Why is TikTok of all things where we're making our stand? I don't buy it.
Having arbitrary companies buy the mines is something that they occasionally do - however, that comes with the risk of exposing themselves to the corruption and issues of the country where the mines are located. The FCPA https://www.trade.gov/us-foreign-corrupt-practices-act makes it difficult for companies that aren't going to use bribery to compete against other companies and countries where corruption isn't seen as an issue.
These can make it rather difficult for the United States government or a company based in the United States to try to "buy up" the raw materials of other countries.
TikTok, however, is a way for one government that the US has a strained relationship with to potentially direct the public discourse in the US or use it to track / identify individuals. The spying that was mentioned is https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-by...
> TikTok has admitted that it used its own app to spy on reporters as part of an attempt to track down the journalists’ sources, according to an internal email.
> The data was accessed by employees of ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company and was used to track the reporters’ physical movements. The company’s chief internal auditor Chris Lepitak, who led the team involved in the operation, has been fired, while his China-based manager Song Ye has resigned.
> ...
> ByteDance and TikTok had initially issued categorical denials of the allegations when they were first reported. The company claimed it “could not monitor US users in the way the article suggested”, and added that TikTok had never been used to “target” any “members of the US government, activists, public figures or journalists”. Those claims are now acknowledged to be false.
US does this for Oil rather. It isn't so sophisticated in mining. But it has occupied the Syrian oil fields and uses them to supply military bases.
Crickets in the media - because it wouldn't look good.
As a consequence of the US war with the Islamic State across Iraq and Syria; IS had previously occupied Eastern Syria where the oil fields now controlled by the US are located.
> Crickets in the media - because it wouldn’t look good.
Crickets in the news media largely because the news media covers news and static situations aren’t news (same reason whey the occupation of Crimea got intense coverage for a short time in 2014 and then critics until 2022, which wasn’t because Russian aggression and occupation looks bad for the US.)
The news media covers events related the US presence in Syria, but the ongoing fact just isn’t news.
I hard disagree - smuggling out oil in 2 large conveys by the US military from a region that has just undergone a natural disaster is most certainly news. But the US media will never cover something like this.
> In 2020, a U.S. firm called Delta Crescent Energy LLC secured a deal with the Kurdish authorities under an authorization from the U.S. government. The firm’s partners include former U.S. ambassador to Denmark James Cain, also a Republican campaign donor; James Reese, a former U.S. special forces officer; and an experience oil executive, John Dorrier Jr.
> The Daily Beast reported that Delta was to earn $1 per barrel of oil exported from Syria, according to government filings. Dorrier, the firm’s CEO, had worked with a U.K. oil company with offices in Syria. He told the Military Times that Delta “had some $2 billion in contracts to sell oil into the international market that will benefit American allies in northeast Syria that have helped in the fight against the Islamic State group.”
> The Assad foreign ministry called it all a U.S. plot to “steal Syria’s crude oil.” The ministry described the Kurdish forces as “terrorist militias,” and predicted they would be defeated by the government.
> Delta Crescent Energy was the only firm licensed by the U.S. government to work in Syria. The license was permitted despite U.S. Treasury sanctions aimed at punishing the Assad regime.
> Things changed when the new Biden administration did not renew Delta’s sanctions waiver this year.
> In February, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that the 900 American troops then in Syria were there to resist IS and “are not authorized to provide assistance to any other private company, including its employees or agents, seeking to develop oil resources in Syria.”
---
Do you have any additional sources that support the US is using Syrian oil fields for supplying US Bases?
https://www.thecitizen.in/opinion/us-continues-to-occupy-syr...
https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2023/03/05/2863033/us-con...
https://thecradle.co/article-view/22945/us-resumes-theft-of-...
Smuggling out and plundering valuable resources from a region that has undergone a disaster is what I call "evil" by any definition.
Also, you may wish to find and talk to some savvy educated Syrians. They will laugh if you suggest the US is doing nothing of the sort. Of-course, usually, there will be no American citizen doing this - it will be all done by third parties. They made a mistake here which got extensively publicised.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
Tolerance is an important social/psychological phenomenon, but perception is even more important. Teaching people to think in memes is dangerous imho.
Even more complicated:
- this applies to all piecs of information, including mainstream "truths" that are not actually true
- there is an important distinction between lies, speaking untruthfully, speaking misinformatively, etc
- most people are not just bad at epistemology (and related fields), they think they are good (because it seems that way, and "seems true equals true" in our culture) - epistemology is highly counter-intuitive
- Normies
- The Man
They are both utterly defenceless against it (yet: don't have any realization of it), it's almost like a weapon from another dimension of reality.
The contention here is that one country does not allow the other to do business in their territory, yet complains when their product is threatened with a ban.
The contention is _not_ that double standards are being applied to TikTok vis-a-vis FB/Twitter.
White people are discriminated against in China, so we should discriminate against Chinese people in the US.
But if you insist on calling money "speech" and banning foreign businesses "censorship" then it turns out, under your very broad definitions, censorship is sometimes a very good thing!
Your argument amounts to word games.
Same thing when RT was banned across Western Europe. It's not what they were saying that was banned, it's what they are: an arm of the Russian government. Russian shills are still free to peddle their propaganda.
https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
Spin up a cloud VM in China now. Go do it. Try.
I can, literally in minutes, go create a virtual machine hosting a web site in some random middle eastern country I probably would not visit because they're anti... everything. Anti-female, anti-christian, anti-gay, anti-freedom, anti everything I hold dear.
But I can create a virtual machine there, right now, no problems.
China? Hah... no.
