Until now, the closest thing we had like this were national our regional networks like Russia's vk, but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.

Now we, for the first time ever, will have the situation where a social network has global reach but without american content.

Will it keep being a english first space? Will it survive/thrive? How the content is going to evolve? What does this means in terms of global cultural influence? Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it? Will this backfire for the US?

Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.

Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.

It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.

What I've learned is that since Switzerland has 3 official languages (German, French and Italian) children and teens at school focus on learning one of the other two regions they are not from.

In particular this leads to French and Italian cantons to be moderately fluent in each other's language. Strikingly when I lived in Lausanne, more people knew Italian than English. English was really not on their radar (plus, add that francophones are kind of elitist when it comes to languages and don't really like to consume content that is not in french).

In German speaking Switzerland proficiency in English was still subpar from most of the rest of Europe when walking in a shop or going to a restaurant.

And even though I probably tend to agree with both of you, it's kinda funny to blame French or German speakers about being elitist against English speakers, of which native speakers are notoriously monolingual :-)

I'm just saying that in the French part of Switzerland English wasn't a given among any generation and it neither was common in the German/Italian parts too if you exclude the expats.

And yes, francophone tend to be very elitist about consuming exclusively french content, regardless of them being from France, Switzerland or Belgium.

This is wrong. In cities where there's a lot of tourism, they might understand. Most Swiss people only speak their local languages (German or French). As for those living in Ticino, they tend to be better polyglots.

About 40% of all Swiss inhabitants speak English at least once a week [1].

Anecdotally, I can't think of a single acquaintance younger than 50 years old that doesn't speak fluently. Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years.

Some of my German speaking friends even talk in English to French speaking people, even when both have learned the other‘s respective language at school.

[1]: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerun...

We learn the other's respective language for 7 years, too. Yet, as you pointed out, people speak in English because there is no willingness to learn and apply the other's language.

Some of my friends speak English fluently, but I have a very hard bias as I work in IT. My whole family doesn't speak any language other than French. Most of the people I've been to school with don't come close to speaking English casually. None would watch an English content creator.

Due to the shared heritage between the English and German languages, perhaps it's different in the German-speaking region. If you ask someone slightly complicated English questions, they might not be completely lost - after all, some words share the same etymology. But Switzerland is absolutely not an English-speaking country at all.

But yes, I can mostly speak of the German-speaking part. People generally have little problems switching to English, and are used to speaking as well.

Many older people I know have no problems communicating in English when they‘re abroad.

Would be interesting to have the BFS statistics split by age group and region as well…

There are also other factors at play. Montréal has a fairly large community of native English speakers and receives a lot of tourism from Anglophone Canada and the United States due to its status as the largest city in Québec (and second largest in Canada). It also gets a lot of immigrants, many of which are (at least initially) more proficient in English than in French.

I can't say I'm entirely familiar with the situation in Switzerland, but as far as I know the country has four official languages, none of which are English. It also doesn't border any English-speaking countries. It seems English is mostly used as a lingua franca for communication between citizens who don't otherwise share a language rather than due to the direct presence of native Anglophones. Also, Romansh aside, all national languages of Switzerland (French, German and Italian) are spoken in areas that directly border a country where that language is the national language (France, Italy, Germany/Austria). With Switzerland being in the Schengen Area, its linguistic regions may be considered to be part of a much larger individual linguistic communities, which I feel may also diminish the need to learn other languages.

The language of French Switzerland is French. You'll never hear German, Italian, or Romansch. If you only spoke German and not French or English, you really couldn't live there very effectively (only places like Bern or Basel are truly multi-lingual), yes you'll get your official docs in German but then what? I assume the same is true in German speaking Switzerland, and I have no idea about Italian Switzerland.

If a Swiss German and Swiss French met for coffee, what language do you think they would wind up speaking? Perhaps English if neither had comfortable fluency in the other language. Not to take away from your point, but English can get you really far in this world.

> Swiss German (Standard German: Schweizerdeutsch, Alemannic German: Schwiizerdütsch, Schwyzerdütsch, Schwiizertüütsch, Schwizertitsch Mundart, and others; Romansh: Svizzers Tudestg) is any of the Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and in some Alpine communities in Northern Italy bordering Switzerland.

All Swiss-German is an Alemannic dialect, not all Alemannic dialects are Swiss-German, is how I'd interpret that.

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

And it's quite easy to steer it towards a certain topic if you want to

Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!"

The majority of the content feels regional, though.

English is used as a lot as a fallback language for inter-cultural exchanges. In that sense it's kind of dominating, but that's it. Intra-cultural communications happens in local languages, and even if that preferred language happened to be one of en-* locales, that only means everyone is functionally bilingual, and it doesn't mean cultural informational borders don't exist. Data still only goes through bridging connections.

So essentially both I guess?

Mastodon only had the raw feed and that drove European network operators insane, so much so that they effectively GFW'd itself.

I would lean for the latter, the simple explanation may be that people just prefer local content.

This is the inverse to the situation you describe but it makes me doubtful that non-US don't see a lot of American content.

You can even find guides by people trying to make their phone seem american so they can reach us audiences.

Or is this like a general US freedom China dictator logic

What matters is that it has the __capability__ of doing it, in ways that would be difficult to detect, when it proves expedient to do so.

China has had such social networks for a long time. Their Weibo and Xiaohongshu are two prominent examples. Weibo started as a copycat of Twitter, but then beats Twitter hands-down with faster iterations, better features, and more vibrant user engagement despite the gross censorship imposed by the government.

My guess is that TT can still thrive without American content, as long as other governments do not interfere as the US did. A potential threat to TT is that the US still has the best consumer market, so creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization, thus snatching away TT's current user base in other countries.

It's called Dispo. You probably haven't heard of it because it became almost irrelevant a few weeks after launch. #1 on the app store doesn't mean a whole lot.

It may not retain all the new users, but it is not going to become irrelevant.

My experience in the UK is that the whole Chinese community is on it for anything (discussions, classifieds...) instead of Facebook, Insta, etc.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2475l7zpqyo

For many it was a revelation that the US government/media complex has been systematically lying to them about China. They are arriving at an acceptance that the US is a shabby declining empire dominated by a corrupt elite and heartless broligarchs. Always a good thing to bump up against reality, imho.

However I think that the US-based population of Tiktok refugees will subside once the novelty effect has worn off. Probably shrink by half in a month. Hopefully there will remain a positive lingering effect.

This is a weird fantasy, but it brings up an interesting point. The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture. Especially when compared to Japan or Korea, countries with a fraction of the population but many, many times the influence.

I wish the CCP didn't wall off their citizens from the rest of the world in the name of protecting their own power. Think of the creativity we are all losing out on.

The CCP has tried to get their culture out there, it just has not been successful at the visually obvious scale of Japan or Korea. But their culture is definitely getting out there, and I think we often don't spot the Chinese influence on something unless some journalist finds out and writes an article about it.

Some of their influence is leveraged in business deals, with several movies being altered by the demand of the CCP, and these changes persisting in worldwide releases, not just the Chinese-released version of the movies.

Some of their influence is leveraged in video games- Genshin Impact is a famously successful Chinese game. There are some competitive Chinese teams in various pockets of e-sports too. Tencent also owns several video game developers, and occasionally uses their influence to change parts of a game to please the CCP.

