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.
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.