Comment by hintymad
11 hours ago
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.
The evidence and reasoning by Congress was all "non-justiciable" by the courts.
Congress looked at some evidence and made a decision. That is their purview and our checks-and-balances do not allow the courts to second-guess Congress like that. They can look at the "how" of the law, but not the "why".
Specifically the court looked at "what is congress' goal and is there any other way to achieve that goal that doesn't stop as much speech" and there isn't, but they can't question the validity of Congress' goals.
So there's no point in Bytedance arguing any of it, at least not in court.
It would have been great for ByteDance to IPO TikTok in the USA, it has had plenty of time to do so, it would have made lots of people boatloads of money, Chinese and Americans alike. Even Snapchat, which had similar levels of pervasive arrogance, IPO'd.
Yes. The Chinese government probably lost its citizens around $100b by not allowing TikTok to sell.
So, you could say that that sweet large scale mind control is apparently worth more than $100b to them...
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In the late 80s and early 90s, the foreign-exchange reserves of China was less than a billion dollars. The US government could spend $50M to negotiate a lot of things from China, like having a war with Vietnam even though it was Soviet who was behind Vietnamese government. Nowadays, Chinese government could easily say fuck this $100B. Papa can afford it to call your bluff.
It's great that an entire nation can gain wealth through hard work and good strategic decisions, at least in some way. But it hurts me that the US lost its way in the process by losing so much manufacturing capabilities, to the point that we can't even adequately produce saline solutions, nor could we make shells or screws for our war planes cheaply.
When you think of it as enough money to give a $100 bill to ~everybody in china, wow. That’s quite a bit of money.
Any amount of $$$ earned by CCP will not be easily passed down to citizens.
I’d be interested if there’s any objective measure of how much a countries money is passed down back to its citizens or hoarded by people in power. Is there any such measure?
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You don't put your treasure for sale, at least not when you have extracted its value first.
So why didn’t they? Cmon. Is that not enough evidence to show you that something else is at play here? Of course going public would have been the honest and rational move. Communist governments would never
>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.
I think in a national security paradigm, you model threats and threat capabilities rather than reacting to threats only after they are realized. This of course can and has been abused to rationalize foreign policy misadventures and there's a real issue of our institutions failing to arrest momentum in that direction.
But I don't think the upshot of those problems is that we stop attempting to model and respond to national security threats altogether, which appears to be the implication of some arguments that dispute the reality of national security concerns.
> Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.
I think this is a great point, but perhaps their hands were tied, because it's a policy decision by congress in the aforementioned national security paradigm and not the kind of thing where it's incumbent on our govt to prove a specific injury in order to have authority to make policy judgments on national security.
As a European I have to ask is this really the way you want to go?
Because we could make nearly the same argument for banning Facebook.
If you look at the people defending TikTok, if you ask similar questions they won't try to defend it either, it's an immediate switch to whataboutism with regards to native US tech companies or arguing that the US Gov is more dangerous than the CCP.
But all that only just confirms the priors of the people who are pro-Ban. And unfortunately it's about justifying why we shouldn't ban TikTok, not why we should ban TikTok. They can't provide a good justification for that, the best they can is just poison the well and try to attack those same institutions. But turns out effectively saying "fuck you" to Congress isn't going to work when Congress has all the power here.
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This is just hypocrisy baiting, this isn't a real analysis at any level. They didn't bring ANY evidence for them to argue against, it was purely an opinion by the state that there could exist a threat, which again is not supported by evidence, true or not. America has a lot to gain by controlling tiktok and one American billionaire will become a lot richer, that's all there is to it. I mean both candidates used tiktok to campaign while wanting to ban it. It's just a ridiculous notion and even they know that.
"Oh you love hamburgers? Then why did you eat chicken last night? Hmmm, curious... You are obviously guilty"
There was evidence and it was discussed in the ruling by the Supreme Court. Please read it.
For example, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf
Gorsuch pg 3
Assuming you mean this:
It basically just says that the app asks for the user's contact list, and that if the user grants it, the phone OS overshares information. That's really thin as evidence of wrong-doing. It doesn't even say that this capability is currently coded into the app. This sounds more like an Android/iOS problem - why is the contact sharing all or nothing? Would the ban still be OK if the app didn't have read contact permissions?
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Can you link it here would be super grateful
It's super interesting to see the custom code in TikTok not in Reels that can enable this not into politics but the algo would be cool to look at
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Do they do this with other bans, like those against network hardware? Other countries sell their goods here at the American government's leisure. It's always been this way.