[HN Gopher] TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday
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TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday
Author : xnhbx
Score : 663 points
Date : 2025-01-15 12:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| milesward wrote:
| ...Good?
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| There are reports that they want to sell the US branch to Musk
| as a contingency if their appeal to the Supreme Court doesn't
| work. So this whole thing might wind up making things even
| worse.
| andybak wrote:
| I don't think TikTok shutting down is great for its users (of
| which I am one). There are genuine areas of concern but I have
| concerns about US based social platforms as well.
|
| It's hard to unpick these thoughts and it's harder to decide
| what a good outcome would look like.
| alp1n3_eth wrote:
| Looking at a lot of user's feeds, its algo doesn't feel as
| "rage-baity" as the ones from YT or Insta. Even normal
| platforms, like FB and Twitter push rage bait to the top.
| TikTok seems to avoid those pitfalls in a lot of cases.
| thih9 wrote:
| Anecdotally, I can confirm.
|
| In general the algorithm seems flexible to me; on TikTok I
| find it easy to scroll away or flag unwanted content as "do
| not show again"; and in my experience the algorithm adjusts
| well to that.
| kmmlng wrote:
| I feel like as an individual user, I'd rather have my social
| media data siphoned off by a foreign government than my own.
| On a societal level, having everyone's data siphoned off by a
| foreign government and being subjected to political influence
| is undesirable.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| Nah, bad.
| tempworkac wrote:
| Meanwhile many are going to another chinese app, RedNote.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I think its name is actually Xiaohongshu - "Little Red Book"
| (you know, like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...
| )
| onionisafruit wrote:
| You mean it isn't a Harvey Penick tribute?
| cyp0633 wrote:
| They are simply different translations, period. The book you
| mentioned is usually referred to as "Hong Bao Shu " (Red
| Precious Book). Don't know where the translation on Wikipedia
| comes from.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Search "Xiao Hong Shu Mao Yu Lu " in Google. You can see
| it is referenced in both way.
|
| The name Hong Bao Shu is popular in mainland China.
| Chinese from Taiwan or other se asian community just call
| it Xiao Hong Shu or Mao Yu Lu
| suraci wrote:
| Hahaha
|
| Guess what
|
| 1. As you mentioned, Xiaohongshu, is the same name of
| Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
|
| 2. The CEO of Xiaohongshu has the surname Mao
|
| 3. The headquarters of Xiaohongshu is located near the site
| of the First National Congress of CPC
|
| obviously, this is part of CPC's conspiracy
| richiebful1 wrote:
| That seems unlikely. The play store lists it at 10m+ downloads
| and it's still a very Chinese app. I checked it out myself.
| This is people trying to troll the US government
| tempworkac wrote:
| what seems unlikely? it's simply a fact that many are going
| to the other app. as you said yourself, 10m+ downloads on
| play store, #1 on ios app store, etc.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| RedNote don't have english user interface, and it have
| worse censorship compare to tiktok or facebook.
|
| Unless you want to learn Chinese and/or spend time to
| navigate around the content modulation system (not very
| hard, it just different), the experience ain't great.
| tempworkac wrote:
| I'm not talking about the quality, I'm saying that red
| note has been getting a wave of downloads as tiktok gets
| closer to its imminent ban
| johnisgood wrote:
| I think they do have an English user interface since
| yesterday, which may still be unpolished. TikTok is
| available in many countries under their own languages
| though.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Rednote is a popular meme at the moment for obvious
| reasons. But TikTok has around 170 Million users in the
| USA. What you see at the moment is a loud minority checking
| out the app and creating content. This is something
| happening all the time with Social Media and especially
| TikTok, loud minorities doing something, and people hard
| overrating the numbers. There is simply no way that with
| Rednotes state at the moment, we will see a significant
| number of users switching from TikTok to it. Maybe at the
| end we will see some millions switching.
| tempworkac wrote:
| sure, but it's a fact that millions have downloaded
| rednote in the past week. I think millions is "many"
| slightwinder wrote:
| That depends on the definition of "many". Some use it
| relative, some absolute. On its own, Millions can be a
| big number for a service, but in relation to the absolute
| amount of TikTok-Users in the USA and Globally, it's just
| a few, a handful, more than 3, less than a majority.
| poszlem wrote:
| I am not saying that it's good or bad, and the geopolitical
| situation has changed a lot, but I miss the relative innocence,
| openness, and sense of unity that characterised the 2000-2010s
| internet.
|
| We are slowly going in the direction of European internet,
| American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Bound to happen when the internet becomes weaponized,
| unfortunately. It's kind of crazy to begin with that we put all
| of our public infrastructure on a network Russia and China have
| wired access to from their home countries and it's lasted this
| long when you think about it.
| poszlem wrote:
| I understand why they do it, and it makes sense. Still, it's
| amazing how quickly that open world has closed down.
| jeffbee wrote:
| "I miss being 9 years old"
|
| It wasn't possible to share videos with the world in 2000
| unless you owned a television broadcasting network. In 2000 you
| could not freely socialize with Chinese people on the Internet.
| kiba wrote:
| You still mostly can't freely converse with Chinese people
| because of the language barrier.
| johnisgood wrote:
| That shrinks by the minute, thanks to AI-assisted
| translators.
|
| I had a long-distance relationship with someone when I was
| in my very early 20s who does not speak English nor my
| first language. I do not think language barrier is a
| difficult obstacle to overcome today if it was not much of
| an issue 10 years ago.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone watching Quicktime and Real Player videos in 2000,
| it was surely possible.
| science4sail wrote:
| The 1990s-2010s Internet was a golden age in the sense that
| even though the Internet was a child of the US military-
| industrial-research complex, political powers didn't yet
| perceive it as a potential threat vector or even comprehend it
| at all ("the internet is a series of tunes"). Many of its users
| also came from academic or technical backgrounds, which helped
| to maintain shared cultural values (although this was
| constantly eroding over time - see "Eternal September").
|
| Social media and "Web 2.0" were probably the death knell for
| this era - while they were wonderful for democratization of the
| Internet's benefits, the merger of Internet culture and non-
| Internet culture meant that all the ills of the latter were
| inflicted on the former.
| stonesthrowaway wrote:
| > The 1990s-2010s Internet was a golden age
|
| It was the golden age because from the 1990 to 2010, the
| internet was majority american. For the entire 90s, the
| internet population was something ridiculous like 95%
| american. Fun times.
|
| > in the sense that even though the Internet was a child of
| the US military-industrial-research complex, political powers
| didn't yet perceive it as a potential threat vector or even
| comprehend it at all ("the internet is a series of tunes").
|
| Comprehend it at all? Are you joking. Maybe the dumb
| politicians didn't know it but certainly the real people in
| charge certainly knew it's potential.
|
| > Social media and "Web 2.0" were probably the death knell
| for this era
|
| The death nell of the era was the smartphone which allowed
| millions of computer illiterate peoples around the world to
| join the internet. The demographics of the internet was
| definitely changing in the 2000s, but the arrival of the
| smartphone toward the end of the decade accelerated the
| demographic shift. Now americans make up a small portion of
| the internet population.
| ragazzina wrote:
| >For the entire 90s, the internet population was something
| ridiculous like 95% american.
|
| Do you have a source for this claim? It doesn't sound
| realistic to me.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not only,
|
| European computer, American computer, Chinese computer, Russian
| computer...
|
| European OS, American OS, Chinese OS, Russian OS...
|
| European programming language, American programming language,
| Chinese programming language, Russian programming language...
|
| Just like in the good old days of computing during cold war.
| ikt wrote:
| I 100% agree, I think social media has been a complete mistake,
| facebook's creation is my version of eternal november since I
| joined the web in 1999
|
| The big reason I think it changed is that the internet went
| from being a place for nerds and geeks, when there was a
| technical barrier to getting online, to a place where there is
| essentially no barrier. As a result the web now reflects the
| innocence, openness, and intellectual curiosity of the average
| person, since the internet has become a daily part of
| everyone's life not just a subsection of the world that appeals
| to us.
| xnx wrote:
| Eternal September?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > European internet, American internet, Chinese internet,
| Russian internet...
|
| Not sure about the European one. Unlike Russia or China, we
| don't seem capable to produce our own services, or to not use
| the US ones. Maybe it'll change with the increased hostility of
| US government and tech CEOs?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > seem capable to produce our own services, or to not use the
| US ones.
|
| Like the China/US situation, as soon as there's friction
| against using the US ones people will switch to local
| competitors. There was a UK competitor to Facebook around the
| time of its launch called "Friends Reunited". Technologically
| these things are not as hard as recruiting users, overcoming
| the natural monopoly effects, and handling moderation.
|
| A confrontation has long been brewing over the Microsoft
| Ireland "safe harbor" case.
| this_user wrote:
| > We are slowly going in the direction of European internet,
| American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
|
| That has always existed, you just may not be aware of it if you
| are from an English speaking country, because those other parts
| are not easily accessible without knowledge of the respective
| languages.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I miss that too. I was in China before 2005 and the Internet
| was pretty much free. I used to speak to the quake editing
| group on IRC about mapping until deep into the night.
|
| I think it's going to get more segmented. And not only that,
| the hardware, the OS, everything.
|
| That said, I believe HN is a good platform. I don't think it's
| banned in China and people here can keep politics out of
| technical discussions, at least for now.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The migration app of choice appears to be .. xiaohongshu, or
| "little red book". I'm guessing this won't last since it wasn't
| intended to have lots of Westerners using it and neither
| government is going to be happy with that scale of unfiltered
| contact between ordinary Chinese citizens and US citizens.
|
| In the meantime, it's the place for Luigi Mangione memes.
| __m wrote:
| Even Top 1 in the german app store where TikTok isn't banned.
| People identify on Red as TikTok refugees
| science4sail wrote:
| I think that the law "banning" TikTok applies to any Chinese
| app with over 1 million US users, so Xiaohongshu/Rednote or
| anywhere else the TikTok refugees flee will be a target -
| except YouTube shorts and Facebook/Instagram reels of course.
| lolinder wrote:
| No, the law doesn't give a users threshold: it names
| ByteDance and TikTok specifically, and provides a mechanism
| for the President to add new companies controlled by a
| "foreign adversary country" to the list. So anything at all
| by ByteDance is banned, but RedNote is owned by a different
| company that would have to be targeted separately under this
| law.
|
| https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7521/BILLS-118hr7521rfs.
| ..
| tivert wrote:
| > No, the law doesn't give a users threshold
|
| It does have a threshold:
|
| > (ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with
| respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on
| which a relevant determination of the President is made
| pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);
|
| So if it stays unpopular, it's protected from this law.
|
| > but RedNote is owned by a different company that would
| have to be targeted separately under this law.
|
| I think that's a foregone conclusion if it actually gets
| popular with Americans.
| lolinder wrote:
| Ah, you're right--it's not a threshold that automatically
| kicks in at a certain number of users, but the president
| can't add one to the list until they reach that
| threshold. Thanks for clarifying.
| donatj wrote:
| As a casual observer, I don't understand why YouTube Shorts
| isn't the obvious successor? The UI is better than TikTok ever
| was and a lot of the most popular creators are already
| mirroring their content there?
| defluct wrote:
| I use both and YouTube Short produces mostly just garbage for
| me. AI voice videos that will get your attention, but has
| little content. TikTok's algorithm on the other hand is much
| better and provides quality, half-long-form content.
| phobotics wrote:
| Shorts has a way worse algorithm, I don't use TikTok because
| it's too addictive but I get bored of YouTube shorts after
| like 5-10mins most times, which actually for me is a Feature
| but for YouTube itself is a drawback.
| cjrp wrote:
| Same with Instagram Reels. Occasionally I'd be scrolling
| going "man my Tiktok feed is bad today", and then I realise
| it's IG.
| vile_wretch wrote:
| At least between Subway Surfer Reddit narrations and
| other garbage, TikTok shows me stuff I know I want to
| see. Instagram reels will start with something I'm
| interested in and very quickly pivot to people seemingly
| in the midst of psychosis, or literal porn. No matter how
| much I manually report as not interested.
| 8note wrote:
| it seems to me like tiktok has a you model, where youtube
| and instagram have an everyone model
| donatj wrote:
| It doesn't need to be better than TikTok though, just
| better than xiaohongshu
| johnisgood wrote:
| Maybe people developed a fetish for Chinese.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Would make a change from fetish for Japan.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Or South Korea. :D
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| You must be 40. Japanese fetish is only for weirdos,
| whereas 15% of young girls will say their favorite band
| is a South Korean one.
| rafram wrote:
| I don't think that's true anymore. In NYC, at least, the
| people who are into Japanese culture tend to be
| black/Hispanic teenage girls, not the classic "basement-
| dwelling white guy" stereotype. Visit a big Japanese
| store like Kinokuniya or Bookoff sometime if you have one
| in your area - I think you'll be surprised!
| delecti wrote:
| "Fetish" is the wrong way to look at it, but it does seem
| connected. The explanation I've seen is basically a
| unified "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me, so
| instead I'm going to give my data to China even harder".
| It's a generation of kids who grew up (mostly correctly)
| assuming all of their data was already all controlled by
| corporations in league with the government. Worrying
| about data privacy is too quaint to even consider.
|
| There's of course a chance of algorithmic meddling,
| nudging people to a different Chinese app, but I think
| spite is a far simpler answer.
| mempko wrote:
| I live in the US. I mean, if I give my data to China,
| what are they going to do, arrest me? Oh wait no, that's
| if I give my data to Google or Meta.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if I give my data to China, what are they going to do,
| arrest me?_
|
| Flip the question around to your familiar villain. You're
| a U.S. intelligence chief, and have a trove of
| embarrassing--possibly worse--information about ordinary
| Chinese citizens. How can you use this to make them
| useful to you?
| delecti wrote:
| The options available to that intelligence chief in your
| scenario are probably bad for China, but are they any
| worse for those citizens than what China's own government
| could do to those citizens?
|
| I kinda get why the US is banning tiktok, I don't get why
| you'd expect most of tiktok's users to care about those
| reasons.
| homebrewer wrote:
| You only need to look at the news for how many Russian
| citizens are tricked by Ukrainian telephone con-men into
| giving away all their money and then setting fire to
| banks/trains/various military installations in the hope
| of getting it back. I'm already expecting to see that in
| the US and elsewhere when the inevitable happens. Now
| imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your
| citizens, how easier would all of this be?
| delecti wrote:
| Your comment just reiterates the same point which I was
| already questioning. My response to JumpCrisscross
| already applies perfectly to your comment.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| You can't make extraordinary claims like that without
| providing a source. Especially considering Wikipedia has
| this to say:
|
| > In August 2023, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office
| and the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued official
| warnings about a new form of phone fraud in which
| Russians are forced to set fire to military enlistment
| offices through pressure or deception. The authorities
| claim that scammers call from the territory of Ukraine
| and choose elderly Russians as their victims. _The
| Russian government has not yet offered any evidence of
| their claims._ Russian business newspaper Kommersant
| claims that fraudsters support the Armed Forces of
| Ukraine and organize "terrorist attacks".
|
| Emphasis mine.
|
| > Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of
| your citizens
|
| You don't really have to imagine this.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Kommersant is a way better source than the Russian
| government anyway.
| LPisGood wrote:
| From China's perspective, the things the US intelligence
| official could to China's citizens is worse than what
| China could do to those same citizens.
|
| I don't think it's unreasonable for some citizens to feel
| the same
| delecti wrote:
| As a US citizen living in the US, I think it's _entirely_
| unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the
| US government. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to even
| consider, and seems just as ridiculous that a Chinese
| citizen could feel the same.
|
| Even leaving aside the state's monopoly on violence,
| agents at any of multiple three-letter agencies could
| easily ruin my life. An IRS agent could randomly decide
| to audit my last decade of tax returns. A law enforcement
| agent (local, state, or federal) could deliberately
| incorrectly mark my vehicle as stolen. They could SWAT me
| on a trumped up basis. They could just black bag me, and
| throw me in some dark pit.
|
| China could probably hack me, and fuck up my digital
| presence, including my finances. But the US government
| could easily skip a few steps and just declare those
| finances illegitimate in a variety of ways much more
| difficult to undo.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese
| government more than the US government_
|
| Sure, individually. If you think about more than
| yourself, you should recognise a collective threat that
| requires a modicum of sacrifice to protect against.
| 8note wrote:
| id consider that the sacrifice is the opposite - the
| local government is a collective threat, and we sacrifice
| locally built products to mitigate that threat
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _are they any worse for those citizens than what China
| 's own government could do to those citizens?_
|
| Yes. It's riskier for the FBI to fuck around with an
| American than it is for the CIA to fuck around with
| someone in Russia or China. Particularly when we're
| dealing with extorting someone using embarassing, but not
| necessarily criminal, information.
|
| Or just, you know, sowing chaos. Again, if the CIA had a
| list of Chinese citizens who may be mentally unstable and
| are obsessing over _e.g._ the Uyghurs, could that not be
| put to use in a way that 's harmful to China and that
| person?
|
| Your risk of being fucked with by either Beijing or D.C.
| is incredibly low. ("Fucked with" meaning being harassed
| for legal behaviour.) Given the existence of such a
| database, however, the chances of fuckery _at the
| population level_ is almost 100%. What President _wouldn
| 't_ want a call they could make that would tumble a
| foreign adversary into chaos for a few days?
| somenameforme wrote:
| This is a very first level consideration of things like
| this. In general it would not be particularly useful
| because exactly the first thing that's going to happen is
| that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their
| domestic law enforcement which would not only curtail
| these efforts (or even completely backfire in the case of
| double agent stuff), but could also blow up into a giant
| international controversy.
|
| And for what? What are you going to gain from trying to
| blackmail an "ordinary citizen"? The risk:reward ratios
| are simply horribly broken in this sort of case. By
| contrast when your own government is doing this to you,
| you have nobody to turn to, and they can completely
| destroy your life in ways far worse than the threat of
| somehow revealing your taste in videos.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _exactly the first thing that 's going to happen is
| that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their
| domestic law enforcement_
|
| Why doesn't this happen every time someone is
| blackmailed?
|
| > _could also blow up into a giant international
| controversy_
|
| Like if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing
| hacked the OPM? Or India tried assasinating an American
| citizen on U.S. soil? What about "opening and operating
| an illegal overseas police station, located in lower
| Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the
| Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People's
| Republic of China (PRC)" [1]?
|
| > _What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an
| "ordinary citizen"?_
|
| Everything needs grunt work. Taking pictures. Accepting
| and transferring funds as part of a laundering operation.
| Driving an operative around.
|
| The ladies who killed Kim Jong-un's uncle thought they
| were "making prank videos at the airport and she was
| required to 'dress nicely, pass by another person and
| pour a cup of liquid on his/her head'" [2]. Being able to
| arrange that from afar, with limited outreach, is
| something Cold War-era spooks could only dream of.
|
| [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-
| operating-illega...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-
| nam#...
| lmm wrote:
| > Why doesn't this happen every time someone is
| blackmailed?
|
| It does, quite often. Which is why blackmail is done
| mainly by those who law enforcement would think twice
| about going after, and/or those who have nothing to lose.
|
| > if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked
| the OPM?
|
| Plausible deniability, and who is there to rally around?
|
| > India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S.
| soil?
|
| I don't know what incident you're talking about, but the
| fact you say specifically "American citizen" suggests to
| me you're talking about someone who had strong
| connections to India and would be generally perceived as
| Indian.
|
| > What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas
| police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for
| a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security
| (MPS) of the People's Republic of China (PRC)"
|
| That sounds like a propaganda framing. In what sense was
| this a "police station", much less an illegal one? All
| they apparently did was "help locate a Chinese dissident
| living in the US". So the ground facts are more like "the
| MPS had a private eye working in New York". Which, well,
| sure; so what?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > I've seen is basically a unified "fuck you ..."
|
| My wife is exploring RedNote for this very reason.
| "You're telling me I have an easy way to make the US
| government upset and the more I use RedNote, the more
| upset they are?" was her line of thinking. She explained
| that it makes her feel like she has a morsel of control
| over a group that previously didn't give a damn.
|
| Her father would also be upset if she starts learning
| Chinese because of his political tendencies. It's
| basically a two-for-one deal of learning about another
| culture and learning a foreign language.
| polytely wrote:
| there are so many low quality shorts, really makes it feel
| like a waste of time. never had that feeling on tiktok
| danielbln wrote:
| I feel a lot of people have compare TikTok that they have
| used for countless of hours and where the algorithm has
| zero'd in in their preferences to a more vanilla YT
| Shorts. I used shorts for a few months heavily, and
| pretty much every video was in some way relevant to my
| interests (which is also why I don't consume short form
| video anymore, it's waaaay to addictive).
| derbOac wrote:
| Not disagreeing with you as TikTok obviously works for a
| lot of people, but its recommendation algorithm never came
| anywhere near working for me after several attempts at it
| over fairly long periods of time.
|
| I can't say I like YouTube shorts a lot, but there's often
| some I find interesting in a long enough window of time --
| the problem there is more the signal to noise ratio than
| the volume of the signal. TikTok just feels like my
| personal signal is just nonexistent.
|
| Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on under the hood.
| There's such a huge difference between how much people like
| TikTok and how I feel about the content, and I don't
| understand why TikTok would have such a hard time with me
| in particular.
|
| In general I'm kind of souring on algorithmic-driven social
| media, or at least short format (video or text). I don't
| have anything against it in principle, I just find I enjoy
| longer format posts and articles more in experience.
| cochne wrote:
| I'm in your boat. I tried out TikTok out a few times,
| including making a new account, but it never showed me
| good content. I had maybe one or two longer sessions, but
| never felt the need to go back, like I (unfortunately) do
| with Reddit or Youtube. I could never understand why it
| was so popular, but maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.
| derbOac wrote:
| I think that's part of why it's always been a little bit
| of a head scratcher for me -- I didn't really go into it
| curmudgeonly, I was genuinely interested in it, people
| seemed to like it, and I was interested in something new.
| It just never worked out at all for me.
|
| I even had people telling me in all seriousness "I must
| secretly like the content", as in the algorithm knows
| better than I do what I like. Which is kind of a weird
| and maybe even disturbing idea to buy into if you think
| about it.
|
| I was told to keep at it, which I did. I'd put aside for
| a long time, go back to it, repeat the process over and
| over again. Eventually I just gave up. I always felt like
| it was targeting some specific demographic by default and
| never got out of that algorithmic optimization spot for
| me.
| rolothrow wrote:
| Tiktoks algorithm takes a while to get used to but it is
| pretty tameable. Quick way that works for me:
|
| - avoid attempts based on "unliking" things, I'm pretty
| sure it treats it as engagement. Instead swipe bad
| content away.
|
| - avoid "accidentally engaging", like replying to a
| comment you feel is wrong or watching something you don't
| like because you were trying to see where the speech was
| going. Disengage ASAP with unwanted.
|
| - positive feedback for whatever video starts getting
| close to what you want.
|
| - positive implies staying the whole clip, liking,
| viewing comments, commenting, liking comments and the
| strongest of all, sharing the video (you can send it to a
| telegram conversation with yourself or whatever, not sure
| if the link you shared ever being opened is accounted for
| but I think nope). Do this on purpose, like if a video is
| cool just open the comment section and like all comments
| without looking.
|
| -try to "navigate". If you want to see tech and it's
| currently showing you music, maybe engage with music
| production or Spotify tricks when they appear. It might
| not be the tech you're looking for, but it's closer to
| tech than a teenage girl dancing. You'll eventually be
| shown things more relevant to you, at which point you
| grab that current.
|
| Also do not try to rush the process. I think updating
| your interests is not instant, and session time might be
| a metric as well.
| dml2135 wrote:
| This is fascinating, I'm curious -- do you find yourself
| generally thinking in this way when using TikTok? Do you
| find that your peers that use TikTok do something
| similar?
|
| This is just completely foreign to how I consume media.
| The idea that I need to try and "trick" an algorithm into
| showing me what I want is just completely unappealing.
| I'd much rather go somewhere else and actively seek out
| the content that I want, rather than trying to fight a
| system that seems like it would prefer me to be a passive
| consumer.
|
| "Passive" not in the sense that I shouldn't be engaged,
| clearly, as the algorithm rewards engagement. But passive
| in the sense that I should not be seeking out what I want
| to see, I should just be reactive based on what I am
| shown, and then the platform will decide from that what I
| really want.
|
| Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why would
| I want to bother with that?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| You don't have to do any of this. He's just explaining
| more about how the algorithm works.
|
| To a first approximation, TikTok simply shows you more of
| what you watch. If you swipe away a lot of stuff in the
| first second or two, it stops showing you that kind of
| stuff. If you watch complete videos, it shows you more
| like that.
| dml2135 wrote:
| I'm aware that this is how the algorithm works, but the
| parent comment is not just explaining how it works, they
| gave suggestions based on things that "work for me".
|
| So I am specifically trying to sus out how common it is
| among tiktok users to have this sort of strategic
| thinking around the algorithm, since it's not something
| I've heard much of before.
| segasaturn wrote:
| This is very common and I would even say a necessary part
| of using algorithmic social media now, basically
| awareness of the algorithm and interacting with content
| in a way that keeps your algorithm tuned to what you
| want. For example I avoid clicking anything political on
| YouTube because as soon as I do, my suggestions become
| full of political ragebait.
| rolothrow wrote:
| >do you find yourself generally thinking in this way when
| using TikTok? Do you find that your peers that use TikTok
| do something similar?
|
| Yup. It was new to me, as I learned from younger friends.
| To them it's obvious it's ride or be taken for a ride -
| not doing this active navigation, they'd compare it with
| surfing reddit using just the default frontpage unlogged.
|
| In fact people even troll each other, for example by
| sending someone a mormon speech or an untranslated meme
| from India to screw with their feeds.
|
| I have to say that in a way it's way better than YouTube
| or Instagram, where you can't really tame the thing and
| it will suddenly decide for a month that you like Joe
| Rogan and Ben Shapiro because you watched a video about
| bodybuilding.
|
| >Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why
| would I want to bother with that?
|
| Because a huge amount of interesting content is there. I
| also prefer the old style, but I'd rather begrudgingly
| adapt than be left behind in progressively decaying
| platforms - it is what it is.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| My cynical take is that a lot of the people for whom the
| tiktok algorithm "didn't work" simply weren't pleased by
| what the algorithm (correctly) thought of them. It's like
| the 40 year old truck driver that complains it's just hot
| girls dancing. No, my dude, you just ALWAYS stay to watch
| the girls dance, you just don't want to admit it.
|
| In general, it "just works" after a short period of maybe
| searching for specific terms just to "seed" the
| algorithm.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I don't think that's cynical, necessarily.
|
| But if you're used to your media telling you who to be
| instead of having media be responsive to who you are, it
| might feel very disconcerting.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Or maybe it's precisely because one will just watch hot
| girls dance if given the opportunity, that one would not
| want a social media feed that caters to your most base
| desires.
| hmmokidk wrote:
| Anecdotally TikTok has the best content for me as well. I
| can't even place my finger on why I like it more than IG.
| I don't know if it's the slight differences in the
| content if surfaces. Even if I am just looking through
| music on both apps (I play guitar) something about TikTok
| is more pleasant and I really am not sure what.
| spixy wrote:
| 5-10mins seems like a perfect algorithm to me.
|
| If you have more time, then you can watch normal youtube
| videos or TV shows...
| Andrex wrote:
| It's strange to me everyone acting as like TikTok's
| algorithm is completely unassailable and will always be
| better than the competition for years and decades to come.
| Tech moves fast and Meta/YT aren't just standing around.
|
| If their only differentiating feature is the algorithm,
| Insta would eat them for lunch eventually the same they did
| for Snapchat after knocking off that app's big/only claim
| to fame (stories).
|
| The discussion seems to be TikTok's algorithm is so good no
| one could ever possibly compete. I really don't think
| that's the case and TikTok really has no moat whatsoever.
| Clamchop wrote:
| > It's strange to me everyone acting as like TikTok's
| algorithm is completely unassailable and will always be
| better than the competition for years and decades to
| come.
|
| I'm not seeing this sentiment. More that none of its
| competitors are so obviously ahead of the pack that we
| can easily predict TikTok's natural successor.
| palata wrote:
| I don't use TikTok, but my understanding is that they are
| just a lot better than anyone else with the algorithm.
| Somehow where Meta built a social graph, TikTok built a graph
| of videos (no need to know who you are, they can just suggest
| videos based on other videos you watch). And it's apparently
| difficult to catch up (presumably because they have more
| users so more data to make better predictions).
|
| That would, IMO, explain why people use TikTok and not
| something else.
|
| As to where they go after TikTok is banned... I feel like
| there is also a factor of "Oh you want to ban chinese apps?
| Let me show you". Not sure whether it will last, though.
| donatj wrote:
| I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and
| it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more
| data points about their personal likes and dislikes.
|
| Of course an app you have used for thousands of hours is
| going to know you better than the one you tried for half an
| hour
| dns_snek wrote:
| Try it. I've been using Youtube for a decade and its
| recommendations are a total crapshoot these days. TikTok
| figured out my preferences within 15 minutes just based
| on which videos I liked and watched, and it can change
| course extremely quickly if you get bored of a certain
| topic.
|
| The total number of hours I spent Youtube must outnumber
| the total number of hours I spent on TikTok by at least
| 100:1.
| vinckr wrote:
| For me the normal video recommendations are awesome on
| Youtube, I regularly find very obscure super interesting
| stuff in my recommendations.
|
| For shorts it is abysmal, I only get horrible
| recommendations there - no idea why it is so different.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| That's interesting. YouTube's gotten me fairly pinned
| algorithm-wise over the past few years (I used to never
| use recommendations at all before that). But my Shorts
| recommendations seem to just be the regular
| recommendations, but Shorts versions of them. Sometimes
| as far as the same channels, or the same people in clips
| even if it's on a different channel.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I think youtube is deliberately not showing good
| recommendations to boost ad revenue
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better"
| and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a
| ton more data points about their personal likes and
| dislikes.
|
| I've watched probably 1000s of hours of youtube and it's
| still pushing crap at me that I would never watch in a
| million years (edit: eg "How to create Smart Contracts
| using ChatGPT" or "Abusive tough guy picks fight w the
| WRONG GUY!"). Maybe it's better if you like a specific
| genre of video essays or whatever but in terms of a
| replacement for tiktok it's completely irrelevant.
|
| Reels is at least in the conversation, but the UX is ass
| and the culture there is a dumpster fire. Granted, I
| haven't had a meta account for about a decade (the ad
| obsession just destroys the experience) so this is all
| hearsay.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Reels is just as bad as you remember, both in content and
| in presentation (the app is a dumpster fire).
| infecto wrote:
| Then be prepared to be surprised? I don't know why its
| better but it actually is night and day different. The
| best uneducated way I can describe it is YouTube sticks
| you into a model that only classifies people in large
| groups. Oh you watch video game streamers, you may like
| this alt-right talking heads. TikTok has a model that is
| tailored just for you. Oh you like video game streamers
| that play Tarkov? Here are some videos of other games
| similar to Tarkov.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-
| right talking heads
|
| This is something that infuriates me about youtube, to
| the extent that I wonder if it's deliberate. Those guys
| feel like the propaganda the platform wants to sell me,
| whereas on the Chinese platforms there isn't the sense of
| HERE IS THE TWO MINUTE HATE PROPAGANDA VIDEO CITIZEN you
| sometimes get on other platforms.
| infecto wrote:
| I wonder if its simply just a pattern over the last N
| years with Google where they maximize everything for ad
| revenue. I honestly don't know how TikToks ad revenue
| looks like but from a consumer point of view it appears
| for whatever reason they have mostly corporate ads where
| YouTube has the lowest value garbage (perhaps highest
| paying) ads on MLM and getting rich through real estate.
|
| Edit: As a weak comparison I think about Prime Streaming
| vs YouTube or Hulu. Ignoring that ads suck. Prime gives
| you a handful of various ads of real products/companies
| and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the
| consumers negativity toward it. YouTube throws whatever
| highest paying garbage at you as much as possible. I
| tried Hulu once with ads, painful, every like 7mins you
| are getting an ad and often the same ad over and over.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| It's also worth noting that TikTok has the "TikTok Shop"
| that allows people to sell directly through the app.
| Perhaps this allows them to rely less heavily on
| advertising. I certainly see virtually zero ads on the
| app. Ideally this is because they've identified that I'm
| a terrible person to sell ads to, but perhaps they're
| just less aggressive about pushing them.
|
| > Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real
| products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart
| job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it.
|
| Sure, I just stopped using prime when they introduced
| ads. It's also the number one complaint about the service
| and it regularly shows up any time the service is
| mentioned. I also can't remember a single ad played that
| was actually relevant to me.
|
| Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being
| equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has
| better content.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them
| being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has
| better content.
|
| I feel like Hulu established early enough that they were
| partially (or fully) ad-supported. I watched a show for
| free on Hulu with ads many years before I ever would have
| considered paying for a streaming service at all. Prime,
| on the other hand, is something people already pay for
| (usually for reasons other than just streaming, but that
| also reinforces that they're paying), so the ads probably
| come off as worse because of that, even though it's kind
| of backwards in some ways.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I commented[1] on this exact observation yesterday,
| right down to the two topics. It's absurd what gets
| highlighted as "suggestions."
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42699541
| paganel wrote:
| Reminder that YT used to be pretty decent about (music)
| recommendations until, I'd say, 2015-ish, that's how I
| discovered lots and lots of very cool and interesting
| (music) stuff that I listen to this day.
|
| Not sure how they managed to screw that up, but screw it
| they did, and nowadays the sidebar, or even the plain
| search, has become unusable.
| palata wrote:
| As others said, you should try it. I did, and I was
| impressed how quickly it gets me to lose a lot of time.
| criddell wrote:
| I've put Tik Tok on my phone three different times now
| and used it each time over a few days and it seemed like
| I was scrolling endlessly and finding nothing.
|
| YouTube's recommendations are terrible, but I usually
| open YouTube when I'm looking for something specific and
| it's amazing in that regard.
|
| Instagram is somewhere in the middle. I mostly follow
| people I actually know so the videos are interesting
| because of that.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Are you "liking" videos? That's how I steered it in the
| right direction because it wasn't doing much for me when
| I first started using it. It only took a few minutes for
| it to latch onto my interest and then the watch time took
| over.
| pigeons wrote:
| I only ever find something interesting on tiktok by
| searching for it. I can only watch the people i follow,
| the "FYP" has totally irrelevant stuff. I too have been
| trying to like and follow to get it to perform this magic
| people talk about but the "FYP" doesn't show me stuff I'd
| like to see like what I intentionally like and follow
| from searches.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I tried TikTok and it was awful. I didn't find a single
| interesting video. I haven't tried it since. I'm curious
| what people actually watch on there?
| somenameforme wrote:
| It seems to have just about everything. I use it mostly
| for bodybuilding, foreign language lessons, and music.
| FWIW it's known for the short-form stuff, but it also has
| plenty of long-form content as well.
| foobarian wrote:
| > not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more
| data points about their personal likes and dislikes
|
| Well, and what about the actual content? If all you have
| is a bunch of garbage it doesn't matter how good your
| algorithm is if all it can do is find the best garbage to
| push at the user.
| dwood_dev wrote:
| When I tried TikTok for the first time in 2020, it had my
| preferences dialed in within about 15 minutes.
|
| I tried reels when it first released, and gave up after
| an hour of constantly being shown videos of scantily clad
| women.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Any video platform is engaged in a constant war against
| being the OnlyFans sales funnel. Mind you, this also has
| a false positives ban problem.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| it absolutely is, i routinely do a vanilla algo run on
| reels vs tiktok to compare and it's crazy how much better
| it is.
|
| reels is really, really bad - it is surprisingly hard to
| get it to stop showing you some combination of "funny
| prank videos" and onlyfans funnel content.
| nytesky wrote:
| I suspect that the algorithm is taking in inputs that maybe
| we don't consider. Not just swipes or likes, but maybe even
| how still the phone is while you watch it or if you blink
| less, signs you're more focused on the video. Maybe they
| don't have access to that telemetry but I think that's kind
| of the vein of how they measure attention more than just
| touchscreen actions
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Also, Tiktok don't even require you to be a user to use,
| exactly because it's kinda irrelevant for them. They will
| build the algo based on which videos you liked, for how
| many seconds, replays, etc etc.
| pjc50 wrote:
| A large part of it is obviously negative polarization: you
| tell people they can't use a Chinese app, they're going to
| use a different Chinese app. Hence the pictures of Luigi.
|
| It's worth asking why Reels/Shorts didn't take off and those
| companies had to ask for their competition to be banned
| instead. Everyone agrees that "the algorithm is better", but
| this is very hard to quantify. Perhaps something about
| surfacing smaller creators? Quantity/quality of invasive
| advertising? Extent to which people feel particular kinds of
| rage content is being forced on them?
| eunos wrote:
| Rednote and TikTok has 'novelty' content type that
| originally cultivated in mainland China. The memes,
| reactions pic, etc don't really exist on reels/shorts.
| preciousoo wrote:
| My god, in this thread you can tell who actually used
| TikTok and who only read about it
| whimsicalism wrote:
| it's painfully obvious
| weinzierl wrote:
| Main reason besides the algorithm is in my opinion that
| TikTok has wide but hard boundaries when it comes to
| content. This leads to diverse but relatively safe content.
|
| It is not 4chan where you think twice before clicking a
| link to avoid emotional damage. It is also not Reddit or
| Youtube where you do not bother to go because you
| permanently encounter stuff that is inconsequentially
| blocked and you are still not safe from trauma. I think
| most platforms other than TikTok try to be too strict, fail
| to enforce their unrealistic rules in any comprehensible
| form and therefore suck for most intellectually curious
| users.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| This has been my experience and it is what people are
| reporting from red note.
|
| In comparison to instagram I have found it far easier to
| explore, for instance, black women making leftist
| political critiques of Harris engaged in long
| conversations with black women who were actively
| supporting Harris.
|
| Similarly, it has been much easier to find discussions
| about Palestine, labor rights, indigenous US culture, and
| numerous other topics.
|
| I think those conversations are probably find-able on Ig
| or Yt, but I have had much more difficult time with those
| platforms. It's been hard for me to find much engaging
| content that is close enough to my (admittedly
| anarchistic) political and cultural views that the
| conversation changes what I think in useful ways, so I
| avoid that work on things like FB. These platforms do
| suck for doing anything other than keeping up with
| pictures of my nieces.
|
| My feeling is that in general the TT algo doesn't really
| care about US politics so it just shows me engaging
| content, whatever that might be for me.
|
| People here can call that "addictive", but in doing so it
| quickly discards any agency for people who have any
| actual political disagreements with the radically
| centrist US political mainstream.
|
| I am used to that flippant dismissal- Allen Dulles would
| have rather believed in mind control than believe that US
| military personal who encountered Koreans were swayed by
| genuine empathy for a legitimate political-economic
| position.
|
| By contrast, my feeling is that various other governments
| don't really care what folks in other countries think
| about the world so as long as it's not objectively porn
| or gore they just let conversations happen.
|
| That is, of course, quite dangerous if your power relies
| on maintaining narrative consistency for the population
| you rule- that's why China and other authoritarian folks
| do things like limit what can happen on social media in
| their countries...
| somenameforme wrote:
| The whole concept that one's views can be changed by what
| they were compelled to watch is what leads to the circus
| of absurdity in modern times. The fact that the media,
| corporations, and political establishment will all
| aggressively repeat a statement only to be rebuffed by
| the public at large seems to have no affect on their
| insistence on believing in this nonsense.
|
| If it were true than the countless nations which turned
| to extreme censorship and propaganda to try to maintain
| themselves would be still standing. Instead, they
| invariably lose the faith of their people who simply stop
| believing anything (or supporting their own government)
| and at that point their collapse is already imminent -
| even if it might only happen decades later. See: Soviet
| Union.
|
| Or for some predictive power - once China's economy
| reaches its twilight years where you have to juke the
| books and redefine exactly how things are measured just
| to keep eeking out that 1 or 2% growth per year, their
| entire political system will collapse. People would be
| happy being ruled by a group of authoritarian mutated
| frogs who demanded you ribbit in loyalty 6 times a day,
| so long as their economy and society was booming from the
| average person's perspective. It's only when things slow
| down that people start looking more critically at the
| systems they live under.
| quesera wrote:
| I have no idea how you can believe that media does not
| affect a person's beliefs.
|
| The evidence is all around you.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I don't think anyone doesn't believe media impacts how
| people think.
|
| I do think that you have toan incredibly reductive view
| of belief formation to think that simply showing someone
| a series of short videos is enough to change how they
| think about the world.
|
| There's a whole dialect in our existence within language,
| but most folks I know think that they are the sole
| authors of their beliefs while other folks are entirely a
| product of whatever happens to be in front of them. It's
| very reminiscent of the Fundamental Attribution
| fallacy...
| quesera wrote:
| Well-executed propaganda does not need to attempt direct
| change in thought.
|
| It sows ideas that are net-beneficial to the
| propagandist. Leans into the ones that get traction.
| Manipulates the conversation. Provides simplistic (but
| advantageous) refutations of more complex (but more true)
| criticisms.
|
| This is Psych 101 material here. Not at all complicated.
| You just need to think on a wider horizon and a longer
| time frame. Stereotypically, this is a cultural weakness
| of US Americans. Certainly of its leaders. Other cultures
| have contrasting reputations, some of which appears to be
| earned.
| somenameforme wrote:
| You miss the direction of causality. People, especially
| in modern times, are attracted to media that 'identifies'
| with their worldview. So you end up with a viewership
| that matches the ideology of the medium. But it's not
| because the medium 'converted' anybody.
|
| Or consider things like the USSR where the government
| strictly controlled all media, there was no media, and
| even entry/exit from the country was strictly (and
| generally ideologically) controlled. If media affected
| people, you'd have had a country of mindless drones of
| the system. But it was anything but. One of my favorite
| jokes from the time is, "Why do we have _two_ newspapers,
| "The Truth" and "The News"? Well that's because there's
| no truth in The News, and no news in The Truth!" And
| indeed once they started allowing some degree of
| expression, it was basically all anti-establishment,
| leading to some notably great Soviet music from the
| 80s-90s that parallels the 60s-70s in the US.
|
| I do think media can have an influence on things people
| know nothing about, but even that comes with an asterisk.
| War propaganda is the obvious example. Each time we go
| invade somewhere, or enjoin a conflict, there's a
| propaganda blitzkrieg about it being the most just action
| ever against the most evil guy ever. And it does usually
| work, at first, because people know nothing whatsoever
| about the conflict. But then over time people begin to
| learn more and formulate their own views and learn more
| about the conflicts and opinion starts to shift, even if
| the media continues the propaganda party 24/7.
|
| And in cases where people already have preformed
| opinions, this is completely futile from day 0. The
| obvious example in recent times would be the media effort
| to try to paint Israel's actions as positively as
| possible. People simply didn't buy it, because they
| already had their opinions and so the media propaganda
| was mostly completely ineffective.
| quesera wrote:
| I don't miss the causality at all. I think you greatly
| overestimate people's willingness to critically examine
| ideas that are surfaced within their affinity group.
|
| Causality works both ways. People are drawn to their
| affirming media, but they are also assimilated into it.
| And it's not like they are unformed lumps of clay before
| they "choose" what media to consume -- often this is a
| product of their developmental environment to begin with.
|
| Where they might not have preexisting biases, a framework
| for thought is provided to them by the group. These
| groups are sometimes tightly, and sometimes loosely,
| defined. There is always a fringe. But independent
| thought is far far from the strongest influence in 99% of
| people.
|
| This is such a blindingly obvious truth of the world (to
| me) that I can't formulate a serious counterargument. Can
| you?
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| A large part of the effectiveness of the media is normal
| people think they don't know this.
|
| Media has absolutely wised up to the fact that contrarian
| attitudes are common amongst Americans. These companies
| know that if they repeat something nonstop and make it as
| obnoxious as possible, a large number of people will
| quickly adopt the opposite viewpoint. That's the desired
| result.
|
| Reverse psychology is something elementary school kids
| learn about and use to torment others or do their
| bidding. It doesn't end in elementary school.
| somenameforme wrote:
| This is nonsense. The media constantly runs overt level 0
| propaganda that directly furthers the interests of the US
| political establishment. It's certainly not some secret
| 5d chess ploy to turn everybody into jaded anti-
| establishment types.
|
| Even more so because once you do realize how silly things
| are (on both sides of the aisle) your favorite media
| outlet quickly becomes NOTA.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| It's not even 5D chess.
|
| They focus on the most ridiculous "controversies" about
| some politicians that they know people will think are
| ridiculous, while completely ignoring their actual
| problems. They say "oh no, definitely don't vote for this
| person, or that means you're against us!!!" Lots of
| people then think "I hate this group, so I'm going to do
| the opposite just to own them." Then you see that these
| companies are donating millions to those candidates that
| they're giving fake criticism of.
|
| It's very transparent.
|
| A decade ago, people on the internet said big corps will
| never advertise on places like reddit because people say
| bad words there and they don't want their brand
| associated with it. Turns out companies just stopped
| posting banners and paid people to do stealth marketing
| and it's much more effective.
|
| Advertising and propaganda works best when there's
| plausible deniability. And half the country very strongly
| believes they can't be advertised to and will never
| believe any propaganda--they're free thinkers who do the
| opposite of what the media tells them.
|
| If you honestly believe companies and political groups
| are just throwing their hands up and saying there's
| nothing they can do because they need to be direct and
| honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to
| appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up,
| then man.
| lmm wrote:
| > If you honestly believe companies and political groups
| are just throwing their hands up and saying there's
| nothing they can do because they need to be direct and
| honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to
| appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up,
| then man.
|
| It's not that they give up, it's that they keep posting
| level 0 things because that's what their manager wants
| and can understand.
|
| Do you think the Tokyo Rose broadcasts were some 5D chess
| ploy to make sure Japan lost the war faster? No, they
| were people who had a job doing their job. Large
| organisations are barely capable of getting their members
| to pull in the same direction. You occasionally see a
| level 1 reverse psychology ad campaign, but they're
| inevitably done by a small agency working for a small
| department and get pulled as soon as they collide with
| someone higher up who doesn't get it.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| Media an entire lifetime ago and media today aren't even
| worthy of being compared. The methods employed aren't a
| fraction as complex. WW2 propaganda being ineffective
| would mean Russia would make zero effort to influence
| western thinking today. Yet western governments are
| absolutely panicking because Russian operations are
| targeting westerners, and they're working.
|
| You could also take the reverse point of view and claim
| Russians _aren 't_ targeting westerners at all, and any
| propaganda they do make isn't working. Which is possible.
| But that also leads to the conclusion that western media
| and governments are _incredibly_ effective at getting
| westerners to believe they 're being targeted by Russian
| propaganda operations.
|
| An honest proposition: if these media companies are dumb
| and completely ineffectual, then you have a multi-
| hundred-billion dollar opportunity. They're missing out
| on hundreds of millions of people in America alone. It'd
| be silly to not take advantage of that by simply starting
| a network saying what everyone else is "really" thinking,
| because people surely want straight to the point content
| that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't
| consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it. [1]
| Surely media companies aren't documented to be doing this
| intentionally and some commenters online have realized
| they're merely dumb and not _really_ trying to just get
| people outraged so they take the opposite point of view.
| They certainly wouldn 't do that.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrage_porn
| somenameforme wrote:
| You're not considering one simple alternative - and
| that's the best "propaganda", by an overwhelming margin,
| is the truth. US propaganda worked during the Cold War
| era because it was mostly just pointing out true things,
| like having store shelves stocked full of really cheap
| and diverse goods. Soviet propaganda, by contrast, failed
| because the truth was not on their side.
|
| And now we've basically swapped roles. So a lot of
| Russian propaganda is effective because it is the truth -
| Ukraine isn't winning, the sanctions are improving
| Russia's economy (and uniting the Global South) while
| wrecking Europe's, they didn't blow up their own oil
| pipeline, and so on endlessly. And vice versa, US
| propaganda isn't really working, because it's often left
| trying to make claims that are simply false - the
| opposite of all of the above would be an example.
|
| As for governments freaking out - it's because of self
| interest. As everything comes crashing down, people are
| holding them accountable and anti-establishment
| candidates/parties are surging (and in many cases taking
| high office) pretty much everywhere. We're simultaneously
| living through a geopolitical inflection point with the
| decline of one great empire and the rise of [something
| else] (which hopefully isn't just another great empire),
| and the likely end of globalism. It's a shift that will
| likely geopolitically define the next century.
| mopsi wrote:
| > So a lot of Russian propaganda is effective because it
| is the truth /.../ the sanctions are improving Russia's
| economy
|
| This is not the truth, very far from it. Western
| observers are fooled by the official statistics because
| they've literally never experienced a government
| blatantly lying and posting completely fabricated
| numbers. They recognize when governments tweak
| definitions and try other manipulations, but they are
| utterly unequipped to recognize completely made up
| numbers.
|
| For Russian economists, this is nothing new. They are
| openly sarcastic when they reference figures like the
| official inflation rate (9.5%), because they estimate the
| true number to be far worse, 20-25%. They used to base
| their opinions on independent market research companies
| like ROMIR that tracked consumer spending habits, but
| Russian government shut them all down in late 2024.
|
| Russia is getting hit with a similar inflation wave like
| the world saw during and after Covid, but unlike the
| rest, Russia cannot climb out of the hole, because they
| are unwilling to stop the war against Ukraine. War
| spending is the main cause of the inflation. Russian
| government is flooding the economy with insane payouts to
| mercenaries for their utterly unproductive "work" on the
| battlefield while the production of goods is stalling and
| the availability of foreign goods is much lower as well
| due to sanctions. Growing amount of money in the system +
| less goods available = money loses value relative to
| goods (inflation).
|
| Vladimir Milov, the former Deputy Minister of Energy,
| gave an excellent interview where he broke it all down:
| https://frontelligence.substack.com/p/war-deficits-and-
| the-r...
| ANewFormation wrote:
| It's not like Russia is a closed country, nor is
| inflation difficult to measure. Third parties don't
| simply take Russian figures at face value, which is why
| the numbers from e.g. the World Bank will vary slightly
| from those of the IMF and then vary once again from the
| official figures, and so on.
|
| When the Russian economy was briefly under substantial
| strain when the huge sanctions attack first landed and
| the ruble fell rapidly, not only did their official
| numbers reflect this, but they had a more negative
| expectation than third parties!
|
| For that matter there are a zillion videos you can watch
| on YouTube of people doing walking tours through various
| supermarkets and places looking at the
| availability/prices of stuff. Here's one from some lady a
| month ago that clearly leans ideologically Western, but
| nonetheless affirms prices to be somewhat lower than
| would be expected from the official rates, while
| complaining about it -
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=m01-iYSPDt0
|
| Made even sillier if you're aware of Russia's economic
| history since the end of the 90s. Their economy has for
| decades been seeing substantial inflation (5-10%) yet
| even more substantial wage growth. So complaining about
| prices without even mentioning the change in wages is the
| sort of behaviour one should expect from people of this
| sort of bias.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The reason they lie to the point of absurdity is because
| media giving up any notion of impartiality and going full
| ideological has led to a polarization in society (or
| perhaps it was vice versa - in any case, it is what has
| happened) and this has gradually led to people believing
| in caricatures of the "other side" which exist in only
| extreme cases. E.g. - conservatives believing liberals
| want to have children reading gay literature and defund
| the police. Or liberals believing that conservatives want
| to completely ban immigration and turn the US into some
| sort of white Christian ethnostate.
|
| Each "side" does share clips of the other sides
| absurdities to galvanize themselves and their rightness,
| while simultaneously unquestioningly believing the
| absurdities their side posts. It's not reverse
| psychology.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| reels cannot seem to give me anything other than America's
| funniest home videos style content and thirst traps, while
| on tiktok I get critical analysis of todays events, planet
| money-esque content, discussion of analytic philosophers
| i'm interested in, etc. it's truly no contest.
|
| Reels just wants to basically treat me as a generic male
| with some bias towards what my social graph likes. I also
| hate that my likes are public on reels.
|
| e: not sure why this is downvoted, just trying to provide
| color to an earnest question
| mholm wrote:
| This is exactly my problem. Instagram thinks they can
| just apply your demographics to an algorithm and find
| what you like. Tiktok figures out your demographic based
| on what you like. Tiktok listens, ineffectually tries to
| sell you things, and gives you what you enjoy; Instagram
| tries to fit you to a mold, and then sell things to that
| mold, then give you slop popular within that mold.
| nytesky wrote:
| Planet, money, style economic analysis, is that the vibes
| woman?
|
| But I would be curious how to make sure I get that kind
| of content I would love philosophy and current events.
|
| Somehow I've trained my algorithm is only show me
| superhero clips, I think because I was watching all the
| Marvel movies during the pandemic and then didn't really
| use it again since then
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't understand your first question at all, but tiktok
| lets you reset your algorithm and try again.
|
| Be diligent about not spending too much time watching
| something if it's not what you want your algo to be,
| sometimes I can get in loops where I watch something
| because I'm confused by it and then just get a lot of
| confusing content.
| nytesky wrote:
| Scanlan, her name escaped me
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9NdaQPjJlo
| whimsicalism wrote:
| mostly morningbrew and actual planet money, but i think
| her face looks vaguely familiar
| suraci wrote:
| I've never saw Luigi or Aaron Bushnell suggested to me by
| YouTube, unless I search them
|
| I think that's why, just saying
| raverbashing wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken the 'killer feature' of Tiktok is not the
| player, but the editor (Capcut?)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yes, although Capcut is a separate piece of software. You
| can in theory make content with it for any app. In
| practice, Tiktok is so dominant that a lot of popular Reels
| content has Tiktok watermarks on it.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Every time in the last year that anyone has shared me a
| link to a short video on Facebook or Instagram, it has a
| TikTok watermark on it. This leads me to assume that most
| of the content on FB or Insta that I would actually want
| to see originally comes from TikTok.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| > The UI is better than TikTok ever was
|
| I cannot disagree more. I just scroll on tiktok and tiktok
| populates the scrolling with videos I want to see, and it
| takes about ten minutes to signal to tiktok what content you
| like and don't like. Youtube, meanwhile, is an exercise in a
| far too-busy UI with thumbnails and comments and text and
| buttons--it's inherently a desktop app shoved into a web
| browser. Nice if you want to search for a specific topic and
| watch a four-hour video on it, but terrible for entertainment
| or killing time.
|
| The only use I have for youtube are in solving these two
| problems: 1) where can I find a music video and 2) how do I
| do x
|
| ...but the focus on the interface obscures why youtube shorts
| won't ever take off: youtube is extremely bad at pushing
| content I want to watch. I've heard this over and over and
| over again and I know it's true for me, too.
| infecto wrote:
| Shorts is absolute trash. It does not have critical mass and
| will repeat the same videos to you over and over.
|
| EDIT: I want to overemphasize just how bad it is. It feels
| like a project someone whipped up in coding bootcamp over a
| week. It feels like it has zero ability to pick the next
| video correctly and it genuinely repeats videos between
| sessions.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| As someone that uses both, YouTube shorts it's _not_
| superior. Two very simple reasons:
|
| 1. the algorithm sucks 2. it will consistently fail to load
| content quickly enough when scrolling unwanted content
| api wrote:
| It's not as addictive. TikTok mastered the hyper-addictive
| algorithm.
|
| IMHO good riddance. Anything bad for the mindless addictive
| chum industry is good for humanity. Now do Instagram,
| Facebook, Xhitter, etc.
| xnx wrote:
| No 2x speed playback doesn't help
| lazycouchpotato wrote:
| Shorts is garbage.
|
| There are so many UI elements on top of video that end up
| blocking what you're trying to see. There is no way to hide
| them.
|
| YouTube also destroyed its search.
| shafyy wrote:
| Let's see if the ActivityPub Loops in time (made by the
| creator of Pixelfed): https://loops.video/
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| I loathe YouTube Shorts entirely.
| cess11 wrote:
| Sometimes I visit forums where people share video snippets,
| I've never seen sexy stuff snagged from Shorts, but a lot
| from TikTok.
|
| I think both Alphabet and Meta suck at seductive material.
| libertine wrote:
| TikTok has a great e-commerce integration, no one else is
| offering this at the moment.
| tmaly wrote:
| the community on TikTok is friendlier and more uplifting
| compared to YouTube shorts
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Shorts is almost there. IMHO all it needed to do was be a
| separate app and not try to get you to sign up for YouTube
| Premium every 2 seconds.
|
| Reels needs to be more disconnected from Facebook for it do
| anything similar.
|
| Why do you say the Shorts UI is better? It seems exactly the
| same to me.
| mholm wrote:
| If it feels the same, you're not familiar enough with
| either app to make that judgement.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Is it not scrolling in either case?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| both shorts and reels give me so much more brain dead content
| than tiktok and it's really hard to get out of that rut
| raincole wrote:
| > I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious
| successor
|
| It might be eventually.
|
| (GenZ) People are migrating to RedNote now to lift a middle
| finger. It's more of a meme.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Because for 5-20 dollars you can drive hundreds of thousands
| of people if not millions of people to your video, product,
| meme, whatever... Youtube, not so much.
| eitally wrote:
| I spend a lot of time on YT, and less time on Instagram...
| and 0 time on TikTok, where I never created an account.
|
| YT Shorts exist exclusively for YT creators who want to
| publish bite-sized pieces of content for their audience with
| a much lower expectation of polish than their normal longer
| form content. Perhaps the algorithm also presents "random"
| YouTubers', too, but the vast majority of what I see is put
| out by the publishers I'm already following (or other very
| similar publishers in the same ecosystem).
|
| I would suggest that TikTok's successor is Insta Reels. Reels
| are almost exclusively entertainment and because they tie
| into Instagram's broader user/connections network the UX is
| much better than TikTok. Nobody goes to Instagram to figure
| out how to replace their garbage disposal -- this is squarely
| YT domain. If YT Shorts can make inroads in the entertainment
| market [without feeling like a commercial break between
| pieces of actual content, which is the impression I have and
| the way I use it].
| kyle_grove wrote:
| I think in part because of YouTube demonization, which is how
| TikTok could poach the creators in the first place.
|
| I suspect if they're mirroring content to YouTube, it's more
| to try to attract audience to TikTok than monetize through
| YouTube.
| saghm wrote:
| Part of it is intentional spite from the users switching; a
| big part of the push for banning TikTok was based on the fact
| that it's based on China, so purposely seeking out a Chinese
| alternative is making a statement. Whether or not you think
| the ban is justified, I think it's hard not to see the
| obvious inconsistency in banning only a single app on those
| grounds that this migration points out.
|
| I've never personally used TikTok, so it's possible my
| perception is flawed, but to me it almost seems like a dare
| to the government to prove how serious their rationale is. If
| the government truly thinks that having data collected by
| Chinese apps is so dangerous, are they willing to flat out
| ban _all_ Chinese apps? If so, is that more extreme step
| still something the courts consider constitutional? If not,
| was TikTok just a convenient political target rather than
| something actually dangerous?
