Unlike some other commenters below, I don't believe that this is a privacy issue. Instead, I believe that it is a national security issue because TikTok is controllable by the CCP which is ideologically opposed to the United States. The next global conflict will likely be one between the east and the west, with control of information being advantageous to both sides in the conflict. China already blocks the western Internet, so they have an advantage by default.
This position is covered much more eloquently than I put it above in Ben Thompson's "The TikTok War" [1].
Also TikTok hasn't violated US laws, then where is the case for banning them?
Banning something that is perfectly legal seems absurd to do in our legal system.
Also US government hasn't made a specific claim of any imminent security threat posed by TikTok.
From a data security point of view the expert opinion seems to be that there isn't a clear cut case for singling out and banning tiktok.
The ban is therefore undoubtedly a political move, and that is problematic. Things should not be banned on political whims by using executive or administrative measures.
Even legislative has limits, even if Congress passes a legislation banning TikTok, that legislation is likely to be struck down by the court is my guess.
Ultimately banning TikTok is not a tenable democratic solution to whatever real or perceived problems it is causing.
Some of the commenters here seems to want the democratic US government to suddenly grow authoritarian powers.
Either TikTok has right to operate in US or it does not. Is there any letter or terms or conditions of the US law that is prohibiting TikTok from operating? I don't think so.
Also it has been allowed to operate for years till now, What sudden change of circumstance has occurred that banning it is imperative now? The government has not made any explanation.
Ideal solution in this case would be to define a data security and privacy legislation through Congress applicable to all social networking apps/services and clarify the terms under which they can operate. Then if TikTok is complying with them they can operate and if they are in violation they face necessary consequences.
Instead what is happening is arbitrary misuse of executive/administrative powers to promulgate a ban without due process, and based merely on fear and speculation.
It's not nearly as back and white as you would appear to like it to be. I do not see any laws being broken or US Citizen rights being trodden on with this ban. They're not even setting a new precedent with this ban. It is completely within the executive branches power to ban a foreign corporation for national security reason, reasons that may not be completely clear to the public.
Though I think the reason is very clear, at least their official one. If you are a China based company the CCP by law has access to your data and they have abused access to sensitive and private data time and time again. Just because nothing has happened yet doesn't mean we shouldn't be proactive against China.
And I wish Congress would do something about it. The Chinese government deserves so much more then a TikTok ban and Congress could give the ban a more stable foundation then a executive order from a controversial administration.
As a European I can‘t resist but to say that I wish that we would start banning all of the American internet cooperations that are required by law to share their data with the US government which has time and time again shown that they are willing to abuse access. Remember the time they wanted to wiretap Angela Merkel? Good times!
It‘s really astonishing to what extent people are willing to be hypocrites not only but especially in the US... American exceptionalism, what a f*cking joke... Might explain how the Republican party and American establishment could create such a mess of the country. It would be funny if it wasn‘t so damn sad and dangerous for all the other countries and people. /rant
>They're not even setting a new precedent with this ban.
They are though. The powers of executive order used for the ban are specifically limited to prevent any banning or stopping the information flow of any forms of media and communication.
i.e. The U.S. President can't use executive orders to circumvent the first amendment.
I'm absolutely not an expert, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect the CCP/Tiktok has no constitutional rights in the US and the President can take any action against a government controlled foreign business if there's even a hint of a national security risk. Not saying it's right it wrong, only that it's within their power.
I think the information age has really pushed the limits of what we find acceptable to leave to independent choice in democratic societies. Freedoms in democracy are being abused left-and-right to highlight specific weaknesses fundamental a democracy's healthy function.
When it comes to TikTok, frankly I'm not sure if a foreign business under the thumb of the CCP is more or less a threat than businesses operating in our own country abusing the same freedoms for personal gain. You would assume those abusing the system located in the US had a vested interest in stability of the country for continuation of their lofty positions in society, but given broad anti-consumer and labor practices, both foreign and domestic are gutting the foundations of the social contract that make citizens want to believe in and support a democracy.
I think the biggest blow we've had in this country is widespread undermining and exploitation of its citizens for personal gain, which have left many unable or in some cases, unwilling, to support the continuation of the system being used against them.
> frankly I'm not sure if a foreign business under the thumb of the CCP is more or less a threat than businesses operating in our own country abusing the same freedoms for personal gain.
The difference is that a foreign business under the thumb of the CCP is essentially a CCP propagandist, capable of spreading pro-CCP, anti-US propaganda. US business's abusing US citizens are doing so purely for profit. This is bad and needs to be stopped, but IMO is the lesser of immediate concerns.
Now of course the US government can (and indeed has) abused its own citizens for political manipulation too, via these tools. But the key difference is that the US government is (at least, in theory, and I agree more needs to be done here...) accountable to US citizens. The CCP is not. The CCP isn't even accountable to its own citizens, both in theory and in practice, which is exactly why many are against the CCP's modus operandi in the first place.
> I think the information age has really pushed the limits of what we find acceptable to leave to independent choice in democratic societies. Freedoms in democracy are being abused left-and-right to highlight specific weaknesses fundamental a democracy's healthy function.
This is precisely what the US's adversaries want; they want democracy to fail, because its failure strengthens their legitimacy as "the correct way" to govern, to any would-be naysayers.
Why should it? Trading with other nations has never worked like that. No one has a right to a specific social media service, especially a foreign owned one at that.
Let's just think practically about what could happen. Suppose the chief executive has a grudge against an individual person. He or she bans them from owning anything produced overseas. Legal or not, I think we can agree that shouldn't be possible.
You violate US law by spying on citizens, you get banned. As a foreign company you don't get a right to a trial.
The US Government does not have a relationship with your users - you do. If you get banned, your users have a right to sue you to recoup their costs. The US Government does not owe your users anything.
If you get banned from the supermarket for not wearing a mask, the supermarket doesn't owe anything to whoever you were making dinner for.
> Also TikTok hasn't violated US laws, then where is the case for banning them? Banning something that is perfectly legal seems absurd to do in our legal system.
Cuban cigars haven't broken any laws. Iranian ceramics haven't broken any laws.
The power to sanction / embargo is a very well established power of the government, and it doesn't require a trial. China has long been in violation of the Trafficking in Persons report[1] and, more recently, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act[2]. Violation of the TIP report especially gives a very strong precedent for trade sanctions.
TikTok has been described as a national security threat multiple times by multiple political leaders. You may disagree with that designation, but the resulting ban itself is strongly supported by law and precedent.
Your argument boils down to: they can be banned, so because “national security,” it’s ok. China may be violating laws, but TikTok isn’t, so singling them out is a bill of attainder, which the Constitution explicitly prohibits.[a] If they’re violating any laws, then why aren’t we being told anything but national security?
[a] And before the “ByteDance isn’t American, so the Constitution doesn’t apply” argument, they actually do employ US citizens in a US office. There’s also the fact that the Constitution doesn’t differentiate between citizens and non-citizens, but that seems to be ignored nowadays.
The Bill of Attainder is something completely different. a _Bill_ of Attainder is an illegal piece of legislation that targets a specific individual. For example, a law that says "It's illegal to be Bill Bryson" is an Bill of attainder, and is forbidden by the constitution.
That does not apply on a number of levels.
1) this ban is an act of the executive, not the legislature. It is not a bill.
2) this ban does not declare tik tok illegal (It's not clear what it even means for a product to be against the law).
3) The department of Commerce has a long history of... regulating commerce. It's what it does. If this kind of trade regulation was indeed unconstitutional, someone would have noticed by now.
The executive powers do not come from nothing; the legislature has delegated certain of its powers to the executive branch. In order to be banned from being imported, in the form of downloads, TikTok would have to be a threat to national security (the government said how yet, but they don't have to until trial) or involved in terrorism (the government has not argued this). They have to make a reasonable case as to how this is not simply banning speech they do not like.
It's also not clear whether a download is actually an importation, or whether the Department of Commerce has any bearing on a US company (Google) manufacturing new copies of a product based on a foreign design. (The Huawei case is far from decided!)
As for your third point: Someone did notice, and filed a lawsuit in federal court! This is an article about the ongoings about that case.
> Your argument boils down to: they can be banned, so because “national security,” it’s ok. China may be violating laws, but TikTok isn’t, so singling them out is a bill of attainder, which the Constitution explicitly prohibits.[a] If they’re violating any laws, then why aren’t we being told anything but national security?
> A bill of attainder (also known as an act of attainder or writ of attainder or bill of penalties) is an act of a legislature declaring a person, or a group of persons, guilty of some crime, and punishing them, often without a trial.
1) The action was not taken by the legislature,
2) I do not believe it declares TikTok to be "guilty" of any crime,
3) I'm sure the district court judge knows what a bill of attainder is, would have said so if this was one.
> The ban is therefore undoubtedly a political move, and that is problematic.
Another possibility is that objective physical reality contains some information (some of which is Top Secret) that does not exist in your internal mental model of reality. An exact, always up to date copy would require something akin to omniscience.
It's extremely ironic that the Trump administration (& their supporters) justify their control over US people and companies, preventing them engaging in normal everyday activities with Chinese partners, by saying "[X] is controllable by the CCP". Even whilst there is no evidence of the latter actually happening.
This is not even "pot meet kettle", this is the pot calling a fridge a kettle.
Further the CCP has already done the same to Western companies across the board. Let's not forget not only the atrocities committed against Uigher people, but the censorship of those atrocities.
> Instead, I believe that it is a national security issue
Are you uncomfortable adopting that belief with literally no concrete evidence that anything of the sort is actually occurring?
I don't know how you reconcile rule of law with such drastic interventions in the rights of companies without evidence of wrongdoing. If anything you can come up with in your most paranoid fantasies can be the basis of shutting down a company, pretty much anything can be done to anyone on the basis of anything, no?
Any business with china is a national security issue. There's plenty of evidence to the level of dictatorship in China. It's your responsibility to look at its history and make reasonable conclusions from it. If you want some sort of smoking gun evidence you're not going to find it, unless you somehow have a security clearance in China good enough to gain knowledge about their operations.
It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.
Let’s not pretend this is anything other than just plain old geopolitics with TikTok caught in the middle.
Going by “national security” reasons most countries should ban Facebook and google, not to mention amazon, Microsoft, oracle, Cisco etc. since the us government has already shown willingness and ability to spy on anything they can get their hands on, including foreign heads of state. Allowing US controlled social media and other tech companies is a huge risk.
Of course power doesn’t balance that way so they don’t.
US companies operating in China need to follow Chinese laws, including those on censorship. Google etc are blocked because they are hosted outside China, and are not willing to cooperate in China.
What I find bizarre about the Tiktok ban is that they are being banned essentially on executive whim: as far as I can tell, there are no concrete allegations, much less evidence, that they're violating any US laws.
So, it's ok for China to ban Google because Google refuses to help with censorship and propaganda, and because Google doesn't want the Chinese govt to be able to spy on its citizens.
But it's not OK for the US to keep out spyware. Heck, retaliation for China's banning of Google etc would be sufficient justification for banning TikTok on its own.
Well yes it is ok for China to block Google, they’re allowed to block anyone they want.
The issue isn’t a tit-for-tat they block, we block issue, with the US and China acting like playground children.
The issue is whether or not the rule-of-law still means anything in the US. Have the executive block things pretty much arbitrarily undermines the rule-of-law.
If the US wants to block Chinese companies, then pass laws in congress to do so. Don’t let your executive do an end run around your democratic process.
>The issue is whether or not the rule-of-law still means anything in the US. Have the executive block things pretty much arbitrarily undermines the rule-of-law. If the US wants to block Chinese companies, then pass laws in congress to do so. Don’t let your executive do an end run around your democratic process.
The courts are doing exactly that, determining whether the executive has the authority to implement this. This is in fact the rule-of-law in action.
This is also the reason why the rule-of-law is lacking in China, the courts rarely if ever finds against the government in constitutional matters like these. Their system was designed for the CCP to retain power.
>> Have the executive block things pretty much arbitrarily undermines the rule-of-law ... If the US wants to block Chinese companies, then pass laws in congress to do so...
That's not how the rule-of-law works. The bill of attainder doesn't allow the US gov't to punish an entity (or a group of) arbitrarily by legislating.
The legislative and executive branches have already been briefed on privacy and/or security threat Tiktok poses to US. The US senate already passed a bill to ban federal employees from using Tiktok on gov't issued devices, which is exactly what the legislative is supposed to be doing without overreaching and impinging on Americans' civil liberty, and Trump in turn issued executive orders to deter national security/privacy threats from foreign entities. The judicial branch likewise appropriately exercised their power by delaying Trump's EO and challenging his authority.
That's precisely how the rule-of-law is supposed to work in the US -- there is nothing novel or arbitrary here.
And, of course, people are still free to voice their disapproval with actions of their government (whether by law or by executive fiat) they don't approve of.
That's independent of the rule of law being preferable to the alternative.
The rule of law itself doesn't put much of a constraint on what the government can do, it just requires proper form.
For that it has to be established that TikTok is some type of malicious spyware to the satisfaction of US courts and legal system, which hasn't been done.
You cannot say "A" is evil because it does "X", so we will also do "X" and then still claim "A" is evil without saying you are evil yourself.
What you are saying is that unless PRC becomes like the US, the US has to become like PRC. I'm amazed how this is not clear to anyone following this. The only way to go forward and not become what you are pointing fingers at is taking the high road. The US is clearly not doing so.
I read a bit about that. The claim that Google was blocked due to unwillingness to follow Chinese laws isn't true.
Be noted that China is not a country under rule of law.
When Google was blocked, there was no primary legislation stipulating that online content shall be censored in whatsoever way. There were vague administrative rules (secondary legislation) with questionable applicability. Today, there is only one piece of primary legislation with a section on online censorship in China, but this section targets ISPs only, not content providers.
If Bytedance was violating U.S. laws a “ban” would not be necessary to prevent them from continuing to do so. The executive order is based on a concrete factual assertion: “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States” [1]. The injunction we are discussing results from a challenge to that assertion.
>> ... being banned essentially on executive whim:
The US Senate unanimously approved a bill banning federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices last month. So there is some consensus among lawmakers that some sort of privacy and/or security threat exists -- it's hardly on "executive whim."
You're tautologically correct (TikTok is banned because TikTok is banned!), but that still doesn't answer the question. Put another way: if whatever Tiktok is doing represents a categorical privacy/security threat, then why aren't they banning all apps that engage in said activity, instead of just Tiktok?
I suspect the answer is that Tiktok is just doing the same as Facebook etc, and that's unacceptable only because the mined data might go to China.
It is quite likely the US will continue to look at companies on which CCP can have control over. I agree it is odd to not have made a more comprehensive list.
Those two examples are fundamentally different and it’s silly to conflate individual action with coercing the app stores to discontinue supporting the app.
They could define it as discrimination against people from Taiwan and Tibet. It looks very similar to discrimination based on national origin, especially if the company does not recognize the nation sovereignty.
But even if that would fail, I am sure that a team full of lawyer could find something which would be incompatible with Chinese law.
Do you honestly believe that geopolitics don’t play a role in China banning US tech companies? You think China would allow Google if it censored search results?
Of course they play a role, and those same Chinese laws also dictate that any foreign IT company needs to have a local partner. But in the unlikely event of Google agreeing to a JV that cedes enough power to a local company, then sure, why not? That's how eg. AWS China operates: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/
FWIW, Google already has a substantial presence in China, but they don't target consumers there.
Google search is not available to consumers, but Google Ads are, and they definitely target any eyeballs they can. Of course most Chinese websites don't use Google for their ads, but when a Chinese user visits a foreign website that does, Google controls what they'll be seeing. And to be allowed to keep doing that, Google censors the ads they show: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-bans-vpn-ads-in-china/
That's not how the law works at all. The actual issue is data collection in China meaning data collected in China must be stored in China. Foreign tech companies just choose to have a local partner to avoid direct liability.
I work at a French software company in Shanghai (outside any pilot zone fwiw) and we don't have or need a local partner. Our software is on-prem so data storage is not an issue.
Of course the US isn’t the only country that plays this game. The government also needs to justify it some how, and I don’t even blame them for that. But at least here we can stop pretending there is some sort of objective, consistently applied standard at play.
> Going by “national security” reasons most countries should ban Facebook and google, not to mention amazon, Microsoft, oracle, Cisco etc. since the us government has already shown willingness and ability to spy on anything they can get their hands on, including foreign heads of state. Allowing US controlled social media and other tech companies is a huge risk.
Yes.
As a European, I believe in Europe (and in the rest of the world) we should definitively ban most US tech be it for ethical reasons or national security. Same for China.
EU Politicians don't seem to understand the situation yet, but given the current technological cold war happening, I hope we'll wake up soon and switch either to open tech or at least to our own local tech.
I think this the key issue against National Security.
The US has used its tech to spy on everybody else and and using Trump logic nobody should use it. Free trade is over
China's tech could also be used, but I am not a Trump supporter. I would be more afraid of Trump facist controlled NSA backdoors monitoring me than CCP seeing my dance moves
> Going by “national security” reasons most countries should ban Facebook and google, not to mention amazon, Microsoft, oracle, Cisco etc. since the us government has already shown willingness and ability to spy on anything they can get their hands on, including foreign heads of state. Allowing US controlled social media and other tech companies is a huge risk.
The immediate security issues are more with WeChat but TikTok gives them a social graph of Western youth documenting their foibles. These are all prospects for future moles when they get jobs in sensitive positions.
Ok, but how is Tik Tok a national security issue, but the fact that damn near every electronic device available on the market is manufactured in or out of components manufactured in China doesn't seem to be one?
Money. It would be way too costly that all countries manufactured their own devices.
A single laptop has likely hundreds of processing units, running unknown software, often with direct access to the memory buss. Building a secure devices however where every bit of code and every bit of hardware is designed domestically (and preferable in house) is so prohibitively expensive that no one do that. The hope is that if there is a security fault then someone else will find it and report it, and so a reputation system is the only economical viable method for hardware security in most consumer devices.
High end cpu's are banned from being produced overseas for exactly this reason iirc, so all of the latest tech are made in USA. China makes cheaper older gen components.
Edit: Quite a lot of high end cpu are now done in Taiwan TSMC, they caught up to US capabilities. But most of intels cpu's are still made in US.
