I think this attitude is wrong. A strong democracy doesn't need to fight "fake news" legally and doesn't need their own propaganda op in foreign states like Radio Free Asia etc. If you are banning foreign media in your own country, you are doing the same as China in the end. Why not establish a great firewall?

A strong democracy does as it pleases within its democratic laws

Do you think the USG would have allowed the USSR to buy NBC?

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.

In the case of airlines it is just straight up protectionism. There's no national security risk there: if push came to shove in time of war the government could simply seize the assets and operate them as they saw fit.

If that’s your view, then it seems better to be up front about the ownership limitations than pretending otherwise until a war comes along and pulling the rug.

It is already law in the United States that companies may be compelled to act in certain ways during emergencies. There is no pretending, it's all there in plain writing in the USC. Look up the Defence Production Act.

A well informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy. Fake news and undue outside influence absolutely must be protected against.

A well-informed electorate isn’t a prerequisite to democracy. This is precisely why fake news proliferates - it’s relatively easy to elicit an emotional response, and that tends to win over critical thinking.

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.

The government is free to add philosophy to standard curriculum so people aren't so helpless.

It's funny it's not there already, with all the talk of the "need" for more critical thinking.

Democracy theatre.

We are starting from a place of weak democracy. I don’t think the tea leaves can be read otherwise. We aren’t alone - but that’s not much succor.

The United States does not have a strong democracy. Half (more or less) of the population believes the election was rigged.

> The United States does not have a strong democracy. Half (more or less) of the population believes the election was rigged.

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.

30% is about par for the course when it comes to contemporary controversial POTUS elections [1][2].

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...

> Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.

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?

> 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.

For better or worse, I've found reading (deep dives) US history adequately anesthetizes one to modern day shenanigans.

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.

For the most recent presidential election maybe. For the previous one a majority of Democrats including many high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.

Clearly you aren't going to have a large contingent of deniers of elections that your favored party won.

> For the most recent presidential election maybe.

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.

Yes they were a huge number of election deniers for the 2016 election and a vast amount of irresponsible rheotoric around it that was very dangerous to democracy. Don't try to gaslight on this one. A lot of uneducated morons and delusional conspiracy theorists thought "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", fueled by dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric from certain anti-democratic election denier politicians and media corporations.

> a huge number of election deniers for the 2016 election

[citation needed]

No it isn't.

Well, since you are just lying, I can see why a demand for evidence is inconvenient.

How many election deniers?

A large majority of Democrat voters fell for these baseless and dangerous election-denial conspiracy theories. Why do you ask?

https://twitter.com/peterjhasson/status/1064259048902668289

The one question you present evidence of is not questioning the legitimacy and validity of the election; 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.

You present no evidence relating to actual election denial.

> The one question you present evidence of is not questioning the legitimacy and validity of the election;

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.

You've broken the site guidelines egregiously here, and have unfortunately been doing that a bunch elsewhere. We've warned you multiple times before:

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.

Sure I'll try to do better, I'm sorry. Would you apply the same rules to people escalating, calling me names, being snarky, etc in the same thread?

Appreciated!

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.)

I don't have a problem with the comment you linked. But this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 kicked off the snark with the first sentence, and quickly escalated to namecalling, calling me a liar a few comments later.

So yes I should have just ignored them or kept the higher ground, but sometimes that kind of trolling sucks me in.

I don't think the first sentence of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 was snarky. Interpretations differ, of course, and often by quite a bit when someone is speaking to you personally, but FWIW that sounds rather neutral to my ear.

When push came to shove, how many Democratic leaders (Reps and Senators) voted against or objected to the electoral college results in 2017? It was less than 10 Representatives and no Senators, meaning none of the objections were even put to a vote[1]. That is a far cry from what occurred in 2021.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_States_Electoral_C...

Talk about clutching at straws and trying to find any possible metric to deflect from the dangerous 2016 election deniers and conspiracy theorist lunatics.

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.

