"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.
As someone who's been on TikTok for years now, it's extremely fake, the algorithm is a total ruse, as most of what trends is based on seeing news stories repeated hundreds of times, and most other content has the same repetitive music behind it... Far too much repetition and subtle seminaries in trending content, down to the way videos are color graded to be honestly real & organic... I've had a few videos go viral, but most things that do go viral are memes, the minute you want to push out anything remotely serious or related to business, they want money to let it pass the visibility gate.
I won't miss it if it does get banned. It's stressed so many people out for no good reason, and sucked up millions of hours of free labor from unrecognized & unpaid creators that deserve better.
That doesn't mean that any Meta product is good for content creators mind you.
The algorithm is genuinely very good. That's why I deleted it.
It's very addictive and not always just shoveling slop.
I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian. Neo-china...
Your perception of TikTok likely depends on your TikTok for you page. If you spend time cultivating it, the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.
This seems to be less true on YouTube and Reels unfortunately.
1) a guy telling me in my native language (not english) how to spot phishing scams
2) another guy doing a short video about how much you need to invest to retire in my native language
3) Donald's AG not answering simple questions directly
4) video about 2CV ice racing where people leisurely drive old Citroens
5) A skit by an Australian dude who has a wall full of Milwaukee tools
Instagram Reels
1) A couple doing a very much scripted skit
2) A stolen clip from an old 90s sitcom
3) one-liner joke
4) A dude farting
5) A homophobic "joke" video
Youtube Shorts
1) pro skier made up to look old doing tricks on the slope
2) A couple I don't know showing what they looked like in 1988
3) A skit by a couple
4) One of those weird youtube-only dating channels reposting a clip of their stuff
5) Americans not knowing how to drive on icy roads in 2022
The quality difference is so clear that it's not even funny. In my experience all of the good content in Reels is just reposted/stolen TikTok content. Shorts has the same or snippets of bigger YT videos.
FB Reels is so bad I don't even want to give them the engagement metrics.
My wife hates it when I don't enjoy the TikTok videos she sends me, because it's very easy for me to tell how staged and fake they are. She, on the other hand, neither notices nor cares.
This would be concerning, if I didn't know that this way of thinking was incredibly common these days—instead, it's mildly terrifying.
It's where the young kids who don't know any better overshare. Instagram is where the perfectly manicured young adults put out a phony facade to make their money.
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.
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.
The lady with the rug story, the tik tok recipes... All felt very real, down to earth to me. Versus IG's obsession with glamor, travel stories, other hucksters.
You have to break it in, strangely enough. When I first used it it was like being logged out and watching Reels. But overtime it really understood what might interest me, even topics I didn't think I'd be interested in but was
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.
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.
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.
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.
>The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt
Um, what? There is zero chance that ByteDance could get a fair price for TikTok. VC calculations can be disregarded, TikTok as a platform is more valuable than Facebook. How much money would it take for Zuckerberg to sell FB to a Chinese company?
I think this is untrue. The government wanted to shut down TikTok, but it can't just outright ban it because that's a clear violation of the first amendment, so it came up with a way to ban it indirectly. That was their intention all along.
I don't see how people don't see what is their most likely rationale - the ban will be temporary. Trump's already come out against it and is going to work to reverse it once in office. If it can't be done directly, it'll be done like usual - as an addon to some must-pass bill.
I think they would probably refuse to sell in a situation where they had reason to expect the ban to persist (for different reasons), but in this case they probably didn't even consider selling when there's a high probability they'll be back legally operating in the US within a year.
> 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.
Are you aware that almost all of the scam calls, phishing emails, and other attempts to separate you from the currency in your bank account arise from outside of the US?
Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users. You can imagine how well they are up to that task.
This is a rather poor take. Individually it's "probably" not much, but when you start putting the data together in bulk you have a social network graph of huge parts of an entire country. That and everything they like and probably work on. If you can get things like location data, then you can figure out what entire companies are doing. You can get insight into secret projects. You can figure out what small companies/contractors to install moles in.
It is literally the biggest spy data gold mine on earth.
It's infinitely worse for someone abroad to have your SS because it is worth it for them to try for several days to scam you for just a few dozen dollars. There's an entire industry of scam farms run in Cambodia by CH gangs.
Exactly. There are people deleting menstrual tracker apps in the US because the information might be used against them by law enforcement. But what's the risk to them of the Chinese government having that? Other than turning it over to the US authorities, of course.
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!
> 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.
You said a lot of words that are a litmus test proving you almost never use TikTok nowadays. First of all this is not 2020 anymore, you're 5 years late if you think TikTok is still filled with "dances". "Paid influencers" mean nothing in TikTok since everyone has an equal voice and equal shot at virality, see you're still seeing it from the lens of Instagram here.
The NPC live streaming is weird yeah but you cherry picked a trend and then make it about all TikTok. Literally hundreds of trends spawn up in TikTok every month and some of them are damn more authentic than whatever happens in IG reels. Some of the successful original trends even pick up in Instagram or YouTube.
yes but those types stick to live and tiktok lets you completely remove live from your feed. In fact if i don't want to see joe rogan, peterson, or other such horsemen of the misinformation apocalypse outside of live, I can make that decision on tiktok in a meaningful way. I can actually remove that content from my feed. Good luck getting that to work on youtube or instagram. You'll get that content if you like it or not. Good luck blocking all the random alphanumeric account names posting the deluge of that kind of content, reels / youtube shorts will force feed it to you anyway, no matter what you do.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Virtually all media you see is very heavily filtered and manipulated to ensure you're getting the right message.
