This is going to be an interesting experiment:
A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
Until now, the closest thing we had like this were national our regional networks like Russia's vk, but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.
Now we, for the first time ever, will have the situation where a social network has global reach but without american content.
Will it keep being a english first space? Will it survive/thrive? How the content is going to evolve? What does this means in terms of global cultural influence? Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it? Will this backfire for the US?
Tiktok is actually surprisingly national in how it serves its content. If you're outside the US you don't see most American accounts except the ones that go very viral.
Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.
Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.
It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.
I believe the algo is somewhat timezone based, too.
Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!"
The majority of the content feels regional, though.
My anecdotal evidence of watching TikTok usage on others’ phones while riding subway systems in Paris suggest there’s plenty of English-language content out there.
TikTok is surprisingly national at the surface level, but it is all coordinated back with the parent China based entities (ByteDance, Douyin, and the CCP), so that even if it is national, it upholds China’s national interests. See the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 for more details. But basically, TikTok executives had to agree to let ByteDance monitor their personal devices, swear oaths to uphold various goals of the CCP (“national unity” “socialism” etc), report to both a US-based manager and a China-based manager, uphold the CCP’s moderation/censorship scheme, and so on. It is REALLY aggressive and unethical, but also reveals how subtly manipulative the entire system of TikTok is.
> This is going to be an interesting experiment: A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
China has had such social networks for a long time. Their Weibo and Xiaohongshu are two prominent examples. Weibo started as a copycat of Twitter, but then beats Twitter hands-down with faster iterations, better features, and more vibrant user engagement despite the gross censorship imposed by the government.
My guess is that TT can still thrive without American content, as long as other governments do not interfere as the US did. A potential threat to TT is that the US still has the best consumer market, so creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization, thus snatching away TT's current user base in other countries.
> Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it?
This is a weird fantasy, but it brings up an interesting point. The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture. Especially when compared to Japan or Korea, countries with a fraction of the population but many, many times the influence.
I wish the CCP didn't wall off their citizens from the rest of the world in the name of protecting their own power. Think of the creativity we are all losing out on.
> The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture
The CCP has tried to get their culture out there, it just has not been successful at the visually obvious scale of Japan or Korea. But their culture is definitely getting out there, and I think we often don't spot the Chinese influence on something unless some journalist finds out and writes an article about it.
Some of their influence is leveraged in business deals, with several movies being altered by the demand of the CCP, and these changes persisting in worldwide releases, not just the Chinese-released version of the movies.
Some of their influence is leveraged in video games- Genshin Impact is a famously successful Chinese game. There are some competitive Chinese teams in various pockets of e-sports too. Tencent also owns several video game developers, and occasionally uses their influence to change parts of a game to please the CCP.
There is a Chinese animation industry (print and video), and occasionally they get a worldwide success. I remember being surprised when I found out that "The Daily Life of the Immortal King" was Chinese- you can tell it isn't Japanese but lots of people guess that it is Korean.
As someone who wants to learn Chinese, I think about it all the time. Watching Chinese shows just isn't as fun for whatever reason. I was telling my wife the other day I have met so many people who credit Friends for why they can speak English.
That's soft power right there.
I've had to resort to watching anime on Netflix with Chinese dubs - anime is good because people actually talk slower and usually use simple language. When I watched Three Body (Chinese version) the dialogue was impenetrable lol
For better or worse, I think CCP has long been on the backfoot in international propaganda just because what passes for persuasive narratives in authoritarian contexts falls flat to global audiences fluent in western entertainment and media culture.
Of course they have modernized, but most actual influence obtained thus fair (e.g. international olympic committees covering up investigations, stopping the NBA from venturing criticisms) has come from projection of soft power rather than being on the cultural cutting edge.
I've never considered there to be one, although I'm open to the idea.
It's easy for me to recognize an Ameican pop culture or an Anglo pop culture, and the favor each show for certain imports over others, but those don't seem nearly so universal as your usage of "global pop culture" suggests.
Latin, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, French, Indian/South Asian, etc each represent huge "pop culture" markets of their own but also each have their own import biases.
The only good Chinese language films were all filmed in Hong Kong, directed by people like Wong Kar-Wai. In the Mood for Love is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.
Chinese cultural (and censor) sensibilities are why big budget US movies are almost universally boring and terrible these days. Authoritarian societies aren’t exactly known for creating good art.
As a Chinese American, this is the real reason people don't know about China.
To be honest, most of the movies/shows China creates sucks. They're Marvel-esque CGI fests with awful storylines.
Meanwhile, Japan and Korea are creating awesome media.
The whole narrative about the US gov trying to "hide" China isn't really true. There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about how great China is. And we welcome Chinese immigrants every year.
The real problem is that China itself doesn't execute when it comes to soft power.
I think you are a bit too premature: China has at least one(usually dozens) competitor for literally everything America has. You just don't hear about everything in the US.
Think of any industry and there is probably a Chinese competitor that is trying.
Tesla -> BYD
Google -> Baidu
Starbucks -> Luckin Coffee
IMAX -> China Film Giant Screen or maybe POLYMAX
Finally Disney -> Possibly Beijing Enlight Pictures
They released an animated film Ne Zha in 2019 that according to wikipedia was "the highest-grossing animated film in China,[16] the worldwide highest-grossing non-U.S. animated film,[17] and the second worldwide highest-grossing non-English-language film of all time at the time of its release. With a gross of over $725 million,[18] it was that year's fourth-highest-grossing animated film, and China's all time fourth-highest-grossing film.[19]"
Ok I'll admit part of the reason people don't hear about these companies is that they are still too half baked. But look at BYD, they started off producing junk but this Chinese mindset of grinding and rapid iteration has put them to be super successful today. Why couldn't that kind of happen with their Disney competitor?
Another thing that might be happening is the literal closing off of the world into two spheres. Western US led and Eastern Chinese led. As we are seeing with BYD, they are taking over all the non western markets(and some western as well) but the US has essentially slammed the door shut on them (they haven't actually but made it impossible to enter with their tariffs). Maybe the Disney competitor will take hold in the non western aligned world?
Honestly its a shame they are not open or democratic. The idea of watching or even being part of a rising country that is building their empire is fascinating to watch. Will they collapse due to demographics or these fundamental issues like communism or will they make it? Unfortunately for many people, the only option is to stick with the US and work to keep the ship afloat as there is no place for them in China.
I'm resentful for not having BYD here to offer affordable vehicles. The vast numbers of people who are now boxed out of the middle class could desperately use the help of a vehicle that doesn't cost them $700 a month.
True that. My wife watched a few Chinese dramas, but they're quite boring compared to k-dramas or japanese shows. I find them annoying and full of propaganda. Only the historical ones are borderline interesting. Also the CCP crackdown on celebrities didn't help.
By contrast, there's now a very good k-drama with Lee Min-ho happening in space or the Gyeongseong Creature horror drama with Park Seo-joon.
I did see some good Chinese movies, mostly out of Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai directed a bunch of good ones but they all predate Xi's regime and the takeover of HK.
One of my favourite contemporary artists is Ai Weiwei, who has gone missing in 2011 only to finally reappear four years later. I understand he now lives in Portugal. Got his book on my night stand, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.
I presume the US market is the dominant target market for ads / influencing, a quick google search suggests it is 75% of the global spend. So the other issue is not just losing US influencers but all influencers will take a haircut. I don't know how much of popular content is paid for by such revenue but taking a 75% haircut could put a real damper on content producers - especially those who make it a full time job. I don't know if that'll make it better with an increase in proportion of more organic content. I personally don't use TikTok - I waste enough time on HN.
There is an additional separate issue that influencer is a coveted 'career' for many children (~30%), so not only would it wipe out many jobs it'll kill their dreams. I guess like cancelling the space program at a time when kids really wanted to be astronauts.
I think there is a lot wrong with society and TikTok is part of it - but that's a much longer discussion for some other time.
If so, good riddance. The good point of TikTok is that the videos appear genuine and wholesome. Not the hyper-optimized for monetization crap YouTube Shorts show you. I much prefer the videos with kids goofing around on icy streets over the American narrator telling me some bs about some great baseball player.
Hopefully the US tech industry is not so schlerotic that they're unable to clone it and offer a competitive alternative. Given TikTok has demonstrated there's a huge amount of money to be made in that space. Although given how awful Google Shorts and Reels' recommendation algorithms are in comparison, maybe there really will be no replacement.
I don't think it will survive because non American cultural exports are not quite there yet you have to be born outside the US to understand the reach of Hollywood/cultural export as an opinion shaping tool
But then again Telegram survived and they had to resort to kidnapping the CEO so if it does survive the US pretty much gifted that space to a geopolitical adversary
But I'm pretty sure Langley/MD folk thought about this and are betting on it not surviving
It will take ages for that to happen. AFAIK the "ban" only really removes it from app stores, I don't think it even requires store owners to force it off of phones that have downloaded it already.
There are such products. Outside of America whatsapp is a dominant social app but its use internally is almost mute despite being an american social app.
Tiktok america is over 50% of tiktok revenue I think that more than anything else would choke out growth world wide.
How will YouTube shorts, and instagram stories pivot? They already aren’t seen as true rivals, but maybe they can change or spinoff a third brand. The gold in TR has always been its algorithm. Maybe they can fake it. How easy will it be to circumvent via vpn? Will other English content on tt skyrocket? Eg uk and Canada.
Yes, but it's also singularly focused on its core experience rather than being a bolted-on experience that is confusingly blended into an ecosystem where it's not the primary experience.
If a US-based alternative appeared which not only substituted performatively, but also monetized creators and influencers enough to put everyone else to shame, people could not help but notice and migrate there in droves.
It would be pretty cool if there was a respectable capitalist with enough money, or if that won't do it then a bigger more-respectable political organization or something, and Tiktok would be nothing but a memory of how things used to be before they got better.
Think about it, a social force or financial pressure strong enough to reverse unfavorable trends, even after they have already gained momentum.
And all it takes is focusing that pressure in an unfamiliar direction that could probably best be described as "anti-enshittification".
I’d worry that such a platform would be used to reverse social trends unfavorable to the owner, instead of social trends unfavorable to society in general.
It also seems… sort of bad if an individual has the ability to be strong enough to reverse a social trend, right? So we basically would have to expect one of the trends they should reverse to be… their own existence. In general it is unreasonable to expect individuals to be so enlightened as to work against their own existence, I think.
First, I still don't think the ban will actually happen. The current administration will punt the issue to the next and Trump has already signaled he wants to save Tiktok, whatever that means. That might be by anointing a buyer that he personally is an investor in. Tiktok may choose to still shutter in the US rather than being forcibly sold.
But there's a biger issue than loss of American content should this come to pass: the loss os American ad revenue for the platform and creators. A lot of people create content aimed at Americans because an American audience is lucrative for ad revenue. If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?
A worrying angle is that Elon is essentially subservient to the CCP because of Tesla’s presence in China. Remember when Tesla signed a pledge to uphold socialism at the behest of the CCP a couple years back? It’s also why Elon - who claims to uphold free speech, capitalism, democratic values, etc - will NEVER say anything negative about China. If Trump is close to Elon, and Elon is easily influenced/controlled by the CCP, it really undermines the independence of US leadership. I am concerned this next administration will be soft on China in all the wrong ways, including not enforcing a ban that has been legally instituted and upheld unanimously by SCOTUS.
At least in Germany, for Gen Z, Facebook is quite dead and Instagram co-exists with TikTok, both with >70% of the cohort [1] using them. There is no clear winner. Anecdata, but for freshmen, TikTok is way more popular.
TikTok-based social media campaigns also e.g. managed to unexpectedly swing an election in Romania (for Georgescu, was later annulled).
India also just banned TikTok, I wouldn't be surprised if bans became widespread outside of America with any country worried about China's geopolitical power.
I think the easiest answer to follow for "why is this not prevented by free speech protection" is "the fact that petitioners “cannot avoid or mitigate” the effects of the Act by altering their speech." (page 10 of this ruling, but is a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Broadcasting_System,_In...)
Simple answer. A chinese owned company has no such rights or protections. Free speech does not apply. The law also does not censor content (so no free speech violation anyway). The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security). Big difference.
The United States is currently in the middle of a cyber cold-war with China.
They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department. Specifically they used the telco hacks to gather geolocation data in order to pinpoint Americans and to spy on phone calls by abusing our legally mandated wiretap capabilities.
Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones.
I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.
The TikTok ban is security theater through and through.
Chinese spy agencies don't have to make an app that millions of American teens use to harvest data on them. American companies have been doing the job for them.
The brokers don't care. They'll sell to anyone and everyone. And the people they sell to don't care either. They'll process and re-sell it too. And on and on, until it ends up in the hands of every interested party on Earth, i.e. everyone.
So don't worry, the Chinese already have a detailed copy of your daily routine & reading habits. Just love this new world that we've created to make $0.002/click.
EDIT — if it makes you feel any better, the Chinese are doing it too!
> The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals.
- harvesting data: sure the CCP could buy some data from data brokers; but that data is very limited compared to the data that TikTok itself has on its users
but data harvesting is not the real problem
the big problem is that you have a social network to which millions of your citizens are connected and used daily, which is under the control of a foreign adversary; it's a bit like if CBS was owned by the CCP
- Lack of US privacy legislation
- Security-sensitive systems and infrastructure owned by competitor nations
The existance of a different problem is not a justification to avoid progress on the original one.
PS: Curious how many total comments there are on this article. Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.
It's less about bare privacy and more about the fact that it's a closed loop system.
Meta collects your data and advertisers can indirectly use that data to serve you ads. In addition, government actors can use Meta's advertising tools to spread propaganda.
But TikTok is an all-in-one solution. The government have direct control over the algorithm in addition to having access to all of the data. They don't have to go through a third party intermediary like Meta and aren't only limited by a public advertising API.
The value is in the ability to influence what your enemy sees, and to push whatever narratives are best for you and worst for your enemy. They don’t give a shit about the data.
> American companies have been doing the job for them.
This right here is the answer. People just don’t care about this type of privacy because they assume some American company already has their data. Combine that with us being two generations removed from the Cold War and the average TikTok user doesn’t see any reason why the owner of this specific data being Chinese matters and frankly I’m sympathetic to that argument. If you live in the US, someone like Musk is going to have a greater influence on your life than the Chinese government and I see no reason to trust him any more or less than the Chinese government. So any discussion of this being a matter of national security just rings hollow.
For anyone reading this who is knowledgeable about this topic, where, specifically, can a regular citizen buy personal data about people from data brokers?
I am in favor of banning TikTok, but not strictly because they harvest data. I am far more concerned about them manipulating people on a large scale, I think TikTok is an effective tool for manipulating public opinion and I have no doubt that they're actively engaged and consciously engaging America in a form of psychological warfare. We are facing the very real threat of a military conflict with China, I do not want the Chinese government in this position of power.
I frankly don't understand why I keep seeing on social media people like yourselves push the idea that it's okay because other companies are also harvesting the data. It is obviously not about the data. It is about China being in a position to manipulate information flow.
I mean let's not pretend that an app on the vast majority of peoples phones isn't a non-trivial vector for a zero-day attack.
If there is an invasion of Taiwan, I don't think it would be unthinkable that everyone's phones being broken wouldn't be a major tactical and political advantage of shifting the US's priorities and political will in the short run.
Sure, it burns the asset in the process, but I mean... this has been a priority for an entire century.
A surprising (and funny) example of this is how the open-source intelligence community and sites like Bellingcat used purchased or leaked data from private Russian commercial data brokers to identify and track the detailed movements of elite Russian assassination squads inside Russia as well as in various other countries. They learned the exact buildings where they go to work every day as well as who they met with and their home addresses. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-bellingcat-unmas...
Volunteer open-source researchers also used these readily available data sources to identify and publicly out several previously unknown Russian sleeper agents who'd spent years hiding in Western countries while building cover identities and making contacts. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/25/socialite-widow-j...
To your point, if volunteer internet hobbyists can use commercial broker data to identify and track elite Russian assassins and undercover sleeper agents, in Russia and around the world, China having direct access to US Tiktok data, which Tiktok sells to anyone through brokers anyway, doesn't seem like an existential intelligence threat to our national security. Forcing TikTok to divest Chinese ownership would, at most, make Chinese intelligence go through an extra step and pay a little for the data.
If politicians were really worried about foreign adversaries aggregating comprehensive data profiles on everyone, just addressing China's access to TikTok is a side show distraction. Why didn't they pass legislation banning all major social media services from selling or sharing certain kinds of data and requiring the anonymization of other kinds of data to prevent anyone aggregating composite profiles across multiple social platforms or data brokers? That would actually reduce the threat profile somewhat.
Obviously, they aren't doing that because the FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, INS, IRS, Homeland Security and their Five Eyes international partners are aggressively buying data broker info on all US residents at massive scale every day and aggregating it into comprehensive profiles - all with no warrants, probable cause or oversight. The US Constitution doesn't apply because it's just private commercial data, not government data. Any such law would have to explicitly carve out exceptions allowing US and allied intelligence agencies to continue doing this. Alternatively, they could put such use under the secret FISA intelligence court. US intelligence has thoroughly co-opted FISA oversight but jumping through the FISA hoop is extra work and filling out the paperwork to be rubber-stamped is annoying. They much prefer remaining completely unregulated and unsupervised like they are now, collecting everything on everyone all the time without limit. They've certainly already automated collecting all the data they want from every broker.
So yeah... let's very publicly make a big show of slapping just China and only about TikTok - and loudly proclaim we really did something to protect citizen privacy and reduce our national data aggregation attack surface. This is the intelligence community cleverly offering a fig leaf of plausible deniability to politicians who can now claim they "did something", while leaving the US intelligence community free to pillage every last shred of citizen privacy in secret.
But what is the point of all this data? People don’t live forever or have unlimited exploitable LTV, so there is a very narrow window of time for where this data is useful for a given population. Is the goal to just use it to influence elections?
It’s this - anyone saying otherwise simply does not know, or is pushing some kind of an agenda. I fully believe some people in the US government buy the whole “security” angle, but it’s very obviously bogus. So is the idea of selling it - china is very protective of chinese user data, there’s no way they are going to trust an american investor to play by their rules, even if a serious price was offered, which it hasn’t been. this entire thing feels like theater, honestly.
It's one of those things. If you asked most Hacker News readers how they feel about the authoritarian government of a single party state literally controlling the algorithm that determines everything you see, most would swear up and down that they would never stand for it.
But yet what happens in practice is people line up to defend it. I can only guess most of the people defending it are active users and aren't aware of how distorted their perception of the world is by the content they see there.
There's some defending it in general, but it's also just a really tough precedent to allow when it could, so easily, be used to shut down any other service they want by just waving the magic "national security" flag.
It's possible to believe TikTok is bad and that the pathway the US just proved out to banning it in the US has shown that no US court will seriously question the "security reasons" fig leaf. Telegram and Signal are both used by plenty of people the US could easily paint as "security threats" and it's unclear there's any defense to a ban that they could mount at this point.
I am of 100% of the same opinion as you. I have told people for years about the cyber warfare going on and that we're losing it, and they just don't seem to care and want that serotonin hit and ignore the rest. I also want curbs on other social media, but TikTok and the war of China against the US on the internet is in a league of its own. The CCP are no doubt funneling the data to their servers, and no doubt have plans for further damaging our youths' minds through brain rot of tiktok diverting them from far more productive activities. There's a reason CCP has strong curbs on similar apps regarding young people in their nation.
We just don't care. We know the all the American TLAs are on our phones, so what's a few more Chinese ones? It's a problem for Washington war wonks to freak out about, not teens in Omaha.
Those teens in Omaha will eventually become voting adults in Omaha and then will eventually come into positions of leadership in both the public and private sector. I can guarantee that 0% would appreciate being blackmailed or unknowingly used as pawns in spycraft. Teens in Omaha may not understand the full scope of what it means.
This is like saying that you don't care about free speech because you don't have anything to say right now. It's no where close to being a justification.
Everyone outside of the US already knows the American three letter agencies and their allies like the Mossad can access, hack or destroy all their networks if push comes to shove. Most network services all over the world are run on infrastructure owned by a handful of American companies with deep defense and government ties - AWS, Google, MS.
As other powers arise, they will naturally want equivalence. The American government may decide that is not in their interest to make this easy - but I'd suggest as Hacker News community, we retain the ability to see beyond propaganda and balance contrary viewpoint.In this case (or the case on Nippon steel),how does one differentiate between "security" considerations and potentially a straightforward cash grab attempt by rich American investors?
So, should we also ban Chinese companies Alibaba, Baidu, Haier, Lenovo, Tencent, and ZTE from operating in the United States? Why just TikTok (Who is ironically also banned in China)?
And should Israeli companies, like those associated with NSO Group, face similar scrutiny after reports of their tools being used to hack U.S. State Department employee phones?
I can think that China is up to no good with my data and still be mad at my own Govt for doing the exact same thing. The outrage is not that TikTok is banned, it's that Zuckerburg is doing the exact same harms to America that China is alleged to be doing, but only 1 app is banned. Hence people flocking to Rednote rather than using Reels.
Tbh I think this has a lot more to do with sympathy for Palestinians and the last year of protests on college campuses.
Besides, who cares if China is listening to us through the app. China and I have no beef with one another. China feeds me and clothes me and builds most of the stuff in my life and I give China my money. It's a good relationship! Much better than my relationship with this state, tbh.
There's at least three separate reasons that justify banning TikTok. If Trump bails them out, it's a complete betrayal of his base and the country at large.
1. Competitive balance. China does not allow US social media companies. If we allow theirs, our industry is essentially fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
2. China controls the algorithm for determining who sees what. This gives them tremendous ability to influence public opinion, and consequently public elections. That cannot be allowed to stand as long as China is hostile to the US.
3. China gets extremely detailed data about the interests and proclivities of millions of Americans, including military personnel and elected officials. This data is not otherwise publicly available and can be used for blackmail and other manipulation. Which is completely unacceptable when we have no mechanism to punish them from doing this short of global nuclear war.
Even ignoring the enormous threat to national sovereignty, TikTok has no redeeming qualities. It's an addiction machine that profits off people wasting away in front a screen. That alone is not a reason to ban it, but it sure does make the case stronger.
Banning TikTok is a clear-cut positive for the American people. Every American adult should be in support.
All of your points except 1. are true of American social media companies. 2., in particular, is widely documented: the Facebook mood manipulation fiasco, Cambridge Analytica, Musk's personal tweaking of the Twitter trending hashtags, and YouTube's heavy-handed censorship of legitimate medical advice during Covid are just a few of the higher profile instances of this.
> If Trump bails them out, it's a complete betrayal of his base and the country at large.
There is no wall. The Trump "tax cuts" raised taxes on most Americans and cut them for the 1%. Trump has not faced any consequences for betrayal in the past, why would he now?
In fact, TikTok helps promote the lack of awareness of all the above. If anything he'll want to keep it in place, to keep the public misinformed.
> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones
Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.
The interesting thing is that, using these tactics, the supreme court has made the legal case for every other country to ban US owned social networks! My opinion is that the US government has made another stupid move.
I think the fallout from this is many Americans like myself don’t see China as our enemy. Based on the recent RedNote phenomenon, Chinese citizens don’t see it that way either.
Maybe the uniparty in the USA should make it a priority to improve the life of everyday Americans and not Zuck and Elon. Young people don’t care who the establishment is warring with because they know the establishment doesn’t represent them, they represent themselves.
> They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department.
Please cite your sources. After decades of watching American propaganda, we know all too well that it is trivial to make up shit from thin air and have a large segment of the population eat it up.
> On January 12, 2010, Google revealed on its weblog that it had been the victim of a cyber attack. The company said the attack occurred in mid-December and originated from China. Google stated that more than 20 other companies had been attacked; other sources have since cited that more than 34 organizations were targeted.
>I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.
Exactly. Everyone is having fun bidding adieu to their Chinese spys. And I think they're losing sight of the fact that there's abundant reporting on harrassing expats and dissidents internationally, pressuring countries to comply with their extradition requests, to say nothing of jailing human rights lawyers and democratic activists and detaining foreigners who enter China based on their online footprint.
Most of the time I bring this up I get incredulous denials that any of this happens (I then politely point such folks to Human Rights Watch reporting on the topic), or I just hear a lot of whataboutism that doesn't even pretend to defend Tiktok.
> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones
This paternalistic framing is the disconnect between you and those opposed to the ban. The idea that it's TikTok insidiously worming its way onto American phones like a virus. In reality, people download the app and use it because they like it. This ban will, in effect, prevent people from accessing an information service they prefer. You must acknowledge this and argue why that is a worthy loss of autonomy if you want to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it.
If it helps, reframe the ban as one on a website rather than an app. They're interchangeable in this context, but I've observed "app" to be somewhat thought-terminating to some people.
For the record - I would totally support a ban on social media services that collect over some minimal threshold of user data for any purposes. This would alleviate fears of spying and targeted manipulation by foreign powers through their own platforms (TikTok) and campaigns staged on domestic social media. But just banning a platform because it's Chinese-owned? That's emblematic of a team-sports motivation. "Americans can only be exposed to our propaganda, not theirs!" How about robust protections against all propaganda? That's a requirement for a functional democracy.
The point of my response is: sometimes you have to be paternalistic, and the federal government doesn't need to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it because those people don't matter. They meaningfully defended the ban to the courts.
> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.
No, it's just information asymmetry shaping public opinion. The US lets its dirty laundry air out. US whistleblowers, press, and historians dig up every shitty thing the US has ever done and US citizens are free to discuss it, sing about it, turn it into movies and viral memes, etc. China doesn't allow this. No one in China is going to become famous by calling for justice for those killed by Mao or exposing MSS-installed backdoors in Chinese telecoms. That kind of talk is quelled immediately. The result is that public discourse trends more anti-American than anti-China.
Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone. Regardless of which apps I choose to rot my brain with, neither the US nor Chinese government should have any say in it, period.
If a red line is not drawn, websites will be next, then VPNs, then books. And then the Great Firewall of America will be complete.
I agree, you should be able to install whatever the fuck you want.
Google and Apple shouldn't be helping China get you to do that, by hosting and advertising it in their app store though*. Oracle shouldn't be helping China spy on Americans by hosting their services.
This isn't a law against you installing things on your phone. You're still free to install whatever you want on your phone.
*And if there is a valid first amendment claim here, it would probably be Google and Apple claiming that they have the right to advertise and convey TikTok to their users, despite it being an espionage tool for a hostile foreign government. Oddly enough they didn't assert that claim or challenge the law.
I think a democratic nation is well within its rights to restrict its citizens access of certain systems.
There is no such thing as unlimited liberty, especially with regards to systems under control of hostile nations such as China and Russia. Would you be comfortable allowing mass release of unrestricted Hamas / ISIS, Russian propaganda content to North American teenagers? National security is a real thing and geopolitics always play a critical role in people's lives.
One could perhaps argue that we must educate our citizens better, however I think rather than being naive, it's better to implement realistic regulations (within _democratic_ means of course) to contain the threats.
> Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone.
Like every other right, your freedom ends where other peoples freedom begins. You can install whatever you'd like on your phone... unless it prevents others from exercising their rights. That's how we all get to stay free from the "might makes right" crowd.
Joining your phone to a botnet belonging to a hostile foreign power might very well prevent others from enjoying the very rights you're trying to preserve.
You have a point about avoiding the slippery slope though. I do hope that the deciders are taking that risk seriously.
Websites and books are already being banned in the US. Ask anyone who can no longer access PornHub or who has seen books being removed from libraries.
But it's not about what you install, or even what you say. It's what you're told and shown. The US and China want control over that, for obvious reasons.
Meta has been 'curating' - censoring - content for years. TikTok is no different. X isn't even trying to pretend any more.
The cultural noise, cat videos, and 'free' debate - such as they are - are wrappers for political payloads designed to influence your beliefs, your opinions, and your behaviours, not just while consuming, but while voting.
If TikTok turned out to be State sponsored spyware, would you reconsider?
I support your slippery slope argument. I wonder where your red line is relative to "state sponsored spyware" and "typical advertising ID tracking" or "cool new app from company influenced by an adversarial super power".
How can you call Americans naive when over and over again for the past 2 decades there have been non-stop news stories about how the US Gov spends insane amounts of effort ensuring the technology Americans use is not fully secure? Maybe you should understand that the public can actually recognize Machiavellianism.
edit: before you downvote me, how many of you remember:
- Bullrun
- PRISM
- Dual EC DRBG and the Juniper backdoors, that too also were exploited by secondary adversaries
- FBI urging Apple to install a backdoor for the govt after the San Bernardino shootings
- the government only recently mandating that partnered zero-day vendors must not sell their wares to other clients who would then target them against Americans
> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones
Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.
It's not hard to see the pattern: any Chinese tech champion that does as well as, or better than American companies will find itself in legal peril. Huawei didn't get in trouble after hacking Nortel, but they got sanctioned much later, when their 5G base equipment was well-received by the markets. TikTok had the best ML-based recommendation systems when it burst in the scene, Google and Meta still haven't quite caught up yet.
Anyone here who's not a TikTok content creator reasonably upset about losing access to the platform? Can you tell me why it will sting for you? I was really surprised that my daughters (avid teenage TikTok users) are much more relieved than mad. Both said they wasted too much time on TikTok and were hoping life will now feel better. Seems the very thing that made the platform sticky puts it in a guilty pleasure category perhaps.
(I'm asking about the lived experience outside of the political questions around who should decide what we see / access online.)
EDIT: Thank you for the replies! Interesting. I'm still wondering if most people use TikTok just for passive entertainment? I don't love Youtube, but it's been a huge learning and music discovery resource for me.
The only thing I get sent from TikTok are dances and silly memes but I don't have an account.
Other's have said it; but TikTok was such a nice format for media. It emphasized what the creator can provide its users; what content was legit; entertaining, informative, etc.
Whereas Instagram and FB are more about personal "branding". You post the best version of yourself and it's rewarded with engagement. Where on TikTok the emphasis is on the content; even creators I follow and have seen dozens of videos on I couldn't tell you what their account name was.
On TikTok you put up or you were shut up.
The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks. Maybe YouTube shorts.
I've heard the algorithms for YouTube shorts are much worse. Most people have said the best thing about TikTok is how well it learns the content you want to see.
I never used tiktok. You don't follow accounts? You just open and scroll and hope eventually you get something? There's a nothing being done intentionally by the user to find content?
> The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks.
I have a lot of Japanese friends and travel between Japan and here frequently. TikTok is huge in Japan and a lot of my For You Page is content trending in Japanese spheres. I don't live in Japan so being able to plug into Japanese media is a very, very convenient thing.
I'll probably continue trying to use the app if possible since I mostly connect with Japanese content, but I will say there's also a fun world of Japanese creators who straddle the English and Japanese speaking words who are about to lose an outlet to the English speaking world, and I feel really bad for that too.
The "algorithm" is also just so much better than Reels and others. I spent an afternoon of PTO training my algorithm a couple years ago and it's been great ever since. My partner and I share TikToks with each other all the time and. we shape each other's algorithm and interests. Reels fixates too much on your follows and Youtube Shorts is honestly a garbage experience. Both platforms really reward creators building "brands" around their content rather than just being authentic or silly. I treat Reels as the place for polished creators or local businesses who are trying to sell me something and TikTok as the place for content. I find that I get a lot less ragebait surfaced to me than I do on other platforms, though I admit my partner gets more than I do. We both skip those videos quickly and that has helped keep this stuff off our FYP.
An important thing to remember is TikTok was one of the first platforms that was opt-in for short-form content. Both Reels and Shorts was foisted upon users who had different expectations of the network and as such had to deal with the impedance mismatch of the existing network and users who didn't want short-form content. TikTok's entire value proposition is short-form content.
I second this. I spend a few minutes each evening watching random people out and about in Japan, Korea, China as it is fascinating to learn about foreign cultures in such a direct way. Just yesterday I learned about the palm scanners some stores in China have as a payment system.
I'm pretty upset about it honestly. TikTok's algorithm has always done a fantastic job of providing interesting clips in a way that Facebook and Instagram has never been able to provide. I will say that upon a new account, it's mostly garbage, but it quickly learned what I was interested in and what I would tend to engage with. It also does this while showing me considerably fewer ads than the meta platforms.
That said, the algorithm got noticeably worse after 2021. Maybe because of the TikTok shop. I’ve categorized around 3,000 clips into different collections (with 600+ being in “educational”) but that fell off over the last few years. I would be a lot more upset about the ban if they had maintained quality, but now I’m like well, whatever.
I don't create for TikTok, I have never had a TikTok account, and I don't use TikTok, outside of being exposed to videos on other sites, or occasionally clicking a link.
I had been exposed to DouYin before, but my first experience of TikTok in real life was someone at a party, holding their phone, exclaiming something along the lines of "I can't look away, it's so addictive." It was uncomfortable, and I'm aware of how fake this sounds, but it happened.
But I think this is very bad.
With Section 230 in crosshairs, EARN IT being reintroduced every year or two, and access to books and sites being fragmented across the US, things are very already bad, and have the potential to get much worse. TikTok being banned is censorship, and presents a significant delta towards more censorship.
Congress didn't just "ban TikTok", Congress banned its first social media. This is case law, this is precedent, this is a path for banning other social media apps.
I think this is bad because I think this is the start of something new and something bad for the internet.
I've found something like a very efficient sorting into communities of shared interest, and something egalitarian in being able to see people with 0 views and get reactions from them.
It's by contrast to say, Youtube and X, where The Algorithm (tm) sustains a central Nile river of dominant creators and you're either in it or you're not.
That said, I think the political questions are rightly the dominant ones in this convo and those color my lived experience of it.
Not a content creator and use it regularly. My algorithm is mostly silly stuff, music, etc. I'm not convinced there's a discernible risk to national security, and as someone with a lot of libertarian views, I think the ban is an overstep by the US government.
The "sticky"-ness is real, but many will flock to the TikTok copies in other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, anyway.
Regardless, I enjoy the platform. It's fun to reference the viral sounds/trends on the platform with other friends that use it.
technology changed our life. especially internet and smart phone impact a lot on social engagement between peoples.
if people spend much time on internet or smart phones daily, if it is not tiktok, it will be something else.
should we go back to non smart phone time? or even roll back to no internet time? maybe no electricity time.
technology is just like a tool. how people use it matters not the technology itself can be evil.
tiktok's algorithm helps speed up information delivery to the people who likes it. eventually it helps to form a community of people online who like similar thing or have similar options.
people needs to be aware of the content on any platform has "survivorship bias". seeing couple of examples is not representing the whole.
> I was really surprised that my daughters (avid teenage TikTok users) are much more relieved than mad.
A sense of relief may be a coping mechanism. I've heard laid-off colleagues inform me they felt relief in the immediate aftermath; granted, the lay-offs were pre-announced before they communicated who would be "impacted", and it was at a high-pressure environment; but the human mind sometimes reacts in unexpected ways to loss outside of one's control. Rationalization is a mechanism for ego defense.
TikTok has replaced Reddit for me (I can expand more on why I stopped using Reddit, but it's not related to TikTok) in terms of "checking what's up on the internet" or as Reddit would put it "Checking the homepage of the internet".
I trust TikTok's "algorithm" to give me quick and entertaining short-bits about what's going on, what's interesting, etc. It learns what I'm into effortlessly, and I appreciate how every now and then it would throw in a completely new (to me) genera or type of content to check out. Whenever I open it, there is a feed that's been curated to me about things I'm interested in checking out, few new things that are hit or miss (and I like that), and very few infuriating/stupid (to me) things.
Its recommendation engine is the best I have used. It's baffling how shitty YouTube's algorithm is. I discover YouTube channels I'm into form TikTok. Sometimes I'd discover new (or old) interesting videos from YouTube channels I already follow from TikTok first. For example, I follow Veritasium and 3Blue1Brown on YouTube but I certainly haven't watched their full back catalog. YouTube NEVER recommends to me anything from their back catalog. When I'm in the mood, I have to go to their channel, scroll for a while, then try to find a video I'd be interested in from the thumbnail/title. And once I do, YouTube will re-recommend to me all the videos I have already watched from them (which are already their best performing videos). Rarely would it recommend something new from them.
On TikTok, it frequently would pull clips from old Veritasium or 3Blue1Brown videos for me which I'd get hooked after watching 10 seconds, then hob on YouTube to watch the full video. It's insane how bad YouTube recommendation algorithm is. Literally the entire "recommended" section of youtube is stuff I have watched before, or stuff with exactly the same content as things I have watched before.
Here is how I find their recommendation algorithm to work:
YouTube: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? Here is that video again, and 10 other "brisket smoking videos". These are just gonna be stuck on your home page for the next couple of weeks now. You need to click on them one by one and mark "not interested" in which case you're clearly not interested in BBQ or cooking. Here are the last 10 videos you watched, and some MrBeast videos and some random YouTube drama videos.
TikTok: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? How about another BBQ video, a video about smokers and their models, some videos about cookouts and BBQ side dishes, a video about a DIY smoker, another about a DIY backyard project for hosting BBQ cookouts, a video about how smoke flavors food, a video about the history of BBQ in the south, a video about a BBQ joint in your city (or where ever my VPN is connected from), etc. And if you're not interested in any of those particular types, it learns from how long you spend watching the video and would branch more or less in that direction in the future.
Another example is search. Search for "sci fi books recommendations":
YouTube: Here are 3 videos about Sci-Fi books. Here are 4 brisket smoking videos. Here are some lost hikers videos (because you watched a video about a lost hiker 3 weeks ago). Here are 3 videos about a breaking story in the news. Here are 2 videos about sci-fi books, and another 8 about brisket.
TikTok: Here is a feed of videos about Sci-Fi books. And I'll make sure to throw in sci-fi book videos into your curated feed every now and then to see if you're interested.
I'm not just upset because I have a general dislike of being told I'm an idiotic, addicted, communist stooge who is easily brainwashed. I am used to folks telling me that- it started when I was writing anti-war editorials in the early oughts, so there is nothing new in that.
What I regret is that I have been following a number of quite-good political discussions on the platform, with a nicely diverse group of interlocutors.
While the discussion generally leans far left, there are many flavors of that left:
not a lot of tankies, mostly just people between "dirt bag left" and "black panther party", lots of women, BIPOC, trans folks, academics, working people, indigenous folks, queer folks of all stripes, activists, and folks who just don't like authority.
Those conversations had been very hard to come by on Yt, Ig, or Fb.
I think it's the response format for videos. I don't think it's worth bothering to speculate about other reasons, though I did note that several legitimate left news sources were shuttered in 2020 when Meta and Tw started their political purge.
Anyhow, I know that folks in the US have very little regard for political autonomy, so I am not surprised that this happens, and compared to the carceral state and the happy ecocide of the planet this is a very little thing. But I will still miss it.
> Anyone here who's not a TikTok content creator reasonably upset about losing access to the platform? Can you tell me why it will sting for you?
I like living in a country where the government does not get to decide what I'm allowed to read/watch/see. The TikTok ban chips away at that in a meaningful way.
I value this above most other concerns, including vague worries about "Chinese spying".
But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.
Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
What changed now?
Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
Because there is no "TikTok" ban and never has been.
There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law. TikTok is completely legal under the law as long as they divest it. However, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.
Exactly. And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat. Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.
What if Congress passed a law that said "The New York Times must shut down unless all foreign owners divest"? That's effectively impossible for a publicly traded corporation. Is that just a ban, in practice?
That would be like telling Facebook to "divest" from the US government. Which, in this case, means ignoring all government requests for data and censorship. Facebook obviously cannot do that.
You could say that about all the American tech companies that are banned in China. They just have to comply with Chinese law and will be unbanned. For example, Google, unlike Microsoft/Apple, chose to withdraw from China rather than comply with Chinese law.
It doesn’t label ccp. It denigrates four countries as foreign adversaries. And then allows the president to remove any company located in those adversaries.
Kaspersky was banned this way. Tiktok was hard coded in the law to be banned. The law allows for sale. It doesn’t enforce sale.
it's more specifically ByteDance must divest. The effects that happen because of a divestment by ByteDance, such as TikTok losing access to "the algorithm", are just incidental. The oral arguments for the case are on YouTube and are worth a listen.
>owever, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.
How is it self-incrimination? That logic doesn't work.
80% of TikTok's users are outside of the U.S., why would they sell the whole thing?
And the law is written in a way that there is no value to just sell the American operation without the algorithm, they have to sell the whole thing, including the algorithm, in order for there to be a serious buyer.
It's technology highway robbery. Imagine if China told Apple "sell to us or be banned", we'd tell them to pound sand too.
Separately, it's hard to get upset about this when China absolutely does not allow similar foreign ownership of large apps in their country. Look at all the hoops, including domestic ownership requirements, required to sell saas or similar in China.
Fact: TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Ltd. was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, but today, roughly sixty percent of the company is beneficially owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group. An additional twenty percent of the company is owned by ByteDance employees around the world, including nearly seven thousand Americans. The remaining twenty percent is owned by the company’s founder, who is a private individual and is not part of any state or government entity.
```
The divestiture clause is just a red herring -- sure, that sounds perfectly fine. But you can substitute it (in the future) with anything.
In the future, the owners of a free press will be permitted to operate if and only if there is board seat made out to a CIA member. Unions will be permitted to congregate as long as they register with the Office of Trade Security
All in all, a huge blow to the potential power of individual rights (essentially goes to the Founding Fathers' point that having a list of rights set in stone is NOT the end-all, be-all, it's who decides the rights that count)
> But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.
> Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
That was explicitly brought up in oral arguments by the court, and the response by the US Gov was: "The act is written to be content neutral."
The court's opinion explains that they agree the law is "appropriately tailored" to remain content neutral. Whether it's "enemy propaganda" or not is, in their view, irrelevant to the application of the law. TikTok can exist in America, using TikTok is not banned, the owner just can't be a deemed "foreign adversary", which there is a history of enforcement (to some degree).
The replies here seem slightly off base. The Court acknowledges that 1s amm. free speech issues are at play. A law can regulate non-expressive activity (corporate ownership) while still burdening expressive activity, which is the case here. In such instances, the Court grants Congress more leeway compared to laws explicitly targeting speech. It checks that (1) the govt has an important interest unrelated to speech (it does), and (2) the law burdens no more speech than necessary (arguable, but not obviously wrong)
My reading of it is they didn't bother to take the motivation of the law into account (suppression of speech), and only took the law "as written" to decide.
> We need not decide
whether that exclusion is content based. The question be-
fore the Court is whether the Act violates the First Amend-
ment as applied to petitioners. To answer that question, we
look to the provisions of the Act that give rise to the effective
TikTok ban that petitioners argue burdens their First
Amendment rights...
> But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling?
Read the decision. They thought the act was content-neutral, and they thought that the espionage concerns were sufficient to reach a decision w/o having to involve the First Amendment. Gorsuch and Sotomayor weren't quite so sure as to the First Amendment issues, but in any case all nine justices found that they could avoid reaching the First Amendment issues, so they did just that.
The first amendment doesn't apply here. You can say whatever you want anywhere else on the internet. You can print what you want anywhere you want. You can distribute what you want anywhere you want. Bytedance refused to sell TikTok so it's being shut down. They could divest, but they didn't.
It just isn’t the Wild Draw 4 some people imagine it to be. You can’t commit fraud or libel or false advertising and claim First Amendment protection. Similarly, there are levels of scrutiny when the government claims national security to shut down a media platform.
>But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling?
Apparently the owners of the operation are not US citizens operating in the USA and don't have any first amendment rights because that's part of the US Constitution and doesn't apply to other countries.
There weren't any laws passed banning Soviet associated agencies from publishing based on chain of ownership. Nothing to do with SCOTUS.
Read the opinion, the law was upheld on intermediate scrutiny. It doesn't ban based on content, it bans based on the designation of the foreign parent as an adversary. Since it's not a content ban, or rather because it's a content-neutral ban, strict scrutiny does not apply.
Without strict scrutiny, the law merely needs to fulfill a compelling government interest.
The motivation was based on content, so the actual text of the law shouldn't matter. Such acts have been overturned before (see the Muslim ban) based on motivation.
You can say whatever you want on a telephone call.
BUT:
The telephone network is regulated. Your cell phone must comply with FCC regulations. You personally may have a restraining order that prohibits you from calling certain people.
IE, if a phone is found to violate FCC rules, pulling it from the market has little to do with the first amendment.
If these FCC rules were designed specifically with the intent to suppress speech of certain parties, they could be found in violation of your first amendment rights if challenged. IMO the ruling does not bother to examine whether the motivation of drafting the Act was to suppress speech.
This case was not about speech. It was about a vehicle for speech having a high risk of being used for espionage and PSYOPS. If TikTok was the only vehicle available for people to post on the internet, then maybe the First Amendment argument would hold water.
This decision doesn't tell people they can't speak any more than, say, shutting down a specific TV station or newspaper which has been used for money laundering or which is broadcasting obscene content.
