It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.
Going by “national security” reasons most countries should ban Facebook and google, not to mention amazon, Microsoft, oracle, Cisco etc. since the us government has already shown willingness and ability to spy on anything they can get their hands on, including foreign heads of state. Allowing US controlled social media and other tech companies is a huge risk.
Of course power doesn’t balance that way so they don’t.
What I find bizarre about the Tiktok ban is that they are being banned essentially on executive whim: as far as I can tell, there are no concrete allegations, much less evidence, that they're violating any US laws.
But it's not OK for the US to keep out spyware. Heck, retaliation for China's banning of Google etc would be sufficient justification for banning TikTok on its own.
The issue isn’t a tit-for-tat they block, we block issue, with the US and China acting like playground children.
The issue is whether or not the rule-of-law still means anything in the US. Have the executive block things pretty much arbitrarily undermines the rule-of-law.
If the US wants to block Chinese companies, then pass laws in congress to do so. Don’t let your executive do an end run around your democratic process.
The courts are doing exactly that, determining whether the executive has the authority to implement this. This is in fact the rule-of-law in action.
This is also the reason why the rule-of-law is lacking in China, the courts rarely if ever finds against the government in constitutional matters like these. Their system was designed for the CCP to retain power.
That's not how the rule-of-law works. The bill of attainder doesn't allow the US gov't to punish an entity (or a group of) arbitrarily by legislating.
The legislative and executive branches have already been briefed on privacy and/or security threat Tiktok poses to US. The US senate already passed a bill to ban federal employees from using Tiktok on gov't issued devices, which is exactly what the legislative is supposed to be doing without overreaching and impinging on Americans' civil liberty, and Trump in turn issued executive orders to deter national security/privacy threats from foreign entities. The judicial branch likewise appropriately exercised their power by delaying Trump's EO and challenging his authority.
That's precisely how the rule-of-law is supposed to work in the US -- there is nothing novel or arbitrary here.
That's independent of the rule of law being preferable to the alternative.
The rule of law itself doesn't put much of a constraint on what the government can do, it just requires proper form.
If US wants to retaliate China by becoming more China, well, surely China isn’t the only one getting hurt.
It's like butting your head against the wall to teach the other fellow not to but his own head against the wall.
Plus it goes against the US's low restrictions and limitations on doing business.
What you are saying is that unless PRC becomes like the US, the US has to become like PRC. I'm amazed how this is not clear to anyone following this. The only way to go forward and not become what you are pointing fingers at is taking the high road. The US is clearly not doing so.
Be noted that China is not a country under rule of law.
When Google was blocked, there was no primary legislation stipulating that online content shall be censored in whatsoever way. There were vague administrative rules (secondary legislation) with questionable applicability. Today, there is only one piece of primary legislation with a section on online censorship in China, but this section targets ISPs only, not content providers.
EDIT2: corrections
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
The US Senate unanimously approved a bill banning federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices last month. So there is some consensus among lawmakers that some sort of privacy and/or security threat exists -- it's hardly on "executive whim."
I suspect the answer is that Tiktok is just doing the same as Facebook etc, and that's unacceptable only because the mined data might go to China.
As an example, they could make it illegal for all video hosting companies operating in the US to censor videos on Taiwan, Tienanmen and Tibet.
Which would probably run afoul of the first amendment. Freedom of speech requires freedom to refrain from speech.
But even if that would fail, I am sure that a team full of lawyer could find something which would be incompatible with Chinese law.
* In a sense that Google didn't want to follow Chinese laws anymore.
FWIW, Google already has a substantial presence in China, but they don't target consumers there.
I work at a French software company in Shanghai (outside any pilot zone fwiw) and we don't have or need a local partner. Our software is on-prem so data storage is not an issue.
Yes.
As a European, I believe in Europe (and in the rest of the world) we should definitively ban most US tech be it for ethical reasons or national security. Same for China.
EU Politicians don't seem to understand the situation yet, but given the current technological cold war happening, I hope we'll wake up soon and switch either to open tech or at least to our own local tech.
China's tech could also be used, but I am not a Trump supporter. I would be more afraid of Trump facist controlled NSA backdoors monitoring me than CCP seeing my dance moves
Yes.
A single laptop has likely hundreds of processing units, running unknown software, often with direct access to the memory buss. Building a secure devices however where every bit of code and every bit of hardware is designed domestically (and preferable in house) is so prohibitively expensive that no one do that. The hope is that if there is a security fault then someone else will find it and report it, and so a reputation system is the only economical viable method for hardware security in most consumer devices.
Edit: Quite a lot of high end cpu are now done in Taiwan TSMC, they caught up to US capabilities. But most of intels cpu's are still made in US.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
By the way, they never provided any proof and even better, claimed that their laptop broke when pressed.