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Because Youtube shorts is awful, at least me, as a user.
|
| Most of the content there, it's, well, "shorts", cuts from
| full videos of podcasts, etc. It lacks _real users_. It 's
| basically the current youtube creators doing content for
| Youtube Shorts.
|
| Let alone how the algo it's worse, and you can't download
| videos :)
| commotionfever wrote:
| Looks like that app may have a backdoor
| https://x.com/d0tslash/status/1878959715033694492
| alp1n3_eth wrote:
| The backdoor named "backdoor", the l33t h4ck3rs strike again.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If it's for spying on Chinese people inside Chinese
| territory, there wouldn't be any need to hide it.
| glurblur wrote:
| Nah, I don't buy it. Chinese as plenty of programmers who
| can read code as well as you. This dude is literally
| dumping symbols. There's no proof that it's actually a
| backdoor.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And those Chinese programmers can't talk to anybody about
| what they find.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Quite plausible. To what extent can a backdoor escape
| Android/iOS sandboxing?
| jeromegv wrote:
| > To what extent can a backdoor escape Android/iOS
| sandboxing?
|
| Chances of that happening are close to 0.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Running strings for "backdoor" isn't quite top-notch
| technical analysis.
| maxglute wrote:
| Well it's more... Xiaohongshu is for cosmo PRC cool kids (read:
| lean wealthy), and also a large ecommerce portal that targets
| that demographic. Not sure if the userbase is interested in...
| western and RoW "riff raff" shitting up the content for too
| long. I say this more as an insult to Xiaohongshu, I like
| TikTok (or Douyin) because I like seeing entrepenurs sell neon
| signs and industrial glycerine between my swipes.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| > cosmo PRC cool kids (read: lean wealthy)
|
| What does this mean?
| jhanschoo wrote:
| well-traveled kids from well-connected families
| maxglute wrote:
| XHS is for cool GenZ, bias female, urban, has money /
| disposable income, think coastal elite. I guess more
| lifestyle/gram, pushes beauty, fashion, wellness, food,
| luxury goods etc. Douyin (TikTok) is for masses... "less
| cultured" audience, more working class / hillbilly, pushes
| some of the above occasionally but also everything else
| from cheap widgets to industrial equipment.
| suraci wrote:
| Or the Chinese version of instagram, by short
| sandspar wrote:
| Not really. Little Redbook is like if everyone on Reddit
| was upper middle class instead of Reddit's low middle
| class. Plus Instagram daily life and friend photos. Plus
| TikTok algorithm videos. Plus Tumblr microblogging. We
| don't have a 1:1 equivalent.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Reddit, except upper middle class, is how HN feels to me
| a lot of the time.
| eunos wrote:
| For more down to earth contents I heard that Kuaishou (They
| made KLING AI video maker) is more suitable.
| wildzzz wrote:
| "Hey Homie, it's Tony,"
|
| I've never been so interested in advertisements for
| commercial equipment before that guy.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| His accent is fascinating. It's like he learned English as
| a second language in Rural Georgia.
| wildzzz wrote:
| And that's only one of his accents. The man is a
| chameleon.
| clydethefrog wrote:
| Rest of World had an informative article about Xiaohongshu
| few months ago, it seems indeed to be a combination of
| Instagram and Tripadvisor. Chinese people that are able to
| travel are using it to find the "authentic" places.
|
| https://restofworld.org/2024/xiaohongshu-southeast-asia-
| tour...
| EA-3167 wrote:
| It's also TIGHTLY controlled, with people complaining on
| Twitter and elsewhere that their posts are under 48 hour
| review before posting. The rules are also quite strict
| around LGBT issues etc, and not in favor.
|
| Most of all though it's just a very silly protest, given
| that the "tiktok ban bill" is really a "hostile foreign-
| power controlled platform divestment bill" so Xiaohongshu
| will just be next on the block in the unlikely event that
| it becomes popular.
| slightwinder wrote:
| In English, it seems to be called rednote. But I doubt that it
| will be a real successor. At the moment it's a funny meme, and
| for some people satisfied cultural curiosity. But we already
| see the problems appearing, from the poorly localized
| interface, to people getting banned for reasons outside their
| understanding.
|
| My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users
| from the USA and some more millions from around the world
| moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction
| between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere
| else.
| tivert wrote:
| > In English, it seems to be called rednote.
|
| I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name
| in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red
| Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of
| it.
|
| > My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million
| users from the USA and some more millions from around the
| world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new
| interaction between the countries, but the majority will end
| up somewhere else.
|
| If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the
| same law that's banning TikTok.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the
| same law that's banning TikTok.
|
| We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million
| Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds. Unless
| they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.
| tivert wrote:
| > We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million
| Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds.
| Unless they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.
|
| The way the law is written, any adversary-controlled
| social network with more than 1 million MAU could be
| affected.
|
| I think they'd ban it if it started gaining traction
| outside of Chinese immigrant communities. And it'd make
| sense to do it early, now that they have the legal power
| to do so, since it'd avoid controversy. No one would have
| cared about the TikTok ban if they did it when it was at
| 1-2 million MAU.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it
|
| "Little Red Book" is the literal translation of the
| original name but that's not the only way companies
| approach global markets, especially with longer to say
| names. It looks like they sometimes use "REDNote" (as it
| appears in App Stores), "RedNote", and sometimes just "RED"
| depending on the context (e.g. their
| advertisement/promotional email address is
| red.ad@xiaohongshu.com).
|
| As to how they got there with it? "Little Red Book" is just
| an awkward mouthful to refer to compared to the alternative
| forms they used.
| thatguymike wrote:
| Also, not coincidentally, explicitly Communist-coded
| which isn't helpful for not getting banned in the US.
| xdennis wrote:
| You're being facetious. The name Xiaohongshu is clearly a
| reference to Mao's book. And it's incorrectly translated
| as "Red Note" specifically to avoid the reference, not
| because it's a "mouthful".
|
| If there was a German app called "My Strawberry" and you
| found out that the original German name translates to "My
| Struggle" you'd be very curious as to why the English
| name is so different and what they're trying to hide.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Re: Xiaohongshu - see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42714339
|
| Can you explain the connection between "kampf" and
| strawberries? I don't speak enough German to get it or
| Google it.
| lovich wrote:
| Its a reference to Hitler's book Mein Kampf
| zamadatix wrote:
| I'm not sure where the humor or joke was supposed to be
| nor where I claimed the original name lacked said
| association. Similarly, I don't particularly see
| "RedNote" as a well aimed choice for a rebrand set about
| for the purpose of distancing the app from communist
| associations.
|
| TikTok doesn't use their literal translation either. Not
| because the name had a certain association but because
| it'd've also been a terrible way to market the app
| globally. I could give some credit to the idea there may
| have been more than a singular reason for changing the
| name but I can't buy the reason other apps also do is not
| at least a major factor, if not the largest.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
|
| It's actually just what it's called in the US app stores:
| "REDnote--Xiao Hong Shu Guo Ji Ban "
| sitkack wrote:
| What law is that exactly?
|
| "Protecting Americans' Data From Foreign Adversaries Act of
| 2024"
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-
| bill/7520...
|
| https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7520/BILLS-118hr7520eh
| ....
|
| One could argue, and I think with a strong case that if
| this law applies to TikTok, it would also apply to Twitter
| (Saudi investment) and Snapchat (also Saudi investment).
| Bigpet wrote:
| Saudi Arabia is not on the list. It's Russia, Iran, North
| Korea, China.
|
| > (4) FOREIGN ADVERSARY COUNTRY.--The term "foreign
| adversary country" means a country specified in section
| 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.
| happyopossum wrote:
| As written there are several problems with your theory:
| A) The bill is about transfer of user information, not
| investment in a company. B) Saudi Arabia owns a small,
| non controlling interest in Twitter/x C) Saudi Arabia is
| not on the list of foreign adversary countries
|
| So you'd have a hard time making that 'strong' argument.
| sitkack wrote:
| Unstated, I implied that Saudi Arabia _should_ be on the
| list. That maybe the list should be behavioral instead of
| statutory.
|
| SA has lead directly and indirectly to the loss of more
| American lives than any of those countries.
|
| 9/11 was perpetrated by mostly Saudis. Sum the knock on
| deaths as you will.
|
| The killing of Jamal Khashoggi
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45812399
|
| We are trying to get away from Saudi influence and
| control so much that we look the other way while we pump
| poison into our water. So much so that the Simpson's even
| have an episode devoted to it where Marge exclaims, "the
| water is on fire!"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ29JFoVqCE
|
| Maybe the list should be behavior based?
| emchammer wrote:
| The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has provisions explicitly
| excluding protections for Communist organizations.
| metacritic12 wrote:
| Yeah but "little red book" (xiaohongshu) in mandarin is not
| actually how the original Mao Little Red Book is called in
| Mandarin, either formally or informally. Informally in
| mandarin it's called hongbaoshu (literally "red cover book"
| and formally, as you can imagine, is like Quotes from
| Chairman Mao).
|
| So this is a case of translators with an agenda translating
| two phrases with different original mandarin renditions
| (hongbaoshu and xiaohongshu), and picking and choosing the
| style of translation (base on usage vs based on character)
| to get the English translation to merge both of them as
| "Little Red Book".
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| Not really. Mao's book has been known as the "Little Red
| Book" in English for decades, well before the app
| existed.
|
| And the characters for "Xiao Hong Shu " directly and
| literally translate to "little", "red", and "book". It's
| the most literal and obvious translation of the name, no
| agenda needed. Go ask any Chinese person.
|
| The app didn't even have an English name until recently.
| It was just "Xiao Hong Shu " which any Chinese person
| would render in English as "Little Red Book". "RedNote"
| is a recent branding exercise.
| jackliuhahaha wrote:
| Little red book means something different in 1970s China.
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman
| _Mao_T...
|
| People are trying to do away with that association, but it
| still boggles my mind why the app is called LRB in the
| first place.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > > In English, it seems to be called rednote.
|
| > I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The
| name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little
| Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note"
| out of it.
|
| I'll tell you a funny one like that in another language:
|
| Instagram reels are well... short-form videos usually with
| music/audio and effects.
|
| It's pronounced something like "real" but longer.
|
| Anyway, in French that word "reel" is printed the same but
| since most people don't practice spoken English it's read
| and pronounced "reel". Something like ray-hell (notice the
| e). And it annoys me to no eeeend :D.
|
| So, among French-speaking community management crews and
| social network teams you hear "reel"/ray-hell all the time
| instead of "reel".
|
| And how do you translate "reel" into English ? You guessed
| it: it's "real".
| Zigurd wrote:
| It's called REDnote--Xiao Hong Shu Guo Ji Ban in the
| Google Play store. That's the exact way it is currently
| listed.
| pishpash wrote:
| Because the posts are called notes and the book is a
| notebook, capiche?
| cwillu wrote:
| It's branded on google play as "REDnote"
| kenjackson wrote:
| My kids in HS and their friends all downloaded "Red Note"
| this week. I said "what about Reels?" -- "That's for you and
| mom".
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Well technically I am in high school and Neither have you
| used ever instagram (okay maybe for that one time , I
| wanted to propose to my crush , (turns out she didn't have
| insta , so I had to talk to her friend asking her on my
| behalf where they said no [aww man])
|
| and I live in India , so tiktok's banned. There are many
| indian alternatives to tiktok's that I have seen , But
| rednote being chinese just makes me wonder if its gonna
| survive.
|
| Y'know things are just different yet so the same. The same
| fomo happened during the facebook time is now happening
| with red note.
|
| "History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes," as
| Mark Twain is often reputed to have said. (I've found no
| compelling evidence that he ever uttered that nifty
| aphorism. No matter -- the line is too good to resist.)
| (source https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-
| rhymes/)
| nbaugh1 wrote:
| How do the youths feel about Snapchat's TikTok knock-off?
| Is Snapchat available in India?
| posterman wrote:
| Proposal via instagram is certainly a move.
| echoangle wrote:
| I guess propose means ,,asking out", or he proposed to
| her over her friends afterwards and they said no...
| patates wrote:
| Wait, you proposed to your crush? Proposed as in marriage
| proposal and crush as in romantic feelings for someone
| seemingly unattainable? You also asked her friend to ask
| for you via Instagram?
|
| I know we come from very different cultures and I have no
| intention of judging you, but can you perhaps give me a
| clue as to how this would work? I'm intrigued, to say the
| least.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I'm guessing proposed to go on a date
| hashhar wrote:
| I'm from India too (but at-least a generation older than
| this kid) and to clarify:
|
| proposed = asking for a date or if he's too forward /
| self-centered then asking her to "be my girlfriend"
|
| crush = a girl I like but haven't told that to her or
| shown it in public
|
| And yes for kids in school it's quite common to initiate
| conversations through mutual friends because otherwise
| gossip spreads too quick and can sometimes be damaging
| (both emotionally and socially).
| patates wrote:
| Uh okay, I totally misunderstood then, sorry to all :)
| Also thank you for the explanation!
| PhunkyPhil wrote:
| That's surprising to me. I'm 23 and Reels is, as far as I
| was aware, a big complimentary app to TikTok in my
| generation. To frame it as a Reel I saw;
|
| "TikTok is vape and Reels are cigarettes".
|
| TikTok's algorithm is _super_ curated and targeted, like a
| Mr. Beast video. Instagram's is pretty good but if you can
| get your algorithm to the brainrot cluster with everyone
| else then you'll get a lot of out-of-left-field, grungier
| content you might not find on TikTok.
|
| I think once RedNote gets banned or the meme fades people
| will mainly flock to IG. There's still a void of creator
| based features that IG can't fill, so maybe a competitor
| will pop up if IG can't replicate the environment well
| enough.
| Lostidentity wrote:
| Counterpoint here, I'm 32 and would have to disagree on
| the complimentary piece.
|
| In my group of friends, the reels/shorts crowd have eased
| off on keeping up with the latest fads/memes. Its similar
| to the old meme cycle of them starting on 4chan and some
| filtering down to Digg/Reddit, you end up with them being
| watered down or receive them extremely late in the fad
| cycle.
|
| Reels have a few problems, the biggest one is randomly
| getting served gore/death videos. This has never happened
| to me on tiktok. I feel like (cant substantiate this)
| reels pushes sex/thirst content more than tiktok does.
| The final one is the actual social aspect of tiktok vs
| reels, the comments and interactions on reels are very
| abusive and spammy compared to tiktok.
|
| I do agree with you about RedNote being a fad, its
| artificially inflated but its possible the astroturfing
| of "interaction" will lead to a sustainable level of
| organic/real interaction with the app. IG is not great
| for communities.
| sandspar wrote:
| You're 32 i.e. too old to really matter for this market.
| The companies are battling for 14-23 year olds.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| He's likely to have more disposable incomr and go through
| a crisis of some sort that many people fill with buying,
| whilst also deluding themselves they're still in their
| 20s. I think mid 30s is a pretty hot market for
| advertisers.
| dartos wrote:
| I mean we'll buy anything with a Harry Potter logo on it,
| so yeah.
| tartoran wrote:
| I really hope people will unflock from most social media,
| at last for now that it is really at its worst. Perhaps
| in time, after building some open source social media
| platforms that does not have these big corporations in
| charge, things will change for the better.
| adamanonymous wrote:
| I disagree I could never get past the dopamine bait posts
| on Reels to genuine conversations like I could on TikTok
| 0xEF wrote:
| I use none of these things and that still hurts more than
| it should.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Pretty much Insta/X is for genx and millennials, Facebook
| is for the boomer gen. Tiktok was for zoomers, when i was a
| teen till like 23 i hated being on the same cringe ass
| social media platform as my mom. Another teen trait is
| rebellion.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Tiktok is buggy, lacks undo in obvious places, and has
| seemingly random transient UI changes. Nobody cares.
|
| Rednote could be a fad that fades, but technical problems
| won't be decisive.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > it's the place for Luigi Mangione memes
|
| I read a lot about TikTok the last few months from users all
| over the web. Trust me, that's not what TikTok is actually full
| of, its just what algorithm you got sucked into, for whatever
| reason. I assume there's some specific bubble for "current
| viral thing" that you're locked into. Make an alt and like
| completely different content, you'll see that your feed will be
| night and day.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Additionally, what's worse is, I've seen posts of people
| unable to get out of the algorithm bubble on TikTok no matter
| how many videos they dislike. I think some people even try
| blocking the accounts. It's the weirdest algorithm. I assume
| it works for MOST users (when its not a "MEME" Bubble, its
| likely content you actually like), but if you shove someone
| into a niche meme bubble, it can get weird.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| tiktok easily lets you reset your algo, not sure if reels
| does the same
| KwanEsq wrote:
| The "it's" to which that sentence is referring is the
| previously mentioned "xiaohongshu, or "little red book"".
| dspillett wrote:
| It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being
| banned because your government says it is dangerous to give
| them your information, is to give your data to another Chinese
| app instead. Not that I'd feel any less safe with Chinese
| companies having all my cat picks & ranting than I feel with
| American companies having the same (particularly under the
| upcoming regime).
|
| Not that it makes a lot of difference to me, facebook is the
| only social-media-y thing I use and that is just under
| sufferance (only way to easily keep tabs on what is happening
| with some people, mainly family) and because I sometimes like
| to "breakfast with Lord Percy". I might try bluesky at some
| pint as many contacts are moving from fb to there (though that
| seems rather twitter-like and that has never appealed to me
| even before I even knew Musk existed).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > It is amusing
|
| Well, the US government has just successfully antagonized a
| bunch of their citizens...
|
| It's amusing on the "interesting times" sense, no doubt. But
| it's not something unexpected. They have been antagonizing
| their citizens for a while by now.
|
| At some point, something breaks and you get either an
| autocracy or real change. Some people claim they are already
| there but this is really still not clear.
| zem wrote:
| > It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app
| being banned because your government says it is dangerous to
| give them your information
|
| my guess is that nigh 100% of tiktok users think the app is
| getting banned because the government is some combination of
| capricious, bought, and incompetent. their stated reasons for
| banning it barely register.
| grumple wrote:
| I have a friends group where everybody is hopping to this in
| the group chat. They are so eager to run from one addiction to
| another - and I told them so. They are so eager to give China
| all their data and to focus their own lives around an addictive
| app. It's baffling. Go live your life, enjoy not being
| indoctrinated by bullshit and having your time wasted by
| manipulative algorithms.
| ixtli wrote:
| It depends on how they respond over the next 1-2 weeks.
| screye wrote:
| Teens are rebellious & want to be far away from parents.
|
| It disqualifies mainstream apps like Twitter, Reddit, BlueSky,
| Reels & now Snapchat as well. This leaves Tiktok and now
| international apps like Xiaohongshu as the obvious
| alternatives.
|
| The more the US govt. forces youths to use American mega-corps,
| the less they want to use it.
| dingnuts wrote:
| parents aren't on Discord
| screye wrote:
| No one is one discord because its UI is impenetrable.
| Amazing VOIP though.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| Discord is more of a small-group or individual
| communication platform. I don't think it's suited as well
| for the one-to-many or feed-based appeals of social media
| such as TikTok. (Large, public Discord servers absolutely
| exist, but they're often themed around something specific;
| and even if they weren't, you can't just have an algorithm
| determine which messages in a channel you do or don't see.)
| LeroyRaz wrote:
| I don't think rebellion has anything to do with why kids use
| Tiktok. Nor do I think the US has any interest in forcing
| kids to use social media...
| polygon87 wrote:
| It's not why they use TikTok but it's why they don't use
| other social media apps. Once an app becomes too popular
| with older people the quality and vibes decrease, plus
| everyone feels awkward about posting.
|
| It's something I've been thinking about outside of
| generational gaps, new social media apps are fun because
| you add all the people you're comfortable with. After some
| years you now have a ton of connections from past stages of
| life, and start feeling restricted again in your personal
| expression.
|
| Plus there's the dual use issue - IG is too commonly shared
| now so I have current and former coworkers there plus
| everyone I've ever been interested in as friends or more at
| a party. So it's not the place I'd want to feel free and
| creative.
|
| IG tries to solve some of this with Close Friends and other
| lists but people don't really want to spend their time
| constantly organizing a list of friends.
| calebio wrote:
| > IG tries to solve some of this with Close Friends and
| other lists but people don't really want to spend their
| time constantly organizing a list of friends.
|
| Agreed. IG's UI for this is horrible.
|
| I really liked Google+'s "Circles" feature back in the
| day that let you drag and drop people into different
| groups really easily and 'assign' posts/content to those
| circles.
| kshacker wrote:
| > It's not why they use TikTok but it's why they don't
| use other social media apps. Once an app becomes too
| popular with older people the quality and vibes decrease,
| plus everyone feels awkward about posting.
|
| What is the point about the "best algo in town" if the
| universally popular app can not curate each person's feed
| differently?
|
| Maybe it is because old people can comment on young
| people's posts and vice versa?
| johnisgood wrote:
| > So it's not the place I'd want to feel free and
| creative.
|
| Alternative account, "Private Friends" list?
| mileycyrusXOXO wrote:
| Exactly, Instagram started as a way for me to interact
| with my social circle. Show people I personally know what
| is going on in my life and see what is going on in their
| life. Instagram later on has slowly tried evolving into
| something else, but mentally I still view it as a place
| to share with people in my life. On the other hand,
| Tiktok is a both a global community and a small niche of
| people who share the same interests as you where you can
| make memes, enjoy the same content together, converse and
| witness trends and ideas in real time
| cg5280 wrote:
| No, but rebellion definitely has to do with why there is a
| shift towards Xiaohongshu, which is obviously even more
| Chinese than TikTok ever was.
| nbaugh1 wrote:
| Hilarious categorizing TikTok as non-mainstream. I get what
| you mean, but the most popular thing is pretty much
| mainstream by default
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Also, Bluesky is _in no way_ mainstream. It 's a niche
| platform used by a handful of terminally online people who
| really hate Elon. Most Twitter users who aren't hung up on
| ideology are still there.
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread (though not much there yet):
|
| _'TikTok refugees' flock to China 's RedNote _ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709236
| metacritic12 wrote:
| for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book
| despite the association, obviously they could have been better
| about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in
| either language:
|
| The social media app Xiaohongshu (Xiao Hong Shu ) does
| literally translate to "little red book" in English. However,
| this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was
| never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was informally known
| as "Hongbaoshu" (Hong Bao Shu ) meaning "red treasured book"
| and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (Mao
| Zhu Xi Yu Lu ).
|
| The apparent connection in English comes from translators using
| "Little Red Book" for both terms (maybe due to training or an
| agenda? who knows, choosing word-by-word translation for one
| and popular translation for another), even though they're
| distinct and unrelated in the original Chinese, and of course
| in the official desired English "RedNote" too.
| segasaturn wrote:
| The way people are talking about the name of the app feels
| very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess
| it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia, trying to tie anything
| Chinese to scary, nefarious communists. I doubt that they
| were thinking of Mao at all when making the app, Xiaohongshu
| is an app tailored for young, wealthy, cosmopolitan Chinese
| as an alternative to Douyin which is more for the masses, I
| wouldn't call that very Maoist.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > The way people are talking about the name of the app
| feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on.
| I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia.
|
| Is it paranoia if Mao Zedong is still revered? If the
| government is the communist party? I realize the CCP is not
| perfectly communist in many ways but they are unapologetic
| about communism and their roots.
|
| It is a coincidence that the original work did not mean
| little red book. But thats how it was translated, and the
| translation of the app is correct. So obviously now when
| you have the same name coming from a country that doesn't
| denounce communism I think it's fair to be concerned about
| communist influence.
| 8note wrote:
| he'll be revered forever the same way geroge washington
| is. theyre both warlords who founded a country, casting
| away the prior government and foreign invaders
|
| washington is still liked even though he was a notable
| slave owner
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Mao Zedong should not be revered even if George
| Washington is worse than Hitler.
|
| What you're doing is called "whataboutism."
| Aunche wrote:
| Antiestablishment-types supporting an ideology like Maoism
| is at least something I can understand. Antiestablishment-
| types expressing their loyalty to the establishment of a
| foreign adversary is significantly more concerning.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| When your own government is more of an adversary than a
| foreign government, the equation solves itself.
| Aunche wrote:
| This nihilistic outlook may make you feel better, but at
| the end of the day only creates a void in government that
| megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill
| in.
|
| In case if you weren't merely being facetious, your home
| country at least has _some_ incentive to work towards
| your interest, no matter how evil they are because they
| have to pay the consequences of these actions. Even in
| autocratic China, for example, anti-lockdown censorship
| during Covid in China eventually caused even more
| resentment against the CCP.
|
| On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election
| interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If
| I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press
| like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get
| Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in
| America has anything to gain from posting this, but China
| and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured
| America. We only found out about this because Facebook
| cooperated with American intelligence to find this
| foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same
| cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP.
| At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to
| disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia
| -2016-e...
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The people who want to unite Americans might find more
| success meeting the outliers where they're at rather than
| framing it as needing them to conform. That approach is
| what made the outliers cynics in the first place. What
| would it look like to make real change to address the
| objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?
| Aunche wrote:
| > What would it look like to make real change to address
| the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?
|
| Real change will come when those who actually put work
| into it. Nobody will do it for you. Not China, not Trump,
| not the DNC. When the NAACP noticed that even the
| Senators who supported Civil Rights were too apathetic to
| put together a coalition to pass the Civil Rights Act,
| they created that coalition themselves. This is level
| political organizing that actually gets things done, and
| likely how Meta and Alphabet got this TikTok ban through
| as well.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Sorry, but I fought and lost. If I have to be under
| someone's boot, at least I get to choose the boot.
| Aunche wrote:
| If that's your attitude, you can't be surprised when your
| side continues to lose. Meta "fought and lost" their
| first attempt to ban TikTok.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Thanks for blaming me. I give up :)
| sushid wrote:
| What a truly insane take. Do you honestly think the
| Chinese government looks out more for your interests as
| an American citizen? The fact that you couldn't make the
| reverse claim in China without being censored speaks
| volumes.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| When you've exhausted legitimate means for change, you
| begin searching for illegitimate means. Sorry, but at the
| end of the day, leverage is leverage and if a person in
| power says "this really hurts," congratulations they've
| told you their weakness.
| zem wrote:
| the chinese government doesn't care about you one way or
| another; the US one is actively hostile towards you.
| 8note wrote:
| it probably isnt, and is just a random name, but it feels
| like the name is a joke about the red scare
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| However, for any Chinese people who also know English, the
| association is obvious.
|
| I asked an actual Chinese person about Xiao Hong Shu and
| they assumed I was talking about Mao's book until I
| clarified.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > an actual Chinese person
|
| None of the "actual" Chinese people I know were confused
| about the terminology. The average Chinese does not care
| one lick about anything related to communism or the history
| of communism in this country. Mao's book is largely a relic
| of their great (or even great) grand parents age.
|
| However most of my Chinese friends _were_ confused about
| why something that most Chinese find to be a relatively
| uninteresting app in mainland China is suddenly so popular
| in the US.
|
| It's also worth pointing out that this isn't some
| serendipitous accident, Xiao Hong Shu has been working to
| become a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
| glurblur wrote:
| I don't know which Chinese person you are talking about.
| I've never associated Xiao Hong Shu with whatever Mao did
| back in the day. Hell, I don't think anyone I know made
| that connection. I only get that idea after watching a
| video made by a youtuber, who's not Chinese.
| porphyra wrote:
| On Wikipedia, it says he chose red because:
|
| > The Chinese name was inspired by two pivotal institutions
| in its co-founder Charlwin Mao's career journey that both
| feature red as their primary color: Bain & Company, where he
| worked as a consultant, and Stanford Graduate School of
| Business, where he earned his MBA.
|
| I would guess that the association to Quotations from
| Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for
| plausible deniability.
| carabiner wrote:
| Chinese in general love the color red, and the number 8.
| Luck, wealth, love connotations.
| bryananderson wrote:
| Maoism-Bainism with Stanford characteristics
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Reality is stranger than fiction. That's the reason I would
| expect to be reported by The Onion aha
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| > I would guess that the association to Quotations from
| Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that
| for plausible deniability.
|
| Yeah, I mean "Every Chinese citizen has a Little Red Book
| in their pocket!" is pretty compelling for a social media
| app.
|
| It's not necessarily political beyond that, but the
| connection is obviously there.
| gastlygem wrote:
| As a native Chinese I can assure you Xiao Hong Shu and
| Hong Bao Shu are as close semantically to each other as
| the words constipation and constitution. Few would relate
| those two.
|
| Even the most leftist Chinese entrepreneurs avoid having
| their brand names associated to politics; it's just common
| sense.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| And in case someone wants to hear a linguistic opinion
| outside of English and Chinese: As a Japanese, I can
| confirm that those two words indeed have about as much to
| do with each other as constipation and constitution.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Then he picked a truly terrible name.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| The guy went to university in the US and his name is
| literally Mao.
|
| He knows Americans call Mao's book the Little Red Book.
| He back-translated it to Chinese word by word. Anyone who
| would have an obviously perfect product name like that
| and _not_ use it would be dumb.
|
| There's zero chance a dude named Mao had an idea for a
| little red book app and thought "Yeah, I'll call it this
| because I went to Stanford and they're red." It'd be like
| Google saying they named themselves after googly eyes and
| not spelling the number googol differently.
| gastlygem wrote:
| > his name is literally Mao
|
| The guy didn't pick the name. "Mao" is the family name he
| inherited from his father. In the case of Mao Zedong and
| Mao Wenchao, they have the same family name, but that's
| about it. The two people aren't even from the same
| province.
|
| Please, at least learn your lessons first. It's like
| suspecting everyone with the family name "Manson" to be a
| serial killer aspirant.
| Gigablah wrote:
| But for a lot of people, the character Hong / red is
| already enough to trigger the association with communism
| and Mao.
| bllguo wrote:
| ..did you only learn chinese academically or something?
| anyone in china would think of Mao if you said Xiao Hong Shu
| (well, at least before the app)
| fencepost wrote:
| So they're moving to a video site named "Red" plus a four-
| letter word?
|
| TikTok, you've changed! But maybe not _that_ much.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I can't believe TikTok is not just getting around this by
| using the philosophy many people use when they are forced
| to change passwords. Just add an "!". TikTok: "We arn't
| TikTok, we are now TikTok!"
| polski-g wrote:
| Is there a problem with Youtube Shorts? Or Facebook videos?
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes, they're shoved in user's faces and cannot get rid of
| them, disable them, etc.
| kpennell wrote:
| It's pretty wild in there...I remember seeing the comment 'IN
| THE CLERB, WE ALL LEARN MANDARIN'...I went in there and started
| commenting about Tienenman...curious if I'll get banned. It's
| very wild to see so many CCP memes and Chinese military people
| making content. Very odd experience so far.
| kccqzy wrote:
| It definitely won't last because even the medium is different.
| TikTok is all about short videos, but most of the content on
| Xiaohongshu are static images, and some even an image of text.
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| It wouldn't be that hard to keep users separated by location.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I would be amazed if the company who runs that application
| wasn't working around the clock to make it a better tiktok
| replacement and to retain this swath of new users.
| madhacker wrote:
| Good riddance. CCP is laughing the US can't even agree in an
| outright ban.
| drcongo wrote:
| Can anyone enlighten me as to what this TikTok ban is supposed to
| be about? It feels a bit satanic panic from a distance.
| Rhapso wrote:
| Politicians realized just how powerful the corporate
| surveillance and propaganda system is, and they don't want to
| share it with China.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| This guy gets it. They don't care about anyone's privacy,
| save their own. This is yet more coddling of American
| industry, bought and paid for by generous political donations
| to keep the _scaaaary Chinese apps_ from stealing honest,
| hard working red-blooded American 's data... so that American
| apps can steal honest, hard working, red-blooded American's
| data.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's not a coincidence that this comes along with similar
| cybersecurity/anticompetitive pushes against Chinese
| routers, drones, and EVs.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Except people may be migrating to Rednote (which you have
| heard, is Chinese).
|
| Government intervention at its finest.
| poszlem wrote:
| It's far more complex than that. TikTok is a Chinese company
| with immense reach and influence that can shape American public
| discourse. A global superpower cannot allow another global
| superpower to influence its population so significantly through
| social media (which is also why Facebook is banned in China).
| EncomLab wrote:
| Perfect analogy. Keep in mind that most US lawmakers still
| think the internet is a series of tubes - and we don't want OUR
| tubes dirties by some pinko commie tubes! THINK OF THE
| CHILDREN!!
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It's generally not wise to let your geopolitical rival have
| extensive influence over your populace, which is why CCP
| doesn't let American companies like Meta operate in China.
|
| Turnabout is fair play.
| woooooo wrote:
| There's also the signaling and red meat factor for
| politicians. Easy headline to be "tough on china", requires
| less explanation than pacific trade deals.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Absent any of these conversations is, in my experience, any
| notion of _what exactly China aims to achieve with TikTok_
| that is so sinister? I 'm not even arguing, I wouldn't doubt
| China has plans or another that involve America, specifically
| that wouldn't be too great for America, I'm just struggling
| to connect TikTok to any of them, and any discussion seems to
| take it as granted that the shifty Chinese government is up
| to something with it.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Oh, you could probably make some effective arguments that
| they're using it to influence American thought in a way
| that's designed to diminish the US as a world power through
| internal strife.
|
| Israel/Hamas would probably be an example.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Its clear to anyone that's looking that what's happening
| in Gaza is a genocide
| Philpax wrote:
| For example, here's the Wikipedia article:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
| grumple wrote:
| Wikipedia is the subject of a very large pro-Palestinian
| propaganda campaign:
|
| https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-
| edit...
|
| And they have banned several of those involved, though
| obviously each of the thousands who participated should
| be banned:
|
| https://www.jpost.com/business-and-
| innovation/article-833180
| spencerflem wrote:
| What about the groups linked in the wikipedia article:
| Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Special
| Committee to investigate Israeli practices and the United
| Nations Special Rapporteur ?
|
| Those seem less biased sources than The Jerusalem Post
| grumple wrote:
| The source here isn't the JP, it's wikipedia. Wikipedia
| investigated and banned the editors. JP is just the
| reporter. You can find other news sites with the same
| news, or Wikipedia itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Wikipedia_and_the_Israeli%E2%8...
|
| Those human rights groups, unfortunately, have a long
| history of bias and foreign influence. The closer they
| are to the UN, the more political they are. Literally
| half of the UN's resolutions pertain to Israel - while
| 99.999% of war deaths, famine, modern slavery, etc,
| happen without Israel being involved. The UN was led by a
| literal Nazi in the 70s - Kurt Waldheim - and the last
| few UN Secretary Generals have said that there is a
| serious bias against Israel there (obvious from the
| obsession).
| dttze wrote:
| Israel has whole government and military orgs dedicated
| to hasbara and advancing Israeli and Zionist interests.
|
| The editors were banned for organizing people around a
| vote. You going to pretend Israel doesn't coordinate
| about the same things?
| grumple wrote:
| Literally every government has people who go on social
| media or provide press reports. Only when Israel is
| involved do you start talking about it like it's a
| conspiracy. Please reflect on that for a while.
|
| Meanwhile Iran and Russia have literally been caught
| manipulating Reddit and TikTok. And you're literally
| replying to evidence of the pro-Palestinian crowd doing
| the same in violation of Wikipedia's terms of use.
| dttze wrote:
| Literally every organized group has people who go on
| social media. Only when Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims
| do the same thing as Israel do you consider it biased and
| wrong. Please reflect on why you think that.
|
| Meanwhile, Israel and the US have literally been caught
| manipulating Reddit and TikTok. And you're literally
| replying to evidence of Israeli hasbara and US
| willingness to ban sites in support of that hasbara.
| grumple wrote:
| "No you" is not really a good argument here. Israel does
| not have an organized campaign to modify wikipedia, like
| what the pro-Palestine crowd does. And scale matters:
| there are 15 million Jews globally, 2 billion Muslims,
| 1.4 billion Chinese, 90 million Iranians. This is not a
| level playing field; manpower matters in swaying public
| opinion. And factually - Israel is an American-aligned
| democracy and has substantially more freedoms than China,
| Iran, Russia, and the Muslim world, and is not working to
| destroy all of those places the way that those places are
| working to destroy the west and all US influence. It's
| just "Jews control the media" using the cover word of
| Israel instead. Obviously untrue - if it were, then
| social media and wikipedia would be dominated by pro-
| Israel narratives, rather than the other way around,
| which is what is actually reality.
|
| Banning a propaganda tool used by China, Russia, and
| Iran, which is also used to collect our data, is not
| hasbara. It's just wise behavior to stop your enemies
| from disrupting your population. Anyway, hasbara means
| "explanation". Use of this as condemnation is basically
| somewhere between "foreign word bad" and "Jews bad".
| dttze wrote:
| Yes it is a good argument here. Yes they do have state
| level organizations and intelligence agencies being used
| to push propaganda and silence criticism across all forms
| of media.
|
| Yes scale matters, the scale of resources used to push
| Israeli, US, and western propaganda dwarves that of
| China, Russia, or Iran. It's laughable you use total
| population numbers here, as if every Muslim person is a
| dedicated jihadist working to bring down the west.
|
| Anyway, not going any further down this pointless hole of
| arguing whether I hate Jews or not cause I don't support
| the mass murder of children.
| grumple wrote:
| [flagged]
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _No, it really isn 't._
|
| I wonder what you know about Genocide better than experts
| in Holocaust studies and other genocides themselves.
| William Schabas, author of the 741-page textbook,
| "Genocide in International Law" - says it's a genocide in
| Gaza. John Quigley, author of the 300-page
| book, "The Genocide Convention: An International Law
| Analysis" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
| @martinshawx, author of the books "What is Genocide?" and
| "War and Genocide" - says it's a genocide.
| @dirkmoses, author of the 600-page book, "The Problems of
| Genocide" - says it's a genocide in Gaza. Raz
| Segal, author of "Genocide in the Carpathians" - says
| it's a genocide in Gaza. Amos Goldberg,
| author of books on Holocaust, says it's a genocide in
| Gaza @bartov_omer, author of several books on
| Holocaust and genocide, says it's a genocide in Gaza.
| But why to listen to the experts in law and genocide
| studies? Why to bother to read the extensive human rights
| reports? Listen to @piersmorgan instead; he
| has a gut feeling.
|
| https://x.com/NimerSultany/status/1870761846497583323
|
| > _This is war, this is how it goes._
|
| Yeah, war is how "I was just following orders" German
| troops justified killing 12m+ in concentration camps.
| Goebbels said, "The Jews are responsible for the war. The
| treatment they receive from us is hardly unjust. They
| have deserved it all." Don't be like Goebbels.
|
| > _the 2 billion Muslims that hate Jews_
|
| Yeah, well: I know a handful Muslims who married Jews.
|
| > _and all you did was bitch on the internet, I 'd be
| ashamed to know you_
|
| Same.
| grumple wrote:
| Unfortunately, popular opinion - at least of the far left
| - has always been united against Israel. In fact, many of
| those authors called it a genocide _before_ this war. You
| can find plenty of such accusations on Twitter from prior
| to 10 /10, when Israel started responding to the attack.
| You have many groups blaming Israel for all sorts of
| absurd things - like the fires in California. I wish I
| was joking. If not for Israel and the Jews, we'd have
| world peace - at least that's what you'd think if you
| listened to these groups.
|
| It is an extension of populist antisemitism. I encourage
| you to think about this on your own: why is Israel
| condemned for 45k deaths in a war they didn't start,
| where half of the killed are militants, where Israel is
| literally providing aid to their enemy, while the
| Houthis, responsible for 300k dead in the past decade,
| including many children via starvation, who have brought
| back slavery in Yemen, are lauded for attacking western
| shipping and have fanboys of one of their murderous
| pirates? Where is the criticism for Muslims planning
| terror attacks against the west, and against individual
| Jews globally? Why do leftists love the idea of jihad and
| intifada, but not a nation defending itself?
|
| Meanwhile, most "genocide" decriers seem to have ignored
| the tens of thousands of rockets, missiles, and drones
| launched at Israeli civilians from Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq,
| Iran, and Yemen. They ignore the videos of Gazans
| chearing in the streets and spitting on corpses. The open
| calls for exterminating the Jews from the Houthis,
| Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ, Iran, and more. There is one side
| calling for the extermination of the other and taking
| actions to make it so - the Muslims trying to destroy
| Israel and calling for and taking actions to kill Jews
| globally.
| dang wrote:
| Religious flamewar isn't allowed on HN, and your comment
| crosses that line. Please don't post like this here.
|
| (yes, this is the case regardless of which religion(s)
| are being flamed)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I mean, I'm not on TikTok at all and Israel is committing
| a genocide. China didn't tell me that, the Israeli's
| killing Palestinians en masse told me that. Because
| that's what the word "genocide" means.
|
| It seems to be if the US Government wants not to be
| associated with a genocide-committing country they should
| just... do that. TikTok might have the largest share of
| the pro-Palestine mood as it were, but like... it's on
| all the platforms. Because again... they're committing a
| genocide, and filming it.
| LargeWu wrote:
| I would argue that even though you're not on tiktok, you
| are being influenced by the narrative that China is
| pushing. There are numerous genocides happening in the
| world today. Sudan. China (try talking about THAT one on
| TikTok...). Why aren't those being treated with equal
| concern? Because China knows that only the Isreal/Gaza
| one is a wedge in America, so they push that to sow
| discord.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Why aren't those being treated with equal concern?
|
| I mean I can't speak to other people's experience, but as
| an American, I'm uniquely pissed off with the Israeli one
| because my tax dollars are paying for it, and because the
| White House could stop it at a time of their choosing, as
| they've done before.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Which one is the US funding, and using UN vetos to
| continue?
|
| We're an active participant in, its not a surprise its
| the one we (USA ppl) care about.
| grumple wrote:
| What makes this a genocide and not every other war where
| far more people, including more civilians, died? And at
| higher ratios of the dead? You can find hundreds of
| videos of Israel targeting militants, Hamas using schools
| and hospitals as bases, and more.
|
| Nearly a million died in the Iraq war. In a single
| battle, Mosul, almost as many were killed as in Gaza,
| including similar ratios of militants and civilians. In
| Ukraine, far more have been killed, both combatants and
| civilians - and Russia clearly targets civilians there,
| and they started the war (while Hamas started the Gaza
| war). In Syria, half a million died, mostly civilians.
| Ditto the Lebanese civil war. Ditto the Yemen-Houthi war.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| This feels so obvious to explain that I can't help but
| feel like it's condescending, but a conflict is not a
| genocide, irrespective of it's death toll. If you looked
| up the definition:
|
| > the deliberate killing of a large number of people from
| a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of
| destroying that nation or group.
|
| Which is just 100% what Israel is attempting to do to
| Palestine, and they're not exactly being coy about it.
| grumple wrote:
| Your assertion is obviously not true. This is why they
| target militants and post the videos and explanations on
| the internet. You can find hundreds or thousands of such
| videos. It's why they send texts hours before bombing.
| It's why they do roof knocks. It's why they provide safe
| passage and humanitarian zones. It's why they drop
| leaflets. It's why they still provide electricity, water,
| and food to Gaza. I read a report about how they asked a
| Palestinian to alert his neighbors via a phone call and
| waited for him to tell everyone to get out. These are
| steps no other nation takes, and it is easy to find
| experts confirming that. It's why there are only 45k dead
| instead of 2 million.
|
| If Israel wanted to maximize casualties, there would not
| be a Palestinian alive today. What would be their
| incentive to stop? The far left claims it's a genocide as
| it is. What would actually killing them all be, then?
| Double genocide? You have used the worst term you can to
| describe something very far from the worst Israel could
| do.
|
| And then of course, is the obvious contradiction that
| they just agreed to a ceasefire for their hostages. Just
| like they did in November 2023. And how they agreed to a
| ceasefire in Lebanon despite all the cries of them trying
| to seize the land. Israel wants to be left alone to live;
| the Palestinians (and the other neighboring Arab nations)
| want to kill all the Israelis and destroy Israel. The
| rest of the world wants these positions to meet in the
| middle, so there we are in the middle ground: perpetual
| war. Go look at the Hamas and Hezbollah founding
| charters, or the Houthi flag, or everything Iran says.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| "You can't be mad at them for killing a lot of
| Palestinians when they've shown incredible restraint in
| not killing all of them" is a hell of an argument, I'll
| give you that. Still genocide though. There's no victim-
| count aspect to this definition, they are attacking
| Palestinians, living in Palestine, because they are
| Palestinian, and they want to settle those areas with
| Israeli's. We don't need to wait for them to kill a
| certain percentage of the population to then be able to
| declare it a genocide.
|
| And, like even if I take this:
|
| > I read a report about how they asked a Palestinian to
| alert his neighbors via a phone call and waited for him
| to tell everyone to get out.
|
| at 100% face value, that some militants were in some
| building and the IDF was about to reduce it to ashes...
| so they called the guy next door, and asked him to
| evacuate the building? Which is presumably... full of
| militants? Cuz that's like the whole thing, that's the
| whole fuckin point?
|
| You talk a lot about how nothing I say makes sense but
| that's just nonsensical on it's face, like... if these
| attacks are genuinely needed, why in the world would you
| warn people beforehand? Doesn't that completely defeat
| the purpose?
|
| > the Palestinians (and the other neighboring Arab
| nations) want to kill all the Israelis and destroy
| Israel.
|
| I mean they can want that as hard as they want, but
| Israel has the military and political backing of the
| West. They're untouchable, as has been demonstrated by
| them being surrounded by enemies essentially since the
| state was partitioned off from the others during it's
| founding, and it's still there.
| grumple wrote:
| > because they are Palestinian
|
| No, this is not why. They are attacking because Gaza
| invaded Israel on 10/7, killing over 1200, injuring 5000,
| and kidnapping over 200. Notice how Arab / Palestinian
| citizens of Israel are not being killed.
|
| > We don't need to wait for them to kill a certain
| percentage of the population to then be able to declare
| it a genocide.
|
| I think this is a fundamental flaw of the genocide
| conventions. With this interpretation, you could call a
| single murder a genocide, if done with the intent of
| destroying a people (in which case, isn't even murder of
| an Israeli by Hamas or other organizations whose intent
| is to destroy a genocide?). Obviously, this is absurd,
| and nobody is on TikTok raging about Hamas' attempted
| genocide of Israel.
|
| > You talk a lot about how nothing I say makes sense but
| that's just nonsensical on it's face, like... if these
| attacks are genuinely needed, why in the world would you
| warn people beforehand? Doesn't that completely defeat
| the purpose?
|
| Yes, it does. It is in fact this attempt to do less harm
| that prolongs the war and keeps Hamas alive. To actually
| destroy Hamas, you would have to kill a lot more
| civilians. So Israel often settles for destroying weapons
| caches, tunnels, and structures they operate from.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > With this interpretation, you could call a single
| murder a genocide, if done with the intent of destroying
| a people
|
| I mean, if you killed someone who for whatever odd reason
| played a critical role in the maintenance of a culture,
| with the stated goal being the extinction of that
| culture, then yes that's an act of genocide. The fact
| that the event itself is a bit strange doesn't change
| what it is.
|
| The systematized way that Canada's residential schools
| literally beat their native tongue out of the native
| children they were put in charge of was _also_ an act of
| genocide. It isn 't an error in the interpretation, it's
| what the word is.
|
| > (in which case, isn't even murder of an Israeli by
| Hamas or other organizations whose intent is to destroy a
| genocide?)
|
| Yes, but they're not the ones aggressing. No one is
| saying Israel's neighbors are innocent, but Israel is
| _currently, actively_ engaged in an ethnic cleansing. The
| fact that those they 're cleansing wouldn't do the same
| back to them given the chance both doesn't make that okay
| and is irrelevant.
|
| > Yes, it does. It is in fact this attempt to do less
| harm that prolongs the war and keeps Hamas alive. To
| actually destroy Hamas, you would have to kill a lot more
| civilians. So Israel often settles for destroying weapons
| caches, tunnels, and structures they operate from.
|
| Well then they fucked up about 47,000 times by official
| numbers.
| grumple wrote:
| > Yes, but they're not the ones aggressing
|
| You do know this war started with a massive assault by
| Hamas, PIJ, PFLP, and other Palestinian groups, right?
| They attacked Israel, targeting civilians in a brutal
| assault, starting this war. If you start a war, you are
| the aggressor, even if you lose.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Social disruption. That's plainly clear given that Douyin
| is prevented from having the destructive content that
| proliferates on TikTok. Keep your competition mired in
| anti-inellectualism for a generation and it accelerates the
| rot.
| MountainMan1312 wrote:
| It's taken for granted that the shifty [any] government is
| up to something because they always are, 100% of the time.
| Why would you expect the evil overlords to not be up to
| something with the big evil brainwashing program that has
| access to almost everyone on earth?
| nozzlegear wrote:
| This but unironically.
|
| Seriously, given all the crazy shit that's been uncovered
| in the last 20 years -- PRISM, Five Eyes, Cambridge
| Analytica -- why would an influence campaign run over one
| of the world's biggest social networks controlled by the
| actual, real life authoritarian Big Brother state be the
| one scenario that crosses the line from plausible to
| fantasy for you?
| derbOac wrote:
| So it's several things. Bear with me because finding news
| reports that I remember is difficult now because search
| results are flooded with stuff about the ban so I can't
| find what I'm looking for.
|
| One concern is a general one that the Chinese government is
| directing the recommendation algorithms to act as
| propaganda. So subtly shifting user's opinions in favor of
| things that suit it and away from things that don't.
|
| https://archive.is/tCVmR
|
| Another is that it is using TikTok to surveil journalists,
| emigres, and other persons of interest who are using
| TikTok. My understanding is there are credible reports of
| journalists being targeted by the Chinese government, where
| they used TikTok to find their personal details, location,
| etc.
|
| There's also been increasing reports of the Chinese
| government operating detention centers in the US and other
| countries, where they bring kidnapped Chinese nationals.
| Basically arresting nationals on foreign soil. In some of
| these cases at least TikTok has been implicated as the
| method of locating them etc.
|
| https://theweek.com/speedreads/764194/intelligence-
| officials...
|
| Discussion of this has all been out there over the years,
| but the way it's been covered has admittedly been weird.
| Maybe this is yet another sign of a fractured media
| landscape, but I think some of it has to do with the US not
| doing a great job of publicizing some things, possibly
| because it involves intelligence services.
|
| I'm generally very in favor of unfettered freedom of
| speech, but have mixed feelings about this case. I guess I
| still side on that, and am skeptical about a ban, but this
| is getting into different territory and also don't feel
| strongly about it. I think the effects of foreign (and
| domestic) propaganda in social networks are very real, and
| although I generally think censorship is a very bad idea,
| I'm not sure I can blame a country for wanting an app
| banned if there's solid information that another country is
| using it in this way; it seems to be in this gray area of
| espionage versus free speech which is kind of an unusual
| territory to be in. Also, I'm fully aware that the US
| probably does similar things, but two wrongs don't really
| make a right to me, and if China produced solid evidence of
| the US doing something similar I wouldn't blame them for
| banning something either on similar grounds.
|
| To me this all just maybe speaks to the need for a shift to
| open decentralized social network platforms. I realize
| that's easier said than done, but there's so many examples
| in the last few years of problems with control of
| centralized platforms (by private, government, or private-
| government combinations) leading to huge problems, either
| in reality or in appearance (which can sometimes be almost
| as equally concerning).
| dpkirchner wrote:
| If these things are truly happening -- especially the
| alleged arrests on US soil -- then that should be really
| easy to demonstrate to the American people. That the
| government hasn't bothered to prove the allegations is
| telling.
|
| Of course, if the allegations were proven, the people
| would demand more action than merely banning a video app.
| Action which would have an huge negative impact the
| economy and would be unpopular among the powerful. So
| maybe that's why they haven't bothered?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| So literally all the same things the US does, but because
| China's doing it, now it's wrong. Got it.
|
| I am being glib but I do want it understood that I
| appreciate the nuance and documentation you put the work
| into to show. It's just that, literally every one of
| these I already know about the United States doing so the
| outrage on it's part feels incredibly, hilariously
| hypocritical.
| quesera wrote:
| How can this be surprising?
|
| If you identify, contemplate, and sometimes activate an
| attack vector against rivals, how could you possibly be
| dumb enough to leave yourself exposed to the same attack?
|
| Also, note that China has blocked this attack vector from
| the US.
|
| So how colossally dumb would it be for the US to _not_
| reciprocally block this attack vector from China?
|
| Hypocrisy is irrelevant. Attack vectors are real.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Yes, but then we also need to realise that pretty much the
| whole world outside of China is 'controlled' by American tech
| companies (both hardware and software/apps)
|
| So if the US think it is not OK to have something like Tiktok
| owned by a Chinese company the rest of the world might wonder
| if it is OK for them to have _everything_ owned by American
| companies...
| johnisgood wrote:
| The usual story, it is OK for the Americans to have
| military bases all around the world, much less so when it
| comes to any other countries.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| All of those military bases are there in partnership with
| and at the invitation of the host country. The US doesn't
| just slap down a base in Poland and say "deal with it."
| johnisgood wrote:
| You mean the Government of the host country, not the
| people.
|
| See: 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Uh yeah the government? I'm not sure if you expect the US
| to go out and poll everyone in the whole country first or
| what you're trying to imply, but governments usually
| coordinate with governments.
|
| > See: 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.
|
| War is war, it sucks but it's been a part of human
| history for all of human history. That said, those wars
| are over. If Iraq no longer wanted US bases in their
| territory, they could ask the US to leave.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I think in 2020, Iraq's parliament did vote to expel
| foreign troops, yet the U.S. military presence continues
| albeit in a limited capacity.
|
| You are right, governments usually coordinate with
| governments, but my point is that the consent of the
| government doesn't always align with the will of the
| people, particularly in cases where public opinion is
| suppressed or ignored.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| 1990 Gulf War is actually an example of the Saudi
| Arabians asking for coalition troops to defend them.
|
| 2003? I'll give you that one.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Regarding 1990, nonetheless, prolonged U.S. presence in
| Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War became highly
| controversial though, fueling anti-American sentiment.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| And the US left.
|
| Also, if there's one thing that the House of Saud has
| made apparent, it's that they don't much care about what
| their subjects consider controversial.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Well the alternative, in realpolitik terms, is having
| everything owned by Chinese companies.
|
| I suppose they're free to pick.
| sobellian wrote:
| I don't necessarily buy the argument that we should play the
| same game as a communist dictatorship in the name of
| fairness. If we eat our own dogfood then we ought to conclude
| that suppression of speech in fact marks a critical weakness
| of their system. Why not take the free real estate, then, and
| leave our system's open nature unmolested?
| DAGdug wrote:
| I hope this doesn't sound overly cynical or conspiratorial. My
| sense is that there's panic about unfettered access to what's
| happening in Gaza on TikTok, which is shaping Gen Z's
| perceptions in a way that isn't deemed acceptable by the
| political establishment. US-based companies seem to have
| processes in place - direct or indirect - to suppress the reach
| of such content.
| spencerflem wrote:
| ^^^^^^
|
| Same reason they passed the nonprofit killing bill
| bipartisanly, for whatever reason this seems to be a huge
| deal for the people in government right now.
| gpm wrote:
| This is overly conspiratorial, because the timeline doesn't
| line up. Gaza has only been in the news since October 7th
| 2023.
|
| The government first started talking about banning TikTok in
| 2018 (under Trump). Ordered them to divest of US interests
| and prohibited transactions with them in 2020 (under Trump).
| The latter of which was overturned by the courts.
|
| The current administration took over in 2021, and in 2021
| labelled the PRC as a foreign adversary. Discussed the threat
| to the US through the PRCs control of software applications
| and teh vasts swaths of information available from their
| users, directed agencies to find risk mitigation measures,
| and started a long process of negotiating with TikTok over
| how exactly it continued to operate.
|
| The act ordering divestment is the inevitable consequence of
| those talks failing... those talks failed sometime late 2022
| or early 2023 (the last proposal under them was in August
| 2022).
| user982 wrote:
| The sudden resurgence of the years-dormant campaign to ban
| TikTok, and its rapid legislative success this time around,
| were directly because of Israel and Gaza. From the mouths
| of senators: _" Some wonder why there was such overwhelming
| support for us to shut down (potentially) TikTok...if you
| look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions
| of Palestinians relative to other social media sites it's
| overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I know that's
| of real interest..."_
| (https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587)
| Jacob Helberg, a member of a congressional research and
| advisory panel called the U.S.-China Economic and Security
| Review Commission, has been working on building a
| bipartisan, bicoastal alliance of China hawks, united in
| part by their desire to ban TikTok. Over the past year, he
| says, he has met with more than 100 members of Congress,
| and brought up TikTok with all of them. [...]
| It was slow going until Oct. 7. The attack that day in
| Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a
| turning point in the push against TikTok, Helberg said.
| People who historically hadn't taken a position on TikTok
| became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the
| videos and what they saw as an increase in antisemitic
| content posted to the app.
|
| "How TikTok Was Blindsided by U.S. Bill That Could Ban It"
| (https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-tiktok-was-blindsided-by-a-
| u-s-...)
| NoGravitas wrote:
| The push for the TikTok ban only went bipartisan after
| October 7. It was stalled out before that.
| polytely wrote:
| According to the people gunning for it seems to be mostly about
| controlling what content Americans can see in order to keep
| public opinions in line with foreign policy goals. (i.e. pro
| Israel)
|
| >While data security issues are paramount, less often discussed
| is TikTok's power to radically distort the world-picture that
| America's young people encounter. Israel's unfolding war with
| Hamas is a crucial test case. According to one poll, 51% of
| Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe that Hamas's
| murder of civilians was justified--a statistic notably
| different from other age cohorts. Analysts have attributed this
| disparity to the ubiquity of anti-Israel content on TikTok,
| where most young internet users get their information about the
| world
|
| from:
|
| https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/Ha...
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I think there's an important distinction between "keeping
| public opinions [pro Israel]," as you claim, and discouraging
| the dissemination of content that _radicalizes_ (for lack of
| a better word) viewers enough to justify and support the
| murder of innocent civilians by a terrorist organization, as
| the Senator claims.
| gpm wrote:
| Yes! In fact the US court system does a great job of things
| like that.
|
| https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2024/12/24-111...
|
| I recommend you start reading on Page 33 if you are impatient.
|
| In extremely short. The PRC is an extremely active cyber
| threat, hacking things all over the US, in large part to gain
| access do gain access to datasets about U.S. people. Including
| hacks of the Goverment's Office of Personnel Management, of a
| credit reporting agency, a health insurance provider.
|
| The PRC has a strategy and laws of using its relationship with
| Chinese companies, and through them their subsidiaries, to
| carry out it's intelligence activities.They specifically point
| to the National Security Law of 2015 and the Cybersecurity law
| of 2017 which require full co-operation with Chinese
| authorities and full access to the data.
|
| So one half of their justification is the significant risk of
| China using TikTok to conduct espionage in the form of
| gathering a huge dataset on Americans.
|
| ---
|
| Another half of the risk is, as everyone else here is already
| saying, their ability to influence Americans.
|
| This is not an entirely theoretical concern as TikTok would
| like you to believe, the Government reports that "ByteDance and
| TikTok Global have taken action in response to PRC demands to
| censor content outside of China".
|
| And all evidence is that it _would_ happen in the US the second
| the PRC decided to ask for it.
| spencerflem wrote:
| If they wanted our datasets they could just buy it lol,
|
| Remember Cambridge Analytica?
| gpm wrote:
| They _do_ just buy it. The opinion mentions that. It turns
| out they want _even more data_ and also do things like
| hacking to steal it.
|
| > The PRC's methods for collecting data include using "its
| relationships with Chinese companies," making "strategic
| investments in foreign companies," and "purchasing large
| data sets." For example [...]
|
| In fact it treats the Chinese investment into TikTok as
| basically a form of "just buying it" with regards to the
| information gathering justification for banning it.
| LargeWu wrote:
| It's not about getting our data. The TikTok algorithm is
| already being used to sow discord by showing stuff the PRC
| wants impressionable Americans to see. This ability of an
| adversarial foreign nation to surgically push
| individualized propaganda to consumers in another country
| is pretty unparalleled in human history. TikTok is the
| ultimate propaganda machine.
| spencerflem wrote:
| TikTok is basically the same as
| Facebook/Instagram/Y.T.Shorts but with a different owner
| gpm wrote:
| Well... yes... it's the owner the government is concerned
| about.
|
| The law requires that ownership of TikTok be changed
| before it continues operating in the US, not that TikTok
| stop operating.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Right, I guess I'm agreeing with you that social media is
| an effective propaganda machine (they're ad companies and
| what is an ad but propaganda to buy a product) and the US
| Govt wants one where they set the tone.
|
| I was disagreeing with GP that seemed to act like TikTok
| was uniquely a propaganda engine
| LargeWu wrote:
| I think the fact that the PRC would rather burn it all
| down rather than allow it to be sold speaks volumes that
| it's not about TikTok as a business venture.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| It's also possible that the US market just isn't as
| valuable or profitable to TikTok/ByteDance as we assume.
| skulk wrote:
| At this point, I trust Xi approximately as much as I do
| Zuck and Musk with my economic future.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| 'There are three fires' is not an argument against
| putting out any one of them.
| coldpie wrote:
| Can you link to some evidence of any of those claims? US
| politicians' statements do not count as evidence.
| thatguymike wrote:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/13/tikt
| ok-...
| coldpie wrote:
| It sounds like they were complying with a Russian law?
| drcongo wrote:
| Excellent summary, thank you.
| thuanao wrote:
| Red panic, racism, and corporate welfare. The usual motivating
| factors in US policy.
| glaksmono wrote:
| Lemon8 is taking over?
| s1mon wrote:
| I tried it for about a 1/2 hr and it was nothing like TikTok in
| terms of content, UX, or the algorithm. More of a fail than
| Reels or Shorts, or any other wannabe clones.
| bpx51 wrote:
| It's currently down (503 Service Temporarily Unavailable), so
| no, it's not taking over
| mempko wrote:
| RedNote is
| donatj wrote:
| If X ne Twitter knew what they were doing, now would have been
| the obvious moment to relaunch Vine.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| I doubt they have the engineering experience to launch anything
| at this point. They try to do a weird tiktok like thing where
| watching a video on mobile will randomly scroll to another
| video, but I think this probably has more to do with juicing
| "unregretted user seconds" than anything.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I've been wondering for the past couple of years, why did Vine
| fail but TikTok succeed? Based on my increasingly fuzzy
| memories of Vine and my rough understanding of TikTok as a non-
| user, they appear to be pretty much the same app.
| modeless wrote:
| Seems to me like they just gave up?
