These companies are saying they are committed to safeguarding user data by spending $X dollars on a privacy project. In reality this is just companies policing themselves. They can always circumvent this in the future and just claim there is a bug with the privacy code. Without any form of legislation or regulatory body from the government there are literally no consequences. Getting grilled on capitol hill is just optics, looks good for the camera. Congress would literally need to spin out something like the SEC but for online privacy, but I dont see that happening.
I don't know how to untangle it. It's obviously possible- BAE Systems Inc. (an American defense contractor) is owned by BAE Systems plc. (a British company).
It's doable when you keep everything separate, only hire US citizens, add lots of locked doors, and put people in jail if they leak. I can't picture this working with data that's not considered classified.
I'm wondering if it's not about the data at all. It's about who gets to control the information space. They don't even have to delete information critical of China, just weigh it down so it's essentially never seen.
I feel it's 100% about control. TikTok was eating their ad lunch. Growth potential for a creator feels much higher TikTok. The writing on the wall for me was when Meta, just two weeks ago, paused their creator payout for the TikTok competitor, reels. I also recall Zuck lobbying hard against TikTok for a while. Unsure if causation is there. But god damn that timing is sweet, eh?
The thing about politics is that it is the art of compromise.
I think it makes sense for policies to discuss the foreign influence angle separately from the domestic influence angle. Further, it makes sense to sub-divide the foreign influence angle along certain dimensions, such as, generally friendly allies (like the British) versus adversarial powers (like China).
Dividing problems these ways makes the conversations easier to happen, and from a political perspective, legislation tends to happen with a scalpel rather than a knife.
People always seem to want to say "if X is a problem, why don't we talk about Y instead" - in this case, if data sharing is a problem, why don't we talk about the bigger problem? The issue when it comes to politics is that the system is almost by design resistant to big sweeping changes.
There is a lot of value in continuing to have conversations about privacy. About domestic privacy. About foreign privacy. And all the sub-divisions possible along those lines.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, especially in politics. Instead of seeing certain targeted privacy legislation (like potentially against TikTok) as bad, see it as part of a larger conversation and movement towards tougher privacy legislation. As public sentiment turns more and more towards privacy, we can continue to evolve other dimensions of the problem space - including domestic.
After watching some of the congressional hearings yesterday and reading some of the news coverage, I can't wrap my head around how anyone can take this seriously anymore - it feels like I am living in a simulation, or a movie of some sort like The Truman Show.
I think what has enabled this must be something like this:
The boiling frog story is generally offered as a metaphor cautioning people to be aware of even gradual change lest they suffer eventual undesirable consequences. It may be invoked in support of a slippery slope argument as a caution against creeping normality. It is also used in business to reinforce that change needs to be gradual to be accepted.[6] The term "boiling frog syndrome" is a metaphor used to describe the failure to act against a problematic situation which will increase in severity until reaching catastrophic proportions.[7] It thereby encapsulates the barely noticeable impact of slow environmental degradation that has been described by Daniel Pauly as shifting baselines.[8]
The story has been retold many times and used to illustrate widely varying viewpoints: in 1960 about warning against those who are sympathetic towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War;[9] in 1980 about the impending collapse of civilization anticipated by survivalists;[10] in the 1990s about inaction in response to climate change and staying in abusive relationships.[11][12] It has also been used by libertarians to warn about the slow erosion of civil liberties.[6]
In the 1996 novel The Story of B, environmentalist author Daniel Quinn spends a chapter on the metaphor of the boiling frog, using it to describe human history, population growth and food surplus.[13] Pierce Brosnan's character Harry Dalton mentioned it in the 1997 disaster movie Dante's Peak in reference to the accumulating warning signs of the volcano's reawakening.[14] Al Gore used a version of the story in a New York Times op-ed,[15] in his presentations and the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth to describe ignorance about global warming. In the movie version the frog is rescued before it is harmed.[16] This use of the story was referenced by writer/director Jon Cooksey in the title of his 2010 comedic documentary How to Boil a Frog.[17]
Law professor and legal commentator Eugene Volokh commented in 2003 that regardless of the behavior of real frogs, the boiling frog story is useful as a metaphor, comparing it to the metaphor of an ostrich with its head in the sand.[6] Economics Nobel laureate and New York Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman used the story as a metaphor in a July 2009 column, while pointing out that real frogs behave differently.[18] Journalist James Fallows has been advocating since 2006 for people to stop retelling the story, describing it as a "stupid canard" and a "myth".[19][20] After Krugman's column appeared, however, he declared "peace on the boiled frog front" and said that using the story is acceptable if the writer points out that it is not literally true.[21]
I feel it's because nearly everyone today has a dysregulated nervous system. Causing us to react out of emotion, rather than responding thoughtfully.
It's like fighting dogs into the pit. They've been put through so much, they'll fight to the death. They want to keep us this way. Much easier to influence and control.
Could someone enlighten me?
Chinese 2017 National Security Law Article 7 says "Any organization and citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work in accordance with the law" [1]. This law says TikTok must obey and help the Chinese government national intelligence.
The concern is that although you live in Canada, US, Europe; you can still be "arrested" by Chinese police working in hidden police departments in the Canada, US, and Europe [2]. And TikTok will tell them where you are. From the second article: FBI director Christopher Wray told a US Senate hearing in November that attempts by China to set up a police presence on US soil "violates sovereignty and circumvents standard judicial and law enforcement cooperation processes".
Under the ironically-named USA Freedom Act, the US government has essentially the same powers. My country doesn't have an extradition treaty with China, but it does have one with the US. There's no evidence that citizens of my country have ever been disappeared by China and taken to secret prisons, but there's documentary evidence that the US have done exactly that.
I'm genuinely trying to think of a good-faith argument for why Chinese tech firms are less trustworthy than American tech firms, but I honestly can't think of one.