The case is entirely about speech, and the various levels of scrutiny that apply to laws that violate the First Amendment. You should read the decision before commenting on what was argued and decided in said decision.
Creating and distributing in the USA, sure. That is allowed. This is why the government isn't regulating Chinese content on Instagram, for example.
The issue here is that TikTok "content" (aka the algorithm that decides what content you get to see) is created abroad and controlled from abroad. The data collected by the app goes abroad. So then it becomes an import/export issue, and the government can and does regulate that.
This is why the government has already agreed to letting TikTik be run by a US entity. You can have the same content and same algorithm, just kept within the borders of the USA.
Because this is not about the first amendment? This just happens to be a company that runs a social network. Congress regulates commerce with foreign nations and made the decision, as it has in many other cases, that a foreign nation can not be the beneficial owner of TikTok. TikTok then made no effort to divest, giving away the game if you want, and predictably lost this challenge.
The arguments presented to the SCOTUS and the opinion itself are totally contained within the context of the First Amendment. No one is even arguing about anything other than the First Amendment and the exceptions permitted to that amendment.
Print media is different. It is much more exhausting to read a newspaper because critical thinking circuits are automatically engaged.
You are more removed from the content because everything is in the physical world. And even within a single newspaper there are so many different topics that it is hard to be in a bubble.
The Internet automatically leads to bubble creation, 200 character messages and indoctrination.
It is more like loudspeakers they had in villages during Mao's tenure blaring politically correct messages. Or like the Volksempfänger (radio) during the Nazi era. Interestingly, many of the most destructive revolutions happened after the widespread use of radio.
Of course the Internet isn't nearly as bad, but most people are completely unable to even consider a view outside of their indoctrination bubble.
TikTok doesn't do speech. Users on TikTok do speech. Banning TikTok doesn't prevent any users from printing / distributing / disseminating their speech.
The first amendment doesn't have any provision regarding the potential reach or enablement of distribution of the speech of the people.
Agreed. TikTok allows people to speak into the app, and to receive speech, but the act of organizing and strategically disseminating the speech is not speech -- it's societal scale hormone regulation and should be controlled for the health of the national body. It's wild that so many people are up in arms about TikTok when it is a Chinese app that is banned in China, where apps are heavily restricted.
For anyone who does consider these algorithms speech, I challenge you to share a single person at any social media company who has taken direct responsibility over a single content feed of an individual user. How can speech exist if nobody is willing to take ownership of it?
"You can drive anywhere you like..." as they take away the super major highways owned by foreign adversaries and leave the ones bending the knee to USA national interests.
It seems incredibly logical from a state perspective. Sucks for users who can't choose to use a major highway without it being owned by an technofeudal oligarch. That statement holds true regardless of any platform. What were those blockchain people up to again?
I'm not bent out of shape over the tiktok ban, but you've got me wondering. Do newspapers do speech? Or is it the editors and columnists who do speech? Could a newspaper be shut down by congress if the law didn't say anything about the editors and columnists, merely denying them the means of distribution?
The entire notion that there's a free speech angle here is a disingenuous red herring by Tik Tok to muddy the waters.
Speech is in no way being limited or compelled - you can say the exact same thing on dozens of other platforms without consequence. You can even say it on tik tok without consequence. You can even publish videos from tik tok in the US just fine.
This law is about what types of foreign corporation can do business in the US, and what sorts of corporate governance structures are allowed.
This is false. There is absolutely content on TikTok critical of the US, Israel, western businesses, etc that is boosted by TikTok’s algorithm and effectively censored or hidden on many American-owned social networks,
First amendment rights is the only argument that I agree with keeping TikTok alive. However if there is proof that China is manipulating the algorithm to feed the worst manipulative content to Americans then I do think there’s a national security concern here.
Bytedance was trying to make your argument. The ruling is that the first ammendment doesn't apply and that was always a stretch for Bytedance as illustrated by the unanimous decision.
I imagine you'll get the same content on YouTube shorts or Facebook reels? I don't like using apps, so I never bothered with Tiktok, but tiktok watermarks are still on most of the short videos I view, content creators are either putting their work on multiple platforms, or someone else is ripping it off and putting it on different platforms.
I'd like to see less pervasive chronic use of media, so would hope Canada follows suit, but I don't think banning specific services for political reasons is necessarily a good way to get there. Along with other toxic outlets like gambling, we should be able to make coherent judgements about what belongs and what doesn't based on assessments of well-being indicators that evolve over time. I know it's a fairly conservative take, but it's one I'm happy with, and have a hard time seeing how we're better off with the existence of things like TikTok that provide such an easy way to siphon off human hours in a way that few things other than TV before.
Incidentally, I feel almost controversial for seeing more ads for alcohol and gambling than anything else, and thinking "when did we agree it was a good thing to be more permissive about encouraging objectively addicting risky behavior?".
This would have been a great opportunity to regulate and prohibit massive data collection on mobile phones, by writing a law that requires the platforms (iOS,android) to architect differently and police this aggressively. Takes care of a lot of the TikTok worry and cleans up ecosystems from location tracking/selling weather apps as well.
There's no compelling argument or evidence of data collection with TikTok, to my knowledge. Theres more evidence of data collection and aggregation with American platforms than TikTok. Additionally, TikTok is operated independently within the USA and hosted on American servers. I think if there's any opportunity to regulate data collection, TikTok seems to have positioned itself defensively and seems to be distant from being used as an example. The only thing that seems to matter with this ban is that TikTok is mostly owned by a Chinese company.
I'd love to be corrected, but I haven't been provided any evidence or information that suggests this ban was justified at all.
I met someone who did some high-level work for ByteDance. I asked them what they thought of the worries that TikTok was a CCP spying instrument.
They said ByteDance is as disorganized as any other big tech company, and it would be approximately impossible for them to discretely pull that off.
It's easy to see "CCP" and think bogeyman, but it is interesting to think about how achievable it would be to pull off something shady at Google or Facebook, and apply that same thought process to ByteDance.
None of the litigants proposed that, and neither did the act in question. The court doesn't usually address matters outside the controversy in question, so it's no surprise that they didn't here.
The United States, through its influence over Facebook, instagram, and twitter, facilitated the Arab Spring. Of course we don’t want an adversary to have the same influence over our domestic political conversation.
TikTok is perhaps the most impressively addictive social media app ever created. The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.
There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China, then Britain introduced stronger, more disruptive versions, forcing a stronger social reaction.
Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that social media is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
From a geopolitical perspective, this issue about 3 items:
1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans.
2) Data- TikTok collects massive amounts of data on 100s of millions of Americans. Opens many avenues for spying, extortion of influence, etc.
3) Reciprocity- Foreign tech companies are essentially banned from operating in China. Much like with other industries, China is not playing fair, they’re playing to win.
Insofar as TikTok has offered a “superior” product, this might be a story of social media and its double edge. But this far more a story of geopolitics.
> 1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans.
There is no credible argument that the CCP doesn't directly control the alg as it's actively being used for just that in tawain/etc.
Does the US really want a (hostile?) foreign govt to have clear direct access to influence 170m americans, an entire generation - completely unfettered? Incredible national security implications. Bot farms can influence X/Meta/etc, but they can be at least be fought. TikTok itself is the influence engine as currently constructed.
1) to be honest, when I see how russia, Iran and other states influence all other networks (especially when it comes to voting), not sure how tiktok is worse than all of them - just think of Facebook & Cambridge Analytica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
0) Protectionism- TikTok is eating Meta's lunch. Meta can't make a social app as good as TikTok in the same way GM can't make a car as good a value as BYD.
It has blown my mind how "free Palestine" has become a meme. That war started with a bunch of terrorists kidnapping/raping/murdering college-age kids at a music festival, and college kids around the world started marching _in support of_ the perpetrators.
At some point, I realized that I avoid social media apps, and the people in those marches certainly don't.
I know that there's more to the Israel:Palestine situation than the attack on the music festival, but the fundamental contradiction that the side that brutalized innocent young people seems to have the popular support of young people is hard to ignore. I wonder to what degree it's algorithmically driven.
1. Is there any real evidence of the CCP using TikTok for anything?
3. Then what is Microsoft doing in China? What is Apple doing in China? Etc. No tech company is banned from China, the only companies that choose not to operate in China are those that do not agree to follow Chinese laws.
Nail in the head with reciprocity. I think the US honored its end of the bargain over the past four plus decades since China started manufacturing goods for US companies. China clearly benefited since they are now the second largest economy. Along the way China grew ambitious which is fine but they made an idiotic policy error in timing. They should’ve waited a couple more decades to show teeth.
> That same year, Douyin imposed a 40-minute daily limit for users under 14. Last year, Chinese regulators introduced a rule that would limit children under age 18 to two hours of smartphone screen time each day.
"It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,”
Indeed, it's all protectionism. They want the money to go to American companies instead. Why do you think the EU, which is generally far more aggressive about these things, has not yet banned TikTok? It's also the same reason Huawei are thriving elsewhere but banned in the US. It's all just trying to protect their big companies with deep pockets.
The government doesn't care about addictive anything, this is about control and access. If they cared about life or citizens in general they would fix healthcare and maybe introduce any kind of gun control. This is the same government that was slanging cocaine in the 1980's...
Multiple reps publicly said TikTok needed to be banned because they couldn't control the narrative around Gaza as easily. TikTok is the only platform I regularly see content about Gaza fed from the algorithm.
TikTok itself is banned in mainland china. Do you need much more of a source?
Yes, you could say Douyin is available in place of TikTok, but have you asked yourself why they have 2 separate apps? One for mainland China, and another for everyone else?
You could substitute anything you don't like (gambling, alcohol, gacha games, convenience foods, televised sports, reality TV) for "social media" in the above and it makes as much sense.
"anything you don't like (gambling, alcohol, gacha games, convenience foods, televised sports, reality TV)"
Respectively, heavily regulated, heavily regulated, poorly regulated but really has to toe the line to not fall into the first bucket, fairly regulated (with shifting attitudes about what they should be, but definitely not unregulated), probably only a problem because this is "gambling" again lately and has been regulated in the past and I suspect may well be more heavily regulated in the near future, and people probably would not generally agree this belongs in the list.
The GP's statement doesn't work with reality TV or televised sports. Both of those are produced with a lot of human effort, and the cycle time for new content is way too large to form addictions.
Gambling, alcohol, and gacha games are clearly addictive and frequently are not set up to be in the best interests of the users.
> TikTok is perhaps the most impressively addictive gambling app ever created.
> Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that gambling is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
I love to drink. Absolutely adore it. Putting on a great recors, open 2 bottles of wine and call 10 different people during the span of 4 hours. I wouldn't trade it for social media any day of the week. I am drinking right now actually
Yes? The person you replied to was pretty explicit in drawing a comparison to vices like gambling and alcohol, which are indeed usually regulated. Gacha games are also being recognized as thinly veiled gambling and regulated as such.
Note that the Supreme Court decided the argument based on national security grounds, not content manipulation grounds.
Justice Gorsuch in his concurrence specifically commended the court for doing so, believing that a content manipulation argument could run afoul of first amendment rights.
He said that "One man's covert content manipulation is another's editorial discretion".
Be that as it may, I think a large percentage of the opposition don't buy this natsec reasoning at all. You could use that excuse for anything, like mass surveillance via the Patriot Act...
EFF's stance is that SCOTUS's decision based on national security ignores the First Amendment scrutiny that is required.
> The United States’ foreign foes easily can steal, scrape, or buy Americans’ data by countless other means. The ban or forced sale of one social media app will do virtually nothing to protect Americans' data privacy – only comprehensive consumer privacy legislation can achieve that goal.
Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.
The fentanyl pipeline is what came to my mind as well; another thing exported from China to the US to disastrous effect on the well-being of many Americans.
To be fair, trying to consider the other way around, I wonder what Chinese people could point to as disastrous stuff (in terms of the well-being of their population) coming from the US.
Maybe it was just a genuine outlet for interconnected entertainment compared to other platforms. American's have always sought similar entertainment since the dawn of the 'couch potato.' Now we can go back to consuming curated narratives/influence on our good ole traditional grams and tubes.
What needs to happen is that all of these platforms need to be straight up banned. TikTok is getting picked on because of its ties to China, but why is it better for Zuckerberg or Musk to have the capabilities that are so frightening in the hands of the CCP?
The US social media billionaire class is ostensibly accountable to the law, but they're also perfectly capable of using their influence over these platforms to write the law.
One plausible theory for why the politicians talk about fears of spying instead of the real fears of algorithmic manipulation is because they don't want to draw too much attention to how capable these media platforms are of manipulating voters, because they rely on those capabilities to get into and stay in power.
Because if Zuck or Musk does something bad with said power, we can do something about it.
We can't really jail the CCP. Additionally, Zuck and Musk don't have armies to back up their propaganda. We shouldn't let foreign powers own the means of broadcast...
I, personally, have views that would lean towards being labeled by HN users as supporting a “nanny state” (at least far departure from younger libertarian phase), but even I struggle with a “why” on banning these platforms in general.
It's still weird to me to see tech website comments calling for extreme government restrictions on technology use. Limiting adults to 1 hour of screen time per day across social apps? That's a call for an insane level of government intrusion into our lives that is virtually unheard of outside of extremely controlling governments.
> Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that social media is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
Come on. We all know that TikTok was banned because the US regime couldn't control it.
If they really wanted to ban vice, they would have banned Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and their kin a long ago.
Like Facebook, the "algorithm" is nothing special. TikTok made some smart design decisions that collect more interaction data that legacy social sites like Instagram and YouTube. They use that data to effectively recommend content.
I disagree that social media is a vice. There's nothing inherently wrong with better communication. Although it's hard for me to see the value (or appeal) in TikTok.
What aspect of modern social media contributes to better communication? We're not taking about WhatsApp here, we're talking about algorithmic infinite scroll feeds.
> I think everyone is kind of aware that social media is a vice
I don't think this is true. Everyone that is reading this forum might even be too strong. The majority of people happily eating the pablum up as the users of TikTok can't even tell the blatantly false content from just the silly dancing videos.
I think that’s besides the point given the entity that is banning it. It’s because it’s Chinese. An equally addictive Western-made app would not have been banned.
And generally speaking as a culture we are too liberal to ban things for being too addictive. Again, showing that it is not relevant in this case since it will not inspire bans of other addictive (pseudo) substances on those grounds.
That might be true but it's irrelevant. Why? Because that's not the issue the government tackled. Arguing "national security" with (quite literally) secret evidence is laughable. Data protection too is a smokescreen or the government would've passed a comprehensive Federal data protection act, which they'd never do.
It's hard to see how the government would tackle algorithmic addiction within running afoul of First Amendment issues. Such an effort should also apply to Meta and Google too if it were attempted.
IMHO reciprocal market access was the most defensible position but wasn't the argument the government made.
That being said, the government did make a strictly commerce-based argument to avoid free speech issues. As came up in oral arguments (and maybe the opinion?) this is functionally no different to the restrictions on foreign ownership of US media outlets.
I wish it were a reckoning for social media, but reading here shows there's plenty of people here who are passionate about "China bad" and see this only through that one lens. And they seem to think it is strictly about TikTok.
> this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
I think politicians have scrutinized american social media and they're 100% fine with the misery they induce so long as they are personally enriched by them.
> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China
TikTok isn't anywhere near as destructive as opium was. Hell, purely in terms of "mis/disinformation" surely facebook and twitter are many times worse than TikTok.
Surely the appropriate modern parallel is fentanyl.
I think TikTok and social media in general is much more insidious than opium, because it is hard to know if you are using an addictive product, or what product you’re even being sold (like if you are being sold a subtly manipulated information diet). For example, it just came out that TikTok staff (in the US) were forced to take oaths of loyalty to not disrupt the “national honor” of China or undermine “ethnic unity” in China and so on. TikTok executives are required to sign an agreement with ByteDance subsidiary Douyin (the China version of TikTok) that polices speech and demands compliance with China’s socialist system. That’s deeply disturbing but also undetectable. It came out now because of a lawsuit.
> this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
Could not be more wrong. "Society" is not deciding anything here. The ban is entirely because of idelogical and geopolical reasons. They have already allowed the good big tech companies to get people hooked as much as they want. If you think you are going to see regulation for public good you will probably be disappointed.
The US gov will do nothing to regulate US owned social networks because they're doing for free the work that the government wants to do itself: collect as much data as possible from each individual. The separation between Meta's collected data and government is just one judicial request away. That's why the US gov hates other countries having this power.
The Tik Tok divestment law was passed by overwhelmingly by both houses of the duly elected Congress. At the time, a majority of Americans polled supported the law, while a minority opposed it: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/more-support-than-oppose-tik....
In a democracy, this is how "society decides" what's in the "public good." This is not a case where legislators are going behind the public's back, hiding something they know they public would oppose. Proponents of the law have been clear in public about what the law would do and what the motivations for the law are. There is nothing closer to "society decides" than Congress overwhelmingly passing a law after making a public case for what the law would do.
Yes, they're doing it for "ideological and geopolitical reasons"--but those things are important to society! Americans are perfectly within their rights to enact legislation, through their duly elected representatives, simply on the basis of "fuck China."
It can still be both- in the sense that once a precedent is set using the these additional ideological and geopolitical motivations as momentum, maybe there will be an appetite for further algorithm regulations.
As a tech person who already understood the system, it's refreshing that I now often see the comment "I need to change my algorithm"- meaning, I can shape the parameters of what X/Twitter / Instagram/ YouTube / TikTok shows me in my feed.
I think there's growing meta-awareness (that I see as comments within these platforms) that there is "healthy" content and that the apps themselves manipulate their user's behavior patterns.
Hopefully there's momentum building that people perceive this as a public health issue.
Yeah, the ban is interesting because it’s happened before (company being forced to sell or leave), but never to a product used at this scale. There are allegedly 120M daily active users in the US alone. That’s more than a third of Americans using it every day.
While many have a love hate relationship with it, there are many who love it. I know people who aren’t too sad, because it’ll break their addiction, and others who are making really decent money as content creators on it. So generally, you’re exactly right. “Society” is not lashing back at TikTok. Maybe some are lashing back at American social media companies (eg some folks leaving Twitter and meta products).
But if we wanted to actually protect our citizens, we’d enact strong data privacy laws, where companies don’t own your data — you do. And can’t spy on you or use that data without your permission. This would solve part of the problem with TikTok.
That's because "being hooked" is not why it is being banned. It's banned because people are hooked on it and an adversarial foreign power has the ability to use it for their own gain.
Which is why a viable solution for TikTok was selling it to a US company. If it was just about the population "being hooked", a sale would not be an acceptable outcome.
More specifically the ban is because of the platform being used to support Palestine. There are public recordings of congressmen openly and plainly saying so.
Think of it like consumer protection laws - Ford has higher safety requirements for the vehicles they sell domestically than they do for those sold in Mexico. Thus, it could be argued that they are not maximizing their monetization of the US market by cutting out expensive safety features that consumers don't pay extra for.
China is wise to have such laws to protect their citizens.
I am a farmer, I grow tomatoes. The ones I sell to large markets, I use pesticides, herbicides, petrochemical fertilizers, etc etc. The ones I grow for my own consumption and for sale at the local market -- those get organic compost and no chemical treatments.
Where is TikTok not maximizing monetization? If you mean the GP's comment on China's ban on the algorithm originally used then you are missing a critical aspect of that: It wasn't TikTok's choice to stop or decrease monetization there.
Also, even if they were differently monetizing by region, you are also missing the non-monetary reasons this might happen: Manipulation & propaganda. Even aside from any formal policy by the Chinese govermnent self-censorship by businesses and individuals for anything the Party might not like is very common. Also common is the government dictating the actions a Chinese company may take abroad for these same efforts in influencing foreign opinions.
Corporations in China all operate at the behest of "the people" (aka the party). If the government thinks a product is damaging or harmful to society, it can be taken off the market without any legal mechanisms necessary.
Frankly, I’m not sure what these comments even mean. Douyin (Chinese TikTok) has the same level of brainrot content, except with some restrictions (political and societal level stuff). Chinese kids are as much addicted to it as Western kids to TikTok/IG, from what I’ve seen.
> TikTok is perhaps the most impressively addictive social media app ever created.
What nonsense.
> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.
"Apparently"? Tiktok was forced to separate itself into a chinese version and the non-chinese version by the US because we didn't want "da ccp" controlling tiktok.
> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China, then Britain introduced stronger, more disruptive versions, forcing a stronger social reaction.
There is no historic symmetry. Unless china invades the US and forces americans to use tiktok. Like britain invaded china ( opium wars ) and forced opium on china's population.
What's with all the same propaganda in every tiktok/china related thread? The same talking points on every single thread for the past few years.
"Tiktok was forced to separate itself into a chinese version and the non-chinese version by the US because we didn't want "da ccp" controlling tiktok."
You're talking about Propaganda but you are spreading straight up fake news.
ByteDance initially released Douyin in China in September 2016.
ByteDance introduced TikTok for users outside of China in 2017.
There was no "split", let alone one "forced by the US".
> Tiktok was forced to separate itself into a chinese version and the non-chinese version by the US because we didn't want "da ccp" controlling tiktok
No. TikTok was forced to put its data on American servers [1].
Douyin was launched in 2016 as musical.ly, and is unrelated to U.S. pressure. (EDIT: Douyin was launched in 2016, TikTok in 2017. Musical.ly was acquired in 2017 and merged into/basically became TikTok. TikTok has never been in China.)
TikTok is also banned in China. For the Chinese market, Douyin is there from the same company ByteDance. Americans need to understand this decision is not an emotional one but for the nation, just like the opposite party does for its nation.
> this decision is not an emotional one but for the nation, just like the opposite party does for its nation
I'd argue that it is an emotional decision for both, and it does seem ironic that the US would be following China in restricting a platform that people see as a major tool for free speech. Whether you agree with that or not the optics are terrible, and the users are very aware of it. If this is really a big concern then they would also ban facebook/instagram/snapchat, but they aren't being included in this, despite having a worse track record.
Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat are not functionally owned & operated by an unfriendly foreign government that would have incentive to destabilize the USA via civil unrest by influencing our algorithms.
"enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”
Surprised not more people are tying this to the Uber-Didi situation. IIRC it was a big complicated mess, but e.g. (this)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_Law_of_the_Peopl...] seems to imply that e.g. Uber would have to use Chinese domestic servers subject to auditing, etc. Upshot is eventually Uber stopped dumping billions to try to get a foothold, and eventually divested their Chinese operations.
(Also later Didi got kinda screwed imo right after their IPO in IMO a retaliatory move by the Chinese gov). So, is this TikTok ban one more shot in a new form of economic warfare? Is this type of war even new? Again, IMO, I think in instituting this law, this kind of stuff was on at least some of congress' minds.
Didi/Uber was more complicated than just data stuff.
At a high level, chinese tech culture is an insane no holds barred cage match with very little legal structure to protect IP or employees or anything and most companies who enter fail at participating in this.
Didi did a lot of corporate espionage and sabotage at uber china. They'd have "double agents" working for uber they'd pay to f stuff up. This type of thing is not practices in america because it is extremely illegal, but it was fine in China at not something that uber could do "back" to didi. There were people on the uber china fraud team paid by didi to tip off fraud networks on how to fraud. In the last year in china, they moved a ton of important work back to US offices because the china office was "compromised".
It is a lot more complicated, and I agree with the vibe of your comment based on some readings, but couldn't find much regarding sources about the sabotage. I found [this article](https://www.digitalaoban.com/why-uber-failed-in-china/), and I also found another by searching "IMEI FRAUD UBER DIDI SIM CARD", (but that other article was literally copy pasted from the first) (couldn't find sources from the first) (I have some hurtful things to say about tech journalism but this website is too polite for that)
Again, don't really doubt, but more sort of wondering where you sorts get primary information from.
This will ultimately benefit the current Big Tech incumbents. Tiktok was gaining ground rapidly on advertising money and I wouldn't be surprised if there was lobbying that stifled the competition.
Instead of banning TikTok, we should be trying to compete with them and make a better product that wins customers over. It's sad to see the US becoming more authoritarian and follow China's example.
In a more functional democracy we would see that mass data collection of any sort, by any company (foreign or domestic), is a national security risk.
Have witnessed first-hand the threats by foreign state actors penetrating US-based cloud infrastructure. And it’s not like any of our domestic corporations are practicing the type of security hygiene necessary to prevent those intrusions.
So idk, the whole thing feels like a farce that will mainly benefit Zuck and co while doing very little to ultimately protect our interests.
We would be much better off actually addressing data privacy and passing legislation that regulates every company in a consistent manner.
> In a more functional democracy we would see that mass data collection of any sort, by any company (foreign or domestic), is a national security risk.
You obviously don't mean "democracy," but some other word. We don't see mass data collection as a problem because most Americans don't care about privacy. The only reason this Tik Tok thing is even registering is because of the treat of China, which Americans do care about.
There's nothing preventing China from buying mass data from Facebook or one of the many data brokers. This is about censorship and the ability to control public narratives.
It's questionable what a more functional democracy would actually do, since there hasn't really been one in history. There's been other forms of democracy, but they've all had their flaws, and none of them so far have acted in the interests of all the people in that country.
I am not an "America bad" type of fellow, but US democracy is clearly reaching a local minimum. I suspect "never more functional" is an idea with which even your representative would disagree. There are multiple major issues that Congress should have addressed decades ago and instead they've only become more intractable. The country is more than its government, but the core democratic component, Congress, simply gets very little done. I do not think it can go much longer before some series of events forces broad compromises and realignment.
I mean, however flawed the EU may be, I think they are earnestly trying to protect the average person from the current paradigm of abusive data collection. Perfect can’t be the enemy of good.
Regardless of one’s view on the outcome, this case is a reminder that textualism as a legal philosophy stands on shaky ground. This case is decided not on some strict analysis of the words written by a legislator, but on the court’s subjective view that there is a compelling national interest (which in turn seems based on speculation about the future, rather than a factual analysis of events).
Textualism might give the court some useful definitions, but it is after all still called, quite literally, an opinion.
You misapprehend what textualism is. It does not say that every legal case can be decided by interpreting written law. It is merely a philosophy of how to interpret written law when its meaning is what's at issue. What American lawyers call "textualism" is how most continental european courts interpret written laws. It would hardly merit a label, if it wasn't for a long history in the 20th century of jurists departing from written law in making decisions. In this case, there is no dispute about what the written law means. It's about applying a pre-existing legal concept, the freedom of speech, to particular facts.
Another example that highlights the distinction: Justice Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court's preeminent textualists, is also one of the biggest proponents of criminal rights. Those cases similarly involve defining the contours of pre-existing legal concepts, such as "unreasonable search or seizure." Nobody denies that such questions are subjective--in referring to what's "unreasonable," the text itself calls for a subjective analysis.
> Another example that highlights the distinction...
No, that just highlights the hypocritical picking-and-choosing they do to justify it. Gorsuch is a textualist when he wants to be, just like the others.
> Textualism is a formalist theory in which the interpretation of the law is based exclusively on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as intention of the law when passed, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law.
Textualism in modern context is a tool used by conservative justices used to uphold laws that serve business interests and conservative causes.
This was a unanimous decision. The only points where Sotomayor and Gorusch disagreed with the majority decision was whether TikTok's operation qualified under strict scrutiny for first amendment considerations, but both agreed that even under strict scrutiny, the law would have survived the challenge.
Much of the decision is indeed based around an analysis of the words written by the legislature.
It's not really speculation, though. Certain aspects of the intelligence relationships between the US and China are highly asymmetrical already.
For example, Chinese nationals can enter our country and gather information on our infrastructure, corporations, and people with relative ease because English is prevalent, and foreign nationals have, with the exception of certain military/research areas, the same access that US citizens have. On the other hand, foreign nationals in China are closely monitored and have very few rights, assuming they know Chinese, are physically in China (Great Firewall), and know how to get around in the first place.
China has unfettered access to our media ecosystem, research, patents, etc., and they do their best to create an uncompetitive/hostile environment for any other country to attempt the same on their territory. Some of this has to do with trade—to be fair, these are intertwined—but the situation regarding intelligence is bleak.
Yeah it’s funny MAGA still wants to encourage more H1b from China because you know apparently Americans are smart enough and are lazy. (Thanks for your vote though we will get rid of trans migrants!)
Well gosh, that sentence makes it seems like Congress could do anything!
However, this case is about something else. The opinion states that there is a first amendment interest, but that interest is secondary to a compelling national security interest that, in the court’s view, is valid. That may or may not be correct - but it is a subjective interpretation.
Whether Congress has jurisdiction here is not at issue. The court is deciding a different question, which is whether the ban would violate the first amendment. We look at their ruling:
>We granted certiorari to decide whether the Act, as applied to petitioners, violates the First Amendment.
This is about as much foreign commerce as it is me buying a Xiaomi phone.
I know there's court precedent, but corporations aren't people. It's yet another Chinese platform that Americans use to communicate with other western companies.
That’s actually my point. I don’t think strict textualism really has anything to do with any case. As soon as you say it’s the rule of law that drives every case, you find yourself somehow interpreting an awful lot.
> a compelling national interest (which in turn seems based on speculation about the future, rather than a factual analysis of events).
I keep seeing this claimed, but these aren't hypothetical risks. China has managerial control over ByteDance. China has laws that require prominent companies to cooperate in their national security operations, and they've recently strengthened them even more. China has already exercised those powers to target political dissidents. This is the normal state of affairs in Chinese business; this is how things work there. It isn't like the west where companies have power to push back, or enjoy managerial independence.
Let's not forget that the US government has forced US companies to secretly hand over user data for "national security" purposes. Anyone who denies that China does similar things either doesn't know how the world works or is consciously denying reality.
> Textualism might give the court some useful definitions, but it is after all still called, quite literally, an opinion.
I don't think you understand SCOTUS' decision here. They are not banning TikTok. Congress is doing so (actually forcing a sale of TikTok or be banned). They are simply ruling whether Congress acted unconstitutionally by doing so. In other words, if they overrule Congress, they would have to show how Congress' ruling contravenes the Constitution, when the Constitution grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce and decide matters of national security.
Congress isn't banning TikTok either. The law says US businesses can't work with TikTok. TokTok is choosing to shut down to try and force the issue politically. TikTok can choose stay running, the app will still be on your phone, no IP addresses are being blocked. The laws impact comes from choking off revenue and marketing (access to app stores).
I'd use the term 'originalism' rather 'textualism', but you have a point. For 1st amendment cases, the court hasn't (yet) tried to use their new fangled originalist methodologies. In fact justice Gorsuch wrote separately in the Tiktok case to dig on the levels of scrutiny.
I think it's understandable, in a Chesterton's Fence sort of way - they better make sure that if they're going to start using a new methodology, it works better than what they use now, (these weird judge-created levels of scrutiny), but there's so much 1A precedent that is hard to be confident.
For 2nd amendment, they have used 'originalism' already. There isn't nearly as much precedent in that area, and so they were able to start more or less from scratch.
Rather I think this a good example of how people go through the steps of delegimitizing institutions if it dosen't agree with their opinion. If the Supreme Court's opinion is "shaky" then I guess the Pro-TikTokers would teetering on pole in the middle on the ocean.
But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.
Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publication s were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
What changed now?
Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
People have rights to speak within reason. Governments don't. The Chinese government shaping content is not protected. The law notably does not ban individual content.
The justices seem to have argued that eliminating a platform for speech does not inhibit your ability to voice that speech on another platform, so is not a violation of the first amendment. I think this is an important outcome and really goes against what many so called "free speech absolutists" would argue.
they found some of the arguments compelling and acknowledged that the law may burden free speech. But they also found that the law is not about speech, it's about corporate ownership. In these cases the court will often (not always) defer to congress / the state.
Individuals can bring Pravda into the USA that is protected speech. But Congress could ban Pravda from doing business in the US same as it can ban or sanction any other foreign business.
Because the law bans the operation of software by a foreign adversary. It does not ban speech.
Legal precedent holds that source code (the expressive part of software) is speech, but that executing software (the functional part) is not speech. Even when the operation conveys speech, the ban is on the functional operation of the software, so the First Amendment doesn't apply.
It's opinion regardless of the specific legal philosophy. Each philosophy makes decisions about what kinds of information, sources, context, etc are considered to form the "correct" interpretation. Those decisions are opinions.
Since I'm a reasonably well-known textualist, I'll bite:
First, the court was not asked to reconsider the meaning of the First Amendment. In the US, we generally hew to the rule of "party presentation," which generally provides that courts will consider the parties' arguments, not make up new ones on their own.
TikTok's claim was that application of the statute in question to it violated the First Amendment's clause that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." The Supreme Court has considered the interpretation and application of that clause in...well, a whole lot of cases. TikTok asked the court to apply the logic of certain of those precedents to rule in its favor and enjoin the statute. It did not, however, ask the court to reconsider those precedents or interpret the First Amendment anew.
Since the court was not asked to do so, it's no surprise that it didn't.
Second, as noted, the court has literally decades' worth of cases fleshing out the meaning of this clause and applying it in particular circumstances. Every textualist, so far as I'm aware, generally supports following the court's existing precedents interpreting the Constitution unless and until they are overruled.
Third, even if one is of the view that the Court ought to consider the text anew in every case, without deferring to its prior rulings interpreting the text, this would have been a particularly inappropriate case for it to do so. A party seeking an injunction, as TikTok was, has to show a strong likelihood of success on the merits. That generally entails showing that you win under existing precedent. A court's expedited consideration of a request for preliminary relief is not an appropriate time to broach a new theory of what the law requires. The court doesn't have the time to give it the consideration required, and asking the court to abrogate its precedents is inconsistent with the standard for a preliminary injunction, which contemplates only a preview of the ultimate legal question, not a full-blown resolution of it.
Fourth, what exactly was the court supposed to do with the text in question, which is "abridging the freedom of speech"? The question here is whether the statute here, as applied to TikTok, violates that text. Well, it depends on what "the freedom of speech" means and perhaps what "abridging" means. It's only natural that a court would look to precedent in answering the question. Precedent develops over time, fleshing out (or "liquidating," to use Madison's term) the meaning and application of ambiguous or general language. Absent some compelling argument that precedent got the meaning wrong, that sort of case-by-case development of the law is how our courts have always functioned--and may be, according to some scholars, itself a requirement of originalism.
Well, India has already banned Tik-Tok, now the US is. It looks like some European countries are giving it the side eye. This may be the beginning of the end for it.
No matter what you think of this ban, the court is obviously not the right place to solve it. It is completely unsurprising that this is a unanimous decision because foreign trade is one of the few powers expressly given to the federal government in the constitution:
>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;[0]
(The actual law may not have relied exclusively on the Commerce Clause, you would have to read it to find out. But from a high level there is nothing stopping congress from regulating any instance foreign trade.)
I'm a Canadian. Almost every major Canadian newspaper is owned by American ideologically-conservative hedge funds, the only variance is how activist they are in their ownership. Our social media (like everyone's) is owned by Americans, men who are now kowtowing to Trump.
And meanwhile, Trump is now incessantly talking about annexing our country. The Premier of Alberta is receptive to the idea.
So, how should a Canadian federal government responsibly react to that?
I'm surprised TikTok isn't trying to push a web version, hosted outside the USA as an alternative to shutting down. While it would be difficult for a new social media service to gain traction that way, TikTok has a huge established audience.
Sort of. In a mobile browser, it almost immediately tries to get me to download the app, which is the opposite of pushing the web version in a marketing sense. Pushing would be telling app users that the app will become unavailable soon and they should use TikTok on the web.
Sounds like we have our answer. Have China flood the internet with "content". American scrapers train on it. Now we can ban LLM use on American websites, compromised by China!
FWIW, this has driven many users to RedNote, which is even more Chinese in every way, regardless of whether it's even the same kind of platform. I doubt it would ever be anywhere near the same numbers as TikTok (assuming ByteDance didn't sell off) but it does illustrate the trouble with this i.e. cat-and-mouse game.
This is very misleading "news" and it doesn't illustrate anything, a bunch of users installed rednote out of protest, but this is a fully chinese app with 100% chinese content and 99% of users will move to youtube, instagram, etc
Rednote has been shown as the top free app (per Apple’s own App Store in my device at least) for going on a week, so the magnitude may be larger than you imply.
Also, having tried it myself, the algorithm works much like TikTok whereby it learns to show English speakers English content pretty quickly.
Also the general consensus among people who have used IG and TikTok (I personally don’t use IG) seems to be that the former does not at all substitute for the latter, particularly in terms of the subjective “authentic” feel of the content (IG often said to be lacking the community feel of TikTok).
A non-trivial number of videos I've seen this week mention also being able to find the creator of said video on Rednote. It is also the number 1 downloaded app in the US iOS store this week. The news may be a logical extreme, but it's not fake.
I agree. I'm not sure if I think all of this is good or not. Even if you, a gov't, didn't have an interest in managing your citizens vis-a-vis some platform, it doesn't mean other govt's don't have that interest, so maybe there's some validity to it in that case. But all of that raises even more questions, like "so what?" and "to what end?"
I feel like the protest move to RedNote will be short lived. The censorship there is draconian - if you say even the slightest thing that offends the CCP on red note, you get banned. See this discussion on the subreddit for TikTok (https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i2wll3/how_to_not_...).
Something I read that’s interesting - RedNote changed the English name to cover their actual name - the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true).
> the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true)
That is the Chinese name of the app (although I've heard mixed reports on if "little red book" as a term for the book actually common in China). The founder claims it's because of the founder's "career at Bain & Company and education at the Stanford Graduate School of Business" which both use red, but I'm pretty sure it's a pun on his name also being Mao.
My wife and I are split on this, though neither of us are regular TikTok users.
I keep coming across elected officials who are apparently briefed on something about TikTok, and they decide there’s a reasonable threat regarding the CCP or some such. The idea that the CCP could drive our national conversation somehow (still murky) bothers me.
My wife feels like this is the US Government trying to shut down a communication and news delivery tool.
While I don’t agree with her, I don’t think she’s wrong. It seems all the folks who “have it on good authority” that this is a dangerous propaganda tool, can’t share what “it” is.
If the President had over Meta and X the sort of control the CCP has over TikTok, Instagram and Twitter would be banned in most countries. The only reason this is debated so much here is we’re (in my opinion correctly) very cautious about free speech.
The owner of Twitter/X is about to be in the president’s cabinet. And the owner of Meta is clearly cozying up to the incoming administration with their new “anti-woke” policies.
> The idea that the CCP could drive our national conversation somehow (still murky) bothers me.
Even if all the CCP can do is modify how often some videos and comments show up to users on tik tok, there's a chance that level of control could have been enough to instigate the whole jump to red note we're seeing. After all, the suggestion originated within tik tok itself as the videos talking about it (and the comments praising it) went viral. Sure everyone was primed to do something with the deadline approaching, but it's entirely possible that the red note trend isn't an organically viral one, but a pre-planned and well executed attempt to throw a wrench in the works.
red note's infrastructure seems to have had no problems absorbing millions of new users at the drop of a hat, cloud scaling is good, but that kind of explosive growth in mere days, when unexpected, often results in some visible hiccups. Maybe the engineers are just that good, or maybe they had a heads up that it'd be happening.
Utter speculation on my part, but I've found it interesting I've not come across anyone else mention the possibility.
Censorship is a form of propaganda, and even the very obvious/reported examples we've seen reported over the years are pretty bad. And you have to assume that there is more going on than is actually reported/noticed, especially in subtler ways. It's also just obvious it's happening in the sense that the Chinese government has ultimate control over TikTok.
I don't see a section on their main wiki either, even though YT is pretty notorious for deleting stuff, even political stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
Biden has said he won't enforce the ban and Trump has said he will keep TikTok from going dark. Shou is attending the inauguration. Ivanka and Kai are posting actively on TikTok. It is not going anywhere.
An interesting angle to this whole drama that I haven’t seen discussed much: in the creator industry, TikTok is known for being significantly harder to make money from your content, as compared to YouTube. For various reasons, content just makes much more money on YouTube than it does on TikTok.
I do wonder what will happen if TikTok users migrate to YouTube shorts, and if that will change this.
It's really quite funny to read the timeline in the opinion.
Essentially, Trump started the TikTok ban, Biden continued it, and Congress finally put it into law. And now both Trump and Biden, as well as Congress, are shying away from actually enforcing the ban.
• In August 2020, President Trump issued an Executive
Order finding that “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in
[China] continues to threaten the national security, foreign
policy, and economy of the United States.”
• President Trump determined
that TikTok raised particular concerns, noting that the
platform “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users” and is susceptible to being used to
further the interests of the Chinese Government.
• Just days after issuing his initial Executive Order, President Trump ordered ByteDance Ltd. to divest all interests
and rights in any property “used to enable or support
ByteDance’s operation of the TikTok application in the
United States,” along with “any data obtained or derived
from” U. S. TikTok users.
• Throughout 2021 and 2022, ByteDance Ltd. negotiated
with Executive Branch officials to develop a national security agreement that would resolve those concerns. Executive Branch officials ultimately determined, however, that
ByteDance Ltd.’s proposed agreement did not adequately
“mitigate the risks posed to U. S. national security interests.” 2 App. 686. Negotiations stalled, and the parties
never finalized an agreement.
• Against this backdrop, Congress enacted the Protecting
Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications
Act.
A simpler explaination, politicians were worried that Tiktok may influence mit-term and presidential elections, but it turns out a good place to run campaigns.
The whole thing, including Biden setting the deadline for literally the last day of his presidency, strikes me as extremely odd. I have no idea what the real story is here, but it very much seems that what is happening is not at all what it seems.
"Impactful" might be counting your chickens a little too early. Let's see if it has any impact. The next POTUS might just ignore it, or some other shenanigans might be used to work around whatever the imagined impact was.
The interesting bits from the text[1], relative to the now flagged sibling
-----
(3) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—
(A) any of—
(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
(ii) TikTok;
(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
(B) a covered company that—
(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—
(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and
(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
-----
The way I read this is that Congress is bootstrapping the law with its own finding that ByteDance, Ltd/TikTok are Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications, but then, in (3)(B), the President is responsible for determining any other entities this law should cover given previously stated parameters (what they mean by "covered entity" here), using the procedure it then provides.
I believe that addresses the concern about this being a "Bill of Attainder".
Edit: Obviously IANAL, but it also doesn't appear that this issue of this being a Bill of Attainder was raised by TikTok, nor was it considered in this opinion. Perhaps they will do so in a separate action, or already have and it just hasn't made its way to the court(?), but if it were such a slam dunk defense, you think their expensive lawyers would have raised it.
The Supreme Court has made only very narrow rulings around Bills of Attainder.
To me this bill seems problematic on that front in two directions. One is that it explicitly names a target of the ban. Secondly, it grants the president power to arbitrarily name more. Similar to how a King can declare certain Subjects be Attainded on His Whim.
But the petitioners (TikTok) did not raise this issue so the court did not have to decide on it. Instead they focused on the first amendment issue, which seems like a loser -- there is no speech present on TikTok that the law bans; any content on TikTok can be posted to red-blooded American apps like shorts or reels so the speech itself is not affected.
> I believe that addresses the concern about this being a "Bill of Attainder".
The definition of "foreign adversary controlled application" in the bill is explicit in including either (a) this specific list of organizations, OR (b) other organization that might meet certain criteria later. I'm not sure how the existence of (b) addresses the concern that (a) amounts to a bill of attainder.
This analysis seems reasonable, but I think the simpler explanation blatant corruption, since the legislation is moving judicial responsibility from from the judicial branch to the legislature and president, and a great deal of money is involved.
I agree we have an activist court in the Roberts court. How is this making an ex-post facto law, though? The suit is over a bill passed with broad bipartisan support by Congress.
Thousands of US content creators were earning on TikTok. Now they need to migrate over to other alternatives. Also this is a reminder for all content creators to always plan for failovers. Though I would assume most them already are on multiple platforms.
Not at all the case except for the largest ones. It is hard to grasp the distribution capacity of TikTok. It WILL put your content in front of people interested in it. It's crazy good at that. Also, a lot of money came in from the live streams within the app.
An implementation detail that might be interesting is that the discussed method of the ban is to use the same ISP block that is used for torrent sites (and other websites).
This may be a bit of relevance when talking about how banning a website get applied through the legal system.
That’s a good point. Apparently VPN popularity is already exploding in states that PornHub had to block.
Maybe we will finally get the decentralized computer network we thought we were building in the 1990s (as a combination of software overlays and point to point unlicensed wireless links).
Who are they actually supposed to be selling to? Given the US has pretty active antitrust for now, I can't really think of anyone who has both the money and expertise to run it and would be allowed to buy it.
Bits that can't be exported can be recreated by the new owner, most likely with material differences anyways not just because the new owner might not be able to recreate the original faithfully but because they might not want to.
rumors are that XHS wont region split, in which case this is setting up to a monumental event in the evolution and future of the internet. words can't really describe how big of a decision this is going to be.