There is a Chinese animation industry (print and video), and occasionally they get a worldwide success. I remember being surprised when I found out that "The Daily Life of the Immortal King" was Chinese- you can tell it isn't Japanese but lots of people guess that it is Korean.

That's soft power right there.

I've had to resort to watching anime on Netflix with Chinese dubs - anime is good because people actually talk slower and usually use simple language. When I watched Three Body (Chinese version) the dialogue was impenetrable lol

Of course they have modernized, but most actual influence obtained thus fair (e.g. international olympic committees covering up investigations, stopping the NBA from venturing criticisms) has come from projection of soft power rather than being on the cultural cutting edge.

I've never considered there to be one, although I'm open to the idea.

It's easy for me to recognize an Ameican pop culture or an Anglo pop culture, and the favor each show for certain imports over others, but those don't seem nearly so universal as your usage of "global pop culture" suggests.

Latin, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, French, Indian/South Asian, etc each represent huge "pop culture" markets of their own but also each have their own import biases.

Chinese cultural (and censor) sensibilities are why big budget US movies are almost universally boring and terrible these days. Authoritarian societies aren’t exactly known for creating good art.

To be honest, most of the movies/shows China creates sucks. They're Marvel-esque CGI fests with awful storylines.

Meanwhile, Japan and Korea are creating awesome media.

The whole narrative about the US gov trying to "hide" China isn't really true. There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about how great China is. And we welcome Chinese immigrants every year.

The real problem is that China itself doesn't execute when it comes to soft power.

Think of any industry and there is probably a Chinese competitor that is trying.

Tesla -> BYD

Google -> Baidu

Starbucks -> Luckin Coffee

IMAX -> China Film Giant Screen or maybe POLYMAX

Finally Disney -> Possibly Beijing Enlight Pictures

They released an animated film Ne Zha in 2019 that according to wikipedia was "the highest-grossing animated film in China,[16] the worldwide highest-grossing non-U.S. animated film,[17] and the second worldwide highest-grossing non-English-language film of all time at the time of its release. With a gross of over $725 million,[18] it was that year's fourth-highest-grossing animated film, and China's all time fourth-highest-grossing film.[19]"

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Zha_(2019_film)

Some great info here [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2J0pRJSToU

Ok I'll admit part of the reason people don't hear about these companies is that they are still too half baked. But look at BYD, they started off producing junk but this Chinese mindset of grinding and rapid iteration has put them to be super successful today. Why couldn't that kind of happen with their Disney competitor?

Another thing that might be happening is the literal closing off of the world into two spheres. Western US led and Eastern Chinese led. As we are seeing with BYD, they are taking over all the non western markets(and some western as well) but the US has essentially slammed the door shut on them (they haven't actually but made it impossible to enter with their tariffs). Maybe the Disney competitor will take hold in the non western aligned world?

Honestly its a shame they are not open or democratic. The idea of watching or even being part of a rising country that is building their empire is fascinating to watch. Will they collapse due to demographics or these fundamental issues like communism or will they make it? Unfortunately for many people, the only option is to stick with the US and work to keep the ship afloat as there is no place for them in China.

By contrast, there's now a very good k-drama with Lee Min-ho happening in space or the Gyeongseong Creature horror drama with Park Seo-joon.

I did see some good Chinese movies, mostly out of Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai directed a bunch of good ones but they all predate Xi's regime and the takeover of HK.

One of my favourite contemporary artists is Ai Weiwei, who has gone missing in 2011 only to finally reappear four years later. I understand he now lives in Portugal. Got his book on my night stand, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.

There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about people travelling the most beautiful parts of China. Free for everyone to consume.

Chinese movies/shows just kind of suck, especially compared to the quality of Kdramas and anime.

For whom? UK users?

TikTok users who use the Chinese version are not consuming content from US creators. They won't notice this ban at all.

Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.

That said, the English-speaking world clearly extends well beyond the US and English commonwealth countries nowadays. Also, a lot of videos don't have any dialogue and can also cross the language barrier.

Also, TikTok is banned in India and—ironically—China [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok

That country’s creators belong to the largest native-speaking bloc of the most-commonly spoken language (native or not) in the world.

Not how a lingua franca works.

There are 1.5 to 2 billion English speakers [1]. By far the largest number of people to speak a single language. Most of them are in America [2]. (If you count English learners, No. 2 is China [3].)

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-today/articl...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236986651_The_stati...

But this number is dubious as it's largely from self response. Here [2] is a list by country. So 25% of Thais, 50% of Ukrainians, 50% of Poles, and so on "speak English."

In the sense of being able to say hello, thank you, and introduce themselves that is probably true. But "my name is Bob" maketh not a common tongue. If we narrowed it down to the percent of people that could hold a basic conversation, the number would plummet precipitously, likely leaving Mandarin at the top.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_languages...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

70% of Chinese speak Mandarin as a first language [1].

> the sense of being able to say hello, thank you, and introduce themselves that is probably true

This is English learners. If you count English learners, a third of Chinese speak English and a majority of the internet-connected world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China

first language = A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth

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

[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/pages/stat/default.a...

> Plurality of the world ... speak English

Sorry, what point are you trying to make?

As for people who learned it later, even in Europe, only about 40% self-identify as being able to speak English. If you visit places like China or Indonesia, you'll soon notice that very few people know more than a few basic words in English once you leave the tourist areas.

Only about 60 million Nigerians speak English. Hausa is the most commonly spoken native language. Just because English is the official language doesn't mean that it's people's native language.

I'm not just making stuff up. The 400 million number is from The Ethnologue, a source which linguists generally consider as reliable.

No you don’t: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Nigeria

~60 million people in Nigeria speak English out of 230 million people, but that 60 million isn’t almost exclusively native speakers.

Not all Nigerians can speak English. But there are a lot who can. It honestly felt about 50/50 to me. And I see some other commenters saying that 60 million Nigerians have some ability to speak it. (But you need to think of that like if I was to say 60 million Americans have some ability to speak Spanish.)

However, even for those with some facility with English,I don't know that I'd classify it as their native language.

wikipedia. You are a bit off...

As for native you have US+UK+Canada+Australia+NZ+Ireland. So more then your 380M.

Where does it state this?

Do you assume that all immigrants are non-native english speakers?

There are also some native born Americans to immigrants who also don’t have English as their first language and People born in China whose first language is English, but that’s ever smaller refinements on a specific estimate.

You do realize they might be coming from another native-english country.

As such, your source is incorrect in that it's overly broad.

If you have an actual number then I'm curious, othewise it's ok to admit you were wrong and made assumptions.

> ~47 million Americans aren’t native English speakers having immigrated from a non English speaking country.

Your link says 46M total which includes native speakers. So it does not state how many non-native speakers. (not that it would matter as most would be proficient english speakers, just pointing out you're exagerating and your numbers are wrong)

“About 47.8 million immigrants in 2023” https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the-...

The number above includes native english speakers.

Also: "This includes people who became US citizens"

So it also includes citizens where there is an exam for english and for civics.

Hope you correct your original statement but I assume you're going to double down again. Best of luck.

The what now? There are no Chinese nationals using TikTok. It's banned there. Like it's now banned in the US.

Can't really disagree, but it's my favorite place to pirate fonts. Typing out site:vk.com <thing I want> feels like a real life cheat code.