> This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Provide literally one source for this. literally any source.
No 小红书 is literally not a TikTok replacement. The app is only very partially short form video, while most of the posts are more like pinterest. If you are talking about the recent UI changes that made it look like TikTok, I'm sorry to break it to you but I think that's just a coincident.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"“I would rather stare at a language I can't understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday."
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"?
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.
> 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.
that would be an extremely interesting experiment. Young people would probably feel completely lost, unsure of where to get "news" from. Actually having to go websites and search for stuff :)
"At this point, we have to accept that younger generations—precisely the people who have been raised on quantified audience feedback for their every creative gesture—have an unrecognizable conception of authenticity."[0]
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.
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 (小红书) 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" (红宝书) meaning "red treasured book" and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (毛主席语录).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Shorts has a way worse algorithm, I don’t use TikTok because it’s too addictive but I get bored of YouTube shorts after like 5-10mins most times, which actually for me is a Feature but for YouTube itself is a drawback.
A large part of it is obviously negative polarization: you tell people they can't use a Chinese app, they're going to use a different Chinese app. Hence the pictures of Luigi.
It's worth asking why Reels/Shorts didn't take off and those companies had to ask for their competition to be banned instead. Everyone agrees that "the algorithm is better", but this is very hard to quantify. Perhaps something about surfacing smaller creators? Quantity/quality of invasive advertising? Extent to which people feel particular kinds of rage content is being forced on them?
I don't use TikTok, but my understanding is that they are just a lot better than anyone else with the algorithm. Somehow where Meta built a social graph, TikTok built a graph of videos (no need to know who you are, they can just suggest videos based on other videos you watch). And it's apparently difficult to catch up (presumably because they have more users so more data to make better predictions).
That would, IMO, explain why people use TikTok and not something else.
As to where they go after TikTok is banned... I feel like there is also a factor of "Oh you want to ban chinese apps? Let me show you". Not sure whether it will last, though.
I use both and YouTube Short produces mostly just garbage for me. AI voice videos that will get your attention, but has little content. TikTok's algorithm on the other hand is much better and provides quality, half-long-form content.
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].
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Well, the US government has just successfully antagonized a bunch of their citizens...
It's amusing on the "interesting times" sense, no doubt. But it's not something unexpected. They have been antagonizing their citizens for a while by now.
At some point, something breaks and you get either an autocracy or real change. Some people claim they are already there but this is really still not clear.
> It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information
my guess is that nigh 100% of tiktok users think the app is getting banned because the government is some combination of capricious, bought, and incompetent. their stated reasons for banning it barely register.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Looking forward to Europe banning Meta and X considering how their CEOs are meeting weekly with their government overlord, quite clear those social networks are in the pocket of the new US government.
> Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't)
Posting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook will get your account terminated for "supporting terrorism". The pro-western censorship regime on FB is extremely strong. US lawmakers specifically cited the amount of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok as why they were banning the app.
Not just trade reciprocity, but ideological reciprocity. The argument that the US should allow TikTok because “free speech”—while China bans American platforms because of censorship and also dictates content on TikTok because of censorship—seems obviously broken. Seems like the rule should at least be something like “Europe is welcome to blast propaganda at our teenagers for as long as we get to blast propaganda at their teenagers.”
>Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
Yes, there are millions of US citizens that would rather have a Russian TV station in their neighborhood than one run by Democrats. I don't understand it, but that seems to be the way it's going lately. And considering who's POTUS now, a Russia-run TV network in the US isn't that far-fetched. I mean, Fox News practically already is.
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).
> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans.
I don't think this is a useful distinction in a world where a handful of ultra-billionaires control most of the remaining media channels. People like Rupert Murdoch, Musk, and the others have very different interests than the average American, and at least several of them openly push their own (divisive) viewpoints through their media. Why is Rupert Murdoch less of an adversary to the average person than the CCP?
The Western media are already doing everything that TikTok has been accused of being hypothetically able to do: sowing social division, brainrot, encouraging lawbreaking, undermining confidence in the government, promoting dangerous or fake products, etc.
The real difference is that TikTok threatens to boost an alternative to the consensus message of the political elite. A US with TikTok would see actual pushback against something like the early 2000s media shennanigans that got the Iraq War and Patriot Act smoothly approved with little public debate. That is the real reason Congress banned it and why the homegrown brainrot isn't seen as a threat.
So many people keep missing this. It's not about data harvesting. It is about influencing huge portions of the population and controlling that narrative. Of course any social media app can do this, but ostensibly it is worse coming from a foreign adversary who don't play by the same rules.
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?
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.
> 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.
> [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].
> 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".
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".
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.
Huawei has been caught stealing more than enough trade secrets to justify a ban. I'd be happy if they banned a lot more Chinese firms for that, or just in response to China's own bans. But TikTok seems to be uniquely about censorship.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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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...
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.
It shows a point I like to bring up often that Capitalism and The Free Market are directly opposed. What capital (a fancy word for shareholders) want is an infinite money machine and that is easiest with a monopoly. Hence, banning a competitor that's doing too well in the free market.
To the other part, I consider your 3 and my 2 the same, the US doesn't want us getting Chinese info and has their own perfered sources instead.
> to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism
.. by the guy sitting next to the President? It's not yet clear what this "DOGE" thing that Musk has been given by Trump actually is, but it sounds like part of the government to me and has "government" in the name?