> I don't think that's going to happen. The party official seems to be positive about the event overall based on their press release recently. IMO it's going to the opposite direction, where they try to get more foreign users on the platform and have them stay there. If I were a CCP official, I would love to have more soft power by having everyone on a Chinese platform.
But in a nut shell I think we're seeing outcome #2 play out, which has huge ramifications for the Chinese internet. Essentially this could become a precedent for all Chinese apps moving forward, and essentially the great firewall slowly dissolving. Trends have been slowly going that way with Bilibili, Douban, Kuaishou, etc, being more open to foreigners. There's still a lot to play out over the next few weeks as Trump assumes office and Tiktok CEO attends the inauguration. But there is just too much to comment about this entire situation, and most people who aren't Chinese or have experience with the great firewall are not going to comprehend just how monumental this whole ordeal has already been, and will be.
Still have no good answer on why its bad for a company that is supposedly under Chineese influence to collect this kind of information on us, and adjust and tweak an 'algorith' for displaying content. But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it? Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
Plenty of good answers have already been put forward. But in case you're asking in good faith, here are the two main ones:
1- It's in the interest of the US government to protect its interests and citizens from governments that are considered adversarial, which China is. And unlike other countries, the Chinese government exercises a great deal of direct control over major companies (like ByteDance). If TikTok was controlled by the Russian government would we even be having this conversation? (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
I think social media in general - including by US companies - does more harm than good to society and concentrates too much power and influence in the hands of a few (Musk, Zuck, etc.) So this isn't to say that "US social media is good". But from a national security standpoint, Congress' decision makes sense.
2- If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on. But those are blocked (along with much of the Western internet) or heavily filtered/censored. TikTok itself is banned in China. So there's a strong tit-for-tat element here, which also is reasonable.
> (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
American-backed forces are fighting the Russian army itself in Ukraine. Implied in all of that is a desire to not have US forces fight them directly in Poland.
> Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.
China benefits greatly from the rules based order that America spends considerable effort to maintain and uphold. They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer, but they're better off with than without and recognize that.
OTOH, Russia does not. They prefer chaos.
China is definitely the stronger threat. But Russia is a greater immediate threat because they're only interested in tearing things down. It's easier to tear things down than to build them up, especially if you don't care about the consequences.
I agree with point #1, but then this ban should also include the US controlled sites - having the main office in the US doesn't mean the data is any more secure, or that the products do less harm socially.
For point #2, this seems like you're saying "they don't have a leg to stand on, and we want to do the same thing". If we don't support the way they control the internet, we shouldn't be doing adopting the same policies. I don't think governments should have any ability to control communication on the internet, so this feels like a huge overstep regardless of the reasons given for it
The US companies continue to feed the same information to the Chinese, even though the Federal government has been trying to get them to stop for almost a decade (I cite sources elsewhere in this thread).
So, all of your arguments apply equally to the big US owned social media companies.
Since the ban won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases, the important part of the question is:
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
> If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on.
So now the US should just do everything China does? What happened to American ideals protecting themselves? If free speech really works, it shouldn't matter that TikTok exists.
1) You can not protect users from being influenced by the media they consume-- that is basically the very nature of the thing.
2) This is not about protecting users of the app, this is about preventing a foreign state from having direct influence on public opinion.
It is obvious to me why this is necessary. If you allow significant foreign influence on public opinion, then this can be leveraged. Just imagine Russia being in control of a lot of US media in 2022. Or 1940's Japan. That is a very serious problem, because it can easily lead to outcomes that are against the interests of ALL US citizens in the longer term...
SCOTUS explicitly avoided ruling on this justification, and it seemed at argument that even some of the conservative justices were uncomfortable with the free speech implications of it.
Isn’t that already happening? Fox news parroting russian talking points to sow division among the working class population of this country? Why is that fine? Because they get Rs in power in the process?
Right, Congress was shown some pretty convincing evidence that execs in China pull the strings, and those execs are vulnerable to Chinese government interference.
As we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks, social media companies based in the US are also vulnerable to US government interference — but that’s the way they like it.
Yes, there is a distinction there. The issue is that it's a small part of the overall problem when looked at the larger scale. The overarching issues of political influence at odds with individual citizens, hostile engagement-maximizing algorithms, adversarial locked-down client apps, and selling influence to the highest bidder are all there with domestically-incorporated companies. The government's argument basically hinges on "but when these companies do something really bad we can force domestic companies to change but we can't do the same for TikTok". That's disingenuous to American individuals who have been on the receiving end of hostile influence campaigns for over a decade, disingenuous to foreign citizens not in the US or China who can't control any of this, and disingenuous to our societal principles as we're still ultimately talking about speech.
That can’t be it. Facebook sells the same data to foreign adversaries including China and Russia. The most famous incident involved the British company Cambridge Analytica, which used it to manipulate election outcomes in multiple countries:
And here’s a story about an executive order from Biden the next year. Apparently the White House concluded that the investigation wasn’t enough to fix the behavior:
It's still completely legal for Meta to sell that user data to Chinese owned companies. So no security is provided by this change. I see it as theatre.
It’s bad because China has different interests than the US. Imagine if a war breaks out in Taiwan and they send targeted propaganda to members of the US military.
US-made missiles are blowing stuff up inside Russia because Russia invaded a treaty partner who gave up their nukes in exchange for a security alliance with the US. And yet Russian apps are in our app stores. Nobody needs to imagine.
Wouldn't banning the collection of this confidential data provide a better solution? Meta could still turnaround and sell this information to Chinese companies.
Define the US here. Is it the government, the people, the business interests of the private sector?
Each one of those has different interests, often competing ones.
In any functional nation the people's interests should prevail, and it seems to me that any information capable of swaying the public's opinion is informing them that their interests are being harmed in favor of other ones.
Then China would just fall back to bombarding them with propaganda on one of the other large social media platforms that are prone to both known and unknown influence.
Indeed - if the US is this afraid of a popular social network under foreign control then every country outside the US should be petrified.
And domestically in the US - citizens should be demanding the dismantling of the big powerful players - which ironically the US government is against because of it's usefulness abroad..... ( let's assume for one moment, despite evidence to the contrary, that the US government doesn't use these tools of persuasion on it's own population ).
I have no horses in the race but if you justify a Tiktok ban in the US because of a foreign influence, you also do justify a Facebook ban in the EU on the same arguments.
Check out the scandal in Romania, some guy that had less than 5% in polls got 30% because of tiktok. Other candidates had tiktok campaigns too but probably didn't use bots.
Social media is a legitimate threat to any countries democracy if used wisely. It is dangerous to have one of the biggest ones in the hands of your enemy when they can influence your own countries narrative to such an extent.
For me the biggest scandal in Romania is that they threw the people's choice to the trash just because he didn't show up in polls... a few months after banning another candidate, Sosoaca, for, and I cite textually, "calling for the removal of fundamental state values and choices, namely EU and NATO membership".
Note that from the little I know about both Sosaca and Georgescu, they both look like dangerous nutjobs that should not rule, but if I were a Romanian I would be more worried about a democracy that removes candidates it doesn't like for purely political reasons (not for having commited a felony or anything like that) than about them.
This is being positioned as a national security issue that a foreign government has so much influence over the US public (and data on people if they want, like geolocation, interests, your contacts, etc).
Note: I'm not saying I either agree or disagree ... just pointing out the dynamics in the case being made.
Legally, the national security component is relatively minor to the case. It's played up to be the justification for the law but SCOTUS doesn't really get to decide whether that is good justification or even correct.
The concern isn't broadly that "social media companies have data". The concern is the governing environment that those companies operate in, which can be coopted for competing national security purposes.
This isn't a consumer data privacy protection.
The concerns here are obvious: For example, it would be trivial for the Chinese military to use TikTok data to find US service members, and serve them propaganda. Or track their locations, etc.
First, it's a national security issue for a company controlled by the CCP to have intimate data access for hundreds of millions of US citizens. Not only can they glean a great deal of sensitive information, but they have the ability to control the algorithm in ways that benefit the CCP.
Second, China does not reciprocate this level of vulnerability. US companies do not have the same access or control over Chinese users. If you want to allow nation states to diddle around with your citizens, then it ought to be a reciprocal arrangement and then it all averages out.
Back in the early stage of social media, US companies had the choice to operate in China as long as they comply with the censorship and local laws. Had they chosen not to quit China market at the point, they would have been probably huge in China holding major access over Chinese users too. (How would Chinese government react to that is something we never get to see now...)
I keep seeing argument regarding "China bans social medias from other countries". It's not an outright ban saying that "Facebook cannot operate in China", but more like "Comply with the censorship rules or you cannot operate in China". It's not targeting "ownership" or "nation states". e.g. Google chose to leave, while Microsoft continues to operate Bing in China.
It is obviously way better on this matter than China, but in principle, liberties are selectively granted in US and in China.
The TikTok ban topic has been stale for long time before it became the main harbor for Pro-Palestine content after it became under censorship by US social media thus depriving anti-Palestine from controling the narrative, effectively becoming a major concern for AIPAC et al.
Data collection is more of a plausible pretext at this point.
Why do we need a good answer? Does US need to be a good guy on some made up rules? Post Soviet collapse, US could have just taken over a bunch of territories. We don’t alway need to be some faithful country when the rest of the world is always messing up asking for millions of Americans to spill blood. I think RoW take US goodwill for granted. We don’t need to play nice. That’s not how competition works.
If US wants to imitate China, they should imitate its industry not its restrictions to freedoms.
The ideal world order isn't the one where Chinese can't find out what happened on Tiananmen square and Americans can't find out what happened in Gaza. That's a very shitty arrangement and I am shocked that the Americans are picking that as their future.
FWIW facebook was blocked in 2009, after ETIM (East Turkistan Islamic Movement) (allegedly) used it to organise the July Urumqi riots, and facebook refused to follow Chinese law and cooperate with the police to identify the perpetrators.
Whatever you think of the law of the PRC, they applied it consistently, Facebook was blocked for doing something that would get any Chinese company shut down.
Tiktok is getting blocked in America for doing what American companies do.
Obviously, China has a constitution, but the freedoms enumerated there are not the same as those in America's. And those that are enumerated are pointless (like North Korea's constitution).
My point is that there's an inherent hypocrisy in saying we're more free than them, but then doing a tit-for-tat retaliatory measure. How can we be more free when we're doing the same things the other side is?
Say, for example, congress passes and the president signs a law that says that product sponsorships in videos need to be disclosed. If a US company (or a European, Australian, Japanese, etc) country violates that law, we're pretty sure that a judgement against them can change that behavior.
It sounds like you have ignored all the answers and then you're saying there's no good answers?
If you want to convince someone they're not good answers you would have to at least engage with them and show how they fail to be correct/moral/legal or something. Pretending they don't exist does nothing.
Why would you want an outside nation to have an outsized influence America's social fabric? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60 Chomsky laid out manufacturing consent decades ago and while his thesis revolves around traditional media heavily influencing thought-in-America, the influencing now happens from algorithmic based feeds. Tik Tok controls the feed for many young American minds.
While I agree with you about domestic policy, I'm not sure why it's inconsistent or hypocritical to deal with an external threat posed from those who want to destroy or harm you.
The details specific to China and TikTok are kind of moot when talking about broad principles. And there is a valid discussion to be had regarding whether or not it does pose a legitimate national security threat. You would be absolutely correct in pointing out all of the trade that happens between China and the USA as a rebuttal to what I'm about to offer.
To put where I'm coming from into perspective, I'm one of those whacko Ayn Rand loving objectivists who wants a complete separation between state and economy just like we have been state and church and for the same reasons. This means that I want nothing shy of absolute laissez-faire capitalism.
But that actually doesn't mean that blockades, sanctions and trade prohibitions are necessarily inconsistent with this world view. It depends on the context.
An ideal trade is one in which both parties to that trade benefit. The idea being that both are better off than they were before the trade.
This means that it is a really stupid idea to trade anything at all at any level with those who want to either destroy or harm you.
National security is one of the proper roles of government.
And I don't think you necessarily disagree with me, because you're saying "we should also be protected our citizens from spying and intrusions into our privacy" and yes! Yes we absolutely should be!
But that's a different role than protecting the nation from external threats. You can do your job with respects to one, and fail at your job with respects to the other, and then it is certainly appropriate to call out that one of the important jobs is not being fulfilled. Does that make it hypocritical? Does it suddenly make it acceptable for enemy states to start spying?
By all means criticize your government always. That's healthy. But one wrong does not excuse another. We can, and should, debate whether TikTok really represents a national security threat, or whether we should be trading with China at all (my opinion is we shouldn't be). It's just that the answer to "why its bad when China does it but it's right when it's done domestically" is "it's wrong in both cases and each can be dealt with independently from the other without contradiction"
optimistically, this is the first step towards banning or at least forcing more transparency for all algorithmic feeds. there's absolutely similar concerns about the leadership of American companies being able to sway public opinion in whatever direction they choose via promotion or demotion of viewpoints. but it's only been possible to convince those with the power to stop them of the danger from China, because while probably none of the companies have "America's best interests" at heart when tuning their algorithms, it's much clearer that China has reason to actively work against American national interests (even just demoting honest critique of China is something to be wary of)
It's about psychological manipulation of Americans. TikTok is a completely different experience in China. Social media influences us in negative ways. And the Chinese government can and does take advantage of that.
Judging by your karma and registration date, you spend some time here on HN. There have been lots of good answers why; they are the many prior discussions of this topic.
You are just seeming to ignore them for whatever reason.
Where in that CNBC article does it say that it's fine for US companies to do that? I don't see that anywhere, yet that's the point you're claiming is being made.
It is, and if this a stepping stone to that conversation, that’s a good thing. Great even. If you expect to have everything at once, you’ll make no progress.
The comparison isn't even close. TikTok's relationship with the Chinese government is well-documented, not "supposed". They are legally required to share data under China's National Intelligence Law. The Chinese government has also a track record of pushing disinformation and find any way to destabilize Western democracies.
Douyin (The Chinese Tiktok version) limits users under 14 to 40 minutes per day and primarily serves educational content, while TikTok's algorithm outside China optimizes for maximum engagement regardless of content quality or user wellbeing.
US tech companies pursuing profit at the expense of user wellbeing is concerning and deserves its own topic. However, there is a fundamental difference between a profit driven company operating under US legal constraints and oversight, versus a platform forced to serve the strategic interests of a foreign government that keeps acting in bad faith.
> Douyin (The Chinese Tiktok version) limits users under 14 to 40 minutes per day and primarily serves educational content, while TikTok's algorithm outside China optimizes for maximum engagement regardless of content quality or user wellbeing.
This isn't true, at least not for adults' accounts. I've watched my girlfriend use it and the content was exactly what she watched on TikTok, mostly dumb skits, singing, dancing, just all in Chinese instead of half in Chinese. It also never kicked her off for watching too long.
I was told a similar story about Xiaohongshu, where it was supposedly an app for Chinese citizens to read Mao's quotations (through the lens of Xi Jinping Thought) to prove their loyalty. Then I saw it for real and it's literally Chinese Instagram.
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
Maybe. But there is a huge constitutional distinction between foreign and domestic threats. And the supreme court was pretty clear that the decision would be different if it didn't reside with a "foreign adversary".
The rational for why TikTok should be banned in the United States is precisely the same rational why Xitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al, should be banned in other countries.
Meta, Musk, and others have no right or grant to operate in the EU, Canada or elsewhere. They should be banned.
Clearly the US government would like only US companies to collect this kind of data. Eliminating the biggest competitors for companies like Google, X and Meta is likely just the icing on the cake.
Because it's not the TWEAKING of the content tho tis the problem. It's the ability to manipulate individuals using fake or altered content.
Not sure why this is a hard one to understand but with the ability to individualized media, you can easily feed people propaganda and they'd never know. Add in AI and deep fakes, and you have the ability to manipulate the entire discourse in a matter of minutes.
How do you think Trump was elected? Do you really think the average 20 something would vote for a Republican, let alone a 78 year old charlatan? They were manipulated into the vote. And that is the most innocuous possible use of such a tech.
> there's no evidence at all that Tik Tok's been feeding China any data.
Because China's political system applies absolutely no pressure for transparency.
> Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.
Something we know about because the US political system has levers that can be pulled to apply pressure for transparency.
You'd have to be very naive not to think that the Chinese government has an interest in controlling what US users of TikTok see. Whether they actually have or not is a somewhat useless question because we'll never know definitively, and even if they haven't today there's nothing saying they won't tomorrow.
We can say that they have both the motive and capability to do so.
If we banned all Chinese business with America, America would hurt a lot more than China. Our plutocracy made sure of that fact decades ago.
I care becsuse I hate hypocrisy. Simple as that. They'll sweep Russian activity under the rug as long as it's done in an American website. This mindset clearly isn't results oriented.
The problem is framing information access as a threat. It is not and that's fundamentally not a First Amendment positive stance. If I want to gorge myself on Chinese propaganda it's my right as an American.
Because the Chinese are openly hostile towards the United States and its interests, whereas American companies have a vested interest in the U.S. and are beholden to its laws.
I don't know why realpolitik is so hard for technologists to understand, perhaps too much utopian fantasy scifi?
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
Indeed, but at the point we are in history the steps to get that done - aka, copy the EU GDPR and roll it out federally - would take far too long, all while China has a direct path to the brains of our children.
Because China is a rival geopolitical power and the US is... us.
It's a national security concern. I get that there's a lot of conversation and debate to be had on the topic but the answer here is very straightforward and I don't understand why people are so obtuse about it.
The thing is, doing it domestically is also a national security concern. We know that data leaks and breaches don't only happen, they are commonplace. Banning TikTok but continuing to allow domestic social media companies to amass hoards of the same kind of data without any real oversight is like saying, "Sorry, you can't have this on a golden platter, the best we can do is silver."
I'm still not sure I understand the national security concerns around 17-year old nobodies publishing videos of themselves doing silly dances. Or the "metadata" those 17 year olds produce. Are people sharing nuclear secrets on TikTok or something (and not doing the same on US services)?
I don’t understand why people are so obtuse about national security being an excuse. Do we really believe the Chinese are going to infiltrate by way of tiktok when they can hack into our telecom networks or any significant figures individual machines? This is about neutering our biggest global economic threat.
This law is dumb, because in no way does it prevent the exact same data to be collected, processed by a US entity and then transferred to China.
I suspect that it's not about data being transferred, but the fact that TikTok can shape opinions of Americans... which US companies do a lot, without any oversight.
Because they're trying to ignore the national security aspect to talk about tracking generically. Which is a valid argument and a good discussion to be had, but it's irrelevant in this context.
If the US was going to get into a legitimate hot "soldiers shooting at soldiers" type of war with any country, China is extremely high on that list. Maybe even #1. Pumping data on tens of millions of Americans directly into the CCP is bad. Putting a CCP-controlled algorithm in front of those tens of millions of Americans is so pants-on-head-retarded in that context it seems crazy to even try to talk about anything more general than that.
Foreign propaganda bots are just as present on US social media, and US social media amplify them just as much.
So where exactly is the meaningful difference here? I don't see it.
The actual difference is that US does not see the money from Tiktok, and blocking tiktok is a convenient excuse to give their propaganda platforms a competetive edge.
Actually doing something about the fundamental problem of foreign influence through the internet would basically destroy sillicon valley, and no politician wants to be responsible for that.
Because it's not clear what the national security concern is. With weapons or infrastructure, it's easy to understand how they can be used against the U.S., but with a social media platform, it's harder to see the threat. The concern really seems to lie with the users of TikTok.
So what's the issue? That people living in the U.S. and using TikTok might be influenced to act differently than how the powers that be want us to act?
I think one of the issues is the details of the national security risk hasn't been articulated well. I haven't followed this in detail, but from what I've seen in summaries, news articles etc is just a vague notion of a theoretical risk from an adversary, with no details on exactly what the risk is, or if there is an actual issue here (vs just a theoretical issue that can happen at some point).
Because personal data about US citizens is up for sale to more or less whoever wants it, and the US government doesn’t seem to have a problem with this otherwise.
Which makes it seem far more plausible that the real national security capability that is being defended is that of the US gov to influence narratives on social media. And while even that might be constitutional, it’s a lot less compelling.
But US companys sale all info about users anyway to anyone (just see today GM) and you accept in between often to over 800 cookies on websites. If thats ok, whats the difference. Why is it ok a website does include over 800 cokies?
X or Facebook isn’t “us”. If we had any reason to believe there were or were even likely to be strong effective democratic controls over their ability to manipulate public sentiment it might be different. But as it stands, it feels more like local oligarchs kicking out competitors in their market: “the US population is our population to manipulate, go back to your own”.
Yeah it's not even a point of view that requires nuance; it's pretty clearly a matter of US interests v. adversarial interests. Anecdotally, a lot of people that struggle to understand this are also squarely in the camp of assuming that the US is doing data collection solely for nefarious purposes.
Except:
• the US performs these activities (data collection, algorithm manipulation allegedly, etc) for US interests, which may not always align with the interests of individuals in the US, whereas
• adversarial foreign governments perform these activities for their own interests, which a US person would be wise to assume does not align with US interests and thus very likely doesn't align with the interests of US persons.
If a person's main concern is living in a better United States, start with ensuring that the United States is sticking around for the long run first. Then we can work on improving it.
Right, its because a law should be passed regulating this sort of data for the good of all citizens, but our congress can't / won't pass that, so they only stepped in when it became an obvious national security concern.
It'll come back as an issue in a less obvious manner next time, and every time until they pass such a law.
Which, imho, won't happen while our overall political environment remains conservatively dominant.
Domestic governments shouldn't let hostile foreign governments the ability to exert soft power over 1/2 of their population. Hence why China banned all USA based tech companies from operating there.
As a Chinese grown up within the Great Firewall, now I began to really feel all the hypocrisy around the matter of "freedom of Internet". It seems the block of Facebook and Twitter in China is surely justified at the very begining, for the same "national security" grounds. China have exactly the same amount of reason to believe the US is stealing data or propelling propaganda by social network.
It seems there are indeed things that can override citizen's free choice even in the "lighthouse of democracy and freedom", and CCP didn't make a mistake for building the firewall. My need to use Shadowsocks to use Google instead of Baidu or some other crap was simply a collateral damage.
Of course, the Chinese censorship is way more intensive, but this act makes a dangerous precedent.
The funny thing is that when China did that, it was unanimously condemned in the Western world as an authoritarian move, and often use as an example of why China was a dictatorship with no freedom of speech, etc. But now it's actually the normal thing to do?
The opinion is mostly not about control over recommendation algorithms; it goes out of its way to say that the data collection is dispositive. Check out Gorsuch's concurrence for some flavor of how much more complicated this would be with respect to the recommender.
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.
That's an interesting hypothetical, I have another one.
Imagine you're a country with natural resources. Private industries want those resources. Suddenly the US media is flooded with fabricated or exaggerated stories about the country written by NGOs and Think Tanks. Suddenly, out of nowhere a coup happens in the country with the stated intention of "liberalization" and "democratic reforms". The country goes through shock therapy and structural adjustments as it takes on mountains of IMF loans to enter the world markets-- it has to sell off control of all its national resources and industries to American companies. The life expectancy plummets.
Oh wait this isn't a hypothetical this is just actual US foreign policy.
Ah the land of free speech and freedom of the press.
Not even in Europe we have such crackdown on freedom while Americans scream censorship because nazi symbols and certain phrases are illegal in Germany.
It sounds like they are just banning it from new installs on app stores, won't people just browse to the URL to use it?
The distinction between apps and websites seems arbitrary to me... especially since a huge fraction of apps seem to be effectively just a browser window with a single website locked in full screen.
I have never before used tiktok, but just now as an experiment I opened it in a browser and scrolled for a minute- I had no problem accessing an apparently endless stream of mostly young women jumping up and down without bras, and young men vandalizing automobiles.
It makes sense to shut down the app in the US immediately rather than be unable to update it- but does that necessarily mean they would also shut it down outside the US, or access directly via the website?
There's a difference in degree, it's less addictive. HN works a little differently, in that its goal is not primarily to convert attention directly into revenue.
Personally, I still need to be deliberate in limiting my use, so I wouldn't be sad to see it disappear, even though I do find some value in it.
None of us have more than 24 hours in our days. That time is precious. Products that are specifically designed to suck up as much of it as possible must be avoided.
I'm really bored at this point by the political discussions around this. We've heard it all a million times. As far as I'm concerned, that's missing the point.
Because, at the end of the day, and ignoring for a moment the practicality of the notion, the world would just be a better place without them.
Seriously, go read a book. We'd be living in a different world if that scaled.
Can someone explain in unambiguous terms why people are so drawn specifically to TikTok? I have tried TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, and they are all basically the same--algorithmically-driven feeds of short videos. I don't see how banning TikTok is such a big problem, just use one of the other apps.
The whole thing with social media is network effects though. The added friction of a VPN, though small, is just so much larger than "click download, open app"
What does this shutdown mean for US employees of Bytedance? Will they shut down their US offices or continue business as usual working from the US but only serving users outside?
From the oral arguments it was immediately obvious that Alito and Thomas had already decided their opinion --- as had the other judges, frankly. They were very skeptical of the ByteDance/petitioner's argument. The Act at issue was written in a very specific way to neuter a lot of their points. Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the US Government, is also an extremely good SC lawyer in oral arguments. A Per Curiam decision is not surprising at all, most people who follow the court were expecting it.
China's vision of the Internet turned out to be more prescient than we realised at the time. Everyone is going to their own Great Firewall. In hindsight, it will seem crazy that we ever allowed media platforms to be controlled by foreign governments - especially ones which like to seed revolution, social unrest and regime change
>In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration, upholding the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act which President Joe Biden signed in April.
Glad to see when it comes to protecting tech monopolies the wisest among us are in full agreement.
Silly things like a right to a speedy trial are up for debate though.
I think this is a massive over reach. You can argue to restrict social media to those over 18, but Americans should have a right to consume content they choose.
What's next, banning books by Chinese authors? Banning Chinese Americans from holding key positions in social media companies, after all they might have uncles in the CCP!
Follow the money. TikTok is an issue for Facebook, BYD cars are an issue for Tesla.
Great twitter thread analyzing the Supreme Court decision from a former Congressional Staffer who now leads a think tank doing tech-focused policy work: https://x.com/marcidale/status/1880274466619691247
Yes, that's precisely the argument of the pro-ban faction. China doesn't allow TikTok in China. It's not about the money, it's about control over a medium that can be exploited for influence, or at the very least the effects of that platform on its audience.
It's silly to pretend like ByteDance are acting on principle. Go post an LGBT meme or refer to Lai Ching-te as the "President of Taiwan" on Red Note and see how long that lasts.
US used to be much smarter in general. Now that Trump is starting a 2nd term on Monday, the world over now realizes the US is comprised of a bunch of imbeciles. We've lost our prestige, and we'd been trading on it for a long, long time.
Your concern about losing the dominant culture status is useless. Recent geopolitical situation clearly shows soft power is useless. Hardpower is where everything is at.
I'd love to see what a global ban for TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, and X would look like. Even better: massive breakdown of iOS and Android installations. Just for a couple of weeks, then revert to the nightmarish status quo we live in. Now that would be an interesting experiment. The change in people's behavior would be palpable for those fourteen days, I bet. It'd be so much fun.
Daniel Dennett was strong proponent of alternative information distribution mechanisms in case of internet goes down for everyone. We haven't even studied such scenarios.
I'm a strong proponent of alternative information distribution mechanisms within the Internet. An "anti-normie" kind of channel of information. Hell, up until the web 2.0 came along, the Internet was exactly that for the most part.
We got something similar with social interactions during covid lockdowns (if your country had those). Btw i feel like people would go literally MAD, I can see it when just WhatsApp crashses for just a couple hours (doesn't happen often but I remember people's reactions when it happened).
You can get a feel of what it would do for yourself by getting a dumbphone and limiting yourself from accessing social media.
>You can get a feel of what it would do for yourself by getting a dumbphone and limiting yourself from accessing social media.
I already do that. It's the most alienating and pessimism-inducing thing. I'd just love to see a world where people aren't hunched over, staring at a screen for 90% of their waking life.
I have trouble lumping those 5 services together. Maybe its something to do with me being a middle-age American male?
Instagram/X/TikTok: Hot garbage. Good riddance. Ban them and this country is a better place.
Whatsapp/YouTube: Actually quite useful. The former for real-time global communications. The latter for visual how-to's of all kinds (bicycles, home maintenance).
> Overall, I view this is as an admission to US populace and the world that the US is a weak-minded country that can easily be influenced by propaganda.
I’d be fine with a general rule that if China (or anyone) places limits on US social media that effectively limits / bans them… same goes for Chinese social media platforms. Done.
Here's what recently happened in Romania, all through TikTok.
Turns out China (or here, Russia) infiltrated the country, waged an enormous disinformation campaign and succeeded by getting their chosen candidate elected. Without TikTok, this would not have happened. I have talked about this with Romanians who concur.
In the real world, there are two responses to this.
1. "Tough luck, it's too late now, should just stand by and watch the country get taken over".
2. "Ban it and future popular big platforms controlled by a foreign adversary".
That's it. We'd all love for something inbetween. It's not happening, all such options would end up becoming 1). That's the state of the modern day world.
The facts that
A. They seem to rather abandon the app rather than receive tens of billions by selling it
B. "The Chinese government also weighed a contingency plan that would have X owner Elon Musk acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations"
C. The remaining mountains of evidence that it is a CCP tool
Mean that the arguments of Congress here are valid and this is the right decision. It is a tool directly controlled by a foreign adversary, for geopolitical, not profit-oriented, purposes. This is nothing like the PATRIOT act or other moves by governments that claim "protect the children" or "protect against terrorism" for some ulterior motive of surveillance or worse. It might be a rarity, but in this case the claims by Congress are factual and a sufficiently good reason.
> Turns out China (or here, Russia) infiltrated the country, waged an enormous disinformation campaign and succeeded by getting their chosen candidate elected.
But in the US, Russia also has waged enormous disinformation campaigns on US-based social media networks. Taking the problem of foreign (dis|mis)information, election interference, etc seriously requires that we do more than ban one network based on the ownership of that company. After TikTok gets shut down, Chinese influence operations can still use Twitter/X, Meta, Reddit etc. We need better tools and regulations to make these campaigns visible stoppable in real-time, rather than just banning one network while leaving up multiple other vulnerable networks. This ban is political theater, where the US can act like it's doing something while not having to address the harder parts of the problem.
> A. They seem to rather abandon the app rather than receive tens of billions by selling it
I think this is weak evidence of them being a mostly political tool. Valuations based on their actual use are well above what anyone has actually offered to pay. And disentangling US operations from the rest of TikTok would not be straight-forward; do you merely cleave it in two? Given network effects, would cutting off the US component to sell it make both the US and non-US portions less valuable?
one would think the ranking member on the House Intel Cmte - my very own Rep - would agree with you, given how he'd be way more privy to such things than you, me, talking heads on TV, etc. yet he disagrees and cites free speech concerns [0][1].
in my mind none of these reasons add up. if this were truly about influence ops on social media we would not have blinders on for our own platforms' role in them. remember Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 campaign, or Facebook's role in the Myanmar genocide? or more-recently the ops Israel ran? furthermore if this were really about our data, we would again not have blinders on. the CCP can still purchase our data as we're all up for sale given our lack of data privacy/protection laws.
as such i tend to side with my Rep: this is bunk, and the pretexts flimsy. i believe the answer is to focus on education - critical thought particularly - and enacting data privacy/protection laws. i do not believe that would lead to 1).
now will that happen? i'm doubtful tbh. our own govt loves the fact that we're up for sale, for it allows them to side-step the need for a warrant. have a great weekend.
What you're really complaining about is that too many people agree with Georgescu. The way mainstream media works, only a few candidates get air time so there's little competition. Georgescu was able to build a following on the alternatives so the election was suspended (without motivation) and new regulations put in place to make sure no un-approved candidate stands a change.
They were so busy banning Șoșoacă and demonizing the best candidate (Simion) that they forgot about Georgescu.
We were already a laughing stock for banning a candidate (Șoșoacă). Now we've suspended democracy and postponed the election 'til kingdom come.
This is laughable, even with your depiction of the events. The candidate in question (Georgescu) had a very popular platform, and was supported by a large bases or Romanians on the left and right.
He was, however, opposed to further expansion of NATO.
If these ideas are too scary to let general public even consider, then democracies have to step in and censor the media. And that begins by banning TikTok, the largest platform where a narrative like this can bypass the existing power structures.
I don't really agree with this line of thinking if you consider the addictive part of TikTok.
Imagine the US legalized and exported meth. All of a sudden, the US is "competing" because everyone is hooked on drugs. We had Opium wars in a somewhat similar vein as the social media wars.
Not sure if sarcastic or not, I'll bite. If tiktok infringes some kind of data privacy laws, punish them. If the data privacy laws of the US are bad, improve them.
But this? Just because some... not so bright soldiers use tiktok to upload videos of their base? What else is there so bad it requires a total ban? It seems like hypocrisy to me, when Meta, Google, X also have similar data available and also don't want to adhere to for example EU laws.
If what TikTok is doing is dangerous when TikTok does it why is it safe when everyone else does it?
This is theft, pure and simple. The government-industrial complex is trying to steal this app. The private side wants to make money and the public side wants yet another way to control narratives on social media much the way President Musk does on twitter.
TikTok is fun but it has degraded into a commercialized mess of copycats, IP theft and scams.
Like everything else that is commercialized on the internet. It has a lifespan of a few years before it becomes unusable to all but the meek and the ignorant.
A new service will emerge and replace it within months. The truth is their algorithm is about as complicated as a HS algebra test.
As a free speech absolutist, I hope that what comes out of this is a completely anonymized, uncensorable alternative. We've gotten the arbitrary censorship walled garden social media sites mostly because until now there hasn't been any particular reason for most users to step outside of them.
I think many have tried but face an uphill battle of unless a significant majority is willing to relocate, the prevailing content will be things that are deemed undesirable/bannable on other platforms, which distracts potential users.
Having a completely decentralized solution also comes with the issue of future governance. If a single entity controls the direction (even if the spec is open and you can host it yourself), then it's not decentralized. If you end up with a consortium then you'll face the same issue of email, innovation is hard to spread as you need multiple actors with competing interests to agree.
If your vision is having multiple entities providing different experiences tailored to individual taste, they might start consolidating and effectively forming several disjoint platforms.
p.s.
The web can be said to be decentralized but it's dominated by large players all the way from hosting to browsers. If all three major browsers don't agree on your proposal, it's effectively dead. Who's to say entrenched players won't arise in your vision of a decentralized social media?
Since the ban is about not allowing app stores to host TT, can TT build its own App Store to offer the download of its app, given that Apple has to allow other app stores?
What I love is that apparently tons of Americans are signing up for a different Chinese social video app whose name is being translated as “Red Note”. I would love if the end result of this was another several years of congressional drama about a different Chinese app.
What's interesting is that RedNote doesn't have the same level of segregation as TikTok, so the US and China users are having a lot of interesting interactions. Assum the app doesn't get banned, it'll be interesting to see if the experiences get more silo'd
> if the end result of this was another several years of congressional drama about a different Chinese app
No need. If it’s Chinese and has more than 100mm (EDIT: 1mm) users, Commerce can designate it a foreign-adversary controlled application and designate it for app-store delisting.
I think the threshold is way lower than that?
The "Covered Company" definition mentions 1 million monthly active users for at least 2 of the 3 months preceding some determination.
Also, I wonder who is the foreign-based "reviews" site that lobbied for the exclusion clause immediately following that?
Isn't Red Note planning to segregate based on IP to prevent US Influence from those TikTok refugees? The original CN users aren't exactly happy with the newcomers either, and the TikTok refugees themselves are getting quite a culture shock with regards to cultural attitudes to LGBQT or even basic "leftist" activism like strikes and collective bargaining
Anyways, those alternatives are not so algorithmically driven, and especially if it's forcing actual user interaction and discussion that certainly would be good for Americans to understand what the mainland Chinese are really thinking and saying domestically. Because if you go to the actual main discussion forums like Weibo, oh boy it's not going to be pretty.
To be punk rock. The main reason I see thrown around is most younger users don't care if China has their user data and understand that the government is banning it for their own selfish reasons (money).
Except that’s not what Mao’s book was/is called in China, it’s a label the US applied to it. In China it’s better known as 红宝书 (Hóng Bǎo Shū) “The Red Treasure Book” or simply “The Red Book”.
Because if this sequence of events (one allegedly Chinese-government controlled social media app is banned over apparent ties to the government, so all of its American users immediately switch to another Chinese app whose name can be translated as "Little Red Book") happened in a movie, a reasonable person would balk at how ludicrous and on-the-nose the whole thing was.
It feels like a joke, and if you can somehow create enough space to actually see the humor in it, its kind of funny.
You don't destroy what can give you even more power by controlling it. Trump/Musk/Zuck plan is to control it, not destroy it: the army of teens willing to be inundated by propaganda just to keep using it is too appealing to ignore, and China will happily trade that control for something (less/no tariffs?).
Maybe someone smarter than me can explain - how both Biden and Trump can hint or announce they wont enforce the law. Signed laws upheld by the Supreme Court can be filtered out by the President? News to me.
They've announced that they won't enforce the fines required by the law. But yes, selective enforcement of laws is legal — it's how prosecutorial discretion works.
The law makes it illegal for Oracle, Apple and Google to continue doing what they are doing. It does in fact make it illegal for some companies to operate with TikTok. The president can use this law in the future on other companies controlled by foreign adversaries to divest or face a ban.
We all know the Elephant in the room, that Israel‘s genocide in Palestine led to lots of criticism on Tik Tok, and that led the Israel lobby to push a Tik Tok ban.
Here is what Chairman McCaul said: “I was proud to join 352 of my Republican and Democrat colleagues and pass H.R. 7521 today. CCP-controlled TikTok is an enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”[1]
The U.S. national security angle identified is "mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions". And give me a break that they actually care about "young Americans’ mental health". This bill was about pro-Palestine content ... "being mobilized by CCP" that was harming "young people's health".
The fact that none of this was put forward by the lawyers makes me think the tiktok lawyers were incompetent. I went through the testimonies given and it was DAMMMMMNNNN weak. Three issues were identified by me: The Bill suddenly declares "non-aligned countries" to be "foreign adversaries" but there is no declared war so how can they be adversaries already; The Bill declares anyone facilitating the company including through the transfer of communication is in violation of the bill but that is a freedom of speech issue which they did not bring up but instead brought the ban as a FoS issue; The Bill labels TikTok and ByteDance as companies to be sold [to an aligned state] or banned entirely but that is the only company being single-handedly called out and I don't know how to say this but that sounds like some form of discrimination and unsubstantiated claim of threat. They could have done a better job at the SCOTUS.
The next Supreme Court decision will be them deciding if disagreeing with the TikTok decision is sufficient grounds for being censored.
Public disagreement with the TikTok decision could lead to legislative pressure, which would add support to the pressure campaigns of Chinese lobbyists and diplomats, or of other organizations that are funded or donated to by Chinese people or people of Chinese descent. This could either result in new legislation being passed that nullifies the ban, or pressure the Executive into failing to enforce the ban.
Either of those outcomes would, in effect, allow the user data of Americans to be accessed by the government of China. Disagreement with the TikTok ban would in and of itself aid America's adversaries.
Besides, disagreement with it implies that America unduly restricts speech, when we're supposed to hate China because China unduly restricts speech. That's a clear case of creating a false equivalence in order to foment discord, which again is material support to China's goal to monitor American's communications and corrupt the minds of America's children.
I believe Biden says his admin won't enforce the ban, as they only have 1 day left in office after it goes into effect.
Trump has signaled he doesn't support the ban, and wants tiktok under american ownership. The legislation allows the president to put a 90 day hold on the ban too.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation around this, no surprise given the TikTok user base..
The law targets other companies that would be breaking the law if they continue providing services for a China-owned TikTok past the ban date. The statute of limitations is five years, past a Trump presidency. No, an executive order can not cancel a law. Google, Apple & co would be exposing themselves to a lot of uncertainty and risk, and for what?
One of the few federal powers in the constitution includes "control over foreign commerce". Somehow a Chinese website is now "foreign commerce". China bad.
The GenZ folks (including my kids) that I interact with on a day-to-day basis are much happier on that application and they’re starting to realize that the US is not what it pretends to be
That doesn’t mean any place is better (though possible) it simply means people started finally realizing the truth of the United States
China is an ethnostate. What does China offer the future to anyone who's not Chinese? Chinese nationals in the United States have substantially more rights than they do in China.
The key issue here now is: The future, freedom, international policy etc of you US guys no longer depends on democratic structures in ANY way whatsoever.
Who pays Trump most, wins. Who does what Musk wants, wins.
From what I know, there is no second Oligarch-run corrupt country that would come close to this. This is worse than China and Russia combined.
Sorry, not meant to bash our US HN friends at all, just an observation from another western country targeted by MuskTrump that has yet to follow the US lead (which they will), so we still have some time left to be in shock and awe about what is going on on your side of the pond for a while.
Commenting on your own posts sucks, but let me add:
The current status of insanity is that the US is threatening to invade a EU country by force to annex it to be able to exploit natural resources and gain a strategic military position.
Again, let me repeat, as very clearly a lot of people are now completely numb to insanity and just filter it out:
THE US IS THREATENING TO INVADE A EU COUNTRY. YES. SERIOUSLY.
Was US Headlines for one day, now drowned in other madness already.
Anyway, you won't have any democratic say on this anyway, so let's just gamble:
Jeff Yass will bribe Trump heavily, and Trump will then lift the ban next week, no matter what his Supreme Court sock puppets want.
It's a bit disingenuous for Mark Zuckerberg to go on Joe Rogan and say that the Biden administration is anti Meta/anti America, when congress passed this bill to shut down TikTok.
I don't love that TikTok is run by a Chinese company (thus giving way too much control to the Chinese government), but Meta builds such garbage experiences in their apps. There really needs to be a real competitor to Meta.
America has the right to ban since china banned all American tech companies from operating in their nation but this means America could never ever talk about freedom of doing business bs
Any country has the right to this kind of ban, that's what national sovereignty is all about.
A different issue is whether doing it is the right decision or not.
And another issue is the hypocrisy. When China did it, the unanimous opinion from the US (both the official stance and what one could hear/read from regular people, e.g. HN comments) was that such bans were authoritarian and evidence that there was no freedom of speech in China. But now suddenly it's a perfectly fine and even obvious/necessary thing to do...
Being neither from China nor from the US, this paints the US (who have benefitted a lot from riding the moral high horse of free market, etc. for decades) in a quite bad light.
Should the EU ban US social networks for pure economic reasons (so we roll our own instead of providing our data and money to US companies, which would almost surely be good for our economy)? The argument for not doing it used to be that freedom should be above domestic interests, one embraces the free market even if some aspects of it are harmful because overall it's a win. But the US is showing it doesn't really believe in that principle, and probably never has.
China bans US businesses because it has an autocratic, ethnocratic government. The US is banning a Chinese business for obvious national security reasons.
Answering tit-for-tat is fine, even if the thing being done is bad in itself (e.g. waging war is bad, but should a country not use weapons to defend itself when invaded?). If else US and in general the West should have acted earlier: if American companies where free to operate in China and influence its people I doubt this ban would have been enacted.
So they were right about banning the US social media platforms then, right? Because according to this court opinion, having foreign social media is a menace to national security. It's funny to see Americans argue for a great firewall lol.
I have mixed feelings. The Supreme Court did the right thing; the democratically elected government did decide upon a ban, so it should likely continue as was made law.
I am not sure that banning forms of media feels good. The point of free speech is to let everyone say their thing and for people to be smart enough to ignore the bad ideas.
I am not sure the general population of vertical video viewers does part 2, however, so I get the desire to force people to not engage. The algorithmic boosting has had lots of weird side effects; increased political polarization, people being constantly inundated with rage bait, and even "trends" that get kids to vandalize their school. (My favorite was when I asked why ice cream is locked up in the freezer at CVS. Apparently it was a TikTok "trend" to lick the ice cream and then put it back in the freezer, so now an employee has to escort you from the ice cream area to the cashier to ensure that you pay for it before you lick it. Not sure how much of this actually happened versus how companies were afraid of it happening, however.)
With all this in mind, it's unclear to me whether TikTok is uniquely responsible for this effect. I feel like Instagram, YouTube Shorts, etc. have the potential to cause the exact same problems (and perhaps already have). Even the legacy media is not guilt free here. Traditional newspapers ownership has changed over the years and they all seem pretty biased in a certain direction, and I am pretty sure that the local news is responsible for a lot of reactionary poor public policy making. (Do I dare mention that I think the whole New Jersy drone thing was just mass hysteria?)
Now, everyone is saying that regulating TikTok has nothing to do with its content, but I'm pretty sure that's just a flat-out lie. First, Trump wanted to ban it because everything on there was negative towards him. Then right-wing influencers got a lot of traction on the platform, and suddenly Democrats want to ban it and Trump wants to reverse the ban. It's pretty transparent what's going on there.