As of January 2025, the countries with the most TikTok users are:

Indonesia: Has the most active users with 157.6 million

United States: 120.5 million

Brazil: 105.2 million

Mexico: 77.5 million

Vietnam: 65.6 million

Pakistan: 62.0 million

Philippines: 56.1 million

Russian Federation: 56.0 million

Thailand: 50.8 million

Bangladesh: 41.1 million

There is an additional separate issue that influencer is a coveted 'career' for many children (~30%), so not only would it wipe out many jobs it'll kill their dreams. I guess like cancelling the space program at a time when kids really wanted to be astronauts.

I think there is a lot wrong with society and TikTok is part of it - but that's a much longer discussion for some other time.

They can dream new dreams. I didn't become an astronaut—and realized I didn't actually want to become one, either.

I think we have to understand the reality that the economy today is not what it once was, not even close. I think a lot of people are looking to the influence trade since they see the corporate / political / economic future as failing them and they want to carve out something on their own while the getting is good and while they still can. Sure some just want to be famous but others appear to have a very realistic view of their prospects both as an influencer and elsewhere.

When I say "made" I mean "Earning six or even seven figures."

Crafts and art services were also doing well. And certain influencers, obviously.

It pretty much took over from Insta, which Meta somehow managed to shoot in the head with some of their algo changes.

So - politics aside - that community is pretty unhappy about this.

Dealing with this is going to be interesting insight into Trump's leanings.

The podcaster felt that with AI capabilities getting better day by day (maybe - that's another discussion) that this multi factor classification could be automated. It seems not to have been done yet AFAIK.

The truth is that the recommendation engine is power and people drawn to power in the US were too quick to abuse it driving out the old hands - and once institutional knowledge is lost it's hard to get back.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/biden-administration-quiet...

But then again Telegram survived and they had to resort to kidnapping the CEO so if it does survive the US pretty much gifted that space to a geopolitical adversary

But I'm pretty sure Langley/MD folk thought about this and are betting on it not surviving

Tiktok america is over 50% of tiktok revenue I think that more than anything else would choke out growth world wide.

TikTok does not exist in China, they have their own version -- Douyin -- that complies with their more stringent privacy laws.

Yes, but it's also singularly focused on its core experience rather than being a bolted-on experience that is confusingly blended into an ecosystem where it's not the primary experience.

Instagram Reels is a bit better but it feels very "sanitized" and fake.

I can let Spotify play on its own for hours and it will be just right...Even with songs I know nothing about, it's just very good.

I tried Tik Tok once and I could see how easily it could pick content.

But Youtube and Youtube Music are a disaster. Youtube Music is a decent service, but it's hard to get suggested anything really.

Youtube Shorts are a disaster. Sure I like the Sopranos, I find some Joe Rogan's interview interesting and sure I like the NBA, but that's virtually all it feeds me, even if I start scrolling away to other topics.

It would be pretty cool if there was a respectable capitalist with enough money, or if that won't do it then a bigger more-respectable political organization or something, and Tiktok would be nothing but a memory of how things used to be before they got better.

Think about it, a social force or financial pressure strong enough to reverse unfavorable trends, even after they have already gained momentum.

And all it takes is focusing that pressure in an unfamiliar direction that could probably best be described as "anti-enshittification".

I know, that's a tall ask, never mind . . .

It also seems… sort of bad if an individual has the ability to be strong enough to reverse a social trend, right? So we basically would have to expect one of the trends they should reverse to be… their own existence. In general it is unreasonable to expect individuals to be so enlightened as to work against their own existence, I think.

Could very well be why Tiktok appeared to begin with, as the original owner's mission.

You're right, anyone who replaced it would most likely have the same mission.

Otherwise,

>expect one of the trends they should reverse to be… their own existence.

Yeah, that won't happen.

Very few could afford it anyway, probably only the usual suspects.

Ah, so Confucius say "Enshittification will be its own reward".

I guess that's as enlightened as things are going to get :\

But there's a biger issue than loss of American content should this come to pass: the loss os American ad revenue for the platform and creators. A lot of people create content aimed at Americans because an American audience is lucrative for ad revenue. If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?

Trump can blame Biden and move on.

> If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?

Bytedance makes most of its money from Douyin.

He has a major donor who owns part of Bytedance. They’re not losing their investment with this ban.

2. Bytedance will certainly lose value if its main product loses one of its main markets.

He also has a daughter who is the only American to hold patents in China without having to license IP to a Chinese company.

We are about to see some strange mental gymnastics out of 1600 Penn.

And yet..

TikTok-based social media campaigns also e.g. managed to unexpectedly swing an election in Romania (for Georgescu, was later annulled).

[1] https://www.absatzwirtschaft.de/tiktok-vs-instagram-ein-verg... - sorry, I only found a German source

This specific campaign was done via TikTok, though, and had massive impact, which shows that TikTok has heavy usage and is popular, outside of the US and China.

(I'm not American, I have no horse in this "ban foreign TikTok" race. :D)

Why they've done it via TikTok - I simply don't know. :D

Maybe better discoverability via the For You page?

maybe next Christmas if I'm not on the Santa naughty list

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/eff-statement-us-supre...

They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department. Specifically they used the telco hacks to gather geolocation data in order to pinpoint Americans and to spy on phone calls by abusing our legally mandated wiretap capabilities.

Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones.

I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.

Chinese spy agencies don't have to make an app that millions of American teens use to harvest data on them. American companies have been doing the job for them.

They — just like the FBI, NSA, American police departments and almost every TLA — can just buy the data from a broker, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/nsa-finally-admi...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government...

The brokers don't care. They'll sell to anyone and everyone. And the people they sell to don't care either. They'll process and re-sell it too. And on and on, until it ends up in the hands of every interested party on Earth, i.e. everyone.

So don't worry, the Chinese already have a detailed copy of your daily routine & reading habits. Just love this new world that we've created to make $0.002/click.

EDIT — if it makes you feel any better, the Chinese are doing it too!

https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...

> The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals.

but data harvesting is not the real problem

the big problem is that you have a social network to which millions of your citizens are connected and used daily, which is under the control of a foreign adversary; it's a bit like if CBS was owned by the CCP

None of this is a normative statement - I’m not saying that this is good or bad, but if you want to know why the US government thinks Elon is better than ByteDance, it’s because they can shoot Elon tomorrow if they decide to, but they can’t shoot Zhang Yiming without causing an international incident.

Basically what Twitter was before Elon bought it.

I think those alone would be grounds to at least take a close look at his access to Twitter data, his censorship choices and any input he has into the algorithms.

If the general public is that stupid and that this kind of protection is really needed, then it also means that democracy is no longer a viable form of government because the public is also too stupid to vote.

No. Influential foreign propaganda is inconspicuous. There’s nothing to be mindful of other than “who benefits if this is widely believed?” and it’s not a low opinion to think most people aren’t mindful of that.

I fully agree. The last year has shaken my confidence in democracy more than any other time in my lifetime. Not because of threats of war or revolution, but because what is the point of elections if the majority is chronically misinformed? Why have a yes/no election if no one knows what the question is?

It's still the best worst system, and i'm still going to vote in 2 years and again in 4, but my faith is low.

Democratic values are good but not without flaws.

