This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear. The narrative of child safety, for example the story about the kid who commit suicide because of their "for you" page, is being used as a kind of legal "pretext" so they can ban TikTok.
China. Yeah, except that any business can just buy that information. I can buy your day-to-day movements for dirt cheap. I own a non-American company (though I'm still an American citizen, but that isn't a factor), and it is insanely cheap to get information about any American you want. Hell, BingBot will tell you all about me, what I do for a living and where I live.
This is about China, but it is a stupid and pointless zero-point game. This bill would get shot down in 30s for being unconstitutional, especially if the company has an American LLC or corporation (making it a legal entity protected by the constitution). Further, you'd think congress would have learned from prohibition that banning something ... hmm, doesn't work? At all? How would you even enforce something like this, stop people randomly to violate their privacy further and search their phone? Will this be another thing to get arrested for when you have a 'broken tailight'?
The point is not to enforce against individual users, just to remove it from the main distribution channels.
Also, websites are pretty powerful. Apple even allowed websites to send notifications now.
They will just switch to a different social network, which is equally destructive but not Chinese.
We ripped CDs so we didn’t have to buy them. Hell, we sat by boomboxes until the right song came on the radio just to push record on the tape player.
Kids will do whatever it takes to get what they want. I’d buy that bridge.
I think you are overestimating the tech know-how of the average person and how driven the average teenager is. TikTok a year ago was pretty unique, but now you have YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. I'd bet a hard money that 99% of people will just switch to those in a heartbeat if TikTok was banned.
> Kids will do whatever it takes to get what they want. I’d buy that bridge.
What they want is cheap dopamine hit from the smartphone. It's really close to drugs, make heroin hard to get and people will go to an analog like fentanyl.
Like the commenter above you said; I too have a bridge to sell.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
S.686 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686
Additionally, app stores and ISPs are a pretty obvious route for blocking 99% of U.S. users from circumventing the ban. Any users who are able to circumvent those measures will be using an app whose network effect has been destroyed.
Information isn't organized by your name but by your quadrant(s) you fall under
I was always under the impression that when people say ‘Google collects all your data and sells it’, or whatever, they really mean that google sells ads which may be targeted based on the data they collect, and it’s only small companies with much less data who might sell it.
China has no jurisdiction over you… there’s no real punishing to relate to what you have viewed on TikTok, so why are your viewing habits a threat to national security?
I don’t believe this to be a zero sum game. This is further extension of authoritarianism from a government that is terrified of anything short of pervasive colonoscopy-tier data collection.
I mean, I mostly agree with what your saying above this, but this particular line I disagree with.
People get blackmailed all the time for different reasons. If I'm looking for a person in a hardware/software company that has weaknesses, having a full view of their social media is a great starting place.
The propaganda part.
Remember a month ago when everyone's feed had a video in it from the TikTok CEO encouraging people to side with TikTok.
They are scared shitless of not being mostly in control of that kind of power when applied to Americans. They are worried that the next Saddam is going to pay TikTok, or some future foreign competitor to torpedo whatever the next WMD lie is (and this will be done with Chinese blessing because that will be in their geopolitical interest).
The possibility was easy to ignore back when all the social media giants were American and the feds had jurisdiction and soft power over them. Now there's a new entrant that China has jurisdiction and soft power over. They want the status quo back. Hence why all the bill language is mostly about preventing foreign ownership.
Remember how Elon makes it a point to stick himself into everybody's Twitter feed and even fired a guy for not maximizing this further?
They can't do that with "hypothetical Chinese Elon" so long as said Elon remains in good standing with the powers that be there.
Of course they do, it's called Prism and it's been around for over a decade.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...
But more to the point here, the American government responds to pressure from the electorate and U.S.-based stakeholders, which the Chinese government by and large does not.
If your point is that different American states responded differently despite broadly similar public opinion based on party affiliation of the legislators and governors, that’s true, and part of how our the US system works. Public preferences clearly aren’t the only thing driving policy decisions.
Though I think it's less that Xi responded to pressure from the people and more that his personal power was starting to become at risk due to the policy from others in the CCP.
If I didn’t have family there, I’d probably give up my passport, because outside of America it is more of a hindrance than a boon.
People keep saying this, but the Snowden leaks make clear this is a fantasy.
> America… isn’t actively imprisoning millions…
It’s a good thing you said “in concentration camps” or that would have been a doozy!
But that will never happen as long as the good citizens of the USA continue to pretend that the rule of law has any meaning in the USA when it comes to mass surveillance, and we point at China and chide them for the millions they have imprisoned as if that is not the pot calling the kettle black.
Calling out China will change very little there, and serves mostly to distract the conversation from the problems we really have the power to solve. We only have the power to change ourselves. The people in the USA and around the globe who suffer from US surveillance will continue to suffer all the while.
And what is worse, China will simply start running domestic companies and collecting our data all the same, because these bills aren't solving the real problem.
Blindly pointing the finger at China causes real harm to us.
ByteDance isn't under the direct authority at any given moment of CCP, but, they will, at any time, receive arbitrary orders for any particular reason, and they will follow them. Notably 1/2 of the Western world uses this app.
Google isn't under the thumb of US Gov. but with a court order, the FBI can obtain specific bits of information. Notably, Google does not operate in China.
