Because in the end it's always about money.
Well about power really, but money is the main means to get that.
Usually this does not work out that well. Point in case - Central Europe after WWII.
Chinese astroturfing is a thing too, but in many cases it is legit naive people.
Yep. I call it "Chomskyism"
China doesn’t allow US social media companies to operate there—why should the US unilaterally allow Chinese social media companies to operate here with no reciprocity?
Continuing to play cooperate over and over when the other player keeps playing defect is not smart.
This statement is not entirely accurate. It is possible for a US social media company to operate in mainland China, provided it complies with local regulations, including hosting its servers in China and adhering to censorship requirements. For instance, LinkedIn operated in China until August 2023. However, it may ultimately prove unfeasible due to factors such as user preferences, the volume of censorship requests, or even perceived unfair competition. Since at least 2010, when Google faced demands for compliance with Chinese censorship regulations, the requirements for foreign companies to operate in China have been clearly outlined.
No comment on these policies, but it is undeniable that businesses operating in foreign markets must comply with local laws. However, by intervening in business activities, undermining corporate property rights, and contradicting its own stated principles of free market economics and international trade rules, the U.S. has demonstrated economic nationalism. I can't tell who is playing defect in this case.
Basically, there are 2 legislation in the world, legistlation and the China legislation. In China, there are laws on the surface and there are rules underneath. For example, the government never admitted that the GFW exists, yet it keeps blocking more and more sites. The government never bans online forums, yet it never grants license to open a online bbs, since like ten years ago.
During some political sensitive times, the government would send secret requirement to local companies like ByteDance and Tencent on how to censor the social media. Back when I worked at ByteDance, when the 19th Communist Party congress was open, the auditors would be in a war room, just for making sure that no negative news or comments would be released. American companies also work with the government on censorship, more or less, but that's another story.
It's very common for Chinese people who have been fooled by the government to say that, these western companys left by themselves. But it's not the laws that on the surface drives them away, it's the rules underneath.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/26/politics/social-media-disinfo...
The US is taking more control over social media, more than the government ever had over traditional media. This is similar to how the switch to the digital medium has been used as an opportunity to weaken the fourth amendment.
My point is that China isn't selectively banning websites from a single country. I wouldn't criticize if US apply the reasons of banning TikTok to all foreign websites.
Read about Google's search engine project in China aka Project Dragonfly[0]; it was a totalitarian dystopian nightmare where CCP wanted to know everything about people who use Google, like their queries and mobile phone numbers and plus they demanded from Google that millions of websites/webpages must be censored (removed from Google's China index).
Project Dragonfly was like Stalin's manifestation of perfect surveillance and propaganda tool.
Is this a serious question? Google removes all sorts of content from its index.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#:~:text=G....
Same thing, different beneficiaries in power
See the difference?
Americans have way more faith in America being the good guys than is warranted.
From experience I can tell you that also means handing over all encryption keys which is a violation of most companies compliance requirements. That means creating an entirely separate org for compliance in China with entirely different b2b and end-user contracts, terms, etc... I know of a few companies that get around this only because they are more totalitarian than China and have their own circuits bypassing the great firewall. Not naming them.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter#China
My biggest fear isnt China or Russia (like Im told it should be) but becoming like China and Russia. It's happening faster every day.
When the first and the fourth amendments are shredded then Putin and Xi Jinping get to say, with increasing truthfulness, "America is no better than us".
And even if it did it isn't a suicide pact that forces the US to do very stupid things like let the CCP use TikTok to manipulate US citizens to the benefit of the CCP and detriment of the US.
Now the other problem is that Meta will sell much of the same data to anyone who is buying. We need to do something about surveillance capitalism from private industry too.
The head of the FBI (among many others) said the ban needed to happen because China could use it to spew propaganda.
When Russia is heavily critical of what one of its media outlet says and then bans it because of tax irregularities or something, only Putin supporters are under any illusions as to why it happened.
No citizen has comparable power to influence (and hide their tracks/sources) no matter how manically they post. It's rapidly becoming 'giant computer farms full of AI following scripts' and that still counts as 'speech', but rather than an individual's opinions it's targeted influence operations towards indirect goals.
It can be as close to 'crying fire in a crowded theater' as you like, except it's methods to coordinate teams of people all crying fire, knowing there's no fire, but intending to cause a mass casualty event through their actions.
Speech?
It does not.
Foreign nationals have at least some First Amendment rights in the US. Foreign agents or countries may have restrictions on some other grounds.
<https://www.freedomforum.org/non-citizens-protected-first-am...>
<https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/aliens/>
TikTok tends toward foreign country / agent as I read it.