Still a problem from a USA national security standpoint.
But absolutely agreed -- as a user, I can't trust any of these governments or companies. The only things I do trust are E2EE services that don't collect unnecessary personal data in the first place.
I thought about asking what country you were from, but I realized it doesn't matter.
I'm from the United States and I want this app banned. While the things you cite are or could be bad, it's entirely irrelevant to dealing with an app that is demonstrably a psychological control system. You're upset that CIA or US Army spec ops kidnapped people from your country? Imagine the United States injecting a social media system into your country that brainwashes people into thinking that they deserved it. TikTok can do this.
I'm a neotech-luddite and think all social media should be banned, so you're not going to get an argument from me on how terrible Meta is.
You admit that social media is bad and increases suicide rates, yes? Okay great, seems logical then to ban the app that's run by a country that has set out to actively degrade the country the app is deployed in.
Here's how I know that TikTok is some sort of psyop: it's an entirely separate app in China. The algorithm does different things, explicitly. I don't know why people are so hostile to the idea that finally we've found a capitalistic company that should be punished for exploiting people. That Meta and Google behave badly is entirely irrelevant, and you and everyone else doing the same whataboutism dance knows it.
> Here's how I know that TikTok is some sort of psyop: it's an entirely separate app in China. The algorithm does different things, explicitly.
Can you explain that a bit more? Of course it's going to behave differently. Any serious multinational is going to tailor their offerings to local preferences. A McDonald's in India sells a significantly different menu than one in Indiana. As for it being a seperate app rather than clicking a country flag during onboarding or whatever, I can see plenty of reasonable technical reasons for that.
I'd think they probably have even more freedom than most players to do so, because they didn't have to play to significant established brand expectations on arrival.
Whataboutism are also all the arguments brought up in this thread against tiktok.
I honestly don't care. I don't use either and actively dislike all of these echo chambers. If it's for me ban all of them, or let them get even worse I don't care. It doesn't influence me at all.
But this is just a shitshow, cold war on a weird social level. This is not against tiktok this is obviously mainly a topic to talk bad about China.
VoA isn't an algorithm that can manipulate you into making purchases you otherwise wouldn't. Those in Eastern Europe are probably thankful that a short wave radio program existed in the 1980s, before the Wall fell. If your point is that America broadcasts propaganda, then yes I'll concede the point. But it's entirely irrelevant.
That isn't arguing the "worse" part. Facebook is also going to support, assist, etc, with US national intelligence services. You can be black-bagged anywhere in the world by the US too, they are pretty famous for how far the arm of US law reaches.
Do you have any evidence that supports that being the case in practice? Can you have evidence of it? Whenever we get a peek behind the curtain it generally seems like warrants are not a factor.
That belief has to ultimately be a statement of faith. It is basically counting on highly untrustworthy people behaving honestly - they probably aren't. And all the elements of the system are hidden where there is no accountability.
It's an appeal to a written system of laws that has continuity. China doesn't have this, it has Xi and the Party. These whataboutisms are tiresome because they're so shallow. They're shallow in that they evoke a criticism of some aspect of how the United States manages itself as a method of deflecting from the quite awful and well evidenced way that CCP runs China.
How do you expect to compare Google to TikTok without "whataboutisms"? Comparison is whataboutism!
It is just a fact that Google and the US intelligence apparatus are more invasive than TikTok and the Chinese. The former combo spy and conspire against almost literally the range of Trump to Afghan goat herders. TikTok can compete with that, but it can't exceed it.
If I could pick one, I'd feel much safer being spied on the Chinese than the Americans. They've got much less ability to make my life hell. Look at how far Snowden had to run, and how Assange never ran far enough.
>It is just a fact that Google and the US intelligence apparatus are more invasive than TikTok and the Chinese.
This isn't a fact, and that people pretend that it is is a strange contortion of reality that I'm really struggling to understand. CCP is actively using a vast state-sponsored surveillance apparatus to do things like build actual (not imagined) concentration camps. And your reaction to these facts is to imagine that the American state's reaction to its secrets being exposed - regardless of how noble that action was - is the same thing. It's clearly not. For your comparison to be worthwhile, you have to pretend that CIA and NSA are co-owners of Meta and Google and have the means to use it to move elections and public opinion (foreign and domestic) in the way the American regime wants. Is this what you're claiming?
Well, the question of coups hasn't come up so far in the conversation but I am happy to claim that. They're media companies, and as we've learned from the history of journalism media companies do tend to put their finger on the scale when it comes to elections. There isn't really a question of whether US social media companies are actively influencing elections after the so-called Twitter Files and although there hasn't been a scandal involving the intelligence agencies influencing foreign elections yet.
But it is coming. We know the US regularly heads out to topple foreign governments. It just isn't plausible that they'd ignore the influence of US social media companies when they do that. Certainly I think India and the EU would have to be a bit crazy to give Facebook & friends free access to their population. I expect there is a faction at Google who have Modi voodoo dolls on hand.
> It's clearly not.
I have no doubt it is clear to you, but the term for that is 'bias'. If you are in a Western country, you're probably safer with TikTok because it is less influential than the US media companies and the Chinese spying and renditioning apparatus is less sophisticated. China are also much more passive (not exactly by choice, it must be said) and won't use the data for targeting missile strikes on your military leaders.
The experience that some Americans have, perhaps those who work in technology in particular, can make you fairly hostile to all of the above. I'm not denying that CIA or NSA or the US State Department use Meta or other social media systems to influence elections or governments abroad. I'm making two specific observations: 1) CIA/NSA are not part owners in those companies, and that's a very significant difference from how TikTok exists, where Bytedance is a CCP controlled organization and is part owner in the subsidiary that operates in the US; and 2) My hostility to TikTok is an extension of my hostility to Meta et al.