It actually has been a problem before, in rather recent memory I may add [0]. China is, for all intents and purposes, a bad actor. They keep positioning themselves infinitely closer to "the line" without seemingly ever being able to cross it, even when they're caught red-handed undermining US security.
“ The Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party exert control over many forms of media in China, including newspapers and the Internet. All Chinese media, including newspapers, periodicals, news agencies, TV stations, broadcasting, the movie industry and art performances, are categorized and managed as "mouthpieces" of the Communist Party, used to manipulate public opinion and exercise "mind control" on its citizens.[70] "Mind control" includes "indoctrination from kindergarten to college through officially compiled textbooks, as all teachers are categorized as 'educators of CCP' (The Chinese Communist Party)". According to Qinglian He, a former Chinese government propagandist and now a senior researcher at Human Rights in China, by exercising "mind control", the Chinese government has misled the Chinese population about the values of human rights and democracy, and also about the truth.[71] The Propaganda and Information Leading Group is generally responsible for censorship and control of information. The unit is also one of the largest in the CCP leadership organ.[72]”
Yeah, sorry I was rushing and wasn’t thinking on how much time I had to investigate. Well it’s out there... Sucks but all I know is I’ve seen it. It could be buried heavily by now. There has been infosec evidence provided.
Edit: this too? Mob mentality here. Sad. Lol if this is being downvoted I have some words for you.
I think Americans should be very, very careful about calling for 'smoking gun evidence' of state oppression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
It is highly duplicitous to be sabre rattling over perceived ideological differences, when America's own ideology is couched in immensely contradicting - nay, hypocritical - failures to conduct state affairs according to International law.
>It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.
This is also true of American companies, especially those with a trillion dollar profit motive in the military-industrial endless-war market.
Be very, very careful about what doors you open with statements such as this:
>If you want some sort of smoking gun evidence you're not going to find it, unless you somehow have a security clearance in China good enough to gain knowledge about their operations
We know all too well how tightly wrapped up in its deep state secrets America's own heinous crimes against humanity are .. and if you are so sure of your own states innocence that you feel warranted in calling for other states' downfall for similar reasons, you must surely be willing to discuss America's own human rights abuses in a similar light.
No? Then the moral authority you claim does not exist.
I guess at minimum I'd expect a non-partisan investigation to substantiate that, and then for it to be applied on an equal basis to all companies with similar issues. Some element of the first may have, but I have no awareness of the second part.
> There's plenty of evidence to the level of dictatorship in China.
The political regime of the countries you deal with is not a national security issue in itself, that's not what national security means. Certainly, 'dictatorship' is not a national security issue. Some of the US's "best friends" were, and are, dictatorships.
>It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.
Neither Bytedance nor TikTok are Chinese companies.
It's true that Bytedance has buildings in Beijing, and a Chinese app (Taotiao) that is a Chinese subsidiary, but Bytedance is a Cayman's Islands company and TikTok doesn't even have servers inside China.
For purposes of the Chinese National Intelligence Law compelling the company to share user information with the CCP, Apple shares way more user data than TikTok does.
Bytedance is a Chinese company. Look up VIE (variable interest entity) or "Sina Structure". Essentially the Cayman islands topco is a fudge that the Chinese government tolerates to facilitate non Chinese investment in Chinese companies, something which is not normally allowed. The structure is very common among Chinese tech companies. Instead of controlling the company by owning a majority of its shares, the "owners" of VIEs control their firms contractually. Paul Gilis' blog is very good on this https://www.chinaaccountingblog.com/weblog/explaining-vie-st...
Well, the US also controls lots of companies that are not American. Especially in finance. They were handing out American sanctions for European banks doing business with Iranian companies.
I was referring to laws literally called "export controls" which regulate goods and technology that originate in China, not stretching the word to make a metaphorical case for ownership.
> I don't know how you reconcile rule of law with such drastic interventions in the rights of companies without evidence of wrongdoing
How far reaching does the rule of law go? Like the US is governed by rule of law, but when you bring in international elements, can all parties operate under rule of law ?
It seems almost in this case that the argument made by the US is actually that TikTok is not governed under an agreed upon rule of laws. Such as it needing to share information with the CCP or having to comply to any other of their wishes.
Also, rule of laws just means the laws define the regulations which apply equally to everyone (which means everyone that bought into the society which honors those laws). So the question here is, do the laws give the president the ability to block a foreign company in such situation? If not, then this should be blocked, though laws could be made to block the company as well, just not exclusively enacted by the president.
> do the laws give the president the ability to block a foreign company in such situation?
Yes, Congress has given the President the power to “regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” [1], “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat” [2]. This is the power that Trump is purporting to exercise.
Read the replies from Chinese nationals on HN defending TikTok. Even they don't pretend you can say anything you want there. Their argument is "How much time would you really spend discussing Tiananmen or criticizing the CCP? Is it really worth losing contact with your friends or colleagues who use TikTok and WeChat?"
In my opinion, absolutely. Stop it now before it gets too powerful to ban. WeChat already has 19 million US users.
Maybe if freedom of speech on social media platforms is an issue (it is, in my opinion), there should be laws regulating it that would apply to any businesses operating in the US, not just ad-hoc executive orders of dubious objectiveness.
Personally I believe there should be a public alternative to most private internet services. An internet post office whose only rules are the laws of the United States. It's not going to happen, though. Google is too powerful.
That’s an excellent idea. The issue is there is also soft censorship through algorithm tweaking. A law like this should require third party auditing of the companies.
As someone who has actually talked about the Tiananmen Square protests on WeChat and occasionally corrects misconceptions about how difficult that is, I don't think banning the app will help in any way, since the ban will just reduce the volume of such messages even more.
The status quo is that you only need some minor skill at language games to talk about forbidden topics without using any keywords that trigger censorship. With a ban in place, at least one of the participants additionally has to circumvent their country's firewall to reach the other side. Censoring censored media even more is not a good way to fight censorship.
I'm also not sure why you think "How much time would you really spend discussing Tiananmen or criticizing the CCP?" is talking about TikTok, since you can absolutely do that there https://www.tiktok.com/tag/tiananmen
Generally I would agree that it is a bad step to ban the app. It can still normalize censorship and if it becomes a main market player, you might loose the ability to talk about it and other apps might follow just because of the success.
Ideally people would stop using it by choice. Perhaps too much to ask, but I know enough people that wouldn't use it precisely because of these issues.
Agreed that it is easy to play language games, but maybe your intention is to draw attention of a larger crowd that would be completely oblivious to it.
since the ban will just reduce the volume of such messages even more.
Trying to "win the hearts and minds" of the Chinese people is a lost cause. Either they agree with the CCP or they've adapted to its restrictions. All we can do is try to keep that ideology from spreading beyond their borders.
There is a world of difference to the consequences here. One is content being taken down. The other is possible arrest, gulag, or dissapearance if you ever go to China.
This whole shift to China as the new "enemy" is fascinating. Even though Trump is more or less mental, and is recognised as such, he has somehow managed to whip up this new cold war frenzy even among his opponents in the media. I can barely remember any focus on China before Trump. Not saying that there shouldn't be any but it's still interesting how this can spread to the entire country even if the author is an untrustworthy demagogue.
Other countries historically accompanying the US in the top GDP pair included the soviet union and japan, so no surprise that today china would get the two minutes hate.
(right now I'd say india is too underdeveloped and too important a part of Oceania, but assuming the US remains in a position to believe it embodies power two or three decades from now, we'll see if india gets the hate, too.)
For some value of "defense". Back when the US DOD was called Department of War, it had (at various times) flagged boots on the ground in china[1], north korea, and russia[2].
[1] In the lost opportunities department, General Wedemeyer on "who lost china?" (emphasis mine):
> "If Uncle Sugar, Russia, and Britain united strongly in their endeavor to bring about a coalition of these two political parties [the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party] in China by coercing both sides to make realistic concessions, serious post-war disturbance may be averted and timely effective military employment of all Chinese may be obtained against the Japanese. I use the term coercion advisedly because it is my conviction that continued appeals to both sides couched in polite diplomatic terms will not accomplish unification."
[2] thanks to burnaway's excellent search fu: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24490540 I learned US propaganda in 1914-1918 had not only been officially going to russia, but also the then-white entities (where American Expeditionary Forces were operating) archangel and siberia.
It's not a company. It's a division of a foreign government. That was the point being made. If it was an independent company, none of this would be happening.
If you examine ByteDance's structure technically, you are correct that it does look like just a regular company. But just about everything runs differently in China. All major companies in China have CCP party members on their boards who not only influence corporate policy, but are actually _deferred to_ on anything remotely political.[2][3] At the end of the day the party has the final say in any matters that it cares about. There's actually a fundamental difference that many westerners don't understand about China, and it comes from an ignorance of the country's history in my opinion: there is no real rule of law, there is the current will of the party[1]. Obviously there's a ton of whataboutism that you can misdirect here about how the US or other western countries don't follow their constitutions or whatever, but it is fundamentally different, as the differences in the CCP run very deep down to the daily lives of basically every citizen ("show me a warrant" does NOT fly in China, ever).
TLDR; the CCP does whatever it wants whenever it wants, and is deeply ingrained in every major corporation at the highest levels.
Legally it is indeed a company and not controlled by the CCP, but exactly how much of its US operations are conducted and directed by non-US citizens on non-US soil is unknown.
Technically correct, but you're almost as guilty of being dishonest as the comment you're replying to saying it's "not a company".
A lot of companies are incorporated in the Cayman Islands, or in Ireland, or other tax havens, but we don't generally refer to them as Cayman companies or Irish companies.
Companies will regularly incorporate in low-tax jurisdictions, but that doesn't exactly make them headquartered in those areas, where they may actually do zero business. ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese multinational internet technology company headquartered in Beijing. It was founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012. [1]
TikTok's parent company ByteDance has sought permission from the Chinese government to export technology, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. ByteDance filed a request with the Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau asking for approval to export its technology under restrictions recently implemented by the Chinese government, according to Bloomberg. [2]
Just because it is registered elsewhere doesn't mean it is not a Chinese company. Seriously, how can anyone think this is a valid argument? Do you think DouYin and TikTok originated from different companies?
This post is going to be similar to my other two comments in this thread.
First, it being incorporated in the Caymans is a technicality. ByteDance's headquarters are in Beijing[1] and they don't speak of a Cayman Islands office. In addition...
> As with many Chinese companies, the company has an internal Chinese Communist Party committee serving the party members among the employees, with vice president Zhang Fuping serving as its Party Committee Secretary. It also has a strategic partnership with the Ministry of Public Security for the ministry's public relations efforts, and joint ventures with a state-run publisher in Beijing and media firm in Shanghai. ... It has garnered public attention over allegations that it worked with the Chinese Communist Party to censor and surveil content pertaining to Xinjiang re-education camps and other topics the Party deemed controversial. [2]
> As with many Chinese companies, the company has an internal Chinese Communist Party committee serving the party members among the employees, with vice president Zhang Fuping serving as its Party Committee Secretary. It also has a strategic partnership with the Ministry of Public Security for the ministry's public relations efforts, and joint ventures with a state-run publisher in Beijing and media firm in Shanghai. ... It has garnered public attention over allegations that it worked with the Chinese Communist Party to censor and surveil content pertaining to Xinjiang re-education camps and other topics the Party deemed controversial.
There is evidence of WeChat being involved in building up PRC's censorship framework[1]. Comments from American citizens were used for this without their consent. It's not improbable that they are carrying out similar exercises on TikTok's data.
In a country without any constraints on government behavior or rule of law beyond whatever the CCP decrees, Chinese entities have to be treated as organs of the Chinese Communist Party.
"Government", "administration", and "party" are all the same thing in China. So something like:
"Huawei would be forced to hand over 5G data to the Chinese government if it was asked for it, because of national security laws, experts told CNBC."
...is really no different from the US, is it?
And while China has lots of problems, citing a lack of "rule of law" in this context is rather brave. Also: if you believe everything called "communist party" is "communist", you definitely have to pay the beer at the next "RePUBlican Party" meeting.
It is enormously different in that it is judicially reviewable (if not in need of an outright warrant) and the USA is a country where there are limits on government. This post, specifically the "judge temporarily blocks" is proof that the USA is a fundamentally different country.
> Also: if you believe everything called "communist party" is "communist", you definitely have to pay the beer at the next "RePUBlican Party" meeting.
I have not commented on communism as a general topic at all. I am specifically talking about the entity named the Chinese Communist Party.
Are there actually real limits on government in the US? If the Democrats and Republicans agreed that they wanted to do something, would anything stop them?
The US government is already unconstitutionally doing what you say that judicial review prevents, and the partisan (by design) Supreme Court simply refuses to take the case. So much for judicial review.
There is no check for power, only balances of power. And power in the US tends to agree on such things as much as power within the CCP.
Are you seriously equating the two govts? Consider that, because hackernews/YC is a US company, your post is read by everyone who cares to see it.
Consider what would happen if you decried the powers of the CCP on a China-based platform. Consider what would happen to you, personally, if you did so while living in China.
Every country on Earth gives its executive some discretion when dealing with foreign powers. The idea that TikTok should have the same due process rights as American corporations is naive (putting it mildly).
"Rule of law" means you need to have a specific rule to govern government's action. The use of the catch-all "national security" justification here is in itself proof that nothing better exists in US law, or they would cite that.
Among the free countries, I'm most familiar with the EU's laws: there are some provisions limiting, for example, acquisitions of land, mergers, and military technology to countries like China. But there's no "we don't like them" power. Those powers belong to a king, not a president.
EU companies have explicit guarantees against discrimination in other EU countries, and most every trade agreement contains similar provision. I believe even WTO rules, which both China and the US are theoretically bound by, would exclude arbitrary bans.
What I'm saying is it's largely hypocritical -- telling China they need to open up their markets to foreign businesses from America just the way Americans do for foreign entities, and then once a Chinese company becomes successful enough to garner the slightest bit of attention forcing a sale to an American company. It's exactly the thing America has been accusing China of doing for mandatory joint ventures.
They can do it, by all means, however it further erodes the brand value of America on the world stage as "open for business."
That's not really a compelling counterargument. The idea is that goods and services brought to market in the US are materially improving the lives of Americans. It doesn't matter really what the home state looks like. If it did, Americans would have never started importing Saudi oil. Or Rwandan tantalum for capacitors. Or Nestle chocolate, which is farmed by child slaves in the Ivory Coast. But don't worry, in 2019, they again, for about the 10th time, promised to stop using child slaves. [1]
This is basically America telling the world to accept American companies, no questions asked, no matter how big or manipulative. Criticizing other countries for their protectionist self-serving practices. And then literally the second a foreign product gets big and interesting enough forcing their sale to a US domestic entity. This is what America is complaining China does.
The worst part? Instead of trying to find some basis in law as one does in a rule-of-law jurisdiction, they just pulled out the national security™ ban-hammer, which cannot be challenged in a meaningful way. That's straight out of China's playbook. If rule of law is the china shop, national security justifications are the bull.
They just ceded the entirety of what was left of the high ground.
There are literally thousands of regulations limiting what we can import into the US, from drugs to protected wildlife to cuban cigars, including total embargos on particular companies and even countries. You're just cherry-picking of a few you want but don't see.
And by the way, the US govt certainly pushes for free trade, but that actually means implementation on a bilateral country-by-country basis (a couple dozen countries or so by now). The public is certainly never going to go for unilateral free trade with anyone who wants to sell anything. I'm sure that's true for almost every country.
Devils advocate - there is no evidence that it isn’t already occurring in subtle ways. Russia’s strategy is sowing discord, which would be fairly easy if one government controls the algorithm deciding what media the other country’s citizens sees.
so is just saying the words "national security" enough for you to believe that this is justified? should the US government be allowed to block any private company from doing business just by saying those magic words, with no further justification? or just any foreign-owned company? or just any chinese company - if it's china, what makes china special?
there's got to be some limitation on where you draw the line on the government exercising this absolute and arbitrary power, i'm curious where exactly it is. could they shut down twitter for national security reasons? what about shopify - they're canadian, and the government is already levying tariffs against canadian imports for national security reasons, so the national security threat is already justified. should they be able to ban shopify with no concrete justification beyond claiming it's a vague threat to national security?
If you're saying that no company controlled by foreign nationals should be allowed to do business in the US, that is absolutely a sharp, consistent dividing line.
The relevant legal powers are indeed confined to “property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest” and this judicial decision illustrates their limits – an irrational assertion that the use of emergency national security powers is warranted may be subject to judicial review. See my other comment for citations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24615640
I don’t really know where I stand on the issue, but it is fairly clear how this is a potentially serious threat to national security.
Maybe a better solution is allowing the us government unfettered access to source code, algorithms, data collection, etc.
Edit - it seems reasonable that if a private company is able to massively influence the countries politics they should be scrutinized more closely. IMO it’s like have 1 national newspaper, but it’s a social platform rather than newspaper.
if it's a clear threat, the government should have no problem explaining what exactly the threat is. It seems plausible to me that there is a national security threat, but i'm bothered by the government being able to invoke national security as a set of magic words that excuse them from explaining anything further.
> if it's a clear threat, the government should have no problem explaining what exactly the threat is. It seems plausible to me that there is a national security threat, but i'm bothered by the government being able to invoke national security as a set of magic words that excuse them from explaining anything further.
It's pretty obvious: TikTok could be a potent propaganda tool, and in a time of increasing geopolitical tensions, you don't hand an adversary nation potential weapons like that. Also, Chinese intelligence is interested in collecting information on Americans (and others) that an app like TikTok could provide. For instance:
> WASHINGTON — The cyberattack on the Marriott hotel chain that collected personal details of roughly 500 million guests was part of a Chinese intelligence-gathering effort that also hacked health insurers and the security clearance files of millions more Americans, according to two people briefed on the investigation....
> Such information is exactly what the Chinese use to root out spies, recruit intelligence agents and build a rich repository of Americans’ personal data for future targeting. With those details and more that were stolen from insurers like Anthem, the Marriott data adds another critical element to the intelligence profile: travel habits.
> James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, said the Chinese have collected “huge pots of data” to feed a Ministry of State Security database seeking to identify American spies — and the Chinese people talking to them.
> “Big data is the new wave for counterintelligence,” Mr. Lewis said.
The thing is US has its own TikToks: if US bans TikTok, CCP will use its influence to undermine FB, WhatsApp, IG, Snapchat, etc. CCP is pretty much saying: "we know you're spying on the entire world and we want to do the same; if you torpedo our secret submarine, we'll do the same to yours."