Well, half the country voted for a convicted felon who _illegally tried to overturn the results of an election_, so yeah, it's pretty low.

> democracy is no longer a viable form of government because the public is also too stupid to vote.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" -- Churchill

It's flawed, but still miles better than what China has. At least there are still some safeguards on Trump, unlike Xi.

What is your evidence that propaganda efficacy scales inversely with intelligence?

There are 2 separate problems:

   - Lack of US privacy legislation
   - Security-sensitive systems and infrastructure owned by competitor nations

PS: Curious how many total comments there are on this article. Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.

That there exist other problems is not a justification for inaction on this particular problem.

I'd absolutely consider Meta to be security sensitive. And Microsoft. And Google. And Netflix.

"You watched Red One, and we'll tell you employer and wife about it unless you ..."

How does this work?

What does that even mean in this context? Have you used TikTok before?

TikTok's CSAM problem is well documented [1].

Disposable idiots are a necessary asset for any intelligence operation. Kim Jong-nam's assasins, for example, "were told to play harmless tricks on people in the vicinity for a prank TV show" [2].

[1] https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/tiktok-under-fede...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam

It isn't like TikTok are the only part of the internet with a CSAM problem. By default anything that offers file hosting has a CSAM problem. To keep the Chinese away from blackmail material the US would have to ban any form of image hosting served from the Chinese mainland - the CSAM people go to the CSAM, it doesn't proactively seek people out.

Of course not. I was just providing an easy example of what TikTok may have that we don’t want the CCP to.

Did you mean for that link to go somewhere different?

Your link doesn't say anything about TikTok?

> Kim Jong-nam's assasins, for example, "were told to play harmless tricks on people in the vicinity for a prank TV show"

What? How is that connected to "blackmailable individual profiles"?

How can they blackmail me? Please explain. You mean like "I see you watch cat videos so now go revolt against your government or I will tell everyone you watch cat videos?", this is the blackmail part?

They may not be able to. But it sure would be helpful to have a list of people in likely financial distress with addresses close to military installations. Such a person may not ask questions if given a job offer from an influencer or whatever to take selfies around town.

Sure, that's possible, but I think it's a bit of a stretched argument. Can't you target people like that on Facebook with ads? Can't you buy data about these people from U.S. data brokers? Can't you already access this data publicly because people share it openly on social media?

We could shut all of this shit down if we actually wanted to, but that means going after American companies too, which they won't. They want to have the cake and eat it too: outlaw foreign spying on American users without outlawing domestic spying on American users. They want to make it so China can't do exactly what social media et al does in America, to Americans. Americans are not stupid: they are perceiving this. They know they are being manipulated, perhaps by China, perhaps by the U.S., definitely by dozens if not hundreds of private enterprises, likely all fucking three.

On one hand, the American government's priority is the security of America and her citizens, but on the other, we have an entire segment of the economy now utterly dependent on being able to violate citizen's privacy at will and at scale. Surveillance capitalism and foreign surveillance are effectively interoperable. You can't kill one without killing the other.

Edit: And even more on the personal front, for your every day Joe: this is completely stake-less. "Oh China is spying on me!" big fucking deal. The NSA was caught spying on us decades ago, and by all accounts, they still are. Google AdSense probably knows my resting heart rate and rectal measurements that it will use to try and sell me the new flavor of Oreo. We accept as a given that our privacy is basically long gone, not only did that boat leave the pier, it sailed to the mid-Atlantic, sunk, and a bunch of billionaires imploded trying to check out the wreckage in a poorly made submarine. I don't fucking care if China is spying on me too, that's just a fact of my online existence.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/15/duolingo-sees-216-spike-in...

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-boycott-faceb...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/over-half-million-tiktok-...

People are protesting because it's cool to do especially when you're a rebellious youngster but I'm pretty convinced it's going to fizzle out. I don't think it's fair to say it's disingenuous to believe as much. Maybe you could say it's "too early" to write it off, to which I'd respond saying it's too early to buy into the belief that it will take over American culture in any way that resembles TikTok.... and that even if it did, that it wouldn't be banned from the US again.

Or maybe this story is hugely relevant to a lot more people than your average story? I find it hard to believe china is waging a huge phsyop on HN

E.g. Fox News comments are that are base-level "Nunh unh!" or argumentless boosting.

Meta collects your data and advertisers can indirectly use that data to serve you ads. In addition, government actors can use Meta's advertising tools to spread propaganda.

But TikTok is an all-in-one solution. The government have direct control over the algorithm in addition to having access to all of the data. They don't have to go through a third party intermediary like Meta and aren't only limited by a public advertising API.

I don't understand how or why this is hard for people to grasp? It's no different than Radio Free Europe being secretly funded by the CIA, except it's even more powerful.

This right here is the answer. People just don’t care about this type of privacy because they assume some American company already has their data. Combine that with us being two generations removed from the Cold War and the average TikTok user doesn’t see any reason why the owner of this specific data being Chinese matters and frankly I’m sympathetic to that argument. If you live in the US, someone like Musk is going to have a greater influence on your life than the Chinese government and I see no reason to trust him any more or less than the Chinese government. So any discussion of this being a matter of national security just rings hollow.

That's the real value of TikTok. Having the eyeballs of young people and being able to (subtly or not) influence their perception of the world is valuable in a way that massive amounts of data aren't.

I do also worry about this with Musk, but I also acknowledge that taking away social media ownership from a foreign company is different than taking it away from a US company.

Fox News* is America's most watched television news source. Is this the kind of alternative you are envisioning?

*Also owned by a foreign national

If there was a way to force Musk to sell X or ban it, I would support that 100%. But that's unlikely to ever happen especially now with co-President Musk. But in the meantime, either breaking TT free of CCP control, or banning it, would be at least one battle won.

My point isn't that there is some grand conspiracy here, just that if you wanted to have outsized influence on people who are there just for entertainment, you could do it and make it look organic. Inception has to be the target's idea and all that.

In a similar vein I see talking heads of people in their kitchens contemplate world issues. Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, life in China: you can get in-depth opinions on all those issues from a hairdresser in Nebraska or a mechanic in Michigan, and they all will present them well enough. So I think there is something there.

But the clear damn solution is to pass laws that prohibit a bunch of this stuff across the board. The fact that Instagram Reels can do exactly what TikTok is doing but with ties to a different world power makes this ban seem shameless. Ban them all. Or none. Or regulate them like they should be regulated. But don't pretend like this security theater is somehow going to fix anything meaningful.

Apparently influencers get a lot of unsolicited pressure to take stances on things like Palestine even if they're just a crafting influencer.

Just because Musk is a f*ing problem for all Americans, doesn't mean that the CCP isn't a problem. Not much you can do about "President" Musk -- so you have to work with what you can control.

https://www.epsilon.com/us/products-and-services/data

I frankly don't understand why I keep seeing on social media people like yourselves push the idea that it's okay because other companies are also harvesting the data. It is obviously not about the data. It is about China being in a position to manipulate information flow.

That's why arguing in this sense never works. Someone isn't trying to work something out, they've already decided and are trying to explain the decision to you. That's not the same thing as thinking through something.

If there is an invasion of Taiwan, I don't think it would be unthinkable that everyone's phones being broken wouldn't be a major tactical and political advantage of shifting the US's priorities and political will in the short run.

