Comment by drcongo
4 days ago
Can anyone enlighten me as to what this TikTok ban is supposed to be about? It feels a bit satanic panic from a distance.
4 days ago
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?
It's not about getting our data. The TikTok algorithm is already being used to sow discord by showing stuff the PRC wants impressionable Americans to see. This ability of an adversarial foreign nation to surgically push individualized propaganda to consumers in another country is pretty unparalleled in human history. TikTok is the ultimate propaganda machine.
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They do just buy it. The opinion mentions that. It turns out they want even more data and also do things like hacking to steal it.
> The PRC’s methods for collecting data include using “its relationships with Chinese companies,” making “strategic investments in foreign companies,” and “purchasing large data sets.” For example [...]
In fact it treats the Chinese investment into TikTok as basically a form of "just buying it" with regards to the information gathering justification for banning it.
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...
The usual story, it is OK for the Americans to have military bases all around the world, much less so when it comes to any other countries.
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Well the alternative, in realpolitik terms, is having everything owned by Chinese companies.
I suppose they're free to pick.
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.
So it's several things. Bear with me because finding news reports that I remember is difficult now because search results are flooded with stuff about the ban so I can't find what I'm looking for.
One concern is a general one that the Chinese government is directing the recommendation algorithms to act as propaganda. So subtly shifting user's opinions in favor of things that suit it and away from things that don't.
https://archive.is/tCVmR
Another is that it is using TikTok to surveil journalists, emigres, and other persons of interest who are using TikTok. My understanding is there are credible reports of journalists being targeted by the Chinese government, where they used TikTok to find their personal details, location, etc.
There's also been increasing reports of the Chinese government operating detention centers in the US and other countries, where they bring kidnapped Chinese nationals. Basically arresting nationals on foreign soil. In some of these cases at least TikTok has been implicated as the method of locating them etc.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/764194/intelligence-officials...
Discussion of this has all been out there over the years, but the way it's been covered has admittedly been weird. Maybe this is yet another sign of a fractured media landscape, but I think some of it has to do with the US not doing a great job of publicizing some things, possibly because it involves intelligence services.
I'm generally very in favor of unfettered freedom of speech, but have mixed feelings about this case. I guess I still side on that, and am skeptical about a ban, but this is getting into different territory and also don't feel strongly about it. I think the effects of foreign (and domestic) propaganda in social networks are very real, and although I generally think censorship is a very bad idea, I'm not sure I can blame a country for wanting an app banned if there's solid information that another country is using it in this way; it seems to be in this gray area of espionage versus free speech which is kind of an unusual territory to be in. Also, I'm fully aware that the US probably does similar things, but two wrongs don't really make a right to me, and if China produced solid evidence of the US doing something similar I wouldn't blame them for banning something either on similar grounds.
To me this all just maybe speaks to the need for a shift to open decentralized social network platforms. I realize that's easier said than done, but there's so many examples in the last few years of problems with control of centralized platforms (by private, government, or private-government combinations) leading to huge problems, either in reality or in appearance (which can sometimes be almost as equally concerning).
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Oh, you could probably make some effective arguments that they're using it to influence American thought in a way that's designed to diminish the US as a world power through internal strife.
Israel/Hamas would probably be an example.
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Social disruption. That's plainly clear given that Douyin is prevented from having the destructive content that proliferates on TikTok. Keep your competition mired in anti-inellectualism for a generation and it accelerates the rot.
It's taken for granted that the shifty [any] government is up to something because they always are, 100% of the time. Why would you expect the evil overlords to not be up to something with the big evil brainwashing program that has access to almost everyone on earth?
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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.
It's not a coincidence that this comes along with similar cybersecurity/anticompetitive pushes against Chinese routers, drones, and EVs.
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).
The sudden resurgence of the years-dormant campaign to ban TikTok, and its rapid legislative success this time around, were directly because of Israel and Gaza. From the mouths of senators: "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down (potentially) TikTok...if you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I know that's of real interest..." (https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587)
"How TikTok Was Blindsided by U.S. Bill That Could Ban It" (https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-tiktok-was-blindsided-by-a-u-s-...)
The push for the TikTok ban only went bipartisan after October 7. It was stalled out before that.
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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!!