They’ve already blocked those in China, Gmail, Google, FB etc. The insidious thing with WeChat is politically sensitive items are reviewed then blocked and use of the app trains their blocking heuristics.
They decide what content is viewed by millions of teens who will be voting in a few years. It’s not that far fetched to show them more violent content / mildly biased content / etc in order to move their political views a bit.
If they successfully do that then isn't that in fact the exact democracy working as it should? If you turn it around, you are endorsing the US government cutting off free speech specifically to manipulate people's voting opinions towards its own perception of what is "good". That seems almost exactly the opposite of the spirit of the constitution.
Perhaps an appropriate response here would be to detect this manipulation and highlight and educate people about it. Possibly create regulation to outlaw specific types of highly problematic aspects of it. But I find it hard to simultaneously accept that it's both so subtle as to be undetectable and unregulatable and yet so terrible it warrants arbitrary restraint of free speech.
I don't think the problem is that if/when it happens, it will be "undetectable". The issue is that if we have a polarized party-over-country political environment (which we do currently have), there is absolutely no guarantee a) that there will be a consensus about that the problem is real, that it matters, and that it should be addressed, b) that the party in power doesn't stand to benefit from interference and therefore takes no action, and c) we will have eyes looking at this seriously before it is "too late".
Protecting free speech of geopolitical competitors (China) and their economic agents (TikTok) is legitimate avenue for democratic destabilization.
The issue isn't whether TikTok is currently doing it or no, its whether this is a national security risk in the future, which is absolutely is. I think he's an idiot and he's using the issue to distract from Russian interference, but its a concern that if you only wait to address this _after_ its already a problem, it will already be unaddressable for the reasons enumerated in my comment.
The KGB already did this in 2016 and the White House conveniently doesn't care and actually vehemently denies anything happened. Now, in the lead up to an election, suddenly they care about foreign intervention of elections? Or is it more likely that Donald Trump is just trying to tally as many "wins" as possible in the lead up an election like any politician would? The CCP already compromised our technology supply chain not even 2 years ago [1] did the White House do anything then?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but evidence of absence does exist. “Claiming that it is impossible to prove a negative is a pseudologic, because there are many proofs that substantiate negative claims”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence
>>Are you uncomfortable adopting that belief with literally no concrete evidence that anything of the sort is actually occurring?
OK, I'll assume that you are right. That will change the minute China decides to, and no Chinese court can intervene.
Why does the government need to provide you with evidence? The government has access to intelligence that citizens do not have, and elected representatives must be trusted to manage that intelligence properly.
we don't need the evidence for TikTok's case when we already have the evidence of what Facebook is capable of (think about their A/B testing people without ethical considerations to whether they can be made depressed by showing them certain posts ... or the many other ways US social media giants are now critical to shaping the political discourse outside of the US from the UK to Myanmar to Hungary ...)
this isn't about hacking or 0days or even spying on Americans but about whether we allow them to control a machine that allows continuous manipulation of billions of people outside China.
Letting a non-ally control a social media platform and what content billions of people around the world are fed (or NOT fed) is too much of a risk for the US. Ofc the US does it too but their logic is that they're the "good guys".
National security is generally best when it is proactive, not reactive.
If you think the CCP having this data could be a problem, you can't wait until they collect it all and use it in order to stop them.
There is a reason laws like GDPR prevent even the mere collection of data, and don't wait until Google does something wrong with the data in order to stop them.
Surely Facebook’s a bigger issue than 60 second videos since any bad actor can target messaging at susceptibile users and no one will know.
This just seems like yet another case of Republican double speak. Say one thing do a different thing that just coincidentally happens to grab power over others.
Also, what is the method of using a 60 second video platform to share messaging with a crowd who will immediately scroll past anything heavy (or just plain stop using the app) to get to the next funny video? It seems a ultra low effectiveness medium for controlled messaging.
TikTok, being a massive analytical (see other discussions at HN) and priming platform, allows for quite interesting effects on the humans to be discovered and/or tested.
Facebook is primarily text which is low bandwidth and it goes through higher thinking. TikTok is high bandwidth from the start and is primarily analyzed using much older parts of brain.
I do not like Facebook (don't have account) and I vehemently hate TikTok.
Priming is one of the least reproducible effects out there and lies literally at the core of the reproducibility crisis [1]. I'm going to call BS on claims of some sort of spooky weaponization of it.
Edit: To add necessary context for those unaware, TikTok's audience in the US is politically liberal. The buy out of Trump rally tickets a few months ago was organized there [2].
It's true that we should be talking about the security implications of foreign control over our social media platforms. It's also true that we should be concerned about a targeted ban (instead of, say, a general crackdown on foreign social media) on what amounts to a meetinghouse for Trump's critics by the Trump administration itself.
To quote the link of yours: "Five years later, Kahneman’s concerns have been largely confirmed. Major studies in social priming research have failed to replicate and the replicability of results in social psychology is estimated to be only 25%"
I cannot discern whether author says that social priming research has replicability of 25% or social psychology has replication success of 25% and priming research has even less.
The scale at which TikTok operates is much larger than any studies that can be performed by a group of scientists. This is true for audience (or test subjects), amount of hardware used and for information gathered.
The link you provided still allows for some replicable effects to be present. Effects that were hypothesized, planned for discovery and then tested and brought to the light of day.
At the scale of TikTok, effects can be discovered without hypothesis first, just by using sheer analytical power available.
Let me offer you other quote from different link [1] (Nature): "Equipped with more-rigorous statistical methods, researchers are finding that social-priming effects do exist, but seem to vary between people and are smaller than first thought, Papies says."
> but seem to vary between people and are smaller than first thought, Papies says. She and others think that social priming might survive as a set of more modest, yet more rigorous, findings.
You linked the full statement, and then focused in on only two words of that statement for your comment.
What about the linked article makes us think that this is something that the US government has the authority to step in and ban? We should skirt both the 1st Amendment and the free market over a social theory that might survive as a set of modest findings?
It's good that the courts are blocking this in the absence of a specific, credible threat. "Some effects do exist, but we don't really know what they are, and they're a lot more modest than the scare effects that people are familiar with" is not a specific, credible threat.
The threat of allowing the US government to get comfortable exercising ever more invasive control over the free market for questionable reasons, to the point of turning off or banning widely used communication channels -- that's a much more tangible threat than what I'm seeing linked in your article.
I am not talking about dangers of US government banning some app or service. I am talking about about dangers of the very existence of that service ruled by what I consider quite unfriendly people. Unfriendly not to me personally, but to the way US operates.
As usual, official justification and real reasons may be very different. The "security threat" may be direct and indirect. I tried to present a picture of indirect threat to the security of US.
> I am talking about about dangers of the very existence of that service
My point is that the indirect threat to the security of the US through priming is statistically tenuous, that there's little reproducible evidence even from optimistic researchers that priming works on a significant scale (or at all), and that even if the threat is real it's likely much smaller than the threat posed by this kind of over-regulation and government overreach. My point is that a threat this vague doesn't warrant this kind of discussion in the first place.
The link you posted optimistically describes a very limited, focused effect that is still actively being debated. Is there any accepted scientific evidence, at all, that priming in a 60 second TikTok video would have a larger effect on the average person's politics than seeing friends share fake news on Facebook?
I would like to note that your last question equalizes single 60 second video and fake news post. You are discarding effects of repeated viewing of different algorithmically selected videos on the views of viewers. It is an experiment that is being done right now by no less than TikTok itself.
Actually, my beef with the Facebook is exactly the same - one does not control the feed, the feed is being controlled by Facebook.
> You are discarding effects of repeated viewing of different algorithmically selected videos on the views of viewers. It is an experiment that is being done right now by no less than TikTok itself.
And is there any accepted scientific evidence, at all, that this would change whether we should be more worried about priming effects in a TikTok video than fake news posts directly shared by friends and family?
> Actually, my beef with the Facebook is exactly the same - one does not control the feed, the feed is being controlled by Facebook.
Our concerns with Facebook aren't related to priming. If your concern is that centralization and control over algorithms can be dangerous (especially in the hands of an authoritarian regime like China), then I agree, but I don't see any particular reason why TikTok should pose a unique danger in that regard. CraigJPerry's original comment you replied to still seems pretty on-point:
> Surely Facebook’s a bigger issue than 60 second videos since any bad actor can target messaging at susceptibile users and no one will know.
> [...] what is the method of using a 60 second video platform to share messaging with a crowd who will immediately scroll past anything heavy (or just plain stop using the app) to get to the next funny video? It seems a ultra low effectiveness medium for controlled messaging.
The main conclusion I have is that TikTok may pose a danger (just like any social media network), but the dangers it poses are not big enough or well-defined enough to justify this kind of intrusion into the free market. Is that something you agree with?
You keep asking for scientific evidence of effects of completely new phenomena. I cannot provide you that. On the other hand, I am pretty sure you cannot provide me with evidence of absence of effects of the experiment of that magnitude.
Facebook is also doing priming, by controlling what user sees. Heck, even television and radio back in the day were used for priming, albeit not in such a direct feedback way.
About "intrusion into the free market".
I see "free market" as a neutral or even negative thing. I do not see "intrusion into the free market" as necessarily negative thing.
I see ban of TikTok as somewhat positive thing given my view on situation. I really want to see regulatory actions on Facebook too.
> TikTok's audience in the US is politically liberal
If anything, then that audience is a very interesting target for either:
- trying to convert them to more conservative ideas, by feeding them with messages that play on their feelings
- trying to get them to not vote, by discouraging it
- trying to incite violence against the other group in order to destabilize the country
Especially the last one is interesting for China. The second one has been (by their own word) effectively used by Cambridge Analytica in Trinidad to influence an election by discouraging young people to vote [0]. Imagine if there was an app, mostly used by impressionable teens and young adults, and you had unlimited access to the users of that app.
I use Facebook: my experience is it's probably 50-50. Which means far more content (by duration or bandwidth) is images/video. I rarely look at the videos.
As an erstwhile small business owner it became very clear that business page posts with images always get more views so all informational posts always have images if you want to improve your engagement scores.
Most friend posts that are popular enough to spread to me include a gallery or shared video.
People make text comments on news stories and link a news website, which then pulls in an image/video. So often the headlines/images are misleading - as one finds on HN too.
I used TikTok for 6 months or so, even posted a video. To me the only content was ever goofy dances, magic tricks, acrobatics and 'pranks'. No more harmful than any other human-targeting Skinner Box.
Does your wife heavily use tiktok? It's possible that different cohorts of Facebook users experience the product in different ways. I can imagine that those drawn to Tiktok also make use of insta stories or fb stories (short videos) etc.
> Facebook is primarily text which is low bandwidth and it goes through higher thinking. TikTok is high bandwidth from the start and is primarily analyzed using much older parts of brain.
Agreed. Reading and writing are recent inventions and involve thought and deliberation. There's a reason why such skills were rare and highly valued in antiquity. It's reasonable to assume that a medium with an emphasis on text is less prone to (but not entirely exempt from) manipulation.
On a somewhat unrelated note, people like Elon Musk believe that "information overload" can be solved by increasing the bandwidth between the medium and the brain. I wonder if that's true, or whether the lower bandwidth is necessary because our newer brain (prefrontal cortex) simply isn't fast enough.
Theoretically, CCP could abuse location services to track movements of military personnel and civilians in a war. Since FB isn't Chinese, that is less of an issue for large scale surveilance. Also, if the Chinese had a zero day that they could exploit by pushing a malicious TikTok update, they could get root access to these phones and use them for surveillance on a large scale.
Sure, this is all hypothetical, but it's not unthinkable in an all out cyber war. Nations are stockpiling zero days and other hacks just to have an advantage when it becomes necessary.
Note: I don't have TikTok, so no clue if they actually use location services, but every app seems to do that nowadays, so I just assumed it does.
Fed government could simply order all federal employees off tiktok or any other service without legal hurdles. What is the point of banning for the general public.
Let's say a child of a worker working in a nuclear reactor site for "Bring your daughter to work-day". She's ofcourse using tiktok, and guess who has that data now.
This is just an example. If I spend enough time, I can think of a whole lot more examples.
Every single secure facility I've ever been to required you to leave your phone at the gate, and this was pre-smartphone days. The more serious ones prohibited even disk-on-keys.If you're relying on kids keeping their phones secure for your national security, you've already lost.
Let's say the nuclear reactor site hosts a "post pictures of our site to Instagram" day. Then who has the data? And then suppose that the worker gets a text from someone impersonating his wife that says, "honey, you should text me some schematics of the plant." That would also be really bad.
And then suppose that the worker adopts a Chinese daughter, but really the daughter has been a Chinese spy the entire time, and on bring your daughter to work day she excuses herself to use the bathroom but actually goes and sabotages the plant by pulling an unguarded lever in a control room, sparking WW3. What is the US doing to protect against that happening?
Maybe you think these scenarios are unrealistic or that there are simple security measures that can mitigate them, but I want to stress that these are just examples. If I spend enough time, I can think of a whole lot more examples.
That's such an odd and incredibly unrealistic scenario. Also, in your hypothetical example, there's nothing that could be gained from TikTok that they couldn't have already figured out from satellite imagery.
> Fed government could simply order all federal employees off tiktok or any other service without legal hurdles.
They already have [0]. Federal employees, however, do have personal cell phones. There have been multiple cases of militairy information being leaked through Facebook posts [1]. Also, these people have conversations with their significant others, who also have personal cell phones. Recently, a list of PoI's leaked from a Chinese data collection company, some of which were children of people in power [2]. It is not completely unthinkable that the phone of a child is hacked and is then used to compromise the home network of an influential person, or something like that.
I'm not saying that TikTok would facilitate this, I don't know. If there's any intelligence indicating that it's a possibility I fully understand that there is a response, however.
No thats strava fitness app with documented cases of this. If this was the concern, you’d see a lot more concern over fitness tracker apps that log routines and times.
Yeah. I don’t buy this argument until they ban all Chinese apps. As far as I can tell, it’s just a way to cut off younger voter’s access to information that is critical of Trump. And that’s a generous reading.
I use both Reddit and TikTok, and I would say Reddit is far more overtly liberal leaning by default, with pockets of right leaning folks. Reddit or Facebook are also much more natural meeting places which can foster discussion or even event planning. In contrast, comment threads on TikTok are kind of a mess; it's more of a broadcast platform.
The only reason Trump has been able to pull this off is the fact that minors can't vote.
If you deny voting rights to a certain group of people, politicians just don't have to care about them at all. They can do things that hurt that group, and no one is going to hold them accountable.
At this point, I believe we should stop discriminating based on age.
> At this point, I believe we should stop discriminating based on age.
If the age of voting is lowered to 6 (as some have asked for: [1]) or even removed altogether what stops me from producing 5-10 kids and then having them vote for a political party that I support? That is 5-10 extra votes in just a decade. And if 1000 families do that, that would significantly tilt the outcome of an election. By the time they grow up to understand what their rights are and that they were being exploited by an adult they would feel disgusted that they were used (or rather misused). You are assuming that minors have inherent understanding of political issues at that young age. Most don't. And it is not reasonable to expect them to know.
Voting should only be enabled for those who are completely aware of their rights. Children typically are not. They are not political by nature. They are playful and more interested in learning things around them. Turning them into political ballots waiting to be exploited by adults around them is the last thing we need in this already fractured World.
Yes but if you are an adult I can't coerce you into voting for a party of my choice. Children can be coerced. Children can be used as pawns. Schools can turn into political arenas. There are so many things that can go wrong by introducing politics at that young age. It is rare for adults to fall for peer pressure as you would have matured by then. Kids and teens can easily succumb to peer pressure.
Do you really want your children to be exposed to political influence at such a tender age when they are already dealing with peer pressure, bullying and all other negative aspects that come with school life?
That is precisely what I am talking about: peer pressure/influence. You are just confirming my point. We already have enough influence on children from different angles: Religion, Race, Sex etc. I am saying that children should not be forced into these things and instead just allow them to explore the World in their own way. Let them learn about everything they feel interested in. This is not an age to be force-fitted into a mould. This is an age where they are growing/learning. Once they are ready they should be given their voting rights.
Giving them voting rights at such a young age will just make them all into activists or worse politicians. I see so many child activists who are just being exploited by their parents for making a quick buck. Most of what these children utter on TV is just stuff that have been told by their parents. If you talk to them outside of all this media circus you'll know that they are innocent and don't have much idea about the World except for doing what they are told.
They are just not prepared for it. The moment you go off script the cookie crumbles. But keep aside politics/activism for a moment. Do you think it is fair that a child has to go through this sort of exploitation for what should be adults coming out with solutions? Because let us face it. This is exploitation. The child needs to be in school studying and enjoying with friends. She will never get back this youthful life again. We as adults are literally using children as props to settle our political issues. This is immoral and not right.
I do agree that this is about "controlling" younger / new of age voters.
However, I'm less worried about whatever correct/incorrect info they get about Trump or politics in general. And more worried about the disturbing cultural trends that this app and others like it are amplifying. Culture can have strong effects on people's political/voting behavior and that's what I think is being addressed (as opposed to the spying/privacy/CCP concerns which are secondary yet used as the main reason behind this ban).
I am pretty sure that Facebook/Youtube/Twitter will be targeted next in some way, but probably not with outright bans such as what they did with TikTok.
>> I am pretty sure that Facebook/Youtube/Twitter will be targeted next in some way
Amnesty international was refused entry to observe the Assange trial. I don't know how it is on your FB search, your twitter search, even google news search, but this is harder information to find than i'd expect.
Perhaps this genuinely isn't as newsworthy as i was thinking it should be but then i feel like i have been privvy to every minute detail of Carrie Lam (and the CCP) vs the protestors.
But they cannot buy the same data - the quantity and quality of the data they obtain themselves (through apps like TikTok and WeChat that are running in the background 24/7 while collecting any information possible, such as secretly copying your clipboard which is likely to reveal passwords and other sensitive information) is far higher than what they could pay for.
You’re also ignoring the fact that they can use their apps to easily spread propaganda and influence elections. They’ve already censored videos that criticized the Chinese government. And inside the app then they have a very prominent “Covid-19” button where they can cherrypick what information to display.. they’ve for instance chosen to omit the fact that the Wuhan Virus originated in China.