Edit: this too? Mob mentality here. Sad. Lol if this is being downvoted I have some words for you.
It is highly duplicitous to be sabre rattling over perceived ideological differences, when America's own ideology is couched in immensely contradicting - nay, hypocritical - failures to conduct state affairs according to International law.
>It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.
This is also true of American companies, especially those with a trillion dollar profit motive in the military-industrial endless-war market.
Be very, very careful about what doors you open with statements such as this:
>If you want some sort of smoking gun evidence you're not going to find it, unless you somehow have a security clearance in China good enough to gain knowledge about their operations
We know all too well how tightly wrapped up in its deep state secrets America's own heinous crimes against humanity are .. and if you are so sure of your own states innocence that you feel warranted in calling for other states' downfall for similar reasons, you must surely be willing to discuss America's own human rights abuses in a similar light.
No? Then the moral authority you claim does not exist.
It is pretty accepted no government has the higher morale ground. You can dig enough in any past or present to find evil or good.
The political regime of the countries you deal with is not a national security issue in itself, that's not what national security means. Certainly, 'dictatorship' is not a national security issue. Some of the US's "best friends" were, and are, dictatorships.
Neither Bytedance nor TikTok are Chinese companies.
It's true that Bytedance has buildings in Beijing, and a Chinese app (Taotiao) that is a Chinese subsidiary, but Bytedance is a Cayman's Islands company and TikTok doesn't even have servers inside China.
For purposes of the Chinese National Intelligence Law compelling the company to share user information with the CCP, Apple shares way more user data than TikTok does.
Sure, it's incorporated in the Caymans, but we all know that that is just a technicality.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-unlikely-approve-ti...
Can you prove to me that any company, domestic or otherwise, operating in the US has its national security in mind over shareholder value?
How far reaching does the rule of law go? Like the US is governed by rule of law, but when you bring in international elements, can all parties operate under rule of law ?
It seems almost in this case that the argument made by the US is actually that TikTok is not governed under an agreed upon rule of laws. Such as it needing to share information with the CCP or having to comply to any other of their wishes.
Also, rule of laws just means the laws define the regulations which apply equally to everyone (which means everyone that bought into the society which honors those laws). So the question here is, do the laws give the president the ability to block a foreign company in such situation? If not, then this should be blocked, though laws could be made to block the company as well, just not exclusively enacted by the president.
Yes, Congress has given the President the power to “regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” [1], “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat” [2]. This is the power that Trump is purporting to exercise.
They also published Bytedance’s written complaint for injunctive relief, but it’s hard to know which arguments the judge accepted: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/tikto...
In my opinion, absolutely. Stop it now before it gets too powerful to ban. WeChat already has 19 million US users.
The status quo is that you only need some minor skill at language games to talk about forbidden topics without using any keywords that trigger censorship. With a ban in place, at least one of the participants additionally has to circumvent their country's firewall to reach the other side. Censoring censored media even more is not a good way to fight censorship.
I'm also not sure why you think "How much time would you really spend discussing Tiananmen or criticizing the CCP?" is talking about TikTok, since you can absolutely do that there https://www.tiktok.com/tag/tiananmen
Ideally people would stop using it by choice. Perhaps too much to ask, but I know enough people that wouldn't use it precisely because of these issues.
Agreed that it is easy to play language games, but maybe your intention is to draw attention of a larger crowd that would be completely oblivious to it.
Trying to "win the hearts and minds" of the Chinese people is a lost cause. Either they agree with the CCP or they've adapted to its restrictions. All we can do is try to keep that ideology from spreading beyond their borders.
Other countries historically accompanying the US in the top GDP pair included the soviet union and japan, so no surprise that today china would get the two minutes hate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_largest_h...
(right now I'd say india is too underdeveloped and too important a part of Oceania, but assuming the US remains in a position to believe it embodies power two or three decades from now, we'll see if india gets the hate, too.)
Iran, on the other hand, was a brit show up until Ajax (1953) or so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–United_Kingdom_relations#... The US would not formally take the baton before ending Suez (1957).
[1] In the lost opportunities department, General Wedemeyer on "who lost china?" (emphasis mine):
> "If Uncle Sugar, Russia, and Britain united strongly in their endeavor to bring about a coalition of these two political parties [the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party] in China by coercing both sides to make realistic concessions, serious post-war disturbance may be averted and timely effective military employment of all Chinese may be obtained against the Japanese. I use the term coercion advisedly because it is my conviction that continued appeals to both sides couched in polite diplomatic terms will not accomplish unification."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Coady_Wedemeyer#China-B...