Sure, it burns the asset in the process, but I mean... this has been a priority for an entire century.

along with details about how the US has no defensive alliance with taiwan, and that the US does not need to intervene

This is a very realistic scenario. It doesn't mean people will suddenly see messages from the CCP on their screens. It could mean that posts that are critical of China are subtly downweighted (not banned, that would be too obvious and problematic) while those favorable towards China would be upweighted.

One thing the CCP is quite good at, from its long experience of always controlling the narrative in China, is this type of social media manipulation.

If they can't take the island quickly, then maybe propaganda helps. I just think neutering or nuking everyone's phones for a few days is enough to genuinely split the attention of the American people. I think it's very safe to say our culture cares much more about it's butter than it's guns right now. We are decadent.

Edit: other sites put YouTube, and others higher with TikTok at 40% of phones.

Nothing else controlled by the CCP looks like it even comes close to that in America.

A surprising (and funny) example of this is how the open-source intelligence community and sites like Bellingcat used purchased or leaked data from private Russian commercial data brokers to identify and track the detailed movements of elite Russian assassination squads inside Russia as well as in various other countries. They learned the exact buildings where they go to work every day as well as who they met with and their home addresses. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-bellingcat-unmas...

Volunteer open-source researchers also used these readily available data sources to identify and publicly out several previously unknown Russian sleeper agents who'd spent years hiding in Western countries while building cover identities and making contacts. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/25/socialite-widow-j...

To your point, if volunteer internet hobbyists can use commercial broker data to identify and track elite Russian assassins and undercover sleeper agents, in Russia and around the world, China having direct access to US Tiktok data, which Tiktok sells to anyone through brokers anyway, doesn't seem like an existential intelligence threat to our national security. Forcing TikTok to divest Chinese ownership would, at most, make Chinese intelligence go through an extra step and pay a little for the data.

If politicians were really worried about foreign adversaries aggregating comprehensive data profiles on everyone, just addressing China's access to TikTok is a side show distraction. Why didn't they pass legislation banning all major social media services from selling or sharing certain kinds of data and requiring the anonymization of other kinds of data to prevent anyone aggregating composite profiles across multiple social platforms or data brokers? That would actually reduce the threat profile somewhat.

Obviously, they aren't doing that because the FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, INS, IRS, Homeland Security and their Five Eyes international partners are aggressively buying data broker info on all US residents at massive scale every day and aggregating it into comprehensive profiles - all with no warrants, probable cause or oversight. The US Constitution doesn't apply because it's just private commercial data, not government data. Any such law would have to explicitly carve out exceptions allowing US and allied intelligence agencies to continue doing this. Alternatively, they could put such use under the secret FISA intelligence court. US intelligence has thoroughly co-opted FISA oversight but jumping through the FISA hoop is extra work and filling out the paperwork to be rubber-stamped is annoying. They much prefer remaining completely unregulated and unsupervised like they are now, collecting everything on everyone all the time without limit. They've certainly already automated collecting all the data they want from every broker.

So yeah... let's very publicly make a big show of slapping just China and only about TikTok - and loudly proclaim we really did something to protect citizen privacy and reduce our national data aggregation attack surface. This is the intelligence community cleverly offering a fig leaf of plausible deniability to politicians who can now claim they "did something", while leaving the US intelligence community free to pillage every last shred of citizen privacy in secret.

Any idea why it is unidirectional? If the data is openly available why can't the Russians track US/Ukrainian agents the same way?

Russian officials / employees are easier to bribe, so there are brokers selling access to car ownership / license plate records, cell phone location records and call logs, passport records etc.

There's a good Bellingcat article on this at https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-...

Or did Tom Clancy lie and they are so incompetent they can't even use OSINT tools lol

I'm not an expert though. There's a lot of detailed info on OSINT sources and methods online. The bottom line is it's extremely difficult to put the data genie back in the bottle. The stuff seeps out everywhere and searching aggregated databases from multiple sources and time periods uncovers any connection. It only requires a single slip-up happening one time. This just reinforces that a regular citizen in a Western democracy who's not a spy trained to operate under cover with a nation-state providing authentic false identities, is screwed in terms of maintaining their own privacy.

Is the FSB/GRU more incompetent than my local fentanyl dealer? new identity, plastic surgery, contacts to protect iris scanning, no digital comms except in house tech, avoiding legal entrypoints seem to be the very basic in today's age especially for a hit

Tom Clancy lied that's a few hours of my life I'll never get back lol

Like foreign adversaries can already run influence campaigns on american media platforms, often, the american ones will even cooperate with it. It’s just theater. They dont need tiktok to do whatever people are saying the reason is.

The other key point you are missing is that we can ban one app and then ban/regulate others later. You don’t have to do it all at once even if all organizations were engaging in the same behavior.

Even more - the process and legislation required to just ban/regulate Meta or other American tech companies for example is more difficult not just because of the actual legal apparatus required to make it happen, but because of economic considerations and jobs and such too. Further, no doubt the CIA, NSA, and FBI all but have offices at Meta headquarters. They might be engaging in activity or influence campaigns we don’t like - but that’s for us to figure out, not some other country.

TikTok is just some random company that doesn’t matter outside of engaging in activities we don’t like and we choose to allow it to do business in the United States as we see fit.

As casually as we can decide to allow it to do business in the United States so too can we revoke that permission. We do this all the time. We recently stopped Nippon Steel from buying US Steel. TikTok isn’t anything special.

It's about having an adversarial entity -- one with whom the US could be at war with one day -- have control over a social media network that is highly pervasive in US society. It's not about harvesting the data. It's about having the ability to subtly manipulate public opinion through control of the algorithm that determines what comes up on people's feeds.

Yes, foreign adversaries can run TV ads like anyone else, or have their people on social media to try to sway the conversation (there's even a name for these people in China - "wumao"). I'm sure there's some people working for the CCP on this thread. But control of the network is a whole other level of influence -- orders of magnitude greater.

But yet what happens in practice is people line up to defend it. I can only guess most of the people defending it are active users and aren't aware of how distorted their perception of the world is by the content they see there.

It's possible to believe TikTok is bad and that the pathway the US just proved out to banning it in the US has shown that no US court will seriously question the "security reasons" fig leaf. Telegram and Signal are both used by plenty of people the US could easily paint as "security threats" and it's unclear there's any defense to a ban that they could mount at this point.

Is there any evidence of this? FWIW, I saw plenty of tiktoks talking about the China hack

We're not going let you have nukes just because you haven't nuked anybody yet.

It's beyond naive.

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

They may be blackmailed for watching forbidden topics like Russia friendly channels. Or explicit material if TikTok has it.

They may be blackmailed if they are in the wrong social network if TikTok has such a thing.

And furthermore, why is it okay that it's collected AND owned by a company based in a country not subject to the rule of law?

"Facebook does it too" isn't a reason not to be worried about TikTok.

Because I, as an adult, decided that I am ok with sharing my personal data within their app in exchange for getting to use the app.

As long as I am not sharing personal data of other people (who haven’t consented to it like I did) or some government/work/etc info that I have no right to share, I am not sure how this is anyone else’s business.