For the record, "Wuhan Pneumonia" and "Wuhan Virus" were widely used by official news coverage in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and guess what, Mainland China, before the WHO suddenly dictated all people must use "Covid-19" or else you're racist or propagandist.
This trick is very effective in erasing the obvious link between the virus and its origin.
Yes, of course the goal is to erase the "obvious link" between the virus and the its origin. The thing is, people are irrational and will start discriminating in weird and unnecessary ways based on where a virus came from.
Nobody is trying to erase "history" or anything. Anybody actually interested can always read about the origin location of the virus in Wikipedia. This is all about keeping things straightforward for the otherwise uninformed.
Note that this is a standard virus naming methodology. The Ebola virus was similarly intentionally named to avoid unintentionally creating a target for discrimination.
It shouldn't matter whether you think Wuhan virus or COVID is the propaganda-name, a company just defaulting to the most common term for their market is not a useful sign of propaganda.
Using Tik Tok's Covid information as proof of propaganda is just looking at noise and pretending it's data.
> Theoretically, CCP could abuse location services to track movements of military personnel and civilians in a war. Since FB isn't Chinese, that is less of an issue for large scale surveilance.
Or the could just buy that information from the phone companies or data brokers.
Facebook allows anyone to purchase targeted messaging, but it's an American run company which likely makes the difference - there is likely a perception (real or imagined) that FB will be willing & able to combat "enemy" messaging.
In regards to the value of 60 second funny videos to share messaging, part of the strength here may be exactly because it's a platform for short, funny videos; as long as the ideas being communicated can be slipped into a funny video in a subtle way, people are hearing them without even realising it. (e.g. perhaps videos making fun of American leaders, undermining their authority etc. - certainly not hard to do with certain leaders...)
Well, free press also means that you shouldn't be forced to consume media you don't like.
But media you don't like being produced at all is perfectly compatible with a free press, including dislike because of influences and pressures you disapprove of. (In some sense, it would be extremely surprising if you liked all the media being produced.)
Why just videos? Images and text posts could be used in the same way, to disguise messaging/propaganda as a joke etc.
FWIW I don't think Facebook is likely any better in this area than TikTok, or indeed any social network or platform based around user generated content. It's likely always possible to create popular content that subconsciously influences people's thinking.
One thing that might separate Facebook from TikTok (for some people, not necessarily myself) is the question of "do I trust who is serving this content?" - in these days of algorithmically generated feeds, these companies can likely get away with more in terms of inserting specifically targeted content etc. without it looking suspicious, and have people assume it's showing because it's organically popular.
exactly people don't realize the subtle implications from watching tiktoks — they do impact you and your thoughts and in any case China censors so much
> with a crowd who will immediately scroll past anything heavy (or just plain stop using the app) to get to the next funny video?
the same can be said for imgur but it's very effective in presenting political content to a young audience which is as you say scrolling past. what makes it to the top is self regulating (by user upvotes) and still imgur has plenty of political content on the front page (twitter or reddit cut-outs with links to both OC and "deeper reading"). So I can't see why the same wouldn't work on TikTok (oddly one of the videos where a make-up tutorial was shared contained anti-Chinese content and criticism of how Uyghurs are treated - which went viral. Not sure if this is proof but it is certainly evidence that this isn't impossible).
>Surely Facebook’s a bigger issue than 60 second videos since any bad actor can target messaging at susceptibile users and no one will know.
TikTok relies much more heavily on an algorithm than FB, though. FB primarily pushes content posted by your friends, while TikTok pushes anything that might interest you. They can subtly influence you. If they hate Trump, the can push joke videos about tax returns and his sexual assault allegations or something. In other words, try creating an unconscious association between Trump and evil in your brain.
Another issue is that, if TikTok becomes crucial for advertisers, we give China power over these companies. Hiring people who have publicly expressed anti-chinese opinions or donating to the wrong politicians might suddenly ban you from the platform.
> FB primarily pushes content posted by your friends
This used to be the case, but is very very far from the case now in my experience. Most facebook newsfeed content is algorithmically driven too (to the point that it's mostly put me off using facebook and pushed me to instagram where most content is still from people I explicitly chose to follow).
>TikTok relies much more heavily on an algorithm than FB, though. FB primarily pushes content posted by your friends, while TikTok pushes anything that might interest you. They can subtly influence you.
I think it's very naive to think that FB is not doing that.
The advertising angle is very good one. US media and sports companies are already self censoring because of the economic retribution they might face in mainland.
TikTok is the generation that is most malleable to propaganda in a way that can undermine an entire generation. TikTok also has history of recording telemetry that’s extremely alarming.
Look into what is mined. Look into how algorithms get optimized to influence behavior. See a recent paper on this with using social media to shut down a power plant. Memetic warfare is real and it’s been going on in cyberspace for a while now. Every single bit of information is manipulation.
Every social network is a memetic warfare piece and TikTok is a primary target.
Lol at the downvoting. Bunch of brainwashed people here already.
> TikTok is the generation that is most malleable to propaganda in a way that can undermine an entire generation.
You don't have to look far to know this hypothesis won't stand up to any scrutiny. Not only are TikTok users typically in the age range less likely to vote, but everyone is susceptible to propaganda and lies. There is a lot of US produced propaganda out there aimed at the older generations which is being lapped up by a public thirsty for negative partisanship and divisive rhetoric.
If the Tiktok generation has been undermined, then it's by the older generations who benefited from more favorable situations, grabbed the wealth and power for themselves, pulled the ladder up and now refuse to see how any of this is an issue and will fight to maintain an unequal situation as long as it favors them.
Not voting is a behavior pattern. Any behavior can be influenced by information propagation. The behavior of not voting has its own second order of effects. Also rooted in not believing in the structure one is participating in.
But that’s less my point, it’s more about the methods and attack vectors being an increased surface area now than ever before.
“Chinese military scholars argue that their nation has a long history of conducting "psychological operations", a phrase that connotes important aspects of strategic deception and, to a certain degree, what the US Department of Defense portrays as perception management. For example, several articles published by the PLA's Academy of Military Science (AMS) journal Zhongguo Junshi Kexue, examine psychological warfare and psychological operations mainly as a deception-oriented function of military strategy.”
My optimistic side says that if 60 second short videos were ideologically useful, CIA (or your favourite "They") would have weaponised them back in the 1960s[1].
My pessimistic side says they probably are, and maybe they even did.
Most definitely cia has a history with manipulating information. But at the point of information, how do you know what to even trust at any level? Evidence can be provided for anything. Information and disinformation all at the same time. This is only increasing - how will anyone be able to sort themselves out? I’m not so sure it’s possible.
Also 60 seconds of video is a ton of information. And it’s not just one video at a time. The total session aggregated per user per active user is way higher than that. These are behaviors where users use the app all day. Their entire worldview is based on the content within the social network experience.
The Arthashastra recommends never acting on intelligence which hasn't been confirmed through at least three independent channels. Russian, swiss, and US secondary sources agree on the the underlying events of that scenario. I guess if the soviets really had had a highly-placed mole like Stierlitz, they could have done more, perhaps have been subtly encouraging top nazis first to prioritise ideology over pragmatism and then to get into speed, into the occult, and into the bunker.
Nighttime, 1944 Berlin: A ushanka-wearing man with skis and a parachute creeps silently along the hallway of an apartment building. He raps quickly on one of the doors.
A dishelved german in nightcap and house shoes opens after a few minutes.
"The eagles fly over the campfire. Repeat: the eagles fly over the campfire!" whispers the man in the hallway.
"Sorry," says the german, "I'm Otto Stierlitz the plumber, born 1904. You want Otto von Stierlitz the spy, born 1899. He lives up on the third floor."
> if 60 second short videos were ideologically useful
A single 60 second video is not materially useful. But steady repetitive exposure to the same or similar messaging videos, is the foundation of TV advertising. There is likely some useful weaponization in there somewhere when the videos can be made without the assistance of a Madison Avenue crew and contract, and the consumers are pecking at the screen for more videos for long stretches of time like a pigeon in a psychology experiment.
Someone is going to try something to achieve controlled/directed opinion shaping with that kind of mass population behavior in a relatively regulation-free context compared to conventional centralized media. It has to be too tempting a centralized target to leave alone. Opinion shaping in these channels already is being attempted commercially. I'd like to hear from domain experts whether the metrics bear out such efforts actually work in the commercial sector, and if other domain experts in politics and defense think such experience warrants those sectors dabbling in making their own attempts.
What you’re describing is exactly what’s going on. Cambridge Analytics was the smoking gun. That unraveled what sophistication of technology is being used to mine the internet and control sentiment.
I wasn't asking for a citation on whether three-letter agencies have weaponized social media. My issue was the"most malleable" language that belongs in a boomer comic rather than HN.
So why not focus on Facebook? Why not do something meaningful, anything, with a company which is actually beholden to us law? Seems like targetting the biggest bang for buck would be a good place to start and THEN move on to others, no?
It’s not mutually exclusive. Facebook is complicit. TikTok however is specifically a unique entity on its own. The demographics that use it are of critical interest to persuade additionally the data is directly at risk of being used as information warfare on increasingly elevated state cyber warfare tactics.
Follow the trail of information. Look into what’s going in across the stack hardware to software to networks. There’s a massive shift the past couple years.
Facebook has been used for misinformation for a significant longer amount of time. Usually I get annoyed when people say something like "but what about X", but in this case it's a case of one company often being proven to manipulate, distort, etc (Facebook) vs a possibility that another company might do that.
It’s not a possibility that another company is doing it, it’s about the state actors involved in doing it and otherwise unknown parties. In the end it’s no specific company that is responsible as the aggregate whole of all data available and the mechanisms to algorithmically control content is the sophistication of manipulation going on today.
Indeed. Again there’s no question the attack vectors - however dismissing it as “kettle” or “them too” solves nothing and contributes to making the situation worse. Every comment I make is being downvoted yet there’s a critical point that’s either entirely dismissed as insignificant because others are doing it too or divorced from the ability to reason about information warfare and it’s implications. Oh well at least I tried.
That’s not really what’s happening though. People are reading your premise that tiktok is a viable mechanism for influencing behaviour of its users, they are then pointing out far bigger examples of the ability you cite (Facebook, Google, Twitter) to which you say that’s different and we need to focus on tiktok because good reasons and not because china but i cant elaborate on good reasons.
I don’t think they’re any less or any more other than the potential net vectors exposed. A boomer typically has traditional media as a source of information which shapes their world view. These channels have their own programming and narratives.
The zoomers are entirely on internet platforms which has a higher degree of manipulation. Every single person is mined against. Every single person gets optimized against. There’s more room for coercion based on the algorithmic use targeting demographics, and with the capability of individual optimization with machine learning tech.
If the typical “hacker” can launch a botnet with GPT2 and automate conversation and thread demographics based on interactions putting a “group” into a human in loop pattern with a goal ... imagine what state actors are doing.
>If the typical “hacker” can launch a botnet with GPT2 and automate conversation and thread demographics based on interactions putting a “group” into a human in loop pattern with a goal ... imagine what state actors are doing.
It scares me everytime I think about it how little $$ you need in order to reach e.g Reddit's front page.
It’s incredibly alarming what one can do with very little resources.
It’s downright horrifying or exciting when realizing what one can do with more than average resources.
In a way, that’s why I think the battleground is more “weird” than ever. It’s not just state actors, it’s factions of organized and convergent groups using memetic warfare. Some groups naturally converge towards each other. Take the anon’s, and various sects then overlay it with state actor and your smaller groups. Weird nameless stuff of massive influence and self organization.
Depending upon if you're counting daily or regular usage, it looks like somewhere between 50+% (daily) and 75+% (occasional usage) of boomers are on facebook. The number for YouTube are a bit lower but not by much. For comparison, Tiktok, the Gen Z share is about 50%.
That is more than enough boomers being algorithmically swayed to alter an election. As has been shown (Cambridge Analytica, etc...) Facebook's segmentation arguably offers more power to target it's user than Tiktok does.
Not the same at all given the sophistication of targeting allowed.
Yes, ads have always been this. But no, it’s never been like this.
All that data on the internet is being used to train algorithms to sway global sentiment. This emerges as bots, ads, interactions, content. It’s mind blowing.
That’s already been known and within US soil. Now it’s the younger generation - it doesn’t make it mutually exclusive. If anything it shows the complete onslaught on all ends to undermine the stability of a nation in a way that’s never been possible before due to mass media and the internet. Broadcast is entirely unidirectional.
You’re absolutely correct that brainwashing happens on those mediums. It’s entirely interesting on one hand and entirely alarming on another. At this rate I’m not sure what the world at large can do given the technology out there to manipulate the populace. It leads to some very critical questions on how to exist.
I completely agree! I do feel like you and I and Ben (even after reading Ben's post) are still talking past each other. I am completely lost at the point where you say "A and B, therefore C, the US should ban TikTok." What is it about the combination of success and external control that means TikTok should be banned? Ben wrote:
> This [video-based content-rich algorithmically-controlled feed] both explains why TikTok succeeds, and why it is an app the United States ought to be concerned about.
I think that's a jump to conclusions that is illogical it does not follow from the priors.
You, Ben, and other advocates of a ban on TikTok try really hard to explain and prove Fact A, that TikTok is a uniquely successful mobile-first semi-social network/information sharing platform. You also describe Fact B, that ByteDance is vulnerable to CCP influence which is ideologically opposed to the US. You do well on both counts, I agree completely with these facts, they're pretty indisputable. I would probably use "different from" instead of "opposed" to frame the philosophical differences in a less antagonistic way, but still, I'm with you on these facts.
http://english.www.gov.cn/ is another platform that's controlled exclusively by the Chinese government. But no one's proposing a book-burning, that the US firewall all information controlled by the CCP or those with ideological differences. Twitter is a popular information-sharing social platform, and there are Chinese actors on it, but this argument isn't extended to suggest that it be banned, either. But somehow, a platform that does both must not be allowed to exist? I don't get it.
> Twitter is a popular information-sharing social platform, and there are Chinese actors on it, but this argument isn't extended to suggest that it be banned, either. But somehow, a platform that does both must not be allowed to exist? I don't get it.
Is it that hard to understand? Twitter and Facebook will at least try to make a genuine effort to root out and ban "coordinated inauthentic activity" by the Chinese government (and if they don't they could probably be compelled to do so): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/23/facebook-.... A Chinese-owned TikTok won't: either it won't do it at all, or it will make a fake/bad-faith effort.
Similarly, Twitter and Facebook may gather a lot of non-public user data, but there's pretty much no chance that any of that data will be willingly handed over to Chinese intelligence.
It should be noted that Chinese intelligence is not exclusively after top secret government data: they're also interested in many kinds of mundane information that you might be surprised by that can be leveraged to get it: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/politics/trump-china-t....
Banning/setting up a firewall makes us no different than the CCP!
Personally I think all the effort and resources spent policing social media platforms is a complete waste and malinvestment. This looks like an overreach of government power.
> Banning/setting up a firewall makes us no different than the CCP! [1]
That's pretty clearly not the case. Context matters. For instance: if I shot someone in self defense, and you shot someone to murder them, we're not "no different" because we both performed the action of shooting a gun at someone. In that case, like this one, the context motivating the action is more important than the action itself in determining its meaning.
> Personally I think all the effort and resources spent policing social media platforms is a complete waste and malinvestment. This looks like an overreach of government power.
Some people say the same thing about having any military at all.
[1] Italicizing something like that is a common quote style, but I'm assuming you're italicizing your own statement for emphasis because that isn't anything like what I said.
> Perhaps the most powerful argument against taking any sort of action is that we aren’t China, and isn’t blocking TikTok something that China would do? Well yes, we know that is what they would do, because the Chinese government has blocked U.S. social networks for years. Wars, though, are fought not because we lust for battle, but because we pray for peace. If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only within its borders but within ours, it is in liberalism’s interest to cut off a vector that has taken root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans exactly what they want.
OK so we should ban something if it gets popular, but it doesn't matter if it's worse but it's not popular.
By extension should we ignore someone who's selling 1 gram of heroin at a time but we should definitely put a guy transporting 1 ton of industrial hemp in prison, on the ground that hemp can be turned into pot, somehow.
You’re comparing Apples to Oranges, or in your case, heroin to hemp; no ones banning the components that make up TikTok (the code, the business, the algorithms etc)...
Comparing heroin to heroin though, yes we do ignore someone who’s selling 1 gram of heroin at a time over someone selling 1 ton of heroin at a time.
So is tiktok full of literal official Chinese propaganda? Or is it full of people doing stupid things? Or is people doing stupid things Chinese propaganda nowadays?
You're saying it's comparing heroin to heroin, is it?
For what it's worth, I was only pointing out that a guy transporting 1 gram of heroin would be a lower priority for investigation compared to a guy transporting a larger quantity of the same product. So a social media platform that's worse but less popular would not be on anyones radar for a ban, precisely because its on nobodies radar to begin with.
But I see the point you're making. I'd say that, in the case of hemp vs heroin, the guy transporting 1 ton of industrial hemp would be subject to close scrutiny since the product could be used for illicit purposes (turning into heroin). If there was any evidence or suspicion of foul play, his capability to transport industrial hemp would be removed and he would face investigation. I'd apply the same logic to software too.
But the difference is that it's hard to scrutinise closed-source software and it's also difficult to "trace" data and know that data isn't being harvested for re-use by the CCP for other nefarious purposes. We do have suspicion of foul play though – TikTok routinely blocks anything anti-China and we're aware of the massive data gathering that the CCP performs to monitor its own citizens. We also know they (and others) are manipulating western social media using the data they've gathered.
Your subsequent argument that TikTok is just full of people doing stupid things is, I think, a bit disingenuous to the potential for harm that TikTok is capable of. The top level commenters link (https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/) explains it quite well. It's also worth noting that the same argument could be made for any social media platform when they first got started. Example, facebook = "just a bunch of teens socialising online". Obviously if you're one of the people who doesn't think facebook has become a problem then this debate is pointless. But if you do see the harm that facebook has caused globally, I personally believe that TikTok has even greater potential for harm.
> I think that’s a jump to conclusions that is illogical it does not follow from the priors.
You’re misreading that line. It’s: “This explains why TikTok succeeds, and why it is an app the United States ought to be concerned about. <continue reading post to find out why>”. The author subsequently explains why.