Now - the more secretive relationship with NSA/CIA/FBI aka national security has with Google is a different question, it's a bit guesswork, but just given the nature of the two regimes, and the fact that again Google has no material presence in China it's plain to see the difference.
The Congressional Hearing was a farce in the wind, but the underlying issues of both security and trade are really serious.
It would have been better to create comprehensive legislation a decade ago about data and corporate ownership so companies could make progress. Even if ByteDance owned 49% of a US company that was 'TikTok' and it was based anywhere but China, that would probably be fine.
If Musk hadn't bought Twitter, we never would have been able to prove that this is also true for Twitter and arbitrary orders from the American government.
Of course it is! and storks deliver babies and the moon is yellow because it's made of cheese.
> [The USA] isn't actively imprisoning millions in concentration camps
It's actively imprisoning millions in prisons. What's the difference between a prison and a concentration camp? Perhaps the guards twirling their evil mustache more?
China has no such protections and guarantees.
What happened to Nixon? What happened to OJ Simpson from the victim's family?
Totalitarian countries like China, with strict controls over what its government and media report is a prime candidate for grossly underreporting its prison population.
https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/
Dialing up things to cause unrest, dialing down stuff critical of the CCP. It’s not an issue about data, or even an issue about speech, it’s an issue of ownership of a media company by an adversary that will weaponize it against you.
Who controls and owns media companies is a reasonable national security question. The CCP knows this risk, they don’t play fair.
These aren’t new issues, there are certain types of corporations where there is a national security interest in American ownership and capability (see also: Intel). Ownership of airlines is another example, you can’t have a foreign controlling interest in a domestic airline (Richard Branson couldn’t save Virgin America due to this).
There are good reasons for a nation to have rules about foreign control in certain types of companies that carry a national security risk.
While fake news and undue outside influence absolutely must be protected against, the line is hard to draw. For instance, would Snowden have been considered undue influence, would Wikileaks have been considered fake news, at least sufficiently enough to cross the ban threshold?
There are pros and cons to both approaches, and it really doesn’t come down to whether or not people agree with a statement that contains such vague terms. It comes down to interpretation of those terms.
It's funny it's not there already, with all the talk of the "need" for more critical thinking.
Democracy theatre.
From various recent polls, it looks like somewhere between 30-40%, somewhere under 2/3 of Republicans and Republican-leaners and basically no one else.
It seems to ebb and flow: each side takes their turn being the aggrieved party and then alternate next go around (2000, 2016, 2020).
Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.
The tapestry of dysfunctional patchwork that make up the American Constitutional Republic, while tattered and frayed before, has found ways to persist.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2000/12/01/many-questio...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4687/seven-americans-accept-bus...
Is that not what we're experiencing now?
It's hard to 'both sides' this issue with a straight face, when the biggest election denier in America is a former president and current presidential candidate. When was the last time that happened?
The closest parallel was probably Aaron Burr and his…whatever exactly he was trying to achieve in 1806-1807 in the Southwest after being dumped as VP in 1804 in part resulting from Jefferson’s suspicions that he was trying to pull electoral shenanigans in 1800. But that’s a long time ago, in very different circumstances, and not a particularly close parallel. So, never anything really similar.
But you raise a good point in that Al Gore was far more gracious when aggrieved. He comported himself with the norms established in the last 60 years during the modern mass media era.
Clearly you aren't going to have a large contingent of deniers of elections that your favored party won.
Yes, that’s generally what “believe the election was stolen” without further qualification means; its not a reference to the total sum of people who believe at least one election in the history of the US was stolen.
> For the previous one a majority of Democrats including high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.
No, they weren’t.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distru...
A large percentage of Democrats believe Russian interference and other improper interference influenced the election results, but that’s different than thinking the actual vote was rigged or invalid.
[citation needed]
You present no evidence relating to actual election denial.
False.
> there is a difference between believing (rightly or wrongly, with or without sufficient cause) that improper activity effected the popular vote tally and believing that the election is illegitimate.
There are differences between different things. Believing election tallies were hacked certainly is a baseless conspiracy theory that questions the legitimacy of the election, despite your wailing and gnashing of teeth. Not to mention something like a full 1/4 of Democrat voters believed Trump to be an illegitimate president too.
Your gaslighting and sealioning doesn't work I'm afraid, better luck with somebody else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34429933 (Jan 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30858404 (March 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29085513 (Nov 2021)
If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you. Therefore could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? Including, but not limited to: not being snarky, not calling names, not making personal attacks, not posting flamewar comments, and not using HN primarily for political battle.
Yes, if that's what they were doing, but I'd have to see specific links. (For example I don't think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366985 broke the site guidelines although it wasn't entirely un-edgy either.)
So yes I should have just ignored them or kept the higher ground, but sometimes that kind of trolling sucks me in.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_States_Electoral_C...
You can't just pick out some other thing and claim that is what is matters most. Just saying "when push comes to shove" doesn't mean anything. How many times did the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee lie about having evidence for the delusional conspiracy theory that "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", dangerously fueling election denial and undermining confidence in the democratic process? Aside from rhetoric and assertions by partisans and conspiracy theorists involved in the whole mess, where is the evidence to say what one side does is better or worse or more or less "damaging to democracy"? There isn't any.