P.S. I would somewhat get your argument if it wasn’t TikTok but something that could theoretically affect the country’s infrastructure or safety (e.g., tax preparation software or a money-managing app or an MFA app for secure logins). But all personal data on me that TikTok has is purely my own, has nothing critical at all (all it knows is what i watch and do within the app), and has zero effect on anyone or anything else.

The ruling mentions that users are in fact doing this.

> (Draft National Security Agreement noting that TikTok collects [...] and device and network data (including device contacts and calendars)). If, for example, a user allows TikTok access to the user’s phone contact list to connect with others on the platform, TikTok can access “any data stored in the user’s contact list,” including names, contact information, contact photos, job titles, and notes. 2 id., at 659.

I also don't believe that most adults using this app really know how much data TikTok collects. It isn't just "what i watch and do within the app". A fuller quote from the above that doesn't just focus on data involving other people is

> The platform collects extensive personal information from and about its users. See H. R. Rep., at 3 (Public reporting has suggested that TikTok’s “data collection practices extend to age, phone number, precise location, internet address, device used, phone contacts, social network connections, the content of private messages sent through the application, and videos watched.”); 1 App. 241 (Draft National Security Agreement noting that TikTok collects user data, user content, behavioral data (including “keystroke patterns and rhythms”), and device and network data (including device contacts and calenders)).

I also don't particularly believe that the US has to allow espionage just because the government spying got the individuals being spied on to agree to it.

And why have we forgotten about kids?

The law in question doesn't forbid you, or any other adult, or even any child for that matter, from knowingly installing the app. It forbids companies from assisting in wide scale espionage. You can still install the app if you want, the US companies just can't help operate the espionage app.

I'd have no problem either, if TikTok were only collecting data on you.

I wouldn't have much of a problem, if TikTok were collecting data on x0,000s of people.

To me, it rises to the level of security-sensitive when information is collected on enough people that there's a high likelihood of people in future sensitive positions (military, government, legal) having had their information collected historically.

One can't put the genie back in the bottle when a competitor government can see a new president elected... and pull up a profile of what they swiped from 10-40.

That scenario impacts not just you (the future president), but everyone you have power or influence over.

And given the Chinese government's documented willingness to coerce people in foreign countries (i.e. the "not police" police stations), betting they won't use that power seems shortsighted...

You, as an adult, may also choose to drunk drive. The country is bigger than single people. Security threats are collective.

we're not in that situation, but i would expect the people of crimea and donetsk would prefer that nobody surveilled them.

but in a practical sense, surveilliance of people in donetsk and crimea by china would be less immediately threatening to their life, because china is not conducting military action in those places.

>1) the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens

i don't understand how anyone can seriously make this claim, and i really don't understand why potential danger isn't a consideration.

potential danger is simply danger. privacy rights are established in recognition that a threat is itself harmful.

and abuse is not unreal. america has had a larger incarcerated population than any other country for my entire lifetime. both absolute size and per capita.

in america, political movements are consistently dismantled by counterintelligence. political action is met with violence and arrest.

perhaps few people are outright murdered, but it's not necessary to murder the powerless. outside of america proper, american power is much more lethal.

every concern and contradiction that threatens the present situation - environment, infrastructure, housing, healthcare, labor, war - is maintained by suppression of political organizing, enabled by surveillance.

the administration incoming next week has promised a massive project of deportation. it has promised retaliation against journalists. it is apparently motivated to criminalize the existence of transgender people. none of these threats are reduced by american surveillance of american people.

>2) the Chinese government has [abused its power]

sure. but this is a problem primarily for chinese people, and americans are not subjects of chinese power.

american surveillance of american people does not reduce any threat of chinese power.

why isn't the american legislature addressing the problems of american people subject to american power?

>3) the US and China are going to war one day.

i don't expect this. there's too much to lose on both sides. it would be a disaster and a tragedy.

true or not, it's certain that american citizens would benefit, and america itself would improve, if arbitrary surveillance on the present scale was impossible.

To the extent this is maybe remotely arguably defensible, it is only so because the US has historically defined internal subjects who it wished to abuse most intently as non-citizens (or even legal non-persons), including chattel slavery of much of the Black population until the Civil War, and the largely genocidal American Indian wars up through 1924. But even in those cases you still have to ignore a lot of abuse in the period after nominal citizenship was granted (for Black Americans, especially, but very much not exclusively, in the first century after abolition of slavery).

As other powers arise, they will naturally want equivalence. The American government may decide that is not in their interest to make this easy - but I'd suggest as Hacker News community, we retain the ability to see beyond propaganda and balance contrary viewpoint.In this case (or the case on Nippon steel),how does one differentiate between "security" considerations and potentially a straightforward cash grab attempt by rich American investors?

And should Israeli companies, like those associated with NSO Group, face similar scrutiny after reports of their tools being used to hack U.S. State Department employee phones?

This. It's this. Don't waste your time thinking past this answer, you already nailed it.

1. Competitive balance. China does not allow US social media companies. If we allow theirs, our industry is essentially fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

2. China controls the algorithm for determining who sees what. This gives them tremendous ability to influence public opinion, and consequently public elections. That cannot be allowed to stand as long as China is hostile to the US.

3. China gets extremely detailed data about the interests and proclivities of millions of Americans, including military personnel and elected officials. This data is not otherwise publicly available and can be used for blackmail and other manipulation. Which is completely unacceptable when we have no mechanism to punish them from doing this short of global nuclear war.

Even ignoring the enormous threat to national sovereignty, TikTok has no redeeming qualities. It's an addiction machine that profits off people wasting away in front a screen. That alone is not a reason to ban it, but it sure does make the case stronger.

Banning TikTok is a clear-cut positive for the American people. Every American adult should be in support.

There is no wall. The Trump "tax cuts" raised taxes on most Americans and cut them for the 1%. Trump has not faced any consequences for betrayal in the past, why would he now?

In fact, TikTok helps promote the lack of awareness of all the above. If anything he'll want to keep it in place, to keep the public misinformed.

Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.

Besides, who cares if China is listening to us through the app. China and I have no beef with one another. China feeds me and clothes me and builds most of the stuff in my life and I give China my money. It's a good relationship! Much better than my relationship with this state, tbh.

I would say both at the same time

Maybe the uniparty in the USA should make it a priority to improve the life of everyday Americans and not Zuck and Elon. Young people don’t care who the establishment is warring with because they know the establishment doesn’t represent them, they represent themselves.

Please cite your sources. After decades of watching American propaganda, we know all too well that it is trivial to make up shit from thin air and have a large segment of the population eat it up.

But here you go anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon

Google it yourself, if you're actually interested. It's fascinating.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/us/politics/china-hack-tr...

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

> On January 12, 2010, Google revealed on its weblog that it had been the victim of a cyber attack. The company said the attack occurred in mid-December and originated from China. Google stated that more than 20 other companies had been attacked; other sources have since cited that more than 34 organizations were targeted.

I am. Google Salt Typhoon.

Can I see the evidence?

Search for Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon.

Exactly. Everyone is having fun bidding adieu to their Chinese spys. And I think they're losing sight of the fact that there's abundant reporting on harrassing expats and dissidents internationally, pressuring countries to comply with their extradition requests, to say nothing of jailing human rights lawyers and democratic activists and detaining foreigners who enter China based on their online footprint.