They can bitch and whine as much as they like, letting people blow off steam is part of the process by which democracy keeps the peace. Aside from various small and short riots, there has been very little political violence in America since the 1860s.

Attempting to overturn the results of the election as the votes were being counted in the Capitol is quite an escalation, though. Sure, it's not up to 1860s standards, but it's still unprecedented in modern times.

While true, the law has also come down harshly on the participants. It should have a chilling effect for other would-be rioters. It was bad, I agree. But perhaps the silver lining is that its occurrence may help set a firm line on what behaviors are acceptable.

> A strong democracy doesn't need to fight "fake news" legally and doesn't need their own propaganda

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.

Since you are straw manning the argument, brave people should be protected from their foolishness by banning rock climbing and base jumping. How does that sound?

Your analogy is again flawed. Brave people are not banned, they are free to do rock climbing and base jumping.

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.

This is the Paradox of Tolerance in action. One must fight against intolerance in order to preserve their tolerant ideals in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

America used the Paradox of Tolerance to outlaw left wing parties during the Cold War and WWI.

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.

Of course the clear meaning of this paradox is that everybody who disagrees with me is intolerant of me, therefore it is my moral imperative to be intolerant to everybody I oppose. /s

Or here's a better idea: The Golden Rule. Eye for an eye is how you run a war, not a civil society.

That doesn't always work so well. If some Viking expedition is coming to pillage your "civil society," for example, there's really not much you can do except to fight. Of course, you can decide who to support or oppose as your moral imperative, but don't be surprised if it has negative consequences to you.

If a war comes to you, then you've got to fight a war and an eye for an eye is the way to do that. But that's no principle on which to organize a civil society.

Hasn’t America traditionally regulated foreign press ownership?

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.

This is just censorship apologia.

TikTok is one vehicle for influence - and there are hundreds.

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.

New accounts on issues like this always make me wary of the 50cent party (kind of a case-in-point example of the kind of nation state influence operations and risk). [0]

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.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

I don’t even know what “reels” is. TikTok clone?

And, yeah, I can see the apprehension regarding the new account.

It's it's the meta/instagram tiktok clone.

It's a clone, but you can't directly compare one social network to another like that. There are differences in the culture and community that won't necessarily survive being transplanted.

I don’t claim there is nothing lost, only that the cost is worth it on net.

An even simpler threshold is that banning it is a reasonable position to hold given the issue even if one may disagree.

yeah i found it noteworthy that your comment had mostly green user replies. thanks for sharing this, i didn't know about the 50 cent party.

  > it’s more the ability for CCP to leverage influence.

like they cant influence twitter, facebook and all the rest?

> like they cant influence twitter, facebook and all the rest?

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.

i think the point is, banning tiktok just means influence can move to these other platforms via other means (troll farms etc), it doesn't solve the issue (unless you want to ban twitter et. al)

but perhaps i am missing some obvious point?

There’s a distinction between adversaries trying to cause trouble within American companies and a foreign hostile government effectively owning the company and dictating policy in its own interests.

if they were forced to divest from bytedance would that be satisfactory?

Probably? I think that was one of the options iirc (ownership by an American company via a sale), but I don't really know enough about the specifics to have a strong position on the implementation.

This argument could make sense to me in a world where powerful corporations, PACs, and monied individuals didn't wield so much control over the media and politics. These domestic entities have far more influence than the CCP, and to the average American I don't think they are any less harmful. These entities profit from disunity and a chaotic government the same way a foreign adversary might. The current divisiveness in America is due to the outsized influence of powerful domestic actors. They are a much bigger concern.

Right… and they don’t want to share that power with an foreign entity.

This is an excellent point and I agree. Social media apps are basically brainwashing devices, and whoever controls the knobs and buttons can change how people think. Very easy to get radicalized with propaganda, or in this extreme case, even be convinced to end one's own life.

Maybe we should then pass laws restricting what companies can do with our data? What kinds of algorithms they can run if they want to be treated as a platform rather than a publisher?