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/28/extrem
| e...
| donatj wrote:
| Vines were limited to six seconds, so the medium was a little
| different. That seems easy enough to change however.
| paxys wrote:
| The precursor to TikTik (Musical.ly) "failed" as well. I
| think it's because while apps of that era were able to
| achieve the viral moment, they failed to convert that into
| advertising and sponsorship $$$. TikTok, Instagram etc. have
| perfected that pipeline.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| TikTok's algorithm for the feed and their data science and
| recommenders are pretty amazing. You can tune it to show you
| what you like really quickly and it's effective. Mine is
| tuned to old house preservation and restoration, a couple
| guys doing skits as blue collar workers that are some of the
| funniest parts of my day, motocross videos, and some
| dog/animal content. I've never liked a video or commented on
| a video, it's just so effective using dwell time and they
| have so much data that they can give you exactly what you
| want and little that you don't. There is no politics on my
| feed. I challenge you to get that with twitter, reels,
| threads, Facebook, vine... any of them
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I think we remember Vine through rose colored glasses. There
| was nothing on vine that was addicting, other than some very
| famous videos, that are still treated as relics. And everyone
| knew about those videos, because of how the feed was
| organized. TikTok is way more tailored-to-the-user.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| vine could only do 7 second videos which hurts long-term
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Until 2020, most TikTok videos were 15 seconds or so.
| They only switched to 30 seconds and later 1min+ after
| gaining huge traction. I guess 7 seconds is pretty short,
| but it the algorithm that was pretty simple.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| 7 seconds was great for certain types of videos
| especially quick comedic ones and brevity being the soul
| of wit means you have to be intentional with the little
| time you have
|
| doubling the max duration length added greater
| versatility for creators while minimizing bloat.
|
| making longer videos beyond a certain length can add to
| rambling and bloat which is why they've since added speed
| controls.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > There was nothing on vine that was addicting
|
| Well that sounds like a selling point to me.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| It's "selling" if you're not going to spend hours on it.
| Kinda the opposite.
| samcat116 wrote:
| > There was nothing on vine that was addicting
|
| Did we use the same app??
|
| RIP Vine
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| IIRC people didn't spend multiple hours a day on Vine.
| That was one of the reasons why it shut down -- they
| couldn't grab attention span of the aging users like
| Instagram and Snapchat did at that period (2012-2016).
| They also couldn't get the fomo feeling that younger
| people nowadays get without TikTok et al.
| michaelmueller wrote:
| Lack of variety in videos. 6s videos limited the amount of
| content that could be included to the point where all videos
| were essentially short comedy skits. TikTok keeps you engaged
| by showing you a variety of different genres of video. This
| includes comedy, but also educational videos, sports
| highlights, video game clips, etc.
|
| Add to this TikTok's algorithm for deciding what content to
| show you based on how engaged you were in the previous videos
| and you end up with a "For you" feed that drastically varies
| from person-to-person. This keeps it fresh and enjoyable at
| all times.
|
| Youtube tries to do a similar thing by presenting you videos
| that are similar to your interests, but in my experience it
| usually trends towards what is likely "more profitable".
| Meaning longer videos from well-established creators to juice
| as much ad revenue as possible from the user.
|
| TikTok feels night-and-day in comparison. On TikTok, I can
| watch a 3 minute educational video on how elevators work, and
| then scroll once and see 3 second video of a grown man
| pretending to be a duck
| xnx wrote:
| Right idea, wrong time. The number of people with phones and
| data plans capable of recording, uploading, and viewing good
| quality video is near 100% now.
| throwaway287391 wrote:
| Given that (as the article mentions) the ban essentially only
| directs Google/Apple to remove the app from their US stores,
| what's the rationale on ByteDance's part to immediately revoke
| existing US users' access? My naive assumption was they'd want to
| keep it going and support the current dead version of the app for
| as long as possible to continue squeezing US revenue for at least
| a few more months until that becomes untenable. Are they instead
| hoping to rally the user base into mass protests and pressure
| lawmakers into reversing the ban?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| As far as I know there's no real calculation, it would just be
| for revenge.
|
| ByteDance is very pissed about how they are being treated and
| so they would rather burn it all down than hand it over to some
| American.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| It is endlessly fascinating to me that people ascribe
| emotions that individuals experience to organizations,
| companies, nation-states, etc.
|
| As the article says ByteDance is a massive company with
| thousands of employees in the US alone. It's ridiculous to
| think a corporation of that size operates as if it was a
| singular (and extremely petty) individual, especially to the
| detriment of its own self interests.
|
| There's a dozen potential motivations for pursuing this
| strategy and none of them boil down to being "pissed".
| suraci wrote:
| I'd like to offer an alternative perspective: TikTok's main
| revenue comes from China. Succumbing to the US gov would
| challenge the domestic nationalism, thereby causing more
| losses.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I was surprised by that too. I assumed we would see a sudden
| interest in android and iphone jailbreaking.
| zzzeek wrote:
| noahpinion has a great post [1] on this today and he points out
| the interesting observations we can make: 1. because it's
| "Beijing" who is tasked with deciding whether or not TikTok can
| be sold makes it extremely clear Bytedance is not an independent
| private company the way it would be the case in the US. They are
| legally required to obey CCP directives [2] 2. Beijing had every
| opportunity to sell the application off, and in fact they did
| just that with another app called Grindr some years back [3]
| without any fanfare. 3. That Beijing would rather _close_ TikTok
| entirely, rather than sell it, shows how deeply important it is
| to Beijing that TikTok does not come under the control of another
| nation, including the US. it 's well established that the
| government censors speech on TikTok including the speech of US
| citizens [4]
|
| noah bangs on the "the government of China is really trying to
| weaken or destroy the economic capacity of the US" drum pretty
| hard and it's hard to disagree with the many books and arguments
| he cites. The current rush to Rednote has a lot of TikTokers
| making the argument that "See? Chinese people are great!" which
| is where they are confusing sentiment about the citizens of China
| with that of the Chinese government itself. It actually _is_
| great if there 's a big cultural interplay between young US and
| Chinese citizens (not sure w/ Rednote though), so that we would
| be able to counteract a key propaganda point from Beijing which
| is that the TikTok forced sale is some kind of strike against the
| Chinese people. It's important that the point be made that this
| is about the hostility of the Chinese government itself, which is
| pretty clearly a hostile adversary to the US.
|
| [1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tiktok-is-just-the-beginning
|
| [2] https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/experts-agree-byte-
| da...
|
| [3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168079/grindr-sold-
| chine...
|
| [4] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-
| ing...
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Some Japanese tried to buy one the these supposedly perfectly
| "independent private compan[ies]", and the US president said
| no, but that's completely different I'm sure.
| zzzeek wrote:
| right instead Biden ordered US Steel to close and cease all
| operations, just like Beijing is doing to TikTok. /sarcasm
|
| there is no comparison between these events
| maxglute wrote:
| TikTok has entire RoW (excluding India) market. Assuming US
| only bans in US... which TBH we don't know. There's no
| comparison because TikTok is still massively profitable
| without US, whereas US Steel is still a mess without JP.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > because TikTok is still massively profitable without US
|
| Do we know that? In almost all cases for mobile apps, the
| US is far and away the largest and most profitable market
| for any business. I'd also be surprised if the TikTok
| shop for example is profitable (or available?) outside
| the US.
| maxglute wrote:
| I think something like 8/18B revenue (mostly ads) this
| year is from US. So it's subtantial, but 10B is not chomp
| change, and theoretically TikTok has growth potential
| since TikTok algo is competitive with western platforms,
| which cannot be said for US steel vs other modern
| metallurgy facilities. Compared to douyin in PRC, TikTok
| hasn't even began monetizing / ecommerce, which TBH would
| probably kill its popularity.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >I think something like 8/18B revenue (mostly ads) this
| year is from US. So it's subtantial, but 10B is not chomp
| change
|
| A social media site is not like a company that makes
| widgets. The latter's profits scale linearly with the
| number of widgets sold. A website's costs do not scale
| linearly (at least, not in the same way) with the number
| of users; much of the infrastructure cost is the same
| whether 500 million or one billion users are on the site.
|
| It's entirely possible that, as nozzlegear said, a TikTok
| without US users is unprofitable. Especially given that,
| the last time I checked, US users are a) only 10% of the
| total TikTok userbase and b) US creators are 21 of the
| top 50 TikTok users with the most followers.
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-
| followed_TikTok_a...>
| maxglute wrote:
| Without US specific data warehousing requirements (~1.5B
| Project Texas / Oracle), TikTok can fallback to using
| Douyin infra... which is already scaled for billion+
| users. All that might goto PRC datacentres, i.e. Huawei
| Cloud which exist in most continents. If anything Douyin
| can eliminate redundant TikTok infra costs. I've no doubt
| Americans is a disproportionately more profitable in
| terms of ARPU, it would be a huge hit, but TikTok
| unlikely to go in red given those factors if RoW markets
| still leaves ~10B, especially if PRC wants to prioritize
| using TikTok as portal for ecommerce with PRC exports,
| which as I mentioned, TikTok is not nearly aggressive
| with monetizing as Douyin. I can't say it's impossible,
| but IMO unlikely.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| This is silly, the US is only 15% of Tiktok users.
| corimaith wrote:
| The majority of ByteDance's users are from China. Without
| India, USA is around 50% of global revenue, and other
| markets are alot more fragmented hence smaller
| ecosystems.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I am talking about Tiktok users, not Douyin. Douyin
| itself has almost a billion users.
|
| Markets are not countries are not ecosystems. The EU is
| fragmented by countries but it's a single market, again
| with more users than the US.
|
| Your stat about revenue is misleading and outdated.
| Turkey for example generates almost as much revenue as
| the US, and many markets are currently in the process of
| being monetized which will take some time, the potential
| revenue is something Bytedance is going to factor in more
| than current revenue when it makes a major strategic
| decision.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _That Beijing would rather close TikTok entirely, rather than
| sell it, shows how deeply important it is to Beijing that
| TikTok does not come under the control of another nation,
| including the US_
|
| I don't think it is important because of how 'powerful' a tool
| it is. I think it is more than being forced to sell it would be
| losing face and a humiliation (a la 19th century's Inequal
| Treaties). Also, they don't have to sell it altogether as the
| issue is only with the US.
|
| So they just shut it down in the US and can say that they don't
| give in to blackmail while pointing out how hypocritical the US
| are (" _free speech but only if controlled by the US_ " sort of
| angle).
| zzzeek wrote:
| why did they sell Grindr when presented with an identical set
| of constraints / demands ?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| The two cases are just very different, why are you even
| comparing the case of an investment company buying a stake
| in an existing app with the original creator being banned
| from owning what they created?
| alp1n3_eth wrote:
| A forced sale would essentially gut them of their proprietary
| algo, which is leagues ahead of anything YT or Insta has. This
| algo and the associated TikTok assets can still be used a
| billion different ways around the world and in other apps.
|
| Why would they ever want to help create an international
| competitor that could compete with them? I don't think any
| business would want to do that. Obviously the CCP has a level
| of access if they want it to data hosted in China, that's how
| it works with every company that has a physical location there.
| zzzeek wrote:
| that is exactly noah's point, that TikTok is an extremely
| potent application. Except it's not "a business" deciding
| this it's "a government", and China does not want to pass off
| this much capability to shape public opinion to the US while
| losing it themselves.
| maxglute wrote:
| >Bytedance is not an independent private company
|
| PRC banned exporting Bytedance algo. By that logic, no US
| companies are independent private companies due to US export
| controls. And TBH both points are true.
|
| >Grindr
|
| Grindr was foreign company acquired by PRC, and sale was
| reversed by CFIUS. Selling an acquired foreign company is
| geo/politically different than having your domestic company
| nationalized/appropriated by another. Which is quite literally
| a strike against Chinese people. Even PRC has never forced a US
| company from divesting US ownership, because that's a retarded
| tier of "hostility" only US hubris can imagine. And it's
| particularly retarded tier analysis from Noahpinion who thinks
| Chinese people won't view divestment requirement a PRC company
| as hostile against Chinese entrepreners, who are Chinese
| people.
| rwarfield wrote:
| > PRC banned exporting Bytedance algo. By that logic, no US
| companies are independent private companies due to US export
| controls. And TBH both points are true.
|
| Chinese state control over private companies is far more
| pervasive, and less bound by rule-of-law, than that of the
| U.S. Export controls are not even the H2O molecule at the tip
| of the iceberg.
|
| > Even PRC has never forced a US company from divesting US
| ownership
|
| Bytedance is not being forced to divest; they can leave the
| market, just like Google and many others had to leave China.
| maxglute wrote:
| >more pervasive
|
| US spectrum export controls have been every bit as
| pervasive as PRC ones, pretending muh "rule of law" is a
| distinction without difference at this point. It's
| functionally the same.
|
| >forced to divest
|
| If US law is forced divestiture, then Bytedance is "force"
| to leave, because having US nationalize a PRC company is
| obviously a nonstarter except for the terminally stupid
| like noahopinion. Unlike Google + western platforms who
| "chose" (read: not banned) to leave because they "chose"
| not to comply with PRC laws that applies to all companies,
| including domestic PRC ones. The difference is US has no
| equitable law, i.e. some sort of data privacy law, that
| enables Bytedance to operate in US... while following the
| same laws that US companies do, as if Bytedance wasn't
| already bending backwards following additional requirements
| that US platforms do not have to follow (i.e. functionally
| Oracle JV).
|
| Like fine, Bytedance needs to follow US laws, except US
| laws is designed specifically to prevent PRC companies from
| operating, vs PRC laws is designed to allow everyone to
| operate, just said operation is onerous - see retarded
| reciprocal argument that US companies should operate in PRC
| without abiding by PRC censorship laws that domestic
| platforms has to abide by. There's a reason FB and Google
| had internal programs to re-enter PRC market compliant with
| PRC laws (before being axed by internal dissent), because
| it's still feasble for US platforms to operate in PRC while
| being US (or at least JV) owned. So let's not pretend what
| US is doing is the same thing - PRC is more rule of law, US
| rule by law in this comparison. But again, functionally
| that hardly matters.
| rwarfield wrote:
| > US spectrum export controls have been every bit as
| pervasive as PRC ones, pretending muh "rule of law" is a
| distinction without difference at this point. It's
| functionally the same.
|
| As I said, export controls are such a minor part of the
| problem as to hardly be worth mentioning. The pervasive
| control I'm speaking of is things like the fact that
| ByteDance (like all large Chinese companies) would have
| an internal CCP committee with influence over personnel
| and strategic decisions.
|
| > having US nationalize a PRC company is obviously a
| nonstarter except for the terminally stupid like
| noahopinion
|
| This is wrong on many levels. No one is talking about
| nationalizing TikTok (which is not a PRC company) and
| certainly not ByteDance.
| maxglute wrote:
| >CCP committee with influence over personnel and
| strategic decisions
|
| Party committees as part of 93 company law basically
| creates dumb shit like organizing staff picnics for
| companies with more than 3 CCP members, which is
| basically any reasonably sized company since 1/8 of
| country are CCP members. It is much more minor than
| export controls. The "pervasive control" exists in the
| sense that there is higher level coordination like META
| having US intelligence on board, or forming partnerships
| with said agencies. Fixating on minor shit like internal
| CCP committee is propaganda trying to pretend somehow US
| companies are less influenced by geo/politics when they
| are every bit as much. The big stuff is again,
| distinction without difference.
|
| > TikTok which is not a PRC company
|
| This is being obtuse like people pretending TikTok being
| based in Singapore/incorporated in Caymen somehow
| seperates it from Bytedance's (quartered in Beijing) PRC
| roots. I'll grant you DE-nationalizing isn't
| "technically" the same as nationalizing, but
| geo/politically it's obviously a none starter just like
| if Beijing told Boeing they would have to divest from US
| ownership. PRC would never allow US to normalize that
| kind of behaviour, and vice versa. DE-nationalizing
| tiktok, i.e. nationalizing by parties other than PRC is
| another distinction without difference.
| rwarfield wrote:
| Right, the CCP committees are just there to organize
| picnics. Sure.
|
| Look, I think anyone who has spent a significant amount
| of time in both places understands that there is a major
| difference in the way private companies relate to the
| government in China versus in the U.S. For example, it's
| far more common for U.S. companies to sue the government
| over laws or policies they disagree with, whereas in
| China it's just taken as given that officials have a lot
| of discretion.
|
| You bring up Meta having US intelligence onboard - I
| assume you're referring to the Edward Snowden / PRISM
| revelations. Remember that this was a huge scandal
| precisely because the idea of American companies working
| with intelligence agencies to spy (even inadvertently) on
| Americans is considered so repugnant. Whereas in China
| it's just taken as given that the government can read
| your WeChat (or whatever) messages whenever they feel
| like it, and any encrypted messaging apps that gain a
| following are quickly removed from app stores.
|
| This is not a distinction without a difference; China is
| a totalitarian state where you have essentially no right
| to speech or privacy. The U.S., for all its flaws, is not
| like that.
|
| > DE-nationalizing... geo/politically it's obviously a
| none starter just like if Beijing told Boeing they would
| have to divest...
|
| Can you not see the hypocrisy here, when China
| functionally bans almost the entire U.S. internet sector?
| maxglute wrote:
| > Sure.
|
| I mean yes? That's what they do - dumb "political work"
| activities. It's not the high level strategic
| coordination, which I said exists (as they do in US), but
| citing pedestrian CCP committees ain't it. It's Karen
| from HR buying birthday cakes tier of activities. As
| someone who spent significant time in both places, sure,
| PRC companies doesn't fuck with central gov, US companies
| gets to try to. But push comes to shove, US companies
| cave, so for the purpose of foreign policy and
| geopolitics, especially with respect to great powers
| competition, it's a distinction without difference,
| because US companies will be subservient to national
| security interests, with minimal discretion, as they
| should be. Reminder much chip restrictions were done
| without industry input / consultation before roll out.
| Because US system capable of unilaterally laying down the
| law as well as CCP.
|
| >is not like that.
|
| Yes and NSA totally dismantled domestic spying / FVEY
| hack to spy on host nationals via third countries (rule
| of law you know) because Americans found it repugnant,
| except not. Ex-CIA hires still deciding facebook content
| policy on "misinfo". US voters thinks lots of things US
| gov does are repugnant, but functionally cannot change
| it, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
|
| >functionally bans
|
| Except PRC doesn't. Entire US internet sector is welcome
| to operate in PRC, provided they follow onerous
| (expensive) PRC filtering regulations. Which they choose
| not to. US platforms functionally choses not to operate
| in PRC, because they don't want to follow the same PRC
| laws that PRC companies has to follow. Let's not forget
| these platforms were blocked post 2009 minority riots for
| actual valid national security reasons, FB/Twitter
| refused to censor / filter calls for retaliatory
| violence. Queue PRC platforms implementing onerously
| expensive human moderation... which later western
| platforms adopted following NZ shooting, myanmar killings
| etc. We have TikTok following the same US laws every
| other US platform follows... and more (again, Oracle
| basically JV arrangment), i.e. TikTok operating at
| regulatory disadvantage. Incidentally after getting up
| their expensive human moderation programs, FB/Google
| tried but internal dissent killed efforts because they
| spent the money and can scaling system to PRC. If
| anything PRC would LOVE if western platforms returned,
| followed PRC law, and start handing over dissident info
| per PRC cyber security regulations / get squeezed by PRC
| influence.
|
| The hypocrisy is thinking they're remotely comparable
| situations when TikTok chooses to compete in an unfair US
| regulatory enviroment and western companies choose not to
| compete in a fair regulatory PRC enviroment. TikTok even
| offered to basically have US intelligence/oversight on
| all US activities. The hypocrisy is there is no onerous,
| concessions TikTok can do to operate in US as a PRC
| company, even ones that puts it at significant
| competitive disadvantaged (extra regulatory costs) vs
| western platforms choosing not to shoulder the same
| regulatory costs as other PRC companies (100,000s human
| moderators ain't cheap). Extra hubris when proponents of
| "CCP ban US platforms" thinks US platforms shouldn't
| follow PRC laws and somehow are victims. Or that
| complying to same filtering laws is the same as
| divestiture. It's difference between house rules being,
| clean your dishes, versus get a sex change.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Surely the value of the TikTok user base is >$0 even without
| the algorithm. Why not sell that part of it?
| maxglute wrote:
| Whose buying? For how much. But maybe for the same reason
| Meta alleges it doesn't sell user data, because there's 7
| billion other potential users who wouldn't look fondly at
| it. Counter productive as long as there's other routes for
| growth.
| andrewla wrote:
| noahpinion is generally very insightful but I don't think his
| analysis holds water here. ByteDance is a major Chinese company
| -- if the EU tried to force the sale of Google you can sure as
| shit expect "Washington" to have strong feelings about this.
| The implication that Beijing controls ByteDance is not really
| supported by this evidence.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| This is an absolutely ridiculous line of reasoning. Tiktok has
| over a billion users, and about 150 million of those are
| American. It would be downright stupid to sell all of it just
| for the US market and it would set an absolutely disastrous
| precedent.
| rafram wrote:
| American eyeballs are worth more than other countries'
| eyeballs.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Tiktok in other countries monetizes mostly using the shop,
| not ads. Turkey brings only slightly less revenue than the
| US.
| rafram wrote:
| Source?
| TMWNN wrote:
| A social media site is not like a company that makes widgets.
| The latter's profits scale linearly with the number of
| widgets sold. A website's costs do not scale linearly (at
| least, not in the same way) with the number of users; much of
| the infrastructure cost is the same whether 500 million or
| one billion users are on the site.
|
| It's entirely possible that a TikTok without US users is
| unprofitable. Especially given that US creators are 21 of the
| top 50 TikTok users with the most followers.
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-
| followed_TikTok_a...>
|
| PS - That you seriously believe that tens of millions of
| iPhone-using Americans will buy, carry around, and constantly
| switch to an Android phone just to sideload TikTok boggles
| the mind.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Tiktok is an offshoot of Douyin, I don't think Douyin needs
| the US to be profitable, and software has a low marginal
| cost.
|
| > PS - That you seriously believe that tens of millions of
| iPhone-using Americans will buy, carry around, and
| constantly switch to an Android phone just to sideload
| TikTok boggles the mind.
|
| I never said so, I said I wouldn't be surprised if a
| significant number did. Having grown up in this environment
| I've seen people literally buy 4 year old iPhones just for
| iMessage. American teenagers are very weird about social
| media and this kind of behavior wouldn't be out of
| character.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I say this as someone who was in high school as the first wave of
| social media sites (early Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.) came
| up:
|
| Just get rid of all of them. They're battery acid poured on the
| human psyche.
|
| Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones. If you
| have to combine your online interactions with people with the
| interactions you have with them in real life, you're better off,
| and that doesn't happen when social networks span the globe.
| tempworkac wrote:
| why? you don't have to use them. should HN be banned?
| zzzeek wrote:
| hacker news has a lot of ideological community problems but
| HN is not "massively centralized", it's just a narrow window
| into the US tech scene with a relatively small community of
| people.
|
| I think there's a great argument that says the first
| amendment is not a suicide pact. The social media environment
| right now is having an unprecedented destructive effect on US
| democracy. I think TikTok is right there as a key player in
| spreading weapons-grade, state-sponsored mush to younger
| people.
| tempworkac wrote:
| but HN is centralized, so you agree if HN exceeds some
| arbitrary amount of users it should be banned? how
| ridiculous. tiktok is not any better or worse than
| facebook, youtube, or the mainstream media.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Hell, I'd make that arbitrary amount 300.
|
| That's about the number of social connections the human
| brain is really meant to handle.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Its worse for the US Govt in that they cannot secretly
| ask them to control what gets seen
| suraci wrote:
| TBO, TikTok and Twitter are far more diverse than HN, which
| is merely an echo chamber, only slightly better than a
| subreddit.
|
| Although I like HN more than TikTok, it's so funny
| AlexandrB wrote:
| What matters is not the diversity of the overall userbase
| but the diversity of what gets shown to you. From my
| (limited) experience TikTok is hyper-targeted and will
| narrow in on your interests/biases quickly and keep you
| in that bubble.
|
| HN (and reddit) generally lacks this hyper-targeting.
| Obviously, just the act of going to HN is selecting for a
| certain cross-section of opinions, but once you're there
| what you see is determined by the community and not by
| your own personal preferences.
| gcr wrote:
| It sounds like you're saying that personalized feeds are
| the key problem?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Absolutely. In two specific ways:
|
| 1. There's often little or no visibility on how this
| personalization happens. People with often _try_ to guess
| and steer the algorithm but the reality is you don 't
| know. This means that unpopular opinions can be quietly
| suppressed with no detectable censorship. On the
| poster/creator side this presents as constant paranoia
| about "shadow banning" and the like.
|
| 2. The personalized feeds are effectively endless. This
| allows for repetition that really amplifies any
| biases/fears. For example, suppose you're worried that
| the roads are getting more dangerous and you go on
| Instagram and start looking at car crash reels. Instagram
| will happily feed you as much of these as you can stomach
| and it starts to affect your perception of reality. Never
| mind that you're looking at incidents captured over a
| period of years from all over the world, seeing them all
| back to back will probably give you anxiety the next time
| you go to cross the street. Now apply this same logic to
| any political topic...
| suraci wrote:
| Tiktok(or other algorithm-suggesting platforms) provides
| echo chambers for each user
|
| HN/subreddit provides a single echo chamber for everyone
|
| that's why I like HN more, I don't want to be in my echo
| chamber, I perfer visiting your chamber
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I mean, you're not wrong. I come to HN to see how awful
| the tech ghouls are being today.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't sneer, including at the rest of the
| community._" It's reliably a marker of bad comments and
| worse threads.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dang wrote:
| You're welcome here, and you're welcome to express
| contrarian views--that's an important part of an
| intellectually curious community, which is our goal with
| HN. However, we need you to do it while sticking to the
| site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You've
| unfortunately been breaking them in various places
| already.
|
| I know how hard it is to be in the minority on a
| contentious topic without getting provoked (and then
| becoming provocative oneself), but that's what we need
| commenters with minority views to do. Otherwise we end up
| having to moderate the accounts, not because we want to
| suppress minority views but because we have to enforce
| HN's rules.
|
| I've written about this extensively because it's such a
| consistent phenomenon. Here's one post if you (or anyone)
| wants a fuller explanation:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722. There are
| plenty more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page
| =0&prefix=true&que...
|
| It's in your interest to do this, because then you
| maximize the persuasive power of your comments.
| Conversely, if you succumb to the pressure to be
| indignant and/or snarky and/or flamey and so on, that
| ends up discrediting your views, which is particularly
| damaging if they happen to be true: https://hn.algolia.co
| m/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| (p.s. I'm an admin here in case that wasn't obvious)
| suraci wrote:
| sorry being snarky, hard to help it, my bad, again
|
| and there's misunderstanding, I was not provoked, at
| least in the comment above
|
| it's not a critique to HN, in fact, isn't it obvious that
| HN inevitably ends to a echo chamber? unpopular opinions
| greyed out, popular opinions ranked up, wasn't it design
| to be this?
|
| it's not that bad, most communities are echo chambers
| jkestner wrote:
| "Echo chamber" is a tautology by this point. What's bad
| about a narrower focus? It's good to cross pollinate on
| occasion but you're not going to ever get to deep
| discussions when you have the same arguments over and
| over with people who share little common ground. I don't
| come to HN to read what flat earthers think about that
| gorgeous photo of the Earth's curve taken by an
| astronaut, and I can have productive disagreements with
| other technologists.
| suraci wrote:
| > I can have productive disagreements with other
| technologists
|
| Only for tech topics
|
| Things went ugly(but fun!) for political/geopolitical
| topics, 'unpopular' opinions will be grayed out, opinions
| survived coalesced into the essence of the Anglo-Saxon
| spirit
| whimsicalism wrote:
| every generation thinks they're the first to argue that
| there are negative effects of free expression.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's not free expression when someone else chooses what
| everyone sees.
|
| Threads is notorious for de-boosting posts with external
| links. This is a deliberate choice which filters facts
| and external references out of the conversation.
|
| Or you can just delay the feed of posters you don't like.
| They arrive at every debate a day late, while your
| favourites go through immediately. And to more people.
|
| And so on.
|
| There's nothing free about any of this. It's covert
| behaviour and sentiment modification.
|
| With a newspaper you get an editorial angle, so you can
| choose it if you want it.
|
| Social media pretends to be a neutral conduit. But it's
| carefully curated and manipulated, and _you don 't know
| how or why._
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Editorial discretion is absolutely part of free
| expression
| refurb wrote:
| I recall similar arguments about the printing press.
|
| "But the masses will be able to access the scripture
| without guidance! Society will crumble!"
| daveguy wrote:
| To be fair, scripture doesn't actively change to increase
| obsessive engagement at the expense of all else.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| it does, just more slowly - modern religions are
| absolutely the result of natural selection for virality
| and fervor in the field of ideas
| daveguy wrote:
| I'd argue the two are like comparing apples and oranges.
| Yes, there is a competition of ideas, but accepted
| scripture is changed so much more slowly than society
| itself that it cannot exploit the zeitgeist of any one
| trend. More importantly, it doesn't change differently to
| each individual to maximize addictive interaction. The
| slowness is a feature. I'm not saying there aren't some
| problems with religion being exploitative, but the
| responsiveness is what makes social media a much more
| effective manipulator.
| refurb wrote:
| But the argument was that your average peasant would not
| be able to understand the scripture and be deceived.
|
| Not that different from arguing that your average
| American can't see through propaganda on TikTok - I think
| they can.
|
| And if the argument is that it's addictive, I mean ok?
| Lots of things are addictive that aren't severely
| harmful. We tolerate those as well.
|
| The argument about teens is an entirely different one,
| I'm talking about adults.
| intended wrote:
| You know, I think lots of us on HN, can at least be the
| people who can and should go to next levels of this
| discussion.
|
| So yes - we should definitely agree that all new
| technology for publishing (publishing? COntent creation?)
| result in issues of free speech.
|
| I will say that each of these, have had different issues,
| and that from Radio onwards, we are dealing with several
| issues (side effects ?) that become more intense with
| each new media developed.
|
| I'll jump to the end, but Social media is definitely
| different from the printing press.
|
| We certainly get new and improved benefits, such as the
| distribution of publishing power to individuals.
|
| At the same time, we are getting issues with an abundance
| of content, that people need content to be eye catching,
| in order to gain an audience.
|
| Theres also a tendency for networks to consolidate over
| time, so at the start of the radio era, or TV era, you
| have a bunch of cable networks, then over time they start
| collapsing into larger groups, which are better able to
| survive.
|
| Fully admit that these are highly generalized, I am just
| thinking of what others can chime in with.
| BryantD wrote:
| Not entirely inaccurate! Martin Luther's 95 Theses
| propagated from Germany to England in a matter of weeks,
| thanks to the printing press. I think society got better
| but it sure did change a lot.
| zzzeek wrote:
| the government of China is a hostile adversary and they
| dont just spread gobs of misinformation and pro-CCP
| propaganda on TikTok, they also heavily censor topics the
| CCP does not like. This is not about free expression so
| much as where the public square should take place. Having
| the US public square take place in a tightly controlled,
| deceptive environment controlled by our worst enemy
| presents an existential risk to the US.
|
| think of the printing press as invented and controlled by
| your worst enemy and only printing what it deems to be
| acceptable.
| trosi wrote:
| Teens don't get addicted to Hacker News
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I've been using hacker news since high
| school, 10+ years ago and haven't been able to stop.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| speak for yourself
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Almost any form of media can be addicting. Kids these days
| might watch TikTok, but my worst addiction since young age
| has been reading online news.
|
| Once I got diagnosed with ADHD and tried stimulant
| medicine, I noticed that the time I spend reading news,
| social media and playing games dropped dramatically. So,
| effectively all these activities have been nothing more
| than drugs for my dysfunctional brain. When my brain isn't
| deficient in dopamine, I seem to automatically spend most
| of my time on something more useful. Probably wouldn't be
| writing this if my meds weren't wearing off at this time of
| day.
| grahamj wrote:
| Meanwhile I'm reading this while I should be coding
| lm28469 wrote:
| HN is too slow for that, if you spend the time kids spend
| on tiktok every day here you'll get bored to death.
| EasyMark wrote:
| yep tiktak has far more serotonin spikes per "next item"
| per unit time than hackernews.
| Kiro wrote:
| HN is the most addictive social media I've ever used.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Not a teen since recently, but got to know it earlier, so
| ... untrue.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| It has a built in timer to prevent folks from using it too
| often.
| lm28469 wrote:
| This is the level 0 of reasoning about these topics...
|
| We live in organised societies, nobody is forcing you to do
| crack but people doing crack will definitely lower the
| experience of everyone they interact with (and more given the
| burden on shared goods like healthcare, infrastructures,
| &c.), that's why we collectively decided that crack shouldn't
| be sold to 13 years old kids.
|
| Now of course this is very flawed and we'll always have
| things slipping through the cracks (alcohol, tobacco, junk
| food, &c.), but unless you want to live in a mad max type of
| world you have to accept some level of regulation, and that
| level of regulation, in a working society, should be
| determined through politics
|
| If tiktok is crack, HN is honey. One becomes problematic much
| quicker than the other, when you see a kid spending 5 hours a
| day on HN hit me up
| voidfunc wrote:
| Won't someone think of the Children!!!?
|
| Social media is just the demon of the day. In the 80s it
| was that damn rock music ruining our kids and in the 90s it
| was violent video games and rap.
|
| Every generation has their "this thing is corrupting the
| youth" moment.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| I don't recall violent video games and rap music
| influencing elections.
| grahamj wrote:
| I wish it had - I'd vote for the person fighting for my
| right to party
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| The impact stated is wildly outsized. I read a microsoft
| report regarding this that was heavily touted and one of
| the "prime" examples given was a 1M view Twitter video.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Yeah sure, Socrates was worried about books too... now if
| you can't see the difference between rock music and kids
| spending 5+ hours a day doomscrolling I think we'll have
| a hard time discussing anything. Feel free to share the
| studies showing the negative effects of books and rock
| music on kids by the way, because there are plenty of
| these when it comes to social media, especially the
| doomscrolling type.
|
| Following your logic everything new has to be desirable,
| that's a tough position to defend imho. Just because new
| trends were incorrectly criticised in the past doesn't
| mean every new trend is good until the heat death of the
| universe, logic 101
| prmoustache wrote:
| > and kids spending 5+ hours a day doomscrolling
|
| Let's stop pretending adults do not do it too.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Oh yeah absolutely, but the comment specifically says:
| "Won't someone think of the Children!!!?"
|
| Children are in a crucial period of their lives when it
| comes to forging habits, learning skills, developing
| addictions, &c.
| refurb wrote:
| This is not an actual argument because you can make it
| about anything.
|
| Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.
|
| Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.
|
| If you can use an argument for anything it's not a very
| convincing argument.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Cool, you can use the argument I was replying to for
| everything too. I guess we're back to square one then.
|
| If you think skiing and cooking have as much of a
| negative impact as social media as on entire generation
| of kids I doubt we'll find common ground to go further,
| usually it requires a bit of good faith
| intended wrote:
| yeah, that makes sense. Everything has a cost, TANSTAFL.
|
| This is the second philopsiphical point of economics.
| Everything is a choice between costs.
|
| Im curious how else you would put it?
| TeaBrain wrote:
| >This is not an actual argument because you can make it
| about anything.
|
| >Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.
|
| >Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs
| society.
|
| This assumes that fairly standard activities are imposing
| the societal cost you are attributing to them. For most
| individuals who perform these activities, they are not
| producing an outsized societal cost, which is the
| delineation the parent comment was making. The parent
| comment used an example of something that from their
| point of view has a negative societal cost in the base
| case. Your examples are not similar as they are not
| referring to the base case of simply performing the
| activities, but only to the relatively uncommon tail end
| outcomes.
| joewhale wrote:
| Idk Xanga was peak non toxic social media. Pretty much just
| blogging. I miss it.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| Yeah that and LiveJournal. And then it just kept going down
| from there in terms of self-expression, effort, quality,
| personal, actually-SOCIAL-media, etc.
|
| "Social media" went from blogging and commenting with your
| friends and others to watching videos of ads interspersed
| with random memes and shit.
|
| Quite a slide.
| palata wrote:
| I understand your point, but I don't think it works like that
| for teenagers. Teenagers _need_ to connect. They will go where
| the others go, because that 's exactly what matters to them.
|
| It's not that they deliberately want the addiction. The
| addiction is a consequence of it, but they go to TikTok because
| their peers are on TikTok.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| They can connect in person. Like they did exclusively up
| until the mid 00s.
|
| I think peers is also a strange word to use. When I joined
| Facebook in 2007 you were more-or-less sorted by where you
| went to high school. You connected with people you _knew_.
|
| I'm sure that still exists on some level, but social media is
| now about driving engagement with people who pay these
| companies to get eyeballs. An influencer isn't your peer.
| It's like considering Billy Mays (may he rest in peace) your
| peer in 2007. No, he's a dude who sold you Oxy-Clean, but he
| was on TV a lot.
| palata wrote:
| > social media is now about driving engagement with people
| who pay these companies to get eyeballs
|
| That's what it is, but that's not how teenagers perceive
| it, I think.
|
| I see it like this: if all your friends watch the news
| everyday and spend a lot of time talking about it, you will
| end up watching the news as well. To connect.
|
| If all your friends watch a lot of sport and meet for that,
| you may well end up learning to enjoy sport as well.
|
| If all your friends know the trends on TikTok and talk
| about it...
| throw2827374 wrote:
| I was bullied in high school because I was so different.
|
| I was also a new kid so it was hard to join an existing
| clique in a small town.
|
| Online groups saved me. It not only let me stay in contact
| with my old friends, but also let me meet new people with
| similar interest so I didn't feel so alone.
| shlant wrote:
| I don't think your story is uncommon especially for
| people who had trouble fitting in, however I would bet
| that places like facebook or instagram were not where you
| found your online groups. More likely to have been forums
| or online games. Very different environments and
| consequences.
| sampullman wrote:
| Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. have mostly killed off
| the places where online groups formed when I was a kid.
| don_neufeld wrote:
| Exactly. Subject specific forums and blogs are just ghost
| towns these days.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Reddit seems just like every forum, but with a mostly
| default skin
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Facebook is not "online groups", and it is known to
| statistically lead teenagers into higher rates of
| suicide.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| Connect in person as a teen when everything is designed
| around cars and stuff a lot more expensive. Where cops
| arrested for you for loitering. Where people see kids going
| home from school as 'they're up to no good'. A lot of the
| past locations are gone and no longer accessible for todays
| youth. Even fast food places want you gone as fast as
| possible.
| dailykoder wrote:
| >Teenagers need to connect.
|
| But not in a tiktok-way. They have more than enough social
| contacts when they go to school. No one need tiktok.
| palata wrote:
| > No one need tiktok.
|
| And we should not underestimate teenagers: if they have
| something better to do than swiping on TikTok, they do it.
| Parents must help them have better things to do.
|
| But still, if all their friends know and talk about the
| TikTok trends, they will feel disconnected if they have no
| clue. That's how I meant that they "need" it. They need to
| "connect" as in having the same references as their
| friends.
| cj wrote:
| That's kind of like telling parents that they should tell
| their kids to eat their vegetables when sitting next to
| McDonalds.
| jkestner wrote:
| Yes, and? Parenting is an active job. It can be done.
| Take a lesson from Steve Jobs and say "no" a lot.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| And Mark Zuckerburg.
| lukan wrote:
| Nah, it is more like parents telling their children to
| eat healthy, while they themself go to McDonalds.
|
| Most parents are addicted to smartphone and don't go with
| their children outside. I would start the investigation
| into root causes right there.
| palata wrote:
| So... in the end it's like telling the parents to eat
| healthy to show their kid that they should also eat
| healthy...
|
| I didn't expect what I wrote to be that confusing.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| > They have more than enough social contacts when they go
| to school.
|
| If you ever found yourself being the "weird kid" in a small
| town high school, you might see it different.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I found myself being the "weird kid", and I'm glad I had
| the Internet in general, but I'm also glad the Internet
| wasn't yet advanced enough to seem like a complete
| replacement for in-person socialization. I knew I was
| missing _something_ by playing Runescape instead of
| talking to people, knowing that drove me to forge in-
| person connections when I did have the opportunity, and
| the fact that I had to actively engage with the Internet
| instead of passively scroll through it gave me at least
| some baseline for doing that.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yes, I generally agree. As a parent of teens I think this
| as well.
|
| But social media isn't the _cause_ of alienation. It 's a
| symptom.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I went to a school with over 1,200 students and still had
| no friends. Kids can be extremely cruel to their
| neurodivergent peers. I wasn't able to learn social skills
| until university .
|
| Things would have been a lot different if I had access to
| the internet.
| don_neufeld wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear that happened to you.
|
| Unfortunately, the data about mental health outcomes of
| teens who consume social media is not positive, so I'm
| not sure things would have been better.
| hammock wrote:
| Xanga allowed kids to connect and be social that
| otherwise weren't able to in high school. But do we want
| to raise a society of Xanga kids, or do we want to solve
| the root problems why they couldn't be social in the
| first place?
|
| (Or am I asking the same exact question two different
| ways, a distinction without a difference?)
| lolinder wrote:
| So if theoretically you ban addictive social media platforms
| and prevent the formation of any platform with more than a
| million users, then yes, teenagers will go where their peers
| go, but that will not necessarily be where teenagers on the
| other side of the country go. It will also not necessarily be
| a destructive algorithm-oriented social network designed to
| maximize time spent viewing ads.
|
| My friend group had a phpBB forum back in the day. I spent
| hours on there because I liked hanging out with that group of
| friends, not because it was profitable for some megacorp.
| shlant wrote:
| yea I don't think people are grasping how different places
| like Myspace or forums or online games are compared to
| modern social media.
| don_neufeld wrote:
| Social media is not connection.
| lm28469 wrote:
| How do you explain the children/teenager loneliness spike
| since ~2008-2010 if these things are the pinnacle of
| connection ?
| palata wrote:
| I didn't want to imply that those things are the pinnacle
| of connection.
|
| I rather wanted to say that it's easier said than done. You
| can't just tell teenagers "stop using social media, it's
| bad for you". Because if their peers use social media, then
| they need to use social media as well.
|
| I'm all for removing social media altogether.
| recroad wrote:
| Completely disagree with this take. TikTok has helped me grow
| my business, helped me learn new skills, which I am now
| monetizing, has educated my kids on math concepts that were
| otherwise too abstract or poorly taught in schools. I have
| personally developed a historical knowledge of many concepts
| that I was unaware of previously. I'm not saying it's a
| substitute for reading books, but it sure can point you to the
| right books to read while supplying the right context on what
| you might learn from them.
|
| Most of all, it's so ironic that in America, which is supposed
| to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is
| so valuable for many people. This sort of confirms what I had
| feared for a few years now: that Americans don't really want to
| be free or have free speech. It would be too much of a threat
| to their core, calcified beliefs that there is no such thing aa
| American exceptionalism.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > Most of all, it's so ironic that in America, which is
| supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning
| something that is so valuable for many people. This sort of
| confirms what I had feared for a few years now: that
| Americans don't really want to be free or have free speech.
|
| What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you
| discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you
| discussed from being spoken about on another online
| platform?_
|
| Let me expand this: what in the law prevents someone from
| going to TikTok.com and seeing the same content?
|
| The ban is on (a) apps in the app stores and (b) hosting by
| American companies. It's _not_ sanctioning TikTok a la
| Huawei.
| lossolo wrote:
| In May 2019, the U.S. government placed Huawei on the
| Entity List, which restricted American companies from
| doing business with it without a special license. This
| included Google, which meant Huawei lost access to the
| licensed version of Android and key Google services,
| including the Google Play Store. As a result, Huawei
| could no longer pre-install Google apps like Gmail,
| YouTube, Google Maps, and other essential services that
| many users in Western markets rely on. Huawei was once a
| strong competitor in Europe challenging Apple, Samsung,
| and other manufacturers. It effectively limited Huawei's
| competitiveness in Western markets and diminished its
| momentum when it was at the peak of its challenge to
| Apple and Samsung. The same will happen with TikTok in
| the U.S. Under the umbrella of national security,
| competition is being sidelined.
| phatfish wrote:
| Until two police officers come and frogmarch you to the
| back of a car when you are saying something the government
| doesn't like there is free speech.
|
| Most people are just annoyed their social media addiction
| is being interrupted when they moan about account bans, or
| app bans in this case.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Hell, even some of the "restrictions" on free speech that
| are legitimately on the books in the US aren't actually
| enforced.
|
| Get a ham radio license and use profanity when you
| transmit. Seriously. Do it. Odds are, the FCC does
| nothing. The thing they do when they _do_ catch you is
| send you a letter saying "please don't do that".
| Rooster61 wrote:
| That may be the case for you, but that's by definition
| anecdotal. I personally have seen the content consumed by a
| number of kids, and the amount of dubious at best information
| on the platform is absolutely rampant, and younger kids don't
| yet have a filter to know the bad from the good. Parental
| oversight can help, of course, but from my own observations,
| parents aren't for the most part monitoring what their kids
| are consuming.
|
| Of course, my take is likewise anecdotal, and you may take it
| for what you will. That said, boiling the entirety of the
| American sentiment to fear of a "threat to their core" is
| disingenuous. Criticism of the effects of the app are as
| valid as its merits, regardless of what conclusions you draw
| based on your "fears".
| frumper wrote:
| This isn't banning dubious information. I only have to look
| at what my mom sends me videos about from Facebook.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| No, it's not, nor did I state that it is. It is, though,
| making it more difficult for something I find detrimental
| to the development of kids to proliferate.
|
| You, as an adult receiving that video, have the
| (hopefully) developed sense of what is accurate
| information or not, as well as the time to gestate on the
| content of that video and apply critical thinking. You
| can delete the video and move on with your life.
|
| Tik Tok sends 15 seconds worth of such information, good
| or bad, and doubles down on detected interest, leaving
| little to no time to process before moving on to the next
| clip which is likely tailored towards the first clip's
| subject. Couple that with the suggestibility and naivete
| of children, and you end up with reinforcement of thin,
| poorly informed opinions based on information that may or
| may not even be remotely accurate.
|
| The idea of banning all dubious information is a
| strawman.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| >Americans don't really want to be free or have free speech.
|
| Americans love free speech. American oligarchs hate it.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Free Speech != freedom to do literally anything.
|
| We don't even have free speech, btw.
|
| You can't yell FIRE in crowded rooms with impunity, you can't
| say untrue things about people that harm their businesses or
| put their lives in danger with impunity, etc.
|
| The idea that our politicians should not be allowed to ban
| something being owned by a foreign company (especially when
| our companies aren't allowed to operate in said country,
| especially when we don't exactly have friendly relations with
| said country) - is, IMO, absurd.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| It is actually legal to yell "fire" in a crowded theater.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_
| t...
|
| https://www.whalenlawoffice.com/blog/legal-mythbusting-
| serie...
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It is SOMETIMES legal, which means that it is in the
| other times illegal.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Not necessarily that either. You'll only possibly receive
| a charge if your conduct was intentionally misleading
| with purpose to harm. Yelling "fire" in a theater while
| in a Gen Z crowd ("this is fire") or while listening to
| Metallica ("Fight fire with fire") isn't going to get a
| charge either, even if it possibly causes a stampede. The
| crime therefore could be accomplished with far more
| alternative words than just "fire."
|
| The point is: Legal experts unanimously agree this
| analogy is terrible and should never be used. The Supreme
| Court also thought so, completely overturning the case it
| originated from just several years later.
| feyman_r wrote:
| To the post indicating shouting fire is legal - I believe
| the parent's intent is to indicate there are consequences
| to it. From the article --
|
| >> The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable
| grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime,
| and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been
| carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise.
| However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a
| result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as
| involuntary manslaughter, assuming the other elements of
| that crime are made out.
| twoodfin wrote:
| All that is great, except for the part where the algorithms
| that collect your reactions to content and then choose new
| content for you in a feedback loop--which as you point out,
| can produce valuable effects as well as harmful ones--are a
| black box under some approximation of direct control by the
| CCP.
| Eextra953 wrote:
| I keep seeing this stated as a reason for banning tt but
| I've yet to see any evidence. During the supreme courts
| oral argument last week they referred to a sealed appendix
| with more info, when they were passing the legislation they
| also referred to secret evidence that Americans can't see.
| I don't want to give in to conspiratorial thinking but if
| its as bad as they claim then we as the public have a right
| to see the evidence and decide for ourselves.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Evidence as to CCP control? Or evidence to another thing?
|
| Because something that is very important to understand
| about China, or any other totalitarian regime, is that
| the people in charge don't let something like TikTok
| happen without having a fairly good grip on the people
| running it. That's just authoritarianism 101.
| Eextra953 wrote:
| Evidence that they are using the app to influence US
| users in a direction that would benefit the ccp and hurt
| the USA.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| If you catch someone planting bombs under all your
| bridges, you don't need evidence that they've detonated
| any to take them down.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| You've just described the reason for this TikTok ban.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Here's a study showing TikTok tilts toward positive views
| on CCP and away from negative ones, unlike trends on
| other socials.
|
| https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Peer-
| Reviewed...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I laid out in another comment how this works, but the
| gist of it is that the CCP can use the populace as dumb
| actors to achieve their goals.
|
| China has secret agents they need to move through an
| area. Why not have an asian hate awareness rally in that
| area at the same time?
|
| Nobody attending that rally would have any idea they are
| acting as decoy agents. None would report seeing CCP
| propaganda on tiktok.
| bjourne wrote:
| Maybe you're the dumb actor posting on behalf of American
| tech moguls?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Think of it this way:
|
| "TikTok would rather shut itself off from the U.S. market
| than divest its ownership from the CCP.
|
| That is not the action of a rational corporation and
| really tells you who calls the shots at TikTok."
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| And it would be better if "the algorithm" were under
| control of some unelected managers in a billion dollar
| company owned by finance capital?
| snapcaster wrote:
| Should I feel better or worse about it being the CCP
| instead of a tiny group of billionaires? From where I'm
| standing the cabal of tech billionaires appear to be a
| bigger threat to me as a normal american. Do you think this
| is naive?
| wesapien wrote:
| I agree. It's the same class of people that helped China
| become the world's factory that is now saying what it has
| always been. These are the same people that is still
| running America.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Let me lay out how this works:
|
| The US occupies a new office downtown. China wants eyes on a
| specific room, and the choice spot for monitoring it is
| someone else's apartment. This person happens to own a bakery
| also in town, and it sort of seems like the apartment is a
| reach for them as it is.
|
| Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious
| findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up
| from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there
| anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you
| those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews
| and put the bad ones on blast.
|
| 6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a
| single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on
| tiktok".
|
| This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting
| banned.
| felbane wrote:
| Devil's advocate: Can this not also happen on literally any
| other social network? Can this kind of shit not also be
| initiated by domestic agents, or agents of allied nations,
| or even just some bored haxor group with a penchant for
| chaos?
|
| If what you said is the primary reason for banning TikTok
| (bad actors can do bad things), it's also a valid reason to
| ban literally every social network, or possibly even all
| user-generated content on the internet.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| On non CCP controlled platforms, they cannot chose what
| stories to "organically" promote and who to promote them
| too. Most people have no concept of the 99% of posts to
| social media that never get traction.
|
| They can still kind of do it, but it requires a lot of
| work to fool other companies algo's into artificially
| promoting what you want. Much easier to just call up
| Bytedance and say "We need everyone in this area seeing
| this tiktok tomorrow".
| felbane wrote:
| If you think domestic social media companies aren't
| capable of silently promoting certain content at the
| request of someone with influence... you wouldn't happen
| to be in the market for a bridge, would you?
| daveguy wrote:
| Non CCP controlled platforms can definitely choose what
| stories to promote. Musk does it every day on twitter.
| Oligarch controlled social media is just as much a blight
| as government controlled social media.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Of course they do, but they aren't interested in toppling
| the west.
| daveguy wrote:
| Guess we will find out. They sure do seem to prefer
| Russian style oligarchy and control over Western values.
| jerf wrote:
| To your first paragraph, yes, across the board, and yes
| to more scenarios than you even laid out here.
|
| To the second, you misunderstand the issue the US
| government has here. It is not that the social network is
| compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses
| by an external authority. It is that it is compromised
| and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an
| external authority _that they are enemies with_.
|
| Whether you consider them _your_ enemy, whether they
| consider you theirs, whether you think that China really
| is or is not an enemy of the US government, and whether
| you consider the US government your enemy or not is all
| irrelevant to the point at hand, as interesting as they
| may be in other contexts; this is about the beliefs of
| the US government.
|
| China has similar concerns and has already taken numerous
| similar steps, and it's equally not any sort of hypocrisy
| or anything because the principle they operate under is
| not about the _existence_ of control, but who _has_ the
| control.
| nprateem wrote:
| You might want to get your paranoia checked out. I'm not
| even going to bother asking for the many sources that
| support your overwhelming reason.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Russia had Bernie Bros and Magatards brawling with each
| other at pre-planned rallys across the street from one
| another. And they didn't even have access to the facebook
| algo.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| Citation needed.
| 05 wrote:
| Might as well ban electricity in case the Chinese manage to
| use it to do bad things, same (insane) logic applies.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| While your scenario might make for an interesting Tom
| Clancy novel there's no evidence any of that is happening
| and no one involved in this ban with any authority is
| arguing that this is something they're worried about.
| Aunche wrote:
| I agree that their example is absurd, but China has
| definitely used social media accounts to influence
| opinions on Hong Kong, Xinjiang etc. American social
| media companies cooperate with investigations and
| flagging of this propaganda. On the other hand, TikTok is
| almost certainly being pressured by the CCP to promote it
| and obfuscate any investigations.
| recroad wrote:
| Wow, this is a whole new level of China otherization and it
| leads to many bad things, and you don't have to look beyond
| the past 100 years to find many examples (even Chinese
| ones).
|
| Maybe consider that it's being banned because it makes it
| harder to control the political narrative and discourse in
| society when people have access to information. I think
| Chomsky put it best: there are many ways of population
| control, in the old Soviet Union it used to be the boot. In
| "democracy" it's controlling information and the Overton
| Window and TikTok breaks that completely. A great example
| is the Israel's assault on Palestine. Has this been covered
| anywhere where you watch news in even remotely the most
| honest way? Don't think so. Is it on TikTok? I think you
| know the answer.
|
| I'd also say to single out TikTok and the Chinese while
| ignoring Meta and Google (why not ban them?) is very
| questionable if you really care about the scenario you
| described.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| > Most of all, it's so ironic that in America, which is
| supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning
| something that is so valuable for many people
|
| 1. There's plenty of speech you can't say (fraud, libel), so
| speech is believe it or not regulated.
|
| 2. This isn't about free speech per se, it's about the right
| of a company to exist. the government has broad leeway to
| regulate which entities do or don't have the right to have
| limited liability. if TikTok were a unincorporated business
| entity and the owners were liable for lawsuit the story would
| be different.
|
| 3. the government forcing a sale is individual free speech
| maximalist position in this situation, because the users of
| the platform can still have their free speech. if tiktok
| doesn't take the deal, then the "loss of free speech" is on
| them, not the government.
|
| 4. America, which is supposed to be a bastion of free
| commerce, forced the sale of Merck away from germany (there
| is still a german merck with the same name). this is no
| different.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Are you sure that the "historical knowledge of many concepts"
| isn't a CCP slanted version of history? Or whatever suits the
| CCPs current interests? As a trivial example, do you think
| you are getting an unbiased view on Tiananmen Square or
| whether the US should back Taiwan in a war?
| EasyMark wrote:
| they aren't banning it. They gave tiktok an out -- sell to an
| American company or non adversarial country, if ByteDance
| doesn't bite on that, then that's on them.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I feel like the actual big difference between social media when
| we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media
| now is the algorithmic feed. There was a time when you'd have a
| couple dozen friends on Facebook, who were people you actually
| know in real life, and you'd check Facebook, read you feed in
| chronological order, and then reach the end. Like with email.
|
| The algorithmic feed, in addition to time spent on social
| media, has also intensified online discourse in a way that I
| believe to be harmful to society. What people see now is not
| the most recent things their friends were posting, no matter
| how banal, but whatever it is that the algorithm judges most
| engaging. Truth doesn't matter. Now the conspiracy theories and
| weird new age shit that your one hippy friend posted constantly
| have an audience. That kind of thing is engaging, so it floats
| to the top.
|
| I'd be perfectly fine with just banning social media
| altogether. Never before in history has the value of a barrier
| to entry to publishing something been more apparent. But as a
| compromise, I would accept banning the algorithmic feed.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| > I feel like the actual big difference between social media
| when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social
| media now is the algorithmic feed.
|
| Bringo.
|
| The day Facebook implemented the feed as the main page rather
| than the original homepage was the day social media went
| sideways. It's little more than a Skinner box with a bright
| candy coating and it has just gotten more egregious over
| time. It's right on the tin, "Feed".
|
| I'd be interested to see how much R&D budget has gone into
| hiring persons in the field of psychology to tweak the
| dopamine treadmill over time.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I distinctly remember when the chronological timeline was
| done away with, people were extremely pissed.
| chatmasta wrote:
| I remember the day they introduced the chronological
| newsfeed! People were pissed about that. Nobody wanted a
| list of all their wall posts to be published to everyone
| who could see them.
|
| Prior to newsfeed, FB was obviously an N-N platform, but
| the interactions were more 1-1. You used the network to
| find and connect, but you interacted with individuals (on
| their wall). The newsfeed tipped the focus toward 1-N
| interactions, and direct messages solidified that (no
| more wall posts).
| evanelias wrote:
| I believe GP is comparing pre-feed and post-feed days,
| not chrono feed vs algo feed.
|
| For its first few years, Facebook had no feed at all.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| You are correct, but the introduction of the algorithm is
| indeed just as if not as significant as the introduction
| of the feed
| grahamj wrote:
| > It's right on the tin, "Feed"
|
| +5 Insightful
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| You just say "bingo"
| Rooster61 wrote:
| That's the wrong movieshow, ya dangus.
|
| For your health
| fullshark wrote:
| Treat algorithmic feeds as "publications" by machines. Treat
| these social media companies as publishers and allow them to
| be sued for libel, with damage amounts based on reach.
|
| If there's no algorithmic feed and the company is truly just
| a self publishing utility then keep the section 230
| protections
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Yup, I absolutely don't understand how they're able to get
| away with choosing material to promote and then not call
| themselves publishers.
|
| They're acting as editors for a publication. Hold them
| accountable like the publication companies they are.
|
| Want to continue getting safe-harbor exemptions for user
| submitted content? No fucking algorithmically chosen feeds.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| CDA 230 was written specifically to overturn a defamation
| ruling that held online platforms responsible for
| content; this was specifically a result of Jordan Belfort
| - _the_ Wolf of Wall Street - suing to censor negative
| opinions of his fraudulent investment offerings.
|
| Prior to that lawsuit, the existing law regarding
| defamation was that you could hold a newspaper
| accountable for what they had printed, but not the
| newsstand selling the newspaper. The courts in the Jordan
| Belfort cases decided to categorize online services based
| on their moderation policy: if you published literally
| anything sent to you, you were the newsstand[0]; if you
| decided not to publish certain things then you were a
| newspaper.
|
| In case it isn't obvious, this is an unacceptable legal
| precedent for running any sort of online service. The
| only services that you could legally run would either be
| the most free-wheeling; or the most censurious, where
| everything either has to be pre-checked by a team of
| lawyers for risk and only a small amount of speech ever
| gets published, or everything gets published, including
| spam and bullshit.
|
| To make things worse, there is also standing precedent in
| Mavrix v. LiveJournal regarding _DMCA_ safe harbor[1]
| that the use of human curation or moderation strips you
| of your copyright safe harbor. The only thing DMCA 512
| protects is machine-generated feeds (algorithmic or
| chronological).
|
| So let's be clear: removing CDA 230 safe harbor from a
| feature of social media you don't like doesn't mean that
| feature goes away. It means that feature gets more and
| more censored by the whims of whatever private citizens
| decide to sue that day. The social media companies are
| not going to get rid of algorithmic feeds unless you
| explicitly say "no algorithmic feeds", because those
| feeds make the product more addictive, which is how they
| make money.
|
| The "slop trough" design of social media is optimal for
| profit because of a few factors; notably the fact that
| social media companies have monopolistic control over the
| client software people use. Even browser extensions
| intended to hide unwanted content on Facebook have to
| endure legal threats, because Facebook does not want you
| using their service as anything other than a slop trough.
|
| So if you want to kill algorithmic feeds, what you want
| to do is kill Facebook's control over Facebook. That
| means you want legal protections for third-party API
| clients, antitrust scrutiny on all social media
| platforms, and legally mandated interoperability so that
| when a social media platform decides to turn into a slop
| trough, anyone so interested can just jump ship to
| another platform _without_ losing access to their
| existing friends.
|
| [0] Ignore the fact that this is not how newsstands work.
| You can't go to any newsstand, put your zine on it, and
| demand they sell it or face defamation risk.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| > I feel like the actual big difference between social media
| when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social
| media now is the algorithmic feed.
|
| More than that too, my recollection is that those early
| social media sites were considered "separate" from the real
| world. It'd be seen as odd to take it "seriously" in the
| early days.
|
| The big change I noticed was when my (our?) cohort started
| graduating college and started sanitizing their Facebooks and
| embracing "professionalism" on the then nascent LinkedIn. I
| distinctly remember being shocked at that, and the implicit
| possibility that employers would "care" about your Facebook
| posts.
|
| How far we've fallen.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| Algorithmic feeds are wonderful, but unfortunately their
| goals as implemented today do not align with anyone's best
| interest except shareholders.
|
| I don't have tiktok, but I used to watch a lot of YouTube
| suggestions. I finally took the app off my devices and used a
| suggestion-blocking browser extension. I could only find
| stuff that I actively searched for. After a few months, I
| took a peek at suggestions and it was actually great: pretty
| much only videos I was legitimately interested in, steering
| me towards useful tiny channels, etc. I still keep it
| blocked, but check it once daily just in case.
|
| The problem is that algorithmic feeds want you to just keep
| watching and will absolutely probe all of your "weaknesses"
| to keep doing so. Instead of trying to support you, it says
| "how can we break this guy/girl down so s/he keeps
| watching...".
|
| Until the feeds say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't serve you
| another video. You should go outside and enjoy the day", then
| it should be treated more as a weapon aimed at one's brain by
| a billion or trillion-dollar corporation than a tool.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.
|
| At least as far as kids are concerned, current evidence does
| not readily support this common believe.
|
| Sabine Hossenfelder writes: "The idea that social media causes
| children mental health distress is plausible, but unfortunately
| it isn't true. Trouble is, if you read what the press has
| written about it, you wouldn't know. Scientists have described
| it as a "moral panic" that isn't backed by data, which has been
| promoted most prominently by one man: Jonathan Haidt."
|
| Video for more insight, if you are interested:
| https://youtu.be/V95Vg2pVlo0
| paulddraper wrote:
| What is causing the record level of mental health disorders
| in children?
| miragecraft wrote:
| Other children.