I agree with the other comments that say if data collection is the issue, we shouldn't let American companies do it either. That seems very fair to regulate and I'm in favor of that.
The best effect will be someone with a lot of money and media reach standing up against app stores. I can live with that.
I only take this as a geopolitical decision. Not saying that the US couldn't do that (like any other country) but adding arguments that also apply to other social media apps as well is, IMHO, FUD.
The silliness of the ban itself aside, it is wild how casually the whole “both chambers of congress passed a law and that law was upheld by the highest federal court but maybe it won’t be a law if one guy decides he doesn’t like it” thing is being treated by the media.
It is like “Does America have laws?” is a 3 minute section of Good Morning America between low-carb breakfast recipes and the memoir of a skateboarding dog.
As with anywhere, laws are toothless without enforcement.
In some cases, they are enforced ruthlessly on one group of people, and not on others. This is a feature, not a mistake, by the way. Well, a feature for those with power, not normal citizens.
The real question is:
"Does America have justice?"
It's not a recent one either. The issue of select enforcement of our laws has been around as long as I can recall, and before I was born. It's not even unique to the United States.
What I find most upsetting as part of the normal citizenry, is that rather than taking things to court and finding that the laws need changed, they tend to go the route of charges dropped or pardons when the laws affect them.
I would have less of an issue with the rich and powerful folks avoiding prosecution if they at least did it in a precedent setting way for the rest of us.
Of recent note in the "no" column for the "does America have justice" question, a convicted felon escapes all consequences because he is president elect.
You're Apple or Google's lawyer - the CEO asks, should I take Tiktok down from the app store. What do you say?
Otoh there's a law and civil penalty. On the other, Trump says he won't enforce. Statute of limitations is 5 years, and the liability will exist whether Trump enforces or not. In 5 years, there will (may?) be a new president. On the other hand, trump saying he's not going to enforce may give us an out if we're ever sued over this (we just did what the Pres told us to do...).
Hard call, I give > 50% that they take it down whatever Trump says.
Knowledge of civics among the media is unfortunately not much higher than the average person, which is a real failure considering that they are supposed to be an entire “estate” of democratic society.
The headline on HN was updated, but it's in the key points on the article:
> Although President-elect Donald Trump could choose to not enforce the law...
Which is ridiculous. It's the executive branch's function to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" [1]. The president's DOJ can't simply refuse to enforce the law. There's some debate over whether this applies to 'enforcement discretion', in that the president doesn't have infinite resources to perfectly execute the law and some things will slip through, or whether the president can decline to enforce a law that he believes to be unconstitutional before the supreme court declares it to be so.
In theory, no, the president can't simply decline to enforce a law, congress would then be able to impeach and remove him. In practice, though it happens a little bit all the time. And even if this was black and white, I don't know that there's anything that the incoming president can do that the incoming congress would impeach him for.
Creating three branches of government that all have to agree that a law should exist (legislative) is constitutional (judicial) and should be enforced (executive) has proven to be an excellent method of keeping bad laws from negatively affecting us. Despite being seemingly simple on the surface, it's created a process a bit longer than what a single Schoolhouse Rock video can teach us, and it's too much for legacy media to handle.
Maybe they only learned from the aforementioned Schoolhouse Rock video, because they seem especially bad at understanding anything outside of the legislative branch. Not only does the legislative branch need to pass a bill into law for it to become a regulation, without objection by the judicial branch to its constitutionality, but the executive branch needs to write that law into a federal regulation, and the legislative branch can reject any new regulation they believe doesn't comply with the law, as can the judicial branch, who can also reject the regulation if it isn't constitutional as written, even if the original law that created it was.
It's no wonder that legacy media's wild misunderstandings of how laws and regulations work only get a small snippet of time, between their more entertaining and feel-good stories that drive viewership and revenue.
Fortunately we are no longer stuck with just legacy media, so I recommend finding a news source that actually knows what they are talking about. I've found the best bet is to get news from outlets and aggregators that specialize in a specific topic, shielding them from the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, and forcing them to publish news that is actually correct.
This is why I come to Hacker News for my tech news aggregation. For political news, my favorite so far has been The Hill, especially for videos like their Daily Brief and Rising videos published on YouTube. I'm open to more, so if anyone has any recommendations, let me know.
What checks remain to counter this power? Impeachment? Constitutional amendment? As I understand it, if the president chooses not to enforce a law, then the only real recourse Congress has is a massive escalation that requires an extremely high level of cooperation. I'm not sure it was ever intended for the executive branch to simply ignore the other two branches and unilaterally decide how to run things. Personally I think willfully refusing to enforce the law of the land should be an impeachable offense but I guess that's not how it works.
“I was proud to join 352 of my Republican and Democrat colleagues and pass H.R. 7521 today. CCP-controlled TikTok is an enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”[1]
Everybody knows the fearmongering about Chinese control and manipulation is a smokescreen. The real reason is that Tiktok doesn't fall in line with State Department propaganda [1].
It's noteworthy that SCOTUS sidestepped this issue entirely by not even considering the secret evidence the government brought.
That being said, it's unsurprising because you can make a strictly commerce-based argument that has nothing to do with speech and the First Amendment. Personally, I think reciprocity would've been a far more defensible position, in that US apps like Google, FB, Youtube and IG are restricted from the Chinese market so you could demand recipricol access on strictly commerce grounds.
The best analogy is the restriction on foreign ownership of media outlets, which used to be a big deal. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, US companies would defend themselves from foreign takeovers by buying TV stations, for example. That's basically the premise of the movie Working Girl, as one (fictional) example.
Politically, the big loser here is Biden and the Democratic Party because they will be (rightly) blamed for banning a highly popular app (even though the Congressional vote was hugely bipartisan) and Trump will likely get credit for saving Tiktok.
We don't know that the secret evidence was that TT doesn't promote U.S. propaganda. We can surmise, but speculation can be wrong. Besides, the justices might simply have revealed that secret evidence, had it really been just that. But they claim they didn't even consider the secret evidence. Unclear whether they took a peek, but they say they didn't consider it.
The kids flocking to another Chinese app just to avoid using Reels, Shorts, or whatever abomination is on X continues to be so funny to me. Looks like a long game of whack a mole starting.
Any parent (and even us non-parents who've spent a lot of time around kids) know that the best way to get teenagers to stop doing something, is to start doing it yourself. If you forbid them to do something, it's basically inviting them to try their hardest to do it anyways.
This is exactly why I’ve started slinging gen alpha lingo at our daughters: even doing it jokingly makes them cringe enough to stop using it themselves.
This is how I got mine to stop saying slay, preppy and sigma. The look of horror and cringe on their face when I say crap like "skibidi ohio rizz" in front of them and their friends, is a chef's kiss.
Under a million kids moving over to RedNote for a week or 2 means nothing. There is no whack a mole. Tiktok algo is the sauce, nothing else has the sauce. People enjoyed the sauce.
"the sauce" is for the audience to figure out. The sauce was disgusting to me, but that didn't matter to those 100m consumers.
And yes, this begs the question of "when does something become a matter of national security". 10 million? A million moving over before the day of reckoning isn't a small thing.
The meme I'm seeing everywhere is that with so many Americans joining RedNote, Americans are discovering how much Chinese people are paying for healthcare, food or property, and Chinese people are discovering things like 40 hour work weeks and actually having a holiday from time to time - so now the question is whether US or China bans it first.
Oh, wasn't meant at any dig in terms of quality, I don't believe in that kind of characterization. Besides, ostensibly, Chinese developers have been much more successful in this space and seem to deliver better products. I just wouldn't know myself as I stay off of shortform video platforms.
The irony of Americans flocking to a CCP-approved app whose Chinese name is translated to "little red book" is just a bit too on-the-nose. For those who don't know, Little Red Book is also the literature spread during the Cultural Revolution in China that was a collection of quotes and sayings by Chairman Mao.
There's gotta be a joke in there about the communists selling the capitalists the rope the capitalists eventually hang themselves with. But, I digress.
Am I missing something obvious, or is that only available in one language? How do American teenagers use that?
Don't get me wrong, I consumed American media and played American video games before I understood English, so clicking around eventually led you down some path.
But isn't most of that content meant to be consumed by people who understand the language said content is made with?
Kids are born into a world where the last generation is already essentially locked into lifetime servitude, the world is burning, and the "adults in the room" are a circus. How could they not indulge in alternatives? What is there to look forward to, identify with, or love about this place?
Culture thrives when the people are able to live meaningful lives.
The Red Note nonsense is just a meme, somewhat fittingly. First, because the only place you see coverage of all the "kids flocking" is... on TikTok itself. It's always a red (heh) flag when your source for big important events comes only from the affected parties.
But secondly because Red Note is subject to exactly the same regulation as TikTok, for exactly the same reason. There's no protection or loophole there, this app is just a district court injunction away from a ban too. Literally no one cares, they just love to meme.
It isn't really whack-a-mole though, because despite the media coverage there is no "TikTok ban bill." Instead it's a "Hostile nation can't own majority stakes in media companies in the US" bill, and this SCOTUS ruling sets the precedent that can be enforced on as many entities as required.
On a more amusing note the Chinese did NOT expect a bunch of Americans to show up on RedNote, and they're not thrilled so far. It seems that sharing details of how to organize labor unions, protest against your government, 3D print weapons, and so on wasn't what they were hoping for either. There's allegedly talk of them siloing off the new joins from abroad.
So how big does Rednote need to be to "majority stakes in media companies in the US"? I don't like this ruling at all, but it feels very American to see another looming threat and say "well, I'll just wait until it gets too big to deal with it".
US should ban all Chinese software apps and services as long as CCP does not allow Google and Facebook to operate in China. As a matter of fact not only Google and Facebook but all the Western internet social apps and services should be allowed in China. We want equal opportunity and equal rights for business. This way it is not fair play, it is botched market economy.
<< Second, I am pleased that the Court declines to consider the classified evidence the government has submitted to us but shielded from petitioners and their counsel. Ante, at 13, n. 3. Efforts to inject secret evidence into judicial proceedings present obvious constitutional concerns. Usually, “the evidence used to prove the Government’s case must be disclosed to the individual so that he has an opportunity to show that it is untrue.”
Good grief.. I clearly wasn't following it closely, but even the fact that this could have become a thing ( SCOTUS ruling using 'redacted' as evidence ) is severely disheartening.
> but even the fact that this could have become a thing
So you're upset that the Biden admin attempted to sway the court with secret evidence. But any admin always could behave in that way, and nothing you can do can stop that. The fact that the court decided to ignore that secret evidence should be comforting. Sure, nothing forces the court in the future to stick to that, but this is always true as to everything.
Friend. Why would you insist on painting this in a simple political framework and, more amusingly, assume I follow it that same framework? I am not upset. I am disheartened, dispirited, demoralized, and dismayed, but I am not upset.
If that is the case, why would you start the sentence with a 'so' suggesting you made a leap of logic, where nothing of the sort actually occured given that it is almost a complete non-sequitur.
I am open to a conversation, but I think, and please correct me as needed, that your political bias blinds you in ways that affect any and all discussions.
Officials at the EU should first wonder why there is no European equivalent of Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Tiktok (the list could continue forever).
Even if it where, such a company would not find the same obstacles in entering the American market as in would in China.
But the US is a foreign adversary of the EU who has ruined the EU economy in the last three years and wants to wrestle away Greenland.
Half joking, but the US performs corporate espionage in the EU and certainly takes compromising material on EU politicians whenever it can get it.
The slavish adherence from EU NPC politicians (they are mediocre and no one knows how they manage to rise) to US directives has to have some reasons. Being compromised is one of those.
Until we ban Denmark as an "adversary" because they won't just hand over Greenland. Or Mexico for setting tarrifs against us (because we declared tarrifs first).
Yup I'd be ok with banning TikTok because all of the US web services that are banned China, but this makes it seem like every country should have their own everything
Exactly, Americans want to voice their opinions whenever a foreign country considers banning or regulating an American social media platform. It's a clear double standard. The U.S. government banning foreign companies is fine, but when a foreign country bans an American company, it’s called censorship or something like that?
People don't fully understand what is at risk of being lost here. Science, history, and technology tutorials, practical life skills like cooking, budgeting, mental health, chronic illness, trauma recovery, creative expression, small businesses, home repair, friend groups, communities, and many people who make their living on TikTok. Losing TikTok means losing a massive ecosystem and all of its connections, knowledge, and content. It's like a library of books vanishing, or a large city disappearing off of a map.
Popular sites come and go. It has admittedly been a few years since we had a big shakeup of where people go to doomscroll, but this is not a paradigm shift -- it is just a chance to see who picks up the slack. It is mildly interesting speculating on whether an existing site will absorb it or if something new will come along. And it is possible TikTok will just keep running. But either way, people gonna make content, people gonna consume content.
a lot of chronic illness sub communities are bad and would be good to lose, just like cryptic pregnancy fb etc - they trigger latent mental illness in people
For those not in the know, why is cryptic pregnancy tiktok bad?
I'd never heard of it, and from what I understand, it's a hashtag people use to share stories of how they found out they were pregnant late in the pregnancy because they didn't have pregnancy symptoms. But I don't understand why that would be bad for people to share/consume.
We also risk losing so much utter nonsense and false information that I'm not at all worried. You want to learn history and science? Buy some (vetted) history and science books.
The number of times I had to correct my step-son when he repeated something he "learned" on TikTok is disturbing.
Unimportant example: He "learned" from a TikTok video that the commonly repeated command of "Open sesame!" is actually "Open says me!". That's not true, and all you have to do is read the story "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" to know that the story actually hinges on the fact that the secret word is the name of a grain/plant.
Another example: He "learned" that the video game character, Mario, is not saying "It's a me, Mario!" with an Italian accent. He "learned" that he is actually saying some Japanese word, like "Itsumi Mario!".
One more: He "learned" that "scientists" now think that "we" originally put the T-Rex fossils together incorrectly and that the animal's arm bones are actually backwards, and should be reversed to reveal that the T-Rex actually had little chicken wings instead of small arms. Anybody who has seen how bone sockets fit together knows that's nonsense.
Forgetting the political theory and morality of the ban, I say good riddance to the constant firehose of bullshit and lying morons on that app.
And for every video of quality on the platform, there's one that's blatant political propaganda, one that's blatant conspiratorial misinformation, one that's sexualizing children, etc.
It's a mixed bag. It has no more to offer than any other social network. Less, some might argue, because of how easy it is to crosspost to the other video networks.
The only way this is different from the loss of other social networks, Vine most closely, is the government is shutting down the site and collapsing the ecosystem rather than private equity.
Yes, I believe so. It's way easier to upload something on tiktok with captions, voiceovers etc than on YouTube. You can have real communities instead of random channels.
No one is deleting data. You just can't run the app in the US anymore. If someone cares to archive this junk, they can just do it from Australia or wherever.
Why do you call it junk? Is everything on YouTube junk, because there are some really bad and fake prank jokes? Is everything on here junk, because some people don't have the best intentions?
Seriously, even in Germany the public opinion about tiktok is so much influenced by people not even having used the app even once (seen some of the good parts of it).
This is ban is only because US has no control over the content and organic anti Israel content was not censored like it was in all other us social platforms.
Wait, where's the Facebook/Meta ban? Is unlawful data collection only unlawful if it's done under a foreign adversary? I guess not to the US Government where their interests align with adversarial data collection practices against its own people.
Facebook / Meta are not controlled by a foreign adversary as designated by the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". Thus they cannot become subject to the distribution restrictions designated by that law.
The core factor in the law is control by a foreign adversary, it's not a law that outlaws data collection.
I know, I was pointing out it's not really about data collection because we allow manipulative practices with our own people. We are our own worst enemy. Meaning government and corporations want that power over our people. They are protecting interests that run counter to the will of the people.
I support any ban on social media platforms because control of the public's data belongs in the hands of individuals.
- Frying teenagers' brains with short attention deficit videos. That one seems logical, but others are doing it, too.
- Political indoctrination.
- Compromised politicians who can be blackmailed: The big one, but a certain island run by the daughter of a certain intelligence agency operative was largely ignored.
- Corporate espionage: Probably not happening on TikTok. Certainly happening in the EU using US products.
Look at what foreign adversaries are already actively doing: working to turn Americans against each other. Social media is the perfect tool to spread discord. Russia has troll farms that create fake news stories, manipulated photos, and incendiary memes targeted at both sides of the political spectrum. They've even orchestrated in-person protests and counter-protests to those protests, though those efforts have been less successful. Now imagine that instead of merely using fake user accounts to this end, an adversary controlled an entire social network, including its algorithm and its content guidelines and could tailor manipulative content on an individual basis.
I can agree to an extent that TT (and social media in general) is an addictive app and harmful to youth and society in general. Spend enough time on these types of apps and suddenly your worldview is just whatever the TT algorithm pushes to you.
It’s not entirely unprecedented either. There was the case of FB and Myanmar/Burma which strongly promoted military propaganda. This unfortunately lead to violence against Rohingya.
But the argument is very weak in my opinion, and wouldn’t be a reason to outright ban it. Prohibition never works.
The only thing that does work is fixing our society. In the USA, we have increasing wage disparity, increasing homelessness, increasing poverty, food scarcity, water scarcity, worsening climate change related events (see Palisades fire…), and a shit ton of other issues that will remain unsolved for at least the next 4 years.
Yet leadership is doing almost nothing to address this. Neoclassical economics and neoliberalism have outright ruined this country. Fuck the culture war the billionaire class is trying to initiate.
It's hard not to see this as a continuation of the American corporate interests controlling the media their population consumes. TikTok I think has the largest share of American's attention out of all the social media?
Doesn't seem to matter which clown flaps about in the wind at the oval office, control of the narrative holds a steady keel for decades. This is the same story, in a new medium. Sure, as the "sides" in culture wars take turns "ruling", certain things are allowed or disallowed. The real consequential stuff, ideas and patterns that would lead to the empowerment of the working class vs hoarders of capital -- all the back to basic education, critical thinking, civic engagement, and the implicit/explicit deprioritization of any and all that in favour of obedient consumerism.
With the "new" tech they've discovered they can really shape people's opinions, tweak the emotional charge to make people act in such unconsidered ways, en masse, against each others' and their own best interest -- of course they'll hold on to that at any cost. It's unprecedented, though not unimagined.
I wonder what will fill this space. Over all the rises and falls of the various blinking nonsense, I've never really seen people go -back- to an app / service / etc. They all just wither away as the next new things comes up.
> Although Trump could choose to not enforce the law
Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance.
> The nation’s highest court said in the opinion that while “data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age,” the sheer size of TikTok and its “susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects” poses a national security concern
What is the point of these "rules and regulations" and "the nation's highest court" when the president could decide just not to enforce them?
Where was this line of thinking when it was Obama ordering the DEA to not enforce marijuana laws? Where is this line of thinking when it's a city that chooses not to enforce dog breed restrictions?
The enforcement of law being separate from the passage of law is a key plank in a functioning democracy, it's one of the safety valves against tyranny.
The president is in charge of executing the law. It’s in our system of checks and balances. I’m choosing to speak at an extremely general level, of course, but that is the answer to your question.
Specifically, I think it's "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" (Art. II, §3).
Does that mean "If foreign companies don't like our laws, they can pay to have them adjusted"? Seems not very faithful, but I hardly understand that word anymore it feels like.
This is largely a non-starter, though? He can't choose to have it not be a law, he could choose to selectively enforce it. Where selective enforcement is assumed to be no enforcement from your post. But he could, as easily, use it to punish any company he doesn't like that is somehow in breach of it.
And this ultimately puts it in a place where you have to assume that it will be enforced against you. Right?
> Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance.
I agree. And the bribery already started when the Trump campaign found itself doing very well on engagement in TikTok. The CCP had already started the bribery before the election in a bid to maintain influence over the US while halting American influence in China.
The Biden administration I believe said they won't enforce the law starting Sunday, leaving it to the incoming administration to enforce. It'll be wildly popular for Trump to save TikTok, so I expect he'll do it without forcing a sale.
From what I've heard, not enforcing the ban doesn't really work. Apple/Google would be liable if the law does get enforced. So unless they've gone completely insane and want to give Trump a threat to wield over them for his whole term, they'll surely act as if it's being enforced. The term on the law is 5 years too, so even if they do have perfect trust in Trump never changing his mind, they have to worry about the next President deciding to enforce it too.
Veering off-topic but I don't understand how there isn't wide-spread protests/riots right now in the US. Is the working/middle class just accepting all of this, even when it's apparent the government is being sold for quick cash?
Strategically, they start with cases the public is more likely to support, and then the precedent, law, norms, mechanisms, etc. are all there to take it further. Another common step is demonization, in this case of anything Chinese, TikTok, and, to a degree, of anything not 'American'.
Look at oppression of unpopular groups. They've started with groups, such as undocumented immigrants and trans people, already unpopular groups and easy targets. They demonize them extensively and make oppression acceptable to the public. Now there is precedent; by now, people don't even object to it on the grounds of human rights, justice, or humanitarianism; stereotype, prejudice, and hatred are no longer taboo. Soon there will be camps, a police force accustomed to and trained in mass arrest, and a public accustomed to it as a legitimate mechanism.
I didn't see a sale of TikTok anywhere? The main point of issue I have with the bill is that the text of the bill [0] specifies that any company if it is owned by a "foreign adversary" (as defined by Congress) and the President deems it to be a threat will be forced to divest or stop participating in the American market.
Part of the core reason that TikTok didn't want to divest was that they had ownership of a damn good algorithm and didn't want to share it. It's not a big leap from this to banning other companies that might have competing algorithms that could eat into major US corporations. If Egypt designs a better X does Elon get to urge it's bad because it's a threat?
I also think it's a pretty badly written bill in general. The bill won't punish or ByteDance. It punishes the digital infrastructure companies like Apple, Google and Oracle who provide the ability to download the app or the database.
I'm not defending TikTok or claiming it's not an security threat. I just think that the bill is poorly written and doesn't deal with the actual root of the problem.
Because if it's owned by a US company the US government will have more control over its content? Especially if it gets bought by one of the country's oligarchs? Honestly seems pretty obvious.
I like more details/discussion; but the take in this podcast feels incredibly naive and conspiratorial; going isnofaras to blame Israeli dark money for the 'ban' while ignoring the legally mandated CCP integration w/ large companies (while claiming "i have no way to know if there is integration" despite it being easily searchable).
That's a fair point. I personally disagreed with some of the points brought up in the podcast, and I completely see what you mean about the "conspiratorial" tone. What I still think is worth discussing (albeit a bit late now) is the scope and lack of checks on the powers granted.
The sitting president of the United States of America was banned by almost every major AMERICAN company, and even some Canadian companies (Shopify), yet we're going after Tiktok.
No Chinese ever banned the sitting president of the United States.
> The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!
> To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.
Twitter said the first tweet "is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an 'orderly transition'" and the second is "being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate".
So they banned him because they wanted to not because of TOS violations. If you can interpret "I will not attend" as "It's illegitimate" you can interpret anything as anything and ban anyone for any TOS provision.
In a developed country, government would ensure its citizens receive top notch education so that they are able by themselves to understand that using a Chinese owned app is just as bad as using Facebook for instance and so these app would be dead, no one would use them.
Instead when you cut so hard on education that you get millions of flat earth believers, you got to protect them from their own behavior with law. But as far as I know, no law can prevent little Jimmy from putting crayons up his nose.
Blocking TikTok won't just make its user look for better privacy, or at least more independent alternative. They will use something else just as bad or worst.. little red book for instance.
Little red book is truly evil. Every Chinese woman I know uses it. It is truly brain rotting. The relationship advice that it promulgates is every bit as toxic as the stuff on TikTok and instagram
This is going to be an interesting experiment: A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
Until now, the closest thing we had like this were national our regional networks like Russia's vk, but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.
Now we, for the first time ever, will have the situation where a social network has global reach but without american content.
Will it keep being a english first space? Will it survive/thrive? How the content is going to evolve? What does this means in terms of global cultural influence? Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it? Will this backfire for the US?
Tiktok is actually surprisingly national in how it serves its content. If you're outside the US you don't see most American accounts except the ones that go very viral.
Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.
Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.
It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.
This hasn't been my experience, using TikTok from Switzerland, I almost exclusively see English language, with a focus on my interests
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My experience is that it serves you the content that you spent time watching and engaging with.
And it's quite easy to steer it towards a certain topic if you want to
I believe the algo is somewhat timezone based, too.
Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!"
The majority of the content feels regional, though.
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Canada and potentially the UK are gonna be having the biggest shock I guess. Potentially Australia too?
The question is, was this a conscious human design decision or did the algorithm learn to do that by itself?
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As an American in the US, I get quite a bit of foreign and foreign language content under For You.
This is the inverse to the situation you describe but it makes me doubtful that non-US don't see a lot of American content.
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If its like Reels (I dont use tiktok) as soon as you are in France its only French content. Same for youtube.
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Source?
My anecdotal evidence of watching TikTok usage on others’ phones while riding subway systems in Paris suggest there’s plenty of English-language content out there.
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TikTok is surprisingly national at the surface level, but it is all coordinated back with the parent China based entities (ByteDance, Douyin, and the CCP), so that even if it is national, it upholds China’s national interests. See the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 for more details. But basically, TikTok executives had to agree to let ByteDance monitor their personal devices, swear oaths to uphold various goals of the CCP (“national unity” “socialism” etc), report to both a US-based manager and a China-based manager, uphold the CCP’s moderation/censorship scheme, and so on. It is REALLY aggressive and unethical, but also reveals how subtly manipulative the entire system of TikTok is.
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> This is going to be an interesting experiment: A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
China has had such social networks for a long time. Their Weibo and Xiaohongshu are two prominent examples. Weibo started as a copycat of Twitter, but then beats Twitter hands-down with faster iterations, better features, and more vibrant user engagement despite the gross censorship imposed by the government.
My guess is that TT can still thrive without American content, as long as other governments do not interfere as the US did. A potential threat to TT is that the US still has the best consumer market, so creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization, thus snatching away TT's current user base in other countries.
Are Weibo and Xiaohongshu used widely outside of China? Given the names alone I'd imagine their adoption is fairly limited to China.
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> creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization
Seems people are already mass migrating to Rednote. I’m not sure how that plays out though.
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Re. copycats -- VK was also a blatant copycat of Facebook, down to copy-pasted CSS styles.
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> Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it?
This is a weird fantasy, but it brings up an interesting point. The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture. Especially when compared to Japan or Korea, countries with a fraction of the population but many, many times the influence.
I wish the CCP didn't wall off their citizens from the rest of the world in the name of protecting their own power. Think of the creativity we are all losing out on.
> The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture
The CCP has tried to get their culture out there, it just has not been successful at the visually obvious scale of Japan or Korea. But their culture is definitely getting out there, and I think we often don't spot the Chinese influence on something unless some journalist finds out and writes an article about it.
Some of their influence is leveraged in business deals, with several movies being altered by the demand of the CCP, and these changes persisting in worldwide releases, not just the Chinese-released version of the movies.
Some of their influence is leveraged in video games- Genshin Impact is a famously successful Chinese game. There are some competitive Chinese teams in various pockets of e-sports too. Tencent also owns several video game developers, and occasionally uses their influence to change parts of a game to please the CCP.
There is a Chinese animation industry (print and video), and occasionally they get a worldwide success. I remember being surprised when I found out that "The Daily Life of the Immortal King" was Chinese- you can tell it isn't Japanese but lots of people guess that it is Korean.
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As someone who wants to learn Chinese, I think about it all the time. Watching Chinese shows just isn't as fun for whatever reason. I was telling my wife the other day I have met so many people who credit Friends for why they can speak English.
That's soft power right there.
I've had to resort to watching anime on Netflix with Chinese dubs - anime is good because people actually talk slower and usually use simple language. When I watched Three Body (Chinese version) the dialogue was impenetrable lol
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For better or worse, I think CCP has long been on the backfoot in international propaganda just because what passes for persuasive narratives in authoritarian contexts falls flat to global audiences fluent in western entertainment and media culture.
Of course they have modernized, but most actual influence obtained thus fair (e.g. international olympic committees covering up investigations, stopping the NBA from venturing criticisms) has come from projection of soft power rather than being on the cultural cutting edge.
What do you mean by "global pop culture" here?
I've never considered there to be one, although I'm open to the idea.
It's easy for me to recognize an Ameican pop culture or an Anglo pop culture, and the favor each show for certain imports over others, but those don't seem nearly so universal as your usage of "global pop culture" suggests.
Latin, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, French, Indian/South Asian, etc each represent huge "pop culture" markets of their own but also each have their own import biases.
I'd say that in the last two years China has advanced quite a big step with video-games.
The only good Chinese language films were all filmed in Hong Kong, directed by people like Wong Kar-Wai. In the Mood for Love is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.
Chinese cultural (and censor) sensibilities are why big budget US movies are almost universally boring and terrible these days. Authoritarian societies aren’t exactly known for creating good art.
As a Chinese American, this is the real reason people don't know about China.
To be honest, most of the movies/shows China creates sucks. They're Marvel-esque CGI fests with awful storylines.
Meanwhile, Japan and Korea are creating awesome media.
The whole narrative about the US gov trying to "hide" China isn't really true. There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about how great China is. And we welcome Chinese immigrants every year.
The real problem is that China itself doesn't execute when it comes to soft power.
“Chinese movies” are popular in Vietnam for example, so not fair to say they have no global reach.
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I think you are a bit too premature: China has at least one(usually dozens) competitor for literally everything America has. You just don't hear about everything in the US.
Think of any industry and there is probably a Chinese competitor that is trying.
Tesla -> BYD
Google -> Baidu
Starbucks -> Luckin Coffee
IMAX -> China Film Giant Screen or maybe POLYMAX
Finally Disney -> Possibly Beijing Enlight Pictures
They released an animated film Ne Zha in 2019 that according to wikipedia was "the highest-grossing animated film in China,[16] the worldwide highest-grossing non-U.S. animated film,[17] and the second worldwide highest-grossing non-English-language film of all time at the time of its release. With a gross of over $725 million,[18] it was that year's fourth-highest-grossing animated film, and China's all time fourth-highest-grossing film.[19]"
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Zha_(2019_film)
Some great info here [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2J0pRJSToU
Ok I'll admit part of the reason people don't hear about these companies is that they are still too half baked. But look at BYD, they started off producing junk but this Chinese mindset of grinding and rapid iteration has put them to be super successful today. Why couldn't that kind of happen with their Disney competitor?
Another thing that might be happening is the literal closing off of the world into two spheres. Western US led and Eastern Chinese led. As we are seeing with BYD, they are taking over all the non western markets(and some western as well) but the US has essentially slammed the door shut on them (they haven't actually but made it impossible to enter with their tariffs). Maybe the Disney competitor will take hold in the non western aligned world?
Honestly its a shame they are not open or democratic. The idea of watching or even being part of a rising country that is building their empire is fascinating to watch. Will they collapse due to demographics or these fundamental issues like communism or will they make it? Unfortunately for many people, the only option is to stick with the US and work to keep the ship afloat as there is no place for them in China.
I'm resentful for not having BYD here to offer affordable vehicles. The vast numbers of people who are now boxed out of the middle class could desperately use the help of a vehicle that doesn't cost them $700 a month.
True that. My wife watched a few Chinese dramas, but they're quite boring compared to k-dramas or japanese shows. I find them annoying and full of propaganda. Only the historical ones are borderline interesting. Also the CCP crackdown on celebrities didn't help.
By contrast, there's now a very good k-drama with Lee Min-ho happening in space or the Gyeongseong Creature horror drama with Park Seo-joon.
I did see some good Chinese movies, mostly out of Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai directed a bunch of good ones but they all predate Xi's regime and the takeover of HK.
One of my favourite contemporary artists is Ai Weiwei, who has gone missing in 2011 only to finally reappear four years later. I understand he now lives in Portugal. Got his book on my night stand, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.
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Or perhaps you haven't encountered Chinese content because of soft suppression of the content from within the US bubble
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> This is going to be an interesting experiment: A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
For whom? UK users?
TikTok users who use the Chinese version are not consuming content from US creators. They won't notice this ban at all.
> For who? UK users?
Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.
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> TikTok users who use the Chinese version
The what now? There are no Chinese nationals using TikTok. It's banned there. Like it's now banned in the US.
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its fantastic for canada
Ah yes, USA, UK and China. The 3 countries that exist.
> but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.
Can't really disagree, but it's my favorite place to pirate fonts. Typing out site:vk.com <thing I want> feels like a real life cheat code.
> widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
As of January 2025, the countries with the most TikTok users are:
Indonesia: Has the most active users with 157.6 million
United States: 120.5 million
Brazil: 105.2 million
Mexico: 77.5 million
Vietnam: 65.6 million
Pakistan: 62.0 million
Philippines: 56.1 million
Russian Federation: 56.0 million
Thailand: 50.8 million
Bangladesh: 41.1 million
I presume the US market is the dominant target market for ads / influencing, a quick google search suggests it is 75% of the global spend. So the other issue is not just losing US influencers but all influencers will take a haircut. I don't know how much of popular content is paid for by such revenue but taking a 75% haircut could put a real damper on content producers - especially those who make it a full time job. I don't know if that'll make it better with an increase in proportion of more organic content. I personally don't use TikTok - I waste enough time on HN.
There is an additional separate issue that influencer is a coveted 'career' for many children (~30%), so not only would it wipe out many jobs it'll kill their dreams. I guess like cancelling the space program at a time when kids really wanted to be astronauts.
I think there is a lot wrong with society and TikTok is part of it - but that's a much longer discussion for some other time.
If so, good riddance. The good point of TikTok is that the videos appear genuine and wholesome. Not the hyper-optimized for monetization crap YouTube Shorts show you. I much prefer the videos with kids goofing around on icy streets over the American narrator telling me some bs about some great baseball player.
> it'll kill their dreams.
They can dream new dreams. I didn't become an astronaut—and realized I didn't actually want to become one, either.
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Hopefully the US tech industry is not so schlerotic that they're unable to clone it and offer a competitive alternative. Given TikTok has demonstrated there's a huge amount of money to be made in that space. Although given how awful Google Shorts and Reels' recommendation algorithms are in comparison, maybe there really will be no replacement.
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It will still legally have American content, but only propaganda :)
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/biden-administration-quiet...
India also banned TikTok a while ago
Orkut was one American social network that barely had any American content because it was taken over by Brazilians.
I don't think it will survive because non American cultural exports are not quite there yet you have to be born outside the US to understand the reach of Hollywood/cultural export as an opinion shaping tool
But then again Telegram survived and they had to resort to kidnapping the CEO so if it does survive the US pretty much gifted that space to a geopolitical adversary
But I'm pretty sure Langley/MD folk thought about this and are betting on it not surviving
It will take ages for that to happen. AFAIK the "ban" only really removes it from app stores, I don't think it even requires store owners to force it off of phones that have downloaded it already.
The data must be hosted in the US. Oracle will have to shutdown their servers.
Although TikTok has said they are gearing up to shut the service down.
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It probably prevents them from distributing updates though.
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There are such products. Outside of America whatsapp is a dominant social app but its use internally is almost mute despite being an american social app.
Tiktok america is over 50% of tiktok revenue I think that more than anything else would choke out growth world wide.
> Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it?
TikTok does not exist in China, they have their own version -- Douyin -- that complies with their more stringent privacy laws.
How will YouTube shorts, and instagram stories pivot? They already aren’t seen as true rivals, but maybe they can change or spinoff a third brand. The gold in TR has always been its algorithm. Maybe they can fake it. How easy will it be to circumvent via vpn? Will other English content on tt skyrocket? Eg uk and Canada.
>The gold in TR has always been its algorithm.
Yes, but it's also singularly focused on its core experience rather than being a bolted-on experience that is confusingly blended into an ecosystem where it's not the primary experience.
YouTube Shorts is terrible. YouTube clearly wanted to have some answer to short-form video but without putting much effort into it.
Instagram Reels is a bit better but it feels very "sanitized" and fake.
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I think it’s going to be a lesson to Americans about just how little their content actually matters to the other 96% of the world.
Some other countries banned tiktok too, e.g. India
And China!
How about WeChat, little red book, … in fact the mainland version of tt, …
If a US-based alternative appeared which not only substituted performatively, but also monetized creators and influencers enough to put everyone else to shame, people could not help but notice and migrate there in droves.
It would be pretty cool if there was a respectable capitalist with enough money, or if that won't do it then a bigger more-respectable political organization or something, and Tiktok would be nothing but a memory of how things used to be before they got better.
Think about it, a social force or financial pressure strong enough to reverse unfavorable trends, even after they have already gained momentum.
And all it takes is focusing that pressure in an unfamiliar direction that could probably best be described as "anti-enshittification".
I know, that's a tall ask, never mind . . .
I’d worry that such a platform would be used to reverse social trends unfavorable to the owner, instead of social trends unfavorable to society in general.
It also seems… sort of bad if an individual has the ability to be strong enough to reverse a social trend, right? So we basically would have to expect one of the trends they should reverse to be… their own existence. In general it is unreasonable to expect individuals to be so enlightened as to work against their own existence, I think.
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Is TikTok big in Europe? Is Europe big on social media?
yes on both
> This is going to be an interesting experiment:
Unclear. Biden and Trump both have stated that they will decline to enforce this law.
Until trump lets it sink, tgis is mwaninvless.
Cash bribes are how laws are define now. Is america avaluable audiemce?
First, I still don't think the ban will actually happen. The current administration will punt the issue to the next and Trump has already signaled he wants to save Tiktok, whatever that means. That might be by anointing a buyer that he personally is an investor in. Tiktok may choose to still shutter in the US rather than being forcibly sold.
But there's a biger issue than loss of American content should this come to pass: the loss os American ad revenue for the platform and creators. A lot of people create content aimed at Americans because an American audience is lucrative for ad revenue. If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?
More like Trump can use it as a bargaining chip with China.
> Trump has already signaled he wants to save Tiktok
Trump can blame Biden and move on.
> If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?
Bytedance makes most of its money from Douyin.
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A worrying angle is that Elon is essentially subservient to the CCP because of Tesla’s presence in China. Remember when Tesla signed a pledge to uphold socialism at the behest of the CCP a couple years back? It’s also why Elon - who claims to uphold free speech, capitalism, democratic values, etc - will NEVER say anything negative about China. If Trump is close to Elon, and Elon is easily influenced/controlled by the CCP, it really undermines the independence of US leadership. I am concerned this next administration will be soft on China in all the wrong ways, including not enforcing a ban that has been legally instituted and upheld unanimously by SCOTUS.
Or Indian content. It will probably end up getting banned in a lot of places over time.
Instagram and Facebook is more popular outside the US and China than TikTok.
At least in Germany, for Gen Z, Facebook is quite dead and Instagram co-exists with TikTok, both with >70% of the cohort [1] using them. There is no clear winner. Anecdata, but for freshmen, TikTok is way more popular.
TikTok-based social media campaigns also e.g. managed to unexpectedly swing an election in Romania (for Georgescu, was later annulled).
[1] https://www.absatzwirtschaft.de/tiktok-vs-instagram-ein-verg... - sorry, I only found a German source
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India also just banned TikTok, I wouldn't be surprised if bans became widespread outside of America with any country worried about China's geopolitical power.
I think the easiest answer to follow for "why is this not prevented by free speech protection" is "the fact that petitioners “cannot avoid or mitigate” the effects of the Act by altering their speech." (page 10 of this ruling, but is a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Broadcasting_System,_In...)
Simple answer. A chinese owned company has no such rights or protections. Free speech does not apply. The law also does not censor content (so no free speech violation anyway). The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security). Big difference.
The EFF disagrees.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/eff-statement-us-supre...
Congress is explicitly empowered in the Constitution to regulate foreign trade. Free speech is not relevant.
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This is a limitation on foreign control of TikTok, not a limitation on speech. TikTok can stay in the us market if it eliminates the foreign control
That's a great point. Hadn't thought about that angle
The easier answer is ”This is really eating into Meta’s revenues”
The United States is currently in the middle of a cyber cold-war with China.
They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department. Specifically they used the telco hacks to gather geolocation data in order to pinpoint Americans and to spy on phone calls by abusing our legally mandated wiretap capabilities.
Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones.
I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.
The TikTok ban is security theater through and through.
Chinese spy agencies don't have to make an app that millions of American teens use to harvest data on them. American companies have been doing the job for them.
They — just like the FBI, NSA, American police departments and almost every TLA — can just buy the data from a broker, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/nsa-finally-admi...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government...
The brokers don't care. They'll sell to anyone and everyone. And the people they sell to don't care either. They'll process and re-sell it too. And on and on, until it ends up in the hands of every interested party on Earth, i.e. everyone.
So don't worry, the Chinese already have a detailed copy of your daily routine & reading habits. Just love this new world that we've created to make $0.002/click.
EDIT — if it makes you feel any better, the Chinese are doing it too!
https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...
> The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals.
- harvesting data: sure the CCP could buy some data from data brokers; but that data is very limited compared to the data that TikTok itself has on its users
but data harvesting is not the real problem
the big problem is that you have a social network to which millions of your citizens are connected and used daily, which is under the control of a foreign adversary; it's a bit like if CBS was owned by the CCP
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That's a convenient fig leaf.
There are 2 separate problems:
The existance of a different problem is not a justification to avoid progress on the original one.
PS: Curious how many total comments there are on this article. Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.
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It's less about bare privacy and more about the fact that it's a closed loop system.
Meta collects your data and advertisers can indirectly use that data to serve you ads. In addition, government actors can use Meta's advertising tools to spread propaganda.
But TikTok is an all-in-one solution. The government have direct control over the algorithm in addition to having access to all of the data. They don't have to go through a third party intermediary like Meta and aren't only limited by a public advertising API.
I doubt it is about data. It should be about digital heroin and psychological warfare.
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The value is in the ability to influence what your enemy sees, and to push whatever narratives are best for you and worst for your enemy. They don’t give a shit about the data.
> American companies have been doing the job for them.
This right here is the answer. People just don’t care about this type of privacy because they assume some American company already has their data. Combine that with us being two generations removed from the Cold War and the average TikTok user doesn’t see any reason why the owner of this specific data being Chinese matters and frankly I’m sympathetic to that argument. If you live in the US, someone like Musk is going to have a greater influence on your life than the Chinese government and I see no reason to trust him any more or less than the Chinese government. So any discussion of this being a matter of national security just rings hollow.
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For anyone reading this who is knowledgeable about this topic, where, specifically, can a regular citizen buy personal data about people from data brokers?
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I am in favor of banning TikTok, but not strictly because they harvest data. I am far more concerned about them manipulating people on a large scale, I think TikTok is an effective tool for manipulating public opinion and I have no doubt that they're actively engaged and consciously engaging America in a form of psychological warfare. We are facing the very real threat of a military conflict with China, I do not want the Chinese government in this position of power.
I frankly don't understand why I keep seeing on social media people like yourselves push the idea that it's okay because other companies are also harvesting the data. It is obviously not about the data. It is about China being in a position to manipulate information flow.
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I mean let's not pretend that an app on the vast majority of peoples phones isn't a non-trivial vector for a zero-day attack.
If there is an invasion of Taiwan, I don't think it would be unthinkable that everyone's phones being broken wouldn't be a major tactical and political advantage of shifting the US's priorities and political will in the short run.
Sure, it burns the asset in the process, but I mean... this has been a priority for an entire century.
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> just buy the data from a broker
A surprising (and funny) example of this is how the open-source intelligence community and sites like Bellingcat used purchased or leaked data from private Russian commercial data brokers to identify and track the detailed movements of elite Russian assassination squads inside Russia as well as in various other countries. They learned the exact buildings where they go to work every day as well as who they met with and their home addresses. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-bellingcat-unmas...
Volunteer open-source researchers also used these readily available data sources to identify and publicly out several previously unknown Russian sleeper agents who'd spent years hiding in Western countries while building cover identities and making contacts. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/25/socialite-widow-j...
To your point, if volunteer internet hobbyists can use commercial broker data to identify and track elite Russian assassins and undercover sleeper agents, in Russia and around the world, China having direct access to US Tiktok data, which Tiktok sells to anyone through brokers anyway, doesn't seem like an existential intelligence threat to our national security. Forcing TikTok to divest Chinese ownership would, at most, make Chinese intelligence go through an extra step and pay a little for the data.
If politicians were really worried about foreign adversaries aggregating comprehensive data profiles on everyone, just addressing China's access to TikTok is a side show distraction. Why didn't they pass legislation banning all major social media services from selling or sharing certain kinds of data and requiring the anonymization of other kinds of data to prevent anyone aggregating composite profiles across multiple social platforms or data brokers? That would actually reduce the threat profile somewhat.
