Funny list. I'm curious why something like swiggy.com, a food ordering and delivery platform is there. Do they even operate in china?

To protect local competitors (and local control)?

> Do they even operate in china?

If they were going to, they won't now.

probably a tit-for-tat against India banning a lot of Chinese services back in 2020

blocking is not always that fine-grained; there are tons of IPs/domains blocked that have nothing to do with China

They don't operate in China but I'm pretty sure they have received funding from chinese investors.

Shouldn't the US prove it's better than China by its self-consistent actions with its espoused virtues of freedom of the press?

The self consistent actions could just be "tit for tat" responses to the behavior of others. Does China allow free reign of American companies within its borders? No? Then China doesn't get that right either.

Regardless, TikTok isn't going away, it is just changing owners. How does that have any effect on freedom of the press?

What if they don't want to change owners? Why should a global company from Singapore do what US politicians want?

I hope they don't. Then I will finally give a smartphone to my kids.

Then...don't? No one is forcing them to, they just can't do business in the US if that is their choice.

Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything.

TikTok can decide to not sell, in which case it's banned, or it can sell, in which case it's not.

All of our global companies do what China wants to operate there, and what they ask is a lot more onerous than to spin out a separate entity for local operation.

At least the US is trying to protect the privacy of its citizens in this case. The CCP meanwhile required Apple to prevent Airdrop from functioning properly in China in order to stop the spread of information between protest groups.

Please, US doesn't need to prove anything w.r.t freedom vs. China.

So you're saying the USA is better and thus it never needs to be compared in any aspect related to 'freedom'? That's a nice way of never having to challenge your assumptions.

No, I'm saying what I said in OP

Holy fucking strawman, Batman!

It's not a strawman. The US espouses freedom of speech, and TikTok is comparable to running a printing press. It also espouses a general freedom to own and run private enterprises.

This ban runs against both of those.

> It's not a strawman.

It is absolutely a strawman:

> A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.

Grandparent: Please, US doesn't need to prove anything w.r.t freedom vs. China.

Parent: So you're saying the USA is better and thus it never needs to be compared in any aspect related to 'freedom'?

Me: GP didn't say the USA never needs to be compared in any aspect related to freedom, they said _relative to China_ the US doesn't need to prove anything.

It's objectively a strawman.

That's separate from the issue of whether or not this infringes on the freedom of speech, but 1) freedom of speech in the US is not nor ever has been absolute with no limits and 2) this move absolutely deserves scrutiny.

Here you go.

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

Enjoy the data.

Actually, it does.

Meh, foreign tech companies still can't even operate in China. The only way even things like iCloud exist there is because Apple literally handed it over to be owned and operated by the Guizhou government.

Sorry but this is about China, the bar is that low.

No. It's about whether or not we're hypocrites regarding freedom of the press and freedom of speech, as well as the overall freedom of business.

The Bill of Rights does not inherently apply to non-citizens. There's nothing stopping the people from running TikTok without government oversight. The only problem is that a foreign adversary controls it. This really is not comparable to China's restrictions.

Yes, it does Yamataya v. Fisher and Yick Wo v. Hopkins. And that protection extends to commercial entities: First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti.

Certain aspects of it do, but it doesn't as a whole. See United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez for the precedent that the Fourth Amendment doesn't totally apply to non-citizens. The Supreme Court hasn't specifically ruled on the First Amendment, it's hard to imagine that they would say hostile nations have an inalienable right to publish as much propaganda as they want in the US.

Even assuming that exception is taken up, it would be difficult to prove in a court that TikTok is using its editorial control to publish propaganda beyond what other social media platforms do quiescently.

Propaganda is what advertising is. Should the courts restrict companies from their ability to advertise?

It's not a criminal trial. The US doesn't have to prove that TikTok did anything. They merely need to show a compelling interest in restricting its future actions.

Looks like the wumao's have made it to HN :)

who?

Yes, but at some point you have to know where to draw the line. That line should be national security.

If China is indeed receiving data from TikTok, the future isn't going to be fun, especially with AI tech heating up.

Truth is, when China benefits, the Han Chinese people benefit. Every other ethnicity? Uncertain.