You mention that you get Fact A and Fact B. Fact C isn’t, “Therefore, TikTok should be banned”. Fact C, according to that post, is that China has begun ideological warfare. For supporters of a ban, Fact D then, is “The US should respond with defensive manoeuvres”. A ban is a defensive move. Nobody’s advocating for an offensive counter-attack (by running misinformation campaigns on their own social media platforms for instance). It’s perfectly reasonable to defend when under attack from a foreign entity.
Whether you think the US is under attack is the real question. But you said you agree with Fact B, so you agree that the possibility for China to use TikTok as a tool for ideological warfare is definitely there. The authors argument is that, combined with the evidence we’ve seen so far (censorship on domestic platforms, censorship on foreign platforms), maybe the US should be taking China’s own words on the matter more seriously.
Ah, I think I'm starting to understand. Ideological warfare, IMO, is not real war and should be countered by facts and public education, not by declaring a War on Memes and defense with censorship.
If a platform is afraid that an adult might see a particular piece of information or a particular idea, and be radicalized by it, they've not adjusted to the Information Age. We might need a better way to authenticate trustworthy sources, but I don't think the attack from Tiktok is a sharing of authoritative facts, it's at worst a message that the Chinese government is less evil than the US would like to represent them.
As you pointed out, it seems like he's saying from China's point of view, their survival is predicated on an ideological war:
> China is not simply resisting Western ideals of freedom, but seeking to impose their own
And that it is likely they would be willing to use TikTok to further their ideology in the US:
> China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?
While no one is proposing banning the other platforms you mentioned that are influenced by China, I feel like that is irrelevant from the TikTok argument. If the two statements above are taken at face value (or the whole article really), then it seems to me that TikTok is indeed a concerning platform when it comes to preserving liberal ideology.
There is a much simpler argument to be made, with regard to protectionism. Whether you agree with the morality or not, it it benefits American companies to have their competition banned. They are then free to clone it, without having to fight for users. Considering the isolationist and nationalist tendencies of the current administration, such a decision is consistent and fitting. One could argue, it most benefits the national security of the country to keep its tech giants strong, and free from external threats. And that entire argument can be made without bringing up data.
To me, this question is easier to model as a function of some scalar impact metric. Suppose we could quantify influence somehow. What people are arguing over is whether TikTok crosses some line of “too much influence” not “existence of influence” for which there are plenty of sources.
Approaching this from an unemotional, abstract, systems analysis perspective seems like a good way to go about this.
If we were debating something like "where shall we go for lunch, Restaurant A or B", most people here likely wouldn't have trouble identifying (or wouldn't deny the existence of) attributes that one might take into consideration (price, location, quality, cleanliness, decor, types and variety of dishes, friendliness of wait staff, etc), and differences in the values of those attributes.
If we slightly change the context to one where rather than comparing restaurants, we are instead comparing software applications (excluding code editors and operating systems, let's say: alarm clocks), most people could likely still competently exercise their systems analysis skills.
But if we make one more slight context change, from comparing alarm clocks, to comparing TikTok to Twitter/Facebook/etc, some very curious things start to happen. Suddenly, people seems to no longer have the ability to reliably identify attributes of each application, or that the value of those attributes differ.
What is the nature of this small context change, such that it seems to have such a remarkably negative effect on the systems analysis capabilities of human beings? On its face, the conversational behavior seems clearly illogical - and yet, based on my 10+ years on HN, I have a rich intuition that the average intelligence level around here is very high.
Something seems very paradoxical about this situation.
My guess is there are two different factors at play.
- Marketing and propaganda cloud everything they touch, and that one market is full of both. We can't even be certain of the public features of those platforms, because there are a bunch of incoherent messages controlling the communication channels.
- Most of the features of those products are not public. They impact your life, but you have no chance of even knowing they exist. Both platforms apply editorial governance on their contents, what kind and how much is anybody's guess. Both platforms profile their users, who has that profile and what they do with it is anybody's guess.
It is hard to discuss some unknowable thing over a noisy channel.
Agreed, there's a lot of hidden complexity, but I'm talking about this phenomenon where people seem to lose access to the ability to properly identify things that are clearly visible.
For example, higher in the thread someone seems unable to see a distinction between TikTok and Twitter, and even http://english.www.gov.cn. They indeed have many similar attributes, but this similarity seems to then be presumed to extend to all other attributes. There are blatantly obvious differences in both distinct attributes, and values of those attributes (otherwise, they wouldn't be different applications), yet people seem to be in some sort of a state where they cannot see them.
This is just one example, this thread is full of all sorts of other counter-intuitive (compared to historical norms on HN) behavior, or at least the surface level appearance of it. The way people describe observable reality is just....weird. How can there be such massive variance in observations between (presumably) intelligent people, but only under certain scenarios? And this isn't a one-off anomalous thread either, I strongly believe that this phenomenon has been present and clearly observable for quite some time now. Am I maybe imagining things?
I read that post as asking exactly what distinction creates a problem, not a denial that there are many of them.
Clearly establishing the problem is key on determining how it can be solved. e.g. The solution for foreign editorial influence will only make discourse control more concentrated, and the other way around.
> I read that post as asking exactly what distinction creates a problem, not a denial that there are many of them.
That question was being asked in a roundabout way, but if you're not so generous, do you not pick up a bit of a whiff of incredulity?
>> http://english.www.gov.cn/ is another platform that's controlled exclusively by the Chinese government. But no one's proposing a book-burning, that the US firewall all information controlled by the CCP or those with ideological differences. Twitter is a popular information-sharing social platform, and there are Chinese actors on it, but this argument isn't extended to suggest that it be banned, either. But somehow, a platform that does both must not be allowed to exist? I don't get it.
"But somehow, a platform that does both must not be allowed to exist?" seems either disingenuous, or that the person is unable to realize that an application that has ~100M users (and significant usage/day), most in a young impressionable demographic, that consists of ~60 second viral videos, just might have distinct and noteworthy differences from a national security point than Twitter, or http://english.www.gov.cn.
To be clear: the onus is not on this person to disprove their counterpart's assertion, far from it. I am referring to the apparent inability to notice that a valid difference might exist, and all of this in a world where we've been constantly told by the media that Russian hackers have been undermining our democracy, and occurring on HN, a site frequented by some of the brightest minds on the planet when it comes to software.
And this is just one example. Reading through the rest of the discussions in this thread, is there not something that seems "a little off" in the way people describe reality? Are so many people simultaneously faking that they are literally unable to see any valid concerns here, or in the arguments put forth in their counterpart in each discussion (and this goes both ways), or are they literally unable to see?
If this was to happen in every thread on HN, one might just write it off to "people being people", but it doesn't happen in every thread, it only seems to happen in certain types of threads. Is this a coincidence? Am I seeing things? Or might something interesting actually be going on here? Is this odd behavior restricted only to HN, or do we see similar behavior elsewhere?
On the context of the post he was replying to, yes, I agree. If it's taken as a simple answer, that question sounds completely disingenuous. But I also find it hard to read the comment as a literal answer to the parent.
But anyway, the reason people are uneasy all over the thread is quite simple. Banning a platform this way is a serious interference on the freedoms of expression and initiative, but letting the platform unchecked is a serious offense to the US sovereignty. There are no good options among the ones presented to the people, and the real non-damaging options depend on coordinating a system that is so complex that nobody is certain that they can.
By the way, just for completeness, that's how people around the world feel about Facebook too.
> But anyway, the reason people are uneasy all over the thread is quite simple.
That's a nice simple explanation, and perhaps there's truth to it, but people aren't just "uneasy" - if that was all that was going on, there wouldn't be such a massive variance in perception of reality, and I also suspect we wouldn't be observing so many instances of weird cognitive failure on simple tasks. I don't know what the explanation is, but something unique is going on that you do not see in other threads, on more complicated topics.
> Banning a platform this way is a serious interference on the freedoms of expression and initiative, but letting the platform unchecked is a serious offense to the US sovereignty.
I have the same take as you, but ours seems to be a minority opinion. Personal opinions on what should be done about the situation are perfectly appropriate, but widespread disagreement and confusion about what the state of affairs of this rather simple scenario, that seems like something else entirely.
One reason for the United States being seen as a good place to do business is because it is consistent. You don't need to worry about being subjected to the whims of a strongman in order to do business in the US; there is supposed to be a firewall between the business of government and certain political pressures.
Regardless of the risks and challenges increasingly posed by companies that have, at best, murky relationships with the folks in Zhongnanhai, attempting to circumvent this process is an outrageously offensive and damaging to the long-term ability for the US to be able to assert rule of law and democratic processes as the way forward.
One can cynically argue it was always a flimsy patina anyway, but the behavior of, whatever this is at the moment, is disorganized, suffers from shifting reasoning, dubious personal intervention by POTUS, and lacks the due process that we demand of the US government. There has been not a single shred of meaningful evidence presented to the public that TikTok itself is engaged in active spying or intelligence gathering on the part of the Beijing. I would not be surprised if the federal government had evidence that Bytedance is using TikTok for nefarious reasons, but as the saga has dragged on it becomes increasingly unclear what evidence exists. First it had to divest; now it has a "strategic partnership" that's somehow still being sold as a divestiture?
On what basis are we to trust the random proclamations of an executive branch that blatantly and unabashedly lies to the press and the public at-large even over trivial nonsense, declares all unfavorable news as "fake" and suffers endless information leaks from people who have repeatedly been burned by its mercurial cast of characters?
Or we could look at history and accepr that the US changes the rules whenever it is eclipsed or finds itself outdone at its own game.
See Japan 1980s
Nah, the ideology is manufactured - we were just fine doing business with them and we keep being just fine doing business with the Saudis or any number of ideologically 'opposed countries.
Every couple of decades we need a new boogeyman to fight against. Right now it's China. Every one of their companies is "controlled by the CCP" hence a CCP stooge. Clearly we must destroy these companies by any means necessary, that or outright take them over.
Exactly. This is like when tax was put on foreign motorcycles to protect Harley Davidson because it clearly was an inferior product that could not live on customer demand alone against Japanese products. I own one of the products that came out of this debacle[1] which might be the reason I still remember this unlike most who seem to believe this is a new way to do things in the US.
Inside China, Bytedance's founder is known as pro-US. They've publicly made pro-US statements.
Furthermore, the CCP has 90+ million members. With the number of employees that Bytedance has in China, you'd expect — by proportion — that they have thousands of employees that are CCP members. But it's just a couple of hundred.
Bytedance's founder has made an effort to make this a global company, not a Chinese company, not a "CCP/state company". He believes in internationalism.
And yet here we are: Mike Pompeo calling him a "mouthpiece of the CCP", and many people on Hacker News believing that Tiktok is a big conspiracy to hack the United States. All without a fair investigation into who Bytedance is, how much of these fears are actually founded, or whether there are more productive solutions than kicking out all things Chinese.
The irony. Can you imagine what all this does to his pro-US stance, or what it does to all the pro-US people in China for that matter? Treating China as an enemy is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> ByteDance has had a party committee since 2017 and is headed by CCP secretary and company editor-in-chief Zhang Fuping (張輔評), reported Human Rights Watch. Members of the committee hold regular gatherings at which they study speeches by Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) and "pledge to follow the party in technological innovation."
> In addition, ByteDance on April 25, 2019, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau (公安部新聞宣傳局) in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.
And this justifies compromising on our freedoms? Some populist utters the words “national security” and we decide to destroy the first amendment.
That mindset is an affront to what it means to be American and it is much more of a threat to our country and the rights of our citizens than TikTok could ever be.
Precisely. We should not censor platforms that enable effective free speech to occur. TikTok is the one place that you can post a political video that doesn’t get removed within seconds for “violating community standards.” It’s blatantly obvious that the American big tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google are propaganda arms of the US government that employ specialized algorithms to censor thought provoking content and further specific political agendas. A platform like TikTok is, by nature of its origin, resilient to that.
It is. FB would never have been tolerated during the Cold War, not even in Europe. We let our guard down after the Cold War, and mostly for the better, but some corporations are exploiting the openness. Everyone on Earth needs to find a way to deal with these companies or continue being exploited.
Lol. The next conflict has been upon us for a while. Trade sanctions. Embargoes. Proxy wars. Information campaigns. We cannot see the forest through the trees.
A decision to block something like this should be made in a court of law with evidence given.
If it needs to be expedited, then it the POTUS should expedite the case, but we can't have arbitrary decisions being made like this without evidence, or we're like the CCP?
The part i dont get - zoom also has ties to China.
Everyone focuses on tiktok which is kids making stupid videos, but zoom which almost certainly has massive amounts of highly sensitive info going through it, seems to raise very few eye brows comparatively.
When you look at the amount of data one would have to sift through to find anything valuable, it’s a pretty big difference between TikTok & Zoom. Put simply, TikTok saves & distributes short video content. Zoom streams long video chats. The potential for gathering psychological data would be far higher with TikTok, and the barrier for entry far lower.
We have computers that can automatically make transcripts. I'm sure china knows how grep works.
Are you seriously suggesting that its easier to gather psychological data from short videos than it would be from therapy sessions held over zoom? Why would that even be more valuable to china than the traditional industry espinoge that would be trivial to extract over zoom. Hell, why would you expect that short videos made for the express purpose of trying to gain popularity would be more telling about someone's personality than their candid work interactions?
I do agree with a number of your points but what about mobile phones built by Chinese companies, what about all apps developed in China. How do you know what is and isn't CCP controlled?
Just seems a slippery slope, or how do you know if an American app isn't funnelling data to CCP.
Propaganda. You don't have to bother making troll farm accounts to spread misinformation and sow doubt when you control the platform and can create and drip content you want into peoples feeds, and you know what they like, you're already serving them an addictive stream of content based on their behaviors.
I don't have tiktok but according to anecdotal evidence from family members who do, the propaganda you describe seemed to be people doing stupid things in their bathroom while getting hurt in the process.
You'd probably say 'potential' but just think about it, banning something for 'potential'. Is that where we are right now?
The problem is they could pull a Facebook and show certain content to change peoples moods intentionally. It's already proven possible. That said, I'm all for legislation against all social media companies.
Changing their mood would be one thing, though I doubt it'd work on TikTok as well as it might on FB, people go to TikTok for specific types of content. Propaganda would be quite another, TikTok's format doesn't seem to really work for that kind of content, it's short videos, not infographics and texts.
Wouldn’t this be better handled by a more sophisticated solution like some kind of law or governance organization? Banning specific apps is like whack a mole. There will also be other countries with opposing ideological beliefs - we probably shouldn’t want to play whack a mole country by country either.
Why not? It’s basically the only app China have managed to make popular in USA. And they’ve had to blow billions on ads to do so.
I do believe it would be best to block all apps owned by the Chinese, but blocking them one by one would work as well, because it’s incredibly difficult and expensive to obtain the userbase that makes the app worth blocking.
I don't really know what to do about it, I just understand why one might be concerned. It's a wild world. I feel like banning things because they're a possible threat is a slippery slope.
We gave an Australian US citizenship so he could get past the limit on foreign ownership of TV stations. He jumped right into bed with US political parties and has a chokehold on one of them by building itself, intentionally, as its media arm.
That said, I think the internet should be free for the most part. If we have to kick them out of the country and deprive them our markets then this should be done by law instead of by authoritarian decree. Google and Apple already have rules against apps that violate laws.
We had these laws and watered them down before because it would benefit a particular political party by putting an influence empire behind it. We just need to update and modernize the laws. Define specific things that are allowed and not allowed.
EG, GDPR-like privacy rules about not sending user data to Asia, with stiff penalties. Restrictions against allowing investment from individual and corporations (and subsidiaries) on a specific watch list, along with defined criteria for getting on that list. EG, Tencent's contending years ago to become the social credit provider for China to help manipulate populace behavior. I'd consider that a human right violation worthy of entry to a list after careful review.
Maybe if we had such things in place, the FBI wouldn't have had to wander around to all of the major US businesses a year or two ago, quietly begging them not to use Kaspersky because it was potentially sending data to Russia. They would either have not been on an approved vendor list due to their sanctions or they could provide sufficient evidence to get them on the list and then demand removal instead of beg for companies to do it voluntarily.
And if strengthening these laws means kicking out Fox News as well, so be it.
...being controlled by the CCP is what makes it different. All of these sites/apps have the ability to shove propaganda in the faces of millions of people, only one of them is run by a government.
Taking this as true, are you suggesting we should have, instead of our (expanding on what I think you're saying) "non-democratic capitalist ologopoly", have our important companies and institutions be run the by the CCP?
Two wrongs don't make a right. Work to improve our system rather than using our failures to normalize CCP oppression and violence.
Yes, there's a lot we need to be doing to put pressure on the CCP that we aren't currently doing, and it also doesn't need to be binary. There's a difference between Apple doing business in China, and a Chinese company doing business in the US. China has considerable influence on Apple, but not as much as it does on TikTok. Tim Cook's family isn't at risk of jail if he criticizes the CCP.
The bigger thing is them dragnetting 100 million Americans for data like interests, conversations, contacts, location, private videos, etc. Not to much potential for pushing backdoors into to target individuals.
Surely there are other websites like this. Bytedance isn't the only chinese company that exists. Should my browser not allow me to visit those websites?
You seriously think that if one of those decided to influence election (for a greater good of course) you would expect direct cooperation of FB in the matter?
I'd think that the guilty party should be prosecuted for doing things like that.
Then he'd completely missed my original point that was about practical inability to prevent that exact scenario - "elect the next Manchurian candidate campaign run by the NSA". I do not think juducial review will enter the picture here. I am not sure what practical legal mechanism is available to prevent such scenario. I guess it would run the risk of being exposed by some whistleblower but with the latest developments in the area the chances are that it wont.
At this point I have doubts about who employs the Manchurian candidates in the first place, people behind the big companies or the three letter agencies. There are revolving doors between them.
And i just saw an anti-China anti-ccp video on tiktok yesterday. A number of them last week. I saw pro Hong Kong Independence video too. If the ccp is manipulating public opinion using tiktok, they are doing a terrible job at it. Bytedance is incorporated in Cayman islands. From a legal perspective it's not subjected to any Chinese laws, including the intelligence law. The tiktok subsidiary is not under Chinese law as well. The management of tiktok is all Americans. And Tiktok is run by American employees, there are 1500 of them. If Chinese government is forcing them to manipulate the algorithm in favor of Chinese, they would have said something in public by now. Also, 2 out of 4 board members of the company is none Chinese. American investor Sequoia and BlackRock owns 40% of the company. They obviously would know if the company is owned by the government right? They also know the day to day operations of the company and they would know if tiktok is being used by the Chinese government for propaganda purposes right?