Eventually our discussion will horseshoe and we'll end up saying basically the same thing. These companies are all terrible, but the specific defense of TikTok will remain bizarre to me, because when you admit that Facebook can influence or tip elections you have to also admit that TikTok can do this too. And it's reasonable to ban it because it's controlled by a power that has publicly stated it wishes to harm the United States.
>I have no doubt it is clear to you, but the term for that is 'bias'.
It is not "bias" to point out that there is a difference between putting dissenters in prison camps and what the US did to Assange. Both are bad, but to imagine these things as the same is a bridge too far for me.
Extraordinary rendition has no laws backing it. The US government simply ignores any cases with a "State Secrets" statement. This is a known practice that happens in the US and other countries.
How many other extraordinary practices without a legal framework does the US government have?
Biden chose to have private intelligence groups monitor social media because they circumvent people's rights. What other rights do they abuse?
The actual tactics underpinning the CCP’s anticorruption campaign are much more unsavory. These include at a minimum surveillance, physical threats, and family intimidation in order to force exiles to return “voluntarily” to China. In October 2020, the US Department of Justice accused eight individuals of acting as illegal agents of China in a multiyear campaign of harassment and stalking in order to coerce an unnamed Chinese individual to return to face trial.68 In 2018, US intelligence officials alleged off the record to Foreign Policy that Chinese agents had beaten and drugged multiple individuals in Australia, returning them to China by boat.69
Nothing. It won't be asked at a hearing because it might be embarrassing to reveal that corporations and law enforcement use this against American civlians already. Jan 6th rioters were detected using cell phone geolocation signals as well as video.
Wouldn't be surprised if they are compelled not to sell the info by the government. Also wouldn't be surprised if they've been buying it this entire time, either.
Common arguments are that those two you listed are American-owned; that China bans US tech giants; that the CCP has outsized control of Chinese companies (and the data that they collect); and that TikTok's algorithm purposefully promotes content that will result in an uneducated, divided population in countries outside of China.
I am not saying that those are true or that I agree with them, but those seem to be the typical arguments.
From a outside perspective content on tiktok is no worse than Facebook, Instagram or Reddit. The main thing you notice about TikToks algorithm is that it's less a echo chamber and more inklusive to alternative content.
Really helpful, thank you. Still don’t see the problem, other than the need to educate kids on digital hygiene. But like anything, I bet they already know the harms of overconsumption.
They said they're not using GPS; and, my iPhone hasn't revealed TikTok asking for my GPS location, so this means if they're tracking location, it's based on preferences, watching times, IP address or something else not GPS-related, all of which are wholely accessible to every single website on the internet, those hosted in China and any other country.
Know anyone that uses AliExpress? Or plays Genshin Impact?
1. China banned Facebook after it refused to cooperate with law enforcement following the Urumqi riots. Google and others decided the cost of following censorship laws was too high compared to the return and decided to retreat. Other American tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and IBM have a presence in China. However unjust China's laws may be, there's a qualitative differences between applying it to all companies in the same way vs. what the US is attempting to do with TikTok.
2. From an American point of view, this strikes true. For the rest of the world there's hardly a difference. If any, the US has proved it is willing to enforce its will globally against non-citizens with all means possible (see fe. Julian Assange).
3. Youtubes algorithm is strongly driven by controversy, Instagram seems to be responsible for a large amount of body dismorphia and depression in young people. I'm all for more research and stricter policies to suppress this, but just claiming things without a shred of evidence isn't helping the discussion along.
TikTok is no better or worse than Facebook or Google. US is just mad it can't boss Tik Tok around like they can any other tech giant. Because TikTok has ties to the Chinese government, there's a national security concern about what information they collect and share with China.
The whole "save the children" angle is pure optics. These politicians couldn't give a rat's about it but they know the public is so fed up with "toxic" social media they're using the excuse that it's psychologically damaging to children to go after it.
The government never seems to place any burden on parenting. But when they're being left out of the spynet is only when they care.
It's not any worse, just that it likely works with the CCP as opposed to the NSA, and the US obviously considers that a threat.
I think it'd be more productive for the US Congress to regulate the online space and the (ab)use of people's data/identity regardless of where the company is based in than to downright ban foreign companies. The latter seems rather... un-American.
Because they're "not an American company" - so they make a great target.
Now what is an American company? Well, I don't really have a clue, companies certainly aren't patriotic citizens and we have no expectation of that even if they're entirely domestic... but once they're global? Well, then they can just jump their headquarters around to get the most advantageous tax laws and liability.
We should hold all social media companies to the same level of accountability because while TikTok might be openly cozy to the chinese government if you think any corporations are on the side of the American people I have a bridge to sell you.
This whole thing is so strange. People in the US were so concerned about Russia running ads for a few thousand dollars in 2016 during the elections but are now ok with TikTok being controlled by CCP?
As always, take every comment with a grain of salt.
Honestly, I think this is refreshing. If anything, it's an acknowledgement that the info gathered and shared by social media to their respective governments is indeed, very useful.
Sure, it might be hypocritical. But it's a win, either way.
For me I don't really care if they are better or worse, I'm just tired of Chinese companies milking the open the market while being protected in their own. If these companies want to participate in the other markets then they should lobby their government to open up more.
Basing on experience and facts I can only say that since TikTok is new and hasn't had many scandals yet, their privacy reviews and processes internally are not mature or not a priority yet compared to other FANG companies that have been burned by it.
And why should they prioritize it over growth?
I spoke to devs, and they didn't care at all about their privacy reviews.
I'm not a TikTok fan, but this behavior was the same as other FANG companies early days. Yet they are being treated different?
It’s very, very simple. So long as China continues to ban US social media companies and search engines, whatever reason they have for doing so is a valid reason for the US and other western countries to respond in kind and ban Chinese social media companies. Not just from a military or security standpoint but also an economic one.
If TikTok is “not a threat” then neither is Facebook and Google. End of story.