Obviously, they aren't doing that because the FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, INS, IRS, Homeland Security and their Five Eyes international partners are aggressively buying data broker info on all US residents at massive scale every day and aggregating it into comprehensive profiles - all with no warrants, probable cause or oversight. The US Constitution doesn't apply because it's just private commercial data, not government data. Any such law would have to explicitly carve out exceptions allowing US and allied intelligence agencies to continue doing this. Alternatively, they could put such use under the secret FISA intelligence court. US intelligence has thoroughly co-opted FISA oversight but jumping through the FISA hoop is extra work and filling out the paperwork to be rubber-stamped is annoying. They much prefer remaining completely unregulated and unsupervised like they are now, collecting everything on everyone all the time without limit. They've certainly already automated collecting all the data they want from every broker.
So yeah... let's very publicly make a big show of slapping just China and only about TikTok - and loudly proclaim we really did something to protect citizen privacy and reduce our national data aggregation attack surface. This is the intelligence community cleverly offering a fig leaf of plausible deniability to politicians who can now claim they "did something", while leaving the US intelligence community free to pillage every last shred of citizen privacy in secret.
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Not just about data harvesting though.
But what is the point of all this data? People don’t live forever or have unlimited exploitable LTV, so there is a very narrow window of time for where this data is useful for a given population. Is the goal to just use it to influence elections?
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It’s this - anyone saying otherwise simply does not know, or is pushing some kind of an agenda. I fully believe some people in the US government buy the whole “security” angle, but it’s very obviously bogus. So is the idea of selling it - china is very protective of chinese user data, there’s no way they are going to trust an american investor to play by their rules, even if a serious price was offered, which it hasn’t been. this entire thing feels like theater, honestly.
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It's one of those things. If you asked most Hacker News readers how they feel about the authoritarian government of a single party state literally controlling the algorithm that determines everything you see, most would swear up and down that they would never stand for it.
But yet what happens in practice is people line up to defend it. I can only guess most of the people defending it are active users and aren't aware of how distorted their perception of the world is by the content they see there.
There's some defending it in general, but it's also just a really tough precedent to allow when it could, so easily, be used to shut down any other service they want by just waving the magic "national security" flag.
It's possible to believe TikTok is bad and that the pathway the US just proved out to banning it in the US has shown that no US court will seriously question the "security reasons" fig leaf. Telegram and Signal are both used by plenty of people the US could easily paint as "security threats" and it's unclear there's any defense to a ban that they could mount at this point.
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I am of 100% of the same opinion as you. I have told people for years about the cyber warfare going on and that we're losing it, and they just don't seem to care and want that serotonin hit and ignore the rest. I also want curbs on other social media, but TikTok and the war of China against the US on the internet is in a league of its own. The CCP are no doubt funneling the data to their servers, and no doubt have plans for further damaging our youths' minds through brain rot of tiktok diverting them from far more productive activities. There's a reason CCP has strong curbs on similar apps regarding young people in their nation.
> Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.
Is there any evidence of this? FWIW, I saw plenty of tiktoks talking about the China hack
It's completely irrelevant whether they have done it or not. The only thing that matters is the fact that they can do it.
We're not going let you have nukes just because you haven't nuked anybody yet.
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Yeah i shared with relatives by taking a screenshot of a tiktok to show them the news
There is no evidence. This is just blind speculation. 95% of the population just doesn't care about telecom cybersecurity.
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We just don't care. We know the all the American TLAs are on our phones, so what's a few more Chinese ones? It's a problem for Washington war wonks to freak out about, not teens in Omaha.
Those teens in Omaha will eventually become voting adults in Omaha and then will eventually come into positions of leadership in both the public and private sector. I can guarantee that 0% would appreciate being blackmailed or unknowingly used as pawns in spycraft. Teens in Omaha may not understand the full scope of what it means.
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This is like saying that you don't care about free speech because you don't have anything to say right now. It's no where close to being a justification.
Oh we care. I care way, way less about an American company with my data over the CCP.
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Everyone outside of the US already knows the American three letter agencies and their allies like the Mossad can access, hack or destroy all their networks if push comes to shove. Most network services all over the world are run on infrastructure owned by a handful of American companies with deep defense and government ties - AWS, Google, MS.
As other powers arise, they will naturally want equivalence. The American government may decide that is not in their interest to make this easy - but I'd suggest as Hacker News community, we retain the ability to see beyond propaganda and balance contrary viewpoint.In this case (or the case on Nippon steel),how does one differentiate between "security" considerations and potentially a straightforward cash grab attempt by rich American investors?
So, should we also ban Chinese companies Alibaba, Baidu, Haier, Lenovo, Tencent, and ZTE from operating in the United States? Why just TikTok (Who is ironically also banned in China)?
And should Israeli companies, like those associated with NSO Group, face similar scrutiny after reports of their tools being used to hack U.S. State Department employee phones?
Yes
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> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening
This. It's this. Don't waste your time thinking past this answer, you already nailed it.
I can think that China is up to no good with my data and still be mad at my own Govt for doing the exact same thing. The outrage is not that TikTok is banned, it's that Zuckerburg is doing the exact same harms to America that China is alleged to be doing, but only 1 app is banned. Hence people flocking to Rednote rather than using Reels.
There is no legal way to ban FB -- nor would there be any way to ban TT if it were not owned and controlled by a foreign power.
Tbh I think this has a lot more to do with sympathy for Palestinians and the last year of protests on college campuses.
Besides, who cares if China is listening to us through the app. China and I have no beef with one another. China feeds me and clothes me and builds most of the stuff in my life and I give China my money. It's a good relationship! Much better than my relationship with this state, tbh.
There's at least three separate reasons that justify banning TikTok. If Trump bails them out, it's a complete betrayal of his base and the country at large.
1. Competitive balance. China does not allow US social media companies. If we allow theirs, our industry is essentially fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
2. China controls the algorithm for determining who sees what. This gives them tremendous ability to influence public opinion, and consequently public elections. That cannot be allowed to stand as long as China is hostile to the US.
3. China gets extremely detailed data about the interests and proclivities of millions of Americans, including military personnel and elected officials. This data is not otherwise publicly available and can be used for blackmail and other manipulation. Which is completely unacceptable when we have no mechanism to punish them from doing this short of global nuclear war.
Even ignoring the enormous threat to national sovereignty, TikTok has no redeeming qualities. It's an addiction machine that profits off people wasting away in front a screen. That alone is not a reason to ban it, but it sure does make the case stronger.
Banning TikTok is a clear-cut positive for the American people. Every American adult should be in support.
All of your points except 1. are true of American social media companies. 2., in particular, is widely documented: the Facebook mood manipulation fiasco, Cambridge Analytica, Musk's personal tweaking of the Twitter trending hashtags, and YouTube's heavy-handed censorship of legitimate medical advice during Covid are just a few of the higher profile instances of this.
> If Trump bails them out, it's a complete betrayal of his base and the country at large.
There is no wall. The Trump "tax cuts" raised taxes on most Americans and cut them for the 1%. Trump has not faced any consequences for betrayal in the past, why would he now?
In fact, TikTok helps promote the lack of awareness of all the above. If anything he'll want to keep it in place, to keep the public misinformed.
> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones
Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.
The interesting thing is that, using these tactics, the supreme court has made the legal case for every other country to ban US owned social networks! My opinion is that the US government has made another stupid move.
> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.
I would say both at the same time
I think the fallout from this is many Americans like myself don’t see China as our enemy. Based on the recent RedNote phenomenon, Chinese citizens don’t see it that way either.
Maybe the uniparty in the USA should make it a priority to improve the life of everyday Americans and not Zuck and Elon. Young people don’t care who the establishment is warring with because they know the establishment doesn’t represent them, they represent themselves.
Try posting a Winnie the Pooh meme on RedNote.
> They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department.
Please cite your sources. After decades of watching American propaganda, we know all too well that it is trivial to make up shit from thin air and have a large segment of the population eat it up.
I'm tempted to say: what's the point if you've preemptively disregarded it as made up "American propaganda."
But here you go anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon
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https://archive.ph/20241007181947/https://www.wsj.com/politi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/us/politics/china-hack-tr...
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I'm not sure about "all our major telco's, but there is this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
> On January 12, 2010, Google revealed on its weblog that it had been the victim of a cyber attack. The company said the attack occurred in mid-December and originated from China. Google stated that more than 20 other companies had been attacked; other sources have since cited that more than 34 organizations were targeted.
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> They hacked all of our major telco's
Can I see the evidence?
Yes, whether you understand it or not is a different question.
Search for Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon.
>I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.
Exactly. Everyone is having fun bidding adieu to their Chinese spys. And I think they're losing sight of the fact that there's abundant reporting on harrassing expats and dissidents internationally, pressuring countries to comply with their extradition requests, to say nothing of jailing human rights lawyers and democratic activists and detaining foreigners who enter China based on their online footprint.
Most of the time I bring this up I get incredulous denials that any of this happens (I then politely point such folks to Human Rights Watch reporting on the topic), or I just hear a lot of whataboutism that doesn't even pretend to defend Tiktok.
Do you have links to the Human Rights Watch reporting that you reference?
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> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones
This paternalistic framing is the disconnect between you and those opposed to the ban. The idea that it's TikTok insidiously worming its way onto American phones like a virus. In reality, people download the app and use it because they like it. This ban will, in effect, prevent people from accessing an information service they prefer. You must acknowledge this and argue why that is a worthy loss of autonomy if you want to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it.
If it helps, reframe the ban as one on a website rather than an app. They're interchangeable in this context, but I've observed "app" to be somewhat thought-terminating to some people.
For the record - I would totally support a ban on social media services that collect over some minimal threshold of user data for any purposes. This would alleviate fears of spying and targeted manipulation by foreign powers through their own platforms (TikTok) and campaigns staged on domestic social media. But just banning a platform because it's Chinese-owned? That's emblematic of a team-sports motivation. "Americans can only be exposed to our propaganda, not theirs!" How about robust protections against all propaganda? That's a requirement for a functional democracy.
Sure, but why can't my teenager smoke cigarettes?
The point of my response is: sometimes you have to be paternalistic, and the federal government doesn't need to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it because those people don't matter. They meaningfully defended the ban to the courts.
Your argument sounds like it's straight out of a CCP playbook.
> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.
No, it's just information asymmetry shaping public opinion. The US lets its dirty laundry air out. US whistleblowers, press, and historians dig up every shitty thing the US has ever done and US citizens are free to discuss it, sing about it, turn it into movies and viral memes, etc. China doesn't allow this. No one in China is going to become famous by calling for justice for those killed by Mao or exposing MSS-installed backdoors in Chinese telecoms. That kind of talk is quelled immediately. The result is that public discourse trends more anti-American than anti-China.
Senator I'm Singaporean.
People are now using Rednote, so what’s new?
Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone. Regardless of which apps I choose to rot my brain with, neither the US nor Chinese government should have any say in it, period.
If a red line is not drawn, websites will be next, then VPNs, then books. And then the Great Firewall of America will be complete.
I agree, you should be able to install whatever the fuck you want.
Google and Apple shouldn't be helping China get you to do that, by hosting and advertising it in their app store though*. Oracle shouldn't be helping China spy on Americans by hosting their services.
This isn't a law against you installing things on your phone. You're still free to install whatever you want on your phone.
*And if there is a valid first amendment claim here, it would probably be Google and Apple claiming that they have the right to advertise and convey TikTok to their users, despite it being an espionage tool for a hostile foreign government. Oddly enough they didn't assert that claim or challenge the law.
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I think a democratic nation is well within its rights to restrict its citizens access of certain systems.
There is no such thing as unlimited liberty, especially with regards to systems under control of hostile nations such as China and Russia. Would you be comfortable allowing mass release of unrestricted Hamas / ISIS, Russian propaganda content to North American teenagers? National security is a real thing and geopolitics always play a critical role in people's lives.
One could perhaps argue that we must educate our citizens better, however I think rather than being naive, it's better to implement realistic regulations (within _democratic_ means of course) to contain the threats.
> Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone.
Like every other right, your freedom ends where other peoples freedom begins. You can install whatever you'd like on your phone... unless it prevents others from exercising their rights. That's how we all get to stay free from the "might makes right" crowd.
Joining your phone to a botnet belonging to a hostile foreign power might very well prevent others from enjoying the very rights you're trying to preserve.
You have a point about avoiding the slippery slope though. I do hope that the deciders are taking that risk seriously.
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Websites and books are already being banned in the US. Ask anyone who can no longer access PornHub or who has seen books being removed from libraries.
But it's not about what you install, or even what you say. It's what you're told and shown. The US and China want control over that, for obvious reasons.
Meta has been 'curating' - censoring - content for years. TikTok is no different. X isn't even trying to pretend any more.
The cultural noise, cat videos, and 'free' debate - such as they are - are wrappers for political payloads designed to influence your beliefs, your opinions, and your behaviours, not just while consuming, but while voting.
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If TikTok turned out to be State sponsored spyware, would you reconsider?
I support your slippery slope argument. I wonder where your red line is relative to "state sponsored spyware" and "typical advertising ID tracking" or "cool new app from company influenced by an adversarial super power".
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You can still install the app on your phone. Tik Tok just can't do business in the US any more.
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How can you call Americans naive when over and over again for the past 2 decades there have been non-stop news stories about how the US Gov spends insane amounts of effort ensuring the technology Americans use is not fully secure? Maybe you should understand that the public can actually recognize Machiavellianism.
edit: before you downvote me, how many of you remember:
- Bullrun
- PRISM
- Dual EC DRBG and the Juniper backdoors, that too also were exploited by secondary adversaries
- FBI urging Apple to install a backdoor for the govt after the San Bernardino shootings
- the government only recently mandating that partnered zero-day vendors must not sell their wares to other clients who would then target them against Americans
- Vault7
- XKeyscore
- STELLARWIND
- MUSCULAR
etc.?
> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones
Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.
It's not hard to see the pattern: any Chinese tech champion that does as well as, or better than American companies will find itself in legal peril. Huawei didn't get in trouble after hacking Nortel, but they got sanctioned much later, when their 5G base equipment was well-received by the markets. TikTok had the best ML-based recommendation systems when it burst in the scene, Google and Meta still haven't quite caught up yet.
Anyone here who's not a TikTok content creator reasonably upset about losing access to the platform? Can you tell me why it will sting for you? I was really surprised that my daughters (avid teenage TikTok users) are much more relieved than mad. Both said they wasted too much time on TikTok and were hoping life will now feel better. Seems the very thing that made the platform sticky puts it in a guilty pleasure category perhaps.
(I'm asking about the lived experience outside of the political questions around who should decide what we see / access online.)
EDIT: Thank you for the replies! Interesting. I'm still wondering if most people use TikTok just for passive entertainment? I don't love Youtube, but it's been a huge learning and music discovery resource for me.
The only thing I get sent from TikTok are dances and silly memes but I don't have an account.
They'll be on RedNote within 2 weeks.
Other's have said it; but TikTok was such a nice format for media. It emphasized what the creator can provide its users; what content was legit; entertaining, informative, etc.
Whereas Instagram and FB are more about personal "branding". You post the best version of yourself and it's rewarded with engagement. Where on TikTok the emphasis is on the content; even creators I follow and have seen dozens of videos on I couldn't tell you what their account name was.
On TikTok you put up or you were shut up.
The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks. Maybe YouTube shorts.
I've heard the algorithms for YouTube shorts are much worse. Most people have said the best thing about TikTok is how well it learns the content you want to see.
I never used tiktok. You don't follow accounts? You just open and scroll and hope eventually you get something? There's a nothing being done intentionally by the user to find content?
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> The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks.
How does TikTok make money?
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I have a lot of Japanese friends and travel between Japan and here frequently. TikTok is huge in Japan and a lot of my For You Page is content trending in Japanese spheres. I don't live in Japan so being able to plug into Japanese media is a very, very convenient thing.
I'll probably continue trying to use the app if possible since I mostly connect with Japanese content, but I will say there's also a fun world of Japanese creators who straddle the English and Japanese speaking words who are about to lose an outlet to the English speaking world, and I feel really bad for that too.
The "algorithm" is also just so much better than Reels and others. I spent an afternoon of PTO training my algorithm a couple years ago and it's been great ever since. My partner and I share TikToks with each other all the time and. we shape each other's algorithm and interests. Reels fixates too much on your follows and Youtube Shorts is honestly a garbage experience. Both platforms really reward creators building "brands" around their content rather than just being authentic or silly. I treat Reels as the place for polished creators or local businesses who are trying to sell me something and TikTok as the place for content. I find that I get a lot less ragebait surfaced to me than I do on other platforms, though I admit my partner gets more than I do. We both skip those videos quickly and that has helped keep this stuff off our FYP.
An important thing to remember is TikTok was one of the first platforms that was opt-in for short-form content. Both Reels and Shorts was foisted upon users who had different expectations of the network and as such had to deal with the impedance mismatch of the existing network and users who didn't want short-form content. TikTok's entire value proposition is short-form content.
I second this. I spend a few minutes each evening watching random people out and about in Japan, Korea, China as it is fascinating to learn about foreign cultures in such a direct way. Just yesterday I learned about the palm scanners some stores in China have as a payment system.
I'm pretty upset about it honestly. TikTok's algorithm has always done a fantastic job of providing interesting clips in a way that Facebook and Instagram has never been able to provide. I will say that upon a new account, it's mostly garbage, but it quickly learned what I was interested in and what I would tend to engage with. It also does this while showing me considerably fewer ads than the meta platforms.
Seconded. My experiences were similar.
That said, the algorithm got noticeably worse after 2021. Maybe because of the TikTok shop. I’ve categorized around 3,000 clips into different collections (with 600+ being in “educational”) but that fell off over the last few years. I would be a lot more upset about the ban if they had maintained quality, but now I’m like well, whatever.
I don't create for TikTok, I have never had a TikTok account, and I don't use TikTok, outside of being exposed to videos on other sites, or occasionally clicking a link.
I had been exposed to DouYin before, but my first experience of TikTok in real life was someone at a party, holding their phone, exclaiming something along the lines of "I can't look away, it's so addictive." It was uncomfortable, and I'm aware of how fake this sounds, but it happened.
But I think this is very bad.
With Section 230 in crosshairs, EARN IT being reintroduced every year or two, and access to books and sites being fragmented across the US, things are very already bad, and have the potential to get much worse. TikTok being banned is censorship, and presents a significant delta towards more censorship.
Congress didn't just "ban TikTok", Congress banned its first social media. This is case law, this is precedent, this is a path for banning other social media apps.
I think this is bad because I think this is the start of something new and something bad for the internet.
I've found something like a very efficient sorting into communities of shared interest, and something egalitarian in being able to see people with 0 views and get reactions from them.
It's by contrast to say, Youtube and X, where The Algorithm (tm) sustains a central Nile river of dominant creators and you're either in it or you're not.
That said, I think the political questions are rightly the dominant ones in this convo and those color my lived experience of it.
Not a content creator and use it regularly. My algorithm is mostly silly stuff, music, etc. I'm not convinced there's a discernible risk to national security, and as someone with a lot of libertarian views, I think the ban is an overstep by the US government.
The "sticky"-ness is real, but many will flock to the TikTok copies in other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, anyway.
Regardless, I enjoy the platform. It's fun to reference the viral sounds/trends on the platform with other friends that use it.
technology changed our life. especially internet and smart phone impact a lot on social engagement between peoples. if people spend much time on internet or smart phones daily, if it is not tiktok, it will be something else. should we go back to non smart phone time? or even roll back to no internet time? maybe no electricity time.
technology is just like a tool. how people use it matters not the technology itself can be evil. tiktok's algorithm helps speed up information delivery to the people who likes it. eventually it helps to form a community of people online who like similar thing or have similar options. people needs to be aware of the content on any platform has "survivorship bias". seeing couple of examples is not representing the whole.
> I was really surprised that my daughters (avid teenage TikTok users) are much more relieved than mad.
A sense of relief may be a coping mechanism. I've heard laid-off colleagues inform me they felt relief in the immediate aftermath; granted, the lay-offs were pre-announced before they communicated who would be "impacted", and it was at a high-pressure environment; but the human mind sometimes reacts in unexpected ways to loss outside of one's control. Rationalization is a mechanism for ego defense.
TikTok has replaced Reddit for me (I can expand more on why I stopped using Reddit, but it's not related to TikTok) in terms of "checking what's up on the internet" or as Reddit would put it "Checking the homepage of the internet".
I trust TikTok's "algorithm" to give me quick and entertaining short-bits about what's going on, what's interesting, etc. It learns what I'm into effortlessly, and I appreciate how every now and then it would throw in a completely new (to me) genera or type of content to check out. Whenever I open it, there is a feed that's been curated to me about things I'm interested in checking out, few new things that are hit or miss (and I like that), and very few infuriating/stupid (to me) things.
Its recommendation engine is the best I have used. It's baffling how shitty YouTube's algorithm is. I discover YouTube channels I'm into form TikTok. Sometimes I'd discover new (or old) interesting videos from YouTube channels I already follow from TikTok first. For example, I follow Veritasium and 3Blue1Brown on YouTube but I certainly haven't watched their full back catalog. YouTube NEVER recommends to me anything from their back catalog. When I'm in the mood, I have to go to their channel, scroll for a while, then try to find a video I'd be interested in from the thumbnail/title. And once I do, YouTube will re-recommend to me all the videos I have already watched from them (which are already their best performing videos). Rarely would it recommend something new from them.
On TikTok, it frequently would pull clips from old Veritasium or 3Blue1Brown videos for me which I'd get hooked after watching 10 seconds, then hob on YouTube to watch the full video. It's insane how bad YouTube recommendation algorithm is. Literally the entire "recommended" section of youtube is stuff I have watched before, or stuff with exactly the same content as things I have watched before.
Here is how I find their recommendation algorithm to work:
YouTube: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? Here is that video again, and 10 other "brisket smoking videos". These are just gonna be stuck on your home page for the next couple of weeks now. You need to click on them one by one and mark "not interested" in which case you're clearly not interested in BBQ or cooking. Here are the last 10 videos you watched, and some MrBeast videos and some random YouTube drama videos.
TikTok: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? How about another BBQ video, a video about smokers and their models, some videos about cookouts and BBQ side dishes, a video about a DIY smoker, another about a DIY backyard project for hosting BBQ cookouts, a video about how smoke flavors food, a video about the history of BBQ in the south, a video about a BBQ joint in your city (or where ever my VPN is connected from), etc. And if you're not interested in any of those particular types, it learns from how long you spend watching the video and would branch more or less in that direction in the future.
Another example is search. Search for "sci fi books recommendations":
YouTube: Here are 3 videos about Sci-Fi books. Here are 4 brisket smoking videos. Here are some lost hikers videos (because you watched a video about a lost hiker 3 weeks ago). Here are 3 videos about a breaking story in the news. Here are 2 videos about sci-fi books, and another 8 about brisket.
TikTok: Here is a feed of videos about Sci-Fi books. And I'll make sure to throw in sci-fi book videos into your curated feed every now and then to see if you're interested.
This is a really good writeup. Thanks for posting it.
I'm pretty upset about it and I am not a creator.
I'm not just upset because I have a general dislike of being told I'm an idiotic, addicted, communist stooge who is easily brainwashed. I am used to folks telling me that- it started when I was writing anti-war editorials in the early oughts, so there is nothing new in that.
What I regret is that I have been following a number of quite-good political discussions on the platform, with a nicely diverse group of interlocutors.
While the discussion generally leans far left, there are many flavors of that left:
not a lot of tankies, mostly just people between "dirt bag left" and "black panther party", lots of women, BIPOC, trans folks, academics, working people, indigenous folks, queer folks of all stripes, activists, and folks who just don't like authority.
Those conversations had been very hard to come by on Yt, Ig, or Fb.
I think it's the response format for videos. I don't think it's worth bothering to speculate about other reasons, though I did note that several legitimate left news sources were shuttered in 2020 when Meta and Tw started their political purge.
Anyhow, I know that folks in the US have very little regard for political autonomy, so I am not surprised that this happens, and compared to the carceral state and the happy ecocide of the planet this is a very little thing. But I will still miss it.
> Anyone here who's not a TikTok content creator reasonably upset about losing access to the platform? Can you tell me why it will sting for you?
I like living in a country where the government does not get to decide what I'm allowed to read/watch/see. The TikTok ban chips away at that in a meaningful way.
I value this above most other concerns, including vague worries about "Chinese spying".
But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.
Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
What changed now?
Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
Because there is no "TikTok" ban and never has been.
There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law. TikTok is completely legal under the law as long as they divest it. However, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.
Exactly. And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat. Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.
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What if Congress passed a law that said "The New York Times must shut down unless all foreign owners divest"? That's effectively impossible for a publicly traded corporation. Is that just a ban, in practice?
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That would be like telling Facebook to "divest" from the US government. Which, in this case, means ignoring all government requests for data and censorship. Facebook obviously cannot do that.
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> There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law
It’s also not a ban on the content. It’s a ban on hosting and the App Store. TikTok.com can still legally resolve to the same content.
Selling TikTok means handing over the source code for the algorithm.
I can see, say, Coca-Cola refusing to sell a local subsidiary if they would be forced to hand over their recipe.
You could say that about all the American tech companies that are banned in China. They just have to comply with Chinese law and will be unbanned. For example, Google, unlike Microsoft/Apple, chose to withdraw from China rather than comply with Chinese law.
It doesn’t label ccp. It denigrates four countries as foreign adversaries. And then allows the president to remove any company located in those adversaries.
Kaspersky was banned this way. Tiktok was hard coded in the law to be banned. The law allows for sale. It doesn’t enforce sale.
it's more specifically ByteDance must divest. The effects that happen because of a divestment by ByteDance, such as TikTok losing access to "the algorithm", are just incidental. The oral arguments for the case are on YouTube and are worth a listen.
Wait is it actually controlled by the CCP? Did they present evidence for policies implemented by TikTok directed by the CCP?
Does divest in this context mean sell it to a non Chinese owner?
>owever, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.
How is it self-incrimination? That logic doesn't work.
80% of TikTok's users are outside of the U.S., why would they sell the whole thing?
And the law is written in a way that there is no value to just sell the American operation without the algorithm, they have to sell the whole thing, including the algorithm, in order for there to be a serious buyer.
It's technology highway robbery. Imagine if China told Apple "sell to us or be banned", we'd tell them to pound sand too.
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Separately, it's hard to get upset about this when China absolutely does not allow similar foreign ownership of large apps in their country. Look at all the hoops, including domestic ownership requirements, required to sell saas or similar in China.
quote from tiktok's webiste https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-myths-vs-facts/: ``` Myth: TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd., is Chinese owned.
Fact: TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Ltd. was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, but today, roughly sixty percent of the company is beneficially owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group. An additional twenty percent of the company is owned by ByteDance employees around the world, including nearly seven thousand Americans. The remaining twenty percent is owned by the company’s founder, who is a private individual and is not part of any state or government entity. ```
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So why is Apple being forced to evict a free app from their store?
> "de facto controlled by CCP"
Where is the evidence for this?
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The divestiture clause is just a red herring -- sure, that sounds perfectly fine. But you can substitute it (in the future) with anything.
In the future, the owners of a free press will be permitted to operate if and only if there is board seat made out to a CIA member. Unions will be permitted to congregate as long as they register with the Office of Trade Security
All in all, a huge blow to the potential power of individual rights (essentially goes to the Founding Fathers' point that having a list of rights set in stone is NOT the end-all, be-all, it's who decides the rights that count)
> But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.
> Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
That was explicitly brought up in oral arguments by the court, and the response by the US Gov was: "The act is written to be content neutral."
The court's opinion explains that they agree the law is "appropriately tailored" to remain content neutral. Whether it's "enemy propaganda" or not is, in their view, irrelevant to the application of the law. TikTok can exist in America, using TikTok is not banned, the owner just can't be a deemed "foreign adversary", which there is a history of enforcement (to some degree).
Like such cannot be enforced for example against foreign radio stations or print publications.
Then how do court justify that it stands in the case of an app.
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The replies here seem slightly off base. The Court acknowledges that 1s amm. free speech issues are at play. A law can regulate non-expressive activity (corporate ownership) while still burdening expressive activity, which is the case here. In such instances, the Court grants Congress more leeway compared to laws explicitly targeting speech. It checks that (1) the govt has an important interest unrelated to speech (it does), and (2) the law burdens no more speech than necessary (arguable, but not obviously wrong)
My reading of it is they didn't bother to take the motivation of the law into account (suppression of speech), and only took the law "as written" to decide.
> We need not decide whether that exclusion is content based. The question be- fore the Court is whether the Act violates the First Amend- ment as applied to petitioners. To answer that question, we look to the provisions of the Act that give rise to the effective TikTok ban that petitioners argue burdens their First Amendment rights...
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You mean Sottomayor and likely Gorsuch acknowledge the 1st amendment issues at play. The rest just assume it without deciding.
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> But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling?
Read the decision. They thought the act was content-neutral, and they thought that the espionage concerns were sufficient to reach a decision w/o having to involve the First Amendment. Gorsuch and Sotomayor weren't quite so sure as to the First Amendment issues, but in any case all nine justices found that they could avoid reaching the First Amendment issues, so they did just that.
US has banned foreign ownership of TV/Radio stations for over a 100 years.
The first amendment doesn't apply here. You can say whatever you want anywhere else on the internet. You can print what you want anywhere you want. You can distribute what you want anywhere you want. Bytedance refused to sell TikTok so it's being shut down. They could divest, but they didn't.
> first amendment doesn't apply here
It absolutely does. (It’s in the opinion.)
It just isn’t the Wild Draw 4 some people imagine it to be. You can’t commit fraud or libel or false advertising and claim First Amendment protection. Similarly, there are levels of scrutiny when the government claims national security to shut down a media platform.
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That is not the point of the First Ammendment, it is that Government cannot stop anyone from saying/printing/dissemination of content.
So question if government has power to do so.
Can they ban RT? Or even the BBC, if the government found it wise to do so?
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>But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling?
Apparently the owners of the operation are not US citizens operating in the USA and don't have any first amendment rights because that's part of the US Constitution and doesn't apply to other countries.
Love the broken English in this comment. It's quite clear you're not an American citizen. Your interpretation of the First Amendment is irrelevant.
There weren't any laws passed banning Soviet associated agencies from publishing based on chain of ownership. Nothing to do with SCOTUS.
Read the opinion, the law was upheld on intermediate scrutiny. It doesn't ban based on content, it bans based on the designation of the foreign parent as an adversary. Since it's not a content ban, or rather because it's a content-neutral ban, strict scrutiny does not apply.
Without strict scrutiny, the law merely needs to fulfill a compelling government interest.
The motivation was based on content, so the actual text of the law shouldn't matter. Such acts have been overturned before (see the Muslim ban) based on motivation.
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To oversimplify:
You can say whatever you want on a telephone call.
BUT:
The telephone network is regulated. Your cell phone must comply with FCC regulations. You personally may have a restraining order that prohibits you from calling certain people.
IE, if a phone is found to violate FCC rules, pulling it from the market has little to do with the first amendment.
If these FCC rules were designed specifically with the intent to suppress speech of certain parties, they could be found in violation of your first amendment rights if challenged. IMO the ruling does not bother to examine whether the motivation of drafting the Act was to suppress speech.
The FCC doesn't make rules based on who owns the telephone though.
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This case was not about speech. It was about a vehicle for speech having a high risk of being used for espionage and PSYOPS. If TikTok was the only vehicle available for people to post on the internet, then maybe the First Amendment argument would hold water.
This decision doesn't tell people they can't speak any more than, say, shutting down a specific TV station or newspaper which has been used for money laundering or which is broadcasting obscene content.
The case is entirely about speech, and the various levels of scrutiny that apply to laws that violate the First Amendment. You should read the decision before commenting on what was argued and decided in said decision.
Text publications don't run software that reports to adversarial countries.
Creating and distributing in the USA, sure. That is allowed. This is why the government isn't regulating Chinese content on Instagram, for example.
The issue here is that TikTok "content" (aka the algorithm that decides what content you get to see) is created abroad and controlled from abroad. The data collected by the app goes abroad. So then it becomes an import/export issue, and the government can and does regulate that.
This is why the government has already agreed to letting TikTik be run by a US entity. You can have the same content and same algorithm, just kept within the borders of the USA.
The justices said this was not about first amendment. It was about security and securing the users in the country
And what specifically is causing the security issue. Is it speech?
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Because this is not about the first amendment? This just happens to be a company that runs a social network. Congress regulates commerce with foreign nations and made the decision, as it has in many other cases, that a foreign nation can not be the beneficial owner of TikTok. TikTok then made no effort to divest, giving away the game if you want, and predictably lost this challenge.
The arguments presented to the SCOTUS and the opinion itself are totally contained within the context of the First Amendment. No one is even arguing about anything other than the First Amendment and the exceptions permitted to that amendment.
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Like you can just go read the opinion. It goes into detail on exactly this question and is easy to understand.
Print media is different. It is much more exhausting to read a newspaper because critical thinking circuits are automatically engaged.
You are more removed from the content because everything is in the physical world. And even within a single newspaper there are so many different topics that it is hard to be in a bubble.
The Internet automatically leads to bubble creation, 200 character messages and indoctrination.
It is more like loudspeakers they had in villages during Mao's tenure blaring politically correct messages. Or like the Volksempfänger (radio) during the Nazi era. Interestingly, many of the most destructive revolutions happened after the widespread use of radio.
Of course the Internet isn't nearly as bad, but most people are completely unable to even consider a view outside of their indoctrination bubble.
As far as first ammendment it does make no difference if it is print or voice or online service.
Because it has the option for selling
If the option wasnt there, it would have stricter first amendment scrutiny
They could have still banned it other ways though
and the first amendment aspect is also torn apart in other ways in the court ruling
TikTok doesn't do speech. Users on TikTok do speech. Banning TikTok doesn't prevent any users from printing / distributing / disseminating their speech.
The first amendment doesn't have any provision regarding the potential reach or enablement of distribution of the speech of the people.
Agreed. TikTok allows people to speak into the app, and to receive speech, but the act of organizing and strategically disseminating the speech is not speech -- it's societal scale hormone regulation and should be controlled for the health of the national body. It's wild that so many people are up in arms about TikTok when it is a Chinese app that is banned in China, where apps are heavily restricted.
For anyone who does consider these algorithms speech, I challenge you to share a single person at any social media company who has taken direct responsibility over a single content feed of an individual user. How can speech exist if nobody is willing to take ownership of it?
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That last sentence needs to be taught in every civics class.
They could have a week of the teacher repeating that single sentence for the entire period
"You can drive anywhere you like..." as they take away the super major highways owned by foreign adversaries and leave the ones bending the knee to USA national interests.
It seems incredibly logical from a state perspective. Sucks for users who can't choose to use a major highway without it being owned by an technofeudal oligarch. That statement holds true regardless of any platform. What were those blockchain people up to again?
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I'm not bent out of shape over the tiktok ban, but you've got me wondering. Do newspapers do speech? Or is it the editors and columnists who do speech? Could a newspaper be shut down by congress if the law didn't say anything about the editors and columnists, merely denying them the means of distribution?
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The entire notion that there's a free speech angle here is a disingenuous red herring by Tik Tok to muddy the waters.
Speech is in no way being limited or compelled - you can say the exact same thing on dozens of other platforms without consequence. You can even say it on tik tok without consequence. You can even publish videos from tik tok in the US just fine.
This law is about what types of foreign corporation can do business in the US, and what sorts of corporate governance structures are allowed.
This is false. There is absolutely content on TikTok critical of the US, Israel, western businesses, etc that is boosted by TikTok’s algorithm and effectively censored or hidden on many American-owned social networks,
First amendment rights is the only argument that I agree with keeping TikTok alive. However if there is proof that China is manipulating the algorithm to feed the worst manipulative content to Americans then I do think there’s a national security concern here.
There are no carve outs for national security in the First Amendment.
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Lets face the truth, the user get what they want, no need to manipulate.
Just look at US social media sites. It’s not like they push MINT content, do they?
Bytedance was trying to make your argument. The ruling is that the first ammendment doesn't apply and that was always a stretch for Bytedance as illustrated by the unanimous decision.
"Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech".
First ammendment protections have no National security caveats.
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Nobody is talking about music?
For the last 4 years, TikTok has been my primary music discovery engine. Probably is for a large chunk of users.
What effect will this have on the music industry?
And just yesterday I saw a news where UK had best music revenue ever, and I do not think US is published but first 1/2 of US also had record sales. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/cn858xgng2vo)
And I agree, even for me, music discovery is (was) via TikTok.
I imagine you'll get the same content on YouTube shorts or Facebook reels? I don't like using apps, so I never bothered with Tiktok, but tiktok watermarks are still on most of the short videos I view, content creators are either putting their work on multiple platforms, or someone else is ripping it off and putting it on different platforms.
I’m hoping https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ takes off
I'd like to see less pervasive chronic use of media, so would hope Canada follows suit, but I don't think banning specific services for political reasons is necessarily a good way to get there. Along with other toxic outlets like gambling, we should be able to make coherent judgements about what belongs and what doesn't based on assessments of well-being indicators that evolve over time. I know it's a fairly conservative take, but it's one I'm happy with, and have a hard time seeing how we're better off with the existence of things like TikTok that provide such an easy way to siphon off human hours in a way that few things other than TV before.
Incidentally, I feel almost controversial for seeing more ads for alcohol and gambling than anything else, and thinking "when did we agree it was a good thing to be more permissive about encouraging objectively addicting risky behavior?".
This would have been a great opportunity to regulate and prohibit massive data collection on mobile phones, by writing a law that requires the platforms (iOS,android) to architect differently and police this aggressively. Takes care of a lot of the TikTok worry and cleans up ecosystems from location tracking/selling weather apps as well.
There's no compelling argument or evidence of data collection with TikTok, to my knowledge. Theres more evidence of data collection and aggregation with American platforms than TikTok. Additionally, TikTok is operated independently within the USA and hosted on American servers. I think if there's any opportunity to regulate data collection, TikTok seems to have positioned itself defensively and seems to be distant from being used as an example. The only thing that seems to matter with this ban is that TikTok is mostly owned by a Chinese company.
I'd love to be corrected, but I haven't been provided any evidence or information that suggests this ban was justified at all.
I met someone who did some high-level work for ByteDance. I asked them what they thought of the worries that TikTok was a CCP spying instrument.
They said ByteDance is as disorganized as any other big tech company, and it would be approximately impossible for them to discretely pull that off.
It's easy to see "CCP" and think bogeyman, but it is interesting to think about how achievable it would be to pull off something shady at Google or Facebook, and apply that same thought process to ByteDance.
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None of the litigants proposed that, and neither did the act in question. The court doesn't usually address matters outside the controversy in question, so it's no surprise that they didn't here.
The United States, through its influence over Facebook, instagram, and twitter, facilitated the Arab Spring. Of course we don’t want an adversary to have the same influence over our domestic political conversation.
TikTok is perhaps the most impressively addictive social media app ever created. The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.
There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China, then Britain introduced stronger, more disruptive versions, forcing a stronger social reaction.
Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that social media is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
From a geopolitical perspective, this issue about 3 items:
1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans.
2) Data- TikTok collects massive amounts of data on 100s of millions of Americans. Opens many avenues for spying, extortion of influence, etc.
3) Reciprocity- Foreign tech companies are essentially banned from operating in China. Much like with other industries, China is not playing fair, they’re playing to win.
Insofar as TikTok has offered a “superior” product, this might be a story of social media and its double edge. But this far more a story of geopolitics.
> 1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans.
There is no credible argument that the CCP doesn't directly control the alg as it's actively being used for just that in tawain/etc.
Does the US really want a (hostile?) foreign govt to have clear direct access to influence 170m americans, an entire generation - completely unfettered? Incredible national security implications. Bot farms can influence X/Meta/etc, but they can be at least be fought. TikTok itself is the influence engine as currently constructed.
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1) to be honest, when I see how russia, Iran and other states influence all other networks (especially when it comes to voting), not sure how tiktok is worse than all of them - just think of Facebook & Cambridge Analytica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
2) yes, that is an issue.
3) fair point.
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> 1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans
More to the point: it removes the ability of the existing American establishment to monopolise the viewpoints presented to Americans.
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0) Protectionism- TikTok is eating Meta's lunch. Meta can't make a social app as good as TikTok in the same way GM can't make a car as good a value as BYD.
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> TikTok collects massive amounts of data on 100s of millions of Americans. Opens many avenues for spying, extortion of influence, etc.
you can buy all of that from data brokers
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Bravo, perfect summary of the issue at hand.
It'll be revealing to see which political actors come out in favor of keeping tiktok around.
It has blown my mind how "free Palestine" has become a meme. That war started with a bunch of terrorists kidnapping/raping/murdering college-age kids at a music festival, and college kids around the world started marching _in support of_ the perpetrators.
At some point, I realized that I avoid social media apps, and the people in those marches certainly don't.
I know that there's more to the Israel:Palestine situation than the attack on the music festival, but the fundamental contradiction that the side that brutalized innocent young people seems to have the popular support of young people is hard to ignore. I wonder to what degree it's algorithmically driven.
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1. Is there any real evidence of the CCP using TikTok for anything?
3. Then what is Microsoft doing in China? What is Apple doing in China? Etc. No tech company is banned from China, the only companies that choose not to operate in China are those that do not agree to follow Chinese laws.
Nail in the head with reciprocity. I think the US honored its end of the bargain over the past four plus decades since China started manufacturing goods for US companies. China clearly benefited since they are now the second largest economy. Along the way China grew ambitious which is fine but they made an idiotic policy error in timing. They should’ve waited a couple more decades to show teeth.
> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.
Source? I could only find this.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...
> That same year, Douyin imposed a 40-minute daily limit for users under 14. Last year, Chinese regulators introduced a rule that would limit children under age 18 to two hours of smartphone screen time each day.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-china/story?id=108111...
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https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-china/story?id=108111...
Anecdotally, I have heard from people who lived in China at the time that there was a significant shift in content a few years back.
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The entire app is banned. They use a different one called Douyin.
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https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe...
"It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,”
His comment is obvious propaganda
[flagged]
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It’s not about the algorithm but about the owner of the platform.
The same algorithm in US possession isn’t a problem.
Indeed, it's all protectionism. They want the money to go to American companies instead. Why do you think the EU, which is generally far more aggressive about these things, has not yet banned TikTok? It's also the same reason Huawei are thriving elsewhere but banned in the US. It's all just trying to protect their big companies with deep pockets.
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Well said. Only if we start looking at both of these issues separately, owner and algorith and deal with each one appropriately.
It wouldn't be the same algorithm, it would suppress pro-Palestine content more aggressively as Meta does. The US's problem is with the algorithm
The government doesn't care about addictive anything, this is about control and access. If they cared about life or citizens in general they would fix healthcare and maybe introduce any kind of gun control. This is the same government that was slanging cocaine in the 1980's...
Multiple reps publicly said TikTok needed to be banned because they couldn't control the narrative around Gaza as easily. TikTok is the only platform I regularly see content about Gaza fed from the algorithm.
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> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.
Source?
>> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.
> Source?
The same source as everything Covid related: Trust me, bro.
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TikTok itself is banned in mainland china. Do you need much more of a source?
Yes, you could say Douyin is available in place of TikTok, but have you asked yourself why they have 2 separate apps? One for mainland China, and another for everyone else?
Another source (see the section "How is Douyin different from TikTok?"): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/business/china-tiktok-dou...
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You could substitute anything you don't like (gambling, alcohol, gacha games, convenience foods, televised sports, reality TV) for "social media" in the above and it makes as much sense.
"anything you don't like (gambling, alcohol, gacha games, convenience foods, televised sports, reality TV)"
Respectively, heavily regulated, heavily regulated, poorly regulated but really has to toe the line to not fall into the first bucket, fairly regulated (with shifting attitudes about what they should be, but definitely not unregulated), probably only a problem because this is "gambling" again lately and has been regulated in the past and I suspect may well be more heavily regulated in the near future, and people probably would not generally agree this belongs in the list.
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The GP's statement doesn't work with reality TV or televised sports. Both of those are produced with a lot of human effort, and the cycle time for new content is way too large to form addictions.
Gambling, alcohol, and gacha games are clearly addictive and frequently are not set up to be in the best interests of the users.
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> TikTok is perhaps the most impressively addictive gambling app ever created.
> Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that gambling is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
Not really. TikTok isn't a gambling app.
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I love to drink. Absolutely adore it. Putting on a great recors, open 2 bottles of wine and call 10 different people during the span of 4 hours. I wouldn't trade it for social media any day of the week. I am drinking right now actually
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Yes? The person you replied to was pretty explicit in drawing a comparison to vices like gambling and alcohol, which are indeed usually regulated. Gacha games are also being recognized as thinly veiled gambling and regulated as such.
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Note that the Supreme Court decided the argument based on national security grounds, not content manipulation grounds.
Justice Gorsuch in his concurrence specifically commended the court for doing so, believing that a content manipulation argument could run afoul of first amendment rights.
He said that "One man's covert content manipulation is another's editorial discretion".