Honestly, given the amount of smearing and disinformation about China and Chinese government in Western media, I can honestly say the ccp is super weak at doing any kind of PR messaging. Half the world still believes the coronavirus is manufacturered by the Wuhan lab and is released to world as a bio weapon. Even when scientists have repeatedly debunked it as a conspiracy theory. It's almost as if ccp isn't even trying at controlling the public opinion. Just let the rumors fly wild. Back in April, I have seen so many videos about this conspiracy theory on Tiktok. Meanwhile, look at how fox news, PragerU and other conservative media are blaming China and defending Trump for things US scientists, public health experts and policy makers have called him on. Look at how they have attacked Dem cities and Dem leaders while promoting themselves as the just and righteous. This looks more like manipulating public opinion and pushing out propaganda to me.
You may be right (and the publicity alone would be sufficcient for this thin-skinned lunatic), but... doesn't that story rest on somewhat tenuous logic?
I. e. they claim to have reserved far more tickets than capacity would allow to attend. But that seems to demonstrate that tickets weren't limited by capacity. So how did their action prevent other people from getting tickets?
Various forms of location data gathered from it, e.g. the location of any member of the military that uses it.
Launching pad for zero days if China feels the need to root someones (or many someones) phones.
Massive social graph, massive amounts of behavioral data. Useful, for doing things like identifying who was likely recruited by a spy agency or identifying potential assets that can be turned.
Potential to pressure speech that China prefers, e.g. by rewarding popular creators with money only if they don't say things China likes, or by decreasing the reach of people who say things China dislikes.
Potential for foreign control of the general trends of content people see. E.g. tweaking the algorithm so "it just happens" to suppress the potential to suppress topics china would prefer we didn't talk about (e.g. their "re-education" camps) or to boost topics they would prefer we did (likely things like political infighting).
Most of these involve various levels of overtness. Many of them it probably only makes sense to start doing once you've captured the market (right now it's more important to onboard more people than to push a message). But I would view all of them as real threats if I was the US government.
An incident in 2020 where TikTok users apparently tanked some Trump campaign rally probably is a bit more practical preview what controlling recommendations and likes could let CCP do (eventually... if they were not involved this time around) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-...
I went to an Obama rally when he was running and just showed up.. no tickets. Got all the way to the front of the crowd. Another option is to charge a nominal fee for a ticket.
Trump's problem was that he wanted to hand out free tickets over the internet. Just don't do that.. problem solved.
If that's the limit of TikTok's power.. then I think we're going to be ok.
Or they can push narratives and stories to manipulate their audience? If the main search engine in a country was controlled by a foreign entity that would be cause for concern.
What exactly is the risk of a single channel of information controlled by one of the worst governments on Earth, massively used by younger people who are in the age of voting?
Mass behavioral data exfiltration... mass biometric data exfiltration (faces)... censorship of those critical of CCP within the U.S... psychological persuasion of the masses... etc., etc.
>The next global conflict will likely be one between the east and the west, with control of information being advantageous to both sides in the conflict
Your linked position is that this is basically an ideological war, and that China won't quit until it has destroyed "liberalism." So why are you advocating the destruction of a key aspect of liberalism, the right to the free spread of ideas?
This reeks of classic red scare techniques. Those damn Chinese are more concerned with destroying our way of life than internal affairs, and we must abandon our values to stop the risk.
That reek made me quote the "ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water" and "precious bodily fluids" scenes from Dr. Strangelove on another TikTok thread, and now I can't even search for the comment, so that's definitely reminding me of red scare.
There's also the fact that the CCP has been known to do things like catfishing or otherwise trying to gather data about US servicemen and women in bulk.
The information on TikTok probably isn't valuable, but we know how rich Facebook has gotten by building social graphs. The same is true of many social apps.
> Instead, I believe that it is a national security issue
That or the president wants a Friendly social network to manage the news cycle of the election instead of a social network that is not so much influenced by him.
Those who control the news has the power to change perceptions.
If you follow the case, you'll see that the Commerce Department does invoke national security in the case. However, the ban violates the First Amendment of the Constitution because it is not narrowly tailored to address the national security concerns.
It’s hard to argue that an eye-for-an-eye response is unjustified, sure.
But it’s easy to see that, in a conflict, direct, equivalent retaliation is often the least strategic response. It signals desperation (which reveals weakness), and also legitimizes your opponent’s actions. It hurts your political capital (allies lose confidence in you), which is a vital tool (e.g. coordinated international show of political/trade force). Given the current US leadership, though, it’s not surprising they’d press any button they can reach.
Well, I’m no pacifist. I’m saying that the latest US move will leave the world with two one-eyed superpowers still in conflict, still on equal footing, when we could’ve taken an arm or a leg.
Can you point out in the article or describe what you feel is the actual, explicit issue? I read the article, and I didn’t catch any concrete description of why TikTok is dangerous aside from the typically general descriptions, or at a minimum, how TikTok is any different from Facebook or YouTube or Twitter Instagram or whatever else, all of which have essentially black box recommendation algorithms.
The article never hones in on anything specific to TikTok or makes a claim. From what I can tell, the two potential issues are concern of data collection with what that feeds and then a concept of influence.
The former feeds a learning algorithm that shows what people find entertaining, funny, interesting. Could this be weaponized? Potentially. My best guess how is that it simply shows what people in various regions like and dislike, providing food for propaganda and policies. So the app is just a vacuum that feeds some external process that may or may not feedback through the app. No doubt this very thing with Facebook’s data was weaponized in the 2016 U.S. election by Cambridge Analytica and other entities.
The latter possibility is one of influence. However, I do not see how TikTok is unique in this. In a different timeline, Facebook or Twitter or a multitude of other sites could have easily been used to hijack the rally, so that example is weak. If anything, the example is damning since there is a large possibility that Trump’s war on TikTok is one of personal vendetta that has been hypernormalized in the context of actual concerns between the U.S. and China and general concerns of the influence of social media. Further, there is factual evidence of Facebook being weaponized by organized groups to start protests and riots and people being influenced by foreign efforts.
From my stance, the question is why is just TikTok a concern? If it is a legitimate concern, which it probably is at least in theory, then these same concerns apply to other social networks. The other question is where does this all stop?
I'm in China and I did stop using facebook because it felt like a stupid data sinkhole from an hostile power...
I agree it's a bit paranoid to block Tik Tok, but maybe if these company found a business model that didn't require my name, age, graph of all my acquaitance and pictures of all of this, maybe that would be better for the worlds ? Maybe we SHOULD ban social media on the principle that the risk of abuse outweighs any advantage ?
"and I didn’t catch any concrete description of why TikTok is dangerous aside from the typically general descriptions"
It's sadly, poorly communicated.
The CCP has entities within all Chinese corps to ensure they follow CCP policy which includes censoring individuals for all sorts of reasons. They will flag individuals for speaking out, possibly having them face arbitrary incarceration - all sorts of dystopian stuff.
This is well documented, and it's why 'WeChat' is getting banned outright.
TikTok is a slightly special case, because it's not an overt tool of CCP control, that said, anything and everything grabbed by TT can be used by the CCP for any and every reason.
Imagine if Donald Trump could order FB to provide detailed data on any Chinese user at any time, for whatever purposes.
I've referenced here several times how China literally has CCP entities within every company, this is 'normal' there I'm loathing to have to look up the reference yet again, but it's public information.
New information has come to light about ByteDance that's rather scary, from NPR:
"ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming has made public statements showing he is "committed to promoting" the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party."
"ByteDance, according to the document, employs 130 Chinese Communist Party members at ByteDance's Beijing office."
"ByteDance employees organized a party in which they faced a Chinese Communist Party flag, "raised their right hand, clenched their fists, and reiterated their guarantee as a party member and vowed to never betray the party.""
This is pretty serious stuff in an autocratic nation with no judiciary etc.. The CCP is effectively forcing control of the entity, even on the basis of morale.
It would be one thing for Trump to be able to legally order FB for data, can you imagine the farce of him requiring FB employees to 'Pledge their fealty and loyalty to the GOP'?.
It would be better for the US Gov. - probably in concert with other nations to make some 'new rules' on this, because it's simply not going to work to have Chinese media apps in the 'rest of the world'. I would say the same for Russia and some other states.
Finally - there are simply issues of trade, on the basis alone, China wouldn't allow an American TikTok in China without censorship, and frankly, I suggest they just wouldn't allow it no matter what.
Bytedance has TaoTiao inside China, which shares TaoTaio user information with the CCP, the same way that Apple has Apple Guizhou, which shares iCloud data with the CCP.
Neither Bytedance, or it's TikTok subsidiary, exist inside China, so there's no reason to suspect data sharing with the CCP without evidence.
You probably don't know how CCP branches work. All government branches, state owned companies, and major internet companies in China have CCP branches. Especially in the government and state own companies, the head of the CCP branch is actually the real person in charge.
>Neither Bytedance, or it's TikTok subsidiary, exist inside China...
Please stop spreading FUD.
> The spokesman says Mayer will continue to live in Los Angeles, but will "travel frequently to Bytedance’s headquarters in Beijing, as well as TikTok’s major offices in New York, London, Japan and India." There's no mention of any trips to the Cayman Islands, though.
Why would TikTok agree to a preliminary American takeover and transfer of all assets to American entities if they are taking directives from the CCP? If this were true I would expect them to fight tooth and nail against a deal with the likes of Oracle and Wal-Mart rather than champion it as they have been doing.
Both the US administration and the CCP represent political systems. These systems are different in several points, including how deciders are chosen and how disagreements are settled.
If you’re willing to admit that media and information can be used against yourself and your nation, you’ve made it to the first stage of your awakening. Great; now look within yourself.
The best defense would be to open up the net even more, but you would need to convince the old ones crafting our policies... and some of the legacy media corporations.
National Security™ was invoked to justify the tariffs imposed a few years ago on Canadian aluminum imports into the United States. [1]
Since the sole arbiter of what constitutes a national security matter is the executive branch, whether or not it represents a material threat to national security is very much up for debate, proclamations aside.
'both sides in the conflict' presumably refers to countries. However, countries are not persons and persons are not countries. For actual persons it is beneficial to have information from both sides. Countries do not necessarily act in the interest of their citizens. A bit more scepticism regarding politicians good intentions is in order. The actual intention of the president of the US is to get reelected which explains his actions regarding any subject much more than the interest of citizens. People saying that Trump is irrational or stupid are missing this point completely. Why is Trump downplaying corona? Because his constituency is more likely to be science-sceptical than the general public and also because his constituency has been fed the 'make America great again' slogan so he has to sound positive and in control. Why is Trump hard on China? Because his constituency is more likely to lose their job to China than people not in his constituency. Politics is a power game before anything else and people would be wise to realize this.
I cannot believe people are downvoting you. The NSA and associated gag orders have made a joke of our right to privacy. FISA courts are a dog and pony show, only 12 out of every 34k warrants are denied.
I don’t think the real issue is whether or not the US block TicTok or any other Chinese company. The issue is how they block these companies.
The approach Trump is using is arbitrary, and he seems more interested in engaging in crony capitalism than actually protecting the US.
This approach undermines the rule-of-law in the US, which alongside its democratic processes, is what US holds up as its reason for moral superiority in the world.
If the executive and they rest of the US really cares about this issue, then put legislation through congress. Put those much vaulted democratic process to work, and don’t support executives that seek to undermine those processes.
Yes I have said so many times about WeChat to friends in USA. I CCP polices are terrible, however there are many in us tech wish they can do what CCP is doing with their apps.
Of course it is a national security issue. CIA knows the best how to use the internet and trains others to do so. It is risky to have a platform you don't control in your home. People thinking it is privacy issue or pure business idea don't really know what's going on in this world. Look around for all the protests almost all of them organized online. Of course, kids pissing off Trump on TikTok made it easier for him to make the decision.
> the CCP which is ideologically opposed to the United States
Really? They seem quite fine with the states last I looked, you 100% sure that statement shouldn't be the other way around?
Does the CCP demand everyone on Earth follow their communist ideals? Does the CCP send drones to go bomb weddings and children in far away countries they really have nothing to do with?
Honestly they are a refreshing superpower and do far less horrendous shit to the rest of the world if you ask me. Sorry about your failing broken nation but someone needs to say it.
Even the EU is over your constant need for war with Iran/China/$NEXTBADGUY and not playing ball, perhaps get a bigger toupee for the president and stop building an entire economy on perpetual warfare next time?
It's neither a privacy nor national security issue. It's the POTUS silencing per decree an alleged pro-Biden voice in upcoming elections, whereas alleged pro-Trump voices by other foreign nations on eg Facebook are welcome. It will become an issue of international free trade on the Internet with the US side as the dominant player standing to loose economically. Why would other foreign nations allow US companies to destroy their publishing and advertising industry when the US market isn't welcoming foreign competition?
We need to push back on this nonsense in journalism in which journalists don't include a link to the opinion when writing an article describing that opinion.
There is not enough information included in the article to meaningfully comment on the situation.
Nichols says while emergency economic powers of the president (IEEPA) give Trump broad latitude on national security, TikTok falls under an exemption for "informational materials," like a news wire and "personal communication"
Maybe not in this specific instance, but the times I have tracked down original sources they often disagree with the way the journalists have framed things. They know most people won't bother to do any original research or even read past the headline in a lot of cases. It's easier to tell people what to think than give them the facts and let them reach their own conclusion.
Ars Technica is generally pretty good about linking to the actual rulings. For this particular matter, they summarized the ruling but didn't link to it unfortunately [0].
Amen. It's very frustrating when you're skeptical of a news item and it's essentially impossible to find the original source as it is not linked and apparently impossible to find with the information given. It doesn't stop the item from trending on social media if it sounds good though.
That's an interesting observation... it's true I don't check the news I find plausible as much as the news I am already sceptical about, while I mostly become sceptical about the news items not because of the reporting/writing itself, but because of the alleged facts not matching my expectations / biases.
It's a messy problem, as checking news items takes a lot of effort and it's just impossible to deal with the news volume nowadays. Ideally I'd love to see some cooperative effort to check news items by many people with different ideologies/biases, but I think there's currently not enough manpower for that and it's also very easy to end with a biased set of checkers.
The Verge backed it up in their article. It’s unclear who’s in the (virtual?) courtroom or how they sourced this info, but it kind of makes sense. Courts aren’t well-known for publishing courtroom activities in real-time and online (Zoom) trials that result in the death penalty are getting extra attention even as other cases (Assange) apparently suffered from a lack of press coverage or public attendance. Hard to say what the right answer is here, but I agree that a small (as short as necessary) press release from a courtroom website would be appreciated for any decision. In this case though, it’s hard to say a decision either way isn’t political, seems to me that would be why it’s still under seal?
You know you don't have to argue about who's in the wrong here? It's okay to accept that both the USA and China are in the wrong, not everything has to be a fight with a winner.
China for having uncomfortable amounts of government control/vision over the data and operations of Chinese social media companies.
And the USA for singling out Tik Tok seemingly arbitrarily, and banning it for "national security" reasons without going into any detail about what they are or what evidence they have for them. (And it potentially violating 1A rights, being inconsistent with treatment of other foreign companies etc etc).
> USA for singling out Tik Tok seemingly arbitrarily, and banning it for "national security" reasons without going into any detail about what they are or what evidence they have for them.
It’s McCarthyism all over again.
This type of behavior, coming from the very top of the US government, is unacceptable. It’s an erosion of your freedoms and needs to be vehemently fought.
Idk if the ban is justifiable or not, but the singling out of TikTok is definitely not arbitrary. They have quickly become one of the most prominant social media networks and are 80% owned by a China - a nation who the US is actively engaged in a trade war with - one who is legally allowed to compel the company to provide access to private data or modify the platform for the ruling party's benefit in secret - one who has a long history of using data, propaganda, and force to suppress ideological dissenters.
Whether or not the ban is appropriate, there is nothing arbitrary about it.
There's another argument to be had about whether Chinese spying is "worse" than western spying because it's officially legitimized by the policies of the Chinese government. And whether it's also "worse" because China is more authoritarian and oppressive with it's own citizens.
I'm making an assumption here that because of these two things it's mostly generally accepted that the Chinese surveillance state is "worse" than the USA surveillance state (and I largely agree with that take, but figured I should still state my priors here in case this isn't uncontroversial).
I don’t think Chinese surveillance is worse for people outside of China. Your local government’s surveillance will always be worse, because it has the capability to act upon the data collected on you, since you are in their jurisdiction.
It's strange how so many in the US have adopted the mindset that it's important, for national security, to deny its citizens access to foreign social networks.
Previously, when China did the same, this was widely viewed as an unfortunate restriction their freedoms -- the actions of an intrusive, authoritarian government.
Now that the US is itself considering doing the same, many in the west have suddenly adopted the attitude that China had it right all along.
It'd be better if Chinese companies could freely operate in the American market and American companies could freely operate in the Chinese market.
But China blocks American companies from their market, or extracts unfair concessions from them. So the US should do the same until they change their practices.
It's similar to how countries that want peace still need militaries -- that isn't a contradiction because militaries can help achieve peace. Similarly here, if you want free and open markets, you need to punish bad actors, like China, through things like sanctions.
The US does in fact do the same. It limits the high-level IP transfers so that China cannot develop and compete higher up in the technology chain. You think the fact that they manufacture the world's plastic crap and assemble iPhones is an enviable position?
The reason why we're stepping it up is because China has shown that they can domestically grow successful tech and social media companies that can penetrate the US market. It's not so much national security that's the issue more than it is insecurity in our fundamental beliefs that our system is inherently superior because they're now crossed the barrier higher up in the value chain. We gave them manufacturing just like we gave domestic immigrants the "dirty" jobs that no one wanted.
#1 is national security.
#2 is trade, level playing field i.e. tit-for-tat policies.
Secondary issues are:
a) As you say, competitive fears - but TikTok is not a threat in that sense.
b) Trump's personal ambitions and elections. TT users apparently screwed up his GOP nomination event. Likely nothing at all to do with CCP, but Trump is an emotional guy, and I think this is 'him getting back at TT' on some level.
But #1 and #2 are legit and the first-order issues. There need be nothing else to legitimize this.