When the US benefits, a variety of ethnicities benefit. The US is now diverse enough where it must work in the interest of a variety of ethnicities in order to operate effectively.

So unless you're Han Chinese, you're more likely to benefit when the US wins.

TikTok isn’t a news organization. It’s an entertainment platform.

I don’t understand the people coming out of the woodworks saying this is suppressing “freedom of the press” or speech.

Set up your own domain, get a VPS, upload your trash to VPS. There ya go, no more “censorship”.

Oh wait , you don’t want to do the work to set this up? Sounds like a personal problem.

> TikTok isn’t a news organization. It’s an entertainment platform.

I don't remember the First Amendment distinguishing between free speech that informs and that which entertains.

Most news on television is selected for its entertainment value. Does that give the government more power to regulate it?

Freedom of the press/speech applies only to humans/entities within US borders not to foreign entities.

Last time I checked China wasn't within US borders.

And yet, at least anecdotally, it is very widely used, along with virtually every other resource that that Chinese state regards as banned.

I think they meant the US domain tiktok.com is banned. TikTok itself is not banned in CN, and its web presence there is likely available at the respective CN domain. I’m guessing it’s tiktok.cn, but I’m not checking so I take no responsibility if it’s a phishing domain.

The Chinese equivalent is DouYin, douyin.com

Douyin as someone else mentioned is the Chinese equivalent to TikTok and it has completely separate content. The international TikTok content (not US specific) is not available in China.

> The international TikTok content (not US specific) is not available in China.

These comments are very confusing to me. Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective?

Do y'all not have friends in China? Contacts who visit?

Do they suddenly drop off the face of the earth? Of course not, they install a VPN and carry on, and communicate with you via all the normal media.

The Great Firewall is really just a means of forcing people not to acknowledge what they know, and to only publicly speak about the censored version of history and politics.

But it's no more effective than any other internet censorship (which is to say, it is trivially bypassed).

> Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective?

It's extremely effective. Just because a very small fraction of the population 1) know how to use a VPN, 2) are willing to pay for it, and 3) bother to use it, doesn't mean the GFW is ineffective. The CCP doesn't need 99.99% efficiency rate, 95% is plenty to control their population.

Source: myself, many years living in China.

I've never lived in China.

But you're saying that 95% of people refrain from reading resources that are not served by The Great Firewall?

That seems like a huge, huge stretch.

I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.

My 95% was an educated guess, it could well be 90%. But I would be shocked if it were any lower than that.

> I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.

I know many as well, but there's major selection bias at work here, in that if you 1) met them abroad, 2) spoke to them in English about 3) a highly sensitive subject, they are highly likely to be one of the 5%.

I would not be surprised if the use of VPNs in China is not as prevalent as is often assumed. I knew a Chinese guy in his thirties who came to the US for a graduate program and he was excited to tell me of the websites he now had access to that he wasn't able to access on the Chinese web.

What people don't understand is that it's hard to discover VPNs in the first place. They're not going to be in the Chinese iOS app store (which is separate from the rest of the world), or local Android app stores (Google Play isn't even there). Websites advertising VPN services are likely to be inaccessible (though not all are). I used a VPN for years in China, as did some Chinese I knew, but even among highly educated and well-off Chinese in a 1st tier city it was less prevalent than you would think, not to mention your average Chinese person living in a 2nd tier or smaller city (the vast majority of the pop).

Have you met more than 5% of the residents of China? If not your point is moot. I’m guessing not.

Yeah, I did!

Joking aside, that's not how statistics work. But I am reasonably confident that a random sampling of 1000 Chinese people drawn proportionally from where they live (meaning mostly in smaller cities, not Beijing, Shanghai, do not speak English, are not well off or highly educated, etc.), that only 50 of them would be using a VPN regularly. But I could be off by a factor of 2 or 3 and the point about control of the population still stands.

I never said the content would be impossible to access given the use of a VPN. The comment I responded to implied that they thought TikTok would be available simply by using a Chinese domain name. Granted, Douyin does have a Chinese domain name, but it does not have the content on TikTok.

Yeah, I think you're correct.