Most of the time I bring this up I get incredulous denials that any of this happens (I then politely point such folks to Human Rights Watch reporting on the topic), or I just hear a lot of whataboutism that doesn't even pretend to defend Tiktok.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/09/japan-chinese-authoritie...

And here's their overall 2025 page on China which details, among other things, harassment of critics based out of Italy, detention of U.S. based artist, and even harrassment of protestors in San Fransisco.

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/china

I think their suppression of criticism on Uighur forced labor has also encompassed harassment of extended support networks people from the region as well, but that's just off the top of my head and not necessarily on that page.

This paternalistic framing is the disconnect between you and those opposed to the ban. The idea that it's TikTok insidiously worming its way onto American phones like a virus. In reality, people download the app and use it because they like it. This ban will, in effect, prevent people from accessing an information service they prefer. You must acknowledge this and argue why that is a worthy loss of autonomy if you want to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it.

If it helps, reframe the ban as one on a website rather than an app. They're interchangeable in this context, but I've observed "app" to be somewhat thought-terminating to some people.

For the record - I would totally support a ban on social media services that collect over some minimal threshold of user data for any purposes. This would alleviate fears of spying and targeted manipulation by foreign powers through their own platforms (TikTok) and campaigns staged on domestic social media. But just banning a platform because it's Chinese-owned? That's emblematic of a team-sports motivation. "Americans can only be exposed to our propaganda, not theirs!" How about robust protections against all propaganda? That's a requirement for a functional democracy.

The point of my response is: sometimes you have to be paternalistic, and the federal government doesn't need to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it because those people don't matter. They meaningfully defended the ban to the courts.

No, it's just information asymmetry shaping public opinion. The US lets its dirty laundry air out. US whistleblowers, press, and historians dig up every shitty thing the US has ever done and US citizens are free to discuss it, sing about it, turn it into movies and viral memes, etc. China doesn't allow this. No one in China is going to become famous by calling for justice for those killed by Mao or exposing MSS-installed backdoors in Chinese telecoms. That kind of talk is quelled immediately. The result is that public discourse trends more anti-American than anti-China.

Google and Apple shouldn't be helping China get you to do that, by hosting and advertising it in their app store though*. Oracle shouldn't be helping China spy on Americans by hosting their services.

This isn't a law against you installing things on your phone. You're still free to install whatever you want on your phone.

*And if there is a valid first amendment claim here, it would probably be Google and Apple claiming that they have the right to advertise and convey TikTok to their users, despite it being an espionage tool for a hostile foreign government. Oddly enough they didn't assert that claim or challenge the law.

I'd agree that forbidding individuals from installing it would be an overreach, because it would be a more restrictive step then is reasonably necessary to eliminate the legitimate government interest of counter espionage.

I don't think that the governments actions here are more restrictive than necessary for that. The fact that they make some legitimate actions more difficult is completely acceptable (inevitable even).

For most people the Venn Diagram of cars they can acquire, and road legal cars, is a single circle. The government mandating all cars, even those driven solely on private property, be road legal would be an absurd overreach. At the same time they have no obligation to make it easy to acquire non road legal cars just because their legitimate regulations have happened to make that difficult.

The government currently lacks the ability to yank a binary from computing devices en masse, but the technology to do so is already mostly in place. (See Apple’s notarization escapades in the EU, for example. And I think Microsoft is working in a similar direction: https://secret.club/2021/06/28/windows11-tpms.html) I have a sickening feeling that this is only step one, and that the government will eventually mandate the ability to control and curate all software running on desktop and mobile devices within the country for “security” reasons. National security goons are salivating at the prospect, to say nothing of US corporations that are getting clobbered by foreign competitors.

If the government were to mandate that they use that feature, or Apple use that feature, especially to prevent future side-loaded installs, I'd be much more sympathetic to the overreach arguments. But that's not what they did. Rather this is a narrow law that prevents these companies from assisting in wide scale espionage. The fact that they could do some other bad thing doesn't mean the thing they did is bad.

The courts use phrases like "narrowly tailored to achieve the governments legitimate interest" to describe the balancing test here...

There is no such thing as unlimited liberty, especially with regards to systems under control of hostile nations such as China and Russia. Would you be comfortable allowing mass release of unrestricted Hamas / ISIS, Russian propaganda content to North American teenagers? National security is a real thing and geopolitics always play a critical role in people's lives.

One could perhaps argue that we must educate our citizens better, however I think rather than being naive, it's better to implement realistic regulations (within _democratic_ means of course) to contain the threats.

Like every other right, your freedom ends where other peoples freedom begins. You can install whatever you'd like on your phone... unless it prevents others from exercising their rights. That's how we all get to stay free from the "might makes right" crowd.

Joining your phone to a botnet belonging to a hostile foreign power might very well prevent others from enjoying the very rights you're trying to preserve.

You have a point about avoiding the slippery slope though. I do hope that the deciders are taking that risk seriously.

Can you think of any reason a government engaged in cyberwarfare might want to ensure there was informational asymmetry? I sure can.

What exactly it says... obviously we don't know.

I don't particularly trust Google or Apple to firewall a malicious and determined nation-state actor (0 days being 0 days), but it seems lower probability than the technically trivial data collection.

But it's not about what you install, or even what you say. It's what you're told and shown. The US and China want control over that, for obvious reasons.

Meta has been 'curating' - censoring - content for years. TikTok is no different. X isn't even trying to pretend any more.

The cultural noise, cat videos, and 'free' debate - such as they are - are wrappers for political payloads designed to influence your beliefs, your opinions, and your behaviours, not just while consuming, but while voting.

I support your slippery slope argument. I wonder where your red line is relative to "state sponsored spyware" and "typical advertising ID tracking" or "cool new app from company influenced by an adversarial super power".

This law is different to that, it's all about specific actors, not about behavior and actions. A "people we don't like" list. CNN could be on a similar list soon. All constitutional of course - the law will specifically mention how this is all for national security. And no one's speech is being suppressed, the journalists can always write for a different news channel.

edit: before you downvote me, how many of you remember:

- Bullrun

- PRISM

- Dual EC DRBG and the Juniper backdoors, that too also were exploited by secondary adversaries

- FBI urging Apple to install a backdoor for the govt after the San Bernardino shootings

- the government only recently mandating that partnered zero-day vendors must not sell their wares to other clients who would then target them against Americans

- Vault7

- XKeyscore

- STELLARWIND

- MUSCULAR

etc.?

Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.

It's not hard to see the pattern: any Chinese tech champion that does as well as, or better than American companies will find itself in legal peril. Huawei didn't get in trouble after hacking Nortel, but they got sanctioned much later, when their 5G base equipment was well-received by the markets. TikTok had the best ML-based recommendation systems when it burst in the scene, Google and Meta still haven't quite caught up yet.

(I'm asking about the lived experience outside of the political questions around who should decide what we see / access online.)

EDIT: Thank you for the replies! Interesting. I'm still wondering if most people use TikTok just for passive entertainment? I don't love Youtube, but it's been a huge learning and music discovery resource for me.

The only thing I get sent from TikTok are dances and silly memes but I don't have an account.

Other's have said it; but TikTok was such a nice format for media. It emphasized what the creator can provide its users; what content was legit; entertaining, informative, etc.

Whereas Instagram and FB are more about personal "branding". You post the best version of yourself and it's rewarded with engagement. Where on TikTok the emphasis is on the content; even creators I follow and have seen dozens of videos on I couldn't tell you what their account name was.