That would require paperwork, in person, in chinese, paid for in renminbi, from a Chinese bank.
I'd have to get a chinese id, and submit it to a police station to get an authorisation number, which I would then have to display on every page of that web server.
Chinese companies can spin up whatever they want in any country they please.
Every other country has to sign up to Chinese censorship laws to publish anything at all on that side of the Great Firewall.
Our companies just got greedy.
China has an asymmetric market, and it’s bad for US businesses but good for Chinese businesses. The US wants to send a message to china that it can also punish businesses that it doesn’t like.
Yes the US has a mechanism to ban a company and that should apply to that company’s app. It’s just trade restrictions like with Huawei. Banning a website will be harder, but by banning advertisers from paying for ads it’ll destroy the profitability of serving American consumers.
Popper’s Paradox on the geopolitical scale.
The media were freaking out about the trade restriction on China, but my circle of D-voting friends and I (and I'm about as libby-lib as a lib can lib) who mostly hated Trump were like "fucking good, more of this please".
I think he mostly caught at least as much shit as he deserved over his shenanigans (far less, in some cases—my "oh no, this is gonna be really bad for the health of our democracy" moment was when he made his "2nd amendment people" remark and suffered no meaningful consequences, back in the '16 campaign) but there were a handful of cases like that, where the negative media response was sharply at odds with our (as, again, solid D voters who AFAIK all voted against him twice) reactions to things he did.
Arguing that the relationship is inherently completely asymmetric isn't really true either. Chinese companies can't really just create a single website that serves both western and Chinese customers. While nothing legally is stopping them, doing this is just going give your western customers a bad time overall, since content delivery across the Chinese border is all but impossible at any reasonable speed. TikTok is an American company, fully owned by Bytedance yes, but they went through incorporating in America and complying with all local laws to do so.
How many Chinese made websites do you use? Unless you're a Chinese immigrant, TikTok is almost certainly the only one. You might use e-commerce websites like AliExpress, but, again, AliExpress is a specially made website that was designed to follow foreign regulation. Chinese companies don't generally operate in other countries. The only reason TikTok is so popular is because they bought their way into the western market with millions of dollars with the acquisition of musical.ly. You have not shown any empirical evidence of any Chinese tech company actually being successful in the west, that hasn't just bought out some American competitor.
Also, nothing is requiring you to setup servers in China to serve your Chinese audience, and in fact it's almost certainly much more expensive to do that, not just for an ICP license but for bandwidth as well. You can serve your Chinese audience well with servers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong (for now), or other East Asian countries and as long as you follow Chinese laws, the GFW won't block you.
Sure, following Chinese laws is hard and goes against a lot of free speech principles, but at the end of the day the laws are enforced reasonably uniformly. Banning TikTok or Chinese companies in general just shows that Americans can't handle foreign competition. Instead I believe that a better solution would be to simply create uniformly enforced laws that create federal data processing regulation ... like Europe has already done with the GDPR ...
This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
That being said, there is always an argument for banning foreign social media companies (really all media companies) from making commercial profits in other countries. The political and military risks are significant.
TikTok is only superior in poisoning the minds of people using it here in US. That's why the Chinese version is different. I think zero is lost if people use the inferior local ones in this case.
> This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
Sure, the optimal solution for the prisoner's dilemma is that both cooperate. But once one doesn't cooperate, the optimal solution is not to cooperate. US looks like a dummy waving the flag of morality while China laughs in its face.
I believe the current recommended example is "Go look up France on TikTok vs look up France on Instagram"
Addendum: TikTok is also superior at dynamically generating an advertisable collective that are specifically interested and desiring of the ads they're given. Five million small businesses found their place on TikTok entirely because they found their 2000-person size niche that would be interested in buying their product, and even encouraged them to buy it.
> poisoning the minds of people using it here in US
Except for some reason, diversity of thought and free speech ideals aren't actually used to justify speech people disagree with, namely China's. This two-mouthed approach is noticed. It de-legitimizes the diversity of thought value.
To anyone who has argued for free speech before but is silent now, your silence says more than your speech ever could.
I agree that banning TikTok on the grounds of its algorithm being controlled by China is dubious. After all, it is content, it is information, and it is up to an open society to call out the fact that social media is trash, that Chinese social media is anti-American disinformation poison.
However, it is reasonable to believe tiktok's recommendations are crafted to harm American intellect, prey on vanity to reward shallow behavior, and gather large scale behavioral and physical activity (site tracking, habits, physical location, items in homes, etc) for the purposes of the Chinese government. If it is recognized as a spy tool of a hostile government, why permit it?
That said, I'm not sure I would lament a body blow to social media specifically.
Let me put the questions to you directly:
Do you think the Chinese government is generally hostile to the long term success of Western liberalism?
Do you think the Chinese government has meaningful influence on the behavior of TikTok or its recommendation engine?
Do you think TikTok data on its hundreds of millions of users is available for general analysis to the Chinese government?
They have backdoors to all major tech companies, they actively try to control discourse in social media and they just bailed out their tech sector. If that's not being tightly coupled, I don't know what is.
>Do you think the Chinese government is generally hostile to the long term success of Western liberalism?
No
>Do you think the Chinese government has meaningful influence on the behavior of TikTok or its recommendation engine?
Probably but no concrete evidence exists
>Do you think TikTok data on its hundreds of millions of users is available for general analysis to the Chinese government?
To the same extent our data is available to the US and its allies, yes. But China cannot do much with my data, my government can.
We gave up on forcing China to keep opening up to US trade if they want us to reciprocate. We shouldn't do that.