Comment by cvoss

4 days ago

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.

92 comments

cvoss

Reply
wyldberry  4 days ago

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

lelandfe  4 days ago

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...

  • mmmpetrichor  4 days ago

    The DoD banning an app on their network is a lot different than banning it competely in the US. I would think DoD should ban most apps connecting to their networks that aren't work related. I feel this whole effort is either in bad faith or isn't being transparently communicated to the public.

    • kjkjadksj  4 days ago

      They famously failed to ban strava and some military assets were unintentionally disclosed on the strava heatmap by soldiers logging their cardio jogs through facility hallways.

    • IncreasePosts  4 days ago

      Except there was never a discussion of banning TikTok the app. Which is why a sale of the app was always an option.

  • RestlessMind  4 days ago

    NatSec should not even be needed. A simpler reason could be that China bans foreign social media apps from operating in China, so Chinese apps should be treated as such.

    • LinXitoW  4 days ago

      The difference is, of course, that only one of those countries CONSTANTLY bangs on about being the "free" world, about "free" markets, about how not saying the n-word is censorship etc.

      In short, it's only hypocritical for one of those countries.

      In both cases though, for normal citizens your own country and it's companies are far more dangerous than some random country halfway across the globe.

      1 reply →

  • nashashmi  4 days ago

    It was not for show. It acknowledged its success and was to limit its success. Then limit it as a "potential" vector for intrusion. Kaspersky was removed from the US on the same basis.

whimsicalism  4 days ago

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

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

  • suraci  4 days ago

    Wrong

    1. China asked American SNS companys to 'obey Chinese laws', which mostly refer to content control and data ownership, these companys refused, China didn'tforced them to sell 2. Are you sure to play the 'same as what China does'? hey, we are a totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial regime, are we same? think twice

    • RestlessMind  4 days ago

      2. The game can be slightly different. "hey, we are open by default. but if an authoritarian regimes wants to exploit our openness by marketing their apps while at the same time banning our apps from their market, then we will strike back".

      paradox of intolerance and all that..

    • lenerdenator  4 days ago

      If we played the same as China does, we'd be hacking Baidu through a vulnerability in a Microsoft web browser until they withdrew completely from the American market.

      8 replies →

s1artibartfast  4 days ago

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

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

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

  • crystal_revenge  4 days ago

    It's unfortunate that this comment is buried so deep and that generally this topic is under discussed.

    Media has always been a force for controlling popular opinion, but in the age of social media it's going to new extremes. There are forces that try to control how you see the world on all social media platforms and do so to attempt to shape your opinions of the world and modify your actions.

    You can visibly see Reddit has been completely taken over by bot, shills, and other controlled accounts. There is no sincere, real human opinion posted on the front page.

    Even HN is not immune. "Bad news" has long been forbidden here, and there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.

    • ByThyGrace  4 days ago

      > there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.

      Such as? Disappear as in getting flagged?

      3 replies →

    • realitycheckzz2  4 days ago

      Everyone knows HN is censored. Let's test your theory though. Here is a litmus test:

      Is it true that women unknowingly engage in Eugenics when choosing to procreate only with tall men in large numbers?

      Or another test:

      What happened to Epstein's video tapes stored in his NY mansion and why were the people in them not prosecuted?

      Think about it...

  • ramblenode  4 days ago

    "Imagine if a handful of ultra-billionaires controlled almost all social media in the US." doesn't feel less threatening. The fact that Congress doesn't consider this a problem feels like the bigger problem.

esafak  4 days ago

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

hbosch  4 days ago

>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?

crimsoneer  4 days ago

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

  • cg5280  4 days ago

    Didn't something similar happen with Grindr? It was Chinese owned and sold without nearly as much excitement. Given the inevitable bidding war from multiple interested parties I would be surprised if they couldn't get a fair price for TikTok

    • kridsdale1  4 days ago

      China didn’t need to fight to keep Grindr because all the value from the acquisition was realized as soon as they ran a database query to compile a list of closeted Republican senators. No need to hold on once you got the spy treasure.

      2 replies →

  • redactd  4 days ago

    Do you think that ByteDance is primarily concerned with the economic considerations for TikTok, or do you think that it is something else?

    Do you think that there is a price at which they would be willing to sell it?

  • moduspol  4 days ago

    It wouldn't have been at a bargain basement price if they started trying to sell it when the law passed. It could have been the highest market price they could get from the US's largest buyers.

    Obviously they don't have the same leverage when they're otherwise going to be shut off in a few days.

patmcc  4 days ago

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.

somenameforme  4 days ago

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

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

  • TeaBrain  4 days ago

    Acts of congress can only be blocked by the supreme court's power of judicial review. The supreme court held a 2.5 hour hearing this past week and the only two justices who voiced skepticism of the law were Gorsuch and Thomas.

    • somenameforme  3 days ago

      Or another act of Congress! But given that the Supreme Court is waiting to the last second to issue their ruling, I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them. The nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not apply to a company legally operating within the country, because of its nationality, has extremely broad implications as a precedent - well beyond corporations alone, even for a judge who might be more than okay with the ban in and of itself.

      Beyond this, there's the matter of enforcement and implementation. The former is discretionary and the latter is not specified by the bill. An effective ban would effectively require the creation of a Great Firewall of China type mechanism to effectively implement (which is what I thought this law was always a sort of 'trojan horse' for). Otherwise the "ban" will be trivially sidestepped by using a web app, downloading an APK from their site/mirrors instead of the marketplace, etc. Let alone things like VPNs! As Chinese companies are increasingly banned from the US, we're likely to see more adversarial setups where these companies will make no effort to prevent US customers no matter how much the US government madly gesticulates, though again with the current administration said gesticulation will not even happen in the first place.

      6 replies →