[2] thanks to burnaway's excellent search fu: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24490540 I learned US propaganda in 1914-1918 had not only been officially going to russia, but also the then-white entities (where American Expeditionary Forces were operating) archangel and siberia.
You should probably break the news to them, given their continued behavior I'm not sure they're aware it's all a front.
Maybe not in the mass media, but the new cold war preceded Trump as an issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_foreign_policy_of_t...
It's not a company. It's a division of a foreign government. That was the point being made. If it was an independent company, none of this would be happening.
Can you elaborate on this? As far as I can tell this is just not the case, and none of the people saying it are clarifying what they mean.
TLDR; the CCP does whatever it wants whenever it wants, and is deeply ingrained in every major corporation at the highest levels.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_People%27s...
[2] https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-th...
[3] https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3045053/c...
ByteDance Ltd. (Cayman) -> TikTok Ltd. (Cayman) -> TikTok LLC. (US)
Legally it is indeed a company and not controlled by the CCP, but exactly how much of its US operations are conducted and directed by non-US citizens on non-US soil is unknown.
A lot of companies are incorporated in the Cayman Islands, or in Ireland, or other tax havens, but we don't generally refer to them as Cayman companies or Irish companies.
TikTok's parent company ByteDance has sought permission from the Chinese government to export technology, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. ByteDance filed a request with the Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau asking for approval to export its technology under restrictions recently implemented by the Chinese government, according to Bloomberg. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/bytedance-seeks-china-govern...
First, it being incorporated in the Caymans is a technicality. ByteDance's headquarters are in Beijing[1] and they don't speak of a Cayman Islands office. In addition...
> As with many Chinese companies, the company has an internal Chinese Communist Party committee serving the party members among the employees, with vice president Zhang Fuping serving as its Party Committee Secretary. It also has a strategic partnership with the Ministry of Public Security for the ministry's public relations efforts, and joint ventures with a state-run publisher in Beijing and media firm in Shanghai. ... It has garnered public attention over allegations that it worked with the Chinese Communist Party to censor and surveil content pertaining to Xinjiang re-education camps and other topics the Party deemed controversial. [2]
[1] https://www.inputmag.com/culture/tiktok-weirdly-tries-to-sug...
It says right there in your link that Bytedance is legally a Cayman's Islands company.
US OpSec is terrible and it's still obvious.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/05/huawei-would-have-to-give-da...
"Huawei would be forced to hand over 5G data to the Chinese government if it was asked for it, because of national security laws, experts told CNBC."
...is really no different from the US, is it?
And while China has lots of problems, citing a lack of "rule of law" in this context is rather brave. Also: if you believe everything called "communist party" is "communist", you definitely have to pay the beer at the next "RePUBlican Party" meeting.
It is enormously different in that it is judicially reviewable (if not in need of an outright warrant) and the USA is a country where there are limits on government. This post, specifically the "judge temporarily blocks" is proof that the USA is a fundamentally different country.
> Also: if you believe everything called "communist party" is "communist", you definitely have to pay the beer at the next "RePUBlican Party" meeting.
I have not commented on communism as a general topic at all. I am specifically talking about the entity named the Chinese Communist Party.
The US government is already unconstitutionally doing what you say that judicial review prevents, and the partisan (by design) Supreme Court simply refuses to take the case. So much for judicial review.
There is no check for power, only balances of power. And power in the US tends to agree on such things as much as power within the CCP.
Consider what would happen if you decried the powers of the CCP on a China-based platform. Consider what would happen to you, personally, if you did so while living in China.
Obviously, China silences dissenters. However, most of the comments in this thread probably wouldn't even be removed.
Take this study (cited 1600 times) from Harvard:
https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-...
Both that can be true and it can also be true that the Chinese government is worse to their own citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_dissidents
Here's some internet-specific examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#A...
Every country on Earth gives its executive some discretion when dealing with foreign powers. The idea that TikTok should have the same due process rights as American corporations is naive (putting it mildly).
"Rule of law" means you need to have a specific rule to govern government's action. The use of the catch-all "national security" justification here is in itself proof that nothing better exists in US law, or they would cite that.
Among the free countries, I'm most familiar with the EU's laws: there are some provisions limiting, for example, acquisitions of land, mergers, and military technology to countries like China. But there's no "we don't like them" power. Those powers belong to a king, not a president.
EU companies have explicit guarantees against discrimination in other EU countries, and most every trade agreement contains similar provision. I believe even WTO rules, which both China and the US are theoretically bound by, would exclude arbitrary bans.