#1 can be used to justify anything. It also sets a dangerous precedent for other countries to start blocking / severely limiting US social media companies.
#2 Blocking apps used for the dissemination of information is a free-speech issue. China blocks information because that's what they believe in. US blocking information is fundamentally against our beliefs. If China jumped off a bridge would we do so as well?
#2 however is the true reason. We're getting insecure about our dominance in certain industries and are applying more "tit-for-tat" policies—even if they contradict our core beliefs.
If China wants to block US social media companies that should be perfectly fine. They get less domestic competition, and lower quality social media services should develop (in theory at least). We should welcome their competition despite this because competition breeds innovation and a healthy competitive landscape. However in reality we're resorting to tit-for-tat tactics because we're insecure about the fundamental superiority of a free and competitive market's ability to develop market-leading businesses and innovation.
You're assuming that there are 'free market' conditions here (i.e. competition) - there are not. Not even close.
'Free market' ideals such as 'competition and innovation' are not the issues here, because a) there is no 'free market' and b) we're talking about mass media, which is really not about 'innovation'.
#1 is a very legitimate issue. To control the mass media, is to control a nation, this is not a 'new world order' concept, it's as old as time.
The CCP maintains it's power in China due to it's control over the media, not the army. By suppressing any and all information against them, and controlling all of the messaging people hear, and of course limiting outside access, you can effectively control people.
Media is a protected industry everywhere. Tell me who owns the main media outlets in Sweden? Germany? UK? USA? They are almost universally domestically owned and operated - when they are not (Rupert Murdoch) even then it creates problems.
The very existence of the BBC, CBC (Canada), ABC (Australia) speaks to this.
Imagine if the CCP itself wanted to buy NBC News. Would we allow that? No.
It's not a lite argument to say 'security' can be used for anything, after all any excuse can be used to validate something.
#1 is real.
As far as #2 - you're crossing streams.
China has a completely 'unlevel' playing field vis-a-vis the US in many markets. CCP controls monetary policy, industrial policy, major banks and most major industry players. This is 'not allowed' in free trade, because it means the CCP will do things like 'require large banks to subsidize solar panel makers to produce surplus to dump on US markets and put US players out of business'. This is not a hypothetical - it happened.
China doesn't allow foreign competitors in so many markets: foreign entities must be 51% China owned. They must have CCP officials working at the company to force CCP oversight. They must censor information, provide data to the CCP. Foreign entities must hand over IP to the CCP so they can give it to competitive entities. China puts up all sorts of non-market barriers to competition.
So when we talk about 'number 2' - the US, in order to provide a 'fair trade' scenario, should effectively apply the very same policies.
So imagine:
1) Chinese companies cannot operate in the US unless 51% US ownership.
2) They must employ GOP/CIA/FBI internally in order to effectuate US strategic policy, censorship.
3) Chinese companies must hand over source code and IP, so the US can give it to local companies while the US 'holds up' Chinese competitor in red tape.
4) US government takes control of the Fed, major banks, and provides massive subsidies to Cisco, and subsidizes Ciscos sales internationally with extremely good financing terms.
5) US government uses industrial espionage to grab Chinese IP and invest in local companies, for example, stealing all Huawei's designs etc., copying them, and creating a company to compete with them etc..
Those would be 'tit for tat' policies implying 'fair trade' between the US and China.
Your comments about 'concerns over competitiveness' are actually way, way further down the pile of issues.
As I say, 'national security' is reason enough for the ban.
After that, there are a host of 'fair trade' issues that should be applied.
Only then does it even make sense to start worrying about the more strategic competitive issues, because until then there is no market based competition.
Disallowing platforms that are controlled by totalitarian regimes like the CCP would be the rational result of any reasonable data protection policy like a 'slightly better GDPR' for example.
Protecting people's interests and basic national interests is not what the CCP is doing.
> But China blocks American companies from their market, or extracts unfair concessions from them. So the US should do the same until they change their practices.
Maybe that is true. I'm not sure. But if this is the real reason and national security is a fig leaf, then it is contrary to the rule of law and the constitution.
> But China blocks American companies from their market, or extracts unfair concessions from them.
This is largely untrue. First, American companies have a far larger market presence in China than vice versa. Second, American companies have made massive returns on investment in China. They're in China because it's profitable for them.
There's a view that developing countries should immediately open their markets to complete, 100% unfettered access by all foreign companies. That might be great for foreign companies, but it would be terrible development policy. The host country would risk destroying any domestic industry it has. Developing countries benefit from some level of protectionism. There's nothing unfair about that - advanced companies from developed countries have enough of an advantage that they can still compete. Asking for 100% market opening on day 1 is like asking to eliminate weight classes in boxing in the name of fairness. That would be great for the heavyweights, but not so much for the featherweights.
> But China blocks American companies from their market, or extracts unfair concessions from them. So the US should do the same until they change their practices.
This needs a little more motivation. 19th-century China (and indeed, early 20th-century China) systematically broke the feet of all upper-class women, preventing them from ever being able to walk normally. But I don't think the primary reason we don't do that is that China stopped doing it.
It seems that the US has the rule of law only in cases where the rule of law is not in conflict with the military dictatorship.
In the cases where the military dictatorship wants to jail a journalist (Assange) or has some protesters for a photo op, law no longer rules and instead the military just does what it wants without consequences.
Note there is a difference between saying one thinks TikTok is a national security threat to the USA, and saying one thinks the U.S. government should ban it (or so on). It's tempting to base your opinion of whether TikTok is a threat on how much you (dis)like authoritarian responses, but that's a logical fallacy.
Imagine, for example, an extremely convincing book is authored that convinces anyone that reads it that the United States government should disolve itself and its citizens should pledge fealty to China.
Quite credibly, the book could be described a national security threat to the US.
However, I would still argue that the book should not be banned, and that any country that wants to honestly describe itself as "free" could not ban the book.
Being a free country means giving citizens the right to engage with ideas that might not be aligned w/ the interests of its government.
I don't think a social network is like a book. It's more like the postal system. TikTok is not saying anything themselves. They are transmitting communications that other people are saying to each other (in the form of short videos).
If users had to address their videos to each other and they were delivered FIFO without priority, I would agree that they would be neutral.
But TikTok (and all social networks) are using algorithms to promote some content and demote others. This algorithm is an extremely powerful voice.
In 2016-2018, everyone was concerned about foreign countries influencing the election by running bots/ads on Facebook. Following the election, there were many policies put into place to try to prevent this bad behavior [1]. Fast forward to 2020 and there is documented proof of a foreign country controlling a social media algorithm and we aren't concerned?
I think the it's a bit different to compare the medium of a book. It's a one directional medium with ideas. In America, we treasure speech and don't fear ideas.
But in a two directional medium, that allows an entity to soak up information .. well that's already a problem in the US. Europe saw it as so much of an issue they implemented GDPR (for better or worse) and California has similar legislation.
Information is way different, and we've already seen cases where TikTok has been caught reading clipboards (could just be to scan for tiktok links, but it could have also been harvesting additional data).
The US does not allow certain things to be imported/exported to other nations. We've seen that for decades with Cuba and various other embargo. If you get a book from an embargoed country, it's not illegal to have to distribute it (granted it doesn't contain illegal/obscene content). The Federal government can legislate foreign commerce.
> Note there is a difference between saying one thinks TikTok is a national security threat to the USA, and saying one thinks the U.S. government should ban it (or so on).
In this case, I'm not convinced there is - the nature of the alleged national security threat is very different from security threats in the past.
From recent actions in Hong Kong, it has been evident that the CCP will arrest and imprison people for criticising the CCP. If the suspicion is that the app gives the CCP access to vast amounts of information (including people's political views via their posts) on individual members of the public, including on the Chinese diaspora (placing relatives at risk in China or they themselves if they visit them) that is a different category of "national security threat". It's not just that it makes political or military strategy harder, or even that it foments domestic dissent (foreign propaganda of the past). The allegation is it directly puts civilians in jeopardy.
If the conclusion is that the app is such a threat (puts civilians in jeopardy to a foreign government), it would be odd to support its presence in app stores, used in playgrounds, etc.
That's really far fetched though. Consider this: the CIA kidnaps and tortures people. They can look at Facebook activity. Therefore, all countries should ban Facebook because it might lead to their citizens being kidnapped and tortured by the CIA. That's equally far fetched and I don't think anybody is seriously arguing for it.
> Consider this: the CIA kidnaps and tortures people
You're clearly a lot more invested in this than I am. I'm not aware of any CIA kidnappings; I am aware of news headlines on HK media executives being arrested and am aware that the Chinese government is heavily invested in monitoring the views its diaspora express in a way that the US government isn't. (If an American called Trump a goose, they'd probably get upvotes. If someone called the Chinese leader something they might have more problems.)
Yes, the quantity is different, the quality I'm not sure about. Are Chinese internment camps worse than Gitmo or Abu Ghraib?
The Chinese have apparently kidnapped people off the street as well, but not in Western states to my knowledge. That's different with the US, though maybe they haven't kidnapped anyone in China or Russia.
It’s possible that the United States will resemble China once its population reaches a comparable size. China may simply the next evolution of what the US will become, and if it happens slowly enough, no one will do anything about it. Conway’s Game of Life on the scale of a nation state, where the US is currently in late-stage capitalism.
Late-stage capitalism, per Wikipedia:
> Since 2016, the term has been used in the United States and Canada to refer to perceived absurdities, contradictions, crises, injustices, and inequality created by modern business development.
The situations are not equivalent at all. China blocks outside social networks so that it can control its citizens' access to information either internal or external.
What is even more concerning is that the ban seems to be widely supported even though it is used for something obviously corrupt: The forced fire sale to Oracle with its personal connections to mr. Trump and the setting up of the 5B "education fund".
Really third world country stuff where extreme nationalism is used hide crony capitalism.
I can understand this attitude in the general public but it’s completely bizarre from HN engineers. Expect more more optimism for FBI/NSA backdoors in encryption next.
It's only bizarre if you consider ByteDance as some plucky startup that is being repressed by USA. If you consider it to be under the thumb of the Chinese state then blocking it seems to be the best action to preserve free speech.
Will TikTok remove Chinese propaganda on their platform, how would that conversation even go at their offices? Can we trust that TikTok will not in future censor things that China finds uncomfortable such as Taiwan being an independent country?
Just a few months ago HN was getting exercised about the rights of Hong Kongers. I'd say it is wholly consistent with the political beliefs of the average HNer to want to see a social network operating from within an autocratic state to be banned from operating, or at least under heavy scrutiny.
And would it be equally “pro free speech” if the US went down the road of preventing we citizens from accessing propaganda websites affiliated with the CCP?
And ban “bad” propaganda movies and media from the CCP?
And ban direct conversation with known “bad actors” in the CCP?
Plenty of western companies have been forced to apologize for listing Taiwan as a country. China recently passed a law in Hong Kong that makes criticism of the regime a crime world wide. There's also the whole overwatch debacle.
China does not care about free speech, nor does it pretend to. Allowing a popular forum for speech to operate out of China is dangerous.
I have not read detailed reports, but just HN commentary and the reddit post that revealed the amount of data collected from phones.
Trump's narcissism notwithstanding, the natsec issue with these apps isn't that US citizens are communicating with others, including foreigners. It is that they are installing what may very well be Chinese government spyware on their phones, with detailed tracking and keylogging.
FWIW it would be interesting to keep an eye on what kind of permissions and access some of these PC gaming platforms have to peoples' workstations, as well.
Yes, that is another argument made against TikTok, separate from the argument I was responding to.
But it's also worth addressing.
As near as I can tell, it is unfounded; there is almost no evidence to support it. The one potentially shady thing I know of that TikTok got caught doing was checking the clipboard every second, which it no longer does. TikTok's explanation is that it was an anti-spam feature. I know of no network analysis showing they were sending back the clipboard contents, or that they are sending anything other than normal analytics.
(Also, as an aside & for what it's worth, I personally think the data collection of Facebook is far worse than anything alleged against TikTok. They require you to provide your real name, they encourage you to give tons of other personal info, & they use trackers to tie your fb profile to your browsing history on non facebook websites. Then they sell targeted access to this profile to any advertiser that cares to pay, as their primary business model.)
(As a second aside, if TikTok is somehow gaining access to more personal info than standard analytics stuff, I would view that, for iOS devices at least, as a security flaw. I'm not that familiar with Android, but I assume the same applies there.)
Lastly, if TikTok is doing something nefarious, the proper way to handle it in a country ruled by laws is to have laws against the nefarious activity and prosecute the company for violation of said laws.
The president waking up one day and declaring TikTok bad and banning it is ridiculous, authoritarian behavior.
Tik Tok itself isn’t the issue. The threat is a threat from the CCP. CCP has shown they are willing to use data from Chinese assets to coerce individuals around the world.
This is the same reason why Europe should be also wary from both CCP and US administration.
> Now that the US is itself considering doing the same, many in the west have suddenly adopted the attitude that China had it right all along.
PRC blocks applications which are critical of the regime and are not openly sharing data with the CCP[1]. The US is blocking applications due to legitimate concerns[2]. I don't know how both can be the same.
It is a reasonable assumption that the CCP, which has expressed ideological opposition to the spread of democracy, will not be using information it gathers on US or European citizens in order to defend or promote democratic rights and freedoms globally. It's a reasonable assumption that western governments, who do have an ideological intention of spreading democracy and western-style freedoms, probably would want to promote individual rights and freedoms (and that is why China was wary of them).
How you see a stick depends on whether you think the person holding it will brandish it for or against you.
>will not be using information it gathers on US or European citizens in order to defend or promote democratic rights and freedoms globally.
And when was America doing this? I seem to recall the last 15 years as being full of America attacking and occupying foreign nations to claim resources.
I really don't think it had much to do with whether they had access to Facebook...
This seems to be getting caught up in general "pro-US"/"anti-US" or "pro-China"/"anti-China" sentiments on the forum. To be honest, I'm not interested in that or getting into general political discussions, though the question of how the tech environment will evolve around the world is very interesting to most of us that read this forum. Someone claimed it was "surprising" that Americans would support their companies operating overseas but oppose alleged data gathering by allegedly foreign-government-linked corporations. I expressed that I'm not surprised by that at all. That matches up pretty well with how I imagine the American public reacting.
Likewise I do think the nature of this allegation is different to national security allegations in the past. So far as I recall, this is the first time a national security risk allegation has been about mass data collection on civilians from the regular operation of an app. Cambridge Analytica is perhaps the closest equivalent, and that got shut down pretty quickly even though it was a company run in another western country.
The problem with an autocracy is that they will not cease until any threat to their existence can be stamped out or controlled. Nations continued to hope Nazi Germany would just stop its expansion and placate Hitler until it was clear he had no intention of stopping.
Last week it was discovered that an additional half a million Tibetans [1] were sent to join the Uighurs in labor camps. When do the democracies of the world say enough is enough? These are vast numbers of human lives being cast into the inferno because they aren't Han Chinese.
China has subsumed Tibet wholly and condemned its people to reeducation and labor camps. If this doesn't sound like lebensraum I don't know what to tell you.
Predatory loans on ports in Africa and their subsequent control by the CCP are by proxy tools of dominion.
China marched into Tibet in 1950, immediately after the founding of the PRC. It was part of the Qing dynasty, and the Republic of China also considered Tibet to be part of China. It's hyperbolic to say that China is expansionist because 70 years ago, it invaded a territory that every successive Chinese government for hundreds of years has controlled or claimed.
That sounds exactly like lebensraum, which if you're not familiar was an effort to create a "Greater Germany" through the annexation of ethnically German neighbors.
There are more than a million people whose only crime was they were not Han Chinese who have been sent to camps. It is an ethical imperative to make a stand.
Lebensraum was not about annexing ethnically German neighbors. Lebensraum was about the "German race" needing space to thrive and, being superior, having a moral right and "biological necessity" to conquer that space and wipe out the "inferior races" currently inhabiting it.
You are correct; lebensraum did go hand-in-hand with Hitler's Grossdeutschland. I argue that the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria) was in Hitler's eyes a test of pavement for lebensraum: for an even greater Germany. China's reconstitution of half a century old territories is evidence of this same desire.
Define Democracy. If simply having a system of elections is enough, then China is also a Democracy. On the other hand, if you define a Democracy as a nation where every nation has an equal vote, then the US definitely is not a Democracy.
Something revealed in the recent court filings was how Bytedance spent over $1 billion in advertising on Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat.
Apparently they were spending $10-$30 to acquire an active user and expecting to generate $5 of revenue per user in the US, implying a revenue payback period of 2-6 years.
In which comment did I say millions of people upsell to subscription?
A 2 yr product lifecycle would be a $240 CLV meaning you just need 12% conversion rate to break even, which you don't even care about in growth mode. $30 CPA is more than reasonable.
It’s an interesting argument that probably won’t end well for bytedance and other foreign controlled apps and software... if executive branch can’t control which of them are allowed to be present in country and distributed by us entities, it’ll be just a matter of time before a law is passed that would let them, or probably an existing one amended (similar to patriot act). I bet it would be bipartisan law as well.
Honestly, this sounds more like a dick-waving contest than a national security issue, from the way it’s being ham-fisted. While there may be legitimate security issues, the timing seems oddly-aligned with the government’s insistence that the Chinese government is responsible for a great number of problems in the US and this right before an election. It smells like blame-passing and extortion, among other things.
The internet has turned into a war zone of perception management involving state and non state entities. The non state entities are able to do things in quite powerful ways never before possible for a civilian level technology. Any hacker with creativity and GPT2 can manipulate hordes of people with a human in a loop pattern.
I'd love to see a response from other countries where they block Facebook and Twitter permanently or at least force them to change their newsfeed algorithm.
These services are causing the world to become politically unstable by stoking up rage for the purpose of selling ads. This is the biggest threat to our shared future.
Now that America has lead the way, it's hopeful we'll see such a response.
Rather than blocking a single app, they should bring in GDPR style laws that make apps like tiktok banned by default unless they change to be strongly privacy protecting.
I agree with the activist spirit! But you have to realize that the incentives of legislators are to first create a strong economy and to maintain the dominance of the US tech sector. If you come to them with a plan that will seriously harm their operations then you won’t even get a meeting.
You need to self regulate though and assume all data you give these companies will be sold. At this point unless it's ride sharing , apps don't get my location. If they means I can't use the apps, that's fine.