Is the pissy-fight back and forth between two world powers worth the 150M people that have gotten more useful news than we have in years; *and* the millions of small businesses that have been able to get off the ground due to TikTok's algorithm helping them find the right audience?
It's not that simple. China has laws that US social media/search engine companies are not willing to follow but AFAICT TikTok abides by every US law that exists.
It is that simple. Chinese “laws” created in such a way to keep American social media and tech giants out. We can just create our own corresponding law.
America cant keep its promises to its citizens and do what you are describing at the same time. It's now choosing the latter and chipping away at the former.
You should read the RESTRICT act that just passed.
"Never let a good crisis (real or manufactured) go to waste" always works on an amnesiatic society. At some point the pro-tiktok ban crowd will realize just how much of their 1st and 4th amendment rights they have lost.
> At some point the pro-tiktok ban crowd will realize just how much of their 1st and 4th amendment rights they have lost.
Yes, Tik Tok developers are likely to use the algorithm to help defend the company.
> America cant keep its promises to its citizens and do what you are describing at the same time. It's now choosing the latter and chipping away at the former.
One main reason that TikTok can be worse is subtle propaganda. There is a very subtle pro-Chinese bias on TikTok and that's beneficial for China in the long term. The more that your rival's population perceives you as a threat, the harder it is to compete against them.
In what other trade context would it be ok for one partner to block all access to their own market (Facebook, Twitter etc) whilst still enjoying full access to everybody else's? How is this remotely acceptable?
The original comment claims that US social networks are banned in China, which they are not.
No one is claiming that America has "banned abortion" despite it's unavailable for 1/3 of American women, i.e. those living in the 11 states that have banned it[0].
Taiwan is not part of China, period. Nation states have a policy of "strategic ambiguity" as a matter of diplomatic convenience but the US is not considering supplying weaponry to Taiwan because it is part of China.
They're not bribing US politicians, which is why there is now unprecedented "bipartisan" support for banning TikTok, because we need to protect the children or not.
While privacy is an issue on TikTok, I would say the more concerning stuff is that they are actively curating speech: they frequently ban content critical of the CCP, promote pro-ccp messaging, and also sometimes they harass journalists using information that has a somewhat reasonable expectation of privacy. There is a suspicion that they bump up divisive content, but that's harder to prove since obviously Facebook and Google do this too. But douyin does the opposite, it bumps up non-divisive content.
I don't know how I didn't know this, but today I learned from nickdrom on TikTok that you can type in the name of anyone in congress to see which (social media) companies they invest in:
Is it any surprise that they want to ban the tool that not only is the biggest competitor for their investments - which pay them hundreds of millions of dollars - but also tells its users where to find the very corruption that they try so hard to cover up?
The obvious one is enforcement would be a political football; see for example the Trump presidency "emoluments" scandal vs. the whinging about Pelosi's investment performance. It'd never end and the quality of the candidates or decisions they make would stay the same.
Another is that it'd be unfair to politicians who think that market indexes are a bad idea.
I think you need to start with making a case that it’s a problem that members of Congress make investments at all, including into social media companies since making investments and making investments specifically into social media companies are likely not severable disputes. I don’t think there’s a strong enough argument to make there, nor was one attempted. It looks bad, there’s probably a conflict of interest, but a conflict of interest over people who are regularly in conflict with each other doesn’t keep me up at night.
It is a problem that we have an unequal exchange with the PRC over social media companies, and that the situation with American businesses under American law and situation with PRC businesses under PRC law subject to the Politburo of the CCP are equivalent, and shouldn’t be ignored by Congress because they’ll look bad or look like hypocrites. They already look bad and like hypocrites on a daily basis, but they still have a responsibility to the American people to investigate what appears to be an asset of the PRC government that only appears to be a private business operating in the American market and address it through law if necessary.
Don’t forget these are the same people who spirited away Jack Ma until he toed the party line. There is no such thing as a private corporation in the PRC whilst it is subject to the CCP’s political regime.
Congress sucks, but it is a notable distinction that despite how much they suck, they also make their investments public information per laws they chose to pass.
I think the point is that anyone in America can do this. The fact that some rando on TikTok did it is just a feature of that particular social media company's algorithmic reach. You can find criticisms of congress and their "constituent" investors all across the American media ecosystem.
Well that’s embarrassing. You’re right, and I completely misread earlier. I think the core of my argument stands even with that, but thanks for pointing that out. Cheers!
This is a strange argument: I mean if TikTok were not owned by CCP and were a public company, I am sure a lot of folks in congress would have invested in it due to its size.
Big tech has ingratiated themselves with congress by hiring friends and family, donating liberally to political campaigns, and staying involved in Washington with think tanks.
In part, the campaign against Tiktok is a campaign for SF based big tech to hold the monopoly on people's attention. As a newer startup, Tiktok has not entrenched itself the way that other tech companies have in DC yet.
I don't know how I didn't know this, but today I learned from zackmorris on HN that you can type in the name of anyone in congress to see which (social media) companies they invest in:
Valve is privately owned. TikTok is owned by an adversarial govt with one of the worst human rights violations in the modern world. The two are not comparable.
> ByteDance is financially backed by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group.[34] As of March 2021, it was estimated to be valued at $250 billion in private trades.[35][needs update]
> In April 2021, a state-owned enterprise owned by the Cyberspace Administration of China and China Media Group, the China Internet Investment Fund, purchased a 1% stake in ByteDance's main Chinese entity and placed a government official, Wu Shugang, on its board of directors.
Pretending this is about human rights abuses is simply a farce. The US has, and continues to support human rights abuse wherever it deems it advantageous.
The recent witch hunt has done more damage to the US than TikTok was ever likely to.
TikTok/CCP supporters keep dragging it in that direction to avoid the main issue.