If you in denial of the reality that both sides question elections and make up conspiracy theories when it suits them, you are incapable of anything approaching an objective understanding of the topic. Sorry.
your argument to me sounded like : > Brave people don't fear heights, you are brave and hence you should jump from empire state building. And you don't need protection, remember you are brave.
A specific unrelaible/untrusted tool and equipment they use for adventure is banned. You are arguing as if people are banned. But they are not.
It has a really nasty history.
It’s not common for tolerant societies to descend into despotism. Liberal deco meadows are very resilient.
Allowing intolerance is usually better than systematic political suppression.
Or here's a better idea: The Golden Rule. Eye for an eye is how you run a war, not a civil society.
It’s not like we would let the Soviets, Nazis, British, Prussians, etc just buy the New York Times.
And non-news media has been protectionist too.
We allow foreign news distribution - but there are limits.
Millions use TikTok. To them, you’re not removing their “adversary”, you’re removing their fun.
From the outside, this looks like the United States is controlling the media - something it’s already accused of by 1/2 of Americans.
This action will reiterate that for some and make it true for more.
It shouldn’t have gotten to this level, but it’s where we are. Users will move to reels or something else that takes its place without the national security risk.
And, yeah, I can see the apprehension regarding the new account.
An even simpler threshold is that banning it is a reasonable position to hold given the issue even if one may disagree.
> it’s more the ability for CCP to leverage influence.
Well, no, that’s more Maximum Bone Saw’s purview than the CCPs, and that foreign influence isn’t (at least per the initial list written into the proposed law) considered adversarial.
but perhaps i am missing some obvious point?
Do they? My Impression is a bit different here. TikTok is much more focused on the automatically selected content, and has fewer options for letting users make their own choices. The format itself (video) also strongly boosts the connection between people. And both combined let TikTok-Trends move much faster and ingrain deeper in the minds of people. It was quite interesting to see how fast and deep the brainwashing on TikTok was spreading after the CEOs appearance in senat, and also kinda concerning.
> US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear.
But isn't that legit concern of any country regarding other countries with even less security than you have yourself? I mean in Europe we also have strong concerns against the USA and their poor handling of data.
However, this is not about the arguments presented. Those are merely talking points as a way to get an upper hand on China. That is it. It is annoying, because there is actually a dire need to make children a little less addicted to screens ( not to mention the chance to get some privacy ).
Politicsgirl makes the case this is about shutting down marginalized voices, among other things. I’m no TikTok user myself but the argument holds water.
In 2022, there were ~25.1 million teens[1], of whom ~67% used TikTok[2], for a total of ~16.8 million on TikTok (totally ignoring anyone under 12 or over 17).
I know the numbers are hacky because the first group includes younger children and the second group doesn't (and 1/3 of TikTok's users could be under 14[3]), but I was trying to get a sense of scale for each category. Assume the TikTok user count is probably an underestimate.
My hacky numbers come up with a bit over 40x more teens being first-hand infuenced by tiktok. To make the numbers even more hypothetical, the next step of deciding how many times worse you think being enrolled at a school that has a shooting is for students and plugging that in to get how much more attention/resources should be used on shootings is left as an exercise for the reader.
[0] https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-school-shootings [1] https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/technology/tiktok-underag...
The fact that school shootings have been so normalized that we’re sitting here and discussing the math around whether they’re worse than social media is… so profoundly sad it’s hard to describe.
Surely you have to do some kind of math eventually, or else you'll end up prioritizing whatever sounds the most dramatic instead of the things that actually matter (consider people who are more afraid of sharks than drowning, even though shark deaths are 1 in 4,332,817 and drowning deaths are 1 in 1,134)
I acknowledge that the numbers I'm using are not, by any means, conclusive. And I'm not saying we should prioritize TikTok above shootings just because it's more common. But this seems like a reason to get better evidence about the way the world is, not refuse to touch numbers because some harms are too sacred to attempt to quantify.
TSA? Or any other "but think of the children"-type bill? Or look at water-scarcity "solutions" in the south west for something different.
I'm serious, "prioritizing whatever sounds the most dramatic instead of the things that actually matter" is literally 90% of the politician's playbook.
The total number of children who should die in school shootings should always be 0.
It's not even particularly hard. Practically every country in the world manages to achieve that target.
Regardless, this makes it very different from a 0 suicide or 0 spyware goal. Those don't have a similarly reasonable theoretical solution.
But again, practically every country has managed to being the total number of school shootings to 0. Which tells you that it’s not a particularly hard problem.
Foreign adversaries have learned exactly how to weaponize our free and open internet against our own people. Regardless of the fact that our kids are most vulnerable, the point is that China's seemingly made a point of outsourcing their most polarizing algorithmic decisions to the rest of the world but not to their own population, which is essentially a tacit admission of awareness of the dangers of social media to their own people.
At this point, I'd venture that politicians in the US are trying to grasp at whatever they can to mitigate the risk while still maintaining their election chances. Easier to "blame China" and get re-elected than it is to dump on their own constituents for not monitoring their kids' social media habits.
And frankly, I'm okay with that. Even if a parent does their best, there'll be second-hand influences through all the kids raised irresponsibly through their parents, and nothing can be done about that aside from homeschooling or going off-grid, which is unsustainable for nearly everyone.
