This happens in the US too and has been happening for a very long time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) only when it happens to US companies they get gag orders and/or paid off. (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/ve... and https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/report-att-cooperated-... and https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)
The content on tiktok is a problem, but there's nothing on tiktok that isn't also on facebook/reddit/twitter/youtube. The difference is that when the servers are in China the US government can't get that kind of access/cooperation.
I can't say that about China, certainly not to me as a United States Citizen, and not even really to Chinese Citizens either - which is why it's another thing entirely when a foreign government is doing this level of monitoring on United States Soil.
China is welcome to monitor its own citizens on its own soil to the extent it desires - and monitor communications in and out of China - they're however not welcome to do that level of monitoring on United States Soil on anyone who resides here - at least not without the explicit consent of the United States Government.
On the other hand it's our own ostensibly accountable government that we have to worry about violating our freedoms, abusing and misinterpreting this data, targeting innocent people, etc. If China has this kind of data they still have no power to throw me in prison (provided that I stay out of China) and very little impact on my day to day life. I'm still not happy about them collecting my data, but I have much less to fear from it.
Except https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/11/china-is-using-tikt...
Not sure why you're discounting the potential for foreign influence campaigns from reducing the accountability your government has to you.
> and very little impact on my day to day life
It doesn't until it does at which point it would be too late & you're dealing with damage instead of preventing harm.
I don't discount that potential. I'm certain it exists. I'm also certain that it exists on youtube and facebook and twitter and reddit and will continue to influence US politics long into the future. Yet the US government has never once spoken about banning facebook and youtube or any other platform doing exactly the same things as TikTok, they're focused only the threat of the one Chinese platform while allowing China, Russia and anyone else to influence Americans though US owned platforms. They're even fine with letting China influence Americans using TikTok as long as TikTok is owned by a US company.
I'm just not buying the argument that TikTok represents a threat to our democracy any greater than the threat posed by youtube or twitter. I don't see how taking away our freedom to access/use a Chinese platform that isn't violating any US law and isn't doing anything different than similar US platforms are doing is really helping to protect us here. The US congress telling Americans what software we can have installed on our own devices, and preventing us from accessing platforms in other countries seems much more likely to lead us down a slippery slope than one Chinese owned social media platform being allowed to do what all the US owned platforms are doing.
-For example, try saying something critical about China or something in defense of Taiwan. If the post gains traction, your account will get banned.
-Observe the amplification of r/latestatecapitalism type of content. https://www.businessinsider.com/capitalism-tiktok-america-pr...
-Whitewashing of life in China and China's accomplishments. https://apnews.com/article/china-tiktok-facebook-influencers...
I often see people online extol the virtues of China's progress, it's technological advancement, it's focus on the climate and equality for people, etc. I say this as someone who has lived in China, and I even like China, but people buy into the bullshit. China isn't some utopia. There are many good things about it, but there are a multitude of odious aspects that get glossed over.
This is about sowing dissent and creating doubt in our values.
I don't think you have any business making so many comments in this thread when you have no idea what is going on.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMMbYJYmU/
I looooove TikTok, but if I was running a regime, taking it down would be Job #1.
But a foreign one that’s directly controlled by an adversary is certainly one we can tackle immediately and it’s easier to muster the political will. They don’t need to be connected. Of course it’s hard to trust the government when they have a history of lying, but there’s every reason to believe the threat they’ve been communicating out as real in the wake of the attacks the Russians launched on us in 2016 and given it’s an election year. It’s like all those people who didn’t trust when Biden said Putin was gearing to attack Ukraine imminently.
On the other hand, there is reason to be skeptical of that claim since the tiktok ban won’t happen until well after the 2020 election. So maybe it is the US trying to kill a major tech adversary that’s managed to dethrone our own oligopoly in the space. But that’s the starting point of the argument - is it really going to be used by the Chinese governments for election meddling or is it protectionism to hide the rot within the US regulatory framework that’s simply entrenched interests.
People often bring up this point, and yet if China poured every resource they had available into spreading chaos and disinformation, it would not touch what domestically-sourced influence campaigns are currently achieving.
You might say that, nonetheless, it's a step in the right direction. But when disinformation and manipulation is as ubiquitous as it is now, the real effect of this law will simply be to protect informal alliances between legislators, media companies, and intelligence agencies. There's a handful of things they all agree on (which may not be in your best interest), and this law helps make sure conversations about those things never gain traction.
American social media is motivated by money. Chinese social media is motivated by state power.
The same can be said of every single website hosted in China, but they aren't (yet) banning all Chinese websites or all content hosted in any other countries. Why not?