It is about an adversarial government having access to the US population while shutting off US companies unfairly. It is about national security and fair trade.
> The recent witch hunt has done more damage to the US than TikTok was ever likely to.
And you have data to support that?
I was neutral about this when starting out but seeing the same weak pro-TikTok arguments repeated in different forms, have pushed to the other side.
> TikTok/CCP supporters keep dragging it in that direction to avoid the main issue.
You were the one to bring human rights into the conversation: "with one of the worst human rights violations in the modern world".
> It is about an adversarial government
The US has spent the last decade using China as a way to score political points at home, after spending the prior three decades moving the majority of their manufacturing there. China is far from perfect but from my perspective the US have been the ones fostering an adversarial relationship.
> And you have data to support that?
I'll qualify that statement as my personal opinion but from my perspective your politicians just spent a day engaging in an embarrassingly transparent attempt at stoking fear and mistrust. The main result of which was showing the world how deeply incompetent many of them are.
Buddy Carter confidently believes that TikTok is tracking it's users emotional response through pupil dilation but has no comprehension of why you'd need to identify someone's eyes to put a motion tracking filter over them[1]. According to Mr. Carter, TikTok isn't doing enough to protect younger users but thinks that asking a user their age and checking whether or not the users public videos align with the age they declared is "creepy".
Dan Crenshaw used his time to state that Chinese law requires it's citizens to co-operate with their national intelligence agencies. That might have been a good point if not for the fact that TikTok's CEO, the person Crenshaw was questioning, is not Chinese.
Richard Hudson proved himself unable of forming a coherent question as to whether TikTok attempts to access other devices on a WiFi network. Instead asking "So if I have a TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home WiFi network, does TikTok access that network?"
> Access to the US population while shutting off US companies unfairly. It is about national security and fair trade.
The average American is at much more risk from their own government's surveillance apparatus than China's. America has never been interested in fair trade, only trade which furthers American interests. There's no "fairness" in a financially poorer country having it's domestic players pushed out of their own markets by companies that can afford to lose more than the country's GDP.
> I was neutral about this when starting out but seeing the same weak pro-TikTok arguments repeated in different forms, have pushed to the other side.
Ah yes, TikTok have been famously adversarial and haven't taken any steps to assuage privacy or security concerns. They aren't a legally separate entity, they aren't already working with Oracle to process US data and they haven't already moved the storage of that data to Oracle's servers in the US either[2]:
> As of October, all new U.S. user data was being stored inside the country. The company started deleting all historic U.S. user data from non-Oracle servers this month, in a process expected to be completed this year, Chew said.
> access to U.S. data is managed by U.S. employees through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security, which is run independently of ByteDance and monitored by outside observers.
By all means, ban TikTok from the devices of government and security personnel. Banning it entirely will only cool the relationship between China and the US even further, followed by a resulting loss in global influence. The lack of support for the sanctions on Russia proves how much damage the antagonistic approach has already caused.
So say they ban TikTok, and Apple and Google remove it from their app stores.
How do they stop people from using the TikTok website instead?
I've never used TikTok other than occasionally clicking a link that takes me to a video on their website, but from what I'm gleaning from a little Googling what using one of their mobile apps gives you really just one big difference:
• You can shoot video from within the app, and add music and do some editing, and upload to TikTok.
If you just use the web you can upload video, but it is up to you to find something to shoot it, add music, and edit.
So...not as convenient for the people creating the content since there will be more steps involving more separate applications, but it doesn't sound like the website will be much of a downgrade for people who just ant to watch.
Also, what happens in a year or two when Apple releases a new version of iOS that allows using third-party stores and side loading to comply with EU regulations? Do we think Apple is going to maintain a separate version of iOS for the EU and the rest of the world, or will they allow the third-party stores and side loading everywhere?
The convenience of making new content is everything to Tiktok. Tiktok is all about flipping through a constant stream of stuff and spending a very short amount of time viewing it. If users constantly see old videos when they scroll due to no updated content, Tiktok would pretty much die. The userbase does not have the attention span or long-form video culture of YouTube.
Would a separate short video making app work? Something that integrates filming short video, adding music, and editing, along with the ability to automatically upload to your TikTok account (and/or YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc accounts)?
I'm sure you're not the target audience of TikTok (which is probably a good thing).
> not as convenient for the people creating the content...
Yeah, and that little inconvenience is day and night. That's why TikTok got popular at the first place. Convenience. Pepople can always record videos and share them to others since digital camera is a thing.
That may have been critical to forming the network but not for maintaining it. As long as the consumer UX is good (which is a big assumption I have no idea about), the creators will do whatever they need to to reach that audience. You lose some at the margins but that's probably low-quality content anyway.
I think there's a lot more going on here than most people appreciate - imho, the BIG/REAL reason the US government wants TikTok gone is because of it's potency for propaganda - specifically, just regular people, American and global citizens, communicating with each other in a format that just so happens (by chance basically, but it makes sense in retrospect) to be WAAAAY better for effectively transmitting ideas from one human mind to another human mind.
It seems like this is "just" videos, but that's not necessarily correct - it is true that it "is videos", but "it's just videos" presumes that there is no noteworthy metaphysical pheomenon going on.....but if you are on TikTok, and got these congressional hearings into your feed (tons of my feed was yesterday, since I hearted every one that came up), seeing video after video of congress people OBVIOUSLY reading from a coordinated script, OBVIOUSLY lying/acting, the emperor OBVIOUSLY having no clothes.....it is surreal. Video after video of different congress people doing the same thing, literally putting on a performance, demonstrating that American politics IS IN FACT fake, a literal illusion / magic trick, unmistakably....this is DEVASTATING from a geopolitics perspective.