I'm fine with a combination of the bill introduced + bills like the one passed in Utah placing curfews on kids since parents have proven to be so bad at parenting their own kids as to present the nation with an emergent aggregate risk to national security.
We can educate or change things at the population level, we just lack the political will to do so and it's disincentivized for the people in power to orient their efforts that way. I think it's worth taking a good hard look about why our Overton Window has ended up where it has on these issues.
There are also other ways to cope rather than outright bans or anarchy. We could study the physiology of the harm caused and require algorithm changes to demonstrate they don't cause biological panic reactions. We could require some knowledge in order to access social media rather than gatekeeping by age (for the record, I don't think this would work and it's probably not legal in America, but it's interesting that nobody seems to discuss it), etc. Even something as simple as requiring a representative age sample for groups addressing these problems so that we can have the perspectives of both those of us who grew up chronically online and people who have to adjust to this weird new techno world they don't understand since both groups need to live in society.
We could also go meta and ask why education has a low chance of success in adults. What of those variables could we influence? Would an economically secure population be easier to educate? Etc.
Exactly how most social media execs handle it with respect to their own kids.
Exactly. We're a decade into the social media experiment now, and it's absolutely clear that it in its current form it doesn't make us smarter, it doesn't make us happier, and it doesn't bring us closer. If anything, it makes people sick and it weakens the social fabric. The proposed solution of "more free speech better" is clearly not working in the face of organized, AI-fueled, nation-state manipulation efforts.
Hacker News is made up of people with a birds-eye view of social media technology. Most of us understand how it works and who operates it. I think it's important to know what an incredible position this is to be in, and to remember that most people aren't like us. Most people can't just say, "screw it, I'll get my information elsewhere."
I think we'll improve over time, but we're at least a generation away from any kind of widespread media literacy. What do we do in the meantime?
The old saying goes that knowledge is power; everyone here with deep knowledge of computers and the things they enable really are in a blessed position.
Not to mention the data collection.
> Foreign adversaries have learned exactly how to weaponize our free and open internet against our own people.
Do you think that we should ban all the Chinese apps and also all the American apps?
America also generally allows businesses and media from foreign companies to take part, whereas China has no such reciprocity.
Security arrangements are real things that can't be merely handwaved away as something that "should" not exist in one's ideal world.
The likes of Tiktok operately strictly for Chinese interests, and Chinese interests do not align with western interests.
They operate for their own interests, which are almost always directly at odds with the interests of the people who actually live in the west.
[1] I have exactly as much evidence for this as you do for your claim.
The game of cutting off foreign players is a luxury only the few countries can afford right now, making it look like everybody else supports the US is disingenuous.
The price of association with the US is, as you say, US influence; however, US influence is much less restrictive and oppressive than many other major players today and historically. Our EU allies regularly criticize us in public forums; North Korea does not have the political freedom to criticize China and Belarus does not have the political freedom to criticize Russia to the same extent that United States' allies do today.
It's high time for global players to wake up from the ideal world where everyone can get along with zero tariffs or restrictions. The United States must do what is in her best interests and other states should follow her lead. I believe it is the US best interest that the world is more free, and should that eventual goal require some restriction of hostile foreign entities' freedom to operate on US soil, so be it.
Most countries criticize the US _and_ China _and_ Russia _and_ North Korea, make trade where they need to and make a balancing act with alliances and relations between all of these countries.
> It's high time for global players to wake up from the ideal world where everyone can get along with zero tariffs or restrictions.
The US have engaged into perpetual tariffs and restrictions from the day it had the power to do so. Are you assuming other countries thought they could stop that ? Or what are you even talking about ?
The way you weaponize the network against a populace is by censoring it. In this regard, Congress is the one doing that.
And it kinda signals to other countries they really should put critical effort in lowering dependence on the US and chalenging the dominance if they ever intend to thrive.
I'm not advocating for guns to be taken away, I believe that ship sailed a couple hundred years ago. But Americans need to get their shit together, that's for sure.
Then they can fine $250K and up to 20 years in jail if a US person attempts to access banned content. If a US person uses a VPN to try to circumvent this ban the fine increases to $1M.
It also enables them to use all devices on your private network, including routers, wifi APs, webcams, video cameras, smart speakers, etc, to spy on US citizens and persons without any warrant and no recourse for people that are spied on. They can spy on you and surveil your entire digital and physical life and you cannot do anything about it.
This is basically the PATRIOT act for the Internet. It makes it so this new, unaccountable government agency, who meets in secret and is not subject to FOIA, can ban any website, content, or entity they want online, then spy on and jail US persons who might try to access it.
It's pure evil and puts us in the same place that China is today.
Some of the the more accusatory headlines:
> The Restrict Act would allow the Feds access to all the data on our devices
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35362848
> The “anti-TikTok” RESTRICT act seems to apply to nearly every U.S. tech company
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35318956
> The RESTRICT act may let the government control any public tech company
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35324114
> The TikTok Ban Act, RESTRICT, will give Gov't unprecedented privacy access
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35342797
> Could the Restrict Act Criminalize the Use of VPNs?
So for example, President Biden could designate TikTok a national security threat under the RESTRICT Act, and then order VPN companies to block outbound traffic to TikTok. If the VPN companies refused they would be liable.