Be that as it may, I think a large percentage of the opposition don't buy this natsec reasoning at all. You could use that excuse for anything, like mass surveillance via the Patriot Act...
EFF's stance is that SCOTUS's decision based on national security ignores the First Amendment scrutiny that is required.
> The United States’ foreign foes easily can steal, scrape, or buy Americans’ data by countless other means. The ban or forced sale of one social media app will do virtually nothing to protect Americans' data privacy – only comprehensive consumer privacy legislation can achieve that goal. Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.
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China doesn't need Tiktok for opium. They have the real thing as well.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-fentanyl-pipeline-and...
The fentanyl pipeline is what came to my mind as well; another thing exported from China to the US to disastrous effect on the well-being of many Americans.
To be fair, trying to consider the other way around, I wonder what Chinese people could point to as disastrous stuff (in terms of the well-being of their population) coming from the US.
Maybe it was just a genuine outlet for interconnected entertainment compared to other platforms. American's have always sought similar entertainment since the dawn of the 'couch potato.' Now we can go back to consuming curated narratives/influence on our good ole traditional grams and tubes.
"Too addictive" is such a nonsensical way of saying "accurate".
Nicotine being legal but TikTok is not tells you everything you need to know about government wanting to control the "addictiveness" of social media.
What needs to happen is that all of these platforms need to be straight up banned. TikTok is getting picked on because of its ties to China, but why is it better for Zuckerberg or Musk to have the capabilities that are so frightening in the hands of the CCP?
The US social media billionaire class is ostensibly accountable to the law, but they're also perfectly capable of using their influence over these platforms to write the law.
One plausible theory for why the politicians talk about fears of spying instead of the real fears of algorithmic manipulation is because they don't want to draw too much attention to how capable these media platforms are of manipulating voters, because they rely on those capabilities to get into and stay in power.
Because if Zuck or Musk does something bad with said power, we can do something about it.
We can't really jail the CCP. Additionally, Zuck and Musk don't have armies to back up their propaganda. We shouldn't let foreign powers own the means of broadcast...
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Under what reasoning should these be banned?
I, personally, have views that would lean towards being labeled by HN users as supporting a “nanny state” (at least far departure from younger libertarian phase), but even I struggle with a “why” on banning these platforms in general.
I am surprised someone has not attempted to reverse engineer it or make something very similar.
The symmetry for opium is fentanyl which China senda to the US by the ton.
> beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
I think the government could fix it with a screen time limit. 30 mins for under 18's, and 1 hour for everyone else, per day.
Maybe allow you to carry over some.
After that, it's emergency calls only.
It's still weird to me to see tech website comments calling for extreme government restrictions on technology use. Limiting adults to 1 hour of screen time per day across social apps? That's a call for an insane level of government intrusion into our lives that is virtually unheard of outside of extremely controlling governments.
I'm with you except for the last sentence.
What's happening to TikTok is not a good proxy for the trajectory of social media companies in the US, esp Meta. They've got plenty of tailwind.
Why are people upvoting this.
Internet loves those public school history fact references.
> Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that social media is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
Come on. We all know that TikTok was banned because the US regime couldn't control it.
If they really wanted to ban vice, they would have banned Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and their kin a long ago.
> TikTok was banned because the US regime couldn't control it
The law is fine with TikTok being owned by a Nigerian.
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Does anyone have any link to some docs explaining how it works?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-alg...
Like Facebook, the "algorithm" is nothing special. TikTok made some smart design decisions that collect more interaction data that legacy social sites like Instagram and YouTube. They use that data to effectively recommend content.
That's a great analogy.
I disagree that social media is a vice. There's nothing inherently wrong with better communication. Although it's hard for me to see the value (or appeal) in TikTok.
What aspect of modern social media contributes to better communication? We're not taking about WhatsApp here, we're talking about algorithmic infinite scroll feeds.
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nothing inherently wrong with fentanyl either. not a strong argument.
> I think everyone is kind of aware that social media is a vice
I don't think this is true. Everyone that is reading this forum might even be too strong. The majority of people happily eating the pablum up as the users of TikTok can't even tell the blatantly false content from just the silly dancing videos.
Americans have faced so little strife domestically that they're unironically comparing social media addiction to the Opium Wars
I think that’s besides the point given the entity that is banning it. It’s because it’s Chinese. An equally addictive Western-made app would not have been banned.
And generally speaking as a culture we are too liberal to ban things for being too addictive. Again, showing that it is not relevant in this case since it will not inspire bans of other addictive (pseudo) substances on those grounds.
That might be true but it's irrelevant. Why? Because that's not the issue the government tackled. Arguing "national security" with (quite literally) secret evidence is laughable. Data protection too is a smokescreen or the government would've passed a comprehensive Federal data protection act, which they'd never do.
It's hard to see how the government would tackle algorithmic addiction within running afoul of First Amendment issues. Such an effort should also apply to Meta and Google too if it were attempted.
IMHO reciprocal market access was the most defensible position but wasn't the argument the government made.
That being said, the government did make a strictly commerce-based argument to avoid free speech issues. As came up in oral arguments (and maybe the opinion?) this is functionally no different to the restrictions on foreign ownership of US media outlets.
I wish it were a reckoning for social media, but reading here shows there's plenty of people here who are passionate about "China bad" and see this only through that one lens. And they seem to think it is strictly about TikTok.
As an European citizen I'm very uneasy with US-based services having my data and I nuked everything from ages bar LinkedIn and HN.
The hard part is de-googling.
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> this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
I think politicians have scrutinized american social media and they're 100% fine with the misery they induce so long as they are personally enriched by them.
> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China
TikTok isn't anywhere near as destructive as opium was. Hell, purely in terms of "mis/disinformation" surely facebook and twitter are many times worse than TikTok.
Surely the appropriate modern parallel is fentanyl.
I think TikTok and social media in general is much more insidious than opium, because it is hard to know if you are using an addictive product, or what product you’re even being sold (like if you are being sold a subtly manipulated information diet). For example, it just came out that TikTok staff (in the US) were forced to take oaths of loyalty to not disrupt the “national honor” of China or undermine “ethnic unity” in China and so on. TikTok executives are required to sign an agreement with ByteDance subsidiary Douyin (the China version of TikTok) that polices speech and demands compliance with China’s socialist system. That’s deeply disturbing but also undetectable. It came out now because of a lawsuit.
See this for more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855
EDIT: the link above doesn’t work for others for reason, so here is the source story: https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
> this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
Could not be more wrong. "Society" is not deciding anything here. The ban is entirely because of idelogical and geopolical reasons. They have already allowed the good big tech companies to get people hooked as much as they want. If you think you are going to see regulation for public good you will probably be disappointed.
The US gov will do nothing to regulate US owned social networks because they're doing for free the work that the government wants to do itself: collect as much data as possible from each individual. The separation between Meta's collected data and government is just one judicial request away. That's why the US gov hates other countries having this power.
The Tik Tok divestment law was passed by overwhelmingly by both houses of the duly elected Congress. At the time, a majority of Americans polled supported the law, while a minority opposed it: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/more-support-than-oppose-tik....
In a democracy, this is how "society decides" what's in the "public good." This is not a case where legislators are going behind the public's back, hiding something they know they public would oppose. Proponents of the law have been clear in public about what the law would do and what the motivations for the law are. There is nothing closer to "society decides" than Congress overwhelmingly passing a law after making a public case for what the law would do.
Yes, they're doing it for "ideological and geopolitical reasons"--but those things are important to society! Americans are perfectly within their rights to enact legislation, through their duly elected representatives, simply on the basis of "fuck China."
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It can still be both- in the sense that once a precedent is set using the these additional ideological and geopolitical motivations as momentum, maybe there will be an appetite for further algorithm regulations.
As a tech person who already understood the system, it's refreshing that I now often see the comment "I need to change my algorithm"- meaning, I can shape the parameters of what X/Twitter / Instagram/ YouTube / TikTok shows me in my feed.
I think there's growing meta-awareness (that I see as comments within these platforms) that there is "healthy" content and that the apps themselves manipulate their user's behavior patterns.
Hopefully there's momentum building that people perceive this as a public health issue.
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Yeah, the ban is interesting because it’s happened before (company being forced to sell or leave), but never to a product used at this scale. There are allegedly 120M daily active users in the US alone. That’s more than a third of Americans using it every day.
While many have a love hate relationship with it, there are many who love it. I know people who aren’t too sad, because it’ll break their addiction, and others who are making really decent money as content creators on it. So generally, you’re exactly right. “Society” is not lashing back at TikTok. Maybe some are lashing back at American social media companies (eg some folks leaving Twitter and meta products).
But if we wanted to actually protect our citizens, we’d enact strong data privacy laws, where companies don’t own your data — you do. And can’t spy on you or use that data without your permission. This would solve part of the problem with TikTok.
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That's because "being hooked" is not why it is being banned. It's banned because people are hooked on it and an adversarial foreign power has the ability to use it for their own gain.
Which is why a viable solution for TikTok was selling it to a US company. If it was just about the population "being hooked", a sale would not be an acceptable outcome.
> They have already allowed the good big tech companies to get people hooked as much as they want
To sell you shoes. Not for whatever nightmarish future application of this technology and relationship between private sector and the state represents: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/15/documents...
More specifically the ban is because of the platform being used to support Palestine. There are public recordings of congressmen openly and plainly saying so.
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By “this” I think they meant this moment in time rather than the ban being a result of societal scrutiny.
agree, it was just a shakedown and money grab.
some US oligarchs wanted to buy tiktok at deep discount while it was private, and make money off of making it public company
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I remember trying out TikTok and realizing in horror that it was a slot machine for video content.
Have you seen YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. Lol
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> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.
Apparently?
What's the obvious about it?
I don't understand the argument here, Tik Tok would maximize their monetization in US but not in other markets?
I don't buy it.
Think of it like consumer protection laws - Ford has higher safety requirements for the vehicles they sell domestically than they do for those sold in Mexico. Thus, it could be argued that they are not maximizing their monetization of the US market by cutting out expensive safety features that consumers don't pay extra for.
China is wise to have such laws to protect their citizens.
I am a farmer, I grow tomatoes. The ones I sell to large markets, I use pesticides, herbicides, petrochemical fertilizers, etc etc. The ones I grow for my own consumption and for sale at the local market -- those get organic compost and no chemical treatments.
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Where is TikTok not maximizing monetization? If you mean the GP's comment on China's ban on the algorithm originally used then you are missing a critical aspect of that: It wasn't TikTok's choice to stop or decrease monetization there.
Also, even if they were differently monetizing by region, you are also missing the non-monetary reasons this might happen: Manipulation & propaganda. Even aside from any formal policy by the Chinese govermnent self-censorship by businesses and individuals for anything the Party might not like is very common. Also common is the government dictating the actions a Chinese company may take abroad for these same efforts in influencing foreign opinions.
Corporations in China all operate at the behest of "the people" (aka the party). If the government thinks a product is damaging or harmful to society, it can be taken off the market without any legal mechanisms necessary.
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> algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China
Sounds like they tried.
Frankly, I’m not sure what these comments even mean. Douyin (Chinese TikTok) has the same level of brainrot content, except with some restrictions (political and societal level stuff). Chinese kids are as much addicted to it as Western kids to TikTok/IG, from what I’ve seen.
> TikTok is perhaps the most impressively addictive social media app ever created.
What nonsense.
> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.
"Apparently"? Tiktok was forced to separate itself into a chinese version and the non-chinese version by the US because we didn't want "da ccp" controlling tiktok.
> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China, then Britain introduced stronger, more disruptive versions, forcing a stronger social reaction.
There is no historic symmetry. Unless china invades the US and forces americans to use tiktok. Like britain invaded china ( opium wars ) and forced opium on china's population.
What's with all the same propaganda in every tiktok/china related thread? The same talking points on every single thread for the past few years.
"Tiktok was forced to separate itself into a chinese version and the non-chinese version by the US because we didn't want "da ccp" controlling tiktok."
You're talking about Propaganda but you are spreading straight up fake news.
ByteDance initially released Douyin in China in September 2016. ByteDance introduced TikTok for users outside of China in 2017.
There was no "split", let alone one "forced by the US".
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> Tiktok was forced to separate itself into a chinese version and the non-chinese version by the US because we didn't want "da ccp" controlling tiktok
No. TikTok was forced to put its data on American servers [1].
Douyin was launched in 2016 as musical.ly, and is unrelated to U.S. pressure. (EDIT: Douyin was launched in 2016, TikTok in 2017. Musical.ly was acquired in 2017 and merged into/basically became TikTok. TikTok has never been in China.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-moves-us-user-data...
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What viewpoint is your use of “da ccp” supposed to disparage?
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> > TikTok is perhaps the most impressively addictive social media app ever created.
> What nonsense.
Obviously experiences will vary, but I think this is actually pretty well-established.
Not many studies, but here's one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9486470/
how did Britain force the Chinese population to consume Opium?
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TikTok is also banned in China. For the Chinese market, Douyin is there from the same company ByteDance. Americans need to understand this decision is not an emotional one but for the nation, just like the opposite party does for its nation.
> this decision is not an emotional one but for the nation, just like the opposite party does for its nation
I'd argue that it is an emotional decision for both, and it does seem ironic that the US would be following China in restricting a platform that people see as a major tool for free speech. Whether you agree with that or not the optics are terrible, and the users are very aware of it. If this is really a big concern then they would also ban facebook/instagram/snapchat, but they aren't being included in this, despite having a worse track record.
Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat are not functionally owned & operated by an unfriendly foreign government that would have incentive to destabilize the USA via civil unrest by influencing our algorithms.
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Direct from the horse's mouth: https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-mcca...
"enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”
Surprised not more people are tying this to the Uber-Didi situation. IIRC it was a big complicated mess, but e.g. (this)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_Law_of_the_Peopl...] seems to imply that e.g. Uber would have to use Chinese domestic servers subject to auditing, etc. Upshot is eventually Uber stopped dumping billions to try to get a foothold, and eventually divested their Chinese operations.
(Also later Didi got kinda screwed imo right after their IPO in IMO a retaliatory move by the Chinese gov). So, is this TikTok ban one more shot in a new form of economic warfare? Is this type of war even new? Again, IMO, I think in instituting this law, this kind of stuff was on at least some of congress' minds.
Didi/Uber was more complicated than just data stuff.
At a high level, chinese tech culture is an insane no holds barred cage match with very little legal structure to protect IP or employees or anything and most companies who enter fail at participating in this.
Didi did a lot of corporate espionage and sabotage at uber china. They'd have "double agents" working for uber they'd pay to f stuff up. This type of thing is not practices in america because it is extremely illegal, but it was fine in China at not something that uber could do "back" to didi. There were people on the uber china fraud team paid by didi to tip off fraud networks on how to fraud. In the last year in china, they moved a ton of important work back to US offices because the china office was "compromised".
It is a lot more complicated, and I agree with the vibe of your comment based on some readings, but couldn't find much regarding sources about the sabotage. I found [this article](https://www.digitalaoban.com/why-uber-failed-in-china/), and I also found another by searching "IMEI FRAUD UBER DIDI SIM CARD", (but that other article was literally copy pasted from the first) (couldn't find sources from the first) (I have some hurtful things to say about tech journalism but this website is too polite for that) Again, don't really doubt, but more sort of wondering where you sorts get primary information from.
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This will ultimately benefit the current Big Tech incumbents. Tiktok was gaining ground rapidly on advertising money and I wouldn't be surprised if there was lobbying that stifled the competition.
Instead of banning TikTok, we should be trying to compete with them and make a better product that wins customers over. It's sad to see the US becoming more authoritarian and follow China's example.
In a more functional democracy we would see that mass data collection of any sort, by any company (foreign or domestic), is a national security risk.
Have witnessed first-hand the threats by foreign state actors penetrating US-based cloud infrastructure. And it’s not like any of our domestic corporations are practicing the type of security hygiene necessary to prevent those intrusions.
So idk, the whole thing feels like a farce that will mainly benefit Zuck and co while doing very little to ultimately protect our interests.
We would be much better off actually addressing data privacy and passing legislation that regulates every company in a consistent manner.
> In a more functional democracy we would see that mass data collection of any sort, by any company (foreign or domestic), is a national security risk.
You obviously don't mean "democracy," but some other word. We don't see mass data collection as a problem because most Americans don't care about privacy. The only reason this Tik Tok thing is even registering is because of the treat of China, which Americans do care about.
There's nothing preventing China from buying mass data from Facebook or one of the many data brokers. This is about censorship and the ability to control public narratives.
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It's questionable what a more functional democracy would actually do, since there hasn't really been one in history. There's been other forms of democracy, but they've all had their flaws, and none of them so far have acted in the interests of all the people in that country.
I am not an "America bad" type of fellow, but US democracy is clearly reaching a local minimum. I suspect "never more functional" is an idea with which even your representative would disagree. There are multiple major issues that Congress should have addressed decades ago and instead they've only become more intractable. The country is more than its government, but the core democratic component, Congress, simply gets very little done. I do not think it can go much longer before some series of events forces broad compromises and realignment.
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I mean, however flawed the EU may be, I think they are earnestly trying to protect the average person from the current paradigm of abusive data collection. Perfect can’t be the enemy of good.
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Claiming that “mass data collection” by our own government is inherently a natural security risk is not an assertion based on rational evidence.
It's absolutely a risk because these databases are unregulated honey pots. They're a total liability
Regardless of one’s view on the outcome, this case is a reminder that textualism as a legal philosophy stands on shaky ground. This case is decided not on some strict analysis of the words written by a legislator, but on the court’s subjective view that there is a compelling national interest (which in turn seems based on speculation about the future, rather than a factual analysis of events).
Textualism might give the court some useful definitions, but it is after all still called, quite literally, an opinion.
You misapprehend what textualism is. It does not say that every legal case can be decided by interpreting written law. It is merely a philosophy of how to interpret written law when its meaning is what's at issue. What American lawyers call "textualism" is how most continental european courts interpret written laws. It would hardly merit a label, if it wasn't for a long history in the 20th century of jurists departing from written law in making decisions. In this case, there is no dispute about what the written law means. It's about applying a pre-existing legal concept, the freedom of speech, to particular facts.
Another example that highlights the distinction: Justice Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court's preeminent textualists, is also one of the biggest proponents of criminal rights. Those cases similarly involve defining the contours of pre-existing legal concepts, such as "unreasonable search or seizure." Nobody denies that such questions are subjective--in referring to what's "unreasonable," the text itself calls for a subjective analysis.
For anyone curious to dig into this more, the terms to read up on are "common law" [0] vs "civil law" [1].
Common law is basically just the US, UK, AU, and NZ. Outside the anglosphere it's mostly civil law.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
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> Another example that highlights the distinction...
No, that just highlights the hypocritical picking-and-choosing they do to justify it. Gorsuch is a textualist when he wants to be, just like the others.
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> Textualism is a formalist theory in which the interpretation of the law is based exclusively on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as intention of the law when passed, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law.
Textualism in modern context is a tool used by conservative justices used to uphold laws that serve business interests and conservative causes.
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This was a unanimous decision. The only points where Sotomayor and Gorusch disagreed with the majority decision was whether TikTok's operation qualified under strict scrutiny for first amendment considerations, but both agreed that even under strict scrutiny, the law would have survived the challenge.
Much of the decision is indeed based around an analysis of the words written by the legislature.
It's not really speculation, though. Certain aspects of the intelligence relationships between the US and China are highly asymmetrical already.
For example, Chinese nationals can enter our country and gather information on our infrastructure, corporations, and people with relative ease because English is prevalent, and foreign nationals have, with the exception of certain military/research areas, the same access that US citizens have. On the other hand, foreign nationals in China are closely monitored and have very few rights, assuming they know Chinese, are physically in China (Great Firewall), and know how to get around in the first place.
China has unfettered access to our media ecosystem, research, patents, etc., and they do their best to create an uncompetitive/hostile environment for any other country to attempt the same on their territory. Some of this has to do with trade—to be fair, these are intertwined—but the situation regarding intelligence is bleak.
Yeah it’s funny MAGA still wants to encourage more H1b from China because you know apparently Americans are smart enough and are lazy. (Thanks for your vote though we will get rid of trans migrants!)
What exactly is your issue with this, as a textualist?
>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; . . .
This is foreign commerce. It falls under the explicit jurisdiction of Congress.
Well gosh, that sentence makes it seems like Congress could do anything!
However, this case is about something else. The opinion states that there is a first amendment interest, but that interest is secondary to a compelling national security interest that, in the court’s view, is valid. That may or may not be correct - but it is a subjective interpretation.
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Whether Congress has jurisdiction here is not at issue. The court is deciding a different question, which is whether the ban would violate the first amendment. We look at their ruling:
>We granted certiorari to decide whether the Act, as applied to petitioners, violates the First Amendment.
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This is about as much foreign commerce as it is me buying a Xiaomi phone.
I know there's court precedent, but corporations aren't people. It's yet another Chinese platform that Americans use to communicate with other western companies.
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I'm no fan of textualism but I don't think it had much to do with this case.
SCOTUS didn't have much to work with aside from level of scrutiny. They defer to Congress regarding national security.
That’s actually my point. I don’t think strict textualism really has anything to do with any case. As soon as you say it’s the rule of law that drives every case, you find yourself somehow interpreting an awful lot.
> a compelling national interest (which in turn seems based on speculation about the future, rather than a factual analysis of events).
I keep seeing this claimed, but these aren't hypothetical risks. China has managerial control over ByteDance. China has laws that require prominent companies to cooperate in their national security operations, and they've recently strengthened them even more. China has already exercised those powers to target political dissidents. This is the normal state of affairs in Chinese business; this is how things work there. It isn't like the west where companies have power to push back, or enjoy managerial independence.
Let's not forget that the US government has forced US companies to secretly hand over user data for "national security" purposes. Anyone who denies that China does similar things either doesn't know how the world works or is consciously denying reality.
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> Textualism might give the court some useful definitions, but it is after all still called, quite literally, an opinion.
I don't think you understand SCOTUS' decision here. They are not banning TikTok. Congress is doing so (actually forcing a sale of TikTok or be banned). They are simply ruling whether Congress acted unconstitutionally by doing so. In other words, if they overrule Congress, they would have to show how Congress' ruling contravenes the Constitution, when the Constitution grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce and decide matters of national security.
Congress isn't banning TikTok either. The law says US businesses can't work with TikTok. TokTok is choosing to shut down to try and force the issue politically. TikTok can choose stay running, the app will still be on your phone, no IP addresses are being blocked. The laws impact comes from choking off revenue and marketing (access to app stores).
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I'd use the term 'originalism' rather 'textualism', but you have a point. For 1st amendment cases, the court hasn't (yet) tried to use their new fangled originalist methodologies. In fact justice Gorsuch wrote separately in the Tiktok case to dig on the levels of scrutiny.
I think it's understandable, in a Chesterton's Fence sort of way - they better make sure that if they're going to start using a new methodology, it works better than what they use now, (these weird judge-created levels of scrutiny), but there's so much 1A precedent that is hard to be confident.
For 2nd amendment, they have used 'originalism' already. There isn't nearly as much precedent in that area, and so they were able to start more or less from scratch.
Rather I think this a good example of how people go through the steps of delegimitizing institutions if it dosen't agree with their opinion. If the Supreme Court's opinion is "shaky" then I guess the Pro-TikTokers would teetering on pole in the middle on the ocean.
But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA. Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publication s were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
What changed now?
Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
People have rights to speak within reason. Governments don't. The Chinese government shaping content is not protected. The law notably does not ban individual content.
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The justices seem to have argued that eliminating a platform for speech does not inhibit your ability to voice that speech on another platform, so is not a violation of the first amendment. I think this is an important outcome and really goes against what many so called "free speech absolutists" would argue.
they found some of the arguments compelling and acknowledged that the law may burden free speech. But they also found that the law is not about speech, it's about corporate ownership. In these cases the court will often (not always) defer to congress / the state.
Individuals can bring Pravda into the USA that is protected speech. But Congress could ban Pravda from doing business in the US same as it can ban or sanction any other foreign business.
Because the law bans the operation of software by a foreign adversary. It does not ban speech.
Legal precedent holds that source code (the expressive part of software) is speech, but that executing software (the functional part) is not speech. Even when the operation conveys speech, the ban is on the functional operation of the software, so the First Amendment doesn't apply.
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What Sotomayor said is irrelevant; she's one of nine Justices. What is in the opinion is what is controlling.
> Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
> Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
It's not an erosion because it was already true and has been true for centuries.
"Shaky" compared to what?
Isn't the inquiry made MORE subjective by incorporating extratextual considerations?
Or do you just mean that textualism is oversold, and delivers less than it advertises?
It's opinion regardless of the specific legal philosophy. Each philosophy makes decisions about what kinds of information, sources, context, etc are considered to form the "correct" interpretation. Those decisions are opinions.
Since I'm a reasonably well-known textualist, I'll bite:
First, the court was not asked to reconsider the meaning of the First Amendment. In the US, we generally hew to the rule of "party presentation," which generally provides that courts will consider the parties' arguments, not make up new ones on their own.
TikTok's claim was that application of the statute in question to it violated the First Amendment's clause that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." The Supreme Court has considered the interpretation and application of that clause in...well, a whole lot of cases. TikTok asked the court to apply the logic of certain of those precedents to rule in its favor and enjoin the statute. It did not, however, ask the court to reconsider those precedents or interpret the First Amendment anew.
Since the court was not asked to do so, it's no surprise that it didn't.
Second, as noted, the court has literally decades' worth of cases fleshing out the meaning of this clause and applying it in particular circumstances. Every textualist, so far as I'm aware, generally supports following the court's existing precedents interpreting the Constitution unless and until they are overruled.
Third, even if one is of the view that the Court ought to consider the text anew in every case, without deferring to its prior rulings interpreting the text, this would have been a particularly inappropriate case for it to do so. A party seeking an injunction, as TikTok was, has to show a strong likelihood of success on the merits. That generally entails showing that you win under existing precedent. A court's expedited consideration of a request for preliminary relief is not an appropriate time to broach a new theory of what the law requires. The court doesn't have the time to give it the consideration required, and asking the court to abrogate its precedents is inconsistent with the standard for a preliminary injunction, which contemplates only a preview of the ultimate legal question, not a full-blown resolution of it.
Fourth, what exactly was the court supposed to do with the text in question, which is "abridging the freedom of speech"? The question here is whether the statute here, as applied to TikTok, violates that text. Well, it depends on what "the freedom of speech" means and perhaps what "abridging" means. It's only natural that a court would look to precedent in answering the question. Precedent develops over time, fleshing out (or "liquidating," to use Madison's term) the meaning and application of ambiguous or general language. Absent some compelling argument that precedent got the meaning wrong, that sort of case-by-case development of the law is how our courts have always functioned--and may be, according to some scholars, itself a requirement of originalism.
What are you talking about? The decision was unanimous.
Well, India has already banned Tik-Tok, now the US is. It looks like some European countries are giving it the side eye. This may be the beginning of the end for it.
No matter what you think of this ban, the court is obviously not the right place to solve it. It is completely unsurprising that this is a unanimous decision because foreign trade is one of the few powers expressly given to the federal government in the constitution:
>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;[0]
(The actual law may not have relied exclusively on the Commerce Clause, you would have to read it to find out. But from a high level there is nothing stopping congress from regulating any instance foreign trade.)
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
Congress passed a law banning it. Where else would you solve it?
In congress, with another law.
I'm sure the other countries are watching this and considering what the US is doing with their data in its apps.
They dont need to wonder. The US is constantly operating media propaganda campaigns around the globe interfering with elections and promoting coups.
Democratic outcomes that don't agree with our politics are officially deemed illegitimate, even if the elections are certified as fair.
It would be crazy to believe the US is somehow shy about running psyops when we openly arm rebels and bomb countries.
And they’re right to. In the news today: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/european-union-o...
Sure. It's a reasonable concern regardless of what country is doing it or having it done to them.
Other countries that were concerned about this started blocking websites of their adversaries decades ago.
TikTok is banned in China. We're just joining in
Sadly they won't, that's just one more reason for e.g. the EU to censor more social media on the grounds that one of their """allies""" does it too.
EU is among the most restrictive legislations when it comes to data leaving European ground already.
Oh look: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/european-union-o...
Right?
I'm a Canadian. Almost every major Canadian newspaper is owned by American ideologically-conservative hedge funds, the only variance is how activist they are in their ownership. Our social media (like everyone's) is owned by Americans, men who are now kowtowing to Trump.
And meanwhile, Trump is now incessantly talking about annexing our country. The Premier of Alberta is receptive to the idea.
So, how should a Canadian federal government responsibly react to that?
I'm surprised TikTok isn't trying to push a web version, hosted outside the USA as an alternative to shutting down. While it would be difficult for a new social media service to gain traction that way, TikTok has a huge established audience.
Isn't https://www.tiktok.com exactly this?
Sort of. In a mobile browser, it almost immediately tries to get me to download the app, which is the opposite of pushing the web version in a marketing sense. Pushing would be telling app users that the app will become unavailable soon and they should use TikTok on the web.
> I'm surprised TikTok isn't trying to push a web version,
They have a web version that's surprisingly capable. Not sure if tiktok.com will be blocked on Sunday.
I wonder about that: wouldn't the law force internet providers to blanket block any and all web versions of TikTok?
I don't think so. It probably stops them from using US-based CDNs to host content, but that only makes it less efficient, not inaccessible.
Where is reels, reddit and shorts gonna get all of its most popular content from now?
AI generated slop, of course
Sounds like we have our answer. Have China flood the internet with "content". American scrapers train on it. Now we can ban LLM use on American websites, compromised by China!
Most Reddit is just Twitter screenshots. There are few from BlueSky now but that is pretty recent.
But there is also lot of OC rage-bait.
FWIW, this has driven many users to RedNote, which is even more Chinese in every way, regardless of whether it's even the same kind of platform. I doubt it would ever be anywhere near the same numbers as TikTok (assuming ByteDance didn't sell off) but it does illustrate the trouble with this i.e. cat-and-mouse game.
Edited for word choice.
If it reaches more than 1 million monthly active American users, it too can be subject to the same scrutiny under the law in question.
It runs and operates outside US. How exactly would you enforce the ban? Seize the domain?
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This is very misleading "news" and it doesn't illustrate anything, a bunch of users installed rednote out of protest, but this is a fully chinese app with 100% chinese content and 99% of users will move to youtube, instagram, etc
Fake news.
Looks like you have never used TikTok or RedNote.
Chinese users are starting to caption their videos in English. American users are posting regularly.
It is the number 1 app in my country right now, because of the TikTok ban.
Look up the playstore and you will see. Download it for yourself and you will see.
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Rednote has been shown as the top free app (per Apple’s own App Store in my device at least) for going on a week, so the magnitude may be larger than you imply.
Also, having tried it myself, the algorithm works much like TikTok whereby it learns to show English speakers English content pretty quickly.
Also the general consensus among people who have used IG and TikTok (I personally don’t use IG) seems to be that the former does not at all substitute for the latter, particularly in terms of the subjective “authentic” feel of the content (IG often said to be lacking the community feel of TikTok).
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A non-trivial number of videos I've seen this week mention also being able to find the creator of said video on Rednote. It is also the number 1 downloaded app in the US iOS store this week. The news may be a logical extreme, but it's not fake.
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Yeah, it's the same with the "millions" of users moving to bluesky or reddit moving to lemmy. A bunch of people go there and eventually come back.
It's not ostensibly, it's an app completely focused on china; did you mean a different word?
Probably. I didn't know that about it when I used that word, but a sibling comment also confirms this, so thanks for the correction.
It asserts how critically powerful platform media is now and that the government sees it as an essential part of managing their citizens
I agree. I'm not sure if I think all of this is good or not. Even if you, a gov't, didn't have an interest in managing your citizens vis-a-vis some platform, it doesn't mean other govt's don't have that interest, so maybe there's some validity to it in that case. But all of that raises even more questions, like "so what?" and "to what end?"
Sure, guy, and Bluesky will become the new Twitter.
A lot of my friends have stopped using twitter and have started using Bluesky.
I feel like the protest move to RedNote will be short lived. The censorship there is draconian - if you say even the slightest thing that offends the CCP on red note, you get banned. See this discussion on the subreddit for TikTok (https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i2wll3/how_to_not_...).
Something I read that’s interesting - RedNote changed the English name to cover their actual name - the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true).
> the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true)
That is the Chinese name of the app (although I've heard mixed reports on if "little red book" as a term for the book actually common in China). The founder claims it's because of the founder's "career at Bain & Company and education at the Stanford Graduate School of Business" which both use red, but I'm pretty sure it's a pun on his name also being Mao.
A globally used social media app without American narrative and propaganda. A huge loss for American soft power.
You mean the young people now on Rednote complaining that they can't buy groceries?
Maybe. Network effects are strong, though. I wonder how much losing access to the US market sets back TT's financial & competitive positions
My wife and I are split on this, though neither of us are regular TikTok users.
I keep coming across elected officials who are apparently briefed on something about TikTok, and they decide there’s a reasonable threat regarding the CCP or some such. The idea that the CCP could drive our national conversation somehow (still murky) bothers me.
My wife feels like this is the US Government trying to shut down a communication and news delivery tool.
While I don’t agree with her, I don’t think she’s wrong. It seems all the folks who “have it on good authority” that this is a dangerous propaganda tool, can’t share what “it” is.
If the President had over Meta and X the sort of control the CCP has over TikTok, Instagram and Twitter would be banned in most countries. The only reason this is debated so much here is we’re (in my opinion correctly) very cautious about free speech.
The owner of X is in the government.
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The owner of Twitter/X is about to be in the president’s cabinet. And the owner of Meta is clearly cozying up to the incoming administration with their new “anti-woke” policies.
I believe theres a related argument that congress might be making here, idk.
> The idea that the CCP could drive our national conversation somehow (still murky) bothers me.
Even if all the CCP can do is modify how often some videos and comments show up to users on tik tok, there's a chance that level of control could have been enough to instigate the whole jump to red note we're seeing. After all, the suggestion originated within tik tok itself as the videos talking about it (and the comments praising it) went viral. Sure everyone was primed to do something with the deadline approaching, but it's entirely possible that the red note trend isn't an organically viral one, but a pre-planned and well executed attempt to throw a wrench in the works.
red note's infrastructure seems to have had no problems absorbing millions of new users at the drop of a hat, cloud scaling is good, but that kind of explosive growth in mere days, when unexpected, often results in some visible hiccups. Maybe the engineers are just that good, or maybe they had a heads up that it'd be happening.
Utter speculation on my part, but I've found it interesting I've not come across anyone else mention the possibility.
> It seems all the folks who “have it on good authority” that this is a dangerous propaganda tool, can’t share what “it” is.
No need to speculate too hard here, there are plenty of examples of censorship on TikTok: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok
Censorship is a form of propaganda, and even the very obvious/reported examples we've seen reported over the years are pretty bad. And you have to assume that there is more going on than is actually reported/noticed, especially in subtler ways. It's also just obvious it's happening in the sense that the Chinese government has ultimate control over TikTok.
I tried to find a "Censorship by Youtube" wiki but couldn't find one. Only one documenting the censorship OF youtube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_YouTube.
I don't see a section on their main wiki either, even though YT is pretty notorious for deleting stuff, even political stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
They make up lies that they tell them in the SCIF.
It's just theater.
Biden has said he won't enforce the ban and Trump has said he will keep TikTok from going dark. Shou is attending the inauguration. Ivanka and Kai are posting actively on TikTok. It is not going anywhere.
I'd be stunned if Trump saved TikTok, that would be really inconsistent with his anti-China rhetoric, which is one of the consistent policies he has.
He may be anti-China, but he’s even more anti-Biden.
An interesting angle to this whole drama that I haven’t seen discussed much: in the creator industry, TikTok is known for being significantly harder to make money from your content, as compared to YouTube. For various reasons, content just makes much more money on YouTube than it does on TikTok.
I do wonder what will happen if TikTok users migrate to YouTube shorts, and if that will change this.
It's really quite funny to read the timeline in the opinion.
Essentially, Trump started the TikTok ban, Biden continued it, and Congress finally put it into law. And now both Trump and Biden, as well as Congress, are shying away from actually enforcing the ban.
• In August 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order finding that “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in [China] continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”
• President Trump determined that TikTok raised particular concerns, noting that the platform “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users” and is susceptible to being used to further the interests of the Chinese Government.
• Just days after issuing his initial Executive Order, President Trump ordered ByteDance Ltd. to divest all interests and rights in any property “used to enable or support ByteDance’s operation of the TikTok application in the United States,” along with “any data obtained or derived from” U. S. TikTok users.
• Throughout 2021 and 2022, ByteDance Ltd. negotiated with Executive Branch officials to develop a national security agreement that would resolve those concerns. Executive Branch officials ultimately determined, however, that ByteDance Ltd.’s proposed agreement did not adequately “mitigate the risks posed to U. S. national security interests.” 2 App. 686. Negotiations stalled, and the parties never finalized an agreement.
• Against this backdrop, Congress enacted the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
A simpler explaination, politicians were worried that Tiktok may influence mit-term and presidential elections, but it turns out a good place to run campaigns.
Then Gaza happened.
Ouch
2025, despite all this going on for four years, Gorusch complains bitterly about having had to rule on the case in less than a fortnight
The whole thing, including Biden setting the deadline for literally the last day of his presidency, strikes me as extremely odd. I have no idea what the real story is here, but it very much seems that what is happening is not at all what it seems.
Link to opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf
And it was an unanimous decision. When was the last time we had those for such an impactful decision I wonder?
"Impactful" might be counting your chickens a little too early. Let's see if it has any impact. The next POTUS might just ignore it, or some other shenanigans might be used to work around whatever the imagined impact was.
The majority of Supreme Court decisions are unanimous, including on major issues. The recent trend of divided opinions is relatively new.
Regularly, you just don't read about them as they don't make news headlines.
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The interesting bits from the text[1], relative to the now flagged sibling
-----
(3) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—
(A) any of—
(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
(ii) TikTok;
(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
(B) a covered company that—
(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—
(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and
(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
-----
The way I read this is that Congress is bootstrapping the law with its own finding that ByteDance, Ltd/TikTok are Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications, but then, in (3)(B), the President is responsible for determining any other entities this law should cover given previously stated parameters (what they mean by "covered entity" here), using the procedure it then provides.
I believe that addresses the concern about this being a "Bill of Attainder".
Edit: Obviously IANAL, but it also doesn't appear that this issue of this being a Bill of Attainder was raised by TikTok, nor was it considered in this opinion. Perhaps they will do so in a separate action, or already have and it just hasn't made its way to the court(?), but if it were such a slam dunk defense, you think their expensive lawyers would have raised it.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
The Supreme Court has made only very narrow rulings around Bills of Attainder.
To me this bill seems problematic on that front in two directions. One is that it explicitly names a target of the ban. Secondly, it grants the president power to arbitrarily name more. Similar to how a King can declare certain Subjects be Attainded on His Whim.
But the petitioners (TikTok) did not raise this issue so the court did not have to decide on it. Instead they focused on the first amendment issue, which seems like a loser -- there is no speech present on TikTok that the law bans; any content on TikTok can be posted to red-blooded American apps like shorts or reels so the speech itself is not affected.
> I believe that addresses the concern about this being a "Bill of Attainder".
The definition of "foreign adversary controlled application" in the bill is explicit in including either (a) this specific list of organizations, OR (b) other organization that might meet certain criteria later. I'm not sure how the existence of (b) addresses the concern that (a) amounts to a bill of attainder.
This analysis seems reasonable, but I think the simpler explanation blatant corruption, since the legislation is moving judicial responsibility from from the judicial branch to the legislature and president, and a great deal of money is involved.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NotebookLM
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I agree we have an activist court in the Roberts court. How is this making an ex-post facto law, though? The suit is over a bill passed with broad bipartisan support by Congress.
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Doesn't really seem relevant in this case.
Thousands of US content creators were earning on TikTok. Now they need to migrate over to other alternatives. Also this is a reminder for all content creators to always plan for failovers. Though I would assume most them already are on multiple platforms.
Not at all the case except for the largest ones. It is hard to grasp the distribution capacity of TikTok. It WILL put your content in front of people interested in it. It's crazy good at that. Also, a lot of money came in from the live streams within the app.
An implementation detail that might be interesting is that the discussed method of the ban is to use the same ISP block that is used for torrent sites (and other websites).
This may be a bit of relevance when talking about how banning a website get applied through the legal system.
That's not how the law works.
The law levies fines against distributors of the app, it doesn't ban possession or block the operation of the app itself.
Ie, Google and Apple are forced to delist TikTok or face heavy fines
That’s a good point. Apparently VPN popularity is already exploding in states that PornHub had to block.
Maybe we will finally get the decentralized computer network we thought we were building in the 1990s (as a combination of software overlays and point to point unlicensed wireless links).
What ISPs blocks? American ISPs don't block anything. The US government prefers to seize domains and hosting.
We're not (yet) like the UK or EU where rights holders can click a button and have IPs blocked without due process.
trump finally got the (fire)wall he wanted
If TikTok is just in the business of earning money they would've sold.
Who are they actually supposed to be selling to? Given the US has pretty active antitrust for now, I can't really think of anyone who has both the money and expertise to run it and would be allowed to buy it.
An easy solution is to spin off TikTok to its own company and then that company IPOs.
Why would I sell my business just to appease some gangsters on capitol hill?
TikTok cannot be sold because the algorithm cannot be sold under the export control laws enacted by China.
Bits that can't be exported can be recreated by the new owner, most likely with material differences anyways not just because the new owner might not be able to recreate the original faithfully but because they might not want to.
Remember, TikTok has also been banned in the largest country in the world by population for years now..
It's been banned in both of the largest countries.
rumors are that XHS wont region split, in which case this is setting up to a monumental event in the evolution and future of the internet. words can't really describe how big of a decision this is going to be.
That's the opposite of what I've heard
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
>There has been no official announcement that such a change is coming, but Reddit commenters speculated
You may want to read more than the headline next time.
Yeah, from my other reply
> I don't think that's going to happen. The party official seems to be positive about the event overall based on their press release recently. IMO it's going to the opposite direction, where they try to get more foreign users on the platform and have them stay there. If I were a CCP official, I would love to have more soft power by having everyone on a Chinese platform.
Arstechnica quoting a random reddit poster is not the same as the people I've been talking to lol
Can you explain further? Sounds important but I don't understand.
I jobbled down some thoughts a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42690618
But in a nut shell I think we're seeing outcome #2 play out, which has huge ramifications for the Chinese internet. Essentially this could become a precedent for all Chinese apps moving forward, and essentially the great firewall slowly dissolving. Trends have been slowly going that way with Bilibili, Douban, Kuaishou, etc, being more open to foreigners. There's still a lot to play out over the next few weeks as Trump assumes office and Tiktok CEO attends the inauguration. But there is just too much to comment about this entire situation, and most people who aren't Chinese or have experience with the great firewall are not going to comprehend just how monumental this whole ordeal has already been, and will be.
How very "land of the free" of America
Still have no good answer on why its bad for a company that is supposedly under Chineese influence to collect this kind of information on us, and adjust and tweak an 'algorith' for displaying content. But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it? Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
Plenty of good answers have already been put forward. But in case you're asking in good faith, here are the two main ones:
1- It's in the interest of the US government to protect its interests and citizens from governments that are considered adversarial, which China is. And unlike other countries, the Chinese government exercises a great deal of direct control over major companies (like ByteDance). If TikTok was controlled by the Russian government would we even be having this conversation? (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
I think social media in general - including by US companies - does more harm than good to society and concentrates too much power and influence in the hands of a few (Musk, Zuck, etc.) So this isn't to say that "US social media is good". But from a national security standpoint, Congress' decision makes sense.
2- If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on. But those are blocked (along with much of the Western internet) or heavily filtered/censored. TikTok itself is banned in China. So there's a strong tit-for-tat element here, which also is reasonable.
> If TikTok was controlled by the Russian government would we even be having this conversation?
Yandex got fragmented into EU bits and Russian bits. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/23/russia-yandex-...
The head of VK is subject to sanctions https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22951307/us-sanctions-rus... (but it appears that Americans are still free to use VK if they want to?)
> (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
American-backed forces are fighting the Russian army itself in Ukraine. Implied in all of that is a desire to not have US forces fight them directly in Poland.
> Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.
China benefits greatly from the rules based order that America spends considerable effort to maintain and uphold. They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer, but they're better off with than without and recognize that.
OTOH, Russia does not. They prefer chaos.
China is definitely the stronger threat. But Russia is a greater immediate threat because they're only interested in tearing things down. It's easier to tear things down than to build them up, especially if you don't care about the consequences.
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I agree with point #1, but then this ban should also include the US controlled sites - having the main office in the US doesn't mean the data is any more secure, or that the products do less harm socially.