The vast majority of the content US citizens view on TikTok was created by other US citizens and that content is no different than the content available on youtube or any other social media platform. Certainly China can influence what types of content people see (and they've done a lot of messed up stuff in the past like filtering out "ugly, poor, and disabled" people's videos) but it isn't as if they can flip a switch and start only showing children dancing to "The East Is Red" and expect to keep their popularity. There seems to be no evidence that TikTok is any more manipulative or dangerous than any other social media platform. Youtube is just as happy to push extremist content to increase engagement but nobody is talking about banning them.
I imagine the US audience for tiktok is larger than all chinese websites combined.
If it turns out that maybe "good speech" simply can't counter "bad speech" when the latter is applied with the resources of nation states behind it, that doesn't feel like an argument the government can win (because of 1A).
Ironically, the data collection angle is still critically important for US businesses and limiting the access and use of citizen data would be great for everyone, but it seems very clear that is not on the table for the same reasons.
The US government won’t be able to do the same thing with the two party systems and with more checks and balances.
Russian did use facebook and other social media to influence voters. It was rather effective.
But it is totally different from Chinese government compelling tiktok using full access of its internal data to do their bidding in secret. The effectiveness will likely be much higher.
It's also strange that Americans are uniquely afforded this privilege and many consider it a natural right, but don't consider that their relationship with TikTok is same relationship the rest of world has with Meta. French citizens, despite the GDPR, have no recourse for accountability when it comes the US government.
Just watch Al Jazeera on Youtube if you want the Palestinian side.
I think people that have this view are pretty new to the internet in general. It's no surprise it's a popular belief with Gen-Z, thinking somehow their "filter bubble" is unique in any way or that they have escaped the filter bubble and stumbled upon "the truth." Complete nonsense. You're hooked into whatever algorithm makes you engage more, that's the whole point of this. To make money from you. You think you're special because you got on a pro-Palestine feed on Tiktok? Hilariously naive.
Aka how confident are you that the information you are getting today is honest, accurate and not influenced in any way? That you get the full picture, the good and the bad?
While I do feel like my personal views are more aligned with the US / west. I’m not convinced im getting balanced information. Its a little naive to suggest that only our enemies are doing propaganda.
That is not what anyone is concerned about. The US tried to get Tiktok to suppress pro-palestine information against israel. Tiktok effectively said they are not doing any manipulation of promoted info, even in favor of israel.
congress resurrected a ban for it. The recent uni protests helped in doing that.
Except that TikTok’s data, or the main copy of it at least, resides in the US, so the evil US govt theoretically already has access to it. That’s not the motivation for this bill.
By the looks of it, it seems like you want the US to be more like the CCP than the other way around. Imitating authoritarian governments harms America's global reputation for "freedom and democracy", if that reputation even still exists.
There's a wild difference between unfettered access to a company's assets, systems, networks, data, etc. vs policywork to simply require that companies be owned at the very least by a country that isn't either Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran.
Yes, I did read the bill. They did specifically single out ByteDance presumably to make sure there wasn't a way ByteDance could claim they weren't under Chinese influence. But they made a point of calling out Foreign Adversary Countries and pointed to https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/4872 in doing so.
Bill raw text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815/...
Realistically, what we needed is comprehensive user privacy legislation, which would prevent anyone from spying on us, including our own government. Likely the reason that did not happen is because our government enjoys access to our user data for various things.
Among the more liberal-minded Russians like me and most people I know back home, support for the Ukrainians had collapsed after two years of interacting with them online. It's become so bad, some people I met on the net have actually gone from opposing the war to volunteering to join the Russian army. And as for the Ukrainian side, their opinion of the common people of Russia is no better.
Anyway, we had way more of the "small links" you mentioned than you guys will ever have with the Chinese. A lot of us have family on the other side, even more had good friends across the border. The war destroyed most of these connections, and in case the West and China fall into a war, I don't see any reason whatsoever for you to do any better.
But still, I'm not sure that whatever we know about interacting with the other group will hold true during wartime.
This two-year period - you mean starting from the Feb 24th invasion (so the "collapse" as up until about two months ago)?
And what kinds of experiences with Ukrainians did they say they were having?
And as for the Ukrainian side, their opinion of the common people of Russia is no better.
Surprise, surprise. They have their physical survival to be concerned about now. And no longer have the attention or empathy resources to ponder the mystries the Russian soul.
There's also the compelling argument I hear them make: that anyone in Russia who understands what's up with Putin and Ukraine, has the financial means to flee (and no compelling reason, such as an elderly family member, to stay) -- should have done so long ago by now.
What else do you honestly expect after what's been happening since 2014/2022?
I'm not saying you were, and you're not answering my questions either.