And in trying to put this genie back in the bottle, my feeling is that they may have shot themselves in the foot. What I have experienced is being experienced by millions of other people (lots have made videos mocking their politicians, but I don't think many people see through it as much as I, see my "Boiled Frog" reference above) - the cat is out of the bag. A MASSIVE exploit in the armour of the US regime has been revealed, analogous to Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star. Nothing so dramatic will happen here at least in the short run, but the idea is now out in the wild, to some degree. And that's why TikTok is so dangerous: it's ability to transmit ideas from the mind of one human being into the mind of another human being - this is The Way. Of course, "duh, that's 'just' communicating, get out of here with your conspiracy theories[1], etc etc etc", I've heard it all before. This is sub-perceptual heuristics not just perceiving reality, but generating reality. Now if THAT idea ever got out into the wild, they'd have even more trouble.
May you live in interesting times!
[1] One of the most potent remotely callable algorithms that has somehow ended up in the mind of most every single node in this system we're stuck in - one of many. It would be a real shame if people started to figure out how this system runs, if they somehow learned how to think outside of the invisible box that's been built around them. Humans are very much like ChatGPT, it can be observed, in massive quantities - people are going to start noticing things like this, and I think there is a very good chance the puzzle pieces will start to fall into place...and then maybe, the gig will finally be up. If citizens of all nations came to this realization more or less simultaneously, I think it could literally change the world. TikTok may not accomplish it, but ~~the~~ A path to it is now known. Even worse (for those running the show): these large language models are also revealing many interesting nuances about reality that were formerly very difficult if not impossible to see.
Twitter 1.0 colluded with US Govt and FBI to push preferred narrative censoring anything they deemed unfit; see Twitter files. FB too was complicit in this practice. All US entities are collaborating with the government to push govt propaganda, TikTok doesn't listen to the US Govt, which is the core problem.
> If you just use the web you can upload video, but it is up to you to find something to shoot it, add music, and edit.
If you don't actually use it regularly then you don't know. Their in-app editor tools is best in class for rapid, convenient social media content (as compared to YouTube, Snapchat or Instagram).
There is a web interface to TikTok. For consuming TikTok it is not quite as fast and fluid as the app, but that's good enough to satisfy the non-creators using it as an entertainment medium.
Sure but the obsession regarding China is leaving everyone vulnerable and blind to the methods being utilized by everyone else. It's not as if TikTok is using some alien technology here that nobody else has access to.
Cambridge Analytica anyone? Did we all just forget? That wasn't even Chinese influence and still it had tremendous impact on the US (and how her citizens view each other).
The US is already influencing US mass psychology, but I guess people are more ok with being manipulated by people who were born in the same border as them, than by people who were born outside that border.
They do have a camp, considered illegal by most of the world, yet still in operation, with middle eastern people, plenty of them innocent, that even has a MC Donald's on the island. Which is literally the most American thing imagineable to put a Mac Donald's on their illegal prison island...
That's a legitimate concern. We've recently had examples of the US government influencing US mass psychology via Twitter, including examples where Twitter was asked to suppress information the government stated was factually correct.
The CCP is trash, and the US government is far better (it has elections, for one thing) but I suggest we should be concerned about any attempt to manipulate the populace.
Being a representative democracy, the USA's critical weakness is that it is ruled by stupid people that are voted in by the stupid people they represent. So yea, the US government is better but dumb, and it is vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation. Our global rivals know this. It shouldn't be a huge surprise that we're being (at best) pen-tested (and at worst) attacked through things like tiktok and troll farms.
It's ruled by monied people, who manufacture consent amongst the stupid people partly by convincing them that the executive and legislative branches are somehow answering to the stupid people, and not the monied people.
Yes. At the moment I expect Facebook, Twitter, etc to be focused mainly on using the data they collect to drive engagement and serve more ads. I expect the US government to have relatively weak and ineffective information operations on those platforms because they don't own the platforms and are relatively inexperienced with internet scale information operations. I expect TikTok to be focused mainly on using the data they collect to drive engagement more effectively than previously feasible and serve information operations. I expect the Chinese government to have strong and effective information operations on that platform because in a real sense the government and by extension the Chinese Communist Party does own the platform and have large amounts of experience in internet scale information operations.
Agreed. The fact that 500+ mostly well-educated, privileged people in Congress can’t understand privacy on the internet suggests a systemic problem that is not only present in Congress.
Those 500+ members of Congress each have a staff of around 10 (if in the House) to 50 (if in the Senate) working to help draft write these policiess but we'd be paid peanuts ($50k/yr in a city where rent for a studio is $2-2.5k and paying for 6 years of student loans - undergrad+grad school). You ain't getting good talent if you ain't paying for it. Those of us who know shit leave for the Private Sector. In general from my time working on the Hill, actual relations between most Congressmembers in both parties are pretty congenial and drama free. It's the pay gap that actually effects policymaking.
Alternatively, the Federal Agencies (which do pay decently btw) end up implementing Policies and Directives on their own that tend to make sense. Congress is a laggard compared to unilateral action that Agencies and Regulators like the SEC, CISA, DoE, DoT, etc can take, but those actions are only bandaids because they can be rolled back when bosses are changed.
> 500+ mostly well-educated, privileged people in Congress can’t understand privacy on the internet suggests a systemic problem that is not only present in Congress
There is no national consensus on internet privacy. Most Americans simply don't care, certainly not enough to give up convenience. The minority who do are politically disengaged. To the degree there is consensus, it's on commons, e.g. national security.
Throughout its history, 99% of people would have described broadcast TV as free rather than ad supported. Knowing that it's paid for by ads is irrelevant if I'm not shelling out cash.
I guess the difference is people that watch ad supported television know they’re seeing ads, people that use gmail often don’t know their personal data is being used to market to them.
WeChat (a far more pernicious threat) was also in the crosshairs but then they just forgot about it. This is all just a performance to make a show of "doing something". Domestic companies are doing the same manipulative invasion as the Chinese apps. Any regulation would hurt the surveillance capitalism business model.