What I'm saying is it's largely hypocritical -- telling China they need to open up their markets to foreign businesses from America just the way Americans do for foreign entities, and then once a Chinese company becomes successful enough to garner the slightest bit of attention forcing a sale to an American company. It's exactly the thing America has been accusing China of doing for mandatory joint ventures.
They can do it, by all means, however it further erodes the brand value of America on the world stage as "open for business."
With those who are open for business.
This is basically America telling the world to accept American companies, no questions asked, no matter how big or manipulative. Criticizing other countries for their protectionist self-serving practices. And then literally the second a foreign product gets big and interesting enough forcing their sale to a US domestic entity. This is what America is complaining China does.
The worst part? Instead of trying to find some basis in law as one does in a rule-of-law jurisdiction, they just pulled out the national security™ ban-hammer, which cannot be challenged in a meaningful way. That's straight out of China's playbook. If rule of law is the china shop, national security justifications are the bull.
They just ceded the entirety of what was left of the high ground.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershe...
And by the way, the US govt certainly pushes for free trade, but that actually means implementation on a bilateral country-by-country basis (a couple dozen countries or so by now). The public is certainly never going to go for unilateral free trade with anyone who wants to sell anything. I'm sure that's true for almost every country.
there's got to be some limitation on where you draw the line on the government exercising this absolute and arbitrary power, i'm curious where exactly it is. could they shut down twitter for national security reasons? what about shopify - they're canadian, and the government is already levying tariffs against canadian imports for national security reasons, so the national security threat is already justified. should they be able to ban shopify with no concrete justification beyond claiming it's a vague threat to national security?
I don't think you're saying that, though.
Maybe a better solution is allowing the us government unfettered access to source code, algorithms, data collection, etc.
Edit - it seems reasonable that if a private company is able to massively influence the countries politics they should be scrutinized more closely. IMO it’s like have 1 national newspaper, but it’s a social platform rather than newspaper.
It's pretty obvious: TikTok could be a potent propaganda tool, and in a time of increasing geopolitical tensions, you don't hand an adversary nation potential weapons like that. Also, Chinese intelligence is interested in collecting information on Americans (and others) that an app like TikTok could provide. For instance:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/politics/trump-china-t...
> WASHINGTON — The cyberattack on the Marriott hotel chain that collected personal details of roughly 500 million guests was part of a Chinese intelligence-gathering effort that also hacked health insurers and the security clearance files of millions more Americans, according to two people briefed on the investigation....
> Such information is exactly what the Chinese use to root out spies, recruit intelligence agents and build a rich repository of Americans’ personal data for future targeting. With those details and more that were stolen from insurers like Anthem, the Marriott data adds another critical element to the intelligence profile: travel habits.
> James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, said the Chinese have collected “huge pots of data” to feed a Ministry of State Security database seeking to identify American spies — and the Chinese people talking to them.
> “Big data is the new wave for counterintelligence,” Mr. Lewis said.
Yeah... the Chinese could, like, get the inside scoop on some serious teen drama.
Perhaps an appropriate response here would be to detect this manipulation and highlight and educate people about it. Possibly create regulation to outlaw specific types of highly problematic aspects of it. But I find it hard to simultaneously accept that it's both so subtle as to be undetectable and unregulatable and yet so terrible it warrants arbitrary restraint of free speech.
Protecting free speech of geopolitical competitors (China) and their economic agents (TikTok) is legitimate avenue for democratic destabilization.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
This isn’t playing the “devil’s advocate” (which-the devil here does not need any advocacy) this is a request to prove a potential negative.
Can we please retire the tactic of giving the devil representation in such a blatant and cavalier fashion?
we don't need the evidence for TikTok's case when we already have the evidence of what Facebook is capable of (think about their A/B testing people without ethical considerations to whether they can be made depressed by showing them certain posts ... or the many other ways US social media giants are now critical to shaping the political discourse outside of the US from the UK to Myanmar to Hungary ...)
this isn't about hacking or 0days or even spying on Americans but about whether we allow them to control a machine that allows continuous manipulation of billions of people outside China.
Letting a non-ally control a social media platform and what content billions of people around the world are fed (or NOT fed) is too much of a risk for the US. Ofc the US does it too but their logic is that they're the "good guys".
If you think the CCP having this data could be a problem, you can't wait until they collect it all and use it in order to stop them.
There is a reason laws like GDPR prevent even the mere collection of data, and don't wait until Google does something wrong with the data in order to stop them.
Are you uncomfortable adopting that belief with literally no concrete evidence that anything of the sort is actually occurring?
I don't know how you reconcile rule of law with such drastic interventions in the rights of companies without evidence of wrongdoing. If anything you can come up with in your most paranoid fantasies can be the basis of shutting down a company, pretty much anything can be done to anyone on the basis of anything, no?