We're supposed to be a democratic republic with safeguards for our rights, not a mercenary war machine that can be reprogrammed at will by a few people lucky enough to influence policymaking.
This sounds good on the surface, but China and the US have very different regimes. Full reciprocity would mean turning the US into a China style dictatorship. For instance, if China censors western press in their country should we be censoring Chinese press here?
1.) It's pointless, TikTok is officially banned in US. Even if trump decides to find a US buyer for it, it will go under strict ownership investigation. So there's no way Chinese government has any influence anymore.
2.) This means that any future Chinese apps that get popular will get banned, and no need to go through any court challenges since there's precedent and law
3.) A lot of people already left TikTok and will not come back - why would they when they know the app could be gone at any minute? The traffic from the original TikTok will just keep getting split and syphoned, until the magnificent seven claims most of it
Edit: I think all it needs is a link from a friend to some TikTok content and they are back in.
Trying to argue about legality is unlikely to hold much sway given how other legal issues ended.
Yass has paid in tens of millions of dollars, he's going to call that in to get an unban.
I really don't know which way to bet on this though. The Trump presidency is going to be consistently unpredictable.
They know exactly what they are doing. That message is going to be effective and the person it’s targeted at doesn’t understand that it can be spun any way the CCP wants to spin it. How does he not see how risky letting a foreign government run something like TikTok in the US?
This is the corporate version of "he quit before they could fire him".
Since he was running as a Republican, why are they not also signing off on all this? Why is the completely Trump-friendly Supreme Court not signing off on all this?
Are you able to expand a bit?
Is it, now? He’s a corrupt convicted felon who brags about lying, which despite that was elected president. Do you think he gives a shit about anyone’s allegations? He’d sell your mother for a pack of peanuts. And why not? From his point of view he can do anything he wants and there will be no serious consequences.
I recently learned, thanks to another HN comment, that more than half of the USA population has a literacy level below the 6th grade. Suddenly it answered so many questions.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...
Kinda says it all.
People in polls repeatedly select stupid answer either due to confusion, trolling, bad poll design, not caring about what they select and so on.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and... ("Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%")
> (a friend on Facebook pointed out that 5% of Obama voters claimed to believe that Obama was the Anti-Christ, which seems to be another piece of evidence in favor of a Lizardman’s Constant of 4-5%. On the other hand, I do enjoy picturing someone standing in a voting booth, thinking to themselves “Well, on the one hand, Obama is the Anti-Christ. On the other, do I really want four years of Romney?”)
> It may be you who lacks the critical reasoning skills. Did you happen to think about the fact that 23% of the population is actually younger than age 12, meaning they wouldn’t even be in 6th grade yet?
This is incredibly ironic. It’s 54% of the adult population, which is abundantly clear by the provided link (in a bullet point, it’s hard to miss). It only takes a minimum of good faith and critical reasoning skills to:
1. Realise that of course the statistic will not include people younger than the level used as the threshold.
2. Click through and at least skim the link to steel man someone’s argument.
From the link.
They completely changed their post after the Tronno reply, which made the replies look out of context.
Their original post, quoted verbatim in my other comment¹, was:
> It may be you who lacks the critical reasoning skills. Did you happen to think about the fact that 23% of the population is actually younger than age 12, meaning they wouldn’t even be in 6th grade yet?
What did they find? He was convicted for paying with his own money to pay a pornstar to hide an affair, in a case that CNN’s own head legal analyst said “contorted the law.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-...
At a certain point you gotta put up or shut up.
Where is what?
> 90% of lawyers are partisan democrats who have hated Trump from day 1 because he is a threat to the professional managerial class.
That is clearly a conspiratorial statistic taken out of nowhere.
> He was convicted for paying with his own money to pay a pornstar to hide an affair
He was convicted of falsifying business records with intent to defraud and conspiring to “promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means”.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-charges-conviction-guilty...
95% of law firm contributions in 2019 went to Biden: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/snubbing-trump-law.... This support wasn’t out of economic interest. The overwhelming majority of lawyers are ideologically captured and hate Trump at a visceral and irrational level for not subscribing to that ideology.
> He was convicted of falsifying business records with intent to defraud and conspiring to “promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means”.
Why quote the statute instead of the facts, which aren’t really in dispute? After he had already won the election, he reimbursed his lawyer for paying off a pornstar through his family business, and booked the reimbursements as “legal expenses” instead of “pornstar payoffs.”
Brilliant minds came over from top law firms to fit those facts into to a clever legal theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carey_R._Dunne. They figured it out, just like the figured out how to make Google’s profits magically all materialize in Ireland. But the underlying conduct remains a politician covering up an affair. That’s the best the legal industry could do after eight years of digging.