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| Actually getting kids tested for them.
| persedes wrote:
| You can argue for more increased self-reporting, but
| suicide rates are going up too.
| paulddraper wrote:
| To support this:
| https://www.charliehealth.com/research/the-us-teen-
| suicide-r...
|
| According to the CDC, teen suicide rate is up over 33%
| from 1999.
|
| (Obviously, social media doesn't have to be the only
| cause. But something is producing a material difference
| and it's hard to say social media isn't a leading one.)
| paulddraper wrote:
| Do you have evidence to back up that claim?
| Gormo wrote:
| Are children actually experiencing mental health disorders
| at a higher rate, or are we just classifying pre-existing
| variations in personality as behavior as mental health
| disorders at a higher rate?
| aqme28 wrote:
| I agree with your skepticism on this, but youth suicide
| rates have been steadily climbing. Unless we were
| misclassifying suicide, it seems like there is a rising
| mental health crisis.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Suicide rates were higher in the 80s
| arkh wrote:
| And it got lower before going back up.
|
| You could use the exact same argument with the Earth
| temperature: it was higher 50 millions year ago.
| Gormo wrote:
| What skepticism did I express? There are two possible
| explanations for the value of a metric changing: either
| the thing being measured has changed, or the methodology
| of conducting the measurement has changed. I honestly do
| not know which is the case here.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Teen suicide rates have been falling in Europe and most
| of the world. North America has edged back up to 1990
| levels, and it's largely alone in that trend.
|
| Europe and the rest of the world has social media as
| well. And of course 1990 didn't have social media.
|
| There are a lot of reasons teens can feel hopeless, and I
| think the hyper-partisan political atmosphere / circus,
| coupled with the existential crisis and very real career
| crisis caused by AI, at least in the common
| understanding, the rapid heating of the Earth, etc. I
| would attribute all of those as dramatically more likely
| to lead a child to seek an out more than social media,
| even if the latter is much easier to blame.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| The DSM used to break mental health disorders down into
| what it called the multi-axial system. Axis 1 being the
| least impacting diseases, and axis 5 the most severe. At
| some point we had so many disorders that more than 50% of
| the population was seen to have Axis 1 or higher mental
| health disorders. This meant that more of the population
| was regarded as mentally ill than were considered
| "healthy."
|
| Rather than accept that >50% of the population being
| classified as mentally ill might be a sign we were
| thinking about things in a backwards way they just got
| rid of the multi-axial system in DSM 5.
|
| Problem solved.
| throw7 wrote:
| The parents.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| In 1990 there were zero identified exoplants. Now there are
| 4000+. It isn't that there is the creation of lots of new
| planets, but that we started looking for them in earnest,
| and had the means to identify them.
|
| Being diagnosed is the likely reason there is an explosion
| in mental health disorders. We go to lengths to apply a
| diagnostic label on every child. The massive variation in
| humans means that a huge portion are going to fall to the
| sides of the curve on all sorts of gradients. Older HNers
| will remember having a wide variety of kids among their
| cohorts, with "nerds", depressives, the hyperactive, the
| super driven and focused, and the manic depressives, etc,
| but likely zero were actually diagnosed in any way. Now you
| could apply a diagnoses on literally all of them.
|
| This isn't judgmental, and it's good to know what people
| are dealing with, and to offer treatment or medication
| where possible.
| mola wrote:
| So Hossenfelder is now a psychiatrist and a sociologist?
|
| bah, I really dislike "scientist influencers". She isn't
| versed in the subject, she's no better than Haidt.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| No, but she doesn't have to be in this context. She's a
| very capable critical thinker who knows how to do very
| thorough research, which is all someone has to be to
| determine that there is, in fact, no data to support the
| claims.
| in3d wrote:
| She's not a capable critical thinker, quite the opposite,
| in fact. Completely unimpressive.
| zorked wrote:
| From that point of view, the press and journalism should
| not exist.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| "Sociologist" is more of an anti-qualification. In any case
| let's not rely on appeals to authority. I think we are
| intelligent enough to judge the evidence ourselves.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist, she's not an expert on
| mental health. She might be right, she might be wrong, but
| she isn't a source of truth.
|
| The chart with the number of suicides for children going up
| is not a moral panic, but a grim reality.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Right, but correlation does not equal causation. Kids are
| also increasingly aware that they live in a neoliberal
| hellworld, and their chances of maintaining the lifestyles
| their parents and grandparents had are slim to none.
| grapesodaaaaa wrote:
| I'm losing family members to conspiracy theory YouTube
| channels.
|
| The crackpots had a greater barrier to transmit back in
| the day. They had to get an FCC license or know someone
| with a radio station. Even then reach was limited unless
| you could reach a deal to transmit nationwide.
|
| I personally believe our brains are primed on some level
| to buy into this stuff. It's very hard to overcome.
| noboostforyou wrote:
| I agree completely, social media is essentially a
| dopamine addiction. Steve Jobs had an apt quote regarding
| what you said "our brains are primed on some level to buy
| into this stuff."
|
| > When you're young, you look at television and think,
| There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb
| us down. But when you get a little older, you realize
| that's not true. The networks are in business to give
| people exactly what they want. That's a far more
| depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can
| shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the
| networks are really in business to give people what they
| want. It's the truth.
| xNeil wrote:
| The moral panic is social media being the reason for the
| suicides going up, not the fact that suicides are going up
| in itself.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Suicides were higher in the 1980s than now. I'm pretty sure
| we didn't have any apps back then.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| The cause might be different, 1980s were 45 years ago.
| Half a century ago.
|
| The causes for suicide might've changed in the last 50
| years.
|
| Also, the number of children suicides was in a downtrend
| before it went up again:
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
|
| https://www.economist.com/graphic-
| detail/2023/05/03/suicide-...
| noboostforyou wrote:
| > she's not an expert on mental health. She might be right,
| she might be wrong, but she isn't a source of truth.
|
| It's FB but for the purpose of studying effects of social
| media on mental health it should suffice:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-
| tox...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/facebook
| -...
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-internal-report-
| sho...
|
| https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/how-social-medias-toxic-
| conten...
| jstummbillig wrote:
| And correlation is not causation. If you disagree with her
| interpretation (it's mostly just presentation, really) of
| the data, feel free to be specific. Attacking the person
| is, as always, bad form and lame.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| I haven't attacked Sabine, it was OP who used her as some
| some sort of authority in children mental health.
| tedivm wrote:
| They might not be causing literally mental health issues, but
| they're certainly radicalizing a lot of young folks into some
| really toxic behaviors and beliefs.
| persedes wrote:
| I don't really want to watch a video, but do you have a write
| up somewhere? The last rebuttal I've read (I think from the
| books that kill podcast) basically dismissed Haidts claims by
| saying that the increase in anxiety related disorders was due
| to increased self reporting. And the podcast seems to have
| ignored the graph on the next page in Haidts book, which
| showed a correlated increase in emergency room admissions due
| to anxiety related disorders.
| lc9er wrote:
| > Sabine Hossenfelder
|
| Why would a physicist's opinion on mental health carry any
| weight?
| coliveira wrote:
| The problem is not the social network in itself, but the fact
| that companies are manipulating what you see to maximize the
| bad aspects of the network. Companies should have strict limits
| on the kind of algorithms they use to generate a feed.
| le-mark wrote:
| Recently I've been imaging a world where social media
| algorithms were tuned to help people instead of "driving
| engagement" with ever more outrage bait. Oh you're watching
| clips about machining and by your data profile you're an
| uneducated adult? Here are some trade school, financial
| assistance, and self help links to nudge you toward a better
| life! What a world that would be.
| prisenco wrote:
| Doesn't China's national TikTok equivalent do that?
|
| I'm fine with going back to 100% chronological feeds. Show
| events as they happen and don't put a hand on the scale.
|
| That's how social networks usually build their base then
| they switch to an algorithmic feed to satisfy advertisers
| once their user base is big enough.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| "We will teach you to be free"
| eunos wrote:
| For all complains of the toxicity of the platforms. For now,
| the contents over there are written by your fellow human (maybe
| AI in a few years). Just focussing on platform closure for me
| indicates that we resigned from fixing our fellow folks.
| nullc wrote:
| But it's not the "folks" that are the factor, generally. The
| mechanisms of many major social media platforms actively
| amplify the worst aspects of the worst people, while
| suppressing the best parts of the best.
|
| Someone put the microphone too close to the speaker. As the
| feedback rings our ears someone reaches out for the power
| switch. Do you call out "but the start of the feedback was
| the music from the band, turning it off won't fix the band"?
| :)
| eunos wrote:
| Assuming that social media is an evolution of traditional
| media.
|
| The traditional media loves to chase negative news (If it
| bleeds, it leads) and we let that happen (muh free
| speech!). So it is logical that social media amplified the
| negativity of society, coupled with algorithms evolution
| and instant broadcasting the impact is amplified.
|
| Fck around and find out I guess.
| codr7 wrote:
| Yep, I'm very careful what kind of content I feed my
| subconscious these days.
|
| Watching news is like begging for nightmares, and most of
| it's made up anyways.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| > we resigned from fixing our fellow folks
|
| We have. It's A) too expensive, and B) we can't agree on what
| "fixed" looks like. "Think of the children" type scare-
| legislation is going to fill this void.
| sneak wrote:
| Please stop advocating for censorship and authoritarianism.
|
| This is the USA, we don't do that here. (Except when we do, as
| in this terrible case, but it's not what we are about.)
|
| If you don't like them, don't use them. Don't force other
| people to share your views and opinions. We like social media
| and choose every day to continue to use it.
|
| App bans are simply state censorship, nothing more. It's a real
| shame we don't have methods of sideloading to bypass such
| idiocy on the part of the USG and the chokepoints at Apple and
| Google.
|
| At least tiktok.com will still work.
| VMG wrote:
| I read it as a personal recommendation to delete the apps,
| not as an appeal to ban them for everybody
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| What content is being censored? Creators are free to post
| their videos on other platforms.
|
| Also note that the law doesn't force TikTok to shut down, it
| requires divestment. The fact that they choose not to divest
| says a lot about how they view the platform.
| LawrenceKerr wrote:
| The comment they are replying to suggests taking down all
| the major social media networks by government force ("Just
| get rid of all of them").
|
| Arguably, even if you are not prohibiting the content
| itself, if you take away the means for your content to
| spread far & wide, that's the same as censorship.
|
| I find this quite disturbing.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| You can not because the money invested into this is to large.
| Same with AI - half of which is used to build a personal
| cheerleader/ hype-train for everyone using those apps now.
|
| If you want to end that, you need to actively sabotage it, by
| creating fake users who eat resources for not add-revenue.
| Feeding crack to children has to become economically unviable
| for the world to change.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| > early Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.
|
| This was really a fun time and it was a whole new vista for
| interaction. It was really something to enter a new age.
|
| That feeling didn't last long, but I still got value from
| Facebook until the early 2010s.
| noboostforyou wrote:
| FB Marketplace is definitely the best way to buy and sell
| anything locally. Of course you will have to filter through
| the usual flakers and what not but that was always the case
| since craigslist days.
|
| But for actual social media? Burn it all down lol
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| People say that, but I've long since abandoned my FB
| account and sinkhole facebook domains. I miss CragisList
| for that. Used it a lot a decade ago.
| teeray wrote:
| >FB Marketplace is definitely the best way to buy and sell
| anything locally
|
| I really wish they had some kind of auction component to
| deal with multiple interested parties / reduce flakers, but
| I imagine eBay has some crappy software patent that they
| wield with an iron fist.
| Hasu wrote:
| > I really wish they had some kind of auction component
| to deal with multiple interested parties / reduce
| flakers, but I imagine eBay has some crappy software
| patent that they wield with an iron fist.
|
| Facebook Ads has auctions for selling ad slots. They have
| the technology, they just reserve it for their real
| customers.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Facebook groups is also a decent way to build communities.
|
| Honestly, Facebook without the push for reels / videos
| isn't that bad. (now you can crucify me)
| EasyMark wrote:
| you can easily block those with extensions. that's what I
| do. I just use if for some local interest groups,
| marketplace, and messenger for some family/friends.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| FB Marketplace is the best way to buy stolen goods cheaply
| - not sure about authentic goods.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I have sold plenty things on there and none of them were
| stolen. I buy broken vintage electronics (60s, 70s, 80s)
| for cheap and resale them after I fix them. It's not a
| lot of money but it's a way to pass the time on a boring
| evening.
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| I remember so fondly coming home from high school and reading
| over my friends posts, curating the pins on my pin/cork
| board, messaging friends who would otherwise not be savvy
| enough to join MSN or IRC or yahoo messenger...
|
| Now I feel physical disgust when I look at the FB logo
| ixtli wrote:
| I think around here people will all agree with you, the problem
| is that in practice this isn't at any level about cleaning up
| peoples experience of each other. it's economic protectionism
| injected with yellow-scare nonsense reminiscent of the 20th
| century. they're gleefully making the large ones worse while
| closing down anything which doesn't benefit US oligarchs
| vanillax wrote:
| The real issue with Facebook is the inability to tune easily.
| One of the reasons I use Instagram and Threads is because I
| feel I can easily tune the algorithm with likes. I can keep up
| with my friends via stories. I dont need to post on my "wall"
| stupid stuff like the beer im drinking. Instagram + Stories
| feels like the best medium to see what my friends are upto with
| short stories and images. The explore feed can be tuned so I
| get content and threads fills the void on X and its terrible
| algorithms. I agree, "deleting" facebook or simple just leave
| it on deprecated mode and never use it besides market place is
| the best thing you can do. I dont give a crap what person's
| political view is and dont need to see a news feed based on
| triggers.
| echelon wrote:
| The real issue with Facebook is that they help precipitate
| the TikTok ban [1].
|
| Not that TikTok should have stayed, but the fact that Meta
| was pushing for this and now stands to benefit massively
| should be concerning.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/face
| boo...
| navbaker wrote:
| I love that I can have multiple profiles in IG and Threads,
| each tuned like you talked about for a specific interest of
| mine with no cross-pollination
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is a trite (and arguably silly) comment bordering on neo-
| Luddism. The genie is out of the bottle. There's really no
| going back.
|
| Worse, it's treating symptoms as the problem. We, as a society,
| deify hyper-individualism. This is to such an extreme that
| people actually in completely and utterly selfish ways are
| glorified and celebrated because "freedom".
|
| Social media happened _after_ we destroyed community and any
| sense of collectivism. Unhealthy social media habits are a
| consequence of that. They didn 't cause it.
|
| Where once you needed just one job to live, you now need 5.
| Every aspect of our lives is financialized. We spend 30 years
| working to the bone to pay for a house that cost 1/10th what it
| did 30 years ago. The high costs of housing have destroyed all
| the so-called "third places".
|
| Federating services does nothing to the core problem here. I
| find HN's obsession with federation, which literally solves
| zero problems for users and creates a bunch of problems,
| bizarre and out-of-touch.
|
| The problem is capitalism.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| What practical alternative do you propose to capitalism?
| raincole wrote:
| The more you ban, the more "centralized" and "massive" the
| platforms you don't ban get. Unless you literally ban
| everything.
|
| One has to be extremely naive to think Google (youtube)
| lobbyists didn't play a role in this Tiktok ban.
| echelon wrote:
| Meta certainly lobbied for a TikTok ban:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo.
| ..
| nprateem wrote:
| Ah so that's why he's sucking up to trump now.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Big things aren't necessarily centralized, and you can
| replace big things with lots of small ones.
| beAbU wrote:
| > Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones.
|
| Herein lies the rub. How do you decide what the threshold is?
| _Who_ gets to decide what that threshold is, and how do you do
| it without inviting accusations of regulatory capture?
|
| If you make it blanket all social networks, then things like
| discord and even public slack orgs will inadvertently become
| collateral damage. If you make it focussed on only a few large
| ones, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, then
| something else will pop up to take it's place. It'll become a
| game of whack-a-mole. Users are supposedly already migrating in
| droves to some other TikTok clone.
|
| I'm not really sure what the solution is though. Regulate the
| shit out of it to the extent where it becomes a government-
| provided utility or something?
|
| The reality is people want social media because they are
| addicted to it. Getting rid of social media will be like the
| war on drugs: completely ineffective. The danger here is that
| the drug is very easy to create, impossible to control and
| extremely lucrative.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| > Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.
|
| Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted?
| You can certainly send letters without them going through a
| human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if
| nothing is flagged? What should be flagged?
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > Does it? Does a human need to examine everything
| posted? You can certainly send letters without them going
| through a human moderator.
|
| Because those are two orthogonal things. You aren't
| sending a letter to be displayed by everyone and their
| dog on this planet to see.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| You can also print flyers, pamphlets, books, posters, and
| all such things without submitting them to a human censor
| (c.f. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/lit
| erature/p... for this usage).
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Yes. To one address at a time. If you do a mass send,
| you'll get regulated at some point, too.
| arccy wrote:
| great way to burn out people and scar them for life, look
| at all the stories of facebook moderators etc.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Nah, they would use AI, and as such, would not really
| limit scale.
| conductr wrote:
| It raises the cost of the service therefore the need of
| user data monetization, I feel like this would backfire.
| I'd limit the revenue via bans on ads and data
| monetization.
| conductr wrote:
| My passing thought is to prohibit advertising and user data
| monetization and it might solve itself.
|
| We also have regulations on usage, like truck drivers can
| only drive X hours a day, force some type of consumption
| limit the networks are required to enforce. We have similar
| laws regarding where, when, and how people can consume things
| like alcohol so could also do something like that. Some
| amount of it is ok, but as you say we've now learned it's so
| addictive we need to force people into moderation of their
| consumption.
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| Honestly this is probably the most realistic solution. The
| only reason all the shit ragebait addictive content is so
| bad is because it drives ad revenue.
|
| I do think there's one exception/problem: youtube. While
| there's a lot of pregnant spiderman-elsa crap on it,
| there's also tons of historical, educational, investigative
| journalism, etc etc etc content there that strikes me as
| distinctly more valuable than literally anything that's
| ever existed on facebook, tiktok or even twitter.
|
| And in addition to the backlog, there's an economics
| problem. Having good, free, easy, available video hosting
| is a huge good. It's also ridiculously expensive (videos
| are big, and you have to render multiple qualities of them,
| and store them forever) and a hard engineering (network and
| software) problem (what tiny % of video upload constitutes
| 90% of the actual network traffic? but you also have to
| brace for videos from nobodies going viral and needing to
| be served to the entire globe).
|
| So how do you fund something like this? Normally I'd say,
| well, damn, this sounds like a utility. But given the
| political climate we're going into for the next 4 years,
| and the fact that even healthcare is privatized (well, the
| part of it that can generate a profit... unprofitable
| customers are of course pushed to the taxpayer)...
| conductr wrote:
| I think we'd have to carefully define what a 'social
| network' is. In my opinion, YT is not a social network.
| The UGC parts of Amazon.com, like reviews, do not make it
| a social network either. YT is a broadcast / streaming
| service with some small layer of UGC (I say small
| because, honestly, if the entire comment section was
| eliminated I don't think anyone would miss it, it's meme
| worthy bad in most cases.)
|
| Or maybe it's just me and don't use it that way and
| others do? I subscribe to some things, watch a lot of
| videos mostly has a lurker and almost never even dip into
| the comments. I have exactly 0 connections with people I
| know on YT. It's more of a modern television channel than
| anything in my case.
| kyleee wrote:
| There is a lot of variation in community and comment
| quality on YouTube. Similar to Reddit there is a massive
| long tail of smaller communities and topics which
| absolutely have vibrant and real, helpful comments. And
| on the biggest channels and videos there is a lot of
| bullshit and low quality comments. Both are true at the
| same time so it would be a shame to stamp out the genuine
| communities and connections
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| Is there any reasonable definition of "social network"
| that includes TikTok, but doesn't include YouTube Shorts?
| conductr wrote:
| Maybe YT needs to ditch Shorts under this hypothetical, I
| don't think it's the enriching part of the service the
| comment above was referencing
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Youtube ain't a social network and you can watch all of
| it without an account.
| dingnuts wrote:
| if the problem is advertising and data monetization, why am
| I so addicted to /this/ website?
|
| I have had a much harder time quitting Hacker News than I
| ever did quitting Facebook. I've been off Facebook for ten
| years yet I keep logging in to leave stupid comments here.
|
| Is that because of advertising and data monetization?
| johnisgood wrote:
| I do not see the correlation either, other than people
| buying stuff because an ad popped up, but that is not
| their primary reason for being on Facebook.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't think "addictiveness" is really the problem. I've
| been "addicted" to Wikipedia for 20+ years too.
| Funes- wrote:
| The voting system (everything it entails in terms of
| visual design) is addictive.
| conductr wrote:
| Ads/monetization isn't necessarily the problem, but it
| enables Facebook to exist at the scale it does. If we're
| trying to reduce their scale or limit the size of the
| social network, it seems silly to fracture the entire
| market by breaking them up. You can simply cut off their
| revenues.
|
| And no, I don't think HN addiction is anything like FB
| addiction. This site is heavily moderated in comparison
| and the content is higher quality. It's a 'news' site
| with some respectable commentary that is so rare people
| like us keep coming back. There's a level of decency
| that's expected and required here. I could go on, lack of
| photos, videos, etc. The content is community driven via
| ranking versus an algorithm optimized for financial
| outcomes.... I also don't actually know any of you people
| so how is that a social network, it's a community forum
| at best. The almost absence of political stuff on HN
| helps a fair amount.
|
| Addiction itself isn't super bad. Addiction to harmful
| things is what's bad. I don't even know if I'm addicted
| to HN, sometimes I go weeks without coming here - but
| have mostly been here daily for many years. I enjoy it,
| it enriches my life, I feel it's a positive habit. Just
| because you take your dog for a walk every day, are you
| addicted to it? You could just let him out in the back
| yard? You do it because it's a healthy habit, for them
| and you.
| msabalau wrote:
| I was interpreting the poster as saying "you, yourself, the
| reader will be better off cutting this out of your life" in
| which case your questions are irrelevant.
|
| Of course, it is possible they meant to come up with a
| holistic plan for improving society in three short sentences,
| as your reply assumes.
|
| Which would, I suppose, indirectly make the case that social
| interactions online tend to be pointless and a little silly.
| pmontra wrote:
| My social network is WhatsApp and Telegram: 1-to-1 messages
| and some groups where I usually know everybody in them.
| That's the threshold.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| In the US, at least, a government-run social media site would
| be impossible to moderate, because of the First Amendment. It
| becomes a Nazi bar immediately.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Get rid of behavioral advertising. You'll find that most or
| all of the negative things people have in mind when they say
| "ban social media" go away.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm in favor of letting people pay for their own smaller
| instances, like something Facebook esque, and you can invite
| all your relatives. They can join your instance. But someone
| (or maybe its a group effort) has to pay for it. Zero ads, just
| friends and family.
|
| I've thought about this a lot.
|
| I don't think I'll ever build it (I have another idea in the
| works consuming all my time), but I'll go a step further and
| share my other thought on it:
|
| The less they use it, the less they should pay for using it. So
| if your goal is to keep up with relatives via sharing photos /
| videos, you can do that, and bug right out. So now there's a
| financial incentive to use it less, but it serves its purpose,
| like email.
| nprateem wrote:
| This won't help with the dopamine craving. Most peoples'
| actual friends can't produce enough content.
|
| The sooner we treat it as an addiction the faster we'll think
| of treatments.
| philote wrote:
| Smaller instance can become big. Say you set up a small
| instance and invite your family. Then family members want to
| invite their family, or friends, or whomever. How do you
| manage that?
|
| I think the answer is what we see with Mastodon, etc. and
| that's federated/distributed social networks.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| A restaurant can become big. Say you have a food critic
| showcase your restaurant and hundreds of people show up.
| How could we possibly deal with this problem without the
| aid of the smartest, most amazing, totally really smart,
| awesome at leet code, software engineers?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| This is how you end up with the UK's Online Safety Act. And
| personally, I'd prefer to have international networks where you
| can get exposed to different opinions; my life would be in an
| objectively worse place if I had only had the opinions of the
| people of my country to go off of.
| erentz wrote:
| First, people say things like they can't not use Facebook
| because it has marketplace, etc. shows there has clearly been
| an issue of not enforcing any kind of anti-trust laws for the
| past 20 years since US v Microsoft in the browser wars days.
|
| The FTC over the past four years has taken a turn here and is
| starting to do that work again, it's slow but it needs to
| continue.
|
| Second, these companies behave as publishers without any of the
| responsibilities/liability. This has to stop. If you publish
| just a chronological feed that's one thing. But when you
| algorithmically decide what people see when, and now introduce
| your own AI bots into the mix, you're 100% a publisher and need
| to be legally responsible for it. That legislation needs to be
| updated to reflect this.
|
| Third, much of the root issues stem from advertising. These
| companies are driven to get and keep as much of your attention
| as possible simply so they can sell that attention to
| advertisers. If we all paid for it, the design of these
| services would be different. I'm not sure how to tackle that
| but it seems a start is privacy legislation to prohibit user
| tracking and sale or sharing of personal data.
| braiamp wrote:
| > First, people say things like they can't not use Facebook
| because it has marketplace, etc. shows there has clearly been
| an issue of not enforcing any kind of anti-trust laws for the
| past 20 years since US v Microsoft in the browser wars days.
|
| Europe is in some capacity doing that.
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/facebook-
| marketplace-t...
| firefax wrote:
| I deleted my Facebook in 2016, and when I tried to create a
| new one they banned me as "inauthentic". I've seen people
| complain about the site demanding a government ID scan, but
| I'd have been willing to prove I am who I am if given the
| chance.
|
| Now I can't delete my Instagram, which I was using FB SSO
| for. They ocassionally send me marketing emails that I might
| want to engage with so and so's content.
|
| How, when you nuked my goddamn account for no reason?
|
| Anyways, if I had the money I'd short them -- they seem to be
| completely unconcerned with the few who'd consider giving
| them a second chance.
|
| As for Tik Tok, as with Telegram having it's servers in
| Russia, I think the real issue is the data is in control of
| the PRC, rather than whinings about "fake news" -- people
| have consumed supermarket check out drivel like the Weekly
| World News for years, it's just moved online.
| jaypeg25 wrote:
| Is this a common issue? I deleted mine around the same
| time. I recently moved to a small town where many of the
| restaurants and businesses use Facebook which kind of
| forced me back on. When I tried creating a new one the same
| thing happened, and there was no way of reversing this
| decision.
| halper wrote:
| Same with me, who "needed" to join FB because that is the
| main communication platform for a leisure activity.
| Apparently I am a fake person.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Did you try signing up with a different email address,
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| If you deleted an account, how are they sending you emails?
| Are you in the EU?
| firefax wrote:
| I am not in the EU. There's two accounts - FB and Insta.
| The same email was given to both.
| williamtrask wrote:
| Or just address the core element of advertising that creates
| the perverse incentive -- the ability for an auction to
| determine what you see. Paying to be a part of a digital
| phonebook is fine. Recommending things is fine. But skewing
| your recommender against the highest bidder maybe not.
| codr7 wrote:
| Solid point!
| misiti3780 wrote:
| They 100% are - I fantasize about world in which they dont
| exist.
| quelup wrote:
| There's a lot of issues with social media - I don't think
| anyone denies that. But not everyone thinks like the HN crew.
| What about the _millions_ of users who actually enjoy FB and
| use it to connect with friends and family? To pretend that use
| case doesn 't exist seems naive and biased. There's a reason
| these companies are so big - some people actually like them.
| Maybe they're the naive ones and we need to save them from
| themselves, but I don't think it's that black and white.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I want to respect the user here, but also they need to be
| saved.
|
| The companies are big because they're advertising machines
| with intense targeting abilities, which makes for a great
| place for advertisers to spend money.
|
| Plenty of people enjoy Facebook, and plenty of people enjoy
| drugs and gambling and all sorts of destructive behaviors
| that many nations regulate. I think we can recognize that it
| can be fun and have utility, while still being dangerous or
| problematic.
|
| If you had to convince people to pay for Facebook as a
| subscription, would people use it the same way? Would they
| still find utility there? Would they prefer a competitor?
|
| I have a facebook account from my college days, but I don't
| use it and neither does most of my network. My parents,
| despite being deeply suspicious and tech-savvy have started
| using it more and more to "connect" with family. In reality,
| I've seen their usage and it's mostly generic groups and
| memes and similar stuff. I suspect that most people
| experience the same reality, and respectfully, I think
| society can survive without that.
|
| To postulate, I think there are a million "better" ways to
| connect with friends and family, but I also think that
| there's no one App that can do everything for everyone. My
| extended family bought a dozen smart picture frames, and
| everyone adds photos to a joint account we all share, and
| that has replaced a social feed for pics of kids/grandkids. I
| think people would be better served finding what works for
| them and letting it be bespoke to their family/friends.
| intended wrote:
| The early waves of most communities is 'better'. Strangely this
| is really consistent, even if you've been on sites quite a bit.
|
| One of the rules of moderation I believe in, is that the
| workload depends on the nature of the people in your community.
|
| Oh, so communities follow the rules of subculture founding and
| decline ???
|
| So there should be a point where things that were not cool,
| become cool again?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| What are you actually saying? The government should make these
| websites illegal?
|
| I like tiktok. I scroll for a bit in the morning and watch some
| funny videos. Who are you to say that's immoral and shouldn't
| happen?
| spokaneplumb wrote:
| The government's banned owning media with too much reach
| before, placing limits on audience size per owner.
|
| We no longer know how to actually govern the country, but it
| used to be entirely possible.
| mk89 wrote:
| basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s of
| known people. I thought about this recently... It was really
| better times.
|
| Even decentralized mastodon is too big and it makes it far too
| easy to post BS and hateful / unhealthy stuff. Plus there are
| far too many posts you can't relate to or just don't want to
| read (,,algorithm" or not), without even mentioning the bubble
| effect, much worse there than on X to be honest.
|
| Smaller communities which you can connect to /disconnect from
| plus a good combo of RSS feeds to get news. That's probably it.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s
| of known people. I thought about this recently... It was
| really better times.
|
| I'm going to take a wild guess and assume this is how you
| grew up?
| raincole wrote:
| It's simply a better model to connected online. I use
| present tense because the "better times" didn't really go
| away: it becomes Discord servers.
|
| The bad part, of course, is that Discord is owned by one
| single entity and not indexed like the open web is.
| mk89 wrote:
| Kind of, yeah.
|
| IRC, simple php forums, no TLS, easy stuff. Nowadays we're
| full of technology and very poor content. In no way can
| mastodon (mentioning because it's the defacto decentralized
| social media) solve that problem. It's really easy to post
| stuff that shouldn't be posted.
|
| On the other hand, crappy looking forums, slow internet
| connection, you really had to take the time to think about
| what to say and mainly why say it in the first place. It
| was more about the content than about quantity.
| supersanity wrote:
| I did, and it truly was better. Threaded forums are far
| better at facilitating complex discussions, organizing
| information, and making the information accessible. Today,
| most communication is happening inside the walled gardens
| of Facebook, Discord, etc. That information is effectively
| being lost rather than being neatly organized and easily
| searchable.
| jghn wrote:
| > go back to old SMF/php forums
|
| Some of us are old enough to remember when those were already
| the enshitification stage, and would prefer to go back to
| usenet
| BryantD wrote:
| "Eternal September" was a more serious problem than we
| knew.
| mk89 wrote:
| Ahahah I believe you! Some forums were really bad. :)
| nameless912 wrote:
| There's a strong part of me that thinks that a model not
| unlike BBSes with Fidonet might be the way to go. Everyone
| gets to have their own little bastion of the 'net that they
| control, filled with their own content (games, warez, text
| files, the good ol' shit) and global email/forums/chat
| provided in a decentralized way. When people are arseholes,
| you cut them off by blocking them from your server, and we
| all move on.
|
| I keep toying with building a modern version of that using
| some of the existing fediverse infrastructure, but I just
| don't have the time or attention span for it. Partially
| because my attention span was fried by Instagram.
| pishpash wrote:
| Just put a propagation delay on the information, like the
| physical world. Human socialization is evolved to handle the
| physical world.
| bparsons wrote:
| I think 90% of the negative social impacts would go away if
| they just did reverse chronological, opt-in news feed.
|
| The black box algorithms are the problem.
| p3rls wrote:
| Whoa there bro didn't you see Zuckeberg's latest podcast, he
| built facebook to bring people together! He paid good money for
| that corporate beastie boy makeover too-- show some damn
| respect.
| redactd wrote:
| The literal terminology we use to refer to them directly
| correlates with their slide. They were "Social Networks" and
| were all about the network effect of having a connection to
| people IRL reflected online. That meant you could also go
| additional links out. They are now "Social Media" and they are
| largely just one-to-many platforms for media. They have
| completely crowded out most of the original benefit of being a
| social network.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| Bring back IRC
| INTPenis wrote:
| It never left. I've been consistently on IRC since the 90s.
| INTPenis wrote:
| First wave? You must have missed yahoo groups.
|
| And of course someone will reply to this and mention usenet.
| EasyMark wrote:
| That can't happen, the 1st amendment protects us from that sort
| of overreach with lots of precedence coming before it. What can
| happen is severe penalties for companies and adults who allow
| minors to get on social media. That is the sort of regulation
| that can happen if the USA Congress really wants to do
| something. They can also regulate foreign propaganda sneaking
| like with TikTok, there is precedence for it. Also severe
| penalties and jailtime for threats (terrorism, personal) done
| online, they should be taken seriously and tracked down and
| prosecuted as if the threat was made against me if I was
| standing on a street corner.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Given how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data
| brokers and how similar the functionality of TikTok and YouTube
| Shorts, I feel like the only explanations are:
|
| 1. The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a
| domestic one
|
| Or more likely, given that there are so many other industries
| that didn't get a ban:
|
| 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on
| Facebook but do not on TikTok
| palata wrote:
| Totally. I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize
| China for their protectionism, but as soon as something out-
| competes US companies, it gets banned: Huawei, DJI, TikTok.
|
| Of course it cannot be said like this, because "free speech"
| and "democracy", so the official reason is "national security".
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| well china does it too with google,fb etc back then, and
| other nation do it too
|
| albeit not outright banned it all together but sometimes they
| prefer homegrown company/technology
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I mean, let's be clear: Facebook and Google are very much
| banned in Mainland China.
| palata wrote:
| Sure. I just noted the irony that the US discourse has
| sounded a lot like "we are better than China, we are more
| free" for decades.
| infecto wrote:
| But we are, there is no irony. China has the great wall
| and massive corporate espionage games to steal state and
| corporate secrets. The US and its various federal
| intelligence agencies have certainly done nefarious
| things but never quite as documented at the level as
| China's. They actively monitor all of their Social Media,
| block most foreign social media. I can easily go to any
| Chinese social media/website from the US.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| In some ways, this is still true, even surrounding this
| decision.
|
| Do you think there were many people standing outside of
| government buildings in Beijing protesting the potential
| ban of Facebook and Google while politicians of different
| political parties were debating the ban in the country's
| primary legislative body? Do you think you could launch a
| campaign for office on repealing said ban in China?
| antifa wrote:
| I think they could, and fundamentally won't because they
| can be accessed via VPN, but ultimately aren't necessary
| because those companies are not exactly interesting for
| any purpose but talking to Americans or studying
| Americans.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| That wasn't the case in the late 00s when those hacks
| happened.
| shlant wrote:
| > "we are better than China, we are more free"
|
| Anyone who disagrees with this is either not being honest
| or is not aware of what extent China restricts it's
| citizens.
| palata wrote:
| But wouldn't you say that there is some irony there,
| still?
|
| I see multiple comments saying "shut up, we're not
| China!", but that's not what I meant :-). I just meant
| that there is some irony here.
|
| And that next time we criticize China's protectionism, we
| may take a step back and think that we do it too,
| sometimes.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Exactly. One doesn't become their own enemy overnight.
| It's death by a thousand cuts; attrition.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > albeit not outright banned it all together
|
| No they absolutely do just ban them.
|
| It's not just that Google or FB can't operate Chinese-
| specific sites as a business within China, from within
| China you can't even get to the foreign/international
| versions of those sites, because they're blocked by China's
| firewall. Wikipedia has a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
| swed420 wrote:
| Yup. China has been kicking Silicon Valley's butt for some
| time now, and I don't see any signs of that changing any time
| soon.
|
| This drives the point home:
|
| _AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World
| Order_ by Kai-Fu Lee
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38242135-ai-superpowers
| tmaly wrote:
| It was with the 2020 version of the algorithm till they
| changed things see https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-
| platforms-cory-doctorow/
| swed420 wrote:
| I'm not referring exclusively to TikTok but tech in
| general. China makes SV look entitled and lazy.
| infecto wrote:
| I cannot argue on the TikTok as strongly but I can see strong
| arguments on why Huawei and DJI are national security risks.
| Some of this is more educated guesses so not defensible with
| numbers. We know most major companies in the Chinese market
| have extremely close ties to the CCP. No doubt historically
| the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other
| mechanisms but I believe the CCP takes it to a next level. We
| know for a fact that the CCP and chinese entities play
| extremely hardball when it comes to corporate espionage. Some
| of the stories we have seen almost read like a spy novel.
| Certainly Huawei and DJI make some incredible products but
| when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid
| or other major pieces of infrastructure, I do believe it
| warrants major concern for national security.
|
| I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy
| compared to the easier explanation, China is a fairly crafty
| bad actor in a lot of cases. 99% of the imported products
| from China are not getting blocked, just the ones that have
| very significant national security risks.
| suraci wrote:
| > 99% of the imported products from China are not getting
| blocked
|
| because it's impossible.
|
| the US offloaded low-added-value manufacturing to China,
| exchanging paper dollars for cheap industrial goods. When
| China tries to upgrade to high-added-value industries, like
| chips, guess what? National security risks!
|
| just enjoy cheap goods and nature resources from 3rd
| world...
| infecto wrote:
| I am not sure I follow your point. There have been both
| National Security risks as well as protectionist economic
| policy enforced against china that benefits domestic
| players. In a lot of those protectionist cases, there is
| either a case of China flooding the market or there are
| cases where the government makes a choice that its
| beneficial to keep domestic manufacturers alive.
|
| In the above provided examples its quite clear that there
| are possible national security risks involved with China
| being involved in US infrastructure and technology. If
| DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
|
| If you have better example beyond hyperbole I am all
| ears.
| suraci wrote:
| > If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a
| discussion.
|
| 1. of course there'll be no 'national security risks'
| because EU is an ally, and the US is spying on it
|
| 2. even though, troubles come to US's allies sometimes,
| like what Alstom and ASML met
|
| 3. EU products are mostly less compatible, overall, it
| cannot challenge the position where the US holds in the
| global value chain, so pose less of threat
| infecto wrote:
| You still have not given any evidence how DJI is not a
| national security risk?
| palata wrote:
| Doesn't it work the other way round? You'd have to prove
| that they are a national security risk? Because it's hard
| to prove a negative.
| infecto wrote:
| Like the way your irony works? I listed my arguments as
| why you can make a case that they are national security
| threats. You are more than welcome to call it a fake
| pretense but the fact remains that the majority of
| Chinese imports are not restricted and that includes
| tech/high-tech related items. If you have nothing more
| than America is ironic I can see where your endless
| questions stem from.
| glurblur wrote:
| The burden of proof lies on the accuser. If you are not
| able to provide a proof of national security threat from
| tiktok or dji, then don't treat it like it's a fact. All
| the "ifs" don't constitute as a proof.
| infecto wrote:
| You obviously have a bias here so its going to be
| impossible to have any real discussion. There are very
| simple facts that I will restate for you. The CCP has
| seats at every major mainland corporation. Chinese
| corporations have in recent years been caught in some
| very spy like espionage, this is happening globally.
| China is an adversary to the US and Europe. There is no
| further burden of proof needed when talking about
| sensitive industries. You don't need to catch DJI in the
| act, similar to TikTok, if you cannot sever data/ties
| with the mainland there are real risks. Geopolitics suck
| but its a real risk that has to be snipped before it
| becomes a problem.
|
| Do the five eyes and other countries have national
| intelligence that are collecting data, absolutely. I
| cannot recall any recent published articles about overt
| Western corporate espionage and especially any that were
| supported by a parent country.
| palata wrote:
| > I cannot recall any recent published articles about
| overt Western corporate espionage and especially any that
| were supported by a parent country.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24992485
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57302806
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Parliamentary_Commit
| tee...
|
| And this is just one known case of the US spying on
| _allies_.
| infecto wrote:
| Are any of those corporate espionage? Those seems to fall
| under government spying which I acknowledged exists for
| all companies and especially so with the five eyes.
| palata wrote:
| > If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a
| discussion.
|
| If DJI was from the EU, the US would manage to buy it.
| amrocha wrote:
| Read some of the many stories out there about the NSA,
| please. They have backdoors into internet infrastructure.
| If any country is a threat to information security, it's
| the USA.
| infecto wrote:
| Did you read my comment? I explicitly called out
| backdoors, you should read comments closer. It most
| definitely happens within the US but the ties between the
| US government and corporate entities are no where as
| perversely intertwined as they are in China.
| palata wrote:
| So you would say for sure that the NSA has definitely
| never been used to give advantages to US companies? I
| could totally imagine Boeing receiving information in
| order to win a contract against Airbus.
|
| After all, we know for a fact that the US have been
| spying on European politicians.
| infecto wrote:
| You are making up stories now. We have proven news
| article of flagrant corporate espionage happening from
| Chinese actors. We know that CCP upper leadership holds
| seats at the major mainland corporations. Will I say
| never has US intelligence participated in corporate
| espionage? There are documented cases of the US meddling
| but as far as we have evidence, not at the level of
| Chinese interference. So nope, I won't say for sure but I
| am also not fabricating stories.
| palata wrote:
| Sorry I don't follow. What did I make up? That I don't
| believe that the US are "always fair" either? That I
| don't need to believe it, because it has been documented
| many times?
|
| > We know that CCP upper leadership holds seats at the
| major mainland corporations.
|
| And who holds seats/has major influence in the US
| government?
| infecto wrote:
| Sorry I am not sure what 1) your point is or 2) what you
| are arguing. This thread is simply DJI poses a real
| national security threat as there has been demonstrable
| issues in recent history.
| palata wrote:
| Depends on where you start the thread. Before your
| comment, this thread was simply "this is US protectionism
| and not really national security".
|
| After your first comment, this thread was "the USA are an
| information security risk".
|
| My point is that of course, from the US point of view,
| China abusing its power is worse than the US abusing
| their power. But if you take a step back... why should a
| European citizen consider that what China is doing is
| worse than what the US are doing?
|
| It has been proven that the US have been targeting
| European politicians with spying. It has been proven that
| the NSA was collecting private information about just
| everything they could (including US citizen BTW). The
| richest people on Earth control the biggest tech
| companies on Earth and are getting closer to the US
| president every day. Some of those people are actively
| trying to influence politics in Europe (e.g. promoting
| neo-nazis in Germany, I don't know if you understand what
| it means there). The US president is talking about
| invading Greenland, Panama etc. And you talk about links
| between the Chinese government and Chinese companies?
|
| If TikTok is a strong national security risk for the US,
| then Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple are all strong
| security risks for Europe. But what would the US say if
| Europe banned those companies? Probably more "it's a free
| market, it's democracy, it's capitalism, you can't do
| that!" than "fair enough, we do it too, and China does it
| too", right?
|
| That's where I find it ironic. The US promote free market
| when it's about having their companies in other
| countries. But when the roles are inverted, then the US
| behave a lot more like China than like Europe (by banning
| companies), don't they?
| infecto wrote:
| Lots of ideas but you are missing the simple point. The
| CCP is partnered with their companies and actively
| support corporate espionage. Its a fact that the five
| eyes spy on lots of people including their own citizens.
| Some of this is certainly based off recent history but
| the way I frame it is China adulterates almost every
| piece of data they release. They limit their incoming
| internet. They aggressively monitor their citizens and
| will cull information on social media proactively. They
| participate in corporate espionage that sounds like its
| from a fiction story. Corporations in China are in some
| form or another tightly partnered with the government
| once they reach a massive scale. To find irony is to
| ignore everything China is doing. Again, absolutely
| everyone is running foreign intelligence. The difference
| is I don't believe anyone is as worried of drones made
| outside of China but its an obvious threat vector that
| drones made in China have the opportunity to phone home
| data and with the increased use of drones in industrial
| settings there are real risks to be thought about.
| palata wrote:
| Feels like your view is "whatever we do is okay, as long
| as we can point to someone else doing worse". Is that
| what you are saying?
|
| > its an obvious threat vector that drones made in China
| have the opportunity to phone home data and with the
| increased use of drones in industrial settings there are
| real risks to be thought about.
|
| Okay, let's take drones. Can you articulate concretely
| one of those "obvious threat vectors"? For instance, a
| DJI drone does not come with an Internet connection
| magically embedded into it. So you can be completely
| offline while you fly your mission.
|
| Are you scared that the drone may save a 4K video in a
| hidden storage, and then upload GBs of it when you
| connect it to the Internet without you having a chance to
| see it? Why not instructing government operators to only
| connect through a router that filters the network? And
| that would be on top of the DJI Local Data mode that you
| don't have to trust.
|
| Or are you scared that the drone may store few bytes of
| critical information? What would that be, a location? Why
| wouldn't the CCP just hack the smartphone of the
| employee, e.g. using something like NSO Pegasus (which is
| western technology, but I won't call any irony there)?
|
| If it is _obvious_ , please explain the national security
| threat caused by DJI drones that couldn't be solved with
| a simple external firewall.
| amrocha wrote:
| I think you're biased if you don't believe the USA is
| also doing domestic corporate espionage. Cisco probably
| has multiple NSA sleeper agents silently inserting
| backdoors into their routers.
| palata wrote:
| > On July 3, 2014, the former Technical Director of the
| NSA, William Binney, who had become a whistleblower after
| the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, testified to
| the committee. He said that the NSA has a totalitarian
| approach that has previously only been known from
| dictatorships and that there is no longer such a thing as
| privacy.
|
| But no, there is _absolutely no reason_ to think that the
| US may be doing corporate espionage /s.
| infecto wrote:
| You don't seem to understand the definition of corporate
| espionage.
| palata wrote:
| > I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy
|
| I am not proposing a conspiracy, I am merely noting some
| irony in the fact that the US are doing protectionism here.
|
| > No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put
| in backdoors or other mechanisms
|
| Well, most of the Western Internet goes through the US, and
| we know for a fact that the US try to extract as much as
| they can from whatever they can (remember Snowden?). Also
| the US are very fine with US companies owning all the data
| of a big part of the world, and they would be really pissed
| if some country started banning them "for national security
| reasons".
|
| > but when you have drones being used to survey the
| electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure
|
| You don't need to connect the drone to the Internet.
| Technical solutions would most definitely exist, I am
| convinced of that. The reason DJI is being banned is
| because DJI is 7 years ahead of anyone else, and the gap is
| getting bigger every year. It really, really sounds like
| the US drone companies have been lobbying _a ton_ because
| they just can 't compete.
| rwarfield wrote:
| This claim is incompatible with the reality that the U.S.
| runs an enormous bilateral trade deficit with China.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's important to say that the US _had_ TikTok with Vine, but
| is so corrupt that it let Facebook buy it to shut it down.
| corimaith wrote:
| Mercantalism begets Mercantalism. If their mercantalist
| policies become successfull then unfortunately we'll need to
| also assume similar policies to protect ourselves, aka Beggar
| Thy Neighbour, and everyone loses in an arms race of tariffs
| and subsidies.
|
| That's exactly why free trade proponets oppose those
| policies, but the CCP didn't want to reform so we'll go the
| opposite way.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative
| on Facebook but do not on TikTok
|
| If the last four years are indicative of anything, it's that
| the US government has fairly limited control over the narrative
| on American social platforms.
|
| I lost count of how many times I saw people typing in "FJB" and
| "MAGA".
| spencerflem wrote:
| Facebook is extremely censored re: the genocide in Gaza
|
| TikTok is not
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Is it censored, or do most people just not talk about it on
| Facebook?
|
| It's interesting how incredibly supportive of human rights
| that a platform in bed with the CCP became, no? Do you
| think that China's human rights bugaboos are often
| discussed on their internal social networks?
|
| It's amplified.
| 93po wrote:
| there's a billion people on facebook, i am sure people
| talk about it
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It's possible, but ultimately it's hard to tell,
| especially in regard to the American users.
|
| The results of the election would point to the idea that
| most American voters aren't so perturbed by what's
| happening in Gaza as to want an administration that would
| be at least as effective in reeling in the Israelis as
| the Biden administration was. Whether that's right or
| wrong, well, that's another discussion.
|
| It's a chicken-or-the-egg problem. Do people not talk
| about Gaza on Facebook because it's censored, or do
| people not talk about Gaza on Facebook because no one was
| talking about it to begin with?
| spencerflem wrote:
| Which party should I vote for to help the people of Gaza?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| lol, doesn't matter at this point.
|
| Given the history I'd say that the incoming
| administration will be less sympathetic to the Gazans
| than the outgoing, but, again, it doesn't matter at this
| point.
| 93po wrote:
| Green party
| FrontierProject wrote:
| >that most American voters aren't so perturbed by what's
| happening in Gaza as to want an administration that would
| be at least as effective in reeling in the Israelis as
| the Biden administration was.
|
| It's not hard to be at least as capable as somebody who's
| completly incapable. Think what you will of Trump, but in
| one meeting he had a solid deadline for implementing the
| ceasefire agreement the Biden admin has had floating
| since May. There weren't even any changes to it, so what
| the heck has Biden been doing?
| spencerflem wrote:
| I'm with you that Biden has been doing worse than
| nothing, and has been stringing us along with this
| ceasefire that will never come, while at the same time
| using UN to block any sort of resolution.
|
| But don't kid yourself that Trump is better. He supports
| the settlement of the West Bank and has recognized
| Jerusalem as exclusively Israeli.
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/11/trump-
| cabinet-is...
|
| The Republicans are just as on board with the genocide as
| the Democrats are, if not more.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The question is whether it's a ruinous empathy thing.
| It's much too early for me to be confident that the
| current ceasefire is actually going to work better than
| the last one. But if it does, it's a pretty strong data
| point for the idea that credibly taking _either_ side is
| better for the Palestinian people than flailing around
| trying to support both.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Is this in favor of a one state solution, with Israel
| being the one state?
|
| genuinely confused - Biden has not been remotely empathic
| towards Palestine.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Biden has been as empathetic towards Palestine as it's
| possible to be without opposing Israel. That's how we
| ended up with things like the crazy floating aid pier.
| Trump's position is much less empathetic, complete with
| overt threats of "all hell to pay" if they don't release
| the hostages soon, and if the current ceasefire holds
| then it's hard to avoid concluding it's better for the
| Palestinian people overall.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| If that cease-fire holds, I'll be very surprised.
|
| More likely than Biden's incompetence is that Bibi now
| has a variable solved for in the geopolitical calculus:
| the American election now has a winner. He finds a
| kindred spirit in Trump and thinks he is now working with
| an American administration that will let him do
| _whatever_ he wants without even the appearance of trying
| to rein him in. There is no Rashida Tlaib in Trump 's
| party.
|
| But that's on a different subject than the greater thread
| discussion.
| bbqfog wrote:
| People in Gaza are celebrating the proposed ceasefire and
| Zionists are angry about it. I'm no Trump fan but it does
| indeed look like he'll be better than Biden (who was the
| worst).
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The people in Gaza are probably desperate enough to
| accept anything at this point and everyone involved has a
| long history of going back on their word.
|
| Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and supports West
| Bank settlements. To suddenly give an Iran-backed militia
| a win goes against literally everything in the grand
| scheme of things.
| briandear wrote:
| Are they desperate enough to overthrow Hamas?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| They weren't desperate enough to vote Hamas out over the
| last decade or so.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Dog. When was the last election? The answer is 2006.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The Biden administration was obviously not effective at
| reeling in Israel at all.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Give it a few months.
| spencerflem wrote:
| No, I do not think China's bugaboos are allowed on TikTok
| for the exact same reason the US's are not allowed on
| Facebook
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I mean, I've seen _plenty_ of dissenting material against
| the powers-that-be on Meta platforms over the years, but
| okay.
|
| Police brutality (both viewpoints), COVID conspiracies,
| election conspiracies, etc. are not particularly hard to
| find on there.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Is posting about CEOs allowed there?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Yes? I've seen plenty of Facebook posts about how CEOs
| are greedy, criminal, ripping us all off, etc. I'm really
| not sure how you could have gotten the impression that
| it's not allowed to talk about CEOs on Facebook.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| It is censored.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo
|
| https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-
| censorship...
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Wait, but I like the issue being amplified. Do you not?
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| tiktok is extremely censored re: genocide in xinjiang.
| facebook is not.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Not disagreeing, that's exactly my point, the govt wants
| to be able control the narrative
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i feel that we overuse the word genocide nowadays, in a
| way that almost amounts to holocaust trivialization
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Yep. The Chinese state is guilty of a number of things in
| Xinjiang, but genocide is not one of them.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| fair. they are guilty of arresting specific ethnicity for
| the crime of gathering in groups, and targetting men and
| forbidding men to have children, and forcing women to
| take han husbands to dilute their ethnicity. but not
| genocide.
| spencerflem wrote:
| if this is referring to Gaza, many Holocaust experts are
| willing to call what's happening there a genocide
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i think i'm pretty clearly referring to Xinjiang.
|
| if the Rohingya genocide is a genocide, then I can see
| the case for Gaza (the UN definition of genocide is quite
| broad) - but still feel that there should be a word
| distinguishing the stuff that happened in the Holocaust
| or the Rwandan genocide from less systemic killings
| occurring in the background of conflict. A lot of the
| power of the word "genocide" comes from the implicit
| comparison to the Holocaust, but none of the events we
| are discussing really come all that close barring Rwanda.
| strathmeyer wrote:
| Yeah when the Palestinians say they want to murder all
| the Jews that's what genocide is. When there are no
| Jewish people in Palestine because they killed them all,
| that's what genocide is. If people didn't hate Jews and
| support terrorism, Palestinians wouldn't be dying. When
| Arabs are allowed to vote, participate in government, and
| join the military, that's the opposite of what genocide
| is.
| squarefoot wrote:
| There are places in the west where you risk losing your
| job just by mentioning the ongoing genocide that is
| happening now in Gaza. I'm not defending the CCP in any
| way, it's just that power corrupts and abuse of power
| happens pretty much everywhere.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Great, so we have TikTok where we can access information
| that's being censored by the West, and Facebook to access
| information that's being censored by the East. What's the
| problem? Information wants to be free.
| strathmeyer wrote:
| Trump won, the Russian misinformation campaign is over now.
| You can stop making stuff up about Jews now.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Or, maybe, those things they don't see as a problem.
|
| These shifty foreigners, however... Xenophobia isn't just
| some old timey things we use to do
| ok123456 wrote:
| "FJB" and "MAGA" are within the bounds of allowed political
| discourse and were encouraged.
|
| "Throw the bums out" without any additional coherent
| political project is precisely what the elites allow and what
| allows them to maintain power.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I mean, if you want to ignore the fact that the JB was Joe
| Biden and he was quite literally President of the United
| States when that was a trend, sure.
|
| Same with MAGA after January 6th.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Why would you have to "ignore" those facts?
|
| It was a concerted effort to channel quiescently
| conservative voters into national electoral politics.
|
| Neither of those challenged the super-structure.
| rwarfield wrote:
| The big issue isn't data security; it's propaganda.
| Irrespective of whether the government has control of the
| narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't)
| there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable
| propaganda line to millions of Americans. Would we have let the
| USSR acquire a major television network?
|
| And even if you disagree with the national security reasons for
| disallowing China to control a major U.S. social network, there
| is still the issue of trade reciprocity - nearly all of the
| U.S. Web companies are banned in China.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Looking forward to Europe banning Meta and X considering how
| their CEOs are meeting weekly with their government overlord,
| quite clear those social networks are in the pocket of the
| new US government.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Musk making threats against the UK government has gone down
| badly: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/uk-
| counter-ext...