Don't blame yourself for not finding it, I had the same reaction last night. The libertarians who caught onto this are not very good at explaining themselves to people who don't care.
b) There is zero appetite from the GOP for gun control. Until that changes the status quo persists.
c) Information about US citizens (which can be used to manipulate them) being handed over to the Chinese government is something that the government should be concerned about.
I can help with that: not seriously at all. Calling someone a nerd has been a thing for the better part of a century. How long has TikTok been around?
Few random webcams which would be illegal to take video from is not substantive and does not provide any insight into their interests, likes etc.
The whole issue with TikTok is that the Chinese government is able to personally identify people who disagree with them.
It is irrelevant if the data is stored in the US if Chinese government have tools they can use to search for dissidents, journalists etc
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...
There are people who look at data to determine how likely they were to die from covid vs. the risk and effectiveness of a vaccine authorized for emergency use, and there are people who watch the news.
You can't have a good argument with people who watch the news because they get convinced of their position emotionally through anecdotes that the news focuses on, not data. You end up arguing with that person's emotional reaction to anecdotes. It's never a good idea to criticize another person's emotions if you expect to remain friends with them or not get flagged on HN.
There have been many years of Democratic control where they didn't prioritize gun control. The status quo persists for some other reasons, not just the GOP bogeyman.
China can psyops on any social media platform, Tencent owned Reddit for longer than anyone in congress has been worried about this only that no US based Reddit competitor makes enough money to pay for national security lobbyists in DC.
Thanks for that!
To us, this was a funny question, to my sister-in-law ... she was like 'wtaf.' I can't imagine having my son worried about that kind of stuff and I can't imagine the internal stress. That's why I said 'might' because it 'might' be normalized to the point that it's just background noise; a joke. Until it isn't.
My son and his friends run around in the streets like when I was a kid; they don't stop until the street lights come on. I could never take that away from him, and I feel like if we were to move back to the US, I would be doing that.
Can you explain how TikTok is more harmful to the average citizen than the constant mass shootings that happen in the U.S.?
Touch grass, indeed.
Then you no longer know the place. According to media the US is nothing but school shootings and government censorship.
I still have family there and still visit for nearly a month out of the year. The number of people running red lights has gone up significantly the last few visits. To the point where I feel like I’m driving in Bali and not the US. People are more rude now than they used to be, and scared.
It took months after moving here to brush off the fear you have living in the US. Fear of the government taking your kid because your neighbor gets pissed off, fear of car accidents, fear of getting pulled over, fear of getting stabbed/shot while walking down the street, fear of seeing someone else getting stabbed/shot, fear of getting fired for no reason, fear of going to the hospital or getting seriously sick because even if you survive, you’re going to be broke af.
I’ve had cops plant evidence in my car, I’ve been hit by trucks running red lights, I’ve gotten in a knife fight with a hobo, I’ve been shot at on the highway, I’ve been fired for no reason, I’ve gotten in a motorcycle accident that fucked me over seven ways to Sunday.
I haven’t had to worry about any of those things since leaving. Not a one.
While I think I can understand many of your feelings about US culture, I'm a bit lost here. I was married to a US citizen and have lived a significant amount of time there, although never settled permanently. But I never experienced any of these things, nor felt an overwhelming need to worry about them. Is it something about your chosen lifestyle?
(For context, I have also lived and worked in a place where many of my neighbours employed armed guards to sit at their gates. And I watched from my office window as an armed bank robbery took place across the way. It ended with corpses lying in the street. And I was far more worried when dealing with police there than in any of my several US interactions with them. Think the US is bad? Well, in some ways it is... but it could be a lot worse.)
Your experience is not everyones experience. For example, the country you describe has 0% resemblance to the one I know. Why should your experience matter more than mine?
Are you actually proposing that your experiences are in some way typical ?
Edit to add: everyone says they never noticed it while living there. They only noticed it after the first few months/years when it was no longer present.
As someone that has lived in a police state before, I can't tell you that your feelings in the US aren't valid. They are yours alone. But perhaps travel somewhere were actual security forces search you randomly, harass you for no reason, etc. Experiences I have never had in the US, not once.
> Main thing I notice is the fear I sense in people whenever cops are nearby, and definitely the sense of this security state hovering over everyone
You should know what that feels like, when it actually occurs. Similarly when someone rushes to declare their country has become "Nazi Germany", they ought to read a history book or two.
(This isn't just a skin color thing, even white people in America have such diverse in-cultures that it feels bizarre to speak to some of them. Go down five houses in a richer white neighborhood and you will not typically find neighbors that share really common understanding among one another.)
> A big part of American fear is knowing that nearly every single person you interact with that isn't a friend of yours doesn't really consider you their "people".
The other side of this coin: America actually accepts people from other places. Most of the world will always see you as foreign if you come from abroad, even if you have lived there your whole life.
The American ideal is now a civic society that's not predicated on the idea of having a "people" who the nation-state is created for. Citizens still often think that they have a "people", but that delineation does not extend to all Americans. As an example a second-gen Mexican person is not particularly likely to consider me part of their "clan" even though we are both American. When everyone's foreign, no one is.
Not been my experience in NYC and other places. Quite the opposite. Also have you seen European integration of foreigners up close? Middle East? Asia?