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.
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.
To be clear, it's not just that China won't let Western websites operate uncensored as businesses within China targeting the Chinese market.
It's also that people within China can't access the foreign websites and apps (without using a VPN), because China's Internet firewall blocks that access! That's what makes it an incontrovertible ban!
Even if a company has no interest in operating as a business within China in the first place, China may still block the websites and apps. That's a ban no matter how you slice it.
China doesn't allow uncensored Chinese social media to operate in China either, so it doesn't really make much sense to say that they should have to allow uncensored American social media in order for Chinese social media companies to operate in the US.
That would be like saying that an Israeli publisher should not be allowed to publish in the US because US publishers cannot publish holocaust denial books in Israel. Or saying that a UAE restaurant should not be allowed to operate in the US because the UAE doesn't Wendy's there to serve the Baconator.
The sensible rule is that X should allow companies from Y to operate in X subject to the same rules that domestic X companies must follow if Y allows X companies to operate in Y if they follow the same rules as domestic Y companies.
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"
This is like saying, "well sure they invaded us with their military, but we don't want to be like them, so let's not take any military action in response."
Fundamentally, aggressive action as a response is not equivalent to being the initiator of aggression. Hence: turnabout is fair play. If someone punches you economically, it's entirely fair and reasonable to punch them back. It does not make you "just like them" to defend yourself.
What about the people who want TT? 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.
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.
They are, in fact, banned. It's not just that they can't operate like a normal business within China, you can't even reach the foreign servers from within China...because they're banned.
If a new social media network opens in Denmark, it might not operate in the US yet -- which means US laws wouldn't even be applicable -- but I could still reach it from the US without needing a VPN, because it wouldn't be banned either. Maybe it wouldn't be useful for me as an American yet, but I could still get to the website, because the US government isn't stopping me.
Many popular US websites are actually banned in China, whether you want to admit it or not.
"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."
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.
I don't recall us being at war or anything with China. For example, most of our crap is made there and shipped here with barely a look. If China were truly hostile and combative like everyone claims, they could literally import bombs and spies via those means.
Is this just the Red Scare 2.0? I've had way more issue with American oligarchs and politicians fucking over America's values and our way of life than China in the past few years/decades, that is for sure.
There's 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
> There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality; Netflix is just easier
I'm slightly annoyed how this comment completely ignores the moral and ethical reasons someone might want to avoid making an illegal copy of something while denying it's creators any compensation. I need more coffee.
Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results. Some random pirating streaming site is unknown and probably not even easily discoverable on google (you have to use yandex for that).
I stick to pirating with adblockers because it is more convenient, there is a much bigger library of content and I don't have to share any personal info or pay for anything.
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.
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.
Exactly. There was a blog post a couple years ago called “The Tyranny of the marginal user” that states this principle succinctly. If it’s anymore effort than a thumb swipe, you’re losing users in a hurry.
This 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
“We” do not want surveillance propaganda targeted towards children. The US government does not want Chinese surveillance propaganda targeted toward children. They’re perfectly happy when it’s done on US soil under US jurisdiction.
If we don't want this then we simply won't make an account on those platforms...
YOU want this ban and you don't like that OTHER PEOPLE like TikTok. Clearly you don't have a TikTok account and that's not enough. You want to make sure no one else is allowed to have a TikTok account either
Instead of spreading the message about possible harms you'd rather ban other people's abilities
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
hm, create a law which gives government emergency powers to delete apps / ban ip networks in case of a war
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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m puzzled too. By the rationale I read here, Europe should ban all non-European social networks (which would be great since we don’t really have any). Whilst TikTok based propaganda is clearly being used to wage war on European elections, US propaganda targeting Europeans is equally being peddled by US tech giants as well. Social media is truly the worst widely accepted invention of the internet.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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
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?
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
> 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.
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?
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?
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
Americans have a fixation on freedom of speech. They even defend the right for people to express hate speech that would be prohibited anywhere else in the world. Why aren't people outraged by the censorship of TikTok?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.]
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.
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.
> 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?
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. :)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
"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.
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..."
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?
小红书 (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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"? :)
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
They are simply different translations, period. The book you mentioned is usually referred to as "红宝书" (Red Precious Book). Don't know where the translation on Wikipedia comes from.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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
"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.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.
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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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Got any room over in your universe? I'm feeling pretty tired of this one.
I think Im in your universe…how do we get out?
TikTok has a lot of true believers.
Fake compared to what? Alt-right Zuck with a fresh perm?
Seriously. US social media is taking a massive turn to the right while its owners are swearing allegiance to Trump. To most of the world that is a much more real danger than the Chinese communists.
Yeah… TikTok is absolutely chock full of garbage for me, whether or not I’m logged out.
YouTube Shorts are not bad now for this kind of thing. I’m guessing it’s based on my subscriptions so it’s already off to a good start for me.
If you spent 10 minutes on each platform, you'd immediately realize how tone-deaf and naive your comment is.
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.
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
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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...
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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.
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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.
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It reminds me of Google's decision to pull out of China instead of censor their results.
>The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt
Um, what? There is zero chance that ByteDance could get a fair price for TikTok. VC calculations can be disregarded, TikTok as a platform is more valuable than Facebook. How much money would it take for Zuckerberg to sell FB to a Chinese company?
I mean, the Chinese government was never going to let the US just take their company at bargain basement prices.