For point #2, this seems like you're saying "they don't have a leg to stand on, and we want to do the same thing". If we don't support the way they control the internet, we shouldn't be doing adopting the same policies. I don't think governments should have any ability to control communication on the internet, so this feels like a huge overstep regardless of the reasons given for it
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Those are answers to a different question.
The US companies continue to feed the same information to the Chinese, even though the Federal government has been trying to get them to stop for almost a decade (I cite sources elsewhere in this thread).
So, all of your arguments apply equally to the big US owned social media companies.
Since the ban won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases, the important part of the question is:
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
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> If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on.
So now the US should just do everything China does? What happened to American ideals protecting themselves? If free speech really works, it shouldn't matter that TikTok exists.
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> government to protect its interests and citizens from governments that are considered adversarial
That's the exact reason why Communist China setup the firewall in the first place. Good luck.
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1) You can not protect users from being influenced by the media they consume-- that is basically the very nature of the thing.
2) This is not about protecting users of the app, this is about preventing a foreign state from having direct influence on public opinion.
It is obvious to me why this is necessary. If you allow significant foreign influence on public opinion, then this can be leveraged. Just imagine Russia being in control of a lot of US media in 2022. Or 1940's Japan. That is a very serious problem, because it can easily lead to outcomes that are against the interests of ALL US citizens in the longer term...
SCOTUS explicitly avoided ruling on this justification, and it seemed at argument that even some of the conservative justices were uncomfortable with the free speech implications of it.
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Isn’t that already happening? Fox news parroting russian talking points to sow division among the working class population of this country? Why is that fine? Because they get Rs in power in the process?
The whole case turns on foreign adversary control of the data.
Right, Congress was shown some pretty convincing evidence that execs in China pull the strings, and those execs are vulnerable to Chinese government interference.
As we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks, social media companies based in the US are also vulnerable to US government interference — but that’s the way they like it.
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That may be true in a legal sense (and my reading of that is the same as yours).
My interpretation of the parent’s comment is that we have pretty serious (and dubiously legal) overreach on this in a purely domestic setting as well.
As someone who has worked a lot on products very much like TikTok, I’d certainly argue that we do.
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There are so many reasons.
- China can access military personnel, politically exposed persons, and their associates. Location data, sensitive kompromat exfiltration, etc.
- China can show favorable political content to America and American youth. They can influence how we vote.
- China could turn TikTok into a massive DDoS botnet during war.
- China doesn't allow American social media on its soil. This is unequal trade and allows their companies to grow stronger.
- China can exert soft power, exposing us to their values while banning ours from their own population.
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Exactly, these are hostile political actors interfering in our country. This is also why Facebook and X should be banned everywhere except the USA.
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Yes, there is a distinction there. The issue is that it's a small part of the overall problem when looked at the larger scale. The overarching issues of political influence at odds with individual citizens, hostile engagement-maximizing algorithms, adversarial locked-down client apps, and selling influence to the highest bidder are all there with domestically-incorporated companies. The government's argument basically hinges on "but when these companies do something really bad we can force domestic companies to change but we can't do the same for TikTok". That's disingenuous to American individuals who have been on the receiving end of hostile influence campaigns for over a decade, disingenuous to foreign citizens not in the US or China who can't control any of this, and disingenuous to our societal principles as we're still ultimately talking about speech.
That can’t be it. Facebook sells the same data to foreign adversaries including China and Russia. The most famous incident involved the British company Cambridge Analytica, which used it to manipulate election outcomes in multiple countries:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica...
Edit: Apparently it’s not common knowledge that this is still happening. Here’s a story about a congressional investigation from 2023:
https://www.scworld.com/analysis/developers-in-china-russia-...
And here’s a story about an executive order from Biden the next year. Apparently the White House concluded that the investigation wasn’t enough to fix the behavior:
https://www.thedailyupside.com/technology/biden-wants-to-sto...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/28/politics/americans-person...
Edit 2: Here’s a detailed article from the EFF from this month explaining how the market operates: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/online-behavioral-ads-...
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It's still completely legal for Meta to sell that user data to Chinese owned companies. So no security is provided by this change. I see it as theatre.
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It seems pretty bold to assume that Google, Facebook, Amazon, X, etc aren't adversaries. Foreign or otherwise.
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It’s bad because China has different interests than the US. Imagine if a war breaks out in Taiwan and they send targeted propaganda to members of the US military.
US-made missiles are blowing stuff up inside Russia because Russia invaded a treaty partner who gave up their nukes in exchange for a security alliance with the US. And yet Russian apps are in our app stores. Nobody needs to imagine.
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but everyone has different interests from everyone else. That's not a sufficient reason.
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Wouldn't banning the collection of this confidential data provide a better solution? Meta could still turnaround and sell this information to Chinese companies.
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> China has different interests than the US
Define the US here. Is it the government, the people, the business interests of the private sector?
Each one of those has different interests, often competing ones.
In any functional nation the people's interests should prevail, and it seems to me that any information capable of swaying the public's opinion is informing them that their interests are being harmed in favor of other ones.
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Crazy take, More likely the US or it's allies goes to war and they try to play up sympathy with the target.
Nobody wants China to take Taiwan, that's not something its possible to convince people of
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Then China would just fall back to bombarding them with propaganda on one of the other large social media platforms that are prone to both known and unknown influence.
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Aka because we're the "good" guys
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Indeed - if the US is this afraid of a popular social network under foreign control then every country outside the US should be petrified.
And domestically in the US - citizens should be demanding the dismantling of the big powerful players - which ironically the US government is against because of it's usefulness abroad..... ( let's assume for one moment, despite evidence to the contrary, that the US government doesn't use these tools of persuasion on it's own population ).
> if the US is this afraid of a popular social network under foreign control then every country outside the US should be petrified.
They are and have been.
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I have no horses in the race but if you justify a Tiktok ban in the US because of a foreign influence, you also do justify a Facebook ban in the EU on the same arguments.
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For the same reason you're okay with the US military being present in the US and not the Chinese one.
Check out the scandal in Romania, some guy that had less than 5% in polls got 30% because of tiktok. Other candidates had tiktok campaigns too but probably didn't use bots.
Social media is a legitimate threat to any countries democracy if used wisely. It is dangerous to have one of the biggest ones in the hands of your enemy when they can influence your own countries narrative to such an extent.
For me the biggest scandal in Romania is that they threw the people's choice to the trash just because he didn't show up in polls... a few months after banning another candidate, Sosoaca, for, and I cite textually, "calling for the removal of fundamental state values and choices, namely EU and NATO membership".
Note that from the little I know about both Sosaca and Georgescu, they both look like dangerous nutjobs that should not rule, but if I were a Romanian I would be more worried about a democracy that removes candidates it doesn't like for purely political reasons (not for having commited a felony or anything like that) than about them.
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I thought it was less about the data and more about the control China had on what Americans saw, and how that could influence Americans.
If China could effectively influence the American populations opinions, how would that not be bad?
Specifically, US citizens can see what's happening in Palestine
If the reality of things, the simple truth, is able to "influence" Americans does it really matter who brought that truth up?
Do you prefer Americans to be ignorant about certain topics, or to be informed even if that comes at the cost of reduced approval for the government?
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This is being positioned as a national security issue that a foreign government has so much influence over the US public (and data on people if they want, like geolocation, interests, your contacts, etc).
Note: I'm not saying I either agree or disagree ... just pointing out the dynamics in the case being made.
Legally, the national security component is relatively minor to the case. It's played up to be the justification for the law but SCOTUS doesn't really get to decide whether that is good justification or even correct.
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The concern isn't broadly that "social media companies have data". The concern is the governing environment that those companies operate in, which can be coopted for competing national security purposes.
This isn't a consumer data privacy protection.
The concerns here are obvious: For example, it would be trivial for the Chinese military to use TikTok data to find US service members, and serve them propaganda. Or track their locations, etc.
Two extremely obvious reasons:
First, it's a national security issue for a company controlled by the CCP to have intimate data access for hundreds of millions of US citizens. Not only can they glean a great deal of sensitive information, but they have the ability to control the algorithm in ways that benefit the CCP.
Second, China does not reciprocate this level of vulnerability. US companies do not have the same access or control over Chinese users. If you want to allow nation states to diddle around with your citizens, then it ought to be a reciprocal arrangement and then it all averages out.
Back in the early stage of social media, US companies had the choice to operate in China as long as they comply with the censorship and local laws. Had they chosen not to quit China market at the point, they would have been probably huge in China holding major access over Chinese users too. (How would Chinese government react to that is something we never get to see now...)
I keep seeing argument regarding "China bans social medias from other countries". It's not an outright ban saying that "Facebook cannot operate in China", but more like "Comply with the censorship rules or you cannot operate in China". It's not targeting "ownership" or "nation states". e.g. Google chose to leave, while Microsoft continues to operate Bing in China.
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Because for all of Mark Zuckerburg's flaws (or Elon, or whoever), America is unlikely to go to war with him?
Of course not. He's already winning the war and "The People" have no voice in that matter.
In addition:
• US data brokers can still sell data to foreign companies (out of control of US and thus indirectly to Chinese companies).
• Chinese companies can buy US companies (thereby obtaining lots of data).
If we killed user-tracking, then that would solve a LOT of problems.
> US data brokers can still sell data to foreign companies (out of control of US and thus indirectly to Chinese companies).
This is false. It was made illegal in April, 2024: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520
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Because US is not really a free country.
It is obviously way better on this matter than China, but in principle, liberties are selectively granted in US and in China.
The TikTok ban topic has been stale for long time before it became the main harbor for Pro-Palestine content after it became under censorship by US social media thus depriving anti-Palestine from controling the narrative, effectively becoming a major concern for AIPAC et al.
Data collection is more of a plausible pretext at this point.
Every country has "selective liberties", that is not a very meaningful criterion.
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Why do we need a good answer? Does US need to be a good guy on some made up rules? Post Soviet collapse, US could have just taken over a bunch of territories. We don’t alway need to be some faithful country when the rest of the world is always messing up asking for millions of Americans to spill blood. I think RoW take US goodwill for granted. We don’t need to play nice. That’s not how competition works.
> But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it?
China blocks facebook/twitter/instagram/pinterest/gmail/wikipedia/twitch and even US newspapers.
So clearly they don't think it's okay for a US-company to do it (and are at least an order magnitude stricter about it)...
If US wants to imitate China, they should imitate its industry not its restrictions to freedoms.
The ideal world order isn't the one where Chinese can't find out what happened on Tiananmen square and Americans can't find out what happened in Gaza. That's a very shitty arrangement and I am shocked that the Americans are picking that as their future.
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FWIW facebook was blocked in 2009, after ETIM (East Turkistan Islamic Movement) (allegedly) used it to organise the July Urumqi riots, and facebook refused to follow Chinese law and cooperate with the police to identify the perpetrators.
Whatever you think of the law of the PRC, they applied it consistently, Facebook was blocked for doing something that would get any Chinese company shut down.
Tiktok is getting blocked in America for doing what American companies do.
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China doesn't have a constitution like America's.
Edit:
Obviously, China has a constitution, but the freedoms enumerated there are not the same as those in America's. And those that are enumerated are pointless (like North Korea's constitution).
My point is that there's an inherent hypocrisy in saying we're more free than them, but then doing a tit-for-tat retaliatory measure. How can we be more free when we're doing the same things the other side is?
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I agree with this sentiment. tit-for-tat, also anyone who slams into our infrastructure should pay up for the repairs and the inconvenience.
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There is a rule of law issue here.
Say, for example, congress passes and the president signs a law that says that product sponsorships in videos need to be disclosed. If a US company (or a European, Australian, Japanese, etc) country violates that law, we're pretty sure that a judgement against them can change that behavior.
China? Not so much, given their history.
It sounds like you have ignored all the answers and then you're saying there's no good answers?
If you want to convince someone they're not good answers you would have to at least engage with them and show how they fail to be correct/moral/legal or something. Pretending they don't exist does nothing.
Yes, all of them should be stopped from doing it. And end Third Party Doctrine. I 100% agree.
Why would you want an outside nation to have an outsized influence America's social fabric? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60 Chomsky laid out manufacturing consent decades ago and while his thesis revolves around traditional media heavily influencing thought-in-America, the influencing now happens from algorithmic based feeds. Tik Tok controls the feed for many young American minds.
> But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it?
It's not perfectly fine, but you need to start with companies of foreign adversaries first.
While I agree with you about domestic policy, I'm not sure why it's inconsistent or hypocritical to deal with an external threat posed from those who want to destroy or harm you.
The details specific to China and TikTok are kind of moot when talking about broad principles. And there is a valid discussion to be had regarding whether or not it does pose a legitimate national security threat. You would be absolutely correct in pointing out all of the trade that happens between China and the USA as a rebuttal to what I'm about to offer.
To put where I'm coming from into perspective, I'm one of those whacko Ayn Rand loving objectivists who wants a complete separation between state and economy just like we have been state and church and for the same reasons. This means that I want nothing shy of absolute laissez-faire capitalism.
But that actually doesn't mean that blockades, sanctions and trade prohibitions are necessarily inconsistent with this world view. It depends on the context.
An ideal trade is one in which both parties to that trade benefit. The idea being that both are better off than they were before the trade.
This means that it is a really stupid idea to trade anything at all at any level with those who want to either destroy or harm you.
National security is one of the proper roles of government.
And I don't think you necessarily disagree with me, because you're saying "we should also be protected our citizens from spying and intrusions into our privacy" and yes! Yes we absolutely should be!
But that's a different role than protecting the nation from external threats. You can do your job with respects to one, and fail at your job with respects to the other, and then it is certainly appropriate to call out that one of the important jobs is not being fulfilled. Does that make it hypocritical? Does it suddenly make it acceptable for enemy states to start spying?
By all means criticize your government always. That's healthy. But one wrong does not excuse another. We can, and should, debate whether TikTok really represents a national security threat, or whether we should be trading with China at all (my opinion is we shouldn't be). It's just that the answer to "why its bad when China does it but it's right when it's done domestically" is "it's wrong in both cases and each can be dealt with independently from the other without contradiction"
optimistically, this is the first step towards banning or at least forcing more transparency for all algorithmic feeds. there's absolutely similar concerns about the leadership of American companies being able to sway public opinion in whatever direction they choose via promotion or demotion of viewpoints. but it's only been possible to convince those with the power to stop them of the danger from China, because while probably none of the companies have "America's best interests" at heart when tuning their algorithms, it's much clearer that China has reason to actively work against American national interests (even just demoting honest critique of China is something to be wary of)
It's about psychological manipulation of Americans. TikTok is a completely different experience in China. Social media influences us in negative ways. And the Chinese government can and does take advantage of that.
Judging by your karma and registration date, you spend some time here on HN. There have been lots of good answers why; they are the many prior discussions of this topic.
You are just seeming to ignore them for whatever reason.
Where in that CNBC article does it say that it's fine for US companies to do that? I don't see that anywhere, yet that's the point you're claiming is being made.
It is, and if this a stepping stone to that conversation, that’s a good thing. Great even. If you expect to have everything at once, you’ll make no progress.
The comparison isn't even close. TikTok's relationship with the Chinese government is well-documented, not "supposed". They are legally required to share data under China's National Intelligence Law. The Chinese government has also a track record of pushing disinformation and find any way to destabilize Western democracies.
Douyin (The Chinese Tiktok version) limits users under 14 to 40 minutes per day and primarily serves educational content, while TikTok's algorithm outside China optimizes for maximum engagement regardless of content quality or user wellbeing.
US tech companies pursuing profit at the expense of user wellbeing is concerning and deserves its own topic. However, there is a fundamental difference between a profit driven company operating under US legal constraints and oversight, versus a platform forced to serve the strategic interests of a foreign government that keeps acting in bad faith.
> Douyin (The Chinese Tiktok version) limits users under 14 to 40 minutes per day and primarily serves educational content, while TikTok's algorithm outside China optimizes for maximum engagement regardless of content quality or user wellbeing.
This isn't true, at least not for adults' accounts. I've watched my girlfriend use it and the content was exactly what she watched on TikTok, mostly dumb skits, singing, dancing, just all in Chinese instead of half in Chinese. It also never kicked her off for watching too long.
I was told a similar story about Xiaohongshu, where it was supposedly an app for Chinese citizens to read Mao's quotations (through the lens of Xi Jinping Thought) to prove their loyalty. Then I saw it for real and it's literally Chinese Instagram.
It's perfectly fine for a South African immigrant to do it, I really don't understand the problem either.
You don't understand the difference between a non-resident corporation under control of an adversary and a naturalized citizen?
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same reason China forbids or controls US companies operating in China. This is just tit-for-tat.
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
Maybe. But there is a huge constitutional distinction between foreign and domestic threats. And the supreme court was pretty clear that the decision would be different if it didn't reside with a "foreign adversary".
The rational for why TikTok should be banned in the United States is precisely the same rational why Xitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al, should be banned in other countries.
Meta, Musk, and others have no right or grant to operate in the EU, Canada or elsewhere. They should be banned.
US benefits from Tiktok ban. US benefits from its social media not being banned in other countries. The calculation is pretty clear to me.
Action against Tiktok doesn't preclude action against US companies
There's no room for equality and fairness when it comes to global political rivals especially when there's stone cold evidence of mischief.
Clearly the US government would like only US companies to collect this kind of data. Eliminating the biggest competitors for companies like Google, X and Meta is likely just the icing on the cake.
Because it's not the TWEAKING of the content tho tis the problem. It's the ability to manipulate individuals using fake or altered content.
Not sure why this is a hard one to understand but with the ability to individualized media, you can easily feed people propaganda and they'd never know. Add in AI and deep fakes, and you have the ability to manipulate the entire discourse in a matter of minutes.
How do you think Trump was elected? Do you really think the average 20 something would vote for a Republican, let alone a 78 year old charlatan? They were manipulated into the vote. And that is the most innocuous possible use of such a tech.
I don't think any big business sees protection of its users as a solution to anything.
Not only that, but there's no evidence at all that Tik Tok's been feeding China any data. None.
Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.
Everybody forgot already US spying on Merkel's phone?
But that's okay, because America is not bound to any rules I guess. Disgusting foreign policy with a disgusting exceptionalism mentality.
> there's no evidence at all that Tik Tok's been feeding China any data.
Because China's political system applies absolutely no pressure for transparency.
> Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.
Something we know about because the US political system has levers that can be pulled to apply pressure for transparency.
You'd have to be very naive not to think that the Chinese government has an interest in controlling what US users of TikTok see. Whether they actually have or not is a somewhat useless question because we'll never know definitively, and even if they haven't today there's nothing saying they won't tomorrow.
We can say that they have both the motive and capability to do so.
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> Not only that, but there's no evidence at all that Tik Tok's been feeding China any data. None.
Yes there has been. TikTok admitted to it. They were tracking journalists.
This is not a mere accusation. Instead the company admitted to it.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-by...
ever hear of election tampering?
Why do you care if a chinese company is banned from business in the US? All sorts of american companies are banned from doing business in China
I'd prefer neither nation ban companies they don't like but I only have a voice in one.
If we banned all Chinese business with America, America would hurt a lot more than China. Our plutocracy made sure of that fact decades ago.
I care becsuse I hate hypocrisy. Simple as that. They'll sweep Russian activity under the rug as long as it's done in an American website. This mindset clearly isn't results oriented.
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Why do you care if your car gets stolen when people in China get their cars stolen every day? Well because they are taking something away from me
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Because we're looking at the Big Picture and seeing how they're figuring out how to dismantle our First Amendment rights.
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I think you have no good answer to this, you should do some soul searching.
The problem is framing information access as a threat. It is not and that's fundamentally not a First Amendment positive stance. If I want to gorge myself on Chinese propaganda it's my right as an American.
Because the Chinese are openly hostile towards the United States and its interests, whereas American companies have a vested interest in the U.S. and are beholden to its laws.
I don't know why realpolitik is so hard for technologists to understand, perhaps too much utopian fantasy scifi?
It is really amazing to see so many replies here of people who do not just disagree with the ruling but completely deny the principles at play exist.
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The idealist and optimist part of technologists tend to block the understanding of the rather simple practicalities at play in geo politics.
Data = Money, the rest is capitalism
my wife can yell at me and spend my money and my neighbour can't, because you know different case
This is essentially a whataboutism argument...
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
Indeed, but at the point we are in history the steps to get that done - aka, copy the EU GDPR and roll it out federally - would take far too long, all while China has a direct path to the brains of our children.
But it's fine for Russia as long as it's through an American corporation.
Because China is a rival geopolitical power and the US is... us.
It's a national security concern. I get that there's a lot of conversation and debate to be had on the topic but the answer here is very straightforward and I don't understand why people are so obtuse about it.
The thing is, doing it domestically is also a national security concern. We know that data leaks and breaches don't only happen, they are commonplace. Banning TikTok but continuing to allow domestic social media companies to amass hoards of the same kind of data without any real oversight is like saying, "Sorry, you can't have this on a golden platter, the best we can do is silver."
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I'm still not sure I understand the national security concerns around 17-year old nobodies publishing videos of themselves doing silly dances. Or the "metadata" those 17 year olds produce. Are people sharing nuclear secrets on TikTok or something (and not doing the same on US services)?
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I don’t understand why people are so obtuse about national security being an excuse. Do we really believe the Chinese are going to infiltrate by way of tiktok when they can hack into our telecom networks or any significant figures individual machines? This is about neutering our biggest global economic threat.
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This law is dumb, because in no way does it prevent the exact same data to be collected, processed by a US entity and then transferred to China.
I suspect that it's not about data being transferred, but the fact that TikTok can shape opinions of Americans... which US companies do a lot, without any oversight.
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Because they're trying to ignore the national security aspect to talk about tracking generically. Which is a valid argument and a good discussion to be had, but it's irrelevant in this context.
If the US was going to get into a legitimate hot "soldiers shooting at soldiers" type of war with any country, China is extremely high on that list. Maybe even #1. Pumping data on tens of millions of Americans directly into the CCP is bad. Putting a CCP-controlled algorithm in front of those tens of millions of Americans is so pants-on-head-retarded in that context it seems crazy to even try to talk about anything more general than that.
Foreign propaganda bots are just as present on US social media, and US social media amplify them just as much.
So where exactly is the meaningful difference here? I don't see it.
The actual difference is that US does not see the money from Tiktok, and blocking tiktok is a convenient excuse to give their propaganda platforms a competetive edge.
Actually doing something about the fundamental problem of foreign influence through the internet would basically destroy sillicon valley, and no politician wants to be responsible for that.
Because it's not clear what the national security concern is. With weapons or infrastructure, it's easy to understand how they can be used against the U.S., but with a social media platform, it's harder to see the threat. The concern really seems to lie with the users of TikTok.
So what's the issue? That people living in the U.S. and using TikTok might be influenced to act differently than how the powers that be want us to act?
I think one of the issues is the details of the national security risk hasn't been articulated well. I haven't followed this in detail, but from what I've seen in summaries, news articles etc is just a vague notion of a theoretical risk from an adversary, with no details on exactly what the risk is, or if there is an actual issue here (vs just a theoretical issue that can happen at some point).
Because personal data about US citizens is up for sale to more or less whoever wants it, and the US government doesn’t seem to have a problem with this otherwise.
Which makes it seem far more plausible that the real national security capability that is being defended is that of the US gov to influence narratives on social media. And while even that might be constitutional, it’s a lot less compelling.
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But US companys sale all info about users anyway to anyone (just see today GM) and you accept in between often to over 800 cookies on websites. If thats ok, whats the difference. Why is it ok a website does include over 800 cokies?
X or Facebook isn’t “us”. If we had any reason to believe there were or were even likely to be strong effective democratic controls over their ability to manipulate public sentiment it might be different. But as it stands, it feels more like local oligarchs kicking out competitors in their market: “the US population is our population to manipulate, go back to your own”.
Because US social media companies have sold data to foreign adversaries when then used it to attempt to influence domestic matters
Surely China can just buy all the data that's being collected by US companies and sold. So whats the difference here?
Not only is it straight forward it has long precedent. We’ve long limited broadcast licenses for instance.
Yeah it's not even a point of view that requires nuance; it's pretty clearly a matter of US interests v. adversarial interests. Anecdotally, a lot of people that struggle to understand this are also squarely in the camp of assuming that the US is doing data collection solely for nefarious purposes.
Except:
• the US performs these activities (data collection, algorithm manipulation allegedly, etc) for US interests, which may not always align with the interests of individuals in the US, whereas
• adversarial foreign governments perform these activities for their own interests, which a US person would be wise to assume does not align with US interests and thus very likely doesn't align with the interests of US persons.
If a person's main concern is living in a better United States, start with ensuring that the United States is sticking around for the long run first. Then we can work on improving it.
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Not everyone on HN is a U.S. national. Many are Chinese nationals. So the discussion here has conflict of interest depending on one’s allegiance
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Right, its because a law should be passed regulating this sort of data for the good of all citizens, but our congress can't / won't pass that, so they only stepped in when it became an obvious national security concern.
It'll come back as an issue in a less obvious manner next time, and every time until they pass such a law.
Which, imho, won't happen while our overall political environment remains conservatively dominant.
Domestic governments shouldn't let hostile foreign governments the ability to exert soft power over 1/2 of their population. Hence why China banned all USA based tech companies from operating there.
As a Chinese grown up within the Great Firewall, now I began to really feel all the hypocrisy around the matter of "freedom of Internet". It seems the block of Facebook and Twitter in China is surely justified at the very begining, for the same "national security" grounds. China have exactly the same amount of reason to believe the US is stealing data or propelling propaganda by social network.
It seems there are indeed things that can override citizen's free choice even in the "lighthouse of democracy and freedom", and CCP didn't make a mistake for building the firewall. My need to use Shadowsocks to use Google instead of Baidu or some other crap was simply a collateral damage.
Of course, the Chinese censorship is way more intensive, but this act makes a dangerous precedent.
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And this is why most countries should ban Facebook, Twitter and US social media.
The funny thing is that when China did that, it was unanimously condemned in the Western world as an authoritarian move, and often use as an example of why China was a dictatorship with no freedom of speech, etc. But now it's actually the normal thing to do?
The opinion is mostly not about control over recommendation algorithms; it goes out of its way to say that the data collection is dispositive. Check out Gorsuch's concurrence for some flavor of how much more complicated this would be with respect to the recommender.
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.
Why just TikTok? Are American corporations immune from coveting thy neighbor's possessions?
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What in the tinfoil hat of god…
> This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.
Because people are writing Orwell fanfiction?
Do you have any evidence at all or just fear, uncertainty, and doubt?
That's an interesting hypothetical, I have another one.
Imagine you're a country with natural resources. Private industries want those resources. Suddenly the US media is flooded with fabricated or exaggerated stories about the country written by NGOs and Think Tanks. Suddenly, out of nowhere a coup happens in the country with the stated intention of "liberalization" and "democratic reforms". The country goes through shock therapy and structural adjustments as it takes on mountains of IMF loans to enter the world markets-- it has to sell off control of all its national resources and industries to American companies. The life expectancy plummets.
Oh wait this isn't a hypothetical this is just actual US foreign policy.
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I cannot tell if this comment was made seriously or as a satire of unhinged conspiracy theories.
Good news for everyone. Get off these endless scrolling trash providers
Ah the land of free speech and freedom of the press.
Not even in Europe we have such crackdown on freedom while Americans scream censorship because nazi symbols and certain phrases are illegal in Germany.
>Not even in Europe we have such crackdown on freedom
Telegram?
Wdym? Last I checked Telegram is not banned in any way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challeng...
It sounds like they are just banning it from new installs on app stores, won't people just browse to the URL to use it?
The distinction between apps and websites seems arbitrary to me... especially since a huge fraction of apps seem to be effectively just a browser window with a single website locked in full screen.
I have never before used tiktok, but just now as an experiment I opened it in a browser and scrolled for a minute- I had no problem accessing an apparently endless stream of mostly young women jumping up and down without bras, and young men vandalizing automobiles.
Tik Tok said they'll fully shut down. They'd rather go dark now than have a slowly-degrading experience, since users won't be able to update the apps.
It makes sense to shut down the app in the US immediately rather than be unable to update it- but does that necessarily mean they would also shut it down outside the US, or access directly via the website?
Why would the experience degrade because US users are disappearing?
There are countries other than America.
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Good riddance, do the other social networks next!
Agreed! You think HN is different?
There's a difference in degree, it's less addictive. HN works a little differently, in that its goal is not primarily to convert attention directly into revenue.
Personally, I still need to be deliberate in limiting my use, so I wouldn't be sad to see it disappear, even though I do find some value in it.
None of us have more than 24 hours in our days. That time is precious. Products that are specifically designed to suck up as much of it as possible must be avoided.
I'm really bored at this point by the political discussions around this. We've heard it all a million times. As far as I'm concerned, that's missing the point.
Because, at the end of the day, and ignoring for a moment the practicality of the notion, the world would just be a better place without them.
Seriously, go read a book. We'd be living in a different world if that scaled.
Everyone thinks their consumption is more virtuous than everyone else.
HN provides the same basic neophilia.
Can someone explain in unambiguous terms why people are so drawn specifically to TikTok? I have tried TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, and they are all basically the same--algorithmically-driven feeds of short videos. I don't see how banning TikTok is such a big problem, just use one of the other apps.
Prediction: We'll hear that magically Truth Social has sourced sufficient funds that will enable it to make an offer for TikTok.
If US users continue to use the app via VPN, will that hinder the CCPs ability to weaponize it? If so, this outcome may be a good middle ground.
This is not a good outcome, this is Meta shooting itself in the face.
The whole thing with social media is network effects though. The added friction of a VPN, though small, is just so much larger than "click download, open app"
You won’t need a vpn. TikTok isn’t getting blocked. It’s getting delisted from the App Store. The app will still be on your phone.
What does this shutdown mean for US employees of Bytedance? Will they shut down their US offices or continue business as usual working from the US but only serving users outside?
The ruling isn't surprising, although I almost expected Alito or Thomas to dissent.
From the oral arguments it was immediately obvious that Alito and Thomas had already decided their opinion --- as had the other judges, frankly. They were very skeptical of the ByteDance/petitioner's argument. The Act at issue was written in a very specific way to neuter a lot of their points. Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the US Government, is also an extremely good SC lawyer in oral arguments. A Per Curiam decision is not surprising at all, most people who follow the court were expecting it.
I think it is often the case that the justices' opinions are already established, based on their lines of questioning.
In the way that Gorsuch wrote a separate concurrence, I expected Alito or Thomas to want to broadcast a particular message to their audience.
Does this only apply to TikTok or any other "foreign adversary" application that collects user data?
What's stopping another version of TikTok from being created, effectively defeating the purpose of banning a single app?
You could have read either the law or the decision, linked in the comments here, to get the answer to this question.
From the decision:
> Second, the Act establishes a general designa-
> tion framework for any application that is both (1) operated
> by a “covered company” that is “controlled by a foreign ad-
> versary,” and (2) “determined by the President to present a
> significant threat to the national security of the United
> States,” following a public notice and reporting process.
> §2(g)(3)(B). In broad terms, the Act defines “covered com-
> pany” to include a company that operates an application
> that enables users to generate, share, and view content and
> has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. §2(g)(2)(A).
> The Act excludes from that definition a company that oper-
> ates an application “whose primary purpose is to allow us-
> ers to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel in-
> formation and reviews.” §2(g)(2)(B).
This still doesn't really directly answer the question in plain English.
So would that mean Red Note would get banned as well?
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By this reading, and since Trump is sworn in on the 20th, it is really up to his discretion as to whether the tiktok ban remains.
He probably should let it stand for a day or two, and then drop an executive order to make it not banned and thus be a hero to all those who use it.
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It’s very difficult to recreate the network effects of an app like TikTok. If it were easy, Zuckerberg would have already done it.
It doesn't defeat the purpose. You can just make a new ban. There would be less friction since there is already an example.
China's vision of the Internet turned out to be more prescient than we realised at the time. Everyone is going to their own Great Firewall. In hindsight, it will seem crazy that we ever allowed media platforms to be controlled by foreign governments - especially ones which like to seed revolution, social unrest and regime change
This law does not impose a Great Wall on the Internet in the U.S.
>In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration, upholding the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act which President Joe Biden signed in April.
Glad to see when it comes to protecting tech monopolies the wisest among us are in full agreement.
Silly things like a right to a speedy trial are up for debate though.
I think this is a massive over reach. You can argue to restrict social media to those over 18, but Americans should have a right to consume content they choose.
What's next, banning books by Chinese authors? Banning Chinese Americans from holding key positions in social media companies, after all they might have uncles in the CCP!
Follow the money. TikTok is an issue for Facebook, BYD cars are an issue for Tesla.
This makes it easier for those 170M users to find new homes with President Musk's X or any of Zuck's advertising products.
Great twitter thread analyzing the Supreme Court decision from a former Congressional Staffer who now leads a think tank doing tech-focused policy work: https://x.com/marcidale/status/1880274466619691247
It isn't a "ban" except that TikTok would rather shut down than sell, forgoing billions of dollars in the process.
From pure PR perspective, it is a win for China; sometimes it is not about the money. US used to be much smarter those kinds of optics.
>sometimes it is not about the money.
Yes, that's precisely the argument of the pro-ban faction. China doesn't allow TikTok in China. It's not about the money, it's about control over a medium that can be exploited for influence, or at the very least the effects of that platform on its audience.
It's silly to pretend like ByteDance are acting on principle. Go post an LGBT meme or refer to Lai Ching-te as the "President of Taiwan" on Red Note and see how long that lasts.
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US used to be much smarter in general. Now that Trump is starting a 2nd term on Monday, the world over now realizes the US is comprised of a bunch of imbeciles. We've lost our prestige, and we'd been trading on it for a long, long time.
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You say that as if they only operate in the US. The US represents less than 20% of their user base.
I mean, it was a ban when China did it to Facebook, no?
If the youth of the rest of the world keeps using it, the US culture attention will be replaced by something else.
This might be another step in the US journey of losing their role as a superpower nation to become just another country.
Your concern about losing the dominant culture status is useless. Recent geopolitical situation clearly shows soft power is useless. Hardpower is where everything is at.
The US is a superpower because of our military and our economy, not because our teenagers are addicted to short videos.
The idea that this will diminish our power globally is beyond laughable.
I'd love to see what a global ban for TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, and X would look like. Even better: massive breakdown of iOS and Android installations. Just for a couple of weeks, then revert to the nightmarish status quo we live in. Now that would be an interesting experiment. The change in people's behavior would be palpable for those fourteen days, I bet. It'd be so much fun.
Daniel Dennett was strong proponent of alternative information distribution mechanisms in case of internet goes down for everyone. We haven't even studied such scenarios.
I'm a strong proponent of alternative information distribution mechanisms within the Internet. An "anti-normie" kind of channel of information. Hell, up until the web 2.0 came along, the Internet was exactly that for the most part.
We got something similar with social interactions during covid lockdowns (if your country had those). Btw i feel like people would go literally MAD, I can see it when just WhatsApp crashses for just a couple hours (doesn't happen often but I remember people's reactions when it happened). You can get a feel of what it would do for yourself by getting a dumbphone and limiting yourself from accessing social media.
>You can get a feel of what it would do for yourself by getting a dumbphone and limiting yourself from accessing social media.
I already do that. It's the most alienating and pessimism-inducing thing. I'd just love to see a world where people aren't hunched over, staring at a screen for 90% of their waking life.
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I have trouble lumping those 5 services together. Maybe its something to do with me being a middle-age American male?
Instagram/X/TikTok: Hot garbage. Good riddance. Ban them and this country is a better place.
Whatsapp/YouTube: Actually quite useful. The former for real-time global communications. The latter for visual how-to's of all kinds (bicycles, home maintenance).
People would just switch to a different service.
I'm not sure how many dimensions this chess game is being played in, but if I were a lawmaker I would be wary of unintended consequences.
Overall, I view this is as an admission to US populace and the world that the US is a weak-minded country that can easily be influenced by propaganda.
> Overall, I view this is as an admission to US populace and the world that the US is a weak-minded country that can easily be influenced by propaganda.
That is quite a silly assumption to make
I’d be fine with a general rule that if China (or anyone) places limits on US social media that effectively limits / bans them… same goes for Chinese social media platforms. Done.
Many people here upset about this.
Here's what recently happened in Romania, all through TikTok.
Turns out China (or here, Russia) infiltrated the country, waged an enormous disinformation campaign and succeeded by getting their chosen candidate elected. Without TikTok, this would not have happened. I have talked about this with Romanians who concur.
In the real world, there are two responses to this.
1. "Tough luck, it's too late now, should just stand by and watch the country get taken over".
2. "Ban it and future popular big platforms controlled by a foreign adversary".
That's it. We'd all love for something inbetween. It's not happening, all such options would end up becoming 1). That's the state of the modern day world.
The facts that
A. They seem to rather abandon the app rather than receive tens of billions by selling it
B. "The Chinese government also weighed a contingency plan that would have X owner Elon Musk acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations"
C. The remaining mountains of evidence that it is a CCP tool
Mean that the arguments of Congress here are valid and this is the right decision. It is a tool directly controlled by a foreign adversary, for geopolitical, not profit-oriented, purposes. This is nothing like the PATRIOT act or other moves by governments that claim "protect the children" or "protect against terrorism" for some ulterior motive of surveillance or worse. It might be a rarity, but in this case the claims by Congress are factual and a sufficiently good reason.
> Turns out China (or here, Russia) infiltrated the country, waged an enormous disinformation campaign and succeeded by getting their chosen candidate elected.
But in the US, Russia also has waged enormous disinformation campaigns on US-based social media networks. Taking the problem of foreign (dis|mis)information, election interference, etc seriously requires that we do more than ban one network based on the ownership of that company. After TikTok gets shut down, Chinese influence operations can still use Twitter/X, Meta, Reddit etc. We need better tools and regulations to make these campaigns visible stoppable in real-time, rather than just banning one network while leaving up multiple other vulnerable networks. This ban is political theater, where the US can act like it's doing something while not having to address the harder parts of the problem.
> A. They seem to rather abandon the app rather than receive tens of billions by selling it
I think this is weak evidence of them being a mostly political tool. Valuations based on their actual use are well above what anyone has actually offered to pay. And disentangling US operations from the rest of TikTok would not be straight-forward; do you merely cleave it in two? Given network effects, would cutting off the US component to sell it make both the US and non-US portions less valuable?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/15/tiktoks-us-unit-could-be-wor...
one would think the ranking member on the House Intel Cmte - my very own Rep - would agree with you, given how he'd be way more privy to such things than you, me, talking heads on TV, etc. yet he disagrees and cites free speech concerns [0][1].
in my mind none of these reasons add up. if this were truly about influence ops on social media we would not have blinders on for our own platforms' role in them. remember Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 campaign, or Facebook's role in the Myanmar genocide? or more-recently the ops Israel ran? furthermore if this were really about our data, we would again not have blinders on. the CCP can still purchase our data as we're all up for sale given our lack of data privacy/protection laws.
as such i tend to side with my Rep: this is bunk, and the pretexts flimsy. i believe the answer is to focus on education - critical thought particularly - and enacting data privacy/protection laws. i do not believe that would lead to 1).
now will that happen? i'm doubtful tbh. our own govt loves the fact that we're up for sale, for it allows them to side-step the need for a warrant. have a great weekend.
[0] https://www.ctinsider.com/columnist/article/tiktok-ban-jim-h... [1] https://himes.house.gov/2024/3/himes-statement-on-protecting...
What you're really complaining about is that too many people agree with Georgescu. The way mainstream media works, only a few candidates get air time so there's little competition. Georgescu was able to build a following on the alternatives so the election was suspended (without motivation) and new regulations put in place to make sure no un-approved candidate stands a change.
They were so busy banning Șoșoacă and demonizing the best candidate (Simion) that they forgot about Georgescu.
We were already a laughing stock for banning a candidate (Șoșoacă). Now we've suspended democracy and postponed the election 'til kingdom come.
Are we that good already?
Thrilling
This is laughable, even with your depiction of the events. The candidate in question (Georgescu) had a very popular platform, and was supported by a large bases or Romanians on the left and right.
He was, however, opposed to further expansion of NATO.
If these ideas are too scary to let general public even consider, then democracies have to step in and censor the media. And that begins by banning TikTok, the largest platform where a narrative like this can bypass the existing power structures.
TikTok should just build out a PWA. That would be a huge fuck you to this whole situation.
How?
It would be interesting to see TikTok go full scorched earth and become a mega pirate movie, music, TV, streaming sports site.
That will never work. The TikTok audience doesn’t have the attention span to support such long form content.
As long as it supports split-screen with Subway Surfers.
Funnily enough there are full movies uploaded on TikTok split up in to parts, they come across my feed every once in a while.
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This outcome is worse than I could have ever conceived:
1) People have valid concerns about TikTok. TikTok will remain, and those concerns will remain.
2) People have valid concerns about free speech. The law that tramples free speech stands and is upheld by the court.
3) People have valid concerns about unfair and unequal enforcement of laws. The law will be blatantly and openly ignored for political reasons.
Literally everyone loses. What a clown show.
Yeah this is why I don't like the "tit for tat - they banned facebook, insta, etc." argument.
We're supposed to be better than them, but we stoop to their level.
> but Trump might offer lifeline
Is this the same guy who wanted to ban TikTok 4.5 years ago? Just asking.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/900019185/trump-signs-executi...
What happens to the copyright on these videos?
This seems like a bandaid, maybe the real national security is that US companies cannot build a product that can compete with TikTok.
I don't really agree with this line of thinking if you consider the addictive part of TikTok.
Imagine the US legalized and exported meth. All of a sudden, the US is "competing" because everyone is hooked on drugs. We had Opium wars in a somewhat similar vein as the social media wars.
Hahaha
Thank goodness! I don’t know how anyone thinks this isn’t a good idea for America.
Market intervention through administrative measures is never a good thing for any country.
I am wondering why, can you develop?
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Do you think a Great Firewall of America is a good thing? Because that is what this ruling enables.
Do you think TikToc is a net positive for the world or the US?
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Not sure if sarcastic or not, I'll bite. If tiktok infringes some kind of data privacy laws, punish them. If the data privacy laws of the US are bad, improve them.
But this? Just because some... not so bright soldiers use tiktok to upload videos of their base? What else is there so bad it requires a total ban? It seems like hypocrisy to me, when Meta, Google, X also have similar data available and also don't want to adhere to for example EU laws.
If what TikTok is doing is dangerous when TikTok does it why is it safe when everyone else does it?
This is theft, pure and simple. The government-industrial complex is trying to steal this app. The private side wants to make money and the public side wants yet another way to control narratives on social media much the way President Musk does on twitter.
Yeah! If China wants our data they'll have to buy it from data brokers like everyone else!
NBC is delusional, thinking Trump who ran on a law and order platform is going to disregard the law.
TikTok is fun but it has degraded into a commercialized mess of copycats, IP theft and scams.
Like everything else that is commercialized on the internet. It has a lifespan of a few years before it becomes unusable to all but the meek and the ignorant.
A new service will emerge and replace it within months. The truth is their algorithm is about as complicated as a HS algebra test.
Looks like India set the way here. Wonder what it holds for US India relations.
china banned US apps like since forever.
Could TikTok develop a web app and direct users to it?
Yes. TikTok.com is legal as long as it isn’t hosted here.
Everyone has been in denial - this was always the most likely outcome.
As a free speech absolutist, I hope that what comes out of this is a completely anonymized, uncensorable alternative. We've gotten the arbitrary censorship walled garden social media sites mostly because until now there hasn't been any particular reason for most users to step outside of them.
I think many have tried but face an uphill battle of unless a significant majority is willing to relocate, the prevailing content will be things that are deemed undesirable/bannable on other platforms, which distracts potential users.
Having a completely decentralized solution also comes with the issue of future governance. If a single entity controls the direction (even if the spec is open and you can host it yourself), then it's not decentralized. If you end up with a consortium then you'll face the same issue of email, innovation is hard to spread as you need multiple actors with competing interests to agree.
If your vision is having multiple entities providing different experiences tailored to individual taste, they might start consolidating and effectively forming several disjoint platforms.
p.s.
The web can be said to be decentralized but it's dominated by large players all the way from hosting to browsers. If all three major browsers don't agree on your proposal, it's effectively dead. Who's to say entrenched players won't arise in your vision of a decentralized social media?
Nah, centralized apps have won because mass appeal and market momentum hinges on factors almost entirely other than an app's technical architecture.
I disagree. People just need to build a good social networking protocol.
Email for example can be thought of as a social networking app but it's really decentralised.
While you can ban Gmail, it's really hard to ban Email.
Something like AT Protocol would be what it would like like or activity pub.
But so far, they are all so bad.
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You mean PeerTube? Perhaps it could also be combined ith I2P.
Exactly - there are technical solutions, they just rely on mass uptake in order to work.
> completely anonymized, uncensorable alternative.
So a fountain of child sexual assault material?
We have that. Welcome to the World Wide Web.