My guess is no, because these places make it far more difficult to assimilate (if not impossible)
I suspect we're disagreeing over what it means to "assimilate" or "be accepted as" one of an ethnic group. Imagine a stirring speech where a speaker says "I have dreamed of a respite from the trials our people have undergone". When the audience hears "our people", they are going to think of a certain group that they imagine themselves belonging to. In America, a miniscule fraction of the population thinks of "everyone who is legally an American" when they hear the phrase "our people".
However, some other place like Paris, the massive city-state of the white Franks, has a carefully guarded culture that they gatekeep as a majority ethnic group. You can live in France, and you can speak French, but you can't "become French" because many of the people who call themselves "French" think specifically of white Frankish/Gaulish/Roman descendents. That's just not happening in major American cities.
So, ghettos. I'm not saying there's not a "little Italy" in most American cities, but a Turkish person living in Germany their whole life is still Turkish. American in Japan, same. These places don't even allow the possibility of assimilation.
Or as my English friend put it, "there's a difference between tolerance and acceptance."
So your selection bias includes only people that have made the decision to leave. Do you not see the issue ?
Even if you didn't select into people who left presumably for a reason, this is still an anecdote. It's your opinion, your reality. It's not shared.
For example, I have an anecdote of living in the EU. It's cloudy 10 months out of the year, everywhere except in the south. No one told me that. Winters were harsh. Foreigners in general were not accepted, most social interactions were with other ex-pats. Salary was much lower and that limited my ability to buy property and save for retirement.
I could go on. But what I wouldn't do is broadcast all of this as if it's some kind of universal truth. It's just my experience.
Are you quite sure you're not misremembering an action movie for your own experiences? Living in America is not even remotely this exciting for most people. T-boned in intersections not just by a truck, but multiple trucks? Shootouts on the highway and knife fights with bums? Are you Neo from the Matrix?
I agree with you that there are more important things, but we do lots at once. Honestly if shooting up congresspeople, kindergartners, and kindergartners shooting teachers hasn't changed anything in regards to guns... I don't know what will.
This isn't really about protecting kids anyway though, it's mostly fearmongering about China, which is one of the rare things most of our legislature agrees on these days.
That this is auxiliary to US goals to antagonize China is the sugar. The real goal is to continue the progress made when when breakaway Trump-supporting networks like Parler were directly attacked by Congress, and app stores informally threatened if they wouldn't ban them. Twitter is being continuously threatened by Congress just because they changed ownership from movement Democrats to an "independent" rich guy.
TikTok will be the precedent. It's obviously just racist to attack TikTok alone; in order to retroactively make it not racist, it's important to attack companies that amplify Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or Palestinian messages, the alt-left, the alt-right, or anyone that might inspire disloyalty to the homeland. Which is why Homeland Security will be overseeing social media.
> they might get shot up in math class?
The safest place that a child is at all day is at school (home and family are far more dangerous), and more people die in a day in Ukraine or (until fairly recently) Yemen, or because asthma inhalers were re-patented in the US through active corruption and their price went from $5 to $75, than have ever died in a school shooting. Middle class paranoia is being exploited by dragging the discussion of 6 deaths in this suburb, 10 deaths in that suburb, over years, with public wailing and gnashing of teeth, energetic and aggressive shaming of dissenters (with state support), and constant press releases from an industry that relies on advocacy for income.
Upper-middle class liberals can only be focused on issues that affect them directly, which is why gun control (and gun rights, classical liberals are liberals too) is an easy way to manipulate them. I wish they could be pushed back to important things, like our failed healthcare system that will ruthlessly bankrupt them with the slightest provocation.
Gun control pandering is just Republican law & order pandering in a Democratic style. It's pretending that there's some magical incantation that will make desperate people both not violent, and also not easy targets for violence and exploitation. The solution is systemic infrastructure, rather than distraction. I'd take a school shooting that kills 6 every week in exchange for a compassionate, functional healthcare system. It's 300 lives versus hundreds of thousands of lives.
edit: Americans live in a country that shut down most public mental health care from 2008-2010.
China is putting itself on a direct 'war footing' path with respect to Taiwan and the likelihood of conflict is worriesome. That conflict will make Ukraine look like a side show, and will involve Japan, Korea, Philippines, Australia, US - and incidentally Vietnam, Singapore, Canada - and everyone will be affected.
For example the CCP has made deep inroads in influencing Canadian politics along a number of vectors.
Xi's stated policy (and what we can infer from actual behaviour) is that 'all assets are geared towards state objectives) and that will 100% include TikTok - to varying degrees.
Even from purely a 'trade parity' perspective, outside countries would simply not be allowed to have the kinds of influence in China that they somehow expect in other states and that there are bunch of conflating factors there as well.
And most of that applies to pretty much all Western nations, and frankly, a bunch of others that would be powerless to do anything anyhow.
I think the only reasonable solution would be to have TikTok sold off and run separately, from Singapore, US, or any place with commercial, regulatory, judicial transparency etc..
It was hilarious to watch clueless clowns in Congress, but I think that was mostly a populist display for the general population so that the 'creator furor' is tempered to some extent by the headlines they read on CNN, Fox, MSNBC etc..
It would be wrong for the US to do nothing.
It's reddit/HN who have never traveled or lived outside US that has jaded your view of US.
You know which country released chatGPT? or NVIDIA A100 or made a huge step towards Quantum Computing / Nuclear Fusion?