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I think this is untrue. The government wanted to shut down TikTok, but it can't just outright ban it because that's a clear violation of the first amendment, so it came up with a way to ban it indirectly. That was their intention all along.
I don't see how people don't see what is their most likely rationale - the ban will be temporary. Trump's already come out against it and is going to work to reverse it once in office. If it can't be done directly, it'll be done like usual - as an addon to some must-pass bill.
I think they would probably refuse to sell in a situation where they had reason to expect the ban to persist (for different reasons), but in this case they probably didn't even consider selling when there's a high probability they'll be back legally operating in the US within a year.
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What, they should just shut up and sell? They're getting extorted.
Yeah it’s about that algorithms could radicalize the population or turn them against each other
> 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.
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.
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This is a rather poor take. Individually it's "probably" not much, but when you start putting the data together in bulk you have a social network graph of huge parts of an entire country. That and everything they like and probably work on. If you can get things like location data, then you can figure out what entire companies are doing. You can get insight into secret projects. You can figure out what small companies/contractors to install moles in.
It is literally the biggest spy data gold mine on earth.
It's infinitely worse for someone abroad to have your SS because it is worth it for them to try for several days to scam you for just a few dozen dollars. There's an entire industry of scam farms run in Cambodia by CH gangs.
Exactly. There are people deleting menstrual tracker apps in the US because the information might be used against them by law enforcement. But what's the risk to them of the Chinese government having that? Other than turning it over to the US authorities, of course.
Funnily enough, the lawyer who quit Meta has resorted to doomposting on .. Linkedin. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/meta-lawyer-lemley-quit...
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!
> 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.
> 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...
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.
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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.
> 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
Just break the addiction to both apps. It's not good for you anyway
Link in bio is literally killing instagram, it’s so anti user for the sake of $$ so people don’t link out easily
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.
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.
The fact people are using either is mind numbing. Such a waste of life.
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.
>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.
> 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 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Virtually all media you see is very heavily filtered and manipulated to ensure you're getting the right message.
> This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Provide literally one source for this. literally any source.
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It's the same kind of mentality that thinks "reality TV" is about real people and not intentionally produced performances.
No 小红书 is literally not a TikTok replacement. The app is only very partially short form video, while most of the posts are more like pinterest. If you are talking about the recent UI changes that made it look like TikTok, I'm sorry to break it to you but I think that's just a coincident.
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?
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.
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YouTube Shorts doesn't even get a mention?
It's more like telling people that they're gonna have to visit a mobile site instead of use a mobile app.
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.
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.
"“I would rather stare at a language I can't understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday."
https://www.wired.com/story/red-note-tiktok-xiaohongshu/
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"?
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.
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> 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.
I wonder what would happen if we shut down all the socials.
HN excluded of course.
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 :)
Reddit is absolutely terrible, it has an extreme far left bias and banned anyone with a different opinion.
Imagine outing yourself as someone who uses these mind numbing apps.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity
Oh wait, you're serious? Let me laugh even louder!
How do I downvote this.
>TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness...
LMAO
"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...
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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.
Related ongoing thread (though not much there yet):
‘TikTok refugees’ flock to China's RedNote - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709236
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 (小红书) 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" (红宝书) meaning "red treasured book" and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (毛主席语录).
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.
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.
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However, for any Chinese people who also know English, the association is obvious.
I asked an actual Chinese person about 小红书 and they assumed I was talking about Mao's book until I clarified.
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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.
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..did you only learn chinese academically or something? anyone in china would think of Mao if you said 小红书 (well, at least before the app)
So they're moving to a video site named "Red" plus a four-letter word?
TikTok, you've changed! But maybe not that much.
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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.
My kids in HS and their friends all downloaded “Red Note” this week. I said “what about Reels?” — “That’s for you and mom”.
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> 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.
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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.
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?
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.
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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?
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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.
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I use both and YouTube Short produces mostly just garbage for me. AI voice videos that will get your attention, but has little content. TikTok's algorithm on the other hand is much better and provides quality, half-long-form content.
Shorts is garbage.
There are so many UI elements on top of video that end up blocking what you're trying to see. There is no way to hide them.
YouTube also destroyed its search.
As someone that uses both, YouTube shorts it's _not_ superior. Two very simple reasons:
1. the algorithm sucks 2. it will consistently fail to load content quickly enough when scrolling unwanted content
I spend a lot of time on YT, and less time on Instagram... and 0 time on TikTok, where I never created an account.
YT Shorts exist exclusively for YT creators who want to publish bite-sized pieces of content for their audience with a much lower expectation of polish than their normal longer form content. Perhaps the algorithm also presents "random" YouTubers', too, but the vast majority of what I see is put out by the publishers I'm already following (or other very similar publishers in the same ecosystem).
I would suggest that TikTok's successor is Insta Reels. Reels are almost exclusively entertainment and because they tie into Instagram's broader user/connections network the UX is much better than TikTok. Nobody goes to Instagram to figure out how to replace their garbage disposal -- this is squarely YT domain. If YT Shorts can make inroads in the entertainment market [without feeling like a commercial break between pieces of actual content, which is the impression I have and the way I use it].
It's not as addictive. TikTok mastered the hyper-addictive algorithm.
IMHO good riddance. Anything bad for the mindless addictive chum industry is good for humanity. Now do Instagram, Facebook, Xhitter, etc.