...but seriously: The Chinese state pretends that Wikipedia is banned in China. Does anybody seriously think that Chinese people don't use Wikipedia, like every day?

Routing around a ban of this nature is so utterly trivial, and the primary audience of TikTok is strongly integrative of demographics which are digital natives accustomed to subverting such bans (heck, they got almost universal training in this area by having to jailbreak their school-issued tablets).

> Does anybody seriously think that Chinese people don't use Wikipedia, like every day?

surprised as you may be, the vast majority certainly do not use Wikipedia

Baidu, the local Internet giant, has its own encyclopedia.

You'd be surprised how different some countries are in their Internet usage. Russians don't really use Facebook, and Google faced an uphill battle to be accepted there. Czechs apparently prefer homegrown map services (such as Seznam) to Google Maps.

Tiktok is indeed banned in China.

Douyin is owned by the same company but not the same platform. It is subject to Chinese gov censorship (like all media in China), while Tiktok is not (therefore banned).

TikTok is branded as Douyin in China. The international version is the one that is blocked.

No, it's not just a rebrand.

Douyin, like all social media in China, is subject to government censorship. Tiktok, like Google, FB, IG, etc., are not and therefore banned in China.

That's why they are two completely separate platforms.

Also, perhaps China doesn’t want its own children to consume the same content they’re spoon-feeding to their adversaries’ children. For reasons.

Like what? Are Americans downloading Tiktok under duress of some sort? Every American competitor has algorithmic video feeds, so there plenty of market substitutes.

This isn't about whether or not algorithmic slop is unhealthy. It's quite obviously awful for the people it's exploiting. It's about who's controlling it. This is without a doubt the proper handling of this from a foreign policy standpoint. The company went out of their way to prove exactly how a foreign government could use the service as a tool to affect policy.

That aside, people do use shit like TikTok, Facebook, Google, and other social media and adtech bad actors' services because they don't fully understand what they're signing up for. To a certain extent, people do use them under duress -- completely checking out from them is going to have a pretty measurable impact on how people interact with you. You will be an afterthought to a lot of people in your life. People will think you not consuming those products is strange. Interacting with many institutions you have to deal with will be harder. Many (maybe even most) people can't handle that.

None of this makes a case for government intervention. From what I can tell, you can be ostracized in a US high school if your text messages are in the wrong colour. DOJ isn't dragging Apple into court for forcing teens to buy iPhones to fit in better.

The economy is designed to get people to sign up for things they don't fully understand. Payday loans, sports gambling, margin trading. None of these are illegal, but they should all have strong public education campaigns so citizens know the risks. Social media should be treated the same.

The second paragraph of my post is completely beside the point, I just wanted to point out that it's a bit silly making the "downloading under duress" point when people _do_ do that in a lot of ways.

The law is not about whether or not it's healthy for people. It's about whether or not it is an uncontrolled tool that an adversarial foreign government can use to sway public opinion in the US. No government with any urgent sense of self-preservation would let that fly.

The US wants to get their hooks into TikTok and use it for PsyOps. It’s that simple. Don’t let the word “PsyOps” trigger your wacko alarm.

It’s understood that the US already does this with Facebook and other websites.

The US doesn't need TikTok for that.

There are 170 million TikTok users in the US. Intelligence services would be doing a bad job if they didn't have their hooks in it somehow.

No, it's not about that. It's about controlling the flow of information, which is totalitarianism 101. Every totalitarian government tries to do the same; it's just that China has perfected the toolkit and has the resources to implement it.

It's a rebrand + censorship then? I'm not sure the distinction you're trying to make exactly, it's not like Douyin is a completely different thing from Tiktok, so I think "completely separate platforms" is also a stretch. The core technology and parent company/ownership is the same for both.

Its functionally completely separate. Douyin content for people unter 18 its like educational material, science experiments, and pro social content. Tiktok for under 18 in the US is like bikini girls dancing, robot voices reading reddit threads while videos of people playing video games play in the background, and lefty social justice content.

> The core technology and parent company/ownership is the same for both.

That's like saying Facebook and Instagram are not separate platforms.

It's like saying all websites are owned by Wordpress