It wouldn't be the worst thing if tommorow Social Media was effectively banned. It's done enough wrong in the world
If you start making everyone suspicious of doing business with US, that dominance will slow fade away as each market tries their home grown alternatives.
Yes they will suck during the first years, get barely enough customers to survive, but eventually they will get there with enough perseverance.
The current administration is only making everyone aware that the globalisation days are over.
Nope. Only specific instances. And in this case POTUS has the power when it comes to foreign entities. It is enshrined in the constitutions. By the way, India and China are even doing this without even a single judicial recourse. USA simply is the best country that has been setup to allow and disallow this kind of things some hundreds years ago.
The powers that POTUS has over international trade (including tariffs, blocking imports, blocking transactions) were actually granted by Congress through various pieces of legislation.
That doesn't generally align with America's approach to these sort of things. A law like that would have made the internet itself very hard to develop.
No, it would have made targeted advertising on the internet be very hard to develop. The internet existed before targeted advertising, with site-specific advertising based on the interests of a site. Stalking users across sites for the purpose of targeted advertising is a much newer development.
I agree that this doesn't align with the US's general approach to this sort of thing. That is a fault with the US's general approach, not with privacy protections.
Targeted advertising is a major reason for the Internet’s success. It has allowed many companies to become extremely wealthy and invest back into the ecosystem.
Targeted advertising on the internet as a general practice did not start until the mid to late aughts, long after the internet was a success. Targeted advertising is not a reason for the Internet's success.
I think that's the best thing to do for the general public.
Most social media already obey GDPR for European users (I suspect TikTok included), so having this law in the US will benefit every user everywhere by forcing companies to treat everyone uniformly with a higher level of protection by default due to the majority of their userbase being covered by such laws.
Also, what is the ‘ideological’ difference between US and China? The mere mention of communism suffices in most government circles, but that doesn’t explain any of their tactics, and certainly not strategy or objectives. I would like to know what you (HN) think.
There’s no formal and credible-sounding assumption of anything that resembles the bill of rights.
There’s not an equivalent of the notion that every human life has intrinsic value, which is traced back to Christianity.
Therefore there isn’t a specific reason why it is wrong for the government to kill an arbitrary number of innocent people if it furthers the overall good.
That’s just one example.
Edit:
I didn’t mean a specific reason, I meant a specific and overwhelming, basically non-negotiable reason, which maps to an equivalent in to the U.S. as an example.
i dont accept US moderation in my life with YouTube, twitter, or facebook. the fact that we're arguing the merit of CCP moderation of our youth is strictly a nonstarter; its crazy talk.
Pornhub is a foreign company, perhaps Trump should ban that too. It could be a national security threat for a foreign company to know the porn habits of government officials, they could use that to blackmail military generals and the like.
This is a poor argument, including the sarcasm. Pornhub is a Canadian company. Last time I checked, Canada was still a democratic country with an ideology roughly aligned with that of the US.
Last time I checked Saudi Arabia was a fundamentalist, religious kingdom with many known inhumane acts and practices. Yet they control a ton of US companies.
It’s the typical measure of rubes. I still remember the “freedom fries” and WMD hysteria. Back then a certain group had to be bombed back into the Stone Age. Today, that same group is being oppressed by the evil totalitarian regime which is also on the verge of destroying all of your freedoms.
In both cases, a collection of plugged in, “informed” citizens, whose brain matter has been shaped by a constant drip of state propaganda, were doing the mental gymnastics required to justify evidence-free actions of their government.
This will play out as well as the last attempt did. “Mission Accomplished.”
The problem with this is that if the liberal states are allowed out of the union, the conservative states will run out of other people's money to spend.
great, then California could take Oregon and Washington as well, since they're "anarchist states" and all. New York would likely follow suit. Colorado would probably join with the west coast, leaving Texas to carry most of what was left of the country. Don't mess with Texas, which is to say that they don't want to be the ones paying for everything.
Now we have 3 countries that can feed themselves, pay for what they need, with coastal access, and we have what's left of the United States. Not a great scenario if you follow it to its conclusion.
At a finer grain, looking at the top 20 CSAs[1], many are non-coastal, but to my guesstimates only 20% are not on a navigable river:
7 8'000'000 Dallas-Forth Worth
11 6'900'000 Atlanta–Athens-Clarke County–Sandy Springs (160 km to Columbus)
13 5'000'000 Phoenix-Mesa
17 3'600'000 Denver-Aurora
(Boston-Worcester-Providence is almost as large as my entire country, and has far better water transport options.)
> ... and we have what's left of the United States. Not a great scenario if you follow it to its conclusion
Why not? While "Civilian aircraft and aircraft engines" probably takes a hit, the remaining US should continue to have its major exports:
1 Food, beverage and feed: $133 billion. Soybeans were the number one product in this category, with sales of $22 billion, followed by meat and poultry at $18 billion.
2 Crude oil, fuel and other petroleum products: $109 billion.
(and I'm pretty sure all three of those categories are things the chinese are currently importing?)
Colorado I wouldn't believe: unlike the west coast, they're tied into the national pipeline network. (On the gripping hand, it, like many other states, is on the western electrical grid.)
> Why not? While "Civilian aircraft and aircraft engines" probably takes a hit, the remaining US should continue to have its major exports:
The US would lose all the nuclear weapons on the west coast in that deal, which would result in some exciting geopolitical changes. CalOreShington would have a bunch of ballistic missiles, nuclear subs, and long-range bombers.
For the first time the US would have a potent, nuclear-armed non-ally adjacent to its border. There would be hostilities resulting from the federal government demanding compensation for the vast amounts of federal land that would be lost, and the inevitable "come and take it" reply.
The remaining states should certainly hope that they don't lose Colorado in that deal, because they'd be losing NORAD to boot.
That's not how it's worked in the past[1]. I was explicitly going by CSAs instead of states to avoid some of those issues[2].
From personal experience, I'd say it's better to live in a non-nuclear[3] country, because the local economy can be directed to positive sum consumer and export goods instead of negative sum MAD. So if Colorado were to leave (with our already unlikely assumptions, yet more unlikely due to network[4] effects) I would recommend only doing so politically, allowing the US to continue with basing rights (following the model of the Rest Of The World).
and then there's the small matter of who takes responsibility for a large national debt...
[1] indeed, ever since the unpleasantries of the 1860s I believe it's US military doctrine to base people in regions other than the one they're from.
[2] specifically, I believe the US would commence hostilities well before losing Kitsap and San Diego, let alone Pearl Harbor (because as long as we're in cloud cuckoo land, I'd bet hawaiians, no matter their attitude towards the mainland or fondness for Las Vegas, would prefer being stuck with the west coast than with anyone east of Stockton, and they don't have any economic argument for complete independence.)
[3] as others in the thread have noted, there is a non-negligible chance that third parties would be willing to provide an umbrella. My democracy has managed to survive the last 500 years with a policy of "we're no threat to you unless you cross our border" and indeed we even apologised to the last country we invaded (they replied no hard feelings).
[4] with navigable waterways (and some credible way to deal with harbour mining and general naval interdiction?) money will get one through times of no food better than food will get one through times of no money. Airlifts, as Qatar has discovered, are expensive.
Edit: found GDP by CSA, population was a good proxy (but inland goes up to 25% of top 20)
inland CSAs
7 Dallas-Fort Worth 0,5 T
11 Atlanta--Athens-Clarke County--Sandy Springs 0,4 T
15 Denver-Aurora 0,3 T
16 Phoenix-Mesa 0,3 T
20 Charlotte-Concord 0,2 T
so top 15 CSAs with navigable access only represent about 11 T of GDP, and if they (and I doubt the following would change much if we added coastal CSA's below the top 20) went their own ways the remaining US would presumably still be globally in 2nd place, with an economy roughly double that of the japanese.
Most Americans still believe in America. Despite what the rage media would tell us, most Americas still have a national identity.
Support for succession of any state is very low. California is also two states. The West coast is super left, yes, but as you move east, it's all very right leaning/republicans. Republicans and also meth .. lots of meth, and desert.
TikTok is under fire because it’s a piece of software from China. We’ve turned a blind eye to hardware security and the fact that the iPhone and nearly every other mainstream consumer device is manufactured in China and likely contain backdoors far more sinister than userland applications can muster. We can not and should not have such double standards when it comes to foreign policy.
The cherry on top, though, is that Western governments are far more sinister than China. Your local government has the capability to act upon the surveillance data that they collect on you, since you are in their jurisdiction. China, by comparison, can’t do anything to you except protect you from such local surveillance.
If the US dislikes China so much, place an embargo and see how long it takes for Uncle Sam’s evil empire to crumble.
Please don't take HN threads into ideological or nationalistic flamewar. It leads to discussions that are predictable, nasty, and dumb. We're hoping to avoid those here.
I think it is just an illusion that Western governments can be changed. In reality, the deep state is an unstoppable machine underneath the facade of democracy.
Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. It leads to discussions that are predictable, nasty, and dumb. We're hoping to avoid those here.
It's not whataboutism if the premise made explicitly by you is to compare and contrast the "badness" of the west with China.
And anyway, a claim that the west isn't worse than China does not entail a belief that the west hasn't done anything wrong or doesn't have objectionable administrative policies.
> How are those “concentration camps” any different than ICE detention camps, where forced sterilization is occurring?
Let's see.. in the US, force sterilization leads to an investigation and the relevant doctor being fired and punished. In China, it results in a promotion, because it's the official policy. Seems like a bit of a difference.
The state that took on the British Empire, Geronimo, the Confederacy, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the USSR, pissing its pants over a mindless phone app for 12 year olds.
Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. It leads to discussions that are predictable, nasty, and dumb. We're hoping to avoid those here.
I think the problem is far greater than TikTok. At a simplistic level I believe countries should use what I call the "mirror principle" to business and legal relationships.
In other words, if you think it's OK to steal our intellectual property, then we do the same. OK, to ban, block and force business structures, we treat you exactly as you treat us. Ban chunks of the international internet? No problem, you are treated the same.
Yes, I know this is simplistic. Yet, I think there's merit to the idea that we treat each other as we each choose to treat the other. I don't say this in a religious sense at all (atheist). I say this as a starting point from which a relationship can be refined and framed in less sophomoric terms. The alternative is to start from a position of absolute contempt for the other it is difficult to shift the relationship towards the middle. Just look at the, sadly, plentiful history of contentious divorces for examples of this.
BTW, I am not saying this in a US-centric fashion. China has been predatory to almost every nation of the world. From the tip of South America to the northern reaches of Europe and everything in between. They ought to live by the same rules they impose on everyone wishing to do business in China.
Another thing that deeply bothers me are the Chinese companies listed in US stock exchanges, none of which seem to comply with US regulatory and accounting requirements. In other words, they are likely as opaque as can be, or worse, they could be fabricating financials. US and other investors could be in for a horrific awakening as investment in these companies could very well be a house of cards.
I do believe framing the TikTok problem in terms of national security is wrong.
The correct term would be "global security". The US happens to be mounting resistance at this stage, yet other nations should think this through carefully. The most important fact to understand here is that the Chinese Communist Party has their hooks into absolutely everything in China. It might look benevolent when you buy your $28 blender at Walmart, but, in the long term, the equation that drives decision-making at the CCP isn't one that seeks to improve the lives of the Walmart shopper. Read Sun Tzu, it's all there. Now add ideology, motive and objectives.
As a parent I do not want my kids anywhere close to these algorithms. I also don't care for my kids to be anywhere close to the Facebook algorithms.
Imagine, if you will, if the US federal government had --by force, by law-- full access to all of the data from Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Would you be comfortable with that reality?
I would not. Not one bit.
Why then, is it OK for the CCP to have their hooks into everything that reaches international shores that has "Made in China" in it?
I think it is fair to say that nobody is comfortable with their own government (anywhere in the world) having detailed access to all of their most intimate social media/internet data.
How could anyone be in favor of the CCP having exactly that access through, quite literally, every Chinese company doing business internationally?
For me, from a Libertarian/Classical Liberal perspective, this isn't about hating China --I do not, they should be free to do as they please within their own nation. This is about a general principle:
No government in the world should be allowed to sink their hooks into internet companies to turn everything we touch with our phones, computers and TV's into surveillance data from birth until death. That would be --and I hope everyone agrees with this-- unequivocally wrong, evil, disturbing and can lead to nothing good in the long term.
This is not how free human beings are supposed to live on this planet. Going from free animals roaming the plains to being entries in massive databases with unique identifiers tattooed on our backs is far from freedom. It's the internet turning humanity into cattle. Add the power of government to that and anyone should be able to understand why this TikTok mess is the right fight to have at this moment in time.
I get the feeling the Trump Administration’s lawyers are going to fumble the full ban lawsuit in November allowing Bytedance to retain control of TikTok.
If this were an actual national security issue then you’d think they’d come up with more compelling reasons to remove it from the App Store.
There's a valid concern but the administration's approach is heavy-handed and impractical. They seem intent on simply stealing a successful company from China and letting american companies earn the rewards and maybe get a kickback in the process. They should use either their national security powers or, better yet, an act of Congress to ban the specific objectionable activities and let the markets sort themselves out.
I'm sure it's not a coincidence that one of the biggest western social media apps - Instagram - launched a direct clone of tiktok. So far IG reels are dead but if TikTok gets banned there's an undeniable benefit for IG, right?
People claiming this isn’t a Chinese company (“it’s incorporated in the Caymans! Hurrdurrr”) are either misinformed or not being honest.
From the Wikipedia link for ByteDance:
> ByteDance's first app, Neihan Duanzi, was shut down in 2018 by the National Radio and Television Administration. In response, Zhang issued an apology stating that the app was "incommensurate with socialist core values", that it had a "weak" implementation of Xi Jinping Thought, and promised that ByteDance would "further deepen cooperation" with the ruling Chinese Communist Party to better promote its policies.[7][8][9]
> It has garnered public attention over allegations that it worked with the Chinese Communist Party to censor and surveil content pertaining to Xinjiang re-education camps and other topics the Party deemed controversial.[18][19][20]
Politics aside, it's crazy Facebook / Instagram / Youtube haven't successfully cloned TikTok yet. No doubt network affect plays a role, but from what I've read, western clones have been very lacking. Maybe US is just not competitive when it comes to quickly copying and iterating designs like China is. It's a skill. Google Meet apart from great transcription feature still feels miles behind Zoom. Wonder how Indian developers are doing after the ban. JioMeet is pretty much a 1:1 Zoom clone, anyone comment on what replaced TikTok?
There are a couple of Indian apps[0] trying to replicate Tiktok functionality. Many of them saw a surge in usage after Tiktok got banned. Not sure about the current numbers though.
I mostly follow sports/cycling/ski stuff on Instagram. What is the most liked/viral content in any category..? It's probably a woman with tight or almost no clothes on. So even when I get a ski video, it's often some babe posing in ski boots and nothing else. Or for cycling it's a woman with the top unzipped. Opening Instagram is basically NSFW even though I've never liked a picture like that or follow those kind of accounts.
And well, most of the content on Reels are reuploads of TikToks or old viral videos. So not much interesting to see.
Yes any Chinese owned company is a potential national security risk. CCP is already known to manipulate their citizens with propaganda on their news and media sites. Tiktok gives them that acres to manipulate/meddle in other countries.
What I'm strongly against is handpicking tiktok and wechat. This should be a law passed by congress which effectively limits companies blacklisted countries like China,Iran to US market. I know this defeats the openness of internet but it is indeed a serious threat.
> Tiktok gives them that acres to manipulate/meddle in other countries.
This is a really naïve world view—not that TikTok isn't potentially a channel of propaganda, but that we somehow are free of propaganda in the US. The Trump administration is a source of propaganda. The Democratic party is a source of propaganda. Propaganda is basically any speech from any biased source. The only significant difference between China and the US isn't that one practices propaganda but that China limits their propaganda to only one source.
Blacklisting "propaganda" from sources you don't like is in fact censorship. If we start blocking China because we don't like what they are telling us, why stop there? Why not start blocking propaganda from the Trump critics.
Nice to know that Apple was given equal legal consideration in China in 2016 when its iBooks store and iTunes movie store were suddenly ordered shut after six months of operation. Oh, wait. . . they weren't given any legal recourse at all and the Obama administration did nothing about it while Silicon Valley grandees kept conspicuously silent.
It sounds like OP is arguing for reciprocity. Why should we give due process to Chinese companies if American companies are not given due process in China? Chinese companies are taking advantage of our tolerance and fairness. We should be intolerant of intolerance.
I love this line of reasoning. Next step is labor camp for non-Uighur Chinese, I guess; on American soil, no less, and inmates will be working for Apple and Nike
So if a bad country with concentration camps is doing bad things, you can't counter them? If you try to stop them, it might be a slippery slope to concentration camps?
Are you… upset that the US is doing, in your mind, the right thing? Like if you just want to vent about the Chinese government then rock on but I kinda doubt you want the US government to start taking pages out of the CCP’s playbook.
Precisely. There is no legal remedy in China for cases such as Apple's, a situation that the Hacker News et al. communities blandly accept in silence while valorizing attempts by ByteDance and WeChat to game the US system for profitable access.
Why the Western world accepts as legitimate the products of a closed society that relies on ubiquitous censorship and withholds free access to the outside world through a national firewall is hard for me to fathom. I have lived in China, South Korea, and Taiwan off and on for decades and believe the people of PRC deserve better.
> Why the Western world accepts as legitimate the products of a closed society that relies on ubiquitous censorship and withholds free access to the outside world through a national firewall is hard for me to fathom. I have lived in China, South Korea, and Taiwan off and on for decades and believe the people of PRC deserve better.
I agree, people of many countries deserve much better. However restricting trade, sanctions, undermining diplomatic relationships etc rarely do anything other than harm the citizens of the country. It's difficult but not impossible to tell someone off while doing the same thing yourself.
As far as national security goes, the US has a checkered history of interfering with other countries.
As far as the rights of citizens within a country again a checkered modern history.
As far as political manipulation .... etc etc, I think you get the picture.
I am not saying the US is as bad as China, but some of their actions would surely deserve reprimand as well. But I doubt the US is sitting there and doing this for the "concerns" of the residents of these countries.
Now in the case of TikTok, I think this is a great case for protection of data in ALL countries. GDPR is a good example of this.
This position is covered much more eloquently than I put it above in Ben Thompson's "The TikTok War" [1].
[1] https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/