> The UI is better than TikTok ever was
I cannot disagree more. I just scroll on tiktok and tiktok populates the scrolling with videos I want to see, and it takes about ten minutes to signal to tiktok what content you like and don't like. Youtube, meanwhile, is an exercise in a far too-busy UI with thumbnails and comments and text and buttons—it's inherently a desktop app shoved into a web browser. Nice if you want to search for a specific topic and watch a four-hour video on it, but terrible for entertainment or killing time.
The only use I have for youtube are in solving these two problems: 1) where can I find a music video and 2) how do I do x
...but the focus on the interface obscures why youtube shorts won't ever take off: youtube is extremely bad at pushing content I want to watch. I've heard this over and over and over again and I know it's true for me, too.
Let's see if the ActivityPub Loops in time (made by the creator of Pixelfed): https://loops.video/
If I'm not mistaken the 'killer feature' of Tiktok is not the player, but the editor (Capcut?)
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No 2x speed playback doesn't help
> I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious successor
It might be eventually.
(GenZ) People are migrating to RedNote now to lift a middle finger. It's more of a meme.
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 :)
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.
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.
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?
Sometimes I visit forums where people share video snippets, I've never seen sexy stuff snagged from Shorts, but a lot from TikTok.
I think both Alphabet and Meta suck at seductive material.
Because for 5-20 dollars you can drive hundreds of thousands of people if not millions of people to your video, product, meme, whatever... Youtube, not so much.
I loathe YouTube Shorts entirely.
TikTok has a great e-commerce integration, no one else is offering this at the moment.
the community on TikTok is friendlier and more uplifting compared to YouTube shorts
both shorts and reels give me so much more brain dead content than tiktok and it’s really hard to get out of that rut
Shorts is almost there. IMHO all it needed to do was be a separate app and not try to get you to sign up for YouTube Premium every 2 seconds.
Reels needs to be more disconnected from Facebook for it do anything similar.
Why do you say the Shorts UI is better? It seems exactly the same to me.
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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.
"Hey Homie, it's Tony,"
I've never been so interested in advertisements for commercial equipment before that guy.
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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...
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> cosmo PRC cool kids (read: lean wealthy)
What does this mean?
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> 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.
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.
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The "it's" to which that sentence is referring is the previously mentioned "xiaohongshu, or "little red book"".
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.
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...
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Hilarious categorizing TikTok as non-mainstream. I get what you mean, but the most popular thing is pretty much mainstream by default
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parents aren't on Discord
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Even Top 1 in the german app store where TikTok isn't banned. People identify on Red as TikTok refugees
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.
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.
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).
> It is amusing
Well, the US government has just successfully antagonized a bunch of their citizens...
It's amusing on the "interesting times" sense, no doubt. But it's not something unexpected. They have been antagonizing their citizens for a while by now.
At some point, something breaks and you get either an autocracy or real change. Some people claim they are already there but this is really still not clear.
> It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information
my guess is that nigh 100% of tiktok users think the app is getting banned because the government is some combination of capricious, bought, and incompetent. their stated reasons for banning it barely register.
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.
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...
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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.
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.
Looks like that app may have a backdoor https://x.com/d0tslash/status/1878959715033694492
The backdoor named "backdoor", the l33t h4ck3rs strike again.
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Running strings for “backdoor” isn’t quite top-notch technical analysis.
Quite plausible. To what extent can a backdoor escape Android/iOS sandboxing?
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It wouldn't be that hard to keep users separated by location.
Is there a problem with Youtube Shorts? Or Facebook videos?
Yes, they're shoved in user's faces and cannot get rid of them, disable them, etc.
It depends on how they respond over the next 1-2 weeks.
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
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.
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.
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> 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/...
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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.”
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>Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
Yes, there are millions of US citizens that would rather have a Russian TV station in their neighborhood than one run by Democrats. I don't understand it, but that seems to be the way it's going lately. And considering who's POTUS now, a Russia-run TV network in the US isn't that far-fetched. I mean, Fox News practically already is.
i absolutely reject this great firewall style of thinking. I’m an American, an adult, and I can read and watch whatever I want.
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But is there actually any evidence that the US's foreign adversaries can more effectively deliver propaganda on Tiktok compared to other platforms?
I understand the concern over foreign propaganda, but this feels like it's not going to remotely impact the ability for foreign governments to deliver propaganda to Americans. It's perfectly possible to deliver propaganda on US-based social networks.
The best outcome of this is just that Americans find the other social networks so boring that they spend less time on social networks altogether, thus reducing their propaganda intake (at least, from social networks).
Literally same arguments used by Iran.
It’s fascinating honestly. Soon we’re going to have “we need government to be able to DPI and block propaganda!”
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> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans.
I don't think this is a useful distinction in a world where a handful of ultra-billionaires control most of the remaining media channels. People like Rupert Murdoch, Musk, and the others have very different interests than the average American, and at least several of them openly push their own (divisive) viewpoints through their media. Why is Rupert Murdoch less of an adversary to the average person than the CCP?
The Western media are already doing everything that TikTok has been accused of being hypothetically able to do: sowing social division, brainrot, encouraging lawbreaking, undermining confidence in the government, promoting dangerous or fake products, etc.
The real difference is that TikTok threatens to boost an alternative to the consensus message of the political elite. A US with TikTok would see actual pushback against something like the early 2000s media shennanigans that got the Iraq War and Patriot Act smoothly approved with little public debate. That is the real reason Congress banned it and why the homegrown brainrot isn't seen as a threat.