I'd rather congress focus on irrelevant details, while startups solve / tackle important issues. When it really comes to it, Congress will get their act together, but anything before is pure meddling in one of the greatest systems that is producing unbelievable innovations at an alarming rate.
I have some jaded views. Perhaps my jading moment was when my unit was used as a political pawn by Obama to get re-elected. That pissed me off to no end and broke my rose colored glasses.
I sincerely miss US startups sometimes. I work at a startup here and they actually (somehow) have a work/life balance, 20 days paid vacation, and other perks with no gimmicks, like a chef who cooks us lunch every day, but no shenanigans (like “unlimited” vacations that aren’t actually unlimited).
I (sometimes) miss working weekends and impossible deadlines while devouring cheap pizza and passing out on the couch. But there’s a good chance even US startups have evolved in the last ten years… but the last US startup I worked at in the early teens was like that. My then-girlfriend-now-wife would come hang out with us nerds for dinner before we got back to work. Hell, I fixed a rare database issue on my honeymoon because everyone else was asleep and I wasn’t while my new wife cussed out my CEO on the phone. He ordered us a really nice bottle wine from the hotel, so I can’t complain…
Meh, maybe I don’t miss it, but you make some valuable points.
That's a shortsighted and very optimistic viewpoint, dripping with typical American pride.
You're underestimating just how much damage foreign propaganda and misinformation can do and has done to your great country. Trump getting to power, and still being a strong contender for 2024, mass delusion and rising popularity of conspiracy theories (QAnon, pizzagate, etc.), record-high social unrest and division, racial tensions, protests, marches, insurrections, etc.
And this is just starting to unravel.
The ironic thing is that all that great technology built by the US, allowing everyone to join, connecting the world and whatnot, has been the perfect weapon of information warfare. You've essentially built the weapons, and handed them to your enemies, and are somehow still debating if that's the case, and what to do about it. This confused state is indicative of the effects of psyops, where the afflicted adversary doesn't understand the situation they're in, or how they got there. An ex-KGB agent explained this well way back in 1985[1].
The East certainly has an advantage, considering they've been doing this for decades now, and Western influence on their own population is close to zero, because of their isolation from the internet.
Banning TikTok is a good defensive measure, but it's too little, too late, to reverse the damage already done, and to stop the bleeding. The US would have to do a major shakeup and banning of foreign accounts across all social media sites, and judging by the reactions on this well educated forum alone, that wouldn't fly with the general population, who perceive this as an infringement on free speech.
Buckle up, it's going to get even bumpier. I suspect the US in its current dominant position won't last more than a couple of decades, at most. Funny that with all its untouchable military power, it's completely defenseless against this type of attack.
The sentiment against assamge, patriot act, even the iraq war was popular at the time.
Now I have tried to make a rational argument for this ban but all I got was downvotes even bots/people downvoting every unrelated thing I post probably including this post.
You need to engage in polite discourse with others and change their minds not complain about the government.
And believe me when I say, having seen how things are in other countries, as bad as things are in the US I wouldn't trade it for any other country.
You've all chosen to whine in your bubbles instead of a healthy debate. Enjoy the result.
You’re stance on this is actually “I don’t believe that the CCP would try to harm the US population”. I can tell that is your stance because if it wasn’t then you are effectively saying “I believe the CCP may potentially feed the US population mental-illness-inducing content via targeted algorithms, but I don’t think it’s worth caring about and we should be mad that lawmakers are even trying to do anything about it.”
I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about something meaningless here. If you believe that there is a chance of the CCP doing something nefarious with their Golden Shares power, then that’s a pretty big deal.
Pathos-heavy comments like this one with no real meat disappoint me. Surely we can do better.
I increasingly think interesting geopolitics are a trap for a certain type of brain. When I was in high school I followed that sort of thing closely, and felt very smart. But it all had no connection to me, and it didn't matter to me at all. I realized I prefered geopolitics to domestic news because I could feel detached from the tradgedy.
Sorry, I'm calling bullshit on this. Look at every single thread that discusses cryptocurrency. If you haven't noticed the Redditification of Hacker News, then I envy you.
That's not how Congress works. We're taught in school that Congress debates bills one at a time, but the reality is that all the real debate and drafting and work happens behind the scenes, massively parallelized.
Time spent during a session of Congress is mostly just the very end of the process, discovering where the votes fall and some last-minute negotiations. Also grandstanding.
There are lots of factors that have been making Congress less "productive" in recent history, depending on how you view it, but the total hours available per year isn't really one of them.
What do you think causes kids to shoot up their math class?
Also, America’s current rate of household gun ownership is about the same as Canada, Norway, and Switzerland in the 1990s: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1485564/pdf/cma... (p. 1723). France and Finland were in the low -20s, not exactly disarmed. But our current homicide rate (65 per million) is more than double Canada’s, five times higher than Norway’s, and six times higher than Switzerland’s rates when those countries had similar percentages of households with guns as america does now.
Yes, in the supposed Great Game this is simply a mole being whacked, a performative exercise that does nothing to solve any of the problems and shoddily disguises these in puerile emnity.
Yet and all, The US Senate is still and nonetheless one of the most powerful and wayward legislative bodies in our species' history. You have a direct part in your Senate, albeit at the length of another's arm, and so you still have this power.