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Musk, is a representative of Trump's government, right?
|
| A senior member of Trump's government is trying to mess
| with our political system - how is this not catastrophic
| for diplomatic relations, coming on top of the threats to
| our NATO allies?
| kklisura wrote:
| No, no, you can't do that. Than they'll come after you and
| claim how you're not free, you don't support free market
| and whatnot. Banning is tool for them, but not for you.
| seventytwo wrote:
| Any country is free to do this.
| kurthr wrote:
| TikTok is literally banned in China (along with YouTube,
| Facebook, Insta, etc, etc).
| Kbelicius wrote:
| Is it banned or is it just not available due to the
| owners already having an app that does the same thing
| (douyin)?
| kurthr wrote:
| Yes, it's region banned (not just by IP so VPNs don't
| even really work well). You'll get a 404, if you try
| connecting, and your packet rate won't support video
| through a VPN. Note that it's also banned in HK and India
| and parts of Europe so it's not really anything new to
| ban it when you're talking about almost half the world's
| population.
|
| Couldn't people just say "but Instagram" is just TikTok?
| Is it really the "same thing" just, because the same
| people have control, if the algos, servers, content,
| moderation/censorship, and promotion are different? Like
| BlueSky, Twitter, and TruthCentral are all the same
| thing? Or if we want the "same company" company Allo and
| Hangouts? I mean everyone loved Allo, right, you can have
| that one.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The US didn't "ban" anything. If the EU required Meta to
| divest I imagine they would do that rather than shut down
| and lose billions.
| kklisura wrote:
| You think US Meta would relinquish tech to EU Meta? You
| think they're better then TikTok?
|
| Yeah, we're not buying that story anymore.
| cm2012 wrote:
| US tech companies sell themselves to European tech
| companies all the time, Meta would definitely sell.
| itake wrote:
| TikTok's main user base is the USA. If TikTok sells their
| US app, they can't support themselves on the rest of the
| world. TikTok isn't even the leader in China.
|
| US Meta can definitely support itself at it's current
| size without EU Meta.
| herbst wrote:
| Are there any numbers for that? I highly doubt tiktok is
| doomed to fail just because is banning it.
|
| It's still way more popular than any Meta or US app for
| that matter, is right now.
| Aunche wrote:
| This ban only applies to foreign adversaries (e.g. China,
| Iran, and Russia).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... Brazil already demanded explanations about the new
| Meta moderation rules. I remember reading the same about
| the UK, but I'm not sure.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| 1. CEOs meeting the President is not evidence of govt.
| control.
|
| 2. Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella .
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Europe is an ally
|
| Was? Isn't a threat of invasion of Nato territory
| something that ended that situation.
|
| Sure "it's Trump being an insane dickhead", but y'all
| elected him, then suspended rule of law for him.
|
| Europe is sitting waiting to be shafted if we don't
| assume Trump will continue to do the absolute worst, most
| hostile things. We should be taking the threats of
| invasion seriously despite them appearing to be a way to,
| for example, invade Panama and not look as insane as was
| expected.
| herbst wrote:
| > Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella
|
| That's an absolute illusion. And definitely absolutely
| wrong to call it ally. Most govs don't want to have
| anything to do with trump, musk and all this bullshit.
|
| Most European countries will basically make no deals or
| anything for 4 years just like we did last time.
|
| There is a literal war thread open of trump claiming to
| invade parts of Europe. We are pissed. Not allies
| kryogen1c wrote:
| You know this was happening before elon bought Twitter,
| right? Secretly?
|
| Members of congress were texting and emailing with execs
| from Twitter and Facebook to request post suppression.
| During an election.
| Ikatza wrote:
| The US is not an enemy to the EU, while China is a clear
| enemy to the US.
|
| The difference is quite easy to easy to spot.
| kubb wrote:
| I mean under Trump the US becomes less and less of an
| ally, and more an opportunistic bully.
| Spivak wrote:
| > Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television
| network?
|
| They don't have to, Fox News does it for free /zing. But for
| real I wouldn't see a problem with it. Less now that the
| world is more globalized than ever, I can get news from every
| corner of the globe both from our allies and enemies.
|
| Could they be subtly pushing a narrative of communism or
| something, sure but this kind of "news is biased towards its
| owners" is beyond commonplace at this point. Jon Stewart just
| did a whole bit about why he couldn't criticize Apple or
| China.
| spencerflem wrote:
| To be clear, Russia pays those right wing trolls a fat
| chunk of change
| briandear wrote:
| Citation needed.
| xnx wrote:
| Right-wing influencers were duped to work for covert
| Russian operation: https://apnews.com/article/russian-
| interference-presidential...
| aaomidi wrote:
| Literally same arguments used by Iran.
|
| It's fascinating honestly. Soon we're going to have "we need
| government to be able to DPI and block propaganda!"
| shlant wrote:
| > Literally same arguments used by Iran.
|
| All governments/nations have some level of self-interest.
| That doesn't mean they are all equal in their motivations
| or approaches.
|
| China is literally controlling the narrative through
| TikTok. Why shouldn't the US respond to that?
| lucianbr wrote:
| > there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a
| deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans
|
| Is the argument itself correct or not? Or do we evaluate
| it based on motivation, i.e. it's ok when we do it
| because we have good reasons for it? Sounds like the ends
| justify the means to me.
|
| The correct approach would be to increase the critical
| thinking skills of the population, increase transparency,
| require corporations to make algorithms fair and
| equitable. Require all feeds to be chronological or some
| other uniform, fair rule for showing posts. No boosting
| certain viewpoints, or paid promotions. But these things
| would bother corporations and politicians in the west as
| well as the external forces with "bad motivations", so
| just ban the external social networks.
|
| The EU I think has a better approach, of course made
| possible because we don't have any powerful social
| networks of our own, and so nobody lobbies against these
| rules. I'm sure the DSA and DMA would be different (if
| they existed at all) if at least one of FAANG was
| European. Nevertheless, the concept is better.
| amrocha wrote:
| The chinese government couldn't care less about tiktok,
| your brain has been poisoned by usa propaganda against
| china
| aaomidi wrote:
| The US literally controls most of the modern internet.
|
| The argument is probably more correct for Iran banning
| YouTube than it is for the US banning TikTok.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Speaking of foreign propaganda, does anyone remember when one
| of the most destructive advocacy organizations in the US was
| found to be heavily influenced by Russian spies?
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44885633 (Fox news
| for balance (!): https://www.foxnews.com/world/timeline-of-
| suspected-russian-... )
| will4274 wrote:
| > one of the most destructive advocacy organizations in the
| US was found to be heavily influenced by Russian spies
|
| Your links do not back up this claim. Both indicate that
| Butina was likely a Russian spy and _desired_ to influence
| the National Rifle Association (NRA). However, neither
| article gives any example of successful influence, however
| minor.
| gruez wrote:
| >Speaking of foreign propaganda, does anyone remember when
| one of the most destructive advocacy organizations in the
| US was found to be heavily influenced by Russian spies?
|
| "heavily influenced by Russian spies" seems like a stretch.
| The BBC article you linked basically says she attended some
| NRA conventions/events, and got some NRA officials to
| travel to Russia. There's no indication those activities
| actually changed anything.
| eunos wrote:
| > propaganda
|
| It's so amusing seeing the society that lionizes itself as
| the paragon of open society and can't stop boasting about the
| effectiveness of free-speech soft-power compared to sclerotic
| communist propaganda now having panics over short video apps.
|
| Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton could never think that.
|
| Well, maybe we will be on yeltsin-on-supermarket stage soon?
| rwarfield wrote:
| The propaganda on TikTok comes disguised as Americans
| sharing points of view that just happen to serve CCP
| interests. Often the creators are expressing a genuine (but
| rare) viewpoint that China just needs to amplify. This
| isn't about keeping Americans from reading Pravda.
|
| It's not hard to imagine the messages China will be pushing
| to weaken support for assisting Taiwan in a conflict.
| "Don't waste money propping up the corrupt Taiwanese
| government, spend it on health care /tax cuts at home!"
|
| Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much
| of the American economy is at their mercy.
| pphysch wrote:
| Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy,
| due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from
| them annually. Hospitals running out of medical supplies
| will hit WAY sooner than your existing 4090 needs to be
| replaced by a new Taiwanese product.
|
| This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative
| is itself pure government propaganda, related to military
| power projection over China's coastline. Surely you can
| at least admit this. It's just a battle of propaganda,
| except China unfortunately has common sense on its side
| in many of these arenas:
|
| USA should not be spending hundreds of billions
| maintaining a WW2 power projection strategy, 80 years
| later.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I can't admit this and have no idea what you're talking
| about. You're right that Taiwan isn't more important to
| the US than China or any other major trading partner; the
| key difference is that China is not threatening to invade
| and conquer any of the other trading partners. Demanding
| that belligerent countries should not invade their
| neighbors is not a "WW2 power projection strategy", as
| China understood perfectly well when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
| rwarfield wrote:
| I disagree (I don't know what "military power projection
| over China's coastline" even means - do you think the
| U.S. has military bases in Taiwan?), but the point is
| that these issues need to be debated by Americans without
| the other side surreptitiously trying to sway public
| opinion.
| cced wrote:
| > these issues need to be debated by Americans
|
| Yo can we drop the whole "our government executes on the
| will of the people charade". If you think your average
| American has any say in their governments foreign policy
| I have a bridge to sell you.
| pphysch wrote:
| > I don't know what "military power projection over
| China's coastline" even means
|
| That's the problem. There's massive lack of historical
| education on this topic. The Taiwan issue greatly
| predates TSMC.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_chain_strategy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis
| tivert wrote:
| >> Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and
| much of the American economy is at their mercy.
|
| > Much of the American economy is already at China's
| mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on
| from them annually.
|
| Yes, but let's not use that as a justification for
| letting it get _worse_.
|
| > This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative
| is itself pure government propaganda, related to military
| power projection over China's coastline.
|
| The whole f*ing modern economy runs on semiconductors,
| and the most advanced ones are fabbed in Taiwan. You
| might have a point if Intel wasn't falling on its face,
| but it is, so you don't
| pphysch wrote:
| The way we stop making this worse, i.e. reducing our
| trade deficit with China and in general, is by doing
| virtually the opposite of what Washington is currently
| doing.
|
| Rebuild the republic instead of wasting everything on
| hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion.
| tivert wrote:
| > Rebuild the republic instead of wasting everything on
| hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion.
|
| Reducing risk from Chinese influence _is_ "rebuild[ing]
| the republic" and is not " hopeless adventurism and
| imperial expansion."
|
| Also, letting China encroach and control _more_ vital
| supplies is a good way to make "rebuild[ing] the
| republic" _a lot_ harder.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| What? Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton would never have allowed a
| hostile foreign government to own a major communications
| platform.
| eunos wrote:
| Bush and Bill would still laugh about nailing jelly to
| the wall
| tevon wrote:
| We haven't allowed a foreign adversary to own a media
| company since 1934.
|
| This is just updating the standard. TikTok is clearly a
| massive threat, how is that not obvious?
|
| https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-
| poli....
| p_j_w wrote:
| >We haven't allowed a foreign adversary to own a media
| company since 1934.
|
| False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_America
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i absolutely reject this great firewall style of thinking.
| I'm an American, an adult, and I can read and watch whatever
| I want.
| tremon wrote:
| Cherish it while you still can.
| msteffen wrote:
| Not just trade reciprocity, but ideological reciprocity. The
| argument that the US should allow TikTok because "free
| speech"--while China bans American platforms because of
| censorship and also dictates content on TikTok because of
| censorship--seems obviously broken. Seems like the rule
| should at least be something like "Europe is welcome to blast
| propaganda at our teenagers for as long as we get to blast
| propaganda at their teenagers."
| whimsicalism wrote:
| we should probably start banning books from China too, for
| the same reason
| diziet_sma wrote:
| That isn't even a remotely realistic propaganda threat,
| while tick tock arguably is.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Not at all the same thing.
|
| Comparing books to TikTok algo is like comparing rifles
| to ICBMs.
|
| This is what people seem to be ignoring: the algorithms
| are damned near mind reading, and these algos put members
| of society into separate realities. We would be better
| off if they were all banned, but at least it should be
| agreeable that a hostile foreign government should not be
| allowed to deploy this on Americans without oversight.
| sahila wrote:
| > hostile foreign government
|
| I don't take this as a given and I believe the US
| government has caused more harm to its own people than
| China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly
| enforces laws against people, create laws that benefit 1%
| of its citizens to the detriment of the rest, forces its
| people to go wars they doesn't support, create rules that
| target certain genders and races, and so on.
|
| Importantly, the US government is able to enact more harm
| on its citizens than China when it feels like.
| r_klancer wrote:
| > the US government has caused more harm to its own
| people than China has today; US spies on its citizens,
| unfairly enforces laws against people,
|
| Maybe, maybe not. But when the PRC decides the time is
| right to take Taiwan, it will have prepared the ground by
| making sure lots of Americans saw TikToks (made by other
| Americans) saying basically this.
| msteffen wrote:
| I mean, Chinese people _should_ be allowed to post videos
| for Americans, the issue is editorialization.
|
| Like how newspapers and other media can use editorial
| discretion to create the impression that "all reasonable
| people" hold some opinion X by only publishing the voices
| of reasonable people who believe X (manufactured
| consent), social media platforms can do the same thing,
| but x1000 thanks to automation and personalization ("the
| algorithm")
|
| So editorialization, including the algorithmic
| editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of
| speech separate from the speech of the authors on these
| platforms. If the editors are independent, and part of
| the same public discourse as their readers and authors,
| then you wind up with a diverse media ecosystem where the
| liberal machinery of people working out complex issues
| through public discourse can hopefully still more or less
| proceed.
|
| If one part of the ecosystem isn't letting outside voices
| in, the feedback mechanisms are broken and you don't have
| a healthy public discourse anymore. And growing and
| maintaining a diverse media ecosystem in a society that
| does still have a healthy public discourse is slow and
| fragile (as the posts below comparing the risk of books
| to TikTok observe).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > So editorialization, including the algorithmic
| editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of
| speech separate from the speech of the authors on these
| platforms.
|
| I certainly agree that editorial discretion is speech.
| I'm an adult and I think it is my prerogative to
| participate in as many broken ecosystems I want. Nor do I
| trust you or 300 million of my peers to accurately assess
| what is a broken ecosystem.
| whatevaa wrote:
| I just want to remind everyone that China/Russia is doing
| everything you dislike the West doing right now. Please talk
| when China/Russia opens up. Right now they spew propaganda
| into our societies with no way for us to retaliate. I don't
| like censorships but these one-way attacks are a weakness to
| democracies, not strengths.
|
| Open internet only works as long as everyone is friendly. The
| world is increasingly becoming not friendly.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| You know the whole idea of "oh, all of our problems are
| actually because X, Y, Z boogeyman!" thing? Yeah that.
| Watching from outside, it feels like political landscape of
| the US knows that they have lost the global competition and
| scrambling to get back on its feet. Everyone just keeps
| yelling "no, no, don't look what's happening inside,
| because everything is so much worse in other countries,
| they're about to completely fall down! Those europoors with
| no ACs, China is about to collapse for the 50th time in the
| last 10 years, Japan is basically dead etc etc.".
| dns_snek wrote:
| Where's the evidence that TikTok is being used by China to
| spew propaganda?
|
| Conversely there's a mountain of evidence which strongly
| suggests that US officials are going after TikTok
| specifically because they're not in control of the truthful
| narratives that paint the US in a bad light.
|
| > Please talk when China/Russia opens up.
|
| Careful with this sort of rhetoric. China's constitution
| enshrines freedom of speech as a constitutional right, just
| like the US, but they're both taking this freedom away by
| invoking "national security".
|
| Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of
| China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too
| late.
| 0x5f3759df-i wrote:
| TikTok has repeatedly shown to nuke political topics on
| TikTok that China doesn't like.
|
| Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet
| all get black holed by the algorithm.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/reveal
| ed-...
|
| > Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the
| people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to
| be too late.
|
| Why would we wait for TikTok to continue to have greater
| and greater social influence before we cut off their
| propaganda tool? Do we have to wait until Taiwan has been
| leveled by China? And TikTok is being used to push the
| narrative that the US must not come to the aid of a
| peaceful nation being brutally conquered? By then it's
| too late.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet
| all get black holed by the algorithm.
|
| None of those threaten US national security - that's what
| the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake. US
| social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't
| like, that's not news.
|
| How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition of
| the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US citizens
| express those views if every popular non-US owned/aligned
| platform is banned on the grounds of national security?
| 0x5f3759df-i wrote:
| > None of those threaten US national security - that's
| what the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake.
| US social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't
| like, that's not news.
|
| Read the last paragraph of my comment again and you'll
| find your answer.
|
| > How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition
| of the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US
| citizens express those views if every popular non-US
| owned/aligned platform is banned on the grounds of
| national security?
|
| This isn't a reality that exists. Did you spend any time
| at all on Twitter in the last year? You literally could
| not go a day without hearing about it. It was front page
| news on US news sites constantly. Protests against both
| Biden and Harris were constantly in the news and all over
| social media. The student protests were all over the news
| and social media. I don't know what world you're living
| in where you think Americans can't talk about Gaza
| because it's all I've been hearing about for a year. And
| here you are, talking about it on an American social
| media website.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > This isn't a reality that exists.
|
| I'll just go ahead and quote my sources. The suppression
| and narrative shaping are very real, but doesn't mean
| that nobody on the internet has said anything about it.
|
| Isn't this exactly what you're worried about with TikTok
| - that an adversary is going to shape the conversation by
| purposefully biasing the conversation? I'd appreciate it
| if you applied the same standard to both sides.
|
| > Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049
| involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that
| was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one
| case involved removal of content in support of Israel.
| The documented cases include content originating from
| over 60 countries around the world, primarily in English,
| all of peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in
| diverse ways. This distribution of cases does not
| necessarily reflect the overall distribution of
| censorship. Hundreds of people continued to report
| censorship after Human Rights Watch completed its
| analysis for this report, meaning that the total number
| of cases Human Rights Watch received greatly exceeded
| 1,050.
|
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-
| promises/...
|
| > The CNN staff member described how the policy works in
| practice. "'War-crime' and 'genocide' are taboo words,"
| the person said. "Israeli bombings in Gaza will be
| reported as 'blasts' attributed to nobody, until the
| Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny
| responsibility. Quotes and information provided by
| Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved
| quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily
| scrutinized and slowly processed."
|
| https://theintercept.com/2024/01/04/cnn-israel-gaza-idf-
| repo...
| 0x5f3759df-i wrote:
| And where is the United States government directing any
| of this? Nowhere.
|
| Even your own source says
|
| "Despite the censorship documented in this report, Meta
| allows a significant amount of pro-Palestinian expression
| and denunciations of Israeli government policies."
|
| Just because you dislike the way CNN is covering a
| conflict doesn't somehow mean the shadowy US government
| is pulling the strings behind the scenes.
|
| The Intercept is also an American news organization that
| is clearly not being censored on this topic, so I'm not
| sure you're really making your point here.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| Yes, but at least in the USA, I constantly have to hear
| shouting about how "free" everything is whenever I ask for
| sane regulations (guns), or something like universal
| healthcare.
|
| If USA was actually so free, that would at least be
| consistent. But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to
| run around with bullet proof vests? I get all the bad, none
| of the good.
|
| Every voting citizen should remember that this TikTok ban
| was bipartisan. That means they all cared more about this
| than ANY other sensible legislation. Banning child
| marriage? Nah! Protecting the childrens physical bodies in
| school was not as important as a hypothetical "mind attack"
| from TikTok.
|
| They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red kid"
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to run around
| with bullet proof vests?
|
| WTF? In no way do kids have to wear bullet proof vests.
| That is a very odd statement.
|
| > They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red
| kid"
|
| They have not literally said that.
| spencerflem wrote:
| They have passed a law to force every schoolkid to:
|
| (B) understand the dangers of communism and similar
| political ideologies; and
|
| (C) understand that 1,500,000,000 people still suffer
| under communism.
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-
| bill/5349...
|
| And yet nothing is being done for school shootings. Make
| of that what you will
| spencerflem wrote:
| This is real though- the only other bipartisan bill they
| passed was the "Crucial Communism Bill" ie. a mandate to
| teach anticommunist propaganda in schools
| segasaturn wrote:
| > Irrespective of whether the government has control of the
| narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly
| don't)
|
| Posting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook will get your
| account terminated for "supporting terrorism". The pro-
| western censorship regime on FB is extremely strong. US
| lawmakers specifically cited the amount of pro-Palestinian
| content on TikTok as why they were banning the app.
|
| Sources:
|
| https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-
| palest...
|
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-
| promises/...
| wk_end wrote:
| Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me.
| I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and
| Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear
| disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post
| frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.
|
| Attempting to reconcile that with HRW's article: on the one
| hand I think HRW might be unrealistic about what FB should
| be expected to tolerate (for instance, they criticize FB
| for taking down posts praising designated terrorist
| organizations); on the other, Meta's approach to content
| moderation - which combines automated systems with
| overworked and underpaid humans exposed non-stop to awful
| content - is notoriously fickle and subject to abuse
| (including, perhaps, by state actors).
|
| Beyond Israel/Palestine, I regularly encounter content on
| Facebook that the Powers That Be would censor if "the pro-
| Western censorship regime on FB [were] extremely strong". I
| think I subscribe to only one political (left-leaning)
| group (along with a bunch of local and meme pages), but
| nevertheless my feed is full of tankies demanding we bring
| back the guillotine and install full communism.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Speaking anecdotally, this doesn 't really ring true
| for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook
| and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear
| disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post
| frequently in support of Palestine with zero
| repercussions._
|
| Naturally there is no overt censorship on FB/Meta, but in
| the wake of October 7th there was a clear difference in
| what kinds of content was being lifted by the algorithms
| on both platforms. I think, save for Bella Hadid, you
| would rarely see "organic" pro-palestine content with
| millions of views on Instagram, while it was less
| censored on TikTok.
|
| Human Rights Watch even did a study on it:
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-
| promises/...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider
| has to bake American policy position into its algorithm,
| what's going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or
| Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own
| algorithm?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Can nation states ban email or bittorrent? Entities can
| be targeted, protocols less so. Where the algorithm is
| matters.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Nation states definitely can by using port targeting,
| traffic heuristics, and DPI. The US historically has not
| done this but several other states have. Even if
| protocols are preserved, I wouldn't want to be in a
| situation where I have to run a client on my local
| machine that consumes from the protocol. I want to be
| able to use a hosted client.
|
| A user should be able to use another person's hosted
| Mastodon instance or Bluesky AppView/Relay.
| johnisgood wrote:
| obfs4proxy, Shadowsocks, Snowflake, Xray?
| directevolve wrote:
| The HRW report's list of complaints starts with censorship
| of praising Hamas (a designated terrorist org) and "from
| the river to the sea" (a call for the elimination of
| Israel, which lies between the river Jordan and the
| Mediterranean Sea).
| snapcaster wrote:
| Right, what i take issue with is that you hear similarly
| dehumanizing things said about palenstinians on
| mainstream news outlets in the US every single day (my
| friends in group chats share thme). I don't think any
| dehumanizing language like that is a good thing but
| really hard to act like there isn't asymmetric policies
| applied here
| 3vidence wrote:
| Elon Musk seemed to leverage Twitter to try to manipulate the
| US election along with a myriad of other underhanded actions.
|
| Should Twitter be banned as a propaganda / risk to US
| democracy?
| munificent wrote:
| Yes.
| protimewaster wrote:
| But is there actually any evidence that the US's foreign
| adversaries can more effectively deliver propaganda on Tiktok
| compared to other platforms?
|
| I understand the concern over foreign propaganda, but this
| feels like it's not going to remotely impact the ability for
| foreign governments to deliver propaganda to Americans. It's
| perfectly possible to deliver propaganda on US-based social
| networks.
|
| The best outcome of this is just that Americans find the
| other social networks so boring that they spend less time on
| social networks altogether, thus reducing their propaganda
| intake (at least, from social networks).
| leptons wrote:
| >Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television
| network?
|
| Yes, there are millions of US citizens that would rather have
| a Russian TV station in their neighborhood than one run by
| Democrats. I don't understand it, but that seems to be the
| way it's going lately. And considering who's POTUS now, a
| Russia-run TV network in the US isn't that far-fetched. I
| mean, Fox News practically already is.
| ramblenode wrote:
| > there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a
| deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans.
|
| I don't think this is a useful distinction in a world where a
| handful of ultra-billionaires control most of the remaining
| media channels. People like Rupert Murdoch, Musk, and the
| others have very different interests than the average
| American, and at least several of them openly push their own
| (divisive) viewpoints through their media. Why is Rupert
| Murdoch less of an adversary to the average person than the
| CCP?
|
| The Western media are already doing everything that TikTok
| has been accused of being hypothetically able to do: sowing
| social division, brainrot, encouraging lawbreaking,
| undermining confidence in the government, promoting dangerous
| or fake products, etc.
|
| The real difference is that TikTok threatens to boost an
| alternative to the consensus message of the political elite.
| A US with TikTok would see actual pushback against something
| like the early 2000s media shennanigans that got the Iraq War
| and Patriot Act smoothly approved with little public debate.
| That is the real reason Congress banned it and why the
| homegrown brainrot isn't seen as a threat.
| herbst wrote:
| Meanwhile the rest of the modern world is not banning apps
| because of propaganda. China and USA is.
| whalesalad wrote:
| So many people keep missing this. It's not about data
| harvesting. It is about influencing huge portions of the
| population and controlling that narrative. Of course any
| social media app can do this, but ostensibly it is worse
| coming from a foreign adversary who don't play by the same
| rules.
| lolinder wrote:
| 3. The government is concerned that having a company that's
| beholden to a foreign government control the algorithm that
| feeds the rising generation much of their worldview may not be
| a good long term plan.
|
| This has a passing resemblance to (2), but the key difference
| is that the government doesn't believe they have control over
| the narrative on Facebook, they just know that a foreign
| government _doesn 't_. It's strictly better from the
| perspective of the US government to have the rising
| generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism (after all,
| that's how all of the older generations' world views were
| shaped) than to risk the possibility that an adversary is
| tipping the scales.
|
| What I don't understand is why the politicians insist on
| talking about spying as the concern. The people who are pro-
| TikTok are pretty clearly skeptical either way, and "think of
| the children" is usually the most effective political tool they
| have.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Funny you mention Raw Capitalism:
|
| It shows a point I like to bring up often that Capitalism and
| The Free Market are directly opposed. What capital (a fancy
| word for shareholders) want is an infinite money machine and
| that is easiest with a monopoly. Hence, banning a competitor
| that's doing too well in the free market.
|
| To the other part, I consider your 3 and my 2 the same, the
| US doesn't want us getting Chinese info and has their own
| perfered sources instead.
| lolinder wrote:
| They're strictly not equivalent--yours believes the US has
| a substantial amount of control over Facebook, mine does
| not. I can't change your belief, but I can draw a
| distinction between our beliefs.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I think it's better to say it the other way round:
| Facebook and to a much greater extent X has a substantial
| amount of influence over the US government.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| In the free market the monopoly buys out the competitors.
| No need for banning. Shareholders, the embodiment of greed,
| will just follow the money.
| spencerflem wrote:
| In a free market, there are monopolies, by definition.
|
| If you're saying that capitalists will inevitably contort
| a free market to an unfree one, via whatever means (often
| mergers) then we agree.
|
| IMO. a common misconception is that allowing all mergers
| is a "free market" policy when it is not
| spencerflem wrote:
| are no monopolies*
| pjc50 wrote:
| > to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw
| capitalism
|
| .. by the guy sitting next to the President? It's not yet
| clear what this "DOGE" thing that Musk has been given by
| Trump actually is, but it sounds like part of the government
| to me and has "government" in the name?
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| it's not the same data or data quality. the concern isn't just
| data collection but manipulation of the american public
| (psyops). What russia is doing through their trollfarms, china
| is doing through tiktok.
| coldpie wrote:
| > the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of
| the american public (psyops).
|
| I don't buy it. If that were actually the concern, we would
| be talking about banning Facebook and X for manipulating
| Americans to vote against their own interests and hand over
| more power & money to the platforms' owners. Facebook has
| done way, way, way, way more harm to America and Americans
| than Tiktok ever did. The Tiktok ban is an illegitimate
| handout to America's oligarchs to protect them from having to
| compete. It's nothing to do with protecting Americans from
| manipulation.
| rsanek wrote:
| > we would be talking about banning Facebook and X for
| manipulating Americans vote
|
| in fact, there is alot of talk about this. wasn't that the
| main reason Musk bought Twitter?
| coldpie wrote:
| > wasn't that the main reason Musk bought Twitter?
|
| Yes.
|
| > there is alot of talk about this
|
| There's a lot of talk by politicians about banning
| Facebook & X in the US? Really?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| American corporations have free speech rights. Chinese
| corporations do not.
| coldpie wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true, and even if it was, the law as
| passed requires American companies to not serve the app
| from their app stores, which is a restriction of American
| company speech.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| American corporations have free _propaganda_ rights.
| Chinese corporations _shall_ not.
|
| You have essentially repeated the argument you are
| replying to while removing the very substance of that
| argument.
| mint2 wrote:
| Well FB is American. Even though I and many people agree FB
| is also a problem, I think it's pretty clear why those in
| Washington are more okay with an American company that they
| have some power over and also should ostensibly care for
| America versus a company that is ostensibly beholden to an
| adversary. (To be clear, I don't think FB cares about
| America.)
|
| I don't really see why it's hard to see the reasoning
| behind the ban even if one disagrees with it.
|
| Take it to an extreme, imagine there were zero American
| social media companies in our modern world where most
| people get there news from social media. That obviously
| would be a huge security risk, having one's population's
| news being controlled exclusively by foreign states.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| American social media is banned in China and if used
| against americans by its leadership, it would be a domestic
| threat not a foreign threat. Twitter was bought by Elon and
| used to influence an election successfully. if we're honest
| in this discussion, we shouldn't pretend the threat isn't
| real. Foreign companies get banned from owning american
| companies all the time. Biden just banned US steel's
| takeover by a japanese company.
|
| You know what scares me? how the actual majority on HN is
| critical of the tiktok ban despite all what I have just
| said being obvious things a critical thinker can deduce.
| I'm concerned the influence of tiktok (foreign actors) is
| already too pervasive and damaging. You all should know the
| US by any historical metrics is at the precipice of a civil
| war as it is.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative
| on Facebook but do not on TikTok
|
| This was the case for the first attempt, but then TikTok gave
| the US government access to everything. So the effort
| completely stalled, and the only people still banging the drum
| about it were R's who had run on anti-China rhetoric.
|
| Then Oct. 7th happened, and the followup genocide that the US
| decided to go out of its way to participate in. The most, and
| most influential, anti-genocide activity was on TikTok, simply
| because TikTok has a hold on the young audience and young
| content producers, and being young they aren't cynical and
| hollowed out inside, and can't justify being silent in order to
| protect their own incomes and families (which they don't have
| yet.) The Lobby quickly picked up the dropped ball and carried
| it over the line, and Biden continued his unbroken record of
| being completely humiliated by Bibi, a regular criminal before
| he was a war criminal.
|
| Now the ban is a zombie, because opposition to (and support
| for) the genocide is now set in stone, and it already looks
| like Trump has ended it even though he isn't in office yet
| through the technique of _placing the slightest amount of
| pressure on Bibi._
|
| All we'll have left is a horrible soon-to-come Supreme Court
| decision that enshrines the idea that bills of attainder
| explicitly intended to limit free speech are ok now _because
| China._ Which is also _because Russia_ and also _because Hamas_
| , and _because Maduro_ , and _because hate_ , and _because
| sowing discord_ , and _because, because, because..._
|
| -----
|
| edit: and if the Trump peace fails, and all the kids migrate to
| some other platform, _that platform will be attacked._ They
| lucked out that TikTok was owned by China, and Americans are
| such racists that they could use that racism to get them to
| agree to silence Americans speaking to Americans. But before,
| they were attacking every social network for allowing speech
| from Trump supporters, people criticizing covid policy, _always
| Palestinians_ , women who don't accept transwomen (to get the
| libs onboard), etc...
| spencerflem wrote:
| Absolutely
| Cyph0n wrote:
| In support of (2): https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-
| city/2024/05/06/senato...
|
| I personally see this as the beginning of a slippery slope - a
| move that follows in the footsteps of China.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Wrong - it's practically impossible to buy _video_ and _audio_
| data at the PII level like Tiktok is getting.
| xnx wrote:
| The video and audio data that users publicly post?
| voxic11 wrote:
| > how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data
| brokers
|
| A law passed at the same time as the tiktok ban attempts to
| address this:
|
| > a) Prohibition It shall be unlawful for a data broker to
| sell, license, rent, trade, transfer, release, disclose,
| provide access to, or otherwise make available personally
| identifiable sensitive data of a United States individual to--
| (1) any foreign adversary country; or (2) any entity that is
| controlled by a foreign adversary.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/9901
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Mitt Romney basically came out and admitted that the reason for
| the TikTok ban was that young people were getting unfiltered
| access to information about the genocide in Gaza.
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
| Aunche wrote:
| > The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a
| domestic one
|
| China certainly engages in security theater for their own
| economic advantage as well. It's no coincidence that any
| American internet company that tries to operate in China gets
| throttled or "accidentally" blocked by the great Chinese
| firewall. And no, economic retaliation against China isn't
| "stooping down" to censorship of China. That would be like
| framing the EU's retaliatory tariffs against Trump as a
| punishment to European bourbon lovers.
|
| > The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on
| Facebook but do not on TikTok
|
| Yes, but people do not appreciate what that really means.
| Countries need to eat the consequences of influencing domestic
| media, so you at least need to maintain a weak form of checks
| and balances. For example, anti-lockdown censorship during
| Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against
| the CCP.
|
| On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election
| interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win
| Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help
| Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and
| hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from
| posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain
| from a more fractured America. We only found out about this
| because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find
| this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same
| cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At
| worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise
| this propaganda as genuine content.
|
| [1]
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...
| jmyeet wrote:
| In the words of Noam Chomsky [1]:
|
| > [Manufacturing Consent] argues that the mass communication
| media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological
| institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda
| function, by reliance on market forces, internalized
| assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion",
| by means of the propaganda model of communication.
|
| The problem with Tiktok, as far as the government is concerned,
| is the lack of control on narrative when Meta, Twitter and
| Google are an extension of the US State Department (eg [2]).
|
| The Tiktok ban came together in a matter of days as a
| bipartisan effort weeks after the ADL said (in leaked audio)
| that they have a "TikTok problem" [3].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
|
| [2]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-
| promises/...
|
| [3]: https://x.com/TaylorNoakes/status/1766612105426596297
| cg5280 wrote:
| To echo what other comments have said about it being propaganda
| related, we can already see this occurring today:
|
| https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/A-Tik-Tok-ing-...
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Only legit reason would've been trade. China won't "import" our
| products, so we do the same. But that seems like not the
| reason.
| mint2 wrote:
| but your 2. implies China has control rather than the US.
|
| Isn't that what the government has been saying?
| penjelly wrote:
| it's been said many times, it's a national security risk, and
| it is very obviously one. Tiktok has already gone against the
| wishes of the US, there's evidence Chinese engineers accessed
| Tiktok data hosted in the US (related: project Texas). It's so
| easy to sway public opinion when you own the largest megaphone
| to the people... That's literally what's happening right now on
| tiktok.
| madhacker wrote:
| "Chinese leaders simply think that TikTok, unlike other apps, is
| so important that they would rather destroy it than see it escape
| their control." -Noah Smith
| palata wrote:
| Maybe the Chinese people will be able to teach the US people how
| to side-load APKs (on Android) and use a VPN.
|
| That would be ironic.
| gretch wrote:
| No it wouldn't be ironic because all of that is allowed.
|
| In fact, existing tiktok users are welcome to keep the existing
| app on their phone.
|
| What's being banned is the commerce.
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| Side-loading APKs are still needed for new Android users, not
| too much difference right? Exactly like the workarounds you
| need to find when you want to install "Risky applications" on
| a Chinese Xiaomi phone.
|
| As a Chinese hated CCP for the internet censorship and
| decided to be an expat, what's going on these days is
| changing my world view.
| palata wrote:
| > No it wouldn't be ironic because all of that is allowed.
|
| The irony is that China is usually the one considered "less
| free" by the US, and in this case Chinese citizen could help
| US citizen "regain their freedom".
|
| > In fact, existing tiktok users are welcome to keep the
| existing app on their phone.
|
| My understanding from the article is that ByteDance will
| redirect US users to a website and prevent them from using
| the app.
| gschizas wrote:
| In the article it's stated that TikTok will display a message
| to US users and the app will not work:
|
| > Under TikTok's plan, people attempting to open the app will
| see a pop-up message directing them to a website with
| information about the ban
| infecto wrote:
| The only real irony is your continued use the word.
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| This is about censorship
| morkalork wrote:
| Which makes all the positive comments about rednote hilarious.
| It's like two proles in 1984 talking one another about how
| they're gonna defect from Oceania to Eastasia because citizens
| are treated just so much better there!
| pkkkzip wrote:
| Again I note the distinctive lack of self-awareness from the
| demographic that is moving away from TikTok to a communist
| country value harboring app like RedNote
|
| The Rednote or "Xiaohongshu" in Chinese is literally
| referring to the Mao Zedong's propaganda book the modern
| counterpart being "Xi's Book of Thoughts"
|
| It's frightening how much young Americans hate their own
| country and the values that have allowed them this much
| freedom.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| "communist country"
|
| I didn't realize China had eliminated class and that
| companies were worker owned.
| hxegon wrote:
| Do you think mayyybeeee this hate stems from how young
| americans are treated and a complete lack of
| representation? Red note censors stuff about Chinese
| politics, they are surprisingly accepting of LGBTQ etc, and
| it's nice to talk with people from other countries you
| don't normally have interactions with. It's really not that
| hard to understand.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| There are only two gender options when you create an
| account on RedNotes: male or female
| ashimim wrote:
| Well yeah, that's because there are only two sexes.
| jdlyga wrote:
| "I would literally write my social security number on a sticky
| note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead than go back to using
| Instagram Reels"
|
| I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling
| right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
| and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads
| and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and
| telling everyone to go to LinkedIn.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Funnily enough, the lawyer who quit Meta has resorted to
| doomposting on .. Linkedin. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-
| law/meta-lawyer-lemley-quit...
| cvoss wrote:
| The US gov's intention was not at all to shut down TikTok. It
| was to force ByteDance to sell it.
|
| The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a
| huge PR stunt, and their unwillingness to sell under the
| circumstances kinda proves their whole First Amendment claims
| are made in bad faith. Something deeper is going on, and it's
| not about your social security number.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i think there are obvious reasons why bytedance would not
| want to spawn a US-based competitor and why a US only social
| media network would be ineffective.
|
| this is exactly the same as what China does with their gfw,
| they allow american apps to divest and be owned by a chinese
| company.
| suraci wrote:
| Wrong
|
| 1. China asked American SNS companys to 'obey Chinese
| laws', which mostly refer to content control and data
| ownership, these companys refused, China didn'tforced them
| to sell 2. Are you sure to play the 'same as what China
| does'? hey, we are a totalitarian, authoritarian,
| dictatorial regime, are we same? think twice
| whimsicalism wrote:
| 1. Yes, China forced the sale of Uber China to Didi -
| this is well documented.
|
| 2. Did I say that? No. I am opposed to the tiktok ban
| suraci wrote:
| China forced the sale of Uber China to Didi - this is
| well documented
|
| really? > https://www.bbc.com/news/36938812 >
| https://www.heritage.org/international-
| economies/commentary/...
|
| Let me tell you a cruel fact - Uber is completely unable
| to compete with Didi. You have no idea how fierce the
| competition in this industry in China is.
|
| Uber died before it grew up in China
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Uber got 33%+ market share.
|
| From your article:
|
| > If Uber had become a commercial success in China,
| Chinese authorities ultimately would have clamped down to
| protect their domestic competitors.
|
| > firms that do occasionally find success often face
| headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access
| to the domestic market.
|
| > Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a
| significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-
| wealth fund.
|
| > "Uber China" sought local investors. The hope was that,
| with local investors, the Chinese operation would be
| spared some of the hamstringing restrictions typically
| imposed on foreign businesses.
|
| China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism.
| Not sure where the profit is in denying that, given your
| own sources seem to clearly state it and even name a
| number of channels through which the state puts their
| thumb on the scale, not just regulatory but also through
| financing.
| suraci wrote:
| You can ignore my following comments if this will make
| you feel better...
|
| > *If* Uber had become a commercial success in China,
| Chinese authorities ultimately *would* have clamped down
| to protect their domestic competitors.
|
| classic demonizing and loser's execuse
|
| > firms that do occasionally find success often face
| headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access
| to the domestic market.
|
| every other demestic companys face headwinds from Chinese
| regulators, just like I mentioned above, and Apple,
| Tesla, Google, Microsoft, they all in same situation,
| some of them couldn't handle this so they leaved, some
| stays
|
| Also, DiDi once were banned more than 2 years by
| authorities, it survived
|
| > Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a
| significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-
| wealth fund
|
| The 'STATE-BACKED' is a typical word used by certain
| people, it's just some kind of gov investment funds,
| there're dozens and invested thousands private companys,
| it's a Socialism country, it's called socialism, what do
| you expect? Didi is not even a state-owned enterprise.
| And is this equals to "force to sell"?
|
| > some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed
| on foreign businesses.
|
| Bruh
|
| > China is well-known to have intense domestic
| favoritism.
|
| That's true, and? many Chinese people also have intense
| domestic favoritism
|
| BTW, Apple is losing market share in China. However, take
| it easy, I don't think Apple will be sold to Huawei.
| Moreover, Apple is produced by Chinese and Indian, why
| bothered?
| kube-system wrote:
| Heck, China forced Apple to divest iCloud to the
| government of Guizhou.
| suraci wrote:
| it's about data ownership, part of data compliance,
| citizen data can not be pass to abroad, of course, it's
| also about content censorship
|
| Microsoft and Tesla accepted the same rule
|
| You can understand it as the US gov requiring TikTok's
| data must be hosted by Microsoft in the US
| lenerdenator wrote:
| If we played the same as China does, we'd be hacking
| Baidu through a vulnerability in a Microsoft web browser
| until they withdrew completely from the American market.
| amrocha wrote:
| Have you heard of the NSA
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I'm not saying we don't hack them.
|
| I'm saying we don't hack them with the goal of driving
| them out of the American market, which is what happened
| to Google's PRC operations.
| protimewaster wrote:
| We hacked Huawei and drove them out, but those were
| separate incidents. I'm not convinced it puts the US in a
| morally superior position, though.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > If we played the same as China does, we'd be hacking
| Baidu through a vulnerability in a Microsoft web browser
|
| We don't?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| With the goal of driving them out of the US?
|
| I just typed https://www.baidu.com into my browser bar,
| hit enter, and their page loaded.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Why throw out something hackable? Apparently they
| couldn't hack TikTok so they thrown them out.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| They probably could, but it's become such a pain in the
| ass, it's no longer worth it.
|
| You can still go to the mobile web version; but that
| doesn't give the same level of access to devices and data
| that an app does.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| 2. The game can be slightly different. "hey, we are open
| by default. but if an authoritarian regimes wants to
| exploit our openness by marketing their apps while at the
| same time banning our apps from their market, then we
| will strike back".
|
| paradox of intolerance and all that..
| lelandfe wrote:
| If you feel that the national security angle is a farce, do
| you similarly feel that the DoD banning TikTok on government
| systems was just for show?
| https://defensescoop.com/2023/06/02/pentagon-proposes-
| rule-t...
| kome wrote:
| well, probably yes
| mmmpetrichor wrote:
| The DoD banning an app on their network is a lot different
| than banning it competely in the US. I would think DoD
| should ban most apps connecting to their networks that
| aren't work related. I feel this whole effort is either in
| bad faith or isn't being transparently communicated to the
| public.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| They famously failed to ban strava and some military
| assets were unintentionally disclosed on the strava
| heatmap by soldiers logging their cardio jogs through
| facility hallways.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Except there was never a discussion of banning TikTok the
| app. Which is why a sale of the app was always an option.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| NatSec should not even be needed. A simpler reason could be
| that China bans foreign social media apps from operating in
| China, so Chinese apps should be treated as such.
| bb123 wrote:
| Reciprocity is not a good idea. Why would we want to copy
| every bad foreign law?
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > Reciprocity is not a good idea.
|
| Sometimes it is. Especially, if an adversary is bad to
| you, you should not be good to him. You should be equally
| bad, or sometimes worse.
|
| That's how wars are won. Those who are nice to enemies
| because of "values" get crushed by the ruthless
| opponents.
| hxegon wrote:
| That's not how you win wars, that's how you start them.
| Diplomacy is a thing.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It only works when one party isn't interested in starting
| a war in the first place.
| hxegon wrote:
| and why on earth would China want to start a war with us?
| We are a huge trading partner and yes there's a lot of
| posturing and conflicting geo-political interests,
| cultural views etc but that doesn't mean that war is
| their goal.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| Diplomacy only works when both sides are playing fair. If
| China is going to ban US apps unilaterally, US should
| reciprocate in kind.
| lkois wrote:
| But China banning foreign apps also plays into their
| stranglehold on their domestic media and economy, so it's
| not a purely adversarial move against the US.
|
| Or to put it another way, should the US also ban/censor
| Chinese art and cinema within it's borders?
| RestlessMind wrote:
| If it's going to help US in any way, why not? TikTok is
| eating the lunch of US social media apps so fair to play
| the protectionism game.
| nucleardog wrote:
| > Sometimes it is. Especially, if an adversary is bad to
| you, you should not be good to him. You should be equally
| bad, or sometimes worse.
|
| Every little thing the West does is already played up in
| China and spun as an intentional attack aimed directly at
| China because the West wants to destroy China. Usually
| this is conveyed in news broadcasts set to a backdrop of
| video of various US military exercises.
|
| A lot of the support the Chinese government enjoys comes
| from people in China generally seeing the country as much
| better off than it was a few decades ago, and a sense of
| nationalism and conflating the government, country, and
| people as one. An attack on China is an attack on all of
| us is an attack on me.
|
| Whatever you do in retaliation is just building the
| public and political will, or even public demand, within
| China for them to take harsher measures or escalate
| things further.
|
| Despite the government's efforts, the populace is not
| exactly entirely isolated from the outside world. There
| are many people who, while maybe not fully distrusting of
| the government, definitely smell something fishy. They're
| curious, and they want to and are able to learn more.
|
| Heading into the 2030s, China itself is already
| forecasting China's going to enter a period of negative
| population growth. Combined with a variety of cultural
| forces, this could be even more impactful than in some
| other countries. And it will only get worse with time.
| "Better off than we were a few decades ago" may soon
| become clearly untrue to a lot of people. The government
| knows this is coming and is trying to prepare by
| strengthening their grip.
|
| I think a smarter long term move here would be to just...
| not. Let them yell at the clouds. Make whatever
| information we can freely available to the curious in any
| way we can. Welcome those that want to embrace Western
| values with open arms. Model the world that we think is
| best.
|
| Rather than giving China the government the tools and
| ammunition needed to unify the people and rally them
| behind China the government... let's just wait. When the
| people feel the government is failing them, instead of
| leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable... let them
| see they have somewhere else to turn.
|
| Or, y'know, escalate this towards an economically and
| politically unstable nation of 1.5 billion people who
| think the West is the cause of all of their woes and see
| how it all shakes out. That'd definitely show everyone we
| have the biggest dick.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Reciprocity is a great idea. It takes the emotion out of
| the decision: we don't allow X from Y because Y doesn't
| allow X from us. It makes sense for trade at least.
|
| Then there is no need to find another excuse that might
| be offensive.
| protimewaster wrote:
| It also lets somebody else make your decision for you,
| though, which is probably not a good strategy.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| If you can't make a decision always, it works out.
| Besides, this is a simple reciprocal trade sanction,
| which are rarely so straightforward. No one in China is
| seriously going to admonish the USA for banning TikTok
| when even China blocks it (since it allows content banned
| in China), while most Americans who would care probably
| don't vote.
| protimewaster wrote:
| It seems like an approach that begs to be gamed, though.
| Country A bans something, Country B reciprocally bans the
| something. Years later, Country B realizes it's at a
| severe disadvantage because County A has hoarded all the
| something and now there's a something shortage in Country
| B that was planned and executed by a Country A.
|
| Obviously not probably an issue with social networks, but
| mindlessly banning something just because somebody else
| banned something seems like a recipe to be tricked.
| lmm wrote:
| If you made a literal mindless robot to reciprocally ban
| anything another country banned, yes, that would probably
| be exploitable. Normalising reciprocal bans and applying
| even a little bit of human oversight seems fine though.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It took us 5 years to go from "let's ban TikTok" to
| actually banning TikTok. I don't think it's going to be
| very exploitable, and it's not like China where Facebook
| works one day and then just doesn't (China doesn't
| publicize what it bans and for what reasons, even a list
| of banned sites is orobably considered a state secret).
| LinXitoW wrote:
| The difference is, of course, that only one of those
| countries CONSTANTLY bangs on about being the "free"
| world, about "free" markets, about how not saying the
| n-word is censorship etc.
|
| In short, it's only hypocritical for one of those
| countries.
|
| In both cases though, for normal citizens your own
| country and it's companies are far more dangerous than
| some random country halfway across the globe.
| lupire wrote:
| China is a foreign sovereign country.
|
| "USA is a free country" does not refer to China. "The
| free world" does not refer to China.
| nashashmi wrote:
| It was not for show. It acknowledged its success and was to
| limit its success. Then limit it as a "potential" vector
| for intrusion. Kaspersky was removed from the US on the
| same basis.
| xnx wrote:
| Don't mobile apps have severely limited permissions
| compared to Kaspersky?
| nashashmi wrote:
| Tiktok has access to photos and videos on the device, and
| user data on interactions. This was seen as a vector for
| compromising the individual's integrity via embarrassment
| and blackmail.
| wfh wrote:
| I just installed tiktok for the first time on my Android
| device and it asked for no permissions and even let me
| use it without creating an account. How is it getting
| photos and videos on my device?
| cwillu wrote:
| Normal practice is a prompt-on-first-attempt: when you
| click on various things, it'll ask; I've never given it
| access to anything, and so I get a prompt asking for
| permission to see my contacts about once a week.
| culi wrote:
| most bases still block twitter, facebook, flickr, etc too
|
| https://www.wired.com/2009/06/despite-army-order-some-
| bases-...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Social media is the front line of an ongoing cyber war. It is
| a matter of propaganda and social engineering.
|
| Imagine if Japan owned all the newspapers in the run-up to
| WWII.
|
| That's not to say China is the only one with propaganda.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| It's unfortunate that this comment is buried so deep and
| that generally this topic is under discussed.
|
| Media has always been a force for controlling popular
| opinion, but in the age of social media it's going to new
| extremes. There are forces that try to control how you see
| the world on all social media platforms and do so to
| attempt to shape your opinions of the world and modify your
| actions.
|
| You can visibly see Reddit has been completely taken over
| by bot, shills, and other controlled accounts. There is no
| sincere, real human opinion posted on the front page.
|
| Even HN is not immune. "Bad news" has long been forbidden
| here, and there is a range of topics that, even when
| heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within
| minutes.
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| > there is a range of topics that, even when heavily
| upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within
| minutes.
|
| Such as? Disappear as in getting flagged?
| whycome wrote:
| Luigi
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Massively controversial on HN, leading to lots of flagged
| posts (due to a mix of legitimate flame bait and
| emotional kneejerk).
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| Large portions of the things posted to the Oakland
| subreddit get flagged and removed. Almost anything
| mentioning the city in a negative light gets flagged.
| Crime reports / trends, anything.
|
| Sarcastically chuckling about the state of the city as a
| long time resident gets the ban hammer.
|
| It is really quite something.
| realitycheckzz2 wrote:
| Everyone knows HN is censored. Let's test your theory
| though. Here is a litmus test:
|
| Is it true that women unknowingly engage in Eugenics when
| choosing to procreate only with tall men in large
| numbers?
|
| Or another test:
|
| What happened to Epstein's video tapes stored in his NY
| mansion and why were the people in them not prosecuted?
|
| Think about it...
| whycome wrote:
| The US owned all the newspapers in the run-up to Iraq war
| II...
| ramblenode wrote:
| "Imagine if a handful of ultra-billionaires controlled
| almost all social media in the US." doesn't feel less
| threatening. The fact that Congress doesn't consider this a
| problem feels like the bigger problem.
| mike50 wrote:
| Imagine if one company owned all the local news papers and
| replaced all the content with wire stories and the lowest
| quality local content or a fox news like company bough
| local news to run a propaganda operation. Oh wait that's
| real.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gannett
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
| crimsoneer wrote:
| I mean, the Chinese government was never going to let the US
| just take their company at bargain basement prices.
| redactd wrote:
| Do you think that ByteDance is primarily concerned with the
| economic considerations for TikTok, or do you think that it
| is something else?
|
| Do you think that there is a price at which they would be
| willing to sell it?
| cg5280 wrote:
| Didn't something similar happen with Grindr? It was Chinese
| owned and sold without nearly as much excitement. Given the
| inevitable bidding war from multiple interested parties I
| would be surprised if they couldn't get a fair price for
| TikTok
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| China didn't need to fight to keep Grindr because all the
| value from the acquisition was realized as soon as they
| ran a database query to compile a list of closeted
| Republican senators. No need to hold on once you got the
| spy treasure.
| lupire wrote:
| What about future senators?
| patmcc wrote:
| Senators have to be at minimum 30, more commonly 50+.
|
| Anyone that's going to be a senator in the next 12 years
| (at minimum) is already on Grindr if they were ever going
| to be.
| moduspol wrote:
| It wouldn't have been at a bargain basement price if they
| started trying to sell it when the law passed. It could
| have been the highest market price they could get from the
| US's largest buyers.
|
| Obviously they don't have the same leverage when they're
| otherwise going to be shut off in a few days.
| wyldberry wrote:
| This isn't rocket science. What's going on is having the keys
| to the kingdom with regards to serving videos to influence
| the mind of a user with extremely precise targeting.
|
| China doesn't want USA doing that, and banned their social
| media. USA doesn't want China doing it because they've been
| doing it all over the world to everybody since Radio Free
| Europe, and likely before.
|
| https://www.britannica.com/topic/Radio-Free-Europe
| drawkward wrote:
| ...except that the "extremely precise targeting" is a new
| thing.
| kranke155 wrote:
| microtargeting specific to individual psychological
| metrics is indeed a new thing.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Lots of countries have made it illegal to listen things
| like Radio Free Europe. I'm guessing you can't in North
| Korea. On the other hand, a US citizen that wants to get
| the Chinese perspective on anything has lots of ways to
| legally find that and repeat it. I am not saying a lot of
| people in the US are interested in a foreign point of view,
| or that the US doesn't have tons of propaganda. But I don't
| think you can convince anyone that the two countries treat
| speech the same way.
| motorest wrote:
| > On the other hand, a US citizen that wants to get the
| Chinese perspective on anything has lots of ways to
| legally find that and repeat it.
|
| What do you mean by "Chinese perspective"? Do you mean
| people's genuine opinion or the official government
| talking points?
| tremon wrote:
| Is that distinction material to the point the GP is
| making?
| op00to wrote:
| Radio Free Europe is nothing like TikTok. Not only is
| broadcast media not able to be pinpoint targeted in real
| time to individuals, but the connection of who was behind
| RFE and other similar propaganda is pretty obvious, unlike
| tiktok.
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| Feels a little bit like the Chinpokomon episode of South
| Park - innocent kids being brainwashed and whatnot. (I know
| the target in that ep is Japan, but still)
| narrator wrote:
| I think that China is working to control left-wing activism
| in the U.S and TikTok is the perfect trojan horse to split
| the Democratic party and elevate their bribed proxies. I'd
| rather not go into how they're doing it, but certainly
| massive focus on the Gaza war in TikTok did do a number on
| the unity of the Democratic party.
|
| Speaking of China influence I keep getting these stories on
| my social media feeds: Isn't this overpass, road, or this
| building, or this city in with lots of LED lights in China
| just great? China is the future, and so on!
| seventhtiger wrote:
| The timing of this with the Israeli crimes in Gaza is
| clear.
|
| https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-
| mike-g...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok
| -...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/tikto
| k...
|
| https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-
| palest...