So looks like there's no need to keep at this, and we can both move on.
I’d expect the takeaway to be “That’s bad, so we shouldn’t do it” instead of “Hold my beer and let me show you how we can follow their example.”
I always thought that the point was to not be like authoritarian countries.
Nothing about this is following their example. It's saying, "if you do the bad thing we won't let you operate here."
No, the point is to not give authoritarian countries a free pass.
This is like saying we shouldn't put people in jail for murder because it's effectively kidnapping and that would make us like them.
Since I'm not it the USA, maybe I will be able to use the global TikTok that I love. Hopefully.
But this is not my main concern, my main concern is that you people act like everything is about business and the users are just cattle.
0 regards about the fact that lots and lots of people love this app. I'm one of them because its the last place on the internet where it feels like I'm not supposed to be outraged or spending money all the time. It feels like the old internet for me.
Also, if the American users are lost, I will loose a lot of great content.
I'm appalled that people here on HN have no ability to realize that they deal with real people and not only numbers in the analytics and the bank.
It almost feels like there's no sense of identity here, no sese of persons who must have freedom to use and consume whatever they want.
The argument goes "The Chinese are banning our social media companies, why would we do the same?". Why don't you rephrase it as "The Chinese communist part controls what apps and media the Chinese citizens can consume, why we don't control what Americans consume?".
Can you really not see that taking away a product that people use is not only about companies? Are you really that blind to see that you can't claim being "the free world" by imitating China?
Chinese government is not the ideal form of governance, please stop trying to be like China. Have some sense of personal freedoms.
I get your concerns over loss of something you enjoy - but the content is steerable enough by algorithm and addictive enough that a little twiddle of the knob, and suddenly a bunch of people believe some very harmful and hard to eliminate untruths.
Without making any judgments on the alt-right label, it was absolutely a real thing. Many documented cases showing how a fresh account could go from “Sesame Street, cooking videos, and CNN” on the default feed - and, within ~10 relatively innocuous clicks down the suggested video rabbit hole, the home feed would be full of Alex Jones tier stuff.
TikTok is heavily reminiscent of the old YouTube. Just taking a few steps down the Free Palestine recommendation road will get you into “Happy Birthday, Uncle Adolf” videos (hyperbolic, but only slightly).
I don’t blame certain parties for getting rather nervous over that. But I wish we could have some honesty from elected officials about why TikTok is suddenly such a pressing issue again.
Whatever happens, I hope they’ve learned from YouTube’s earlier mistakes. In trying to break the alt-right pipeline, they ended up breaking the entire recommendation engine for years (tbf it’s a lot better now).
That said I otherwise agree with you 100% - I saw folks get sucked down you YouTube pipeline then, and I've watched people get sucked down the TikTok one now, I got one person in my life to switch to FB reels, because I would correct the purported facts in each video and they found that annoying.
Agree (even if it is hyperbolic) on the yellow brick road model of radicalization.
Can we please stop admiring China, Russia, DPRK and other similar countries where having the "wrong opinions" is considered radicalisation?
QAnon, birthed in 4chan and largely disseminated to Boomers through Facebook isolated people and convinced a large number of people to stage a coup on the US government. I can't tell if you missed the QAnon craze, or you are intentionally being ignorant. I can't think of a single TikTok trend that comes close to the level of radicalization of QAnon.
There seems to still be a large conspiratorial rabbit hole on TikTok that still leads to QAnon influencers (using more generalized hashtags and catch all conspiracies).
Given the demographics of those most heavily influenced by QAnon, it's ridiculous to imply that Tiktok had even a 10th of the influence of Facebook wrt to QAnon.
It's really not. ByteDance isn't being sanctioned. TikTok.com will remain accessible to everyone in America. This is simply saying if it can't be sold to an American (EDIT: non-Chinese) buyer within a year, it gets removed from U.S. hosting and U.S. app stores.
> you can't claim being "the free world" by imitating China
Good thing we're not.
Or else be removed from French app stores yet remain available online? Without being sanctioned or blocked?
ByteDance's CEO perjured himself in front of the Congress [1]. Meanwhile, you can't Google the 1989 Tianamen Square massacre in China because (a) Google is blocked, as in actually blocked, and (b) the very term is blocked.
There are reasonable objections to this bill. Claiming we're stooping to China's level is not one of them.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/05/30/tikt...
Oddly, the articles I've seen don't feel the need to specify there. Seems like a big difference to me, and requiring sale to specifically US buyer seems rather more of a takeover.
No, you are correct. Thank you. It must simply be no longer controlled by a foreign adversary [1]. (And yes, the term foreign adversary is defined in law [2].)