Do you think Trump's being paid by ByteDance to lift the ban?
There is never a need to be that direct. Republican and Democrat donors tell politicians what positions to take. Trump doesn't need to take money directly from a company. He takes it from his donors, who in turn take it from the company in some form.
In this case, the theory is that billionaire Jeff Yass (an investor in Tik Tok) has "persuaded" Trump to flip his position.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/jeff-yass-billionaire...
My understanding now is that now we've shifted from "ByteDance pays Trump to flip" to "American businessman Jeff Yass meets with Trump and convinces him to flip"
I hope you can understand that as a non-American observer I see a lot of distance between those two claims and find myself confused when they're treated with equivalency.
Non-democratic places have more direct path for bribes but otherwise its same.
I think that local level corruption in my small town in Canada or in yours in Switzerland is pretty markedly different from what’s been originally presented, which is that DJT was paid directly by ByteDance to adjust his position.
I'd still love your clarification though - do you still stand by the claim that Trump is being paid to reneg on his position re. TikTok, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42755872 ?
Often this is accompanied by a public message of flattery or a donation to his "political" coffers.
An easy way is for TikTok to just promise to algorithm away any criticism of him in the US.
Politicians take political decisions, not logical ones.
The waters get pretty muddy if we're willing to suggest that American presidents are "paid" by other nations to enact policy which benefits said nations, it's not unreasonable to ask for clarity about such claims.
What I think you’re describing is political favor, something entirely different from what was originally presented.
Exactly. Money is the decree – the concrete representation of debt. A recognizable token that can be given to someone that says "I owe you something", which can subsequently be exchanged back by the recipient to get the something of value that they are owed. Which you already know if you've ever used money before, and no doubt you have.
But, as it pertains to the topic at hand, in cases where there is no reason to delay delivery of the actual value, you can skip holding the debt. You could go through the motions of receiving money, and then giving it right back in exchange for the thing of value that you are owed, but there is no practical difference between that and cutting money out of the picture and simply accept the thing of value as payment.
> What I think you’re describing is political favor
Money might be a tool used in offering political favor, I suppose, but that is well beyond the content of my comment about the function of money. How did you manage to reach this conclusion?
I think it's fairly obvious, no? The originally presented case was that Trump had received payment for assuring TikTok's survival. I've noted a few times in this thread that this is a really poor framing, and that it's more likely his actions were motivated by politics, not fiduciary gain.
Do you have some insults you’d like to sling?
None you have ever heard before, and which you most likely know you deserve. No need to feed you with any of that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: it looks like we've had to warn you about this kind of thing more than once before, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26742673. However, the good news is that it seems to be rare in your otherwise very good commenting history (for which, thank you!) so it should be easy to avoid in the future.
To my knowledge, if I'm understanding rbanffy's position correctly, this would be the first time in history US president was directly being bribed by a foreign actor, so I still maintain it's worth seeking clarification.
Am I wrong in holding skepticism here? I don't doubt there are political points to be gained for Trump here, especially given the domestically controversial nature of the ban, but I'd really love for someone to hold true to the original notion under question that someone (ByteDance, CCP, etc.) is "paying the incoming president", as rbanffy suggseted.
Certainly. The whole corruption setup is always done in such a way that there is never direct proof, only some more or less well hidden ones. So if you expect somebody here will post a recording of their bribe negotiations, that won't ever happen, Trump would directly order CIA to eliminate such person with extreme prejudice, and that's how it would have been done.
Look, he is crook, smart, properly fucked up man baby with issues that no psychologist could ever fix, but he is a crook at the core. These are facts. Enough evidence with few seconds of googling to condemn 10 such persons of highly amoral and sometimes also criminal behavior. And everybody knows it, even here. So folks understand how to deal with such currently most powerful person, so they do.
I don't get where your doubts come from. Facts are out there, you only need to connect few dots.
As somebody coming from a third-world country, it’s a matter of fact that the people view politicians as a corrupt group. They think they are better than the people they represent, they are multiple times richer than the population and campaigns range from distorted truths to clear lies.
Proven or unproven, a claim that a given politician received bribes to influence something is not met with skepticism, but a mere “yeah, of course”!
Some say the US is a rich third-world country, or becoming one.
Why do we bother with the farce that elected representatives are better than us? They are looking for their own interests.
This is eerily similar to the Carter/Regan hostages situation
And never mind that the majority of users on TikTok are far left woke democrats.
Why do you assume conspiracy instead of unilateral political maneuvering?
If that's not foreign influence, I don't know what is.