It’s pretty simple for me, really. Either forced technology transfers are bad or they’re not. Forcing TikTok to be sold to a U.S. company, which Bytedance will if given no other option, is a forced technology transfer.
They are bad. That fact also has to be weighted against the completely one-sided nature of social networks between the PRC and United States where American social networks are firewalled from PRC subjects in the mainland but still made use of by the Party and Government there if it assists them in propaganda abroad.
This is not an equal exchange founded on principles of free trade and respect for any kind of free speech. So it is not simple either.
This (probable) technology transfer shouldn’t be happening but not because this shouldn’t now happen; we should never have been in this position to begin with but we are.
Exactly. That kind of unequal ruleset isn't free trade, and it's not a good idea to permit it unless you're trying to subsidize the development of a foreign state (or, if you simply have no leverage to stop it without harming yourself way more than it's worth). Responding in kind is absolutely appropriate, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. It's ridiculous (and unpopular, in a pretty bipartisan fashion, among actual voters) that we've allowed China to "defect" on trade matters this long, without pushing back hard.
Overall, China is not "defecting" on trade. American companies have a very large presence in the Chinese market - moreso than Chinese companies in the American market.
Apple is the largest smartphone brand in China. GM is a major car brand in China. China has bought huge numbers of Boeing airplanes. I could go down the list, but you get the point.
Social media is a special case, because China has political censorship, which Facebook and Google were unwilling to go along with.
I don't know if anyone is arguing that a forced transfer like this is a good thing. But there's a fair discussion at least, like for many things we do, about whether it can--or perhaps must--be used for some "greater good."
I mean, you may not care about that discussion--and that's fine, you do you--but to ignore the circumstances around this situation means that once decided that it's going to happen, and therefore must be "good", we have to start asking other questions like, "Meta has been kinda lame lately, why don't we force them to sell to a someone we like better?" and "Probably Google, too?"
There is something I don't understand about the legal/political (theatrical?) wrangling surrounding TikTok:
Can't they just sanction the parent company if they want to kill it that badly? Control of the sanctioned entities list is under the executive branch, so all they have to do is place Bytedance on that list; no CDN in the country or App Store is allowed to do business with them, TikTok is gone overnight. The website would probably be accessible and there is always the sideloading gambit but it would perform like crap.
Unlike the Huawei and ZTE sanctions, I believe they do not have strong evidence or reasoning for Bytedance, which is why all that politicians can do is being angry at Tiktok for their addictive algorithm and their China-based ownership, and realistically only the latter because "addictive algorithms" are everywhere, including FB.
Respectfully, that doesn't make much sense. If we're worried about bad things an app can do why don't we make legislation prohibiting apps from doing those bad things? If your model is that bad things are OK if American companies can do them and bad if Chinese companies do them then you still end up getting abused, it's just by Americans in stead of China.
Radical suggestion: stop everyone from doing bad things.
i think the argument is: TikTok is a tool China will use to push propaganda. The problem is that a nation state is using a viral, addictive app for its own purposes.
So the thing to stop everyone from is "letting a maybe-hostile foreign power push an agenda via a software platform."
How do you know what bad things will be done? Do we have laws against tweaking an algorithm to display more anti-American videos or videos on eating Tidepods or other harmful things? How do you even prove it?
We can easily react to American companies doing something like this, but how easy is it to go after a company which is based in another country and has been hostile towards America and American business for decades?
Probably so, but while you are thinking of those details, a country that sends people to gulags and internment camps is collecting data at scale of important people, their families and the people that work around them.
I personally struggle understanding adults installing this app at all, and the fact that it targets mostly oblivious youngsters is pervasive.
it's not necessarily social media itself but the underlying structure and the ways it's misused that makes it harmful. it says more about american values than social media itself.
This isn’t about actual harms or actual privacy risks. Facebook directly interfered in the 2016 election and no laws changed, no one went to prison, Mark Zuckerberg had a few cringe moments in front of Congress and then they pretty much forgot about him. So the message I’m getting is, no actual existential harm will come to a social media company that allows that to happen.
That’s because you cannot lay the result of the 2016 election at Facebook’s doorstep.
Functionally they were used for five things:
1. Political advertising, which is what all campaigns engage in.
2. Discussions of the election by our own citizens, sometimes critical, more often an echo chamber or virtual throat stabbing contest.
3. News about the election which is free name recognition for all of the candidates the media considers worth talking about.
4. Market research by the campaigns.
5. A platform for foreign propaganda including psy-ops, which is bad and should be addressed, but not even close to bad enough to effect the outcome of an election as much as many might want to think that it did.
You can’t really pin the 2016 election on Facebook specifically since any information on there competes with any information not from there and there was a lot more not-Facebook information involved in that election, but Facebook by that point made for a nice scapegoat that nobody has any real sympathy for. Remember too that it was real Americans that actually filled in their ballots that decided the election for every single candidate on the list.
It’s not paranoia to think that China and the U.S. are engaged in a cyber conflict. For quite some time China has engaged in cyber warfare to steal American technological secrets and to spy on the U.S. We spy on them. Both nations are adversaries of each other and it’s not paranoia to recognize the blatantly obvious.
well I mean we're doing it to them too. it's not paranoid to assume large countries are engaged in just-barely-sub-causus-belli levels of shit against each other.
But that doesn't make trying to ban or force the sale of tiktok anything more than a depressing/transparent sinophobic propoganda exercise.
I don’t live in the world of extremes that you do. There is room for other emotions between hate and love. In arrogance neo-liberals thought China embracing market reforms and “free” trade would liberalize/weaken the CCP. It did not work. We have long passed the point whereby China can be viewed as anything other than an adversary. China has engaged in state sponsored hacking and theft of American technological secrets and in a cyber war with the U.S. It’s not a conventional war.