An EU, Gulf or Indian buyer would be totally fine if done in good faith, i.e. without being a front for Chinese interests.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521... § 2(g)(6)
[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
This is bigger than China for a lot of people. TikTok has given an alternative voice to groups typically marginalized on pro-Western platforms. We typically see hypocrisy from the West when it comes to Israel and current times are no different. Tiktok has allowed nearly more access to whatever footage is capable of sneaking out of the warzone whereas Meta platforms tend to suppress. (ex: they recently auto-defaulted a restriction on political content without informing their users).
A society's strength comes from its unity of will and resolve. Social media can be used to attack that unity... and has, not just by China.
So just like the other platforms, but for China instead of the US? (aka: "It's bad when you do it, not when we do it").
All social media with attention management may be weaponized and has generally proven to be unhealthy for society. TikTok happens to be actively worse for a number of reasons, one of them being that it is designed to be so.
If Xi wants to show you ponies, you'll see them all over tiktok tomorow.
One exmaple of many. If Biden doesn't want you seeing something, the white house will put pressure on social media companies to censor it.
Also: The 5th Circuit panel found that the White House coerced the platforms through “intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences” and commandeered the decision-making processes of social media companies, particularly in handling pandemic-related and 2020 election posts.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/09/08/biden-adminis...
To say they were free to refuse is disingeneous.
If a cartel member comes up to you and tells you to give him your wallet or there might be "consequences", do you think you are free to refuse him?
However, this is contrary to China, who has never really pressured any Chinese organization to do anything. This is because they don't need to use pressure. They can just do it. Because there is no concept of "private organization" in China. The state has all the power.
It's so tellingly naive when people try to equivocate the US to China.
About one half (!) of all UNGA emergency special sessions are about its conflicts, for crying out loud. :) This nothingcountry of <10 million people entertains the whole UN for the last 80 years or so almost constantly.
The world has grown by 4 billion people during that time, lol. Most of that time social media did not even exist.
The level of direct control the US Government has over US Social Media platforms pales in comparison to the control China has over TikTok.
This has to be substantiated, because it seems blatantly absurd on its face. Are you saying TikTok is an anti-western platform? That, in and of itself, justifies the divestment, considering the owner, no? Furthermore, what "pro-western" platforms are you talking about? I haven't seen anything from TikTok that wouldn't fly on discord or reddit, for example.
You only need to compare TikTok to it's US rival Reels. A majority of the pro-palestine is suppressed on Reels. The loss of TikTok is the destruction of Americans to access content that isn't filtered through US hegemony.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
Meta's arcane moderation decisions apply to other platforms than their own? Go to reddit, to youtube, or to twitter, and you can find the most vile, unfiltered opinions on Israel and Palestine known to man.
Americans aren't missing out on any content at all. The only thing that will be destroyed is China's fast lane to American eyes.
My feed is repeatedly missing these things. And then i have to manually revisit them. It starts up again. And then ceases.
So far, China doesn’t control the feed algo. They control what content is uploaded. Imagine putting work into a video yet it never seeing the light because it was shadow banned. Now imagine it not allowed to be seen. The former is the western world. The latter is china.
That said, my point isn't that "I can't watch pro-palestine content". TikTok presents the first major news platform used by Americans that wasn't created for Americans. For all the whining about how $social_media_platform doesn't offer diverse view points, that goes out the window when the owner isn't American.
I don't believe that China is better than America. I personally don't think it's a good thing that the US can just decide ban any content platform that isn't controlled by a US interest. I don't think it's good for the country and I think the security issues are overblown - any realistic security issue you can have with foreign interference, Meta has already committed and any legislation that does not address this just means the legislation doesn't really give a shit about security.
I don't think any Chinese viewpoint is inherently good, but the fact that millions of Americans cannot view content from a diversity of platforms is a problem.
[1]:https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
As I have mentioned above and in other replies. Meta platforms has quietly introduced a filter for certain political topics that was pushed to their user base with no notification.
[2]:https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/meta-limit-some-fa...
My biggest problem is that it’s too narrowly targeted.
I have worked for several US businesses with global footprints and working with China (and some other countries) required whole or part ownership of the business by entities within that nation. So we partnered with businesses in China to set up and operate our infra, and had to manage everything through contracts.
Further, Chinese government officials would show up unannounced and plug shit into our networks, and required access to our encryption keys and accounts databases and employee & customer lists etc. We had to build independent systems just for China to prevent sharing information about non-China based customers and employees. Where we couldn’t do that, we had to build filtered replication “diodes” to prevent data leakage.
China and other countries do far worse to us than just requiring local ownership of businesses; and if they feel that is in their national interest, why can’t we return the favor when we feel it’s in our interest?