So many people keep missing this. It's not about data harvesting. It is about influencing huge portions of the population and controlling that narrative. Of course any social media app can do this, but ostensibly it is worse coming from a foreign adversary who don't play by the same rules.
> propaganda
It's so amusing seeing the society that lionizes itself as the paragon of open society and can't stop boasting about the effectiveness of free-speech soft-power compared to sclerotic communist propaganda now having panics over short video apps.
Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton could never think that.
Well, maybe we will be on yeltsin-on-supermarket stage soon?
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Meanwhile the rest of the modern world is not banning apps because of propaganda. China and USA is.
I just want to remind everyone that China/Russia is doing everything you dislike the West doing right now. Please talk when China/Russia opens up. Right now they spew propaganda into our societies with no way for us to retaliate. I don't like censorships but these one-way attacks are a weakness to democracies, not strengths.
Open internet only works as long as everyone is friendly. The world is increasingly becoming not friendly.
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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?
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> 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.
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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
> 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".
"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.
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Or, maybe, those things they don't see as a problem.
These shifty foreigners, however... Xenophobia isn't just some old timey things we use to do
Facebook is extremely censored re: the genocide in Gaza
TikTok is not
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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".
This claim is incompatible with the reality that the U.S. runs an enormous bilateral trade deficit with China.
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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
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Mercantalism begets Mercantalism. If their mercantalist policies become successfull then unfortunately we'll need to also assume similar policies to protect ourselves, aka Beggar Thy Neighbour, and everyone loses in an arms race of tariffs and subsidies.
That's exactly why free trade proponets oppose those policies, but the CCP didn't want to reform so we'll go the opposite way.
It's important to say that the US had TikTok with Vine, but is so corrupt that it let Facebook buy it to shut it down.
Huawei has been caught stealing more than enough trade secrets to justify a ban. I'd be happy if they banned a lot more Chinese firms for that, or just in response to China's own bans. But TikTok seems to be uniquely about censorship.
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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.
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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
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> 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
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-...
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.
> 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.
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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...
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.
Wrong - it's practically impossible to buy video and audio data at the PII level like Tiktok is getting.
The video and audio data that users publicly post?
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.
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.
but your 2. implies China has control rather than the US.
Isn’t that what the government has been saying?
> 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...
> 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...
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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...
Absolutely
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.
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.
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> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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"
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.
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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.
> 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.
TikTok is banned in China.
> 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
Well I did say "popular".
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I am genuine interested in details why and how US media didnt abide to China laws?
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> tiktok goes out of its way to abide by US laws and still were banned
I'm guessing they decided there was no effective legislation Tiktok couldn't weasel around via loopholes, deception, or some combination of the two.
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> refuse to abide by chinese laws
Honest question: what laws?
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More misinformation from the PRC defense squad!
They are, in fact, banned. It's not just that they can't operate like a normal business within China, you can't even reach the foreign servers from within China...because they're banned.
If a new social media network opens in Denmark, it might not operate in the US yet -- which means US laws wouldn't even be applicable -- but I could still reach it from the US without needing a VPN, because it wouldn't be banned either. Maybe it wouldn't be useful for me as an American yet, but I could still get to the website, because the US government isn't stopping me.
Many popular US websites are actually banned in China, whether you want to admit it or not.
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."
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.
The problem is that it's the government who decides who the enemies are when silencing "the words of enemies"
> hostile government
I don't recall us being at war or anything with China. For example, most of our crap is made there and shipped here with barely a look. If China were truly hostile and combative like everyone claims, they could literally import bombs and spies via those means.
Is this just the Red Scare 2.0? I've had way more issue with American oligarchs and politicians fucking over America's values and our way of life than China in the past few years/decades, that is for sure.
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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.
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...
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.
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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.
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.
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).
> There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality; Netflix is just easier
I'm slightly annoyed how this comment completely ignores the moral and ethical reasons someone might want to avoid making an illegal copy of something while denying it's creators any compensation. I need more coffee.
Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results. Some random pirating streaming site is unknown and probably not even easily discoverable on google (you have to use yandex for that).
I stick to pirating with adblockers because it is more convenient, there is a much bigger library of content and I don't have to share any personal info or pay for anything.
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Convenience wins every time. Digital photos are lower quality but easy. MP3 is worse than CD quality but easy. Etc.
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.
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.
Exactly. There was a blog post a couple years ago called “The Tyranny of the marginal user” that states this principle succinctly. If it’s anymore effort than a thumb swipe, you’re losing users in a hurry.
This 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.
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.
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.
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.
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I got popcorn ready to see how the masses of iOS users will react to the TikTok ban
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
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
“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.
For most of the world, your platforms are already foreign-owned.
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
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.
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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.
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I watch like 25 hours of TikTok a week. I absolutely love it.
I certainly _do_not_ want this.
There's a Kremlin radio station in Missouri.
> US citizens do not want this
Ha ha, I guess you are discovering, many many people do want this.
No one who actually uses it or understands it wants this. This is like vegans banning steak.
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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!
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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...
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.
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.
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?
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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?
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I’m a us citizen and I do want this. Speak for yourself. China bans us social media. Us should ban Chinese social media.
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?
The Senator you voted for this probably voted for this so yes, America does want this.
Those in leadership being against a meaningful percentage (about 30%) of those under their care is common.
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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)
Hey, the ADL president is a US citizen, and he said "we really have a TikTok problem."
America has an Israel problem.
