The irony is that we were just about to witness US govt forcing said "private entities" to ban specific applications.
to some degree? No, they are completely controlled by China.
> "WeChatApp spies on the content that all users send to each other, including Americans. The results are fed into their censorship of Chinese users" [1]
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Key findings rom the Citizen lab research report, which is quite comprehensive [2]:
> Documents and images transmitted entirely among non-China-registered accounts undergo content surveillance wherein these files are analyzed for content that is politically sensitive in China.
>Upon analysis, files deemed politically sensitive are used to invisibly train and build up WeChat’s Chinese political censorship system.
[1] https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1258391908319137797
This is a matter of perspective.
Do you think the question is "if the CCP tells Tencent to do something, will they do it?", or "does Tencent do anything the CCP doesn't tell it to do?"?
I think that difference is not that wide as people believe. Throwing money into advertising on any platform will get you close or beyond ideological subversion or active measures.
All you have to do is look at the radicalization and the polarization of left and right in the US and you will see you don't need a state controlled entity at all.
FB/Twitter/Tiktok are different because they control WHAT you see. None of them show things chronologically. Their algorithms show things that are popular, and the weights they use are trade secrets. Being able to influence ideas takes classic advertising, or even targeted advertising, to an entirely new level. It has an entirely different set of legal and ethical challenges.
To bypass the filter then I slightly modify images to change their hash, or record video of the video/image/text. Maybe soon they’ll start making fake likes from friends so that people can’t use inactivity as a way of detecting shadowbans, or maybe they’ll make the posts only visible to a small subset of friends.
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-e...
It is much easier to enforce laws on a US-based company than a foreign one.
Continue is the wrong word. Nothing is done by legislation or these companies themselves to properly regulate these platforms.
There is also nothing preventing foreign influence on U.S.-based company platforms, which is already happening, and has been happening, unchecked.
I have used WeChat daily for over three years. There is not a single instance in which I have been unduly influenced. I use it to message, video chat, and pay for things. That simply is not true for YouTube, Twitter, Google, Apple, etc. I can't even go to YouTube without having unremovable, unhidable ads for Trump. We also have a situation where the sitting president has rented out the YouTube homepage for an entire week prior to the election. It's naivety, and frankly delusional, to think the U.S. is somehow at threat by WeChat and not the multitude of sly behavior going on with U.S.-based companies.
U.S.-based companies and culture have long been driven by highly concentrated special interest groups, from Hollywood to Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and all of this amounts to undue influence and control upon the American people, who have been manipulated into playing the game.
Believe it or not, US foreign policy people put out enormous amounts of propaganda and they got the US to repeal a ban on importing news from state regime change news like Radio Free Europe in 2012.
Personally, I am suspicious of all of these corporations, but I'd rather all of them be allowed than the USG be able to dictate who is allowed to say what. That always works out so well. Foreign government news agencies and companies are much more likely to criticize the (obviously insane) USG on grounds that fundamentally disagree with policy direction rather than the tactical disagreement you find in the US mainstream press.
There's a very good (but LONG) documentary you can watch about the FP community called "A Very Heavy Agenda". Part 2 covers how the US FP community responded to the Ukraine presidential election crisis and Russian interference in 2014-2015. https://averyheavyagenda.com/
The fact that we regard their coverage as propaganda and not ours is quite telling given the entanglements between government and the media here, the ownership by a small group of large corporations, and the ability of larger corporations to yank ad dollars when they hear something they don't like.
The only honest position imo is to allow all comers to state their viewpoint, which is the foundation of liberal democracy and enshrined in the first amendment. Just keep their viewpoint in mind when watching as you would for an American network. Also, don't just accept something because someone authoritative said something, it has to fit into a logical picture of the world.
We're not at war with Russia lol and god help us if we were. They have nukes!
So either WeChat, Facebook, and whoever can facilitate protected speech among their users (in this case you're protecting the users specifically) or the various platforms are treated as publishers which still wouldn't allow the US government to prevent or compel speech (protecting the organization).
It's possible they can get away with banning the payment portions of the app but the outright ban appears to be prior restraint of free speech by the government.
As a non-American, my question is why does WeChat have first amendment rights? It's not an American company.
In that framework, the US government is not to violate anyone's freedom of speech anywhere in the world. That doesn't seem to be what's at issue in this case though; the case was brought by a group of US-based WeChat users on grounds that the ban would restrict their freedom to communicate with people in China who are unable to use other communication services.
> Yes.
We might also observe that the only mention of "people" in the first amendment gives them the rights to assemble and to petition the government.