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-
| post/2024/3/...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/business/tiktok-israel-
| ha...
| CommanderData wrote:
| Israel's practices are historically so insidious. The
| more I learn about that state the more disturbing it is.
|
| People have said it before but the clear internet is
| increasingly under Israel's influence. X's have silenced
| so many Palestinian accounts.
|
| Western social media have platforms that allow states to
| censor content, and they have to comply. Under the guise
| of misinformation ofcourse.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I don't see how people don't see what is their most likely
| rationale - the ban will be temporary. Trump's already come
| out against it and is going to work to reverse it once in
| office. If it can't be done directly, it'll be done like
| usual - as an addon to some must-pass bill.
|
| I think they would _probably_ refuse to sell in a situation
| where they had reason to expect the ban to persist (for
| different reasons), but in this case they probably didn 't
| even consider selling when there's a high probability they'll
| be back legally operating in the US within a year.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| Acts of congress can only be blocked by the supreme court's
| power of judicial review. The supreme court held a 2.5 hour
| hearing this past week and the only two justices who voiced
| skepticism of the law were Gorsuch and Thomas.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Or another act of Congress! But given that the Supreme
| Court is waiting to the last second to issue their
| ruling, I don't think it's all quite as clear behind
| doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them. The
| nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not
| apply to a company legally operating within the country,
| because of its nationality, has _extremely_ broad
| implications as a precedent - well beyond corporations
| alone, even for a judge who might be more than okay with
| the ban in and of itself.
|
| Beyond this, there's the matter of enforcement and
| implementation. The former is discretionary and the
| latter is not specified by the bill. An effective ban
| would effectively require the creation of a Great
| Firewall of China type mechanism to effectively implement
| (which is what I thought this law was always a sort of
| 'trojan horse' for). Otherwise the "ban" will be
| trivially sidestepped by using a web app, downloading an
| APK from their site/mirrors instead of the marketplace,
| etc. Let alone things like VPNs! As Chinese companies are
| increasingly banned from the US, we're likely to see more
| adversarial setups where these companies will make no
| effort to prevent US customers no matter how much the US
| government madly gesticulates, though again with the
| current administration said gesticulation will not even
| happen in the first place.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| >The nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not
| apply to a company legally operating within the country,
| because of its nationality, has extremely broad
| implications as a precedent
|
| The law (PAFACA) doesn't directly apply to TikTok, but
| only to TikTok's ownership by ByteDance, due to ByteDance
| being a corporation located in a foreign adversary
| nation. Foreign corporations are not protected by the
| first amendment as domestic corporations are. Case law
| clarifying separate first amendment protections for
| domestic vs foreign entities such as Citizens United v
| FEC (2010) and Bluman v FEC (2011), already established
| the precedent for this.
|
| >I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as
| you seem to believe it was in front of them
|
| Did you watch the hearing or read the transcript? The
| opinions of the majority of the justices on both sides,
| including the chief justice, were not ambiguous. As
| referenced in the hearing by the justices, the first
| amendment only applies to communication on the platform,
| not the ownership of the platform. Given that TikTok's
| parent company is ByteDance, and as the first amendment
| does not apply to foreign corporations as it does to
| domestic corporations, which multiple justices pointed
| out, the law is not in conflict with the first amendment.
| The law is referred to as the "TikTok ban law", but it
| doesn't ban the platform explicitly, it only bans its
| ownership by a foreign adversary located corporation,
| which are not protected by the first amendment, which is
| how the law avoids a conflict with the first amendment
| while potentially still effectively banning the platform.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| What, they should just shut up and sell? They're getting
| extorted.
| hbosch wrote:
| >The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is
| a huge PR stunt
|
| Um, what? There is zero chance that ByteDance could get a
| fair price for TikTok. VC calculations can be disregarded,
| TikTok as a platform is more valuable than Facebook. How much
| money would it take for Zuckerberg to sell FB to a Chinese
| company?
| patmcc wrote:
| I think this is untrue. The government wanted to shut down
| TikTok, but it can't just outright ban it because that's a
| clear violation of the first amendment, so it came up with a
| way to ban it indirectly. That was their intention all along.
| esafak wrote:
| It reminds me of Google's decision to pull out of China
| instead of censor their results.
| barfingclouds wrote:
| Yeah it's about that algorithms could radicalize the
| population or turn them against each other
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and
| Instagram is so phony and overly perfect
|
| I feel like this is what so many people (including myself) are
| missing about TikTok.I'll be honest I saw TikTok largely as an
| "extension" of Reels and vice-versa where folks with a
| following on one will post to the other because they are so
| similar and that would increase their reach.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| The comment and quote is telling of the zeitgeist. I would be
| more aghast by it, but then I remember that my SSN has been a
| subject to multiple data breach notices in past year.. so..
| what is one more bad actor at this point?
| hxegon wrote:
| Exactly. They keep fear mongering about China stealing our
| data but when these companies leak every single piece of
| sensitive data about hundreds of millions of americans they
| get a slap on the wrist. Tells you exactly where their
| priorities are.
| mns wrote:
| What I don't understand is what's with all the China
| apologists around here, it's absolutely insane to me to see
| how even here, but also on reddit, for example, there is
| this wave of praising everything that a dictatorship does,
| do people really believe that what China does is ok and
| something to follow, or is it just propaganda? And no, I'm
| not ignoring all the bad stuff in the west, but I'm a bit
| afraid of the Chinese model appreciation.
| hxegon wrote:
| Honestly I don't see a lot of people praising China who
| are against the tiktok ban. It's not just that our
| opinion of China is high, it's that our opinion of the US
| government is very low and they are _our_ government, so
| why be worried about a foreign power when you feel like
| your own government is actively setting you up to fail,
| lying to your face and doing horrible shit.
|
| I'll definitely admit that China is doing some horrible
| shit. I'm not the most educated on all of their issues
| but from what I've seen it's not great. But I'm also not
| convinced that TikTok is as much of a critical
| intelligence/espionage tool as much as the government
| claims it is, and I've seen a very real positive
| influence on people's connection with each other, and a
| frankly insane amount of mutual aid content on tiktok.
|
| I am seeing a lot of people talking about how they have
| discovered that Chinese _people_ are very welcoming and
| polite when you talk to them online. IDK, maybe I 'm just
| missing the pro-chinese government stuff you are.
| jjulius wrote:
| >TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness...
|
| LMAO
| xxr wrote:
| "At this point, we have to accept that younger generations--
| precisely the people who have been raised on quantified
| audience feedback for their every creative gesture--have an
| unrecognizable conception of authenticity."[0]
|
| [0]https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-
| mrbea...
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Thanks for that link! Really interesting.
| xxr wrote:
| You're welcome--this was on the HN front page earlier
| this week, so my taste here is crowdsourced.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| YouTube Shorts doesn't even get a mention?
| leptons wrote:
| Is it actually Instagram Reels that is inauthentic, or is it
| the content that people post there? The Instagram Reels service
| is just that - a service people can use to post videos, same as
| TikTok. It's the people who choose to use the service that
| cause it to seem inauthentic, not the service itself. If
| everyone migrated from TikTok to Reels overnight, then wouldn't
| Reels become more "authentic"?
| lupire wrote:
| The content doesn't matter. There's more than a lifetime
| supply of I'll relevant kinds of content on both platforms.
| The algorithm for curating your feed matters.
| leptons wrote:
| "The algorithm" doesn't matter as much as you think it
| does. If all the videos have metadata, it's quite simple to
| suggest another video to someone if they just watched a
| similar video. I watch how my wife uses TikTok, and "the
| algorithm" is hit or miss. Most of the time it's a hit, but
| that's because the metadata from the preceding videos (and
| how long she watched them, or didn't) makes it easy to
| figure out what she'll most likely want to watch next.
| Without metadata, there is no "algorithm", and with
| metadata, it's trivially easy for anyone to produce "an
| algorithm" that does the same thing, maybe even better than
| TikTok does it now. I mean, if you do a search about how to
| put on makeup, then the next 10 videos you see are going to
| be about how to put on makeup - that isn't exactly an
| irreplaceable algorithm.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It's more like telling people that they're gonna have to visit
| a mobile site instead of use a mobile app.
| bearjaws wrote:
| > TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
|
| I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| You're both right! There was a good article/discussion on on
| this yesterday, but tldr: They are authentically fake! As in,
| the creators are not putting up a show with a 'real' person
| behind the persona, the algorithms have remade whatever
| person there use to be such that their 'authentic' self has
| become the persona.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42696691
| j_bum wrote:
| Interpellation [0]
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation_(philosophy)
| niobe wrote:
| Go outside, everyone's real .. at least for the time being!
| fullshark wrote:
| They are boring though
| recursive wrote:
| Only seems that way until you come down off the
| hyperstimulation.
| thorum wrote:
| Your perception of TikTok likely depends on your TikTok for
| you page. If you spend time cultivating it, the algorithm
| will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.
|
| This seems to be less true on YouTube and Reels
| unfortunately.
| Salgat wrote:
| The algorithm will spoonfeed you content that you perceive
| a certain way, whether that's true or not is a different
| story. Unfortunately for most people, all those hilarious
| situations that are not-so-obviously staged just fly over
| their heads as genuine. My wife is smart and well educated,
| but I even had to keep correcting her when she showed me
| videos that she believed were genuine.
| boringg wrote:
| I think a lot of people fall for the feels authentic and
| confuse it with authentic. Also a lot of people cant tell
| the difference.
| raydev wrote:
| A lot of people are simply pessimists and will dismiss
| real authenticity because they don't have the tools to
| recognize it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Because the internet is filled by slop shit by people
| trying to make a buck from it.
|
| It's like saying I don't know how to recognize non-spam
| when I end up blocking 99.99% of all mail showing up at
| the server.
|
| I do recognize non-spam, it's just that I know most of it
| is crap.
| snoman wrote:
| I don't know that it's people trying to make a buck - and
| that seems a bit silly of a thing to say to begin with. I
| presume you try to make your buck doing whatever it is
| you do.
|
| What I will say is that it's definitely a different form
| of expression from what we've had beyond recent history
| and - at the same time - artists, photographers,
| painters, jesters, philosophers, and playwrights have
| been trying to live off their form of expression for a
| while now too.
| motorest wrote:
| > A lot of people are simply pessimists and will dismiss
| real authenticity because they don't have the tools to
| recognize it.
|
| Do you think you have those tools? And if you do, do you
| actually have them?
|
| You are purposely being shoveled content that's expected
| to be engaging. Your feedback is used to tune your own
| personal model to maximize the volume of content you
| swallow.
| pizza wrote:
| If I ever get to know you, remind me not to recommend you
| books I think you'll like.
| motorest wrote:
| The mistake you're making is presuming that these
| recommendations are pushed to you with your best
| interests in mind. Read up on propaganda attacks such as
| the infamous alt-right pipeline.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| Is there truly a difference? It's not our reality that
| shapes our perception, but our perception that shapes our
| reality.
| topherclay wrote:
| Excuse me, have you never "perceived" a lie before?
| hirvi74 wrote:
| I have believed vastly more than I have perceived. Of the
| lies I have perceived, my reality has altered in response
| to the perception.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| My TikTok For You Page is almost entirely made up of
| Veritasium videos, sci-fi authors, some standup, lock
| picking lawyer and "how is it made" style videos. I don't
| get any of that brain-rot slop. If I did, I wouldn't use
| it. Which would be a slight improvement to my life.
| Although I'm not negatively impacted by the current level
| of my TikTok use, I can definitely see it takes an extra
| level of willpower to stop (i.e. close the app, put down
| the phone) than almost any other of my extra curriculars.
| From enjoyable hobbies to other fun time wasting
| activities such as gaming. Barring Factorio which is the
| biggest time warp I've ever encountered, with an almost
| perfect dopamine extracting game loop.
|
| The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's
| dangerous.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why
| it's dangerous.
|
| So, based on your description, the algorithm gives you
| almost exactly what you like, in terms of authenticity
| and legitimate interest on your part, instead of force
| feeding you crap that tries to change your perception of
| X or Y, and this is... bad? How exactly is it dangerous
| for doing what you want it to instead of pouring slop
| onto your brain?
| rndmio wrote:
| An endless supply of content you like is infinitely more
| problematic than just shovelling irrelevant slop at you.
| With the latter you're going to put it down.
| itishappy wrote:
| I'd argue that shorts, even the educational ones, are
| still the same brain-rot slop.
| motoxpro wrote:
| The funny thing is I think you're misunderstanding the
| scale. You wife likes videos that are not-so-obviously
| staged. Somone else would get purely staged videos.
| Someone else would get actual real videos. If you like
| real pilots landing planes on runways where the wheels
| make sudden noises, it will give you that.
|
| There are tens of billions of pieces of content there.
| TikTok is the furthest thing from a monolith possible.
|
| It has to start somewhere, so it recommends the things
| that the most people like, but it's not the only content
| there, that's just common sense and good business
| (recommend The Beatles/Taylor Swift before you recommend
| Arch Echo/Aesop Rock)
| munificent wrote:
| _> the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show
| you more of it._
|
| Jesus, this is like a line out of a William Gibson novel. I
| hope you wrote that aware of the irony inherent in it.
|
| I'm also reminded of this George Burns quote: "The key to
| success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it
| made."
| echelon wrote:
| > Jesus, this is like a line out of a William Gibson
| novel. I hope you wrote that aware of the irony inherent
| in it.
|
| There's a spectrum between Vaudeville and sharing family
| recipes. YouTube's MrBeast is on one end of that
| spectrum.
|
| This is the kind of stuff that happens on TikTok:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdXhx-yECOc
|
| This is what was meant.
| karmakaze wrote:
| It all looks the same to me. Something made to be
| amusing/viral for the clicks.
| thrwthsnw wrote:
| Is this supposed to be good?
| motorest wrote:
| > This is what was meant.
|
| I think you inadvertently made an entirely different
| point: it's all fake, but you just swallow some content
| acritically believing it's something personal that speaks
| to you.
|
| In the end, you're just complaining that some sirens are
| fake but others really do love you.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > This is the kind of stuff that happens on TikTok:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdXhx-yECOc
|
| still confused. Is this supposed to be an example of
| "bad" or "good" content?
|
| Because I can't (perhaps due to lack of empathy.. idk)
| imagine why anyone would want to waste their time
| watching stuff like that.
| jerojero wrote:
| It's pretty creative and funny stuff, imo. If you
| consider that to be "good" or "bad" that's up to you I
| guess.
|
| The way people choose to spend their lives is largely up
| to them, I'm not sure it's good to be labeling things as
| a "waste of time" when they're deriving something from it
| that you simply do not understand. Particularly when they
| do it in a way that is pretty harmless.
|
| I don't know if you have pets, but if you spend time
| observing them you'll see most of what they do is simply
| letting time pass and for them, that's enough. Believe it
| or not, for many people the same is the case. Finding
| meaning in the acts we do is a personal endeavour so I
| think rather than telling people they're wasting their
| time instead try to understand what they're seeing in
| such things that you don't see.
|
| I think a lot of people find creative acts very
| rewarding, there's an element of surprise that comes from
| it. The unexpected can be enjoyable. I think one of the
| reasons why the TikTok algorithm is so powerful is that
| it really succeeds in giving people the feeling of
| constant surprise.
|
| Personally, I've found really inspiring art on Tiktok, as
| well as new music and also a lot of simple but engaging
| content in german (which I'm trying to learn).
| mambodog wrote:
| 'authenticity' in the sense of content made by normal
| people without any strong goals other than 'some other
| people might like that' (and for some, maybe eventually
| getting some income from monetization) rather than highly
| produced content with the goal of reaching the largest
| possible audience and extracting the largest possible
| amount of money from that, which is what reels feels
| like. if you want to see that type of 'more authentic'
| content, tiktok's approach to populating your feed will
| be much more responsive to that than instagram's. there
| also seem to be a lot more people creating content on
| tiktok aimed at that level.
| thorum wrote:
| Connecting people to other people, to life changing art,
| places and things that they end up loving and wouldn't
| know about otherwise? That has to be one of the best uses
| for technology. I'd like to see more of it.
|
| I think you and others here are focusing on the
| stereotypical "influencer" faking authenticity for views
| but there are literally millions of human beings posting
| on TikTok about all kinds of things. A lot of them are
| pretty cool. Just click "not interested" on influencers
| and click like on the stuff you want to see instead.
| corimaith wrote:
| I think it's fair to say after a decade or so social
| media does not "connect people to other people", what you
| are describing are parasocial relationships. People are
| lonelier than ever, not just in America but worldwide.
|
| Besides, for any hobby, recommendations are only really
| relevant for newcomers without solidified preferences and
| knowledge, after that the space of available content
| quickly dwindles as one seeks increasingly ambitious and
| avant-garde works to their preferences. Amateur stuff can
| be quite generic after all, what not with the lack of
| resources and experience. If you're still relying on an
| algorithm, I'd see it more as a vapid surface-level
| engagement with a hobby/medium than a genuine interest to
| dive further.
|
| Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that
| we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of
| it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still
| produced far higher quality and authentic cultural
| products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is
| just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
| snoman wrote:
| > Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue
| that we're not better of it, that despite the greater
| size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet
| still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural
| products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is
| just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
|
| You're just getting older. You've seen it before in
| another place, another medium, a different author, actor,
| photographer, director, philosopher, painter. You just
| haven't realized that the internet isn't just for you,
| and that reel you saw that just rehashed something well-
| known to you, was new info to someone else, somewhere. I
| can assure you, in 2010, there were plenty oh people
| bitching about bloggers retelling the same old things
| they learned decades prior.
|
| "Everything old is new again" is a centuries-old
| expression. Every generation tells their tales, and
| shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right
| now, people express themselves in short-form video. I'm
| curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won't
| like it.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Everything invented up to your 20s is just the innate
| environment.
|
| Everything invented from your 20s-40s is cool, you accept
| it and will probably make a living with it.
|
| Everything invented after your 40s is a perversion of the
| natural order and must be destroyed.
| mlyle wrote:
| On the other hand, kids don't seem to have great mental
| health, attention spans, or academic attainment right
| now, and this type of social media is one of the likely
| factors behind this change.
| lmm wrote:
| One person's short attention span is another person's
| intolerance for bullshit. One person's poor mental health
| is another person's emotions appropriate to the actual
| state of the world. The kids these days are doing great
| in all the ways that matter.
| chabska wrote:
| Put a short straight-to-the-point instructional video on
| youtube, gets praised for being the best of humanity,
| "You win the internet today sir". Put the same video on
| TikTok, suddenly it's brain rot.
| mlyle wrote:
| > One person's short attention span is another person's
| intolerance for bullshit.
|
| If a student asks a friend a question, and then drifts
| off into space before the two sentence answer has been
| delivered, that's not great.
|
| > One person's poor mental health is another person's
| emotions appropriate to the actual state of the world.
|
| Perhaps being prone to anxiety attacks, panic, and self-
| harm are what we need to meet today's challenges head-on.
|
| > The kids these days are doing great in all the ways
| that matter.
|
| Hey, not everything is negative-- we live in a world with
| more interpersonal kindness and tolerance than a few
| decades ago, and that's great. But the kids aren't
| alright.
|
| Especially teen girls. It's impossible to escape curated
| content encouraging social comparison to edited,
| perfectly curated standards of perfection.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| would you like to serve up some comparative evidence
| showing just how much these things have degraded in kids
| these days vs. some particular point in the past?
|
| This reminds me of people harping about the pervasiveness
| of misinformation in social media today, while completely
| forgetting how narrowly propagandized and baited toward
| yellow journalism the much more restricted media sources
| of the past often were, helping create all kinds of
| absurdly ignorant belief systems from which escape into
| alternative viewpoints was much harder.
| mlyle wrote:
| Here is a blog that rolls up lots and lots of time series
| graphs from different research.
|
| https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-
| illness-pa...
|
| Time series data is always confounded in many ways; lots
| of stuff changes, and as a society we change what we're
| paying attention to and that itself changes things like
| emergency room visits or perceptions of being anxious. At
| the same time, a _whole_ lot of different measures moved
| in a negative direction suddenly (after slowly moving
| that way for many years). Of course, to be fair: these
| time series seem to show more the effect of _social media
| in general_ and _smartphones_ than _short form video
| content_ on social media /smartphones.
|
| There is no shortage of comparative evidence, though.
|
| There's also evidence that short form video use is
| correlated with shorter attention span and that it is
| addictive. Of course, correlation ain't causation: maybe
| it's just the most naturally attention-challenged that
| consume a lot of it. I personally suspect it's a little
| of both.
|
| We also have research that shows that if you show people
| lots of short form video and then test their attention
| span later, it's worse. But this, of course, isn't the
| same as the effect of voluntarily watching short form
| video. This is all trivial to find, but if you want links
| to specific things, let me knwo.
|
| Kids complain that the other kids who are on tiktok all
| the time will do something like ask a peer a question,
| and then drift off to something else during the answer if
| it's longer than a single short sentence.
|
| I've been doing youth programs for quite awhile now, and
| there's been a definite qualitative shift in the past
| several years, and various kinds of quantitative shifts
| in my own data aligned with this trend, too.
|
| There will never be perfect evidence, unfortunately. We
| have to act on the information we have, and when we're
| studying humans it's going to include time series data
| and artificial studies of the phenomenon in lab
| conditions.
| photonthug wrote:
| > You're just getting older. You've seen it before in
| another place .. You just haven't realized that the
| internet isn't just for you.. same old things decades
| prior..
|
| This reads as both extremely condescending and extremely
| naive at the same time.
|
| An earlier version of the internet had blogs and meme
| lords sure, and a generation consumed that stuff and
| found that it was good. And after that consumption, it
| turns out kids still wanted to grow up to be doctors,
| astronauts, or whatever.
|
| Another generation consumed another kind of content which
| was mostly leaning towards short-format, after many years
| spent researching/weaponizing dopamine and
| misinformation. Almost all of that content was mediated
| by corporations really, with as little involvement from
| people as the corporations could manage. That generation
| wanted to be influencers and "content creators" when they
| grew up.
|
| The basic incentive structures are radically different
| now, for companies, creators, and consumers, and we're
| sort of past doing things for the lulz. There's a
| difference here that actually makes a difference, and
| writing it off as " _yawn, more of the same if only your
| perspective was as wide as mine!_ " seems more ignorant
| than enlightened.
| corimaith wrote:
| >"Everything old is new again" is a centuries-old
| expression. Every generation tells their tales, and
| shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right
| now, people express themselves in short-form video. I'm
| curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won't
| like it.
|
| You know it's interesting to frame these arguments
| because it's exemplar of the clash of worldviews here,
| between the classic view of an cyclical history, and the
| modern linear view of historical continuity. The latter
| was birthed in reaction against the former, yet as the
| inheritors of Rennaisance conquered the world, it
| eventually became the norm, the "old" of which the
| "present" would be compared against.
|
| So if the present now cycles the past, is this an
| abberation or the norm here? The past is the "future",
| and the present is "stagnation". It is both revolutionary
| and regressionary. The TikTok Bill, the need to retake
| the Narrative by the Establishment thus represents itself
| the Past reasserting Continuity, and thus the Future,
| while Present pushes back to the very denial of the
| Future itself, to establish it's totalizing dominance of
| an endless now. So for the question of whether I would
| like the future, well that depends on which of the two
| sides win.
| motorest wrote:
| > Connecting people to other people, to life changing
| art, places and things that they end up loving and
| wouldn't know about otherwise?
|
| Does your opinion change if you understand that none of
| that is remotely real or actually exists?
|
| You have an app that is designed to feed you Potemkin
| villages, and here you are praising their real estate
| value.
|
| > That has to be one of the best uses for technology. I'd
| like to see more of it.
|
| That's like praising psychosis for being one of the best
| mental illnesses, and concluding that you'd like to see
| more of it.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I had cultivated a FYP that felt authentic to me,
| especially relative to everything else on the internet, but
| after a while it looked just as phony to my eyes, without
| any real change in the content itself. Just a different
| brand of phony.
| boringg wrote:
| This is exactly it - its filled with phony garbage but
| its a new and exciting kind of phony garbage that people
| lap up.
|
| Also people are getting really good at making content
| seem real.
| gunian wrote:
| the TikTok reocmmendation engine seemed to work better with
| a sparse history and better understood user feedback about
| content that one wants to see or avoid
|
| Instagram tbh just feels icky but at least you can
| explicitly like or dislike stuff not that it would fix the
| feed though
|
| YT shorts is also good but I hate you can't say show me
| this or do not show me that and it is all based on
| duration. idk what the powers that be at YT were thinking
| but I'm sure they did user studies and stuff
|
| so much for free market economics though stuck with two
| imperfect options because Zuck couldn't fix the feed :(
| mhh__ wrote:
| The algorithm is genuinely very good. That's why I deleted
| it.
|
| It's very addictive _and_ not always just shoveling slop.
|
| I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something
| genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and
| again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling
| industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian.
| Neo-china...
| sitkack wrote:
| Same reason I never touched prismatic after its first load.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prismatic_(app)
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&qu
| e...
| esafak wrote:
| Prismatic served the news. You can only get so addicted
| to Reuters!?
| lostlogin wrote:
| Fox manages to do ok.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Back in the day when I was using Windows Mobile
| (2002-2008) there was an app (RSS basic) that was pulling
| the news from various websites (I had added BBC, CNN,
| some with IT news, etc.). Before I would leave home I'd
| sync it, and it would give me 'many' news articles, just
| the text ofc.
|
| At some point I got addicted into reading news, so out it
| went. So yes, anything that gives you dopamine hits (cat
| videos, semi-naked men/women, news of the world), must
| go!
| sitkack wrote:
| Prismatic was even worse (better?), IIRC it scanned your
| twitter feed and then gave you a set research articles,
| academic websites, etc. To say I have a breadth of
| interests is an understatement. My twitter feed looks
| like arxiv and and a british tabloid had a baby.
|
| What prismatic gave me was pages and pages of Art,
| Design, Philosophy, Mathematics, Literature and all of it
| hours to days old. Every single article it back I wanted
| to read and there was pages of it, never ending. There
| was no way I could even filter out what read and even
| what to be _aware of_ , there was simply too much.
|
| I closed it and never went back. I also realized that
| even knowing of knowing is itself a Faustian bargain, we
| are all on a temporary atoll in a giant sea.
| mhh__ wrote:
| https://youtube.com/shorts/3FISFq_sCH8
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Can't watch YT shorts because _their_ algorithm is too
| good also ...
| soylentcola wrote:
| I disable them with a browser addon (and Revanced on
| mobile) because I seriously never want to watch a 30
| second video on Youtube. Having to scroll past useless
| snippets when I'm looking for something had borderline-
| ruined Youtube for me.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| there's some astoundingly good shit on there. some
| japanese cabinet maker who does phenomenal stuff and
| conveys it all in 30 secs. so much more. but so much
| more, in fact, that i can't risk my life/time by stepping
| into the stream.
|
| first time i did that, i finally realized that this is
| probably the tiktok experience that so many other people
| are talking about. utterly terrifying.
| whateveracct wrote:
| It's a proper Skinner box. Very well made. And in millions
| of people's pockets too.
| leobg wrote:
| Someone who remembers good old Skinner. Cool!
| jagermo wrote:
| same here. I found myself loosing an hour of just scrolling
| through short videos, most of them really good and ones
| that I liked. I had to delete the app because it was
| working too good.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| """ Within such a possible future system, the only command
| or need that the machine would not respond to would
| be the one command that I have a feeling some of us
| would most want to type into the machine. Which is
| the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that
| would be my problem with the machine. It would meet all the
| needs except my need to see it destroyed. It would
| take every other command well, and meet every other
| need well, but the need to just to just shut it down.
| Television is something like that now. I feel
| sometimes as though I am plugged into a giant computer that
| will take every command I give it except the one that I
| want the most. The command that the damn machine blow
| itself up. It will do anything else I say. I type in
| "food", and out comes food. I type in "I want to give
| this talk in Washington". It comes out. But the one
| command I want is the command for the damn thing to just go
| "boom!", and all the little transistors just to go...
| """ Rick Roderick 1990
| fullshark wrote:
| It's where the young kids who don't know any better
| overshare. Instagram is where the perfectly manicured young
| adults put out a phony facade to make their money.
| t-writescode wrote:
| My TikTok feed is full of very much adults and who own
| small businesses. I've seen some people in college, but
| there's no kids in my feeds.
| snoman wrote:
| Hm. I'm a grown man and I post reels to all the platforms.
| I like the tech and enjoy trying to emulate a professional
| process with prosumer equipment and practices (filming,
| editing, color grading, sound design, etc.).
|
| After about 30 or so reels this year, I've got about 70
| followers - half of which are definitely bots, a third are
| family/friends, and the rest seem to be real people.
|
| My feed has a lot of people like me, and people whose
| content I think is at the quality I'd like to be at (mostly
| photographers, videographers, small but full-time
| YouTubers).
|
| Maybe you're just finding what you're looking for.
| robrtsql wrote:
| I don't know if I would characterize TikTok as 'authentic'
| first and foremost, but it's a platform where real people go
| to perform. When I scrolled TikTok, I would often get poorly-
| shot videos from average folks trying to put their spin on
| the day's joke format, or reacting to that day's outrage. It
| was junk food, but at least somewhat 'real'.
|
| My Reels feed, on the other hand, is 100% bot drivel. It's
| all stolen viral videos by artificially-boosted accounts, and
| the comments appear to be fake comments that were 'paid for'.
| I assume there must be some sort of financial incentive to
| gaming the system this way.
|
| The end result is that TikTok feels like scrolling through
| (attention-grabbing, reactionary) stuff by real people, and
| Reels feels like scrolling through some sort of bot
| wasteland.
|
| I guess I should add that, due to its size, TikTok almost
| certainly also has a bot problem, but if it does it's not as
| clearly evident in a way that is detrimental to the platform.
| alex1138 wrote:
| I genuinely have no idea what Zuckerberg is responsible for
| at Facebook other than hijacking credentials
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433) and
| stealing/copying ideas
|
| Anyone with half a brain ought to have come up with a
| better system than Reels is
| kyle_grove wrote:
| I would use the word 'fresh' for TikTok; like old school
| YouTube, there's quirkiness and variety.
| xnx wrote:
| Exactly. In other threads on hacker news people have
| bemoaned the loss of the old weird web. I don't think
| anyone believed me that the same spirit exists in some
| sides of TikTok.
| krapp wrote:
| I remember seeing threads here about how TikTok reminded
| people of the old web. It's wild seeing attitudes shift
| so completely.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| You have to break it in, strangely enough. When I first used
| it it was like being logged out and watching Reels. But
| overtime it really understood what might interest me, even
| topics I didn't think I'd be interested in but was
| xnx wrote:
| Exactly. Despite using TikTok since mid 2019, I recognized
| very few of the top 20 accounts.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yeah... TikTok is absolutely chock full of garbage for me,
| whether or not I'm logged out.
|
| YouTube Shorts are not bad now for this kind of thing. I'm
| guessing it's based on my subscriptions so it's already off
| to a good start for me.
| adamrezich wrote:
| My wife hates it when I don't enjoy the TikTok videos she
| sends me, because it's very easy for me to tell how staged
| and fake they are. She, on the other hand, neither notices
| nor cares.
|
| This would be concerning, if I didn't know that this way of
| thinking was incredibly common these days--instead, it's
| mildly terrifying.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I enjoy movies, even though they are staged.
| frogcoder wrote:
| Everybody knows movies are staged, even the ones that are
| "based on a true story". From what I can tell, people
| seem to think those short videos are genuine.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Everyone knows movies are staged, and they _expect_ this.
| No one in their right mind wants to go to a theater and
| pay $20 for some crap that someone shot on their phone
| with no script.
|
| With the short videos, people _expect_ them to be
| genuine, and not highly staged productions meant to
| entertain.
| bobbobington wrote:
| I think better comparison would be documentaries and
| reality tv.
| johnisgood wrote:
| No, I watch these kind of videos expecting them to be
| fake. Why would I expect otherwise when I have every
| reason to expect them to be non-genuine? If people's
| expectations are not right, that is on them.
| kortilla wrote:
| Do you friends think they are real and get mad when you
| point out that they aren't?
| frde_me wrote:
| If every time I watched a movie with my SO they said "you
| do know this is completely fake, why do you even like
| movies?", I would probably get a bit annoyed
| carabiner wrote:
| The lady with the rug story, the tik tok recipes... All felt
| very real, down to earth to me. Versus IG's obsession with
| glamor, travel stories, other hucksters.
| op00to wrote:
| Strange. Until about a month ago, my IG feed was almost all
| independent and amateur musicians, interesting tech makers
| (NOT reviewers or "influencers", and some alt comedy.
| Suddenly, in the past 4 weeks, my feed is all political
| propaganda from the far right, ads, and more ads.
|
| I deleted Instagram because of the change. I'm done. Never
| used TikTok, it seemed totally fake to me.
| boringg wrote:
| I think Im in your universe...how do we get out?
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| If you spent 10 minutes on each platform, you'd immediately
| realize how tone-deaf and naive your comment is.
| winternett wrote:
| As someone who's been on TikTok for years now, it's extremely
| fake, the algorithm is a total ruse, as most of what trends
| is based on seeing news stories repeated hundreds of times,
| and most other content has the same repetitive music behind
| it... Far too much repetition and subtle seminaries in
| trending content, down to the way videos are color graded to
| be honestly real & organic... I've had a few videos go viral,
| but most things that do go viral are memes, the minute you
| want to push out anything remotely serious or related to
| business, they want money to let it pass the visibility gate.
|
| I won't miss it if it does get banned. It's stressed so many
| people out for no good reason, and sucked up millions of
| hours of free labor from unrecognized & unpaid creators that
| deserve better.
|
| That doesn't mean that any Meta product is good for content
| creators mind you.
| __alias wrote:
| what types of videos have made that have gone viral?
| whateveracct wrote:
| TikTok has a lot of true believers.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Just did a test, opened up TikTok
|
| 1) a guy telling me in my native language (not english) how
| to spot phishing scams 2) another guy doing a short video
| about how much you need to invest to retire in my native
| language 3) Donald's AG not answering simple questions
| directly 4) video about 2CV ice racing where people leisurely
| drive old Citroens 5) A skit by an Australian dude who has a
| wall full of Milwaukee tools
|
| Instagram Reels
|
| 1) A couple doing a very much scripted skit 2) A stolen clip
| from an old 90s sitcom 3) one-liner joke 4) A dude farting 5)
| A homophobic "joke" video
|
| Youtube Shorts
|
| 1) pro skier made up to look old doing tricks on the slope 2)
| A couple I don't know showing what they looked like in 1988
| 3) A skit by a couple 4) One of those weird youtube-only
| dating channels reposting a clip of their stuff 5) Americans
| not knowing how to drive on icy roads in 2022
|
| The quality difference is so clear that it's not even funny.
| In my experience all of the good content in Reels is just
| reposted/stolen TikTok content. Shorts has the same or
| snippets of bigger YT videos.
|
| FB Reels is so bad I don't even want to give them the
| engagement metrics.
| stouset wrote:
| Have you considered that Reels is so bad precisely
| _because_ you don't use it?
|
| Mine:
|
| A bit from the SF Chronicle on the LA fires. A comedy/info
| bit by Alex Falcone. An Ad. A wrestling technique (I'm into
| judo and BJJ). A card trick. Cooking techniques. An ad.
|
| It's ad-heavy and frankly I don't try to spend a lot of
| time on it. But as somebody who uses it at least some, I
| get absolutely zero of the kind of garbage you suggest.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Tiktok is serving you better things because
|
| 1) more people post there 2) you've used it much more and
| given them huge amounts of data on who you are and what
| your like to watch, when.
|
| I can assure you those tiktok things are not the top of
| everyone's feed, sounds personalized. But your list for
| reels, and the other one sounds like the basic things they
| show to new people to try to figure out what they like,
| possibly somewhat curated by some past swipes.
|
| Each of these are just algorithms. They get better the more
| you use them because your use = your data and personality
| and you've just used tiktok enough that they know _exactly_
| what you like and who you are. Give it time, the others
| will come along if people use them
| chvid wrote:
| Fake compared to what? Alt-right Zuck with a fresh perm?
|
| Seriously. US social media is taking a massive turn to the
| right while its owners are swearing allegiance to Trump. To
| most of the world that is a much more real danger than the
| Chinese communists.
| nottorp wrote:
| All the major social networking things are fake, no matter
| how they feel to one particular user.
|
| However, the US seems to ban only the options where it's not
| US companies making money off their users...
| curt15 wrote:
| It's commensurate with how China treats foreign companies.
| Nobody can do serious business in China without the CCP's
| blessing, often involving a "partnership" with a local
| company.
| nottorp wrote:
| Maybe, but the point is the US government is not
| concerned with privacy or addictive effects of
| 'engagement'.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| A glaring example of the fakeness of insta reels I saw
| yesterday was comments regarding the LA fires. On multiple
| reels, I saw the exact same back and forth exchanges between a
| handful of accounts. I thought maybe it was some kind of
| caching issue but there were different accounts commenting on
| in the fake threads across reels. Good way to boost engagement
| for the bot accounts.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the
| feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity
| and realness
|
| Exhibit A for banning tiktok right here
| qoez wrote:
| Just break the addiction to both apps. It's not good for you
| anyway
| kpennell wrote:
| My tiktok feed was night and day better compared to IG reels.
| IG reels is simply attrocious memes. Like the same recycled
| crap over and over again. Where my tiktok feed always felt
| fresh. Makes me embarrassed that Zuck and co can't make the
| feed better. I thought this was America!
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Link in bio is literally killing instagram, it's so anti user
| for the sake of $$ so people don't link out easily
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > I would literally write my social security number on a sticky
| note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead
|
| Somewhat paradoxically, I am actually more comfortable giving
| out private data to foreign countries than my own. I mean, what
| is Xi Jinping going to do with a US social security number? If
| I am in the US, it will be hard for bad people in China to
| reach me, because there is a border between the two countries,
| in every sense of the word. There is no such protection if me
| and my data are both in the same country.
|
| Xi Jinping can have my social security number, in fact, he can
| have my whole life, it is not like he is going to do anything
| to an random guy who lives in a foreign country. I will
| definitely won't give these data to a neighbor I barely know
| because my neighbor can do something I don't want him to do
| with it and may find some motivation to do so.
| munificent wrote:
| Are you aware that almost all of the scam calls, phishing
| emails, and other attempts to separate you from the currency
| in your bank account arise from outside of the US?
|
| Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up
| to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users.
| You can imagine how well they are up to that task.
| culi wrote:
| it's still much harder for overseas scams to succeed
| against someone who's tech savvy vs domestic identity
| fraud. There's simply a lot more barriers to moving money
| outside of the country
|
| > Economic globalization means there are no borders and
| it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their
| users
|
| Historically speaking this is actually the opposite. Many
| critics of globalization have pointed out that you can
| directly track trade deals to massive spikes in border
| funding, much stronger enforcement of intellectual property
| laws, etc. Research actually shows a huge decrease in the
| dissemination of ideas, language, etc across borders where
| trade deals have been enacted. Paradoxically, globalization
| has made us more siloed off from each other
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is a rather poor take. Individually it's "probably" not
| much, but when you start putting the data together in bulk
| you have a social network graph of huge parts of an entire
| country. That and everything they like and probably work on.
| If you can get things like location data, then you can figure
| out what entire companies are doing. You can get insight into
| secret projects. You can figure out what small
| companies/contractors to install moles in.
|
| It is literally the biggest spy data gold mine on earth.
| neither_color wrote:
| It's infinitely worse for someone abroad to have your SS
| because it is worth it for them to try for several days to
| scam you for just a few dozen dollars. There's an entire
| industry of scam farms run in Cambodia by CH gangs.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Exactly. There are people deleting menstrual tracker apps in
| the US because the information might be used against them by
| law enforcement. But what's the risk to them of the Chinese
| government having that? Other than turning it over to the US
| authorities, of course.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
|
| I'm shocked how easily manipulated people are by social media.
| The vast majority of TikTok content is very intentionally
| produced, largely to attempt to generate revenue or, at the
| very least, to feed ones ego.
|
| The "real" people you see on there are all, to different
| degrees of success, actors. Nearly all of the spontaneous/I
| can't believe this happened!/caught on camera style content is
| entirely staged.
|
| Likewise all of the "freedom of speech must be protected" posts
| are laughable. Everything on TikTok is ultimately created for
| and prompoted to ultimately drive profit.
|
| This movement to Xiao Hong Shu is also, surprise surprise, not
| some spontaneous movement. The people at Xiao Hong Shu have
| intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for
| awhile now.
|
| Virtually all media you see is very heavily filtered and
| manipulated to ensure you're getting the right message.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's the same kind of mentality that thinks "reality TV" is
| about real people and not intentionally produced
| performances.
| hxegon wrote:
| > This movement to Xiao Hong Shu is also, surprise surprise,
| not some spontaneous movement. The people at Xiao Hong Shu
| have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok
| replacement for awhile now.
|
| Provide literally one source for this. literally any source.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| They completely revamped the UX from being essentially an
| instagram clone focusing on pictures and written content,
| to increasingly a tiktok clone focusing on browseable short
| form video?
|
| Are you going to need similar evidence if I claim that
| YouTube has been working on being a TikTok replacement as
| well? It's pretty clear that YouTube created the "shorts"
| feature as an attempt to allow TikTok creators to trivially
| repost content.
| glurblur wrote:
| No Xiao Hong Shu is literally not a TikTok replacement. The
| app is only very partially short form video, while most of
| the posts are more like pinterest. If you are talking about
| the recent UI changes that made it look like TikTok, I'm
| sorry to break it to you but I think that's just a
| coincident.
| dartos wrote:
| > TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
|
| Yknow creators get paid _by tiktok_ to do natural ad placement
| in their videos?
|
| It's just as fake as everything else, if not more so.
| esotericsean wrote:
| Very interesting. To me TikTok is nothing but memes and useless
| stuff. Whereas Instagram has been an amazing community for many
| of my passions. And now Threads is gaining in popularity as
| well (it really feels like hope scrolling in comparison to X's
| doom scrolling). I wish it wasn't owned by Meta, but if TikTok
| actually gets banned I would say good riddance. Something about
| Instagram/Threads is just perfect to me.
| favacctontiktok wrote:
| The best account on TikTok is that old man who champions his
| cause of stopping circumcision. One must ask oneself why it's
| not considered on the same plane as genital mutilation in our
| so called modern civilized society.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Strange, I found Instagram Reels' algorithm to be much better
| suited to my interests than TikTok's, and I've tried both
| multiple times, deleting them multiple times and seeing if it
| would improve, but TikTok's never did.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I wonder what would happen if we shut down all the socials.
|
| HN excluded of course.
| nunodonato wrote:
| that would be an extremely interesting experiment. Young
| people would probably feel completely lost, unsure of where
| to get "news" from. Actually having to go websites and search
| for stuff :)
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| >TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
|
| Probably the most bizarre thing I've read on here in the last
| few days. You actually believe that what you're seeing on
| TikTok is real? It's literally the antithesis of base reality.
| It's a living, breathing delusion.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and
| Instagram is so phony and overly perfect
|
| They're very different, and I understand what you're getting at
| comparing it to the hyper-manufactured perfectly glossy
| Instagram culture, but I wouldn't call TikTok 'authentic'.
|
| Of course, Tiktok is large and there's many different
| subcultures there, but overall I think TikTok is heavily
| drenched in Irony. It's a stark difference to the very fake
| Instagram, but that doesn't make it authentic.
|
| Are tiktok dances 'authentic'? They might have started as just
| innocent kids doing a fun little dance, but the moment anything
| turns into a trend I think it loses authenticity. The whole NPC
| live streaming trend[1] from a few years ago was anything but
| authentic. TikTok 'suffers' from the exact same paid
| 'influencers' promoting whatever garbage of the day, and even
| has its own version of affiliate marking spam with 'TikTok
| shop' junk.
|
| [1]: https://theconversation.com/people-are-pretending-to-be-
| npcs...
| aimanbenbaha wrote:
| You said a lot of words that are a litmus test proving you
| almost never use TikTok nowadays. First of all this is not
| 2020 anymore, you're 5 years late if you think TikTok is
| still filled with "dances". "Paid influencers" mean nothing
| in TikTok since everyone has an equal voice and equal shot at
| virality, see you're still seeing it from the lens of
| Instagram here.
|
| The NPC live streaming is weird yeah but you cherry picked a
| trend and then make it about all TikTok. Literally hundreds
| of trends spawn up in TikTok every month and some of them are
| damn more authentic than whatever happens in IG reels. Some
| of the successful original trends even pick up in Instagram
| or YouTube.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I use tiktok every day. Maybe I don't know what 'authentic'
| means, but I don't think most content on tiktok is
| authentic. I think it is a particular type of fitting to an
| ideal or trend.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| > Equal shot at virality
|
| What makes you think that? The process is not open and
| fully controlled by the company running the show
| Grimblewald wrote:
| yes but those types stick to live and tiktok lets you
| completely remove live from your feed. In fact if i don't
| want to see joe rogan, peterson, or other such horsemen of
| the misinformation apocalypse outside of live, I can make
| that decision on tiktok in a meaningful way. I can actually
| remove that content from my feed. Good luck getting that to
| work on youtube or instagram. You'll get that content if you
| like it or not. Good luck blocking all the random
| alphanumeric account names posting the deluge of that kind of
| content, reels / youtube shorts will force feed it to you
| anyway, no matter what you do.
| misja111 wrote:
| TikTok has simply beaten FB and YouTube, its algorithm is much
| better. That's why it has to be killed now in the US, big tech
| needs to be protected.
| garydevenay wrote:
| The fact people are using either is mind numbing. Such a waste
| of life.
| solumunus wrote:
| Imagine outing yourself as someone who uses these mind numbing
| apps.
| rvz wrote:
| Once again, digital drug addicts getting their supply cut off and
| running to the next hit.
|
| Neither this TikTok "ban" or the new app "Rednote" are going to
| last in the long term. They will run back to TikTok again.
|
| Would have been better to fine TikTok in the billions just like
| we already have done for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and all the
| other social networks.
|
| But this is all temporary.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Why doesn't China simply open up for domestic competition? What
| are they afraid of? It's a serious question. Are they that much
| afraid of their consumers switching to Western products? I
| frankly think it's overblown. Chinese people will simply stick
| with homegrown products at this point. It's way too entrenched
| for anyone to enter their market and succeed. I think they have
| made enough progress to open up their markets and they have so
| much to lose by growing anti-sino sentiments abroad all because
| they didn't want US tech monopolies to compete in their home
| turf. Maybe 10 years ago it made sense but Chinese tech companies
| can compete on merits at this point. They have the ecosystem to
| compete without govt protection.
| ajross wrote:
| > What are they afraid of?
|
| Definitely _not_ the consumption of foreign products.
|
| The PRC remains a totalitarian government which built itself on
| an environment where they exert total control over public
| communication. There are _long_ lists of topics that you simply
| cannot cover, analyze, talk about or even discuss privately via
| internet media in China. There 's no way to do that if those
| discussions happen on Snapchat via a data center in Oregon.
|
| Does the CCP _need_ to do that? It 's a reasonable question
| with answers more complicated than I'll be able to offer. But
| for sure they _want_ (desperately) to do it. Thus, no foreign
| media in China.
| gmm1990 wrote:
| Pretty sure Google was allowed but decided to pull out (maybe
| due to censorship demands from China) not sure about facebook.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Facebook was allowed until 2009, it was blocked because it
| was allegedly used by ETIM to organise the 2009 Urumqi riots,
| and facebook refused to cooperate with the Chinese police.
| wavemode wrote:
| You're assuming it's about economics, but it has almost nothing
| to do with that. Foreign companies like Ford and GM can and do
| sell in China.
|
| The reason China restricts foreign internet companies
| specifically, is because the government lacks control over what
| information is shared on such apps. China is a dictatorship
| where free speech is considered dangerous.
| lvl155 wrote:
| And that's my point really. US tech companies have all
| kowtowed to CCP for the past two decades trying to gain
| access to the second largest economy.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| They did, largely what China did is make any companies that
| want to do business in China partner with a local company.
| From there what happened in many cases is the foreign
| company had their IP stolen and then shut out of the
| market.
|
| China doesn't want western companies operating in China,
| they want western IP owned by Chinese companies operating
| there. That's why so many companies have pulled out of that
| market.
| stonesthrowaway wrote:
| > Why doesn't China simply open up for domestic competition?
|
| China does allow competition. It's just that google, facebook,
| etc chose not to follow chinese laws.
|
| > they have so much to lose by growing anti-sino sentiments
| abroad all because they didn't want US tech monopolies to
| compete in their home turf
|
| Funny how microsoft, apple, tesla, etc are competing in china?
|
| You are just parroting stale propaganda.
| richwater wrote:
| > China does allow competition. It's just that google,
| facebook, etc chose not to follow chinese laws.
|
| HAHA, thanks for giving me a good laugh
| stonesthrowaway wrote:
| Typical pathetic response from a silly political activist.
| There are tons of american companies operating in china. I
| listed few of the biggest. Google used to operate in china.
| But when china tighten their laws, google chose not to
| follow them and left. Probably because google, like
| facebook, are state sponsored propaganda outfits. Unlike
| tiktok...
| theultdev wrote:
| Really skipped over expanding on the CCP laws that Google
| chose not follow, didn't ya?
| pishpash wrote:
| What's the relevance? Would you have been more satisfied
| if Google were forced to sell to Jack Ma instead?
| theultdev wrote:
| Would you have been more satisfied if the US government
| forced a backdoor to TikTok? That's why Google pulled out
| of China.
|
| The US is doing the opposite, it's removing TikTok
| because they probably spy / psyop for the CCP.
|
| One country (China) was trying to force foreign companies
| to spy / psyop.
|
| One country (US) is making sure a foreign adversary
| doesn't use it to spy / psyop.
| pishpash wrote:
| Yes, because it would at least show a modicum of honesty.
| Instead it's being done indirectly through putting a
| company in the hands of state-sanctioned owners. What
| difference does it make other than theater?
| theultdev wrote:
| if they did that the US government would then be spying
| on US citizens by monitoring TikTok data.
|
| how in the world would that show a modicum of honesty?
| stonesthrowaway wrote:
| > Would you have been more satisfied if the US government
| forced a backdoor to TikTok? That's why Google pulled out
| of China.
|
| What a dope. Imagine being dumb enough to believe google
| pulled out to protect chinese people's privacy.
|
| Google pulled out because the chinese government wanted
| to monitor it to make sure google wasn't acting as a
| state actor pushing propaganda to destabilize nations.
| Turns out the chinese were right and google was indeed a
| state actor. Their dirty little fingers were all over the
| color revolutions.
|
| > One country (China) was trying to force foreign
| companies to spy / psyop.
|
| But that's google's business model. Do you have two brain
| cells to rub together? Why would the chinese force google
| to do what it already was doing in china and everywhere
| in the world? And still does today?
|
| > One country (US) is making sure a foreign adversary
| doesn't use it to spy / psyop.
|
| That's what china was doing. Dummy. Literally, china
| created laws to stop google/facebook/etc from running
| psyops in china and that's why they chose to leave china.
|
| You must be one of the morons that actually swallowed
| google's motto "Don't be evil" hook line and sinker.
|
| How stupid do you have to be to think google left china
| because the chinese government forced them to spy on the
| chinese. When spying is google's bread and butter.
| neilv wrote:
| I have some concerns about TikTok, as well as with a shutdown,
| but if I can imagine a silver lining of a TikTok shutdown, it
| would be if huge numbers of teens are inspired to learn the tools
| and awarenesses to not be total b-words of Big Tech.
|
| In this fantasy, initially it would just be to get onto a
| particular Big Tech (but Chinese) thing that "grownups" don't
| want them doing. But then they'd start to realize they're also
| being exploited there, and also by many of the people who are
| pitching circumventions. And eventually they'd figure out and
| create genuine empowerment. And rediscover better conventions for
| society, where everyone isn't either exploiting or being dumb.
| And it would just be the grownups who are hopelessly b-words of
| Big Tech, and the teens just have to roll their eyes and be
| patient with them. Then those teens become grownups and have
| kids, and raise them to not be airhead b-words. And those kids
| teach their kids, etc.
|
| Of course, within several generations, the lessons would be
| diluted and then forgotten, and people would get dumb and shitty
| again. But society would have improved enough that at least
| there's room for people to backslide, and fritter away what their
| great-grandparents achieved. :)
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| That would be amazing, honestly. Big Tech needs to get the fuck
| out of our lives...
| ericyd wrote:
| > TikTok... estimates one-third of the 170 million Americans
| using its app would stop accessing the platform if the ban lasts
| a month.
|
| If customers care that little about the product, maybe it's a
| good sign that it isn't providing significant value to their
| lives.
| BrawnyBadger53 wrote:
| You can also read this as despite being banned TikTok expects
| 2/3 users to find ways to circumvent the ban
| affinepplan wrote:
| surely this will be the big break for bluesky
| low_common wrote:
| Haha there's no shot. Apples and oranges - completely different
| platforms and features.
| affinepplan wrote:
| I know, it was sarcasm
| hermannj314 wrote:
| The "War on Drugs" ensured that when an American dies from a drug
| overdose it is an American company, like Purdue Pharma, that made
| money killing them.
|
| And when an American is brainwashed into believing a lie, it
| better damn well be an American company that sold them that lie.
|
| That is the dream this country was built on.
| serenadeineb wrote:
| Congress shall make no law respecting ... or the right of the
| people peaceably to assemble ...
|
| unless they mumble 'national security', and then screw the
| constitution ...
| bdcravens wrote:
| Congress does have the power to regulate foreign commerce
| however. Not that I disagree with you, but rarely can something
| be distilled to a single concern.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| It is a balancing act for sure, but is it 'right' to have all
| those choices, but only as long as they sufficiently support
| governing body overall worldview?
| lm28469 wrote:
| Americans finally discovering their constitution is interpreted
| all day every day is the funniest thing on the internet. You
| also don't have free speech, and your rights to bear arm are
| very restricted.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Foreign corporations do not have free speech rights.
| nness wrote:
| I actually think that they do -- tourists to the US have free
| speech protections. There are many foreign-owned press
| outlets operating in the US (Forbes, Al Jazeera, RT, CGTN
| etc.) that are also protected by the first amendment.
| Miner49er wrote:
| Doesn't matter, US citizens have the right to receive the
| speech on TikTok
| mindslight wrote:
| The real answer is that no corporations should have free
| speech rights in and of themselves - by obtaining a
| government granted liability shield a corporation (/LLC) is
| not merely a group of individuals, but rather a highly scaled
| governmentesque entity running on its own subbureaucracy.
| That liability shield is an explicit government creation for
| specific public policy goals, and when the outcome is at odds
| with the individual freedom the arrangement can and should be
| modified.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| Remember, money is speech (Citizens United v. FEC)!
| tdb7893 wrote:
| There are still a million places online people can organize and
| assemble so I don't really see how this right is being
| meaningfully infringed here. It definitely doesn't seem clear
| to me that this clause means the government needs to maintain
| _every_ avenue of assembly to the point this is a
| constitutional issue.
| tevon wrote:
| THIS!
|
| If you listen to the arguments that TikTok made before the
| Supreme Court, the court is extremely dubious of the free
| speech argument. And this has been a court that has been very
| favorable to free speech overall.
| serenadeineb wrote:
| Its the fact that 140 million of us chose to assemble in this
| place ( app ) that IMHO should have weighed much higher as a
| concern, over speculative spoooky dangers. No actual harm to
| the country was shown, just supposition, which equates to us
| trusting the government when it strips out constitutional
| rights away.
| tevon wrote:
| It makes no sense to me how this is an argument of free speech.
|
| I assume you are saying this is curtailing the creators speech?
| However the creators can move to any other platform, they are
| not being restricted in what they can say or produce.
|
| So perhaps the concern is about TikTok's free speech; which,
| thank god the constitution does not protect a foreign
| adversaries right to free speech.
| Miner49er wrote:
| Free speech includes the right to receive/hear speech. TikTok
| contains lots of speech that US citizens have the right to
| hear.
| tevon wrote:
| I agree, though not when broadcast by a foreign adversary
| (per the 1934 law).
|
| Forcing a sale to a US company also enables that to
| continue. Additionally, it does not protect the right for
| users to receive/hear speech from EVERY outlet, this same
| speech is permissible on any other platform - simply not
| one mediated by an adversary.
| randomcatuser wrote:
| I'm very curious about this case, actually. My top
| questions
|
| - difference between _actually broadcast_ and
| _potentially broadcast_. Can the government suspend
| someone for potentially doing something?
|
| - More on the right to hear speech -- you're saying that
| I cannot receive speech from foreign adversaries _if I
| choose to do so myself_? IMO this is well within my
| rights
|
| - Do platform effects (e.g. recommendation) count as
| speech? For example, I may choose to post on TikTok bc it
| circulates in 24h to a specific audience - if TT got
| changed, does this mean that my speech got curtailed?
| (right to assemble, etc)
| Invictus0 wrote:
| So just go hear it from somewhere else. There is no content
| on tiktok that can't be recorded and posted on instagram
| reels.
| coryfklein wrote:
| This is completely untrue, there are unlimited examples of
| speech that exists out there that you have absolutely no
| inherent right to hear, and in fact many existing laws
| explicitly support _restrictions_ on your ability to hear
| the speech. Just a few examples off the top of my head; do
| I have the right to hear:
|
| * A comedian at a paid event when I haven't paid
|
| * Private conversations between you and your significant
| other
|
| * DMs between other people on social media
|
| * Podcasts published exclusively on Spotify when I don't
| have a membership
|
| * Speech in walled gardens (FB, Insta, X, etc) where I
| don't have an account
| hxegon wrote:
| What does this have to do with anything? How do _any_ of
| these examples relate to the tiktok ban in the slightest?
| mint2 wrote:
| By your reasoning, I have a right to hear the speech on
| instagram and X, correct?
|
| Well tough cookies for me, meta and X are bith
| restricting my freedom of assembly. Will you go to bat
| for me?
|
| They've imposed arbitrary restrictions on my access to
| speech simply because I refuse to sign up. And The
| government is okay with them restricting me from these
| public squares, outrageous!
|
| Will you be angry on my behalf, like you are with the
| restriction on tik tok?
|
| If these are truly public squares, it's outrageous that I
| need to essentially show ID and give away a ton of rights
| to X and meta just to access the public square. Why are
| we not mad about that as well?
| hxegon wrote:
| Again, this feels completely unrelated to the tiktok ban.
| It's fine for a venue of free speech to have rules, it's
| different for the government to ban a platform 1/3 of
| americans use because of intangible threats that are
| frankly an incredibly thin excuse for censorship.
| serenadeineb wrote:
| Not free speech. INHO its about free assembly. 140M of us
| assembled there, and now that meeting place is being
| distroyed, and we are being dispersed, without any actual
| harm being in evidence. If the government can do that here,
| it can do it anywhere.
| drawkward wrote:
| Go try to assemble on the White House lawn without an
| invitation; I'm sure it will work very well for you.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| That's how women earned the right to vote in this
| country...
| bbqfog wrote:
| I downloaded Rednote and was already blown away by just the app
| quality. So much better than X. I'd never used TikTok but I
| really hate the idea of our government censoring what I can and
| cannot see. Rednote has a bunch of great content on it too.
| Thanks for the Streisand rec US gov!
| jimbob45 wrote:
| ?? X/Twitter is not the main competitor to TikTok/RedNote.
| Meta's Instagram/Instagram Reels is.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| And YouTube Shorts?
| bbqfog wrote:
| I was commenting more on the code quality and app
| performance. It's very well written.
|
| The content is good too though. It's nice to see so much
| amazing Chinese cooking.
| gcr wrote:
| Xiao Hong Shu (pronounced Xiaohongshu) is the Chinese version of
| TikTok by Bytedance (EDIT: I'm wrong, it's a different company,
| see below). It's currently #1 on the USA App Store.
|
| The people on there are super kind and accommodating to all the
| "American TikTok refugees" today! Lots of little Mandarin 101
| classes, UI tutorials, and co-commiserating about government
| overreach.
|
| I have a negative view of all of social media, but I think
| banning it is extremely politically unwise. Appreciate the
| hospitality of these users inviting us into their platform for a
| bit
| swang wrote:
| > Xiao Hong Shu (pronounced Xiaohongshu) is the Chinese
| version of TikTok by Bytedance. It's currently #1 on the USA
| App Store.
|
| Dou Yin Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok by
| Bytedance...
| gcr wrote:
| Oops. TIL
| paxys wrote:
| No that is a completely different app. The Chinese TikTok
| (Douyin) isn't on US app stores.
| taylodl wrote:
| My prediction, based off raising kids and working with teenagers?
| The teens are going to give a big ol' Yankee Doodle Middle Finger
| to Uncle Sam. They'll flock to _any_ social media site not hosted
| by a US megacorp.
|
| If you don't understand why that would be then I posit you
| haven't spent much time around teens.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The concern is China specifically. If TikTok were owned by a
| German company there wouldn't have been any concerns.
| taylodl wrote:
| Sounds to me like the United States just handed South Korea a
| gift.
| currymj wrote:
| obviously bad policy for many reasons, but as a geriatric
| millennial I'm selfishly happy. As long as the ban continues, I
| will never have to sit on the bus and listen to those horrible
| robot voices blasting nonsense out of someone's phone speakers.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I'm sure they will move to some other platform.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Are you sure you're actually thinking of people using youtube
| shorts or facebook?
| arduinomancer wrote:
| There's nothing worse than listening to the audio of someone
| else scrolling TikTok
|
| Hearing the same 10 second clip of a song 20 times
| darknavi wrote:
| If Vine dying taught us anything its that the content from
| Tiktok will outlive the platform by being reposted to others.
| That voice will never die unfortunately.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| You probably might not know whether that's coming from Tiktok,
| or instagram, facebook, youtube reels and shorts.
|
| Tiktoks isn't the only provider of that type of content.
| paxys wrote:
| Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban
| access to a popular website? I imagine this ban will go down
| exactly the same. Never underestimate a bored teenager's ability
| to bypass tech restrictions. Heck maybe this is what is needed to
| finally get a new generation out of the comforts of their tech
| walled garden and get their hands dirty.
| rsanek wrote:
| how would this actually work? iOS is so dominant among US teens
| it's crazy, and the ability to sideload on that platform is
| nonexistent even to very technically savvy users.
| greenavocado wrote:
| I got popcorn ready to see how the masses of iOS users will
| react to the TikTok ban
| paxys wrote:
| If the holding power of TikTok is strong enough (which it
| just might be) then you might actually see teens start to
| switch to Android.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| you won't
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I don't think it would be as unlikely as you'd think.
| It's not impossible for a significant amount of people to
| get a cheap Android for these apps, after all iPhones are
| a result of iMessage.
| kube-system wrote:
| I think it's more likely that people would simply use the
| browser
| ketzo wrote:
| "Large portions of US teens will get second phones for
| one specific social media app" is an absolutely wild
| thing to predict seriously
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Most US teens probably already have a second smartphone-
| like device, and large portions of them have purchased
| them purely for one specific social media app.
|
| I'm not saying it's more likely that not, but I am saying
| I wouldn't be surprised. If you replace "one specific
| social media app" with "iMessage", it has already
| happened.
| warner25 wrote:
| Not only this - my observation is that having a secret
| backup phone is not an unusual practice for kids who
| might get their primary phone taken away at times by
| parents, school officials, etc. Or if their primary phone
| is subject to technical parental controls.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Yes, anecdotally many of my friends (and I) had a backup
| phone. Second hand Android phones are so cheap that why
| not? By the time the app has to be reinstalled it may
| make sense, if sideloading on Android takes off.
| buildbot wrote:
| Many of your high school aged friends had a secondary
| backup phone with a separate cellphone plan they pay for?
| That's wild!
|
| I don't think the average American high school student
| has two smart phones one of which is a secret from their
| major source of income (their parents).
| sudosysgen wrote:
| No, why would they pay a cellphone plan for it? For most
| of them it was their or their siblings' previous phone,
| or their first phone they paid for themselves when they
| got a job, for others it's a cheap 60$ used phone they
| bought when their parents took theirs away at some point.
| That's like money for going out for lunch three times.
|
| There's no use for a cellphone plan, we would just use
| wifi or hotspot from their main phone.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| I wonder how many Android users would actually sideload it.
| Same happened with Fortnite for a few years, and idk how
| many people did that.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Fortnite never had even a hundredth of the smartphone
| screentime as Tiktok. I honestly think a lot (at least 5
| million) Android users will sideload it once it comes to
| that.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Yeah but what % of them. Cause if it's only 1%, and 99%
| are going to some other app...
| herbst wrote:
| Or DJI. Side loading is so easy, we usually just call it
| "installing an app" there is no hacking or magic around
| that, works just like a .exe with some extra protections.