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US citizens most definitely want this.
Some, sure, highly unlikely a majority does if you look at how many Americans use TikTok
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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.
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...
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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hm, create a law which gives government emergency powers to delete apps / ban ip networks in case of a war
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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
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?
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
I’m puzzled too. By the rationale I read here, Europe should ban all non-European social networks (which would be great since we don’t really have any). Whilst TikTok based propaganda is clearly being used to wage war on European elections, US propaganda targeting Europeans is equally being peddled by US tech giants as well. Social media is truly the worst widely accepted invention of the internet.
If X ne Twitter knew what they were doing, now would have been the obvious moment to relaunch Vine.
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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.
Vines were limited to six seconds, so the medium was a little different. That seems easy enough to change however.
Seems to me like they just gave up?
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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.
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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...
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.
> 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.
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> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Eternal September?
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.
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.
I understand why they do it, and it makes sense. Still, it's amazing how quickly that open world has closed down.
"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.
You still mostly can't freely converse with Chinese people because of the language barrier.
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As someone watching Quicktime and Real Player videos in 2000, it was surely possible.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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> 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.
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
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> ensure everybody sees the same content.
Terrible idea.
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?
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?
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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Waiting for Trump to take office to cut a deal.
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
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.
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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.
those plays can easily backfire - like when tiktok first did it
although there are success cases, like prop 22 in california and uber
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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.
Many of those users are not eligible to vote.
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Drawing attention to the stupidity and agenda-driven approach of the USG by causing pain to millions of users, is my guess.
The downloading your data thing is actually part of what is required by law.
> 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!
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?
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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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?
> 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.
Because better data privacy laws would be bad for American companies for collecting the same data.
Ding ding ding
I believe there was a bill that addressed this, but if failed shortly before the TikTok stuff.
Privacy is irrelevant in this case. It’s a free line of propaganda for almost all our youth at their most vulnerable age.
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.
> 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?
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.
That Tom Cotton interview was wild.
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.
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?
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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
The only real irony is your continued use the word.
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.
Can you provide examples of China controlled propaganda happening on Tiktok?
Things that are factually true don't count, obviously.
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.
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There are many different ways to read your comment. Both of which are actually pretty funny. Well done.
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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.
Ban all social media.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
I created a quick tutorial on how to backup and download all of your TikToks.
https://x.com/adocomplete/status/1879568249261621572
Doesn't "yt-dlp https://www.tiktok.com/@YOURPROFILE" also work?
oh wow, didn't think that would work, but it does. even better!
You are linking the wrong script in the initial tweet. You meant to link to this one: https://gist.github.com/kukicado/e92b31601117060f6895ecefc98...
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.
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
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.
I’m sure they will move to some other platform.
Are you sure you're actually thinking of people using youtube shorts or facebook?
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.
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?
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.
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.
We'd be better off without a clone, whether its owned by a Western company or not.
Perfect time to ditch TikTok, Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts and restore your attention span.
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.
That's mostly true and it's a good thing for the US to prevent hostile, autocratic, foreign powers from gaining undue cultural power.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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...
tencent should divest from reddit?
The US censorship of Chinese social media apps on these grounds sure makes it look like China was completely justified in doing it first.
???
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
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?
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?
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.
> 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.
Ok. What if I think nobody should have that power?
> 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.
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> 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.
I don't recall legacy media spreading tourettes-like tics...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9553600/
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And nothing of value was lost.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Lord_Shang
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?
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.
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”.
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I was surprised by that too. I assumed we would see a sudden interest in android and iphone jailbreaking.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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Free speech includes the right to receive/hear speech. TikTok contains lots of speech that US citizens have the right to hear.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Foreign corporations do not have free speech rights.
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.
Doesn't matter, US citizens have the right to receive the speech on TikTok
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.
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Remember, money is speech (Citizens United v. FEC)!
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
This will be such a fascinating moment to track statistically. Like how Covid in 2020 shows up every graph. Tiktok day might too.
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.
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.
Can you elaborate on this phenomena?
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.
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?)
Americans have a fixation on freedom of speech. They even defend the right for people to express hate speech that would be prohibited anywhere else in the world. Why aren't people outraged by the censorship of TikTok?
This move shouts “you win China, your products are superior than ours”. We hate losing at our own game don’t we?
As China bans TikTok too, this move shouts “We don’t want this app either.”
Because neither government wants a well-educated, knowledgeable population. Carlin was trying to teach us that for decades and it still rings true.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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/
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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...
>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.
> 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.
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Surely the value of the TikTok user base is >$0 even without the algorithm. Why not sell that part of it?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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> 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).
why did they sell Grindr when presented with an identical set of constraints / demands ?
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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.
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.
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American eyeballs are worth more than other countries' eyeballs.
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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...
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.
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.
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.
What kind of content do you think's going to end up filling a platform like that?
You can do that, except nobody would use it.
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.
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...
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.]
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.
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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.
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?
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.
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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.
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. :)
That would be amazing, honestly. Big Tech needs to get the fuck out of our lives...
This is about censorship
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!
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.
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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?
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...
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.
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1. https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/the-evidence
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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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
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> 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.
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?
>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.
Reddit is the exact same - just a propaganda machine
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.
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Can you provide examples of China controlled propaganda happening on Tiktok?
Things that are factually true don't count, obviously.
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.
Why does the ban need to be reactive for you to understand it?
"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.
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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..."