Freedoms of speech and the press are phrased as restrictions on Congress, not as rights given to anyone (and this is probably the main justification for extending first amendment rights to foreigners, which appears to be a popular but not universal viewpoint).
of Free Speech is arbitrarily granted, then it's not free speech, and that violates Prior Restraint, at least, if the Courts are not also arbitrarily deciding who's free speech deserves to be protected.
Note the subject.
So yes, the First Amendment is okay with any censoring of information by a foreign government or company.
"Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
I don't see any mention of government there. Why limit the interpretation of free speech to the US constitution? How do you reconcile ideologically or philosophically that it is not ok for US Congress to limit speech but ok for other powerful entities?
Because that's literally what the grandparent asked. You appear to have a completely different question.
Also, the Chinese communist party/government has recently decided to tighten the noose on its private companies: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/business/china-communist-... which makes wechat a national threat.
It is documented fact that FB, Google and the rest are tapped by US intelligence agencies. Anyone remembers Snowden? We know for fact that pretty much every single global US network works with the US government, but when comes to TikTok and WeChat something yet to be proven(I am sure they do but the evidence is weaker than the evidence if US internet companies working with the US government on surveillance). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
EU was trying to fix this through GDPR and such but US seems to desperately wanting to embrace the Chinese model and with US cultural lead, this will inevitably open the way to other governments ban FB, Google and the others because if TikTok is a national security risk to the USA then obviously Facebook and Google are to them. Probably Amazon and all other ad networks too. Anything that can be started from a dorm room will no longer be able to go global.
This will lead to a world where if you want to do a global project you will have to incorporate in every country you want to operate. It is even possible that internet to break up in patches and operating even a forum website becomes like Coca-Cola opening a plant in another country.
It is a very bleak future for humanity if you ask me. Can be good for local businesses though.
I wish the US went the EU path(regulating data handling) instead of Russa/China path(banning) so we could still have global networks and kids in their dorms could continue creating products with global impact.
What a shame.
> Yeah these are real problems, I agree. And US citizens should continue to put pressure on their politicians to pass more privacy-related legislation
> But my point wasn't really about data collection, it was about influence and content-control. People are readily influenced by memes, ads, headlines, etc which is why such platforms are so problematic because people are not comfortable with how much influence they have and how easily misinformation is spread.
> What am I less comfortable with is leaving a path open for China to have that same kind of control in the US as FB/Google/etc, but without being subject to US laws like our private entities are.
US can regulate the internet companies to mitigate the risk when keeping the global community intact. Make foreign services run on US servers when serving US citizens, make them disclose what and how they process the data. Then if they don't obey the laws can be enforced to obey the laws. Which law TikTok broke? There is no law forbidding being Chinese and successful, that's the US political system failing to have what they want and embracing Chinese ways of doing things. It could be also a failure of the US market to stay competitive due to monopolies, giving lead to China in innovation.
But somehow the freedom loving Americans cannot be told to wear a mask but can be told which app the can use, just like in China. It's mind boggling.
In the 1960s it created a government-funded television network to offer alternative programming. But television is an old medium, and less of a source of information today -- partly because it's been supplanted by social media.
It seems like there's inevitably going to be a need for some kind of content moderation -- but maybe that could be handled by local librarians, local newspapers. (At least that's a solution that actually scales.)
Also, as Snowden has shown us, the line between private and state control is very, very thin.
Trust, but verify.
How is for example Facebook better because it isn't somehow tied in to the US government? On the one hand the state still have access to all the data from Facebook it wants (NSA, warrants) but on the other they have a hard time protecting its users privacy rights. I'm not convinced private entities are any better. For a US citizen maybe Facebook is better as a private entity but for everyone else outside the US?
Personally I would rather put my data in a Chinese-owned Tiktok than an American one because of the extreme amount of data already flowing into US services. Even if Tiktok is used to spy on me I can't see how it would be any worse for an European than putting more data into US services.
But my point wasn't really about data collection, it was about influence and content-control. People are readily influenced by memes, ads, headlines, etc which is why such platforms are so problematic because people are not comfortable with how much influence they have and how easily misinformation is spread.
What am I less comfortable with is leaving a path open for China to have that same kind of control in the US as FB/Google/etc, but without being subject to US laws like our private entities are.
If TikTok and WeChat's usage becomes more widespread in the voting population of the US, they would have a lot of influence by controlling what kind of content its users sees; e.g., FB has been criticized many times for this, namely performing psychological experiments on its users
I recall this quote by former KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov:
> The main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. Only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage and such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures ... or psychological warfare
The difference between TikTok and WeChat and FB/Google/Twitter is obvious: the former are to some degree controlled by China and the latter are private entities.
I understand there are services part of WeChat that are essential to users, so I would hope there is a good compromise here. I don't see why the communication component of the app can't continue to exist but WeChat is a lot more than a chat app.