We all walked into the walled gardens and went "ooh, looks mighty nice in here!"
just think a tiny bit about why that would be a bad idea
Since the ban is about not allowing app stores to host TT, can TT build its own App Store to offer the download of its app, given that Apple has to allow other app stores?
Apple doesn't have to and doesn't choose to allow alternative app stores outside of the EU.
What I love is that apparently tons of Americans are signing up for a different Chinese social video app whose name is being translated as “Red Note”. I would love if the end result of this was another several years of congressional drama about a different Chinese app.
What's interesting is that RedNote doesn't have the same level of segregation as TikTok, so the US and China users are having a lot of interesting interactions. Assum the app doesn't get banned, it'll be interesting to see if the experiences get more silo'd
I am afraid this might not last long. There is no official announcement yet for now, to be clear, but still[0].
0. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
I think it would be a good thing if average Americans and Chinese interacted more
Maybe then we will see we are all more alike than we are different
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> if the end result of this was another several years of congressional drama about a different Chinese app
No need. If it’s Chinese and has more than 100mm (EDIT: 1mm) users, Commerce can designate it a foreign-adversary controlled application and designate it for app-store delisting.
I think the threshold is way lower than that? The "Covered Company" definition mentions 1 million monthly active users for at least 2 of the 3 months preceding some determination.
Also, I wonder who is the foreign-based "reviews" site that lobbied for the exclusion clause immediately following that?
https://www.congress.gov/118/plaws/publ50/PLAW-118publ50.pdf
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It’s even better than that. “Red Note” is the softened version. A more direct translation is “Little Red Book.”
> “Little Red Book.”
As in Mao's Little Red Book - https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34932800
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Isn't Red Note planning to segregate based on IP to prevent US Influence from those TikTok refugees? The original CN users aren't exactly happy with the newcomers either, and the TikTok refugees themselves are getting quite a culture shock with regards to cultural attitudes to LGBQT or even basic "leftist" activism like strikes and collective bargaining
Anyways, those alternatives are not so algorithmically driven, and especially if it's forcing actual user interaction and discussion that certainly would be good for Americans to understand what the mainland Chinese are really thinking and saying domestically. Because if you go to the actual main discussion forums like Weibo, oh boy it's not going to be pretty.
Honest question: why would an American consciously seek out multiple Chinese apps on purpose?
To be punk rock. The main reason I see thrown around is most younger users don't care if China has their user data and understand that the government is banning it for their own selfish reasons (money).
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Because deep inside, most people are still children, desperate to declare their autonomy.
if China has US consumer's data they can do very little harm as they lack enforcement. So its not a big deal to use Chinese owned social media app.
US however, if it has data on US users, has all the means to cause harm to US users, starting from censorship and persecution.
UK and Germany for example are jailing people for social media posts
https://www.standingforfreedom.com/2024/08/think-before-you-...
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Apparently currently they’re posting tons of 3d printed gun content. People are weird.
The most literal translation of 小红书 is “Little Red Book”, which recalls the famous book of quotes from Mao Zedong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...
Except that’s not what Mao’s book was/is called in China, it’s a label the US applied to it. In China it’s better known as 红宝书 (Hóng Bǎo Shū) “The Red Treasure Book” or simply “The Red Book”.
I'm pretty sure it would be more a quick "Add this app to the TikTok court order".
Why would you love that?
It would likely lay bare just how much any of the TikTok detractors actually cared about privacy/security concerns versus cultural ones.
Sometimes it’s fun to watch chaos unfold. It’s subjectively entertaining
Someone wrote, "Because it's punk rock" and I think that sums it up. It's an act of rebellion.
He’s using sarcasm
Why do you love this?
Because if this sequence of events (one allegedly Chinese-government controlled social media app is banned over apparent ties to the government, so all of its American users immediately switch to another Chinese app whose name can be translated as "Little Red Book") happened in a movie, a reasonable person would balk at how ludicrous and on-the-nose the whole thing was.
It feels like a joke, and if you can somehow create enough space to actually see the humor in it, its kind of funny.
[dead]
It’s a clone being inorganically pushed to fill vacuum.
You don't destroy what can give you even more power by controlling it. Trump/Musk/Zuck plan is to control it, not destroy it: the army of teens willing to be inundated by propaganda just to keep using it is too appealing to ignore, and China will happily trade that control for something (less/no tariffs?).
Maybe someone smarter than me can explain - how both Biden and Trump can hint or announce they wont enforce the law. Signed laws upheld by the Supreme Court can be filtered out by the President? News to me.
They've announced that they won't enforce the fines required by the law. But yes, selective enforcement of laws is legal — it's how prosecutorial discretion works.
the law doesn’t ban tiktok it just grants discretion to the president to ban tiktok
The law makes it illegal for Oracle, Apple and Google to continue doing what they are doing. It does in fact make it illegal for some companies to operate with TikTok. The president can use this law in the future on other companies controlled by foreign adversaries to divest or face a ban.
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The companies still take risk not obeying the law. Most large publicly traded companies will not task the liability risk based on a wink and a nod.
Congress writes the law but the executive enforces the law. They can choose not to enforce the ban.
We all know the Elephant in the room, that Israel‘s genocide in Palestine led to lots of criticism on Tik Tok, and that led the Israel lobby to push a Tik Tok ban.
Yes, the "we have a Tiktok problem" statement is proof of that.
I love all the comments saying that the Supreme Court doesn't understand the first amendment.
Kinda funny we have a president that can and will just ignore the Supreme Court and laws
I think in the future people will look back at kids on social media, like we look back at kids smoking cigarettes.
This is like paying doctors to say only evil foreign cigarettes cause cancer. Buy American!
Surprised some American billionaire hasn't thrown 50 Milly into like 5 clones of tik Tok to see which one takes off?
there should be an easy pivot to an American equivalent but there hasn't been?
Or has there?
Here is what Chairman McCaul said: “I was proud to join 352 of my Republican and Democrat colleagues and pass H.R. 7521 today. CCP-controlled TikTok is an enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”[1]
The U.S. national security angle identified is "mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions". And give me a break that they actually care about "young Americans’ mental health". This bill was about pro-Palestine content ... "being mobilized by CCP" that was harming "young people's health".
The fact that none of this was put forward by the lawyers makes me think the tiktok lawyers were incompetent. I went through the testimonies given and it was DAMMMMMNNNN weak. Three issues were identified by me: The Bill suddenly declares "non-aligned countries" to be "foreign adversaries" but there is no declared war so how can they be adversaries already; The Bill declares anyone facilitating the company including through the transfer of communication is in violation of the bill but that is a freedom of speech issue which they did not bring up but instead brought the ban as a FoS issue; The Bill labels TikTok and ByteDance as companies to be sold [to an aligned state] or banned entirely but that is the only company being single-handedly called out and I don't know how to say this but that sounds like some form of discrimination and unsubstantiated claim of threat. They could have done a better job at the SCOTUS.
[1] https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-mcca...
The next Supreme Court decision will be them deciding if disagreeing with the TikTok decision is sufficient grounds for being censored.
Public disagreement with the TikTok decision could lead to legislative pressure, which would add support to the pressure campaigns of Chinese lobbyists and diplomats, or of other organizations that are funded or donated to by Chinese people or people of Chinese descent. This could either result in new legislation being passed that nullifies the ban, or pressure the Executive into failing to enforce the ban.
Either of those outcomes would, in effect, allow the user data of Americans to be accessed by the government of China. Disagreement with the TikTok ban would in and of itself aid America's adversaries.
Besides, disagreement with it implies that America unduly restricts speech, when we're supposed to hate China because China unduly restricts speech. That's a clear case of creating a false equivalence in order to foment discord, which again is material support to China's goal to monitor American's communications and corrupt the minds of America's children.
I believe Biden says his admin won't enforce the ban, as they only have 1 day left in office after it goes into effect.
Trump has signaled he doesn't support the ban, and wants tiktok under american ownership. The legislation allows the president to put a 90 day hold on the ban too.
So my guess is that this isn't over yet.
Do you think Apple, Oracle and Google are going to thumb their noses at the law?
Trump initially championed the ban during his first term
For one day? Maybe.
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> The legislation allows the president to put a 90 day hold on the ban too.
Only if there is an in-progress divestiture and only before the ban goes into effect.
Aka, TikTok/Biden would have to announce a sale is in process and Biden would have to enact the extension before the 19th.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation around this, no surprise given the TikTok user base..
The law targets other companies that would be breaking the law if they continue providing services for a China-owned TikTok past the ban date. The statute of limitations is five years, past a Trump presidency. No, an executive order can not cancel a law. Google, Apple & co would be exposing themselves to a lot of uncertainty and risk, and for what?
Very sad moment for the united states. Banning an app because the users are too critical of israel/support palestine, and they cannot control it.
Can someone ELI5 how/why this is legal?
One of the few federal powers in the constitution includes "control over foreign commerce". Somehow a Chinese website is now "foreign commerce". China bad.
I think that covers it.
Everybody already moved to red book and are starting to recognize that the US is just an aging colonialist with nothing to offer the future
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/s/hXe9HsWslW
The GenZ folks (including my kids) that I interact with on a day-to-day basis are much happier on that application and they’re starting to realize that the US is not what it pretends to be
That doesn’t mean any place is better (though possible) it simply means people started finally realizing the truth of the United States
China is an ethnostate. What does China offer the future to anyone who's not Chinese? Chinese nationals in the United States have substantially more rights than they do in China.
China has 1.4 billion people. Americans can learn from them.
You use colonialist as a slur, but China has literal colonies in Tibet and the Uyghur land.
[flagged]
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This is great news!
The key issue here now is: The future, freedom, international policy etc of you US guys no longer depends on democratic structures in ANY way whatsoever.
Who pays Trump most, wins. Who does what Musk wants, wins.
From what I know, there is no second Oligarch-run corrupt country that would come close to this. This is worse than China and Russia combined.
Sorry, not meant to bash our US HN friends at all, just an observation from another western country targeted by MuskTrump that has yet to follow the US lead (which they will), so we still have some time left to be in shock and awe about what is going on on your side of the pond for a while.
FFS.
Commenting on your own posts sucks, but let me add:
The current status of insanity is that the US is threatening to invade a EU country by force to annex it to be able to exploit natural resources and gain a strategic military position.
Again, let me repeat, as very clearly a lot of people are now completely numb to insanity and just filter it out:
THE US IS THREATENING TO INVADE A EU COUNTRY. YES. SERIOUSLY.
Was US Headlines for one day, now drowned in other madness already.
Anyway, you won't have any democratic say on this anyway, so let's just gamble:
Jeff Yass will bribe Trump heavily, and Trump will then lift the ban next week, no matter what his Supreme Court sock puppets want.
It's a bit disingenuous for Mark Zuckerberg to go on Joe Rogan and say that the Biden administration is anti Meta/anti America, when congress passed this bill to shut down TikTok.
I don't love that TikTok is run by a Chinese company (thus giving way too much control to the Chinese government), but Meta builds such garbage experiences in their apps. There really needs to be a real competitor to Meta.
This is just a roundabout way for Trump to get bribed
Free speech.
America has the right to ban since china banned all American tech companies from operating in their nation but this means America could never ever talk about freedom of doing business bs
Any country has the right to this kind of ban, that's what national sovereignty is all about.
A different issue is whether doing it is the right decision or not.
And another issue is the hypocrisy. When China did it, the unanimous opinion from the US (both the official stance and what one could hear/read from regular people, e.g. HN comments) was that such bans were authoritarian and evidence that there was no freedom of speech in China. But now suddenly it's a perfectly fine and even obvious/necessary thing to do...
Being neither from China nor from the US, this paints the US (who have benefitted a lot from riding the moral high horse of free market, etc. for decades) in a quite bad light.
Should the EU ban US social networks for pure economic reasons (so we roll our own instead of providing our data and money to US companies, which would almost surely be good for our economy)? The argument for not doing it used to be that freedom should be above domestic interests, one embraces the free market even if some aspects of it are harmful because overall it's a win. But the US is showing it doesn't really believe in that principle, and probably never has.
China bans US businesses because it has an autocratic, ethnocratic government. The US is banning a Chinese business for obvious national security reasons.
Answering tit-for-tat is fine, even if the thing being done is bad in itself (e.g. waging war is bad, but should a country not use weapons to defend itself when invaded?). If else US and in general the West should have acted earlier: if American companies where free to operate in China and influence its people I doubt this ban would have been enacted.
Not too obvious to me unless there's some actual evidence of any of these claims of "China takes American data".
They take as much data as any of the various other manufacturing processes we outsourced over the decades.
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I need to print this sentence out, frame it, paste it on the Tiananmen's wall.
I'm not sure about that... They'll surely continue to use buzzwords "freedom","democracy" for their geopolitics seo.
So they were right about banning the US social media platforms then, right? Because according to this court opinion, having foreign social media is a menace to national security. It's funny to see Americans argue for a great firewall lol.
I have mixed feelings. The Supreme Court did the right thing; the democratically elected government did decide upon a ban, so it should likely continue as was made law.
I am not sure that banning forms of media feels good. The point of free speech is to let everyone say their thing and for people to be smart enough to ignore the bad ideas.
I am not sure the general population of vertical video viewers does part 2, however, so I get the desire to force people to not engage. The algorithmic boosting has had lots of weird side effects; increased political polarization, people being constantly inundated with rage bait, and even "trends" that get kids to vandalize their school. (My favorite was when I asked why ice cream is locked up in the freezer at CVS. Apparently it was a TikTok "trend" to lick the ice cream and then put it back in the freezer, so now an employee has to escort you from the ice cream area to the cashier to ensure that you pay for it before you lick it. Not sure how much of this actually happened versus how companies were afraid of it happening, however.)
With all this in mind, it's unclear to me whether TikTok is uniquely responsible for this effect. I feel like Instagram, YouTube Shorts, etc. have the potential to cause the exact same problems (and perhaps already have). Even the legacy media is not guilt free here. Traditional newspapers ownership has changed over the years and they all seem pretty biased in a certain direction, and I am pretty sure that the local news is responsible for a lot of reactionary poor public policy making. (Do I dare mention that I think the whole New Jersy drone thing was just mass hysteria?)
Now, everyone is saying that regulating TikTok has nothing to do with its content, but I'm pretty sure that's just a flat-out lie. First, Trump wanted to ban it because everything on there was negative towards him. Then right-wing influencers got a lot of traction on the platform, and suddenly Democrats want to ban it and Trump wants to reverse the ban. It's pretty transparent what's going on there.
I agree with the other comments that say if data collection is the issue, we shouldn't let American companies do it either. That seems very fair to regulate and I'm in favor of that.
The best effect will be someone with a lot of money and media reach standing up against app stores. I can live with that.
I only take this as a geopolitical decision. Not saying that the US couldn't do that (like any other country) but adding arguments that also apply to other social media apps as well is, IMHO, FUD.
Wasn't the idea Trump's in the first place?
Not hard to see how this will play out.
Trump will get a bribe from them and it will be opened.
I mean this won't happen. The TikTok CEO is invited to Trump's inauguration.
The silliness of the ban itself aside, it is wild how casually the whole “both chambers of congress passed a law and that law was upheld by the highest federal court but maybe it won’t be a law if one guy decides he doesn’t like it” thing is being treated by the media.
It is like “Does America have laws?” is a 3 minute section of Good Morning America between low-carb breakfast recipes and the memoir of a skateboarding dog.
As with anywhere, laws are toothless without enforcement.
In some cases, they are enforced ruthlessly on one group of people, and not on others. This is a feature, not a mistake, by the way. Well, a feature for those with power, not normal citizens.
The real question is:
"Does America have justice?"
It's not a recent one either. The issue of select enforcement of our laws has been around as long as I can recall, and before I was born. It's not even unique to the United States.
What I find most upsetting as part of the normal citizenry, is that rather than taking things to court and finding that the laws need changed, they tend to go the route of charges dropped or pardons when the laws affect them.
I would have less of an issue with the rich and powerful folks avoiding prosecution if they at least did it in a precedent setting way for the rest of us.
That's the injustice.
Of recent note in the "no" column for the "does America have justice" question, a convicted felon escapes all consequences because he is president elect.
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it may be toothless but will they have an effect?
You're Apple or Google's lawyer - the CEO asks, should I take Tiktok down from the app store. What do you say?
Otoh there's a law and civil penalty. On the other, Trump says he won't enforce. Statute of limitations is 5 years, and the liability will exist whether Trump enforces or not. In 5 years, there will (may?) be a new president. On the other hand, trump saying he's not going to enforce may give us an out if we're ever sued over this (we just did what the Pres told us to do...).
Hard call, I give > 50% that they take it down whatever Trump says.
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Knowledge of civics among the media is unfortunately not much higher than the average person, which is a real failure considering that they are supposed to be an entire “estate” of democratic society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate
> but maybe it won’t be a law if one guy decides he doesn’t like it
Are you talking about a presidential veto? What are you saying?
No. The opportunity for a presidential veto in our system happened in April of last year.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/tech/congress-tiktok-ban-what...
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The headline on HN was updated, but it's in the key points on the article:
> Although President-elect Donald Trump could choose to not enforce the law...
Which is ridiculous. It's the executive branch's function to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" [1]. The president's DOJ can't simply refuse to enforce the law. There's some debate over whether this applies to 'enforcement discretion', in that the president doesn't have infinite resources to perfectly execute the law and some things will slip through, or whether the president can decline to enforce a law that he believes to be unconstitutional before the supreme court declares it to be so.
In theory, no, the president can't simply decline to enforce a law, congress would then be able to impeach and remove him. In practice, though it happens a little bit all the time. And even if this was black and white, I don't know that there's anything that the incoming president can do that the incoming congress would impeach him for.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S3-3-5/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
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Creating three branches of government that all have to agree that a law should exist (legislative) is constitutional (judicial) and should be enforced (executive) has proven to be an excellent method of keeping bad laws from negatively affecting us. Despite being seemingly simple on the surface, it's created a process a bit longer than what a single Schoolhouse Rock video can teach us, and it's too much for legacy media to handle.
Maybe they only learned from the aforementioned Schoolhouse Rock video, because they seem especially bad at understanding anything outside of the legislative branch. Not only does the legislative branch need to pass a bill into law for it to become a regulation, without objection by the judicial branch to its constitutionality, but the executive branch needs to write that law into a federal regulation, and the legislative branch can reject any new regulation they believe doesn't comply with the law, as can the judicial branch, who can also reject the regulation if it isn't constitutional as written, even if the original law that created it was.
It's no wonder that legacy media's wild misunderstandings of how laws and regulations work only get a small snippet of time, between their more entertaining and feel-good stories that drive viewership and revenue.
Fortunately we are no longer stuck with just legacy media, so I recommend finding a news source that actually knows what they are talking about. I've found the best bet is to get news from outlets and aggregators that specialize in a specific topic, shielding them from the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, and forcing them to publish news that is actually correct.
This is why I come to Hacker News for my tech news aggregation. For political news, my favorite so far has been The Hill, especially for videos like their Daily Brief and Rising videos published on YouTube. I'm open to more, so if anyone has any recommendations, let me know.
This is just checks-and-balances at work, is it not? It’s by design.
What checks remain to counter this power? Impeachment? Constitutional amendment? As I understand it, if the president chooses not to enforce a law, then the only real recourse Congress has is a massive escalation that requires an extremely high level of cooperation. I'm not sure it was ever intended for the executive branch to simply ignore the other two branches and unilaterally decide how to run things. Personally I think willfully refusing to enforce the law of the land should be an impeachable offense but I guess that's not how it works.
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“I was proud to join 352 of my Republican and Democrat colleagues and pass H.R. 7521 today. CCP-controlled TikTok is an enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”[1]
[1] https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-mcca...
U.S. national security: "mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions"
And give me a break on "young Americans’ mental health".
This bill was about pro-Palestine content ... "being mobilized by CCP" and was harming young people's health.
The fact that none of this was put forward by the lawyers makes me think the tiktok lawyers were incompetent.
The fact that none of this was put forward by the lawyers makes me think the tiktok lawyers were incompetent.
Or they knew it would get them nowhere because they understand precisely how unpopular pro-Palestine sentiment is among lawmakers.
Both Biden and Trump have said that they will not enforce this law. So not just "one guy", but two :)
It is one. The other one is already out the door and just said "your problem not mine".
Wait until you hear about how one ordinary guy on a jury can nullify a whole law. Our system is geared to err towards enforcing fewer laws.
Good, now do it for the rest of them, from linkd-in to facebook.
This whole thing is both silly and unsurprising.
Everybody knows the fearmongering about Chinese control and manipulation is a smokescreen. The real reason is that Tiktok doesn't fall in line with State Department propaganda [1].
It's noteworthy that SCOTUS sidestepped this issue entirely by not even considering the secret evidence the government brought.
That being said, it's unsurprising because you can make a strictly commerce-based argument that has nothing to do with speech and the First Amendment. Personally, I think reciprocity would've been a far more defensible position, in that US apps like Google, FB, Youtube and IG are restricted from the Chinese market so you could demand recipricol access on strictly commerce grounds.
The best analogy is the restriction on foreign ownership of media outlets, which used to be a big deal. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, US companies would defend themselves from foreign takeovers by buying TV stations, for example. That's basically the premise of the movie Working Girl, as one (fictional) example.
Politically, the big loser here is Biden and the Democratic Party because they will be (rightly) blamed for banning a highly popular app (even though the Congressional vote was hugely bipartisan) and Trump will likely get credit for saving Tiktok.
[1]: https://x.com/Roots_Action/status/1767941861866348615
We don't know that the secret evidence was that TT doesn't promote U.S. propaganda. We can surmise, but speculation can be wrong. Besides, the justices might simply have revealed that secret evidence, had it really been just that. But they claim they didn't even consider the secret evidence. Unclear whether they took a peek, but they say they didn't consider it.
The kids flocking to another Chinese app just to avoid using Reels, Shorts, or whatever abomination is on X continues to be so funny to me. Looks like a long game of whack a mole starting.
Any parent (and even us non-parents who've spent a lot of time around kids) know that the best way to get teenagers to stop doing something, is to start doing it yourself. If you forbid them to do something, it's basically inviting them to try their hardest to do it anyways.
This is exactly why I’ve started slinging gen alpha lingo at our daughters: even doing it jokingly makes them cringe enough to stop using it themselves.
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There are tons of people over 30, 40, 50 even over 90 on TikTok.
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This is how I got mine to stop saying slay, preppy and sigma. The look of horror and cringe on their face when I say crap like "skibidi ohio rizz" in front of them and their friends, is a chef's kiss.
Under a million kids moving over to RedNote for a week or 2 means nothing. There is no whack a mole. Tiktok algo is the sauce, nothing else has the sauce. People enjoyed the sauce.
Xiaohongshu has better sauce than youtube shorts or instagram reels.
Using Chinese social media is cool now.
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> Tiktok algo is the sauce, nothing else has the sauce.
Tiktok algo is nothing special: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-alg...
The volume of interaction data from good interface design and huge user base is the core of the success.
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> Tiktok algo is the sauce
What makes you think the Bytedance chefs who cooked the sauce wont join the Redbook company? Their HQ were both located in China anyway.
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"the sauce" is for the audience to figure out. The sauce was disgusting to me, but that didn't matter to those 100m consumers.
And yes, this begs the question of "when does something become a matter of national security". 10 million? A million moving over before the day of reckoning isn't a small thing.
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The big one is called RedNote, and it's actually fairly well done.
The meme I'm seeing everywhere is that with so many Americans joining RedNote, Americans are discovering how much Chinese people are paying for healthcare, food or property, and Chinese people are discovering things like 40 hour work weeks and actually having a holiday from time to time - so now the question is whether US or China bans it first.
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Oh, wasn't meant at any dig in terms of quality, I don't believe in that kind of characterization. Besides, ostensibly, Chinese developers have been much more successful in this space and seem to deliver better products. I just wouldn't know myself as I stay off of shortform video platforms.
The irony of Americans flocking to a CCP-approved app whose Chinese name is translated to "little red book" is just a bit too on-the-nose. For those who don't know, Little Red Book is also the literature spread during the Cultural Revolution in China that was a collection of quotes and sayings by Chairman Mao.
There's gotta be a joke in there about the communists selling the capitalists the rope the capitalists eventually hang themselves with. But, I digress.
https://www.xiaohongshu.com
Am I missing something obvious, or is that only available in one language? How do American teenagers use that?
Don't get me wrong, I consumed American media and played American video games before I understood English, so clicking around eventually led you down some path.
But isn't most of that content meant to be consumed by people who understand the language said content is made with?
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Can confirm. I had no idea about RedNote till my 18yo niece sent me a link to download it.
I think it's a troubling sign that American cultural decline is much broader and deeper than Trumpism.
Kids are born into a world where the last generation is already essentially locked into lifetime servitude, the world is burning, and the "adults in the room" are a circus. How could they not indulge in alternatives? What is there to look forward to, identify with, or love about this place?
Culture thrives when the people are able to live meaningful lives.
The Red Note nonsense is just a meme, somewhat fittingly. First, because the only place you see coverage of all the "kids flocking" is... on TikTok itself. It's always a red (heh) flag when your source for big important events comes only from the affected parties.
But secondly because Red Note is subject to exactly the same regulation as TikTok, for exactly the same reason. There's no protection or loophole there, this app is just a district court injunction away from a ban too. Literally no one cares, they just love to meme.
It isn't really whack-a-mole though, because despite the media coverage there is no "TikTok ban bill." Instead it's a "Hostile nation can't own majority stakes in media companies in the US" bill, and this SCOTUS ruling sets the precedent that can be enforced on as many entities as required.
On a more amusing note the Chinese did NOT expect a bunch of Americans to show up on RedNote, and they're not thrilled so far. It seems that sharing details of how to organize labor unions, protest against your government, 3D print weapons, and so on wasn't what they were hoping for either. There's allegedly talk of them siloing off the new joins from abroad.
So how big does Rednote need to be to "majority stakes in media companies in the US"? I don't like this ruling at all, but it feels very American to see another looming threat and say "well, I'll just wait until it gets too big to deal with it".
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US should ban all Chinese software apps and services as long as CCP does not allow Google and Facebook to operate in China. As a matter of fact not only Google and Facebook but all the Western internet social apps and services should be allowed in China. We want equal opportunity and equal rights for business. This way it is not fair play, it is botched market economy.
US should ban the Internet. Lets have huge LAN parties in every country instead!
I'm in!
Come on, we are Communist China
don't be like us
<< Second, I am pleased that the Court declines to consider the classified evidence the government has submitted to us but shielded from petitioners and their counsel. Ante, at 13, n. 3. Efforts to inject secret evidence into judicial proceedings present obvious constitutional concerns. Usually, “the evidence used to prove the Government’s case must be disclosed to the individual so that he has an opportunity to show that it is untrue.”
Good grief.. I clearly wasn't following it closely, but even the fact that this could have become a thing ( SCOTUS ruling using 'redacted' as evidence ) is severely disheartening.
> but even the fact that this could have become a thing
So you're upset that the Biden admin attempted to sway the court with secret evidence. But any admin always could behave in that way, and nothing you can do can stop that. The fact that the court decided to ignore that secret evidence should be comforting. Sure, nothing forces the court in the future to stick to that, but this is always true as to everything.
Friend. Why would you insist on painting this in a simple political framework and, more amusingly, assume I follow it that same framework? I am not upset. I am disheartened, dispirited, demoralized, and dismayed, but I am not upset.
If that is the case, why would you start the sentence with a 'so' suggesting you made a leap of logic, where nothing of the sort actually occured given that it is almost a complete non-sequitur.
I am open to a conversation, but I think, and please correct me as needed, that your political bias blinds you in ways that affect any and all discussions.
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By the given reasoning every official at the EU wonders why they ever allowed Google, Facebook or Twitter to exist.
This is balkanization.
They have been wondering about that for many years quite explicitly.
Yeah, I think WhatsApp in particular makes Facebook impossible to remove, but I fully expect X to get hit with a banhammer.
The bizarre episode with Elon this week really didn’t help given it appears his whims trump any sense of rules or basic decency.
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Officials at the EU should first wonder why there is no European equivalent of Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Tiktok (the list could continue forever).
Even if it where, such a company would not find the same obstacles in entering the American market as in would in China.
My representatives represent me, my country, its citizens and its government. They specifically do NOT represent foreign entities.
The ban only has 32% support from the US public. This isn’t happening because the government is representing its citizens.
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Given the controversy over this, they clearly do not represent "the people". I think that's a big part of the issue.
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Maybe they'll cite this ruling as part of a reconsideration?
An EU controlled app would be allowed in the US as none of them are foreign adversaries.
But the US is a foreign adversary of the EU who has ruined the EU economy in the last three years and wants to wrestle away Greenland.
Half joking, but the US performs corporate espionage in the EU and certainly takes compromising material on EU politicians whenever it can get it.
The slavish adherence from EU NPC politicians (they are mediocre and no one knows how they manage to rise) to US directives has to have some reasons. Being compromised is one of those.
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> none of them are foreign adversaries
From the US side it may look like that, but the EU doesn’t see it that way.
Until we ban Denmark as an "adversary" because they won't just hand over Greenland. Or Mexico for setting tarrifs against us (because we declared tarrifs first).
Lovely precedent we just set here.
Yup I'd be ok with banning TikTok because all of the US web services that are banned China, but this makes it seem like every country should have their own everything
Exactly, Americans want to voice their opinions whenever a foreign country considers banning or regulating an American social media platform. It's a clear double standard. The U.S. government banning foreign companies is fine, but when a foreign country bans an American company, it’s called censorship or something like that?
People don't fully understand what is at risk of being lost here. Science, history, and technology tutorials, practical life skills like cooking, budgeting, mental health, chronic illness, trauma recovery, creative expression, small businesses, home repair, friend groups, communities, and many people who make their living on TikTok. Losing TikTok means losing a massive ecosystem and all of its connections, knowledge, and content. It's like a library of books vanishing, or a large city disappearing off of a map.
Popular sites come and go. It has admittedly been a few years since we had a big shakeup of where people go to doomscroll, but this is not a paradigm shift -- it is just a chance to see who picks up the slack. It is mildly interesting speculating on whether an existing site will absorb it or if something new will come along. And it is possible TikTok will just keep running. But either way, people gonna make content, people gonna consume content.
This is always the risk of building your castle on someone else's land (or cloud).
It's insulting to compare libraries to TikTok.
TikTok isn't going away and the content isn't going away. It's just not accessible in the US.
a lot of chronic illness sub communities are bad and would be good to lose, just like cryptic pregnancy fb etc - they trigger latent mental illness in people
For those not in the know, why is cryptic pregnancy tiktok bad?
I'd never heard of it, and from what I understand, it's a hashtag people use to share stories of how they found out they were pregnant late in the pregnancy because they didn't have pregnancy symptoms. But I don't understand why that would be bad for people to share/consume.
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We have an archiving institution for stuff like that. Relying on a private business to maintain a catalogue is nonsense.
Is no one downloading the best content?
I download all my favorite YouTube videos because inevitably some disappear.
Not sure it's the best, but I've got 240K downloaded so far.
There are plenty of other places they can upload that content.
All of these points apply to YouTube, which has arguably higher quality content on all of those things.
We also risk losing so much utter nonsense and false information that I'm not at all worried. You want to learn history and science? Buy some (vetted) history and science books.
The number of times I had to correct my step-son when he repeated something he "learned" on TikTok is disturbing.
Unimportant example: He "learned" from a TikTok video that the commonly repeated command of "Open sesame!" is actually "Open says me!". That's not true, and all you have to do is read the story "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" to know that the story actually hinges on the fact that the secret word is the name of a grain/plant.
Another example: He "learned" that the video game character, Mario, is not saying "It's a me, Mario!" with an Italian accent. He "learned" that he is actually saying some Japanese word, like "Itsumi Mario!".
One more: He "learned" that "scientists" now think that "we" originally put the T-Rex fossils together incorrectly and that the animal's arm bones are actually backwards, and should be reversed to reveal that the T-Rex actually had little chicken wings instead of small arms. Anybody who has seen how bone sockets fit together knows that's nonsense.
Forgetting the political theory and morality of the ban, I say good riddance to the constant firehose of bullshit and lying morons on that app.
And for every video of quality on the platform, there's one that's blatant political propaganda, one that's blatant conspiratorial misinformation, one that's sexualizing children, etc.
It's a mixed bag. It has no more to offer than any other social network. Less, some might argue, because of how easy it is to crosspost to the other video networks.
The only way this is different from the loss of other social networks, Vine most closely, is the government is shutting down the site and collapsing the ecosystem rather than private equity.
You honestly believe most of that hasn't already be re-uploaded to other platforms and more of it won't be re-uploaded over the next month?
Yes, I believe so. It's way easier to upload something on tiktok with captions, voiceovers etc than on YouTube. You can have real communities instead of random channels.
Nothing will be lost. It will be trivial to access this content, obviously. The internet has gotten extremely adept at routing around censorship.
No one is deleting data. You just can't run the app in the US anymore. If someone cares to archive this junk, they can just do it from Australia or wherever.
Why do you call it junk? Is everything on YouTube junk, because there are some really bad and fake prank jokes? Is everything on here junk, because some people don't have the best intentions?
Seriously, even in Germany the public opinion about tiktok is so much influenced by people not even having used the app even once (seen some of the good parts of it).
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This is ban is only because US has no control over the content and organic anti Israel content was not censored like it was in all other us social platforms.
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Wait, where's the Facebook/Meta ban? Is unlawful data collection only unlawful if it's done under a foreign adversary? I guess not to the US Government where their interests align with adversarial data collection practices against its own people.
Facebook / Meta are not controlled by a foreign adversary as designated by the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". Thus they cannot become subject to the distribution restrictions designated by that law.
The core factor in the law is control by a foreign adversary, it's not a law that outlaws data collection.
I know, I was pointing out it's not really about data collection because we allow manipulative practices with our own people. We are our own worst enemy. Meaning government and corporations want that power over our people. They are protecting interests that run counter to the will of the people.
I support any ban on social media platforms because control of the public's data belongs in the hands of individuals.
60% of Bytedance is owned by outside of China investors. I fail to see how that makes it controlled by China.
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It's not about data collection, it's about being able to manipulate viewpoints based on that collection and access to people's eyeballs.
So what are the real dangers?
- Frying teenagers' brains with short attention deficit videos. That one seems logical, but others are doing it, too.
- Political indoctrination.
- Compromised politicians who can be blackmailed: The big one, but a certain island run by the daughter of a certain intelligence agency operative was largely ignored.
- Corporate espionage: Probably not happening on TikTok. Certainly happening in the EU using US products.
Look at what foreign adversaries are already actively doing: working to turn Americans against each other. Social media is the perfect tool to spread discord. Russia has troll farms that create fake news stories, manipulated photos, and incendiary memes targeted at both sides of the political spectrum. They've even orchestrated in-person protests and counter-protests to those protests, though those efforts have been less successful. Now imagine that instead of merely using fake user accounts to this end, an adversary controlled an entire social network, including its algorithm and its content guidelines and could tailor manipulative content on an individual basis.
funny many of us(Chinese) also believe that online disputes and the moral decay of teenagers are all part of a conspiracy by the US.
It's possible that we all wrong or we all right about it, or one of us are right
Or, equally as importantly, imagine if US oligarchs used to be doing that and can't as effectively anymore.
US Govt has a lot more limited say on what content is pushed or neutered.
Content relating to the genocide happening in Palestine for example, is much more restricted on US sites.
I can agree to an extent that TT (and social media in general) is an addictive app and harmful to youth and society in general. Spend enough time on these types of apps and suddenly your worldview is just whatever the TT algorithm pushes to you.
It’s not entirely unprecedented either. There was the case of FB and Myanmar/Burma which strongly promoted military propaganda. This unfortunately lead to violence against Rohingya.
But the argument is very weak in my opinion, and wouldn’t be a reason to outright ban it. Prohibition never works.
The only thing that does work is fixing our society. In the USA, we have increasing wage disparity, increasing homelessness, increasing poverty, food scarcity, water scarcity, worsening climate change related events (see Palisades fire…), and a shit ton of other issues that will remain unsolved for at least the next 4 years.
Yet leadership is doing almost nothing to address this. Neoclassical economics and neoliberalism have outright ruined this country. Fuck the culture war the billionaire class is trying to initiate.
> I can agree to an extent that TT (and social media in general) is an addictive app and harmful to youth and society in general.
You could say this about Fox News, scratch-off lottery tickets, Cocomelon, or anything you don't like.
Supreme Court only likes when data is stolen locally by good US-based corporations
It's hard not to see this as a continuation of the American corporate interests controlling the media their population consumes. TikTok I think has the largest share of American's attention out of all the social media?
Doesn't seem to matter which clown flaps about in the wind at the oval office, control of the narrative holds a steady keel for decades. This is the same story, in a new medium. Sure, as the "sides" in culture wars take turns "ruling", certain things are allowed or disallowed. The real consequential stuff, ideas and patterns that would lead to the empowerment of the working class vs hoarders of capital -- all the back to basic education, critical thinking, civic engagement, and the implicit/explicit deprioritization of any and all that in favour of obedient consumerism.
With the "new" tech they've discovered they can really shape people's opinions, tweak the emotional charge to make people act in such unconsidered ways, en masse, against each others' and their own best interest -- of course they'll hold on to that at any cost. It's unprecedented, though not unimagined.
I wonder what will fill this space. Over all the rises and falls of the various blinking nonsense, I've never really seen people go -back- to an app / service / etc. They all just wither away as the next new things comes up.
> It's hard not to see this as a continuation of the American corporate interests controlling the media their population consumes.
Do you find the natsec argument to be compelling considering:
> TikTok I think has the largest share of American's attention out of all the social media?
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> Although Trump could choose to not enforce the law
Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance.
> The nation’s highest court said in the opinion that while “data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age,” the sheer size of TikTok and its “susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects” poses a national security concern
What is the point of these "rules and regulations" and "the nation's highest court" when the president could decide just not to enforce them?
>> What is the point of these "rules and regulations" and "the nation's highest court" when the president could decide just not to enforce them?
What is the point of freedom of speech and freedom of press when we can just shut down any apps not touting the mono-party lines?
people in the us finally found a real public square to talk, and it is being shut down against the spirit of everything the US purports to stand for.
> What is the point of freedom of speech and freedom of press when we can just shut down any apps not touting the mono-party lines?
I agree with you, and wouldn't agree with a TikTok ban either if it affected me.
But how does that change anything about what I wrote?
Where was this line of thinking when it was Obama ordering the DEA to not enforce marijuana laws? Where is this line of thinking when it's a city that chooses not to enforce dog breed restrictions?
The enforcement of law being separate from the passage of law is a key plank in a functioning democracy, it's one of the safety valves against tyranny.
I doubt those events made it to HN, and the questions are obviously from people outside the US who thought that 'Supreme' means 'Supreme'.
Trump has a history of accepting bribes. Past history with this is very relevant. Let me know if Cleveland mayor is accepting bribes for pitbulls.
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The president is in charge of executing the law. It’s in our system of checks and balances. I’m choosing to speak at an extremely general level, of course, but that is the answer to your question.
Specifically, I think it's "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" (Art. II, §3).
Does that mean "If foreign companies don't like our laws, they can pay to have them adjusted"? Seems not very faithful, but I hardly understand that word anymore it feels like.
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> What is the point of these "rules and regulations" and "the nation's highest court" when the president could decide just not to enforce them?
Good question actually.
This is largely a non-starter, though? He can't choose to have it not be a law, he could choose to selectively enforce it. Where selective enforcement is assumed to be no enforcement from your post. But he could, as easily, use it to punish any company he doesn't like that is somehow in breach of it.
And this ultimately puts it in a place where you have to assume that it will be enforced against you. Right?
This isn't a new problem.
"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."
> Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance.
I agree. And the bribery already started when the Trump campaign found itself doing very well on engagement in TikTok. The CCP had already started the bribery before the election in a bid to maintain influence over the US while halting American influence in China.
The Biden administration I believe said they won't enforce the law starting Sunday, leaving it to the incoming administration to enforce. It'll be wildly popular for Trump to save TikTok, so I expect he'll do it without forcing a sale.
From what I've heard, not enforcing the ban doesn't really work. Apple/Google would be liable if the law does get enforced. So unless they've gone completely insane and want to give Trump a threat to wield over them for his whole term, they'll surely act as if it's being enforced. The term on the law is 5 years too, so even if they do have perfect trust in Trump never changing his mind, they have to worry about the next President deciding to enforce it too.
> Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance.
News story from yesterday, "TikTok CEO expected to attend Trump inauguration as ban looms":
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/...
Veering off-topic but I don't understand how there isn't wide-spread protests/riots right now in the US. Is the working/middle class just accepting all of this, even when it's apparent the government is being sold for quick cash?
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Incredible stuff, really.
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Strategically, they start with cases the public is more likely to support, and then the precedent, law, norms, mechanisms, etc. are all there to take it further. Another common step is demonization, in this case of anything Chinese, TikTok, and, to a degree, of anything not 'American'.
Look at oppression of unpopular groups. They've started with groups, such as undocumented immigrants and trans people, already unpopular groups and easy targets. They demonize them extensively and make oppression acceptable to the public. Now there is precedent; by now, people don't even object to it on the grounds of human rights, justice, or humanitarianism; stereotype, prejudice, and hatred are no longer taboo. Soon there will be camps, a police force accustomed to and trained in mass arrest, and a public accustomed to it as a legitimate mechanism.
Why was a sale of TikTok allowed if the bill was anything to do with banning dissenting viewpoints?
I didn't see a sale of TikTok anywhere? The main point of issue I have with the bill is that the text of the bill [0] specifies that any company if it is owned by a "foreign adversary" (as defined by Congress) and the President deems it to be a threat will be forced to divest or stop participating in the American market.
Part of the core reason that TikTok didn't want to divest was that they had ownership of a damn good algorithm and didn't want to share it. It's not a big leap from this to banning other companies that might have competing algorithms that could eat into major US corporations. If Egypt designs a better X does Elon get to urge it's bad because it's a threat?
I also think it's a pretty badly written bill in general. The bill won't punish or ByteDance. It punishes the digital infrastructure companies like Apple, Google and Oracle who provide the ability to download the app or the database.
I'm not defending TikTok or claiming it's not an security threat. I just think that the bill is poorly written and doesn't deal with the actual root of the problem.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
Because if it's owned by a US company the US government will have more control over its content? Especially if it gets bought by one of the country's oligarchs? Honestly seems pretty obvious.
I like more details/discussion; but the take in this podcast feels incredibly naive and conspiratorial; going isnofaras to blame Israeli dark money for the 'ban' while ignoring the legally mandated CCP integration w/ large companies (while claiming "i have no way to know if there is integration" despite it being easily searchable).
That's a fair point. I personally disagreed with some of the points brought up in the podcast, and I completely see what you mean about the "conspiratorial" tone. What I still think is worth discussing (albeit a bit late now) is the scope and lack of checks on the powers granted.
Somehow people shilling for Russia can operate unimpeded in this country.
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Banning an app because of China's threat only makes you resemble China itself.
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Telling others what they must want is an example of that famous freedom of expression, right?
Is there a difference between the communists and the capitalists spying on 'US'?
The sitting president of the United States of America was banned by almost every major AMERICAN company, and even some Canadian companies (Shopify), yet we're going after Tiktok.
No Chinese ever banned the sitting president of the United States.
Company banned user who fragrantly and continually violated TOS, regardless of who they were... the horror!
These are the tweets he was banned for:
> The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!
> To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.
Twitter said the first tweet "is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an 'orderly transition'" and the second is "being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate".
So they banned him because they wanted to not because of TOS violations. If you can interpret "I will not attend" as "It's illegitimate" you can interpret anything as anything and ban anyone for any TOS provision.
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What founding principle is the SCOTUS saying doesn't matter with this ruling?
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Thank you, finally a real patriot in the comments
Good riddance.
The clock is still "tiking" for TikTok.
As usual, the digital crack / cocaine addicts of this generation are now running to Red note for their next fresh hit in less than 48 hours.
Nothing's changed. Just a new brand of digital crack / cocaine has overtaken another one who's supply is getting cut off by the US.
Although a fine would be better than an outright ban as I said before.
In a developed country, government would ensure its citizens receive top notch education so that they are able by themselves to understand that using a Chinese owned app is just as bad as using Facebook for instance and so these app would be dead, no one would use them.
Instead when you cut so hard on education that you get millions of flat earth believers, you got to protect them from their own behavior with law. But as far as I know, no law can prevent little Jimmy from putting crayons up his nose.
Blocking TikTok won't just make its user look for better privacy, or at least more independent alternative. They will use something else just as bad or worst.. little red book for instance.
Little red book is truly evil. Every Chinese woman I know uses it. It is truly brain rotting. The relationship advice that it promulgates is every bit as toxic as the stuff on TikTok and instagram
How's it worse for me, personally, to give up PII to Tik Tok as opposed to - well, all the US-owned equivalents.