National security risk to which nation? The kids on TikTok seem to understand pretty well why it all the sudden was wrongthink.
"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."
They do see it, they just support that very foreign adversary (or may even be such adversaries).
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
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?
Allowing the government to control the information its citizens receive is dangerous.
小红书 (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
No that is a completely different app. The Chinese TikTok (Douyin) isn't on US app stores.
> 小红书 (pronounced Xiaohongshu) is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance. It’s currently #1 on the USA App Store.
抖音 Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance...
Oops. TIL
From an engineering point of view it is VPN companies that need to be bracing for 1000x spikes.
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.
I strongly expect they will shut down service to USA IPs; why on earth would they block anyone else?
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.
Can anyone enlighten me as to what this TikTok ban is supposed to be about? It feels a bit satanic panic from a distance.
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.
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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.
If they wanted our datasets they could just buy it lol,
Remember Cambridge Analytica?
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Excellent summary, thank you.
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.
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...
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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.
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.
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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?
Politicians realized just how powerful the corporate surveillance and propaganda system is, and they don't want to share it with China.
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.
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Except people may be migrating to Rednote (which you have heard, is Chinese).
Government intervention at its finest.
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...
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.
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).
Red panic, racism, and corporate welfare. The usual motivating factors in US policy.
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.
^^^^^^
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.
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).
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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!!
What a weird Jira ticket it must be to get "implement complete turn-off".
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_...
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.
> 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.
> 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
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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.
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.
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> 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.
Pretty sure Google was allowed but decided to pull out (maybe due to censorship demands from China) not sure about facebook.
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.
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)
Considering how many of our sites they ban, this seems pretty reasonable.
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.
ActivityPub is exactly that. Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, etc.
What you're asking for exists.
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.
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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...
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!
?? X/Twitter is not the main competitor to TikTok/RedNote. Meta's Instagram/Instagram Reels is.
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.
And YouTube Shorts?
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It’s good to get fresh perspectives, especially when the military industrial complex wants to hide them from you.
How many users does Genshin Impact need to have before it gets banned?
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.
Perhaps other countries will also regulate or ban social media companies.
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.
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.
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https://www.newsweek.com/australia-social-media-ban-teens-wh...
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.
IMO they should be for children under 15.
Good.
And I want this to set a precedent that we CAN reign in the social media companies.
Looks like we’re about to witness a digital apocalypse...
America deserves more for supporting authoritarian gov
Won’t the website still work? Or do kids these days only open apps?
> 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.
You can also read this as despite being banned TikTok expects 2/3 users to find ways to circumvent the ban
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.
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.
surely this will be the big break for bluesky
Haha there's no shot. Apples and oranges - completely different platforms and features.
I know, it was sarcasm
Good riddance. Hopefully whatever fills its place is stricter on sexual content, insane what kids have been inspired to do on there.
So basically, tiktok will be unavailable in the US for 24 hours until Trump takes office and then he'll probably extend the deadline
When the President literally owns a competitor called "Truth Social" do you think he will not take the America First pledge??
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.
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.
> 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.
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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)
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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Solid point!
> 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.
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.
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Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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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
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.
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/faceboo...
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
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.
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.
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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.
Idk Xanga was peak non toxic social media. Pretty much just blogging. I miss it.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
> 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?
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Just put a propagation delay on the information, like the physical world. Human socialization is evolved to handle the physical world.
> 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
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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.
Big things aren't necessarily centralized, and you can replace big things with lots of small ones.
Meta certainly lobbied for a TikTok ban:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
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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.
why? you don't have to use them. should HN be banned?
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
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Teens don't get addicted to Hacker News
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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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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"? :)
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> 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.
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.
> 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.
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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
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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.
> 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.
They 100% are - I fantasize about world in which they dont exist.
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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.
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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.
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> 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?
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> 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.
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?
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.
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".
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>Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech.
Americans love free speech. American oligarchs hate it.
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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.
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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.
First wave? You must have missed yahoo groups.
And of course someone will reply to this and mention usenet.
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?
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.
Bring back IRC
It never left. I've been consistently on IRC since the 90s.
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.
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
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.
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.
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>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.
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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.
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How do you explain the children/teenager loneliness spike since ~2008-2010 if these things are the pinnacle of connection ?
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Social media is not connection.
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.
What practical alternative do you propose to capitalism?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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I read it as a personal recommendation to delete the apps, not as an appeal to ban them for everybody
> 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
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
> Sabine Hossenfelder
Why would a physicist's opinion on mental health carry any weight?
What is causing the record level of mental health disorders in children?
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Lemon8 is taking over?
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.
It's currently down (503 Service Temporarily Unavailable), so no, it's not taking over
RedNote is
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.
The concern is China specifically. If TikTok were owned by a German company there wouldn’t have been any concerns.
Sounds to me like the United States just handed South Korea a gift.
Honestly I'm fine with this. I look forward to a break from the nonsense until whatever comes next to replace it.
Hope they do that worldwide soon too!
Do yourself a favor and delete social media and go outside and touch grass. Life was so much better before social media.
Meanwhile many are going to another chinese app, RedNote.
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
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.
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I think its name is actually Xiaohongshu - "Little Red Book" (you know, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T... )
They are simply different translations, period. The book you mentioned is usually referred to as "红宝书" (Red Precious Book). Don't know where the translation on Wikipedia comes from.
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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
You mean it isn’t a Harvey Penick tribute?
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...Good?
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.
Nah, bad.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
> 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.
"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