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| Don't underestimate the human ability to "settle for less" if
| said less requires less effort from them. There's a reason
| people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher
| level of quality ; Netflix is just easier. They will settle for
| the "easy" solution, which will be any one of the TikTok clones
| already existing (YT shorts, reels, whatever).
| kingstoned wrote:
| Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition
| is censored in search results. Some random pirating streaming
| site is unknown and probably not even easily discoverable on
| google (you have to use yandex for that).
|
| I stick to pirating with adblockers because it is more
| convenient, there is a much bigger library of content and I
| don't have to share any personal info or pay for anything.
| ketzo wrote:
| If you know the words "yandex" and "adblocker" you are
| already 90th percentile ability to pirate content
|
| Netflix is absolutely easier to use than any form of
| pirating _for the vast majority of their userbase_.
|
| Everyone in this thread talking about how people will "just
| get a VPN" to use TikTok have zero concept of the technical
| abilities of TikTok's user base
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Even just having a PC hooked up to your TV in the first
| place is rare. People have locked-down smart TVs or STBs.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| What's amazing about this comment chain is that it's
| totally wrong. Netflix is missing tons of content, like
| older movies, and tries to replace them with store-brand
| "originals" that everyone knows are garbage or only have
| a couple seasons before being cut. It lost its most
| popular product, The Office. Netflix literally cannot
| serve the product its users want the most, so the
| "easiness" of using netflix to get that product is 0.
| 4xAM wrote:
| The particular shows don't matter to most of Netflix's
| customers. Piracy to them is someone in a dark room
| wearing a balaclava with a laughing ASCII skull on their
| laptop. The ones that care about "The Office" will either
| throw up their hands and watch whatever suggestion
| Netflix has for them, or they'll subscribe to Peacock.
|
| Netflix has succeeded in diluting what product its users
| want from "The Office" to "something funny". Why hunt for
| one specific show when it will throw a million options at
| you?
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Or piracy is a somewhat tech-savvy person searching "The
| Office 123movies 321 123" on Google, then trying on Bing
| cause Google hid some DCMA takedowns, giving up on 9
| results that only pretend to work, then finally getting a
| working one. Except episode 2 is weirdly quieter than the
| others, episode 11 is missing, and the whole website
| disappears a month later.
|
| This person may have also had uBlock Origin, or maybe
| they got duped into the fake uBlock that still shows ads,
| or Chrome disabled uBO.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Netflix's death has been greatly exaggerated on HN. It's
| not popular with us, and for good reasons, but it's ever
| more popular both in terms of subscribers and viewer
| hours. It's not the easiest to always get the exact and
| best content you want but it's the best to get okay
| content any time. The latter tends to drive the average
| user.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Their stock had a scare in 2022, but it's recovered: http
| s://www.google.com/finance/quote/NFLX:NASDAQ?sa=X&ved=2a.
| ..
| iforgot22 wrote:
| So whoever wants The Office so much, and hasn't seen it
| already, pays for Peacock.
| ge96 wrote:
| I wouldn't mind paying if it wasn't setup in a way like "oh
| want to watch that movie? subscribe to this service" at one
| point I was paying for maybe 5 different providers eg.
| Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax, etc...
| zamadatix wrote:
| I used to pirate, went to Netflix because it was easy, and
| recently went back to pirating. Not because pirating became
| easier... but because Netflix became shit enough for
| pirating to be worth the bother.
| csomar wrote:
| > Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and
| competition is censored in search results.
|
| Did you just confirm the parent poster point while also
| denying it.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Convenience wins every time. Digital photos are lower quality
| but easy. MP3 is worse than CD quality but easy. Etc.
| 3minus1 wrote:
| > There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating
| proposing a higher level of quality; Netflix is just easier
|
| I'm slightly annoyed how this comment completely ignores the
| moral and ethical reasons someone might want to avoid making
| an illegal copy of something while denying it's creators any
| compensation. I need more coffee.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| If it works on 75% of the population, that's good enough. The
| other 25% will give up and move on as well, because people
| flock to social media where the others are.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| Popular creators will leave, if they can't monetize their
| content anymore. Then, everyone else will follow the creators
| to whatever platform they will end up on.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| This ban does nothing about the mobile tick tok website. You
| don't need to be a techie to use the browser on your cellphone.
| Yet it is a point of friction compared to an app with native
| notifications. And given the expectations of the average
| american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade
| into safe app store apps instead of the scary web, people are
| legitimately concerned.
| warner25 wrote:
| This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app,"
| but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app"
| for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It
| also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page
| with information about the ban, not to the main page of the
| website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP
| or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required
| to circumvent it. No?
|
| In any case, yeah, I'm not sure that _" the average american
| tech user who has been coddled for the last decade"_ knows
| what a web browser is. I've observed some user behavior among
| family members that indicates a pretty bizarre mental model
| of how the Internet, web, and mobile applications work.
| mrtksn wrote:
| AFAIK most teenagers use iPhones in US. What are they going to
| do? I'm Apple fanboy but this is the exact type of power they
| shouldn't have.
|
| Maybe you agree with the ban, I'm curious how would many people
| be feeling around year of 2028 after a few years of oligarchs
| consolidating their power and designing an obedient society
| through full control of the communications. Maybe you have
| ideas against H1B or maybe you use birth control, whatever your
| current opinions oh these are there's non-zero chance that you
| will be enforced into the correct opinions.
| nashashmi wrote:
| That is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that if
| I have a tiktok channel, and the only way for people to see it
| is through a hack, then obviously my channel won't do that
| well.
|
| The bored teenager will learn ways to get tiktok. But the bored
| tiktokker won't learn ways to get the audience on tiktok
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to
| ban access to a popular website?
|
| Uhhh there are many websites that are banned in the USA.
| Otherwise working URLs that wont work in the USA. Mostly
| hostile state actor stuff.Iran, NK, etc. The fact that you
| don't know about it just says how effective it is.
|
| Sure, VPN. But (serious question, not rhetorical) is that going
| to get the app on your phone? And are you going to go to the
| trouble when the algorithm thinks you're eastern european? When
| the user base is smalelr?
| staticman2 wrote:
| The only reason social media is popular is Americans are too
| lazy to find stuff on the open web. They'd prefer the lazier
| option of the single web site deciding for them what to see and
| think about.
|
| There's zero chance most will put in effort to access TikTok.
| cellis wrote:
| Exactly. There was a blog post a couple years ago called "The
| Tyranny of the marginal user" that states this principle
| succinctly. If it's anymore effort than a thumb swipe, you're
| losing users in a hurry.
| culi wrote:
| All they're really banning is the app on the App or Play store
| basically. Anyone who still has tiktok on their phone can
| continue on and even make a new account. Anyone who cares
| enough can probably get a cracked APK too
|
| TikTok will probably die slowly not suddenly
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| The duopoly of app store and play store makes this kind of ban
| much more effective. India banned TikTok and nobody uses it
| over here now. It's simply too hard to download the app. Google
| won't let me download it even when I'm traveling abroad.
|
| Banning websites has been very hard, but today's closed
| marketplace ecosystems make banning apps much easier and people
| are not motivated to find loopholes.
| egorfine wrote:
| When Ukraine banned russian social networks in 2015, all the
| teens had free FSB-sponsored VPNs running on their phones in no
| time. Like, almost 100% of them. In mere days. Now leaking not
| just the social network data to russia, but rather the entirety
| of their traffic.
|
| Let's see if US teenagers are as savvy and motivated.
| abeppu wrote:
| > The outcome of the shutdown would be different from that
| mandated by the law. The law would mandate a ban only on new
| TikTok downloads on Apple or Google app stores, while existing
| users could continue using it for some time.
|
| Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for
| existing users? I.e. why would they choose to do more than the
| minimum required by the law? It's nice that they want to point
| people to a way to download their data, but they could also keep
| showing videos after notifying people of that option. What's the
| rationale here?
| voxic11 wrote:
| The downloading your data thing is actually part of what is
| required by law.
| sneak wrote:
| Drawing attention to the stupidity and agenda-driven approach
| of the USG by causing pain to millions of users, is my guess.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The obvious play would be to incite those active users to take
| action by letting their congress critters know their opinions
| in an effort to have them reverse their vote
| whimsicalism wrote:
| those plays can easily backfire - like when tiktok first did
| it
|
| although there are success cases, like prop 22 in california
| and uber
| dylan604 wrote:
| The threat of losing something vs actually losing something
| is not the same though. If TikTok did something with all of
| the tracking data they did for each user so they could show
| the contact information for their Rep and Senators to make
| it easy for everyone with clickable links directly to phone
| numbers/emails would increase that engagement. It would
| also just show how creepy AF their tracking is. So maybe
| just a screen like PH does that refuses access to their
| content with a screen that says talk to your reps.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| no, i think the negative reaction in political places
| would be exactly the same if they did this again
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/krishnamoorthi-
| gallagher-ti...
| dylan604 wrote:
| again, I think you are not considering the loyalty to the
| incoming president and that his party now controls both
| houses of Congress.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > again
|
| you didn't mention anything about either of those two
| points in your previous comments, but sure
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sure I did, just not to you directly. Read the full
| thread and the time stamps
| whimsicalism wrote:
| not sure how you expect me to take into account things
| you are saying in different threads _after_ i made my
| original comment
| abeppu wrote:
| They did try that last year though it did generate a lot of
| calls in absolute terms and it didn't actually work as
| political pressure for them to vote against the ban.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/07/tiktok-
| us...
|
| Getting congress to _reverse_ something seems much harder, in
| that they also have to get someone to introduce the bill, get
| it through a committee, get it scheduled for a vote, etc, in
| both houses.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Getting congress to reverse something seems much harder,
|
| The GOP is absolutely flip flopping on this issue since
| Trump has also reversed on the ban idea. That's why the
| TikTok lawyers' arguments to SCOTUS were to just delay the
| ban until after Jan 20 so the incoming administration could
| weigh in on the matter.
|
| > in that they also have to get someone to introduce the
| bill, get it through a committee, get it scheduled for a
| vote, etc, in both houses.
|
| I think you are forgetting that the GOP just took control
| of both houses. It will not be that difficult for them is
| that's what the orange man says he wants.
| abeppu wrote:
| If there's an escape hatch, I think it's more likely that
| Trump directs the DOJ to defer enforcement, first
| temporarily. Some deal will be made where Trump
| stipulates some stuff about content moderation, including
| removing TikTok's ban on political ads. Once TikTok has
| agreed to act like X, Trump can direct the DOJ to delay
| enforcement indefinitely, but keeping the law on the
| books as a sword of damocles to keep leverage.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| The Reuters article already states this will happen:
|
| > If it is banned, TikTok plans that users attempting to open
| the app will see a pop-up message directing them to a website
| with information about the ban, the people said, requesting
| anonymity as the matter is not public.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Political pressure. There are more Americans on TikTok than
| voted in the last election. I think the parent company is
| calculating that they can draw attention to the government
| taking away something the users love and turn that into
| political pressure to undo the law. We'll see what happens, but
| I'd imagine they are right. Taking away the opiate of the
| masses has not worked out for governments in the past.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Many of those users are not eligible to vote.
| hengistbury wrote:
| People in the US have the right to petition the Government,
| regardless of their eligibility to vote.
| stonesthrowaway wrote:
| > Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop
| for existing users?
|
| What business would choose to keep operating if it can't gain
| new customers? Think about it. The law makes it impossible for
| tiktok to grow or be profitable. What advertiser would be
| interested in a platform that will lose users every day and
| won't gain more in the future?
|
| The law was sneakily and intentially written to outright ban
| tiktok. It would be like congress creating a law saying you
| specifically cannot buy more gas. You can keep using the gas in
| the car, but you can't fill up your tank anymore. Would you
| spend thousands to fix your car? Change the oil or the tire?
| No. You'd either sell the damn thing or just throw it away.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Would you throw away a $100B asset? If TikTok was just a
| business and not an arm of the CCP then they would not be
| shutting down.
| teqsun wrote:
| It's not being thrown away, it will work as normal in every
| other country except the United States.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I wonder how many countries you need to have to match the
| united states' revenue
| montag wrote:
| Waiting for Trump to take office to cut a deal.
| simoncion wrote:
| > Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop
| for existing users?
|
| For the same reason Google or Facebook or many other major
| players might choose to stop operating in a jurisdiction that's
| trying to impose restrictions on them that they feel are
| unconscionable, rather than knuckling under?
|
| The "national security" angle that FedGov is attempting to hang
| this all on is pretty bullshit... defense contractors that do
| classified work for the DoD can be foreign owned!
| Funes- wrote:
| I dream of the day we give ourselves a decentralized protocol
| that, while providing an opt-in way of following current events,
| offers us an extreme breadth of content without being a
| hypercapitalistic, attention-grabbing nightmare that tries to get
| us to compulsively consume absolute junk constantly, at the cost
| of everything else. In the meantime, looks like Sunday is gonna
| be a fun day.
| smeggysmeg wrote:
| ActivityPub is exactly that. Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, etc.
|
| What you're asking for exists.
| Funes- wrote:
| It doesn't. I'm talking about true decentralization (peer to
| peer), not federation (the worst of both worlds). It should
| also be uncensorable and come with some implementation that
| does away entirely with the idea of "social media" or
| "microblogging". Just a better version of what the web 1.0
| was.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| true decentralization means it will be rife with bad actors
| taking over the network in decentralized methods. it won't
| work and will be ultimately result for illegal activities.
|
| decentralization != morally beneficial for the masses.
| pishpash wrote:
| So do the masses have the wisdom to rule themselves or do
| they need a paternalistic gatekeeper? Pick one.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| Was your father a gatekeeper?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| What about Nostr?
| captainepoch wrote:
| Hope they do that worldwide soon too!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| What if any practical effect will this have on American users if
| 150M of them already have the app downloaded? A pop-up that
| doesn't block use of the app?
|
| Haven't seen anything about an IP ban/block (ahem, great
| firewall), nothing's going to block anyone from business as usual
| on Sunday right?
|
| There's no 'shut down'. And other than a bunch of misinformed
| users jumping over to RedNote briefly or whatever, the only
| difference will be an oddly _American-free_ app for the rest of
| the world?
| fckgw wrote:
| Yes, you can do an IP block and you can also detect VPN clients
| and block those.
|
| If the companies is barred from doing business with US users
| then they will be required to take reasonable steps to block
| those users.
| hiatus wrote:
| > If the companies is barred from doing business with US
| users then they will be required to take reasonable steps to
| block those users.
|
| Or what? I don't think a US-brought lawsuit would succeed in
| China.
| codingdave wrote:
| According to the article, they are voluntarily shutting down in
| the USA despite that not being required by the law. So yes,
| there is a potential shut down. Time will tell is they really
| do it.
| 34679 wrote:
| I've never felt inclined to use TikTok. I've always kept my
| online presence psuedo-anonymous, all the way back to AOL days. I
| don't use Meta products at all.
|
| The day TikTok is banned I will create an account and post a
| video showing my face, in which I will state my name and address.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm not assigning a cause, but US culture, these days, seems to
| encourage folks to treat others as "NPCs," and that can have
| rather bad consequences.
|
| It's always been an issue (sort of human nature), but it seems
| (to this battered old warhorse), that it's a lot more prevalent,
| these days, than it was, just twenty years ago.
| theaussiestew wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this phenomena?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Just that we consider "others," (with the exception of a
| close entourage) to be "non-player characters." Basically,
| shallow simulacrums, with no feelings, standalone, not
| connected with others, and that can be "disposed of," or
| "forgotten," with no personal consequences.
|
| We don't have to allow anyone other than ourselves, any
| agency or consideration.
|
| That makes it _very_ easy to reduce everyone else into one-
| dimensional caricatures, easy to attack, dismiss or neglect.
|
| Like I said, this has always been a feature of normal human
| tribalism, but it seems to have gotten a shot of steroids,
| sometime recently.
|
| I have found, for myself, that closely interacting with as
| many others as possible; especially ones that challenge me,
| has helped me to avoid that.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| A semi-related term to the "NPC" thing is "main character
| syndrome." It's usually used derogatorily, but it's the idea
| that someone thinks they're the "main character" of the
| world; the people they care about are side characters who
| matter less, and people they don't care about (or know) don't
| matter at all. "The self as the center of the universe" is
| another way to phrase it.
|
| Not sure entirely how that's connected to this thread's
| topic, but it is relevant in social media in general (and
| maybe TikTok moreso because of its "great" algorithm?)
| vitalurk wrote:
| This move shouts "you win China, your products are superior than
| ours". We hate losing at our own game don't we?
| smoovb wrote:
| As China bans TikTok too, this move shouts "We don't want this
| app either."
| WesleyJohnson wrote:
| Because neither government wants a well-educated,
| knowledgeable population. Carlin was trying to teach us that
| for decades and it still rings true.
| sschueller wrote:
| I wonder if this will have an effect on iPhone sales vs Android.
| On android the app can easily be side loaded while on iPhone (in
| the US) it's incredibly difficult for the average user.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| It's really rare for me to be pro-intervention when it comes to
| the government vs free-industry but TikTok has become undeniably,
| geopolitically hazardous for the US. The dismal bit of it is that
| nation state backed, habit-forming propaganda apps are only
| likely to proliferate.
| abeppu wrote:
| I continue to be baffled by people who simultaneously believe
| that TikTok is dangerous because of Chinese propaganda that may
| happen in the future, but that all the other social media
| networks are not dangerous despite the mostly Russian
| misinformation and election interference that has been ongoing
| since 2016. So far as I can see the important part is not who
| owns the network, but just how easy it is for misinformation to
| be published, and basic info like "is this poster a real
| human?" or "was this person paid to say this?" or "is this a
| factually incorrect statement?" are not readily visible to
| users.
| drawkward wrote:
| Ban all social media.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| > but that all the other social media networks are not
| dangerous despite the mostly Russian misinformation and
| election interference that has been ongoing since 2016
|
| You can affirm one thing without affirming similar arguments.
| This is important for me to say because you're consigning me
| to an argument that I didn't make.
| ossobuco wrote:
| Can you provide examples of China controlled propaganda
| happening on Tiktok?
|
| Things that are factually true don't count, obviously.
| qvrjuec wrote:
| Surely you can't think propaganda is just spreading lies...
| Contextual presentation can change how true information is
| perceived. Seeing a perspective more will align your own with
| it.
| ossobuco wrote:
| I know of many instances in which Meta suppressed specific
| opinions, but I don't know any of TikTok doing the same
| thing. Examples are welcome, if you have any.
|
| Or is this just about Tiktok not being owned by a
| billionaire who will use censorship to keep the USA
| government happy?
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| There are many different ways to read your comment. Both of
| which are actually pretty funny. Well done.
| ossobuco wrote:
| There's only one way if you're being intellectually honest.
|
| I'm still waiting for examples of Chinese propaganda
| pushing for misinformation, by the way.
|
| It seems not a single person on this post is capable of
| providing one, even though there are dozens of users
| scaremongering over Chinese propaganda.
| hxegon wrote:
| Yeah good thing they banned facebook as well which provably has
| a huge fake news / propaganda problem while tiktok... while
| tiktok has.... um... while tiktok... quick, tell me what
| propaganda tiktok has been pushing that's so much worse than FB
| or twitter or IG! You can do it! Can't you?
| exabrial wrote:
| Honestly I'm fine with this. I look forward to a break from the
| nonsense until whatever comes next to replace it.
| ergonaught wrote:
| US citizens do not want this.
|
| Every news article descending into tangents on any other point
| than that is part of why we can't have nice things.
|
| The whole country has turned into some sort of lower primate
| improv troupe where whatever stupid thing comes up gets a "Yes
| and let's" diversion instead of an adult in the room standing up
| and cutting the crap.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > US citizens do not want this
|
| Ha ha, I guess you are discovering, many many people do want
| this.
| tills13 wrote:
| No one who actually uses it or understands it wants this.
| This is like vegans banning steak.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| You're getting it. It is like vegans banning steak!
|
| > "lower primate improv troupe"
|
| > "No one who actually uses it or understands it wants
| this."
|
| "Everyone's generalizations are stupid, except mine."
| loeg wrote:
| It's like the non-addicts banning heroin. You don't have to
| be a Tik Tok user to understand that it's bad for it to be
| PRC-controlled!
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| yeah because they wont censor gaza information
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| That is a fine take, but the assumption that all other
| forms of media masses of people are exposed to aren't
| also propaganda is a foolish one to make. We have an
| entire advertising industry in this country. Something
| like $300 billion in ad spend a year in the US. Ad spend
| is literally propaganda lest we forget.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > aren't also propaganda
|
| It's not that other propaganda doesn't exist, it's that a
| likely intended effect of Chinese propaganda is
| destabilization and/or delegitimization of hostile
| governments. Ad spend is more about destabilizing
| consumers' savings.
| rsanek wrote:
| I don't think that people are arguing that. What _kind_
| of propaganda one is exposed to matters.
| amrocha wrote:
| Why is it bad when China (supposedly) creates propaganda
| on tiktok but it's good when the US creates propaganda on
| facebook?
|
| You're not a government, you're a person. Either way
| you're being manipulated, and the US government
| definitely doesn't have your best interests in mind.
| corimaith wrote:
| Because we live in a world of Sovereign States, where the
| point of discrimination very much is between Citizen and
| Non-Citizen? You free to renounce your citizenship and
| live without the Protections of the Government, there are
| many who would be quite happy with that to take your
| wealth freely then :)
|
| The only people thinking in such a arrogantly privileged
| manner ironically are Westerners, try saying this crap in
| China or India and people will laugh at you all day. Or I
| doubt this poster has the best interests of Americans in
| mind either.
| amrocha wrote:
| Do I have to adopt the government line of the country I
| was born in if I want to maintain citizenship? Am I not
| allowed to think for myself?
|
| How exactly is that different from a dictatorship?
| qvrjuec wrote:
| Is this a serious question? China has its best interests
| in mind, the US government has its best interests in
| mind. Which one of those two adversaries are more likely
| to align with your interests?
| panic wrote:
| I honestly believe the answer is China--by living in the
| US, its interests and my own are more likely to come into
| conflict, whereas China's interests are more likely
| irrelevant to me.
| qvrjuec wrote:
| Huh. What are your interests? I'm curious why you think
| they would come in conflict with those of the US.
|
| I'm confused why you think China's interests are
| irrelevant to you, unless you truly believe geopolitics
| is a zero-sum game. We compete in markets, militarily in
| the indo-pacific, and technologically in ways that are
| not mutually beneficial.
| panic wrote:
| The US government generally works to maintain harmful
| institutions like health insurance, gun manufacturing,
| prisons and policing, etc., and will oppose me through
| violence if I work to weaken these. They can restrict my
| access to things online and control what online services
| I can run via laws like SESTA/FOSTA and this TikTok ban.
| China can't do any of that to me. I'm less concerned
| about geopolitics given our massive military and the
| position of the dollar, not to mention our cultural
| influence via the Internet (which bans like this directly
| weaken).
| dns_snek wrote:
| Why do we have to choose one? I'm not going to trust US-
| owned media on the topic of Israel and Palestine, I'm not
| going to trust Russian media on Ukraine, or Chinese media
| on Taiwan.
|
| By stifling freedom of expression under the guise of
| "national security" you're creating blind spots that
| allow atrocities to go unchallenged. I thought we learned
| from history but maybe I was wrong.
| amrocha wrote:
| Considering that my country has a history of CIA
| sponsored coups and election meddling by the US, China
| definitely has been better to me
| 0x5f3759df-i wrote:
| > Why is it bad when China (supposedly) creates
| propaganda on tiktok but it's good when the US creates
| propaganda on facebook?
|
| Because this imaginary world where the US somehow equally
| controls Facebook on the level that China directly
| influences TikTok isn't one that exists?
|
| This low resolution view of the world is grating.
| "Facebook is a US based social media company so it's
| exactly the same as China and TikTok" is completely
| devoid of the context of reality.
|
| Not only does Facebook actually have 1st amendment speech
| rights with a judicial system empowered to enforce them.
| But even the slightest appearance that the US government
| was attempting to influence speech on Facebook would be a
| career ending scandal.
|
| Compared to TikTok where the CCP literally has a seat on
| ByteDance's board by law and has for its entire existence
| had its algorithm nuke political topics that China does
| not want discussed.
|
| It's not the same thing.
| amrocha wrote:
| Honestly, I don't believe China has as much control over
| TikTok as you claim, and I believe the US government has
| much higher control over FB than you.
|
| So from where I'm standing it's the same thing.
|
| And to give you some perspective, there's plenty of
| content critical of China on TikTok even though that
| stuff gets banned on DouYin.
| mileycyrusXOXO wrote:
| I'd rather be able to choose to consume propaganda than
| for than the government to be able to decide what I
| should and should not consume.
| loeg wrote:
| Yeah, the heroin addicts say the same thing about heroin
| though.
| herbst wrote:
| And yet the systems where addicts get actual heroin
| instead of even worse alternatives usually work better.
| See Switzerland
| randomcatuser wrote:
| The users for sure don't want this. Among non-users, I'd say
| there's a sizable difference (let's say 50/50)...
|
| Many things aren't _that_ democratic when you look at it like
| that!
| theultdev wrote:
| US citizens elected representatives to make laws for them.
| Even more so, this is a bipartisan law.
|
| Tiktok US users of voting age are already accounted for in
| that process, they don't get extra sway just because they
| use the app.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > US citizens elected representatives to make laws for
| them. Even more so, this is a bipartisan law.
|
| A majority of American citizens want affordable
| healthcare, housing, and education, net neutrality, an
| arms embargo vs Israel, an end to illegal forever wars,
| stronger environmental protections, cleaner water, less
| fossil fuel use and an end to fracking, etc - and there's
| still bipartisan resistance in our politics and media
| against all of those.
|
| Congress doesn't actually represent us, it represents
| capital. Been like that for a long time.
| https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
| theultdev wrote:
| Nevertheless, the voters made their choice and actively
| voted for these representatives.
|
| If everyone is so outraged and there's so many TikTok
| users, they can rally and vote out the people who voted
| for this.
|
| I for one support this ban fwiw. You'll find out a lot of
| people do too. So in this instance and quite a few
| others, my representative has voted in my favor.
| 3vidence wrote:
| Voting between 1 of 2 respectives every few years to
| represent all issues doesnt seem to represent how
| citizens feel about individual issues.
| theultdev wrote:
| What would your system be?
| herbst wrote:
| Democratic
| theultdev wrote:
| So mob rule? Doesn't work.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| That's not how voting works in practice. The people I
| vote for do not match my views on every single topic.
| Just enough (weighted) that they are the better choice.
|
| It is possible that every single candidate on the ballot
| is in agreement on a topic that every single non-
| candidate voter has the opposite view on. That doesn't
| mean nobody gets elected.
| herbst wrote:
| I don't understand this. In my view most people don't
| want this otherwise they would have implemented a
| government where the majority is heard, but they didn't.
| And don't even seem to try.
|
| Either it's a dictatorship or it's listening to the
| majority. There is nothing democratic about acting
| against the majority. Never was
| mint2 wrote:
| Of course the users don't want it. Asking a fanbase if the
| thing they are a fan of should be banned and ignoring all
| other groups doesn't make much sense. Nothing would be
| banned.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| I think part of the problem is everyone thinks they are the
| "adult in the room" and everyone else is the "primates". I
| agree policy discussions are a bit of a farce though (in a
| sorta funny twist places like TikTok are responsible for that
| since the engagement metrics have a tendency to promote
| nonsense and lies)
| Etheryte wrote:
| We all live in a bubble that consists of the people and things
| we interact with. People in your bubble not wanting this
| doesn't mean other people outside of your bubble don't.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| US citizens most definitely want this.
| Miner49er wrote:
| Some, sure, highly unlikely a majority does if you look at
| how many Americans use TikTok
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| How many of those people voted? The young people who don't
| vote don't want this and the old people who do vote do want
| this. The outcome is predictable.
| t-writescode wrote:
| About 1/3 of Americans use TikTok.
|
| When it comes to *restricting* rights (not growing them),
| it's very concerning that such a large percentage of
| people can _not_ want something and still have it forced
| upon them.
| tartoran wrote:
| I don't think it matters who voted for what and who got
| elected, TikTok's ban would probably still occur.
| I_AM_A_SMURF wrote:
| We certainly _do_ want this. I think the fact that we let a
| foreign company own a social media platform in the first place
| is preposterous. As others have said, we would never let the
| CCP own a TV broadcast, why should we let china own a major
| social media platform? That's just absurd.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| There are foreign-controlled TV networks in the US. Not over-
| the-air, but that's probably due to them being niche more
| than anything.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Part of it is almost certainly due to the FCC controlling
| licenses for what is broadcast over the air.
| perlgeek wrote:
| You do realize that in vast majority of all countries, all
| major social media platforms are owned by foreign companies?
|
| There seems to be a real risk of propaganda on Tiktok, but
| foreign ownership alone isn't a sound reason for a ban.
| rsanek wrote:
| > foreign ownership alone isn't a sound reason for a ban
|
| You're right -- but foreign ownership _by a repressive
| regime with undemocratic ideals_ certainly is. For example,
| I don 't think anyone would be too concerned if a European
| country was the one that founded & owned TikTok.
| herbst wrote:
| But if it would be a US company people in Europe would
| have the same kind of distrust like they have right now
| with china.
|
| The US is even working on their great Firewall. It's red
| apples Vs blue apples at this point.
| herbst wrote:
| Or should it be reason enough. The EU should ban Meta as
| well, no question. This foreign propaganda, risking mental
| health in teenagers and all that stuff is US propaganda
| shoved down our eyes.
| gabruoy wrote:
| "We" do not want surveillance propaganda targeted towards
| children. The US government does not want Chinese
| surveillance propaganda targeted toward children. They're
| perfectly happy when it's done on US soil under US
| jurisdiction.
| paulcole wrote:
| I watch like 25 hours of TikTok a week. I absolutely love it.
|
| I certainly _do_not_ want this.
| culi wrote:
| If we don't want this then we simply won't make an account on
| those platforms...
|
| YOU want this ban and you don't like that OTHER PEOPLE like
| TikTok. Clearly you don't have a TikTok account and that's
| not enough. You want to make sure no one else is allowed to
| have a TikTok account either
|
| Instead of spreading the message about possible harms you'd
| rather ban other people's abilities
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| There's a Kremlin radio station in Missouri.
| dpig_ wrote:
| For most of the world, _your_ platforms are already foreign-
| owned.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Hey, the ADL president is a US citizen, and he said "we really
| have a TikTok problem."
| drawkward wrote:
| America has an Israel problem.
| jhp123 wrote:
| Pew has it at 32-28 in support of the ban[0]. I think that's
| pretty low for a bipartisan effort where the opposition hasn't
| really had a chance to air it's case.
|
| [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2024/09/05/support-f...
| dlivingston wrote:
| My opinion on this has not changed since Trump tried to ban
| TikTok in his first term [0]: if the USA wants to ban TikTok
| for XYZ reason, _they need to pass a general purpose law in
| Congress that applies equally to all foreign-owned companies._
|
| Singling out TikTok without a universal principle or law leaves
| a nasty taste in my mouth, and the US gov. will just be playing
| whack-a-mole with whatever the TikTok successor is.
|
| [0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/944039053/u-s-judge-halts-
| tru...
| happyopossum wrote:
| Shockingly, given how often congress shirks its duty these
| days, they did write such a law:
|
| https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7520/BILLS-118hr7520eh..
| ..
| nashashmi wrote:
| The ones that use the app don't want this. The ones that don't
| use it ... don't care.
|
| Naturally either you don't want it. or you don't care.
| corimaith wrote:
| The Senator you voted for this probably voted for this so yes,
| America does want this.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Those in leadership being against a meaningful percentage
| (about 30%) of those under their care is common.
| corimaith wrote:
| Well let's not talk in abstract phrases, who did YOU vote
| for, and did you not find it probable that they would
| support such actions?
| t-writescode wrote:
| I voted for a Democrat; and I also was a loud fighter
| against previous attempts at a TikTok ban. That
| * my representatives didn't vote in line with my requests
| *and* * that they tend to vote in line with me for
| other issues *and* * that there are no other viable
| options either due to no competition or worse competition
|
| Does not negate that my "representative" is not
| representing me.
| kansface wrote:
| I'm for the ban chiefly on the grounds of economic fairness in
| access to markets. China doesn't allow access to any US social
| media products. We should only open our doors to Chinese
| companies conditioned on reciprocation.
| valleyjo wrote:
| I'm a us citizen and I do want this. Speak for yourself. China
| bans us social media. Us should ban Chinese social media.
| herbst wrote:
| Where is that whataboutism coming from. What has the one to
| do with the other? Do you want a great Firewall for America?
| Is that what this is about?
| drawkward wrote:
| I am a US Citizen and I 100% want this. I think this is far too
| small a step; I think all social media should be banned.
| dns_snek wrote:
| But this isn't about banning social media, it's about banning
| dissent.
|
| Would you feel the same way if the US government banned all
| mainstream media organizations except the ones you
| ideologically oppose?
| drawkward wrote:
| > it's about banning dissent
|
| On the contrary, I think it is about banning a propaganda
| and social engineering vector that is under the thumb of an
| adversarial foreign government. That, for me, is enough of
| a reason to ban it and justify it under our constitution.
|
| The fact that I am in favor of banning all social media
| should tell you that it is not ideological, but rather that
| I think social media is extremely addictive, and has huge
| negative externalities.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > The fact that I am in favor of banning all social media
| should tell you that it is not ideological,
|
| I'm not accusing you of being ideologically motivated, I
| just think that your (otherwise understandable) support
| for banning social media is inadvertently helping a bad
| actor in stifling freedom of speech.
|
| Could China be using TikTok to spread propaganda in the
| US? Sure, but I haven't seen any evidence supporting this
| and if there was concrete proof I'd support the ban.
| Meanwhile the US government is labeling truthful
| discussions about Israel's genocide "antisemitic
| propaganda" and using them as motivation for the TikTok
| ban.
|
| On one side we have vague communist boogeymen, on the
| other there's expressed desire to take control of
| unpleasant narratives. That tells me that they're really
| just trying to take away people's ability to discuss
| their dissenting ideas.
| Cookingboy wrote:
| > I think it is about banning a propaganda
|
| The problem of allowing government banning propaganda is
| it allows government to ban anything they label as
| propaganda. There is no law defining what's propaganda,
| so you just end up with the government being able to ban
| any information they don't like.
|
| Imagine the government drums up for another illegal war
| like Iraq using fake evidence, and we ban all counter
| evidence as "foreign propaganda". Do you not see how
| dangerous that gets?
|
| >That, for me, is enough of a reason to ban it and
| justify it under our constitution
|
| The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled in the past
| foreign propaganda is protected speech under First
| Amendment.
|
| You cannot strip American citizens' rights to receive
| foreign propaganda if they choose to do so.
| drawkward wrote:
| You left a few words off in my first quote. I did not say
| anything about banning propaganda! I am talking about the
| system of dissemination, not its content.
| Zak wrote:
| What criteria define social media that's ban-worthy for you?
| Does it require the combination of user-generated content and
| a personalized algorithmic feed which characterizes modern
| corporate social media, or do you extend it to a broader
| range of ways people can interact over the internet?
| drawkward wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, and therefore I am not qualified to make
| that kind of definition.
| Zak wrote:
| I'm not asking for a legal definition. This is Hacker
| News; in looking for a definition that would enable
| hackers to correctly classify things most of the time.
| drawkward wrote:
| I think there is probably some combination of the
| following aspects:
|
| -Content is user-generated -Content is curated by the
| company (i.e., users don't have the ability to fully turn
| off what is shown to them) -Content is not universal
| (i.e., users don't see the same thing)
| moi2388 wrote:
| One thing that would make social media much better, is forcing
| providers by law to ensure everybody sees the same content.
|
| Example: I can be on Reddit in subreddit A. You can be on Reddit
| in subreddit B.
|
| We would obviously still see different content.
|
| But ALL members of subreddit A MUST see the exact same topics in
| the exact same order with the exact same comments and
| likes/dislikes.
|
| This would help build up a more shared "worldview" like mediums
| such as radio and TV did; you chose the channel, but everybody on
| the same channel gets the same information.
|
| This would then allow the service provider and potentially
| government agencies, as well as users themselves, to moderate
| harmful content or false information more reliably.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > One thing that would make social media much better, is
| forcing providers by law to ensure everybody sees the same
| content.
|
| This sounds terrible. I don't want to see the same content as
| everyone else. A good chunk of Youtube right now is rightwing
| content that I don't have to see.
| moi2388 wrote:
| You won't. You will still see the videos from the channels
| you subscribed to.
|
| It's just that everybody subscribing to that particular
| channel most get the same information from it; the same
| videos, the same comments, the same likes/dislikes
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| I'm going to blow your mind, but at one point you weren't
| subscribed to the channel. You found that channel likely
| through the algo.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Originally (and I don't know if this is still the case) the
| case for randomizing the content view on Reddit a bit (fuzzy
| numbering) was as a layer which helped prevent vote
| manipulation and brigading/bandwagoning. There may be similar
| reason for other platforms where not being exactly the same is
| unrelated to tuning the types of information presented to
| people. I.e. I don't know how much it matters that "all member
| absolutely must see the same exact order" as much as "the
| ordering defaults are not gamed for individual engagement"
|
| Even then, I'd settle for "must have the option to use
| chronological/absolute vote based/similar type by default" type
| option. I'm not as convinced I know what others need to do to
| save themselves as much as I'm I think it'd be nice if it to be
| easy for us to be able to choose how we engage with content
| feeds (regardless what the platform is).
|
| And then there is a matter of content groups when it comes to
| exposure rather than the addictive nature. Does it really make
| a difference if people end up seeing only /r/MyEchoChamberA and
| /r/MyEchoChamberB anyways. After all, each is perfectly
| representing the same echo chamber to all of the users who
| bother to browse there.
| ertdfgcvb wrote:
| On what order would you show things? Upvotes/downvotes? Could
| work but "social" media implies we all have different social
| circles, so my social circle of friends is very different from
| yours. I can probably see posts from my friends which you won't
| (since you're not friends with them) Maybe I follow certain
| pages that you don't. How do we still have the same feed then?
| logicchains wrote:
| >This would help build up a more shared "worldview" like
| mediums such as radio and TV did; you chose the channel, but
| everybody on the same channel gets the same information.
|
| That would be a nightmare, going back to the bad old days when
| people's worldviews were entirely decided by whatever flavour
| of government propaganda their preferred TV station happened to
| favour.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Oh yea, thank god we left that world behind completely. It
| would be terrible like, some major news network was
| completely in the tank for one of our political parties, and
| a huge percentage of the population kept it on basically
| 24/7. That would completely poison our discourse. Good thing
| the internet fixed that one.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| >huge percentage of the population
|
| I happen to have just looked into this, and it turns out
| this percentage peaks at 1 (for Sean Hannity, apparently?),
| but typically is around 0.5%. Less huge than you may be
| imagining
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > ensure everybody sees the same content.
|
| Terrible idea.
| sobellian wrote:
| At some point SCOTUS will have to revisit the massive deference
| they give the other branches on natsec issues. We are days away
| from a new president applying blanket tariffs to everything on
| the same grounds. What isn't national security in that light?
| They might as well start with this case and send an early
| message. Otherwise they'll be fielding all manner of lawsuits
| over ridiculous overreach for the foreseeable future.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| And nothing of value was lost.
| ado__dev wrote:
| I created a quick tutorial on how to backup and download all of
| your TikToks.
|
| https://x.com/adocomplete/status/1879568249261621572
| yreg wrote:
| You are linking the wrong script in the initial tweet. You
| meant to link to this one:
| https://gist.github.com/kukicado/e92b31601117060f6895ecefc98...
| xnx wrote:
| Doesn't "yt-dlp https://www.tiktok.com/@YOURPROFILE" also work?
| ado__dev wrote:
| oh wow, didn't think that would work, but it does. even
| better!
| subarctic wrote:
| So basically, tiktok will be unavailable in the US for 24 hours
| until Trump takes office and then he'll probably extend the
| deadline
| itomato wrote:
| When the President literally owns a competitor called "Truth
| Social" do you think he will not take the America First
| pledge??
| LeroyRaz wrote:
| Tiktok is obviously a massive national security risk, and I find
| it funny people don't see that.
|
| It is extremely well established that propaganda has great value,
| and so allowing a foreign adversary the capacity to potentially
| control the information your citizens receive in a clandestine
| way is insanely dangerous.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| Reddit is the exact same - just a propaganda machine
| redactd wrote:
| I disagree. While I think there are definitely biases on
| Reddit, there is a difference between users, individual
| moderators, or even established sub policies having a
| political leaning versus an algorithmically masked propaganda
| machine like TikTok.
|
| Call me old fashion, but I put more faith in a profit seeking
| US company (recently public) with light government oversight
| than a foreign owned black box.
| barbazoo wrote:
| You might be missing the fact that there is a significant
| amount of bots on Reddit pushing certain agendas giving the
| impression they're foreign sponsored.
| redactd wrote:
| you may be right that there is a, "significant amount of
| bots on Reddit pushing certain agendas". However, Reddit
| is fundamentally designed to incentivize authentic
| engagement and to punish bots. If it wasn't the case
| before is certainly is now given the fact that they are
| now extracting value from the authenticity of data on
| their platform via AI Training data sales. Reddit is
| fiduciarily encouraged to tamp down bots and spam because
| they are financially incentivized to have the most
| genuine data.
|
| All of that aside it is irrelevant because we are talking
| about third parties (users/bots) pushing propaganda vs
| the platform owner itself pushing propaganda.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I'd vouch for fake-ness of political Reddit as well
|
| it's easier to see phrasing and logical inconsistencies
| when you don't share the opinion that gets forced, sadly
| advisedwang wrote:
| Yes, we should also forbid books published by Chinese
| publishing companies because the CPC might pressure those
| companies to put propaganda in the books.
|
| We should also forbid Hollywood from selling movies in China,
| because as we've already seen that means the movies are being
| adjusted to get approval in China.
|
| We should also forbid Chinese citizens talking to Americans,
| because they might convince Americans on a topic we don't can't
| allow American minds to be changed about.
| barbazoo wrote:
| The first two don't apply because they don't share the hyper
| personalized nature of social media. No two people see the
| same thing so it's impossible to react to foreign propaganda.
| Books and movies don't work that way.
|
| Third example is irrelevant because it's impossible to
| achieve the efficiency (reach) that social media has.
| mightyham wrote:
| I don't really see your point. Tiktok is a video library.
| With the exception of private videos, anything hosted on
| the app can be viewed by anyone. Whether or not the app
| provides a personalized algorithmic selection of videos
| does not have any bearing on the more fundamental question
| of whether American's have the right to access foreign
| media.
| tevon wrote:
| Of course it's relevant. TikTok should be considered a
| broadcaster. We have not allowed foreign ownership of a
| broadcaster since 1934.
|
| A book does not broadcast in the same way.
| mightyham wrote:
| Since when are social media apps considered broadcasters?
| In fact, section 230 legally protects social media apps
| from the civil liabilities of broadcasting. You're also
| just distracting from the actual issue. Being that, as
| citizens of a democratic republic promoting free speech,
| press, association, etc., do you think we have a right to
| view foreign media (including broadcasts for that
| matter)?
| barbazoo wrote:
| > TikTok should be considered a broadcaster.
|
| > Since when are social media apps considered
| broadcasters?
|
| Not OP but they said _should be_ , not _is_
| gretch wrote:
| We live in a democracy. If you get enough people to vote for
| this platform, then sure let's do it.
|
| You can't compare a popular bipartisan law to a hypothetical
| thing you just made up.
|
| Peoples' votes matter
| WesleyJohnson wrote:
| The popular vote for president would like a word. And, yes,
| I know Trump won that too, but the point still stands that
| it doesn't matter.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > It is extremely well established that propaganda has great
| value, and so allowing a foreign adversary the capacity to
| potentially control the information your citizens receive in a
| clandestine way is insanely dangerous.
|
| I would say that allowing a ~foreign adversary~ _anyone_ the
| capacity to potentially control the information your citizens
| receive in a clandestine way is insanely dangerous. Why do we
| let domestic ones do it? We 're seeing what they're doing to
| our societies.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| It would have been farcically easy to legislate that any large
| social media company have to expose their algorithm to a
| regulator, with a capacity for spot checks and immense
| sanctions if they fail to comply.
|
| If your argument is "we can't allow any foreign owned social
| media to operate in the US", then how can you possible argue
| that the rest of the world should allow American applications?
| corimaith wrote:
| >If your argument is "we can't allow any foreign owned social
| media to operate in the US", then how can you possible argue
| that the rest of the world should allow American
| applications?
|
| Are they not free to ban it if they wish? But they won't
| because contrary to what some people would like to push, the
| CCP in fact is alot more sinister than the US Government, and
| foreigners do recognize that in genuine security analysis.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| the problem is that similar efforts in other countries have
| been criticized as "internet censorship"
|
| either Russia and Indonesia are in the right - or US is in the
| wrong
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Allowing the government to control the information its citizens
| receive is dangerous.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I think the American government is contorting its public
| argument to avoid saying this plainly because there are many
| American companies that control information for most of the
| world, and they don't want other countries to go "Hmm, hang on
| a minute..."
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| National security risk to which nation? The kids on TikTok seem
| to understand pretty well why it all the sudden was wrongthink.
| ossobuco wrote:
| Can you provide examples of China controlled propaganda
| happening on Tiktok?
|
| Things that are factually true don't count, obviously.
| corimaith wrote:
| They do see it, they just support that very foreign adversary
| (or may even be such adversaries).
| hxegon wrote:
| Can you, someone, anyone in this toxic wasteland of a thread
| please point out what propaganda you're talking about? Point to
| an actual thing that justifies banning something 140M Americans
| use daily and don't just expound upon your vague national
| security paranoia.
| deepfriedrice wrote:
| "Where are the examples" is a straw man. Imagine the ways a
| political enemy might exploit limitless access to the
| attention of 140M Americans. The calculus seems to be that a
| false negative will be much more catastrophic than a false
| positive.
| hxegon wrote:
| I understand what you're saying but that argument I don't
| think should apply here. Having some kind of evidence to
| back up a drastic action like this is not something that
| should be argued for, it should be a given. I've asked at
| least 5 different times for people to point to _anything_
| material, and no one has come up with anything. I 'm not
| saying there is no threat, I could be wrong and there could
| be a massive threat, but if there is one shouldn't we be
| able to point to something more than "it could happen" and
| being paranoid about it? I'm being asked to have faith in
| institutions/politicians that have a long, long, long
| proven track record of not having my best interests at
| heart and I can't accept that when they have clear
| conflicting interests / motives.
| madebylaw wrote:
| Why does the ban need to be reactive for you to understand
| it?
| thuanao wrote:
| What do you mean national security risk? What risk to whom,
| exactly? Do you mean that the algorithm can portray communism
| or China in a positive light? Can you provide an example video
| that constitutes this threat?
| mileycyrusXOXO wrote:
| "The internet is obviously a massive national security risk,
| and I find it funny people don't see that"
|
| "Libraries are obviously a massive national security risk, and
| I find it funny people don't see that."
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| I'm tearing my hair out... how is the solution here not just
| better data privacy laws? Doesn't that solve all the issues, both
| domestic and international?
| syspec wrote:
| Because it's not necessarily about the / data privacy/, it's
| about the ability of a foreign adversary to influence the
| American populous in subtle ways over time.
|
| By simply suppressing topics, or elevating trends they might
| find helpful in swaying the populous.
|
| That's what propaganda is and it works.
| ossobuco wrote:
| > By simply suppressing topics, or elevating trends they
| might find helpful in swaying the populous.
|
| Isn't that exactly what US media does as well? Every media
| has an owner with his own interests, the information they'll
| provide you will be carefully crafted to not harm those
| interests.
| havefunbesafe wrote:
| Best case: I am not propagandized by any state media ||
| Second worst case: I am propagandized by my own country's
| media || Worst case: I am propagandized by a foreign
| adversary's media
| ossobuco wrote:
| So just blind nationalism? Who guarantees that your own
| country's propaganda is more beneficial to you?
| andy24 wrote:
| The amount of mental gymnastics to justify censorship in
| this thread is off the charts. A really solid anti utopia
| material. One can probably make a dystopian museum
| exhibition with quotes from this thread.
|
| On a similar note, I have never seen so much bigotry and
| populism on HN as in this and H1B threads.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > it's about the ability of a foreign adversary
|
| Hang on, 'foreign adversary'? Who makes all of America's
| stuff? Who sent so much of the jobs and manufacturing over
| there?
|
| > to influence the American populous [sic] in subtle ways
| over time.
|
| Eg, pointing out Israel's atrocities and how they lead right
| back to us, or about advantages of socialism compared to
| oligarchy.
|
| Most other countries allow foreign media to be aired quite
| freely. Any 'subtle influence' is in a sea of other
| influences, and quite diluted.
|
| Diverse media with free exchange of ideas leads to a populace
| with a chance of being informed. Restricting media to the US
| megacorps is obviously a terrible idea, no?
|
| > That's what propaganda is and it works.
|
| The solution to propaganda is to educate people and teach
| them critical thinking. However, that would damage the yacht
| class far too much.
| thuanao wrote:
| Link a video. What is the alleged propaganda that is so
| threatening to national security Americans can't be allowed
| to see it?
|
| In the article, this discussion, all the media I've read...
| I've yet to see a single example of this alleged propaganda
| and manipulation by the CPC. What propaganda? Manipulated
| into believing what?
| nemothekid wrote:
| It's not about data privacy - it's about social control. I
| don't know why it's always lost on every commentary that the
| TikTok ban became a widely bipartisan issue _after_ October
| 7th.
|
| TikTok was the only large social media platform that did not
| overtly deplatform Palestinian users and sympathizers.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Privacy is irrelevant in this case. It's a free line of
| propaganda for almost all our youth at their most vulnerable
| age.
| thiagoharry wrote:
| Yeah, at this age,they need to be fed only with US
| propaganda, just to be sure. Too bad that another country
| produced a better product to that demography.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Because the point is to funnel people to US apps where the US
| Govt has control of the narrative
|
| Data privacy is not the concern, or else they'd have done what
| you suggest
| jgrowl wrote:
| I believe there was a bill that addressed this, but if failed
| shortly before the TikTok stuff.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Because better data privacy laws would be bad for American
| companies for collecting the same data.
| hxegon wrote:
| Ding ding ding
| zackmorris wrote:
| TikTok practically saved my life by exposing me to alternate
| worldviews and the spiritual nature of existence, so the US
| government singling it out feels like a personal attack to me. To
| think of all of the people earning independent side incomes on
| TikTok - one of the few places outside of
| eBay/Craigslist/Uber/etc where that's even still possible - who
| will lose that lifeline, well, words like travesty barely convey
| the loss.
|
| I also don't buy the national security argument. Considering how
| much of our personal data is leaked through all of the other
| social media apps, as well as international ad markets, that
| argument is nonsense. This is about the US government and
| corporations going to any length to control the narrative as the
| US falls to authoritarian dystopia and fascism.
|
| I'm disappointed in the Democratic Party for not standing up for
| free speech and the rights of its constituency. It's forgotten
| where it came from, and what its goals are. This move means that
| there effectively is no Democratic Party - we just have two
| Republican Parties, both beholden to their corporate overlords
| (Meta and X/Twitter), as well as the billionaires behind them
| (Zuckerberg and Musk).
|
| It's also tragic beyond words that Donald Trump may be viewed as
| TikTok's savior if he lifts the ban after he takes office. After
| he has undermined so many aspects of American tradition and our
| institutions. It reeks.
|
| And most of all, I'm at least as mad at all of you as I am at
| myself for not organizing to stop this ban. 170 million TikTok
| users and we can't come together in solidarity to have real
| leverage on our elected officials? As in, withholding our
| participation in keeping the web running? Talk about ineffectual.
|
| The more time goes by, the more I'm giving up on the tech scene.
| We've lost our values on such a fundamental level that we are now
| the clear and present danger threatening the American democratic
| experiment. Shame on all of us.
|
| If we keep losing the way we are, and with the rise of AI and
| unprecedented wealth inequality, we have maybe 5-10 years left
| before revolution. We've entered a Cold Civil War, divided along
| ideological lines. I dearly hope I'm wrong and it doesn't come to
| violence, but after watching America's decline as a beacon of
| freedom post-9/11, the safest bet is continued cynicism.
| tolerance wrote:
| > TikTok practically saved my life by exposing me to alternate
| worldviews and the spiritual nature of existence
|
| If what you say is true then perhaps the credit is due to
| something that's Above being subject to the whims of society &
| you never needed the clock app & "the beacon of freedom" was
| acqui-hired sometime around the age you think we're headed back
| toward & the cynics are the sages.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Has anyone written up exactly how TikTok is a distinct national
| security risk?
|
| The best I've heard is "they get your data", which is something
| they surely can buy from Facebook through an intermediary, "they
| influence content", which is a moderation decision that every
| social media app does, and "there's a part of the report to
| congress that's redacted", that could be a recipe for tuna
| casserole for all I know.
|
| Edit: I'm assuming the downvotes are a way of saying "no"? I
| would assume that "national security threat" would involve some
| sort of concrete standard of harm or risk that could be
| communicated beyond "just trust us". I haven't even seen concrete
| examples of _what_ content they influence, just people assuring
| everyone that it happens and it's Bad.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Perhaps other countries will also regulate or ban social media
| companies.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Countries like China, where TikTok is from, already ban US
| social media.
|
| The other countries you're presumably thinking of are our
| allies and typically our propaganda aligns with their
| (governments') interests. China's interests do not.
| ponty_rick wrote:
| IMO they should be for children under 15.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| https://www.newsweek.com/australia-social-media-ban-teens-wh...
| pyrale wrote:
| I'm rooting for a Twitter ban in Europe. Musk has shown
| willingness to temper with elections in at least two European
| countries, and the ban would also leave a message for Zuck.
| cbeach wrote:
| You'd rather bad actors like Soros used their $billions to
| manipulate elections in the shadows? At least Musk is
| upfront.
|
| Like many celebrities he's chosen to endorse a political
| candidate and make donations. Like many celebrities he has
| large influence.
|
| But the difference with Musk is he's supporting a political
| side that you don't like.
| pyrale wrote:
| Foreign interference is foreign interference. If you don't
| tolerate it at home, don't promote it abroad.
| seventytwo wrote:
| Good.
|
| And I want this to set a precedent that we CAN reign in the
| social media companies.
| tdiff wrote:
| Americans may turn to experience of other countries. E.g. in
| Russia Istagram has been blocked for years, however it does not
| really stop everyone from using or running business in it.
| baxtr wrote:
| _> Privately held ByteDance is about 60% owned by institutional
| investors such as BlackRock and General Atlantic, while its
| founders and employees own 20% each. It has more than 7,000
| employees in the United States_
|
| That's probably a very stupid question, but is how this is a
| Chinese company when 60% are owned by American funds?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Presumably, the relevant factor here is not ownership on paper,
| but who has real control via being able to tell Bytedance
| employees (including the executives) what to do. Which, in this
| case, is assumed to be China's government leaders.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Presumably, yes, but is that actually how it works? I think
| we need a primer on how Chinese companies are structured.
| What does it mean to own 60% of a company if that doesn't
| give you any real control over the company?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Control can be separated from who is owed what share of
| economic profits. For example, some Alphabet and Meta
| shares having more voting power than others.
|
| On a more pragmatic level, even in the US "own" means what
| society will defend for you. However, the US (and other
| western countries) are presumed to have courts that have a
| higher probability of defending claims of ownership
| assuming you have the right paperwork. Whereas in places
| like China, it is presumed that your paperwork is less
| likely to entitle you to a defense.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Same way the Singaporean CEO is part of the CCP: He's not, it's
| not, but there are a lot of vested interests like Facebook
| lobbying to treat them as the boogeyman.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| That Tom Cotton interview was wild.
| nashashmi wrote:
| The tiktok ban law forbids chinese ownership of 20% and chinese
| control of 100%. That is how it is a chinese company, either by
| 20% ownership or 100% contro.
| gorlami wrote:
| In the US government's view, as expressed in its brief in the
| Supreme Court:
|
| "Because of the authoritarian structures and laws of the PRC
| regime, Chinese companies lack meaningful independence from the
| PRC's agenda and objectives. As a result, even putatively
| 'private' companies based in China do not operate with
| independence from the government. Indeed, "the PRC maintains a
| powerful Chinese Communist Party committee 'embedded in
| ByteDance' through which it can 'exert its will on the
| company.' ... the committee includes "at least 138 employees,"
| including ByteDance's "chief editor"
|
| ...
|
| "Even assuming that the law would recognize Zhang as a bona
| fide domiciliary of Singapore and not the PRC, ByteDance would
| nevertheless qualify as being "controlled by a foreign
| adversary" under one or more of the other statutory criteria.
| For instance, ByteDance is "headquartered in" China, which is
| sufficient on its own.... ByteDance also is "subject to the
| direction or control of " Chinese persons domiciled in China
| (in particular, Chinese Communist Party officials), which
| likewise is sufficient on its own."
|
| http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-656/336144/20241...
| CSSer wrote:
| The saddest part of this to me was watching congressional
| representatives try to wrestle with the Singapore thing and
| fail in hearings. It really made me feel like they thought
| they had some kind of gotcha when in reality all they did was
| publicly demonstrate how little they actually grasp the real
| national security threat at play.
| mproud wrote:
| Won't the website still work? Or do kids these days only open
| apps?
| thorum wrote:
| I don't understand why, with so much advanced warning that users
| would need a good replacement for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and
| Instagram Reels are still so bad. Why not invest in matching, at
| least, every TikTok UX feature? And beyond that, how are these
| two leading AI companies really unable to make a recommendation
| algorithm that actually shows people things they like?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| We'd be better off without a clone, whether its owned by a
| Western company or not.
| xnx wrote:
| I agree that it is unusual that YouTube and Instagram don't
| seem to be trying harder to court TikTok users. I assume this
| is because it would expose how much of an unpopular alternative
| they are.