I'm at risk of rambling, but you are still a citizen of one of the greatest nations, and you should have more than hope. I take your two bucks and give it to a beggar, as their need is greater than either of ours.
Please, if you are willing and brave, and as you have served your country we know you are willing and brave, get into Politics. Good people working together is the best way of making things better
On the kids' manipulation -- even though that's not the main intent and American social media co's influence kids as well -- I'd still argue it's significant. A foreign adversary can control how your population thinks... it almost speaks for itself.
I mean, at least China might actually criticize American government and policy, which is something America's so-called "free press" is no longer capable of. I say give Americans a healthy dose of propaganda from all sides and let the market decide!
The raw footage has changed substantially in recent years.
I watched recent senate hearings and, instead of bringing expert witnesses to educate senators to help them better do their job, it seems hearings (and basically any other chance at being in front of a camera) is an opportunity to PWN the “other side” in a series of 30s sound bites.
Senators yell at each other, talk past each other and their guests, fall back on their pre-written “serious burn!” scripts no matter where the conversation goes, and insult the guests they invite in to speak. Everyone is freaking out about whether or not everything was shared with “their side” prior to the hearing because they need to have pre written burns and defensese to score more “points” than the other side.
You see these 30s clips floating around the internet and wonder how they can all come from the same hearing. It’s because they are all rapid firing a bunch of pre-written dribble optimized for 30s sound bites.
I don’t know how we come back from this.
not only that but you have media outfits literally called "Infowars" operating inside the country basically supporting treasonous activities. I find it absolutely hilarious that imaginary threats from TikTok, for which even the US government cannot find genuine evidence, somehow are more relevant than existing domestic ones. Some of the largest news channels in the country openly publish the kind of propaganda that TikTok is allegedly supposed to boost.
From the outside over the last two decades it honestly looks like 9/11 just broke the US flat out. Ever since then it's been a spiral into paranoia and insecurity with 'foreign adversaries' being blamed for absolutely every self-inflicted stupidity.
In reality, you take for granted the freedom that you enjoy here, protected by the US military, constitution and rule of law. People in many other countries would go to great lengths to just have what you have.
I agree that gun control is a serious issue, but this TikTok thing can easily cause many more suicides among teenagers if we don't ban it, the scale of harm is much higher than school shootings.
That's my 2 cents.
Not that it isn't at least a little reasonable to be wary of adversaries having access to a data collection platform, but the problem also gets meaningfully less substantial in general if you put meaningful limits on these companies' capacity to grow and eat each other in the name of building empires of surveillance capitalism.
Meta in particular is pushing hard on that angle while hand-waving away the fact that Facebook has a history of treating society as a large-scale experiment. It's manipulated users' mental health on purpose, meddled in elections by selling users' data directly to campaigners, and furthered incitements of everything from genocides abroad to the attack on the Capitol. They're feeding into attacks that single out TikTok specifically, as part of a broader pattern that Facebook and Zuckerberg personally have exhibited of trying to buy or clone nearly anything that represents competition. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp. They tried to buy Snapchat. They've lifted the primary functionality of several large competitors, ranging from disappearing messages to basically all of Reels.
Instead of just taking the blunt-instrument approach of banning social media platforms from within the borders of specific foreign countries, we arguably should be having an entirely different conversation about banning the business practices that make TikTok a problem.
Apathy, learned helplessness, inaction, cult-like fervor, magical thinking, pan-colonial ambitions, and inability to fund or defend itself lead a society to ruin.
The thing is that every 8-12 generations (250+-50 years), a civilization must rework or recommit itself or it slides into decline and decay.
No rampant conservative moral panic crusade, violent upheaval, civil war, or totalitarian junta can rebuild what divides left or right, or rebalances fewer haves and many more have nots.
Do you think banning Huawei from owning US telecommunications infrastructure is also a sign of the end times (Parent comment)?
Not that the US spying agencies cant do the same with US companies. They surely do. But it's a strong argument for banning technology coming from an adversarial government.
Call US government whatever you want in another conversation, but China has a direct line to every user of Tiktok, and we don't know they plan to leverage that against US interests. Their hail mary with Tiktok could cause a social collapse if they engineered it like how the Russians engineered English social media for the last 7 years.
I expected it to get downvoted to oblivion but the whole thing made me sad and no one else seemed to feel that way, so I made this comment.
Some other country created something we couldn’t: a social media app that appeals to Gen-Z. Our domestic industry tried and failed to clone it. So we banned it.
not inclusive enough, your opinion is invalid /s
yieldcrv explains the substantive nature of this joke: OP believes that people have their priorities wrong in the face of surprise death matters, pointing out opinionated gender inclusion logic that also has not permeated universally outside of the US would be another example of prioritizing in the face of surprise death matters
For half a decade, I have lived outside of the US, and I've watched as it has fallen to shit in slow motion. I make a decent chunk of income in USD and this terrifies me... but this. This move saddens me.
There are only so many hours that congress has to make real decisions ... and this, this is what they spent their time on? Talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm when they're being influenced every day by how they might get shot up in math class? Come on (wo)man. This shit is fucking stupid.
It's just sad to me, sad to watch the country I grew up in, the one I went to war for ... do this level of stupid shit.
That's my 2 bucks, spend it how you want it.