It’s possible that I’m a victim of propaganda and it’s possible you are. The way to determine who is more likely to have fallen for propaganda is to compare respective beliefs against known facts. It is indisputable that Chinese hackers have stolen U.S. technology secrets and that China prevents/restricts who can operate there much more so than the U.S. Given this and China’s overt human rights violations on a grand scale in the western part of the country it’s clear that a conflict exists as a clash of both culture and national security.
I know it’s a concept that is hard to grasp for CCP followers to understand but it is possible to criticize the CCP and past American actions. The U.S. is not a saint. Neither is China.
> guess what, in 2002 pretty much everyone was enthusiastically on board (as instructed!)
mmm, no. In 2002 "everyone" pretty much agreed that invading Iraq was a bad idea. People only went along with it after it happened to "show support for the troops." Or have you forgotten the "Hate Bush, love the troops" bumper stickers?
> willingness to engage in a war the US and Taiwan might very well lose (badly) with Americans dying
Based on Russia's performance in Ukraine and China's military might seemingly less than Russia's I doubt the US Navy has a tough time keeping China out of Taiwan, let alone the entire military might of the US
I recommend looking up the Battle of the Chosin Resevoir....worst military defeat ever suffered by the US (worse than Bastogne imho), the Chinese didn't even have one gun per soldier...some didn't have boots...they DEMOLISHED the best equipped army in the world (and this was during Korea when the US military was the unquestioned top dog)
and btw if you are going to go look at casualty counts, don't bother, its well understood that the Chinese lost ten men for every US soldier killed...they still won
Hard to definitively claim victory for either side in the battle you mention. The Chinese outnumbered the US 4 to 1 and still got blasted, the Chinese unit was out of commission for months following the battle while the US forces maintained unit integrity.
In the years since the gulf between capabilities has grown, and especially seeing how Russia can't crush Ukraine using castoff NATO gear China will be wise to not poke the bear.
Do you believe the same for the US involvment in the ukraine conflict? The wars in the middle east? Vietnam? Korea? and so on? If not, what differences made you arrive at a different conclusion?
To be clear I'm not implying you are wrong in terms of a conflict is being setup with China, just curious if your criticism is consistently applied. Many if not most news outlets are saying exactly what you are, but only make this distinction for China.
I'm more than happy to go through that list, but I suspect I will be downvoted anyway for merely explaining my own beliefs (which is what you are asking for)
- Ukraine - a contrived proxy war and we are very generously and bravely assisting in the avoidable deaths of as many Ukrainians as possible. I'll go even further - neoliberal support in the US is comes from this notion that Trump and Putin are penpals, so if we punch Putin, its like punching Trump
- Middle East Wars - worst geopolitical decision since ww2, probably ruined the US forever
- Vietnam - a massive mistake...and I mean MISTAKE. this was not evil on the US part, but a legit misunderstanding. We mistook a civil war for a Red Wave
- Korea - neutral...but it was the last time we faced off against China militarily and although we massively outgunned them, they probably delivered the single worst military defeat in US history (Chosin Resevoir). By any rational assessment we should have demolished the Chinese, instead they demolished us.
Thank you for explaining, I certainly wont downvote (not that I know how to anyways). Sorry in advance if you get nuked just for answering my question. Those are certainly opinions that seem consistent to me and are not just the usual parroting of <choose a media outlet> that seems to be so prevalent now. You've restored my faith in the free thinking public just a little bit today, so thanks.
So the point is that actually adopting data privacy laws is politically difficult but shouting about tiktok is cheap. But why can we not make the data privacy issues less contentious politically?
I feel like it should be possible to have a cop-out, like "Online services doing business in the USA must offer US-based users data and privacy rights which are at least as strict as those of any other national jurisdiction in which the service does business." The tag line for press appearances would be "Americans using online services should have just as much control over their data as Europeans." The line for industry lobbyists is that by effectively adopting GDPR, multinationals don't actually have a meaningfully increased compliance cost.
Yes but maybe shouting about tiktok allows the next conversation to happen. 'TikTok was very bad, but we should be asking ourselves if even american companies should have this much insight into our citizens'.
The constitution explicitly grants Congress the power to regulate foreign trade. Foreign companies do not have a first amendment right to operate in the US. This has nothing to do with the first amendment.
But I thought TikTok is an US company now? Didn't they launch a new company, which is separate from Chinese TikTok, in the US, to avoid this exact situation? Am I conflating things?
Despite media portrayals, virtually every constitutional question has at the core a conflict where different rights or different parts of the constitution conflict. In that case you can't absolutely follow every constitutional dictum because they are mutually exclusive. To some extent legal principals can be used to resolved these conflicts, but they provide huge maneuvering space for political machinations.
In this case, there's a conflict between the first amendment on one side and the congressional power to regulate foreign relations and largely judicially constructed executive powers around national security.
Of course there's a very strong legal argument you can make that the first amendment clearly trump the congressional power, and the national security powers are (to me) obvious bullshit from the outset. But this is largely irrelevant because it's much more convenient for all branches of government to pretend that this it's a gray area and decide it how they wish.
there's plenty of precedent for just throwing the bill of rights out the window for asian americans. 99% of americans simply don't care, or actively encourage it. the supreme court agrees. look up the case law. so why not? nobody will ever receive any significant pushback for throwing them under the bus whenever it's convenient. they might even say "it's for their own safety."
the reality on the ground is the only reality that matters.
> throwing the bill of rights out the window for asian americans. 99% of americans simply don't care, or actively encourage it.
Since 7.2% of Americans self-identify their ethnicity as Asian, I guess what you are saying is that a minimum of 70-80% of Asian-Americans actively encourage the removal of their own rights.
I don’t see how banning TikTok would infringe on anyone’s freedom of expression (other than possibly for TikTok’s own self-produced videos). There is no right to distribution over a specific channel.