|
| The user base is probably more important to the quality of the
| feed than the interface or the algorithm.
| dqv wrote:
| No really. The Shorts and Reels algorithms are so one
| dimensional. They both interpreted me disliking smug
| milquetoast rants about Republicans and Democrats as not
| wanting politics in my feed at all. I do want the politics, but
| I don't need it hammered into my head that Republicans are dumb
| as bricks. I don't need to see the performative Tom Cotton and
| Jasmine Crockett clips that have already been shown 100 times.
|
| TikTok's algo, OTOH, somehow understands that interests are
| multi-dimensional and that maybe I just want a different kind
| of politics or discussions that go deeper than cheap shots. I
| never in my life thought I'd encounter an anti-Marxist right-
| libertarian who _actually read and is familiar with all three
| volumes of Capital_ , but TikTok figured out that I'd find it
| interesting.
| gaoshan wrote:
| Banning individual apps in this manner is wrong, IMO. In a
| country where concepts like freedom of speech and restrictions on
| government censorship are not insignificant considerations (in
| theory, at a minimum) a decision like this is unfortunate. China
| bans apps... tons of apps... in order to maintain strict control
| over the content and identity of users. This strategy is not
| something the US should be mimicking.
|
| The claim that it's a "national security" risk and the ban is
| needed to mitigate that is silly. If it is really that then ban
| it from government facilities and devices. The actual risk from
| TikTok is no greater than the risk from Facebook, Instagram or
| any of a myriad of apps.
|
| The correct thing to do would be to strengthen laws that address
| the core concerns so that we are protected from ANY app that
| represents a threat to privacy or security. Just banning a single
| app (and then another, and another...) is ridiculous and goes
| against a number of things this country is supposed to stand for.
| randomopining wrote:
| So what if a conflict breaks out and the CCP essentially use
| TikTok as a pathway directly into the brains of millions of
| Americans. Let's say they tweak the algorithm with a button
| press to create confusion and public discord when we should be
| united to protect taiwan.
|
| That's a possible tool of disinformation.
| ok_dad wrote:
| WHAT IF aliens invade and take over TikTok and then use it to
| convince hard-working Americans to dive into the mouths of
| the aliens?
|
| It's a possible tool for aliens to make lunch.
| kccoder wrote:
| One of those scenarios is much more likely than the other.
| herbst wrote:
| You (the US) should definitely make same laws banning
| aliens from owning social media before it's to late!
| Think about the children!!1!
| tryauuum wrote:
| hm, create a law which gives government emergency powers to
| delete apps / ban ip networks in case of a war
|
| ---
|
| now that I think about it more banning foreign websites is
| the perfect way to brain wash
|
| 1. ban all foreign websites, because clearly it's a foreign
| influence on your people. "What if the war breaks" and so on
|
| 2. now you only have your local websites. Their owners are
| here and can be forced to mangle / edit content and bend it
| to your will. Where the foreign actor can ignore your
| requests local one can not
|
| We already have it in Russia. People use the ugly and banned
| Facebook because they know that at least it's less censored
| in regards to Russian topics than locally owned VK or dzen.
| And Facebook is less likely to provide your messages to the
| russian police
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Counterbalance to misinformation is, just, information.
| Strengthen the institutions that provide valuable and quality
| information and use them as counter. Why aren't PBS and such
| institutions funded to produce shorts that inform users and
| put those on Tiktok et all?
| karakot wrote:
| This is so fucking sad. As a russian american who lived
| through russian transition from relatively free country to an
| authoritarian one I'm getting dejavu vibes here(Putin started
| with taking over of all independent news sources like
| newspapers/tv and radio channels etc). This is not up to the
| government or some other people to decide what I read, what I
| watch where I get my information/news from. America has a
| beautiful concept of free speech, stick to it. I personally
| think that TikTok is a brain rot, but I still don't want any
| government involvement into this. Don't like it? - Don't use
| it.
| gaoshan wrote:
| Totally agree with this.
| phatfish wrote:
| I broadly agree with this, but there was a path for the Tiktok
| app to not be banned, which is basically the China playbook of
| handing over control to a domestically controlled entity. Which
| in the case of a social media company with the reach of Tiktok
| i don't think is unreasonable.
|
| Strengthened laws would be welcome, but all the social media
| companies would resist this as hard as they can. I don't see
| any real regulation happening until there is a crisis of some
| sort that will push it through against all the lobbyists and
| bought politicians.
| herbst wrote:
| If they would ban what they think tiktok does wrong. Mr
| Zuckerberg would be very sad I guess.
|
| But so much this, just banning TikTok will change nothing but
| more distrust in American politics
| spyder wrote:
| So they want to ban only the mobile app, but the Tiktok website
| would still work from the mobile browsers? Huh... I guess they
| can get less user data from the website than an app, but the
| content manipulation and the usage data collection could still
| happen that way if that's the real fear of the US...
| warner25 wrote:
| This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but
| this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for
| stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also
| says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with
| information about the ban, not to the main page of the website.
| Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN
| level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to
| circumvent it. No?
|
| [I made the same comment elsewhere, but I'm putting it here too
| because I'm really puzzled by this.]
| swatcoder wrote:
| TikTok is ostensibly a commercial product meant to earn
| revenue that offset costs, and those costs are _tremendous_.
|
| Meanwhile, the ban will make it impossible for them to (a)
| enter into trade relationships with the advertisers and other
| partners that bring in revenu, and (b) share that revenue
| with monetized users.
|
| Continuing to run it at scale as a website without ads or
| monetization payouts (and without any legal protections)
| would pretty well blow the cover of it being a legitimate
| international business.
| warner25 wrote:
| That makes sense, but means that banning it from making
| money through (a) and (b) would be sufficient to kill it
| quickly (if it's a legitimate business, as you said),
| without directly taking it away from users and causing so
| much political uproar.
| swatcoder wrote:
| That amounts to the same thing and ByteDance would
| present it as the same thing in their PR effort, so
| nothing material would be different.
|
| Meanwhile, the kind of law that would allow a business to
| "operate" but disallow it from making money is probably
| close to unprecedented and would look like even more
| peculiar targeting. It doesn't really even make sense as
| operating a business naturally implies participating in
| commerce.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Let's remember this when the discussion again centers around the
| US' immense commercial success.
|
| It is easy when you have been placed at an advantageous place and
| use all the tricks in the book against competition.
| tnt128 wrote:
| Let's be clear about one thing: it's never about protecting the
| privacy of private citizens--that's just the justification.
|
| Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools
| for mass influence, second only to religion.
|
| The U.S. has held a monopoly on this power, leveraging it to
| gather data on citizens worldwide and projecting our value
| systems onto others.
|
| Banning TikTok is simply an effort by us to maintain that
| monopoly, and making sure a foreign adversary do not wield such
| power.
| mullingitover wrote:
| The US censorship of Chinese social media apps on these grounds
| sure makes it look like China was completely justified in doing
| it first.
| some_random wrote:
| Could you elaborate on that? I have no clue how the US
| banning TikTok for granting the CCP the ability to
| algorithmically influence the views of Americans somehow
| justifies the decade plus of the GFW, blocking Western social
| media, rampant censorship, etc.
| mullingitover wrote:
| The US government has never provided any direct evidence of
| their claims of CCP puppet-mastery, the whole thing is
| generally some combination of "Trust me bro" and "Well
| obviously China's government is gonna control a Chinese
| company."
|
| Meanwhile China's reasoning for blocking US companies has
| been eerily similar arguments the entire time. Hard to
| prove them wrong when we have the major aristocrats of US
| tech companies completely prostrating themselves at Mar-a-
| Lago, offering bribes (er, sorry, the going term is
| "funding inauguration parties") to the incoming
| administration in broad daylight, staffing themselves with
| party officials, etc.
|
| Arguably _both are right_ , and it's a shame because the
| general working class people of both nations have more in
| common with each other than they do with their ruling
| classes. I think the thing that terrifies those in
| authority the most is the idea that the citizenry might
| realize this if there's enough communication.
| Raidion wrote:
| I think the OP is saying that both nations are banning
| software because of the risks of the software/data
| collection posing risks to the political stability of each
| nation. You can obviously say "our reason is better because
| X", but the outcomes being the same means that there is
| justification.
|
| Both sides say it's worth banning "Tiktok/Google for
| granting the CCP/USA the ability to algorithmically
| influence the views of Chinese/Americans".
| tnt128 wrote:
| Data sovereignty -- the idea that every country should
| protect and prevent its citizens' data from foreign
| entities.
|
| We never discussed this seriously before because we held a
| monopoly on it. For decades, other countries provided us
| with a direct feed of their data. Only recently have they
| begun to grasp the ramifications of that.
|
| China never bought into that narrative. They have
| consistently upheld their data sovereignty policy,
| requiring foreign entities to host servers within their
| borders to operate, and that looks like the direction the
| rest of the world is heading.
|
| I wish for an open world where data & communication flows
| freely, but it's unclear who can be trusted to wield that
| power.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| ???
|
| Isn't it the reverse? China has censored/banned many US apps
| and websites for a long time, surely turnabout is fair play?
|
| Hell, TikTok _itself_ is already banned in China, irony of
| ironies.
| tnt128 wrote:
| China didn't ban U.S. apps. it maintains a policy that sets
| a high bar for foreign operators, such as requiring
| domestic servers, domestic partners legally responsible for
| operations, content access and moderation to meet local
| standards, etc.
|
| U.S. apps and websites simply choose not to operate there
| due to these requirements.
|
| The U.S. has been complaining about this for years,
| advocating for a free internet without censorship in the
| Chinese market. But now that Chinese apps have access to
| American data, we've begun implementing the same measures.
| theultdev wrote:
| > content access and moderation to meet local standards
|
| what a nice way to say forcing a backdoor to identify,
| spy on, and oppress citizens.
|
| but yeah I guess oppression of people is a "high bar" for
| foreign operators to meet.
|
| backdoors are wrong here and are wrong there.
| rez9x wrote:
| We can't have people doing things like searching for
| Tiananman Square or Mao Zedong or talking about how
| Taiwan and Hong Kong want complete independence from
| China.
|
| I'm sure a big part of the cost is the additional
| infrastructure and manpower to implement all of China's
| censorship, tracking, etc.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Ah, more misinformation from the PRC defense squad, right
| on time!
|
| > China didn't ban U.S. apps.
|
| Yes, it did.
|
| It's not just that the websites and apps don't operate as
| normal businesses within China, but you can't even reach
| the foreign versions from within China without using a
| VPN. _That 's_ what makes them truly banned.
|
| There are plenty of Chinese websites who do not operate
| as businesses within the US, but Americans can still
| freely access the sites if they want to, thus they're not
| banned.
|
| Please, read this and educate yourself about China's
| firewall: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_website
| s_blocked_in_...
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I can get to the main Xinhua news website -- the Chinese
| one, not some US-specific page -- easily enough as an
| American. You definitely can't do the equivalent from
| within China, you can't get to Voice of America, or the
| New York Times, or similar sites.
|
| That's the difference. It's not about operating as a
| business within the country, it's about banning access to
| even the foreign version of the site or app.
|
| China commonly bans Western websites and apps, even ones
| that have never operated or attempted to operate as
| businesses within China. The US doing the same is
| relatively rare, situations like this TikTok ban are very
| uncommon.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| The difference being American citizens used to have the final
| say while the Chinese never did.
|
| Congratulations, you turned the U.S into an authoritarian
| clone of China.
| some_random wrote:
| That's mostly true and it's a good thing for the US to prevent
| hostile, autocratic, foreign powers from gaining undue cultural
| power.
| josho wrote:
| I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic
| private institutions having undue cultural power is proving
| to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country
| has done to us.
|
| Don't believe me, we've got lots of data correlating the rise
| of social media and mental health crisis. As time moves on
| the evidence linking the two continues to become stronger.
| chinathrow wrote:
| I guess the counterpoint here is that we have lots of data
| how external actors (e.g. Russia) is influencing large
| parts of the political landscape in Europe right now.
| motorest wrote:
| > I think you've been propagandized because having
| autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power
| is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a
| foreign country has done to us.
|
| That's pure, shameless whataboutism, and one that
| desperately tries to hide the fact that totalitarian
| regimes are using social media service as a tool to control
| you and your opinions.
|
| You can bring up any bogeyman you'd like, but you are
| failing to address the fact that these totalitarian regimes
| clearly are manipulating you to act against your own best
| interests.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| How are you not doing the exact same thing?
| motorest wrote:
| > How are you not doing the exact same thing?
|
| I'm not trying to distract people away from discussing
| how totalitarian regimes are abusing services like TikTok
| to manipulate people from Democratic countries to act
| against their best interests and in line with the
| totalitarian regime's interests.
|
| Now, can we go back to discuss how the CCP is using the
| likes of TikTok to manipulate people to do their bidding?
| Or is the subject being discussed verboten?
| nrb wrote:
| You strained to look past the parent's point, nowhere did
| they excuse the private institutions for their part in
| this; just that a totally unaccountable foreign power
| having this capability is not ideal.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| uh... "... worse for our culture than anything a foreign
| country has done to us"... _yet_. this is only true because
| we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation-- up to
| now, the U.S. has had a monopoloy on social media giants
| and the like. it is absolutely not guaranteed that this
| will hold true, and there are many reasons to suspect that
| it won 't be true. given how china views about U.S.
| sovereignty when it comes to setting up their own (secret)
| de facto government, police state, etc. on U.S. soil, it
| would be shocking if they _didn 't_ put their thumb on the
| scale.
|
| and none of that is to say that i agree with the ban-- i
| think the mere fact of how unamerican, frankly, taking
| possession of foreign assets for american gain at others'
| expense is as blatant a signal as possible that we
| shouldn't be doing it. if we are trying to protect america,
| western values, etc., if we don't act in accordance with
| those values, what are we even protecting? the way to
| protect the american way of life is not through becoming
| more "unamerican".
|
| in my personal opinion, the so-called "decline of western
| values", or whatever, has nothing to do with imperialism,
| nor to do with those values being short-sighted or wrong.
| it is because of our collective crisis of confidence in
| these values because of the (many) mistakes we have made
| along the way. the moral compass still points essentially
| in the same direction; it's just that for whatever reason
| we seem to have convinced ourselves that we don't want to
| go North after all, and instead prefer to just wander
| around the map aimlessly (all the while shitting on how the
| compass isn't taking us where we want to go). and so now we
| have people who unironically defend organizations like
| Hamas at the expense of the United States as though
| believing in universal freedom and equality of opportunity
| is merely a "cultural" value, rather than an absolute one.
| and, more insanely, that these values are somehow
| subordinate to the political issue du jour. these values
| don't give anyone carte blanche to coerce others who don't
| share them, but the idea that they are somehow subjective
| or relative-- that they are negotiable-- is the height of
| insanity.
| drawkward wrote:
| how did you manage to shoehorn israel in here? seems
| entirely irrelevant.
| Aunche wrote:
| > having autocratic private institutions having undue
| cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than
| anything a foreign country has done to us
|
| Dogs kill more Americans than lions, but that doesn't mean
| that we should be letting people have lions as pets.
|
| I'd personally be happy to see something like Australia's
| recent restriction of teen use of social media in the US,
| but bringing that up now is just a whataboutism.
| toofy wrote:
| i would argue, if it's that powerful, it should be illegal
| for anyone to have that sort of power. from china to musk to
| zuckerberg to religions.
|
| we really should ask ourselves why we're continuing to allow
| some to continue these abuses.... there should be laws in
| place to stop all of them.
| dingnuts wrote:
| The type of power China has is very different than Zuck's.
| You aren't going to get taken to a black site for talking
| about Tianamen Square on Facebook. (or something like the
| Tusla Race Massacre may be a better example, since that is
| embarrassing to the US similarly to Tianamen Square in
| China)
| drawkward wrote:
| Agreed; let's ban social media.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It would be nice if they could also prevent hostile
| autocratic domestic(ish) powers from leveraging their current
| cultural power. But they didn't, so naturally those in power
| are going to build their moat to maintain it.
| dhc02 wrote:
| I have been coming around to the idea that we should ban
| all* algorithmic content surfacing.
|
| It's taken a while, but the longer we go down this path,
| the more clear it seems that it is impossible to design a
| content algorithm that does not have significant negative
| cultural side effects. This is not to say that content
| algorithms don't have benefits; they do. It's just that
| they can't be useful (i.e., designed to optimize for some
| profitable metric) without causing harm.
|
| I think something like asbestos is a good metaphor:
| Extremely useful, but the long-term risks outweigh any
| possible gains.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > It's just that they can't be useful (i.e., designed to
| optimize for some profitable metric) without causing
| harm.
|
| That's not the pattern I've seen, as close as you are to
| it.
|
| I've seen lots of platforms be wildly useful. Digg was
| good for a while; StumpleUpon, Pinterest, Instagram,
| TikTok, Twitter, Reddit and even Facebook _all_ had
| periods at the start where they added real value to
| people 's lives.
|
| At some point they start to "optimize for some profitable
| metric" - and quickly become heinous.
|
| The problem isn't the algorithm; it's that it gets
| twisted toward profit. And that's basically a tautology -
| once you start trying to suck money out of the equation
| for yourself, that juice has to come from somewhere.
|
| I can envision a platform that _isn 't_ based on profit
| being far more useful than harmful - if it can only ward
| off the manipulations of the yacht class.
| unsui wrote:
| > if it can only ward off the manipulations of the yacht
| class.
|
| The inevitable enshittification of goods and services
| once they reach a certain level of maturity (i.e.,
| profitability) basically guarantees that the yachted-
| classes will be involved.
|
| Given this de-facto inevitability, the original premise
| (that algorithmic content is eventually a bad thing)
| makes more sense
| mandmandam wrote:
| It's _not_ inevitable though.
|
| Emails, torrents, Mastodon, VLC, Blender, Linux - They're
| all either solid, or even getting better over time.
|
| Why? Because the capital class were explicitly denied, by
| design or by principle.
|
| Like with healthcare, transport, post services, housing,
| and much else, there's simply areas where the public good
| is too important to give the profit motive too strong a
| foothold. I believe social media is one of those areas.
| S_Bear wrote:
| Reddit is still extremely valuable if you curate it
| heavily. My entire feed is my narrow interests and
| passions (though I still use old.reddit, which helps. The
| minute that's gone, I probably am too)
| bojan wrote:
| It's a good thing for anyone. Which is why the EU should find
| the way to restrain, or completely ban if necessary, American
| social media.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. A foreign enemy
| keeps us from focusing on our own domestic policies. Turns
| out, if you look into it, _we 're_ the baddies.
|
| In addition to widespread data collection and social
| manipulation, we also intentionally shove our culture down
| the throats of other nations in order to maintain cultural
| supremacy.
| Aunche wrote:
| > A foreign enemy keeps us from focusing on our own
| domestic policies.
|
| The nice thing about fiction is that you can make anything
| sound plausible. Ironically, what people consider the most
| prosperous time of America happened to be the time when
| America was opposing a vague foreign adversary. If
| anything, nihilist platitudes like this that have created a
| void in civic engagement that megacorporations and
| malicious actors are happy to fill in.
| tdeck wrote:
| > Ironically, what people consider the most prosperous
| time of America happened to be the time when America was
| opposing a vague foreign adversary.
|
| It happened to be at a time when the rest of the world's
| industrial capacity had been almost completely destroyed
| by a devastating world war which hardly touched US
| infrastructure.
| eszed wrote:
| ?Porque no los dos?
|
| Outsized returns to the post-war US economy were
| consequent on being the only intact industrial economy;
| the regulatory system which ensured those gains be shared
| with the working class was a response to communism.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| tencent should divest from reddit?
| cpursley wrote:
| We should return the favor then and shut down the psyops
| divisions like this (and these are just the public ones):
|
| https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/specialty-
| careers/sp...
| hxegon wrote:
| The US is a hostile autocratic power with undue cultural
| power on our own citizens, so even if it's a given that
| TikTok is mostly a propaganda platform (which I completely,
| categorically disagree with), wouldn't it be better to at
| least have a choice? Or be able to compare between them? You
| are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't capable
| of making their own decisions which is about as autocratic as
| it gets.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| "You are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't
| capable of making their own decisions" - the overwhelming
| majority of HN users would support U.K style ISP blocking
| of websites and apps deemed hostile to the government.
|
| Endless comments about reciprocity, as if the American
| citizen doesn't have freedom of expression rights vastly
| different than Chinese citizens.
| hxegon wrote:
| Yeah I think you're right. Unfortunately I'm coming to
| appreciate that many of the users here are heavily pro-
| censorship / "protect the children" types. Never thought
| I would see it happen. Feel like I'm waking up from a
| coma realizing everything's changed. It's so antithetical
| to the HN I knew and loved.
| xnx wrote:
| > Social networking platforms are among the most effective
| tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
|
| Fox News and talk radio demonstrate that isn't true in the US.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it's never about protecting the privacy of private citizens
| --that's just the justification_
|
| ...but it wasn 't. It was clearly and explicitly about national
| security.
| andrewla wrote:
| > Social networking platforms are among the most effective
| tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
|
| There is no evidence for this belief. Really for either
| religion or for "social networking platforms".
|
| You could maybe make the claim that this is true in terms of
| reach, but the implication here is that "these mediums can be
| used deliberately to influence people in a chosen direction",
| and this is just kind of silly. It's fun to imagine that some
| nefarious powers (or benificent powers) have some magical
| insight into how to make people believe things but this just
| isn't true and I think intuitively we all understand that.
|
| To make the case that this is true you would have to do an
| examination of all attempts to spread messages, not just look
| at successful cases where messages catch on. Nobody has the
| power to do this on demand through some principled approach, or
| else they would be emperor of the world.
| drawkward wrote:
| I don't recall legacy media spreading tourettes-like tics...
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9553600/
| andrewla wrote:
| Are you implying that this was a deliberate attempt by an
| agent to create tourettes-like tics? Are you also asserting
| that this hypothetical boogieman can do similar attacks on
| demand because of their understanding of social contagion
| [1]?
|
| The idea of social networking (or other broadcast or widely
| disseminated media) being able to influence beliefs or
| behavior is kind of inarguable. In specific cases there
| might be causal confusion - whether the media was effective
| because of existing trends or piggybacked on other
| phenomena vs. creating the effect directly. But this is a
| far cry from claiming that it can be deliberately
| weaponized, or that it is more effective for this purpose
| than other means of information dissemination.
|
| [1] Social contagion, a phenomenon that long predates the
| internet
| drawkward wrote:
| I am simply providing evidence for the claim
|
| >Social networking platforms are among the most effective
| tools for mass influence
| andrewla wrote:
| To be a tool it has to be able to be directed towards an
| end.
|
| Hurricanes are effective for coastal property
| destruction, but they can't be used as a tool
| drawkward wrote:
| I have a hammer on my shelf that I have not used yet; is
| it therefore not a tool?
| andrewla wrote:
| The shallow response here is that use is important. The
| hammer on your shelf is an effective tool for hammering
| in nails.
|
| Is the hammer on your shelf an effective tool for
| influencing public opinion? It can be used for that --
| you can smash statues of people you find objectionable
| and maybe have a greater effect on public opinion than
| you could by trying to tear down statues with your bare
| hands (although the nature of the public opinion change
| is not really that predictable). But it is not a tool for
| that because it cannot be directed to the general purpose
| of influencing public opinion. You cannot convince people
| that assisted suicide should be acceptable or that we
| shouldn't keep cats as pets or that we should not go to
| war to defend Taiwan using the hammer.
|
| Similarly, TikTok.
| drawkward wrote:
| I'd call your reasoning shallow, but there isn't any. You
| state a bunch of stuff about a hammer and conclude
| "therefore TikTok cannot influence public opinion." It is
| manifestly obvious that many advertisers pay TikTok huge
| sums of money to literally influence not merely public
| opinion (of their products) but to incite action (buying
| those products).
|
| Tiktok has incited action on its own behalf:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/tiktok-phone-
| cal...
|
| https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/press-
| releas...
|
| Your claims are ridiculous and your arguments are
| nonexistent.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| It demonstrates Western weakness. Remember, during the Cold war
| the "iron curtain" was meant to prevent Soviets from seeing
| Western culture, political points of views.
|
| The United States does not feel confident in its ability to
| persuade Americans that it's model, culture and political
| ideals are superior to global alternatives. Hence a Western
| Iron Curtain.
| antiterra wrote:
| Simple exposure to culture, propaganda and points of view is
| child's play compared to the modern strategy of inciting
| discord by amplifying existing differences and mass scale
| disinformation.
|
| Don't forget that part of the reason there's a
| compartmentalization between Douyin and Tiktok is China's own
| concerns about their nationals being exposed to outside
| influence in a manner far greater than what the US dictates
| the other way.
|
| I really enjoyed TikTok and will miss it, but it's hard to
| argue that it didn't at least provide the _potential_ for the
| CCP to more directly have an intentionally negative influence
| on western audiences.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| You fundamentally misunderstand the rights American
| citizens have that are being violated. The government
| doesn't get to decide where it's citizens get their
| information from. We're supposed to be free to come to our
| own conclusions even if presented with propaganda and
| disinformation.
|
| Once the government decides it has the right to curate what
| media it's citizens are exposed to you are living in a n
| authoritarian state.
|
| These actions make me more hostile to my country.
| antiterra wrote:
| I made no assertions as to whether or not this was an
| appropriate trade-off.
|
| The issue at hand, however, is not about any particular
| media content being censored but about the manipulation
| of how that media is presented or suppressed by a foreign
| source. I think people should be given the freedom to
| choose what to view, but I am also not naive enough to
| think that we as a whole are not susceptible to
| influence, often without even being aware of how we are
| influenced.
|
| To the end that the US has a national security interest
| here: We have other laws on foreign political influence
| like FARA and the Logan Act that have similar tradeoffs
| around free speech and free association, but these elicit
| much less controversy. There's a fundamental question:
| should the ideals of free speech be allowed to undermine
| the framework that allows that free speech to exist? To
| some, saying yes to that question is like arguing the US
| Constitution is a death pact.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Repeating my other comment:
|
| Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider has
| to bake American policy position into its algorithm, what's
| going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or
| Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own
| algorithm?
|
| From here on out, are only US government collaborating social
| media apps going to be allowed to scale? If so that is a
| _chilling_ effect on speech. I _want_ to use my own algorithm.
| I don 't need China nor the USG to tell me what I want to
| watch. I'm perfectly willing to write my own feed algorithm to
| do it, I tinker with several on Bluesky right now. Will this be
| banned?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Is there even a single phone that doesn't have a component
| that's derived from China? It's never been about security. I
| agree, the US wants access and they can't make a foreign
| company comply, even trying exposes the US.
|
| Other countries have rules, make rules, the reality is they
| don't want to make rules because that might persuade foreign
| companies from not doing business here. Why make rules when you
| can get a warrant from a fisa court preventing any and all
| public scrutiny and getting everything you want?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Gives you some idea of the massive amount of data available to
| US authorities derived from the US domination of privacy
| invading services.
|
| They know it's a threat because they wrote the book on it.
| That's also why we'll never get decent privacy legislation.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Ok. What if I think nobody should have that power?
| Biologist123 wrote:
| > Social networking platforms are among the most effective
| tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
|
| Religion is distributed through churches, synagogues, mosques
| etc, the medieval equivalent of a digital social platform. A
| social media platform is kinda like the Vatican but x10000000.
| xnx wrote:
| Any guesses on how this will actually work? The apps will be
| definitely be removed from app stores. Will existing apps work?
| Will the website still work? Will the death of the app come from
| "creators" not getting paid? What if users continue to use tikok,
| but there are no longer professional creators or ads? Would a
| social network like that be the most radical of all?
| teqsun wrote:
| Tiktok is popular on a global level. They'll just block access
| to US users with a link to the details of the ban, and let
| things stew up the heat until the US budges.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| I was surprised most by the general publics ignorance regarding
| possible work arounds. Nobody I spoke to on large Tik Tok lives
| believed it was even possible to download and install apps from
| somewhere other than the Play Store. Apple users believed their
| ability to install apps was identical to Android users
|
| In the future I think the government can force the public to do
| things simply because the public is unaware of the options they
| have.
|
| The good news is Rednote seems to be a potential replacement,
| which is also Chinese owned.
| andrewla wrote:
| Let's just be clear on what this is. Supporting a TikTok ban has
| several valuable benefits to politicians.
|
| 1. You look tough on China
|
| 2. You look like you're being tough on "misinformation"
|
| 3. You get to look like you are in favor of privacy
|
| 4. You get to implicitly support the American competitors of this
| product
|
| 5. You get to look like you're helping kids by getting rid of
| something that they like but older voters are skeptical about
|
| 6. None of this affects the supply chain so won't impose consumer
| costs
|
| None of these things are real (except the competitors and supply
| chain ones)
| kgeist wrote:
| Lots of American social media are banned here by the Russian
| government (all for the same reason of protecting citizens from
| foreign avdersaries), and we just use VPN. We're used to it, and
| if a service is popular (like Instagram), it's practically
| impossible to ban it. Monetization provided by the service is
| replaced by embedding sponsors' videos directly in the video (and
| getting money directly from the sponsor without third parties),
| or by selling merchendize to fans.
|
| I wonder how many Americans will just use VPN? Is it common to
| use VPN in the US? Here, almost everyone uses it now. A few weeks
| ago they suddenly banned Viber for some reason and I barely
| noticed it.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| As someone in Australia which I assume is fairly similar, we
| really don't use VPN's, at the very least the average person
| doesn't and their use isn't common knowledge. However I have
| friends in China like you, where VPN's are used by the
| majority.
|
| We are used to having access to pretty much everything we want
| access to.
|
| The most popular apps and services used around the world are
| largely readily available in the US and do not need VPN's to
| use.
|
| A Tiktok ban is in my memory probably the first time that a
| major platform used by the masses has been banned for use in
| the US. Because of the lack of VPN usage by every day people,
| I'd say everyone will flock to Instagram rather than continuing
| to try accessing Tiktok. If nobody else you know is using
| Tiktok, then why use it would be the question.
| montag wrote:
| Almost nobody uses a VPN here, just the geeks and people who
| need it for their corporate job. We're not used to this at all.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I'm fine with this, based on the simple principle of _Turnabout
| Is Fair Play_.
|
| China already bans practically all the popular US social media
| apps and similar apps/websites. I'm for free trade, but it ought
| to be fair trade too, as in, roughly similar/equal policies. If
| another country bans X imports from your own, it's hardly unfair
| to respond in kind.
| 0x5f3759df-i wrote:
| This is exactly it. If China allowed fully uncensored American
| social media to operate in China I'd had zero issue letting
| them do the same in the US.
|
| But the CCP wants to have their cake and eat it too. Fully
| repressive social media lock downs and censorship for their
| citizens but exploiting the west's values of free speech and
| debate.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| To be clear, it's not just that China won't let Western
| websites operate uncensored as businesses within China
| targeting the Chinese market.
|
| It's also that people within China can't access the foreign
| websites and apps (without using a VPN), because China's
| Internet firewall blocks that access! _That 's_ what makes it
| an incontrovertible ban!
|
| Even if a company has no interest in operating as a business
| within China in the first place, China may still block the
| websites and apps. That's a ban no matter how you slice it.
| culi wrote:
| On the other hand, the reason these bans are in place have
| very specific origins. Facebook for example refused to
| provide Chinese authorities with information on domestic
| terrorists in 2009. Facebook has never pulled that off in a
| western country.
|
| Meanwhile TikTok has worked very hard to work with
| authorities in the US for pretty much any of their demands.
|
| I don't support any of these bans but I don't think its
| fair to equate these.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > On the other hand, the reason these bans are in place
| have very specific origins.
|
| No, they don't.
|
| You think all these sites refused to provide Chinese
| authorities with legit information? https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
|
| What exactly do you think Wikipedia did that was so
| wrong? Or Voice of America -- that's an American
| propaganda outlet sure, but I can get to Xinhua (Chinese
| state media) as an American easily enough, so why not the
| other way?
|
| In any case, refusing to provide info on domestic
| terrorists could be a legit case for bannning a company
| from operating within your country...but what does that
| have to do with banning everyone residing in your country
| from being able to access the foreign versions of those
| websites on foreign servers?
|
| The simple reality is that China is extremely ban-happy
| when it comes to foreign websites and apps, even for
| companies that have never tried to operate their business
| from within China.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| You've either fallen victim to or are knowingly spreading
| CCCP propaganda.
| tzs wrote:
| China doesn't allow uncensored _Chinese_ social media to
| operate in China either, so it doesn 't really make much
| sense to say that they should have to allow uncensored
| American social media in order for Chinese social media
| companies to operate in the US.
|
| That would be like saying that an Israeli publisher should
| not be allowed to publish in the US because US publishers
| cannot publish holocaust denial books in Israel. Or saying
| that a UAE restaurant should not be allowed to operate in the
| US because the UAE doesn't Wendy's there to serve the
| Baconator.
|
| The sensible rule is that X should allow companies from Y to
| operate in X subject to the same rules that domestic X
| companies must follow if Y allows X companies to operate in Y
| if they follow the same rules as domestic Y companies.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Ah, so because China severely represses their own people,
| that means outright banning foreign web platforms even when
| they're hosted on foreign soil isn't _really_ a ban for
| some reason.
|
| The logic of PRC defenders never ceases to amaze.
| est wrote:
| > China already bans practically all the popular US social
| media apps and similar apps/websites
|
| Sorry but not ALL of them. Myspace is not banned lmao
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Well I did say "popular".
| SOTGO wrote:
| Couldn't you argue the opposite? That is, if we are so opposed
| to China then shouldn't we do the opposite of them? I don't
| think it seems very American to change our policy to be more
| like the "enemy"
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This is like saying, "well sure they invaded us with their
| military, but we don't want to be like them, so let's not
| take any military action in response."
|
| Fundamentally, aggressive action as a response is not
| equivalent to being the initiator of aggression. Hence:
| turnabout is fair play. If someone punches you economically,
| it's entirely fair and reasonable to punch them back. It does
| not make you "just like them" to defend yourself.
| mileycyrusXOXO wrote:
| That's a poor analogy. It's more like they censor their
| citizens so we should censor ours!
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| No, it's a perfect analogy, you just don't like it. If
| you actually had a valid point, you'd bother to explain
| the issue, but you didn't. Telling.
|
| The US isn't censoring it based on content anyway -- in
| fact, the US government's ability to censor much of
| anything based on content is severely constrained by the
| First Amendment -- the US doesn't like the fact that it's
| controlled by the PRC. But blocking businesses from a
| rival nation is a trade issue, not a speech issue.
|
| China is a rival and opponent of the US on the
| geopolitical stage. It's entirely reasonable to respond
| to trade restrictions with trade restrictions.
| kshacker wrote:
| Sure but that is the ruling class's perspective.
|
| What about the people who want TT? You can not hold them
| hostage to Chinese people not having TT or other apps. That's
| what the current Red Note revolt is all about.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > What about the people who want TT?
|
| Well, unlike Chinese nationals, Americans live in a
| democracy, so they could write to representatives or vote.
|
| But realistically, few care enough for this to sway who
| they're voting for.
|
| > You can not hold them hostage to Chinese people not having
| TT or other apps.
|
| You actually can! As long as one nation is being shitty on
| trade and that starts a trade war, yeah that will hurt some
| regular people, but the alternative would be to become a
| total doormat and just let other countries get away with
| doing whatever they want.
| nojvek wrote:
| Zuckerberg and Elon got what they wanted. Regulatory capture. Got
| the govt to ban a superior product. Elon even gets dips on
| acquiring it and expanding his megaphone.
|
| I guess US is becoming more like China. Choosing their horses and
| warding off competition.
|
| So much for free markets.
| thrance wrote:
| Welcome to Oligarchy America. From now on billionaires will get
| their hands on whatever they can, with a shining approval from
| the government and the FTC. DOGE will privatize what's left of
| public services so they can have that too.
|
| And when that's done they'll consolidate into a few monopolies
| and we'll basically be back in the Gilded Age.
| thrance wrote:
| A few months ago I'd have cheered on this news but now that
| Zuckerberg has made his coming out and basically promised to turn
| Instagram and Facebook into yet more MAGA echo chambers, I
| feel... conflicted.
|
| I _do_ still think the world would be better with less social
| media, but the only words in my mind right now are "not like
| this".
| xnx wrote:
| How many users does Genshin Impact need to have before it gets
| banned?
| unit_circle wrote:
| This is very welcome as a parent in the USA. It is also sound
| legally, and was a long time coming. Nothing of great value is
| being lost and in a year users will have moved on to something
| else.
|
| There are two positive effects here: 1. A company that is
| meaningfully foreign is losing control of a mass media asset. 2.
| Children and young adults are losing access to a product that is
| not good for them.
|
| A country should not allow foreign powers to control platforms
| with so much reach--full stop. We do not allow foreign entities
| to own radio stations... Imagine how much deeper these platforms
| penetrate a person's mind, and how much larger their audiences
| are. We should all be MUCH more concerned about how these apps
| are stretching the social fabric (throughout the world) and how
| every society's ability to function is effected. I challenge
| anyone voicing discontent at this result to question whose
| interests they are voicing.
|
| American manipulation of American minds... Yea! That's the point.
| I'd rather have someone with interests as aligned as possible
| with mine working for, owning and ultimately making business
| decisions at these companies. Regulation as appropriate to
| further align them.
|
| Which leads me into my next point: I think that everyone here
| would argue that TikTok is in a class of its own with regard to
| very engaging short form content and rapid feedback feed
| training. I would argue that these attributes make it necessarily
| vapid and reactionary, providing little to no net benefit to
| either the individual or society to begin with.
|
| If you disagree, what is the value of this product to the user
| and to society? Does it make people's lives better? I think that
| when the harms are considered, the answer to both is ultimately
| no. There are very well-documented negative effects on focus,
| happiness, and anxiety in children, which persist into adulthood
| from social media[1]. I don't think it can be argued that
| something that makes you feel good and connected in the moment
| but disconnects you from your immediate neighbors and friends and
| is highly correlated with mental illness is good.
|
| Social platforms (TikTok included) are putting our children at a
| disadvantage mentally compared to previous generations and need
| to be more regulated. If these platforms (TikTok and other short-
| form rapid feedback products most of all) are of dubious value to
| begin with, what is the harm being done here?
|
| Finally, I conjecture that we've only gotten a taste so far of
| how power can be wielded through these instruments. Even if Elon
| decides NOT wield his asset overtly during this administration, I
| believe we'll see more overt demonstrations of the power of
| social media sites in the next few years if relations with China
| continue to deteriorate and Russia becomes more desperate, with
| Meta clearly becoming less scrupulous.
|
| ----
|
| 1. https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/the-evidence
| mileycyrusXOXO wrote:
| For years people have dogged on North Korea, Iran, China and
| Russia talking about how the government controls information by
| banning apps and by creating firewalls blocking access to parts
| of the internet. Now when the US introduces censorship people
| like you welcome it with open arms. Something of value is lost,
| our ability to access information freely
| root-user wrote:
| Think of it like Oreos:
|
| - Text-based blogging platforms: regular Oreos
|
| - Image-based blogging platforms: Double Stuff Oreos
|
| - Short-form video blogging platforms: Mega Stuff Oreos
|
| There are still plenty of high-quality and addictive ways to
| share information without Tik-tok.
|
| Everyone will be better off without Mega Stuff Oreos, they
| were an abomination to begin with
| mrkramer wrote:
| This only shows how incompetent Twitter's management was; they
| not only ruined Twitter but Vine too and gave the opportunity to
| TikTok to fill the massive vacuum.
| hxegon wrote:
| It's honestly wild how many people in these comments are
| defending some vague, unsubstantiated, paper thin national
| security scare vs recognizing this as a clear suppression of free
| speech and active stoking of xenophobia.
|
| I would genuinely rather drop ship the CCP my SSN/banking info
| than trust the US government to do something in favor of it's own
| people when there's lobbying money involved. Why are so many of
| you pro-government and anti competition only when it comes to
| tiktok specifically? It's completely the opposite on nearly every
| other topic from what I've seen.
| theultdev wrote:
| Oh stop, it has nothing to do with xenophobia, the CCP has a
| terrible spying and human rights track record (organ
| harvesting, concentration camps, child labor, etc.).
|
| Nothing to do with the Chinese people as a whole, and
| everything to do about their overlords.
|
| Before you do some whataboutism, yes the US spies, even on it's
| own citizens. That is a separate issue we should make sure
| doesn't happen.
|
| Two things can be bad and is not an excuse for more spying or
| letting foreign adversaries broadcast psyops.
| hxegon wrote:
| What psyops are you talking about? Is it a bunch of US
| citizens talking about how they don't like the US bankrolling
| a genocide? Why is it more important to protect tiktok users
| from a threat no one can actually point to versus preserving
| a place a lot of people feel like is very important to their
| day to day lives? Why are these lawmakers prioritizing this
| over actual threats like school shootings? Honestly the
| general opinion is that this is extremely obviously not about
| national security for anybody I've talked to about this and I
| can't possibly disagree.
| theultdev wrote:
| Yeah that's a good example.
|
| Framing Gaza as the victims in this whole ordeal.
|
| That's like the 3rd time you dropped Israel in this China
| topic.
|
| Really trying to shoehorn that in eh?
| hxegon wrote:
| Do you have an actual counter-argument to this or do you
| just like pointing out that you don't think Palestinians
| have a right to live? Just because we disagree doesn't
| mean that I'm only against human rights violations and
| war crimes because _China_ said they were bad. Is that
| how you live your life? Being a good little boy or girl
| and doing what uncle sam tells you to? If no, why do you
| assume other people aren 't capable of thinking for
| themselves?
| theultdev wrote:
| You're terrible at this. Noone is defending the US, your
| whataboutism is just irrelevant.
|
| I can be against Chinese spying and bad things the US
| does.
|
| Israel is irrelevant in this thread...
|
| Hopefully they aren't paying you the full 50c for these
| posts, get better.
| hxegon wrote:
| You are arguing that my only reason for being against a
| genocide is either that I've been brainwashed or paid
| for. Get better at having basic human empathy. Israel is
| extremely relevant in this thread as pro-Palestinian
| sentiment is arguably the reason it's being banned.
|
| You proved my point. You claim to be a free thinker and
| then try to dismiss what I'm saying by claiming I'm paid
| for without any substance.
| postcert wrote:
| The most disheartening part of this ban is that it's just about
| the only thing the government can agree on. IMO Mitt Romney
| slipped the truth in saying: "Some wonder why there was such
| overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or
| other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on
| TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to
| other social media sites -- it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok
| broadcasts."
|
| TikTok is the first and just about the only place I've seen
| content about corporate greed, the accelerating disappearance
| of the middle class and the real downstream effects of US
| foreign policy that hasn't been whitewashed.
|
| The ball is in China's court now, if they can provide a space
| where this class consciousness can continue to grow they'll
| easily get equal/better (though I think magnitudes greater)
| returns than Russia's recent social campaigns.
| theultdev wrote:
| > The ball is in China's court now, if they can provide a
| space where this class consciousness can continue to grow
| they'll easily get equal/better
|
| We can hope the CCP's consciousness grows and they shutdown
| their concentration camps, stop organ harvesting, and start
| having elections.
|
| The ball is in their court.
|
| We can talk TikTok being allowed after that.
| postcert wrote:
| What's the implication? That we as a society and/or
| government have a more just consciousness?
|
| There are certainly are issues in China but are these
| "popular headline" talking points worse than the suffering
| we have here? And that's even after assuming they are
| factual.
|
| We sell prison labor for pennies. We allow individuals to
| create epidemics and slap them on the wrist. We allow the
| future of our next generations to be squandered for today's
| profits. We allow our government to be just as captive to
| the desires of private parties in a way that's effectually
| reduced elections to a non-choice.
|
| I don't think anyone with a conscious can say we're any
| better and that's without taking into account our worst
| contributions of genocides/wars/instability to the global
| community.
|
| But in the end w/e, you have your freedom tinted glasses on
| (it must be nice) and the average american is screwed on
| our current trajectory.
| theultdev wrote:
| The difference between prison labor and Uyghur forced
| labor camps:
|
| In the US those people lost their rights by committing
| criminal acts and were convicted by a jury of their
| peers.
|
| In China, the Uyghurs were forced into camps because of
| their ethnicity.
|
| No different than Nazi Germany. And yes those camps are
| real.
|
| Btw the prison labor camp talking point is a common 50
| cent army tactic. Not sure if you're doing it for free
| or...
| hxegon wrote:
| Let me genuinely ask you something because you seem to be
| all over this thread with a strong different opinion, and
| I'm not so arrogant as to believe it's impossible that
| I'm wrong.
|
| Do you really think, in real world terms, that China
| could not accomplish the types of infiltrations /
| surveillance it would deem strategically important
| without tiktok? Considering that they already compromise
| government systems on a regular basis (which I can
| provide links for if you're curious)
|
| Do you genuinely think that corruption / lobbying has
| nothing to do with this ban? What is your primary concern
| that makes you in favor of this?
|
| Do you look at things like facebook and instagram and
| either not see the blatant propaganda on there or not see
| a problem with it?
|
| I'm just wondering if we are disagreeing on the facts or
| if we have fundamentally incompatable values, I want to
| understand.
| theultdev wrote:
| Nice pivot. Don't want to talk about the Uyghur camps eh?
|
| Respond to the prison labor vs concentration camps point,
| since you brought up prison labor in attempts to compare
| convicted criminals to an ethnic group being forced into
| labor.
| hxegon wrote:
| I don't have a point, that wasn't me talking about it.
| The Uyghur camps are horrible, horrible things, and
| legalized slavery in the US is also horrible. I don't
| think they are equal at all but tbh I just don't know
| enough about the Uyghur situation to have an educated
| opinion on it generally or specifically in regards to the
| tiktok situation.
|
| Although I do think there's some degree of equivalence
| specifically in regard to a specific ethnic group being
| forced into labor since you mentioned it, but I don't
| want to go on a tangent because that's not what I brought
| up and not what I was talking about.
| hxegon wrote:
| Maybe every other country should ban American imports until
| we stop bankrolling Israel if that's your position.
| theultdev wrote:
| Sure. Plenty of people to trade with who don't support
| terrorists like Hamas.
| hxegon wrote:
| This is like saying that people who are against civilian
| casualties in the wars in iraq and Afghanistan are all
| pro 9/11 and love al-qaeda. How does the boot taste?
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I feel the same.
|
| I think there are two things in play.
|
| First, folks on this site don't know what real propaganda looks
| like. Based on growing up in Texas, as far as I can tell you'd
| have to publish and mandate textbooks to make a meaningful
| impact on peoples' belief systems. I have seen it happen, and
| I've had the experience of often leaning that things I had
| thought were true (or some underlying assumption) was in fact
| false, and then been able to trace that to my early education.
| So propaganda feels likely, but it also doesn't seem like some
| easy magic that can happen at the behest of some autocrat
| somewhere.
|
| Unfortunately the folks here don't really have much perspective
| to judge the ways in which their own assumptions about the
| world are shaped by the rhetoric of the systems that raised
| them.
|
| Second, many people likely generally haven't had many positive
| and genuine experiences on social media, or at least not on
| contemporary short-form video social media. Having been on the
| net since usenet days, I believe that it's possible to learn
| how to have those kinds of experiences, just as it's possible
| to engage with trolls and have a bad day or whatever. I don't
| consider HN to be fundamentally different than other social
| media sites, but I also understand that is a marginal view.
|
| However, since folks here have generally never used something
| like Tiktok in a way that has had a positive impact in their
| life, the folks using it look like they are addicted doom
| scrollers instead of people highly engaged in conversations
| with their community.
|
| I've personally gotten a lot out of Tiktok- the quality of the
| discussions there is much higher and more diverse than HN. I've
| also interacted with a lot of folks there in ways that make me
| fairly certain that I am dealing with actual humans and not,
| like, a PRC Botnet or something.
|
| It's tough for me to disregard my own experience:
|
| TT doesn't feel any more propaganda-laden than any other media
| stream, and certainly not in ways that are driven more by the
| PRC than by the content creators themselves
|
| Further, I feel a little fury at folks who are happy engaging
| in whatever crappy media they like: mass sports, bad sitcoms,
| poorly written TV news, etc and feeling like the hour they
| might spend with that is somehow better than the half hour I
| might spend listening to some lakota guy talk about some nuance
| of tribal politics, and then have the gall to tell me that I'm
| addicted.
|
| However, at the same time those folks apparently have a lot of
| power- they can happily elect folks who will hake it harder for
| me to hear some conversations that I found useful. So I suppose
| it's important to understand that these sociopaths view me as
| just another addicted, over-propagandized NPC.
| hxegon wrote:
| I can see what you mean about a lack of positive experiences
| on social media, I think tiktok is the first one I see
| genuinely having a positive impact on myself and others. It's
| so frustrating seeing all these people who have clearly never
| been on there talk about it like it's the CCP selling us
| heroin.
| zzzeek wrote:
| if you trust the CCP (which to be clear refers to the
| _government_ of China, not the actual people who live there,
| just like any country) to be more respectful and magnanimous to
| its citizens and human rights overall than the US, you might
| want to do some research on that (and not on Tiktok)
| hxegon wrote:
| This isn't how the about how the CCP treats it's own
| citizens, it's about how the US is currently treating it's
| citizens.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
|
| "As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century,
| free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.
| The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on
| information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but
| the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public
| discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he
| who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he
| dreams himself your master."
| GlickWick wrote:
| There's nothing free-flow about TikTok, though. Like Twitter/X,
| Instagram, etc it's actually a carefully curated experience
| that can be tuned opaquely by whoever runs it to control the
| flow of information. The US took umbrage to this being in the
| direct hands of a foreign adversary.
| phatfish wrote:
| Maybe this soundbite applies in an information vacuum like
| North Korea or ironically, and to a lesser extent, China. But
| in an environment where there is too much information for
| people to process, and truth is drowned out by lies and
| nonsense on social media feeds, it works against society.
|
| It's bad enough that US based social media corporations are
| allowed to wash their hands of responsibility for the content
| on their platform and add to the executive bonus pool in the
| process. But having a hostile government control a platform is
| just insane.
|
| There is a middle ground between being bundled into the back of
| a police car if someone speaks against their government, and
| freely allowing enemies to manipulate your population.
| ok_dad wrote:
| > hostile government
|
| I don't recall us being at war or anything with China. For
| example, most of our crap is made there and shipped here with
| barely a look. If China were truly hostile and combative like
| everyone claims, they could literally import bombs and spies
| via those means.
|
| Is this just the Red Scare 2.0? I've had way more issue with
| American oligarchs and politicians fucking over America's
| values and our way of life than China in the past few
| years/decades, that is for sure.
| tryauuum wrote:
| The problem is that it's the government who decides who the
| enemies are when silencing "the words of enemies"
| zzzeek wrote:
| TikTok _is_ a restricted information environment controlled and
| manipulated by literal tyrants. Subjects that are disfavored by
| the CCP are heavily penalized by their algorithm [1]
|
| if you are looking to safeguard against tyranny step 1 is to
| not have the CCP be in full control of your country's public
| square
|
| [1] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-
| ing...
| Maximus9000 wrote:
| Google the phase "flood the zone with shit". Your strategy only
| works if most of the people speaking/writing are genuinely
| trying to make the world a better place. If state actors are
| trying to flood the zone with anything and everything, then it
| becomes impossible for John Everyman to distinguish signal from
| noise.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Considering how many of our sites they ban, this seems pretty
| reasonable.
| gemerald wrote:
| Good riddance. Hopefully whatever fills its place is stricter on
| sexual content, insane what kids have been inspired to do on
| there.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Do yourself a favor and delete social media and go outside and
| touch grass. Life was so much better before social media.
| Zak wrote:
| I'm surprised they're shutting down rather than trying to push
| the web version. The law does not require ISPs to block the
| website or forbid anyone from using it; only US-based mobile app
| stores are affected.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| The Reuters article says
|
| > Users who have downloaded TikTok would theoretically still be
| able to use the app, except that the law also bars U.S.
| companies starting Sunday from providing services to enable the
| distribution, maintenance, or updating of it.
|
| Are you sure that the website and the native mobile app use
| different CDNs, or a CDN which won't be affected by the ban?
| Zak wrote:
| I'm sure it's possible to serve the website entirely from
| outside the US. I suppose there's a chance it wouldn't be
| cost effective.
| pdx6 wrote:
| Here's the lesson: We need our social media platforms to be
| distributed and out of the hands of any government to promote
| sharing knowledge and creating peace.
|
| When the mass Tiktok exodus tsent Red Book [1] to the top of the
| App store, it was the first time in history that American
| citizens started talking directly to Chinese citizens in mass.
| I've heard all sorts of stories of both sides learning a lot
| about each other, including the lies and propaganda each others
| government places in the media, but mostly more positive things
| like art, fashion, cooking, food, healthcare and -- probably the
| most important, each other's different humor.
|
| Video, and an AI algorithm to drive the For You page, is probably
| the most difficult part. We have some good ideas on privacy[2],
| and I can imagine some sort of crypto ledger system paired with
| AI learning, but video expensive to store/stream and at such a
| high volume of streaming, I don't know what kind of end points
| would really work to keep quality up.
|
| Then there's the problem of policing such a system, and who the
| police would be. There's some dark places on the internet that I
| think everyone but a handful of people think should never be
| allowed on such a network, but more generally there's questions
| on politeness, stalking, harassment, "facts", memes, and other
| culture differences that would need to be ironed out.
|
| Who's building this? We need it by Jan 19th, 2025.
|
| [1] Not to be confused with SF's Redbook:
| https://www.wired.com/2015/02/redbook/
|
| [2] Tim has been making the rounds about his Solid project:
| https://www.inrupt.com/
| mrtransient wrote:
| Why can't the decentralized social media be made? What are the
| technical obstacles for this? Why cant it run in your browser,
| users could store their content on their own devices and share it
| P2P. Noone knows whats being shared, no problems with
| censorships, regulations, laws...
| leesalminen wrote:
| Primal.net and yakihonne.com speak nostr protocol and are both
| pretty slick implementations.
|
| Primal recently launched "build your own algorithm" along with
| a feed marketplace.
|
| P2P doesn't work for social, see SecureScuttleButt. Rabble has
| moved pretty firmly into the Nostr camp. He's one of the top
| minds thinking about decentralized social media. Study nostr
| and don't dismiss the relay model lightly.
| EthicalSimilar wrote:
| You can do that, except nobody would use it.
| witherk wrote:
| It's just ease of use. I tried to make a mastodon account early
| into the xitter takeover. I spent probably half an hour trying
| to make a account before I decided if it was gonna take me this
| long that there was no way it would ever catch on anyway so I
| should just give up.
| Sebguer wrote:
| What kind of content do you think's going to end up filling a
| platform like that?
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| It can. https://loops.video/
|
| If it becomes too popular, though, Congress will probably pass
| a law to force you to use some oligarch-approved alternative.
| thrance wrote:
| Even if it was technically doable and user-friendly, you'd end
| up with a toxic cesspool filled to the brim with neonazis and
| CSAM, which only deranged individuals would want to engage
| with.
| bentt wrote:
| This will be such a fascinating moment to track statistically.
| Like how Covid in 2020 shows up every graph. Tiktok day might
| too.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| The Trump attempt to force TikTok to sell or get out failed.
| Stopped by the courts in 2020 1
|
| Then everyone was fine with TikTok more or less. A few
| departments, if not all banned it, have given warnings about it.
|
| Then when Gaza blew up, TikTok was not quick enough to ban all
| pro Palestine content and that is when congress again decided
| that it was time to take on TikTok 2
|
| 1 https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-courts-a526c144fad9f...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_co...
|
| 2 https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
| https://forward.com/culture/688840/tiktok-ban-gaza-palestine...
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/tiktok-faces-renew...
| https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/tiktok-ban-israel-...
| https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmaker...
| sabersei2 wrote:
| Looks like we're about to witness a digital apocalypse...
| benced wrote:
| What a weird Jira ticket it must be to get "implement complete
| turn-off".
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| It might be pretty simple, if it's just a protest banner and an
| information website as Reuters said. You can't see TikTok's
| issue tracker but you can read the Wikimedia Foundation's tasks
| to implement the Wikipedia campaigns about SOPA and the 2019 EU
| copyright directive.
|
| https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T203095
|
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I don't believe the super addictive, antidemocratic backdoor into
| US citizens lives is actually getting TKO'd. Crisis is their
| (misquoted) word for new opportunities[1], and the value of the
| spy tool is too damn high for it to simply go dark.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis
| throwblack wrote:
| America deserves more for supporting authoritarian gov
| spprashant wrote:
| Someone tell me what data TikTok is collecting, that is making it
| such a national security threat. I guess it knows what videos you
| like. Awesome, so does every other social media company out
| there. Its not like the sign up form is asking for upload of SSN
| and DL.
|
| I guess the US is afraid of manipulation of the video feed by
| China, that may influence elections. There might be a kernel of
| truth there, so I d be curious to hear anecdotes of something
| like that actually happening.
| killerpopiller wrote:
| its not about their official data collection. It is a safe
| assumption that TikTok app is used to spy on targeted users and
| their surroundings, just google it.
| spprashant wrote:
| Ok but both Android and iOS have a good permission system
| where location and other data access can be highly
| controlled. Isn't it more prudent that the app be restricted
| by the OS to not have permissions it does not require? Surely
| the US can enforce something like that.
| root-user wrote:
| You don't need to directly tap that information from the
| phone if you have enough variety of video and an algorithm
| that will identify and converge on micro-genres of video
| based on watch time, likes, and shares.
|
| Aside from that, Tik-Tok Shop is also a thing. So elements
| of the application exist where you volunteer data like
| location.
| quotz wrote:
| The two reasons behind the TikTok ban:
|
| 1. Domestic big tech lobby
|
| 2. Domestic Israeli Lobby [1]
|
| The China data is just a scapegoat. The risk is very minor. The
| US is banning TikTok because is a domestic big tech competition,
| and because lawmakers cant control it.
|
| [1] https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-
| palest...
| antigeox wrote:
| This thread is a cesspool of hypocrisy, in its most accurate
| form.
|
| You claim you want a free and open Internet for everyone but, do
| you really?
| almaight wrote:
| Do you know Shang Yang's Shangjunlun?Any superior will divide and
| disintegrate the lower class groups,This is the same everywhere,
| so who is the real enemy?
| almaight wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Lord_Shang
| mdavid626 wrote:
| Perfect time to ditch TikTok, Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts
| and restore your attention span.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| The one source of true, lasting happiness in life is the love of
| others.
|
| All of this stuff - TikTok, Instagram, etc - are entertainment,
| distraction, and that's fine, but taken to excess is unbalanced,
| and no matter what, cannot bring true, lasting happiness because
| they are not the love of another person.
| ZiiS wrote:
| From an engineering point of view it is VPN companies that need
| to be bracing for 1000x spikes.
| theferalrobot wrote:
| This isn't a 'great firewall' solution. It just prevents
| google/apple from hosting it in their app stores. If tiktok
| wanted to they could still host it from outside the USA and let
| people access it via the web (or sideload the apk on android).
| Having said that tiktok has announced if the ban does occur
| they will shut down service on Sunday.
| ZiiS wrote:
| I strongly expect they will shut down service to USA IPs; why
| on earth would they block anyone else?
| herbst wrote:
| I don't care about tiktok. But if this is the reality we are
| stuck in right now. I really hope the EU is banning all the
| privacy melting Meta apps soon.
| herbst wrote:
| People in here literally argue that they should build a great
| Firewall because China has one too.
|
| Do these people listen themself when they write things like this?
|
| I think it's absolutely worrisome if this mentality gets an
| actual thing, if it isn't already.
| stouset wrote:
| I find it pretty telling that the two sides of this argument boil
| down to:
|
| 1. This is a platform owned within China which can easily be used
| to silently and effectively spread highly targeted propaganda to
| extremely vulnerable demographics. If it has already been used
| for this purpose we will never know.
|
| 2. They make the most engaging internet junk food and other
| competitors don't do nearly as good a job.
|
| Does that about cover it?
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