On TikTok you put up or you were shut up.

The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks. Maybe YouTube shorts.

How does TikTok make money?

I'll probably continue trying to use the app if possible since I mostly connect with Japanese content, but I will say there's also a fun world of Japanese creators who straddle the English and Japanese speaking words who are about to lose an outlet to the English speaking world, and I feel really bad for that too.

The "algorithm" is also just so much better than Reels and others. I spent an afternoon of PTO training my algorithm a couple years ago and it's been great ever since. My partner and I share TikToks with each other all the time and. we shape each other's algorithm and interests. Reels fixates too much on your follows and Youtube Shorts is honestly a garbage experience. Both platforms really reward creators building "brands" around their content rather than just being authentic or silly. I treat Reels as the place for polished creators or local businesses who are trying to sell me something and TikTok as the place for content. I find that I get a lot less ragebait surfaced to me than I do on other platforms, though I admit my partner gets more than I do. We both skip those videos quickly and that has helped keep this stuff off our FYP.

An important thing to remember is TikTok was one of the first platforms that was opt-in for short-form content. Both Reels and Shorts was foisted upon users who had different expectations of the network and as such had to deal with the impedance mismatch of the existing network and users who didn't want short-form content. TikTok's entire value proposition is short-form content.

That said, the algorithm got noticeably worse after 2021. Maybe because of the TikTok shop. I’ve categorized around 3,000 clips into different collections (with 600+ being in “educational”) but that fell off over the last few years. I would be a lot more upset about the ban if they had maintained quality, but now I’m like well, whatever.

It's by contrast to say, Youtube and X, where The Algorithm (tm) sustains a central Nile river of dominant creators and you're either in it or you're not.

That said, I think the political questions are rightly the dominant ones in this convo and those color my lived experience of it.

The "sticky"-ness is real, but many will flock to the TikTok copies in other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, anyway.

Regardless, I enjoy the platform. It's fun to reference the viral sounds/trends on the platform with other friends that use it.

technology is just like a tool. how people use it matters not the technology itself can be evil. tiktok's algorithm helps speed up information delivery to the people who likes it. eventually it helps to form a community of people online who like similar thing or have similar options. people needs to be aware of the content on any platform has "survivorship bias". seeing couple of examples is not representing the whole.

A sense of relief may be a coping mechanism. I've heard laid-off colleagues inform me they felt relief in the immediate aftermath; granted, the lay-offs were pre-announced before they communicated who would be "impacted", and it was at a high-pressure environment; but the human mind sometimes reacts in unexpected ways to loss outside of one's control. Rationalization is a mechanism for ego defense.

I trust TikTok's "algorithm" to give me quick and entertaining short-bits about what's going on, what's interesting, etc. It learns what I'm into effortlessly, and I appreciate how every now and then it would throw in a completely new (to me) genera or type of content to check out. Whenever I open it, there is a feed that's been curated to me about things I'm interested in checking out, few new things that are hit or miss (and I like that), and very few infuriating/stupid (to me) things.

Its recommendation engine is the best I have used. It's baffling how shitty YouTube's algorithm is. I discover YouTube channels I'm into form TikTok. Sometimes I'd discover new (or old) interesting videos from YouTube channels I already follow from TikTok first. For example, I follow Veritasium and 3Blue1Brown on YouTube but I certainly haven't watched their full back catalog. YouTube NEVER recommends to me anything from their back catalog. When I'm in the mood, I have to go to their channel, scroll for a while, then try to find a video I'd be interested in from the thumbnail/title. And once I do, YouTube will re-recommend to me all the videos I have already watched from them (which are already their best performing videos). Rarely would it recommend something new from them.

On TikTok, it frequently would pull clips from old Veritasium or 3Blue1Brown videos for me which I'd get hooked after watching 10 seconds, then hob on YouTube to watch the full video. It's insane how bad YouTube recommendation algorithm is. Literally the entire "recommended" section of youtube is stuff I have watched before, or stuff with exactly the same content as things I have watched before.

Here is how I find their recommendation algorithm to work:

YouTube: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? Here is that video again, and 10 other "brisket smoking videos". These are just gonna be stuck on your home page for the next couple of weeks now. You need to click on them one by one and mark "not interested" in which case you're clearly not interested in BBQ or cooking. Here are the last 10 videos you watched, and some MrBeast videos and some random YouTube drama videos.

TikTok: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? How about another BBQ video, a video about smokers and their models, some videos about cookouts and BBQ side dishes, a video about a DIY smoker, another about a DIY backyard project for hosting BBQ cookouts, a video about how smoke flavors food, a video about the history of BBQ in the south, a video about a BBQ joint in your city (or where ever my VPN is connected from), etc. And if you're not interested in any of those particular types, it learns from how long you spend watching the video and would branch more or less in that direction in the future.

Another example is search. Search for "sci fi books recommendations":

YouTube: Here are 3 videos about Sci-Fi books. Here are 4 brisket smoking videos. Here are some lost hikers videos (because you watched a video about a lost hiker 3 weeks ago). Here are 3 videos about a breaking story in the news. Here are 2 videos about sci-fi books, and another 8 about brisket.

TikTok: Here is a feed of videos about Sci-Fi books. And I'll make sure to throw in sci-fi book videos into your curated feed every now and then to see if you're interested.

I'm not just upset because I have a general dislike of being told I'm an idiotic, addicted, communist stooge who is easily brainwashed. I am used to folks telling me that- it started when I was writing anti-war editorials in the early oughts, so there is nothing new in that.

What I regret is that I have been following a number of quite-good political discussions on the platform, with a nicely diverse group of interlocutors.

While the discussion generally leans far left, there are many flavors of that left:

not a lot of tankies, mostly just people between "dirt bag left" and "black panther party", lots of women, BIPOC, trans folks, academics, working people, indigenous folks, queer folks of all stripes, activists, and folks who just don't like authority.

Those conversations had been very hard to come by on Yt, Ig, or Fb.

I think it's the response format for videos. I don't think it's worth bothering to speculate about other reasons, though I did note that several legitimate left news sources were shuttered in 2020 when Meta and Tw started their political purge.

Anyhow, I know that folks in the US have very little regard for political autonomy, so I am not surprised that this happens, and compared to the carceral state and the happy ecocide of the planet this is a very little thing. But I will still miss it.

I like living in a country where the government does not get to decide what I'm allowed to read/watch/see. The TikTok ban chips away at that in a meaningful way.

I value this above most other concerns, including vague worries about "Chinese spying".

Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.

What changed now?

Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.

Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.

There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law. TikTok is completely legal under the law as long as they divest it. However, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.

Congress looked at some evidence and made a decision. That is their purview and our checks-and-balances do not allow the courts to second-guess Congress like that. They can look at the "how" of the law, but not the "why".

Specifically the court looked at "what is congress' goal and is there any other way to achieve that goal that doesn't stop as much speech" and there isn't, but they can't question the validity of Congress' goals.

So there's no point in Bytedance arguing any of it, at least not in court.

It's great that an entire nation can gain wealth through hard work and good strategic decisions, at least in some way. But it hurts me that the US lost its way in the process by losing so much manufacturing capabilities, to the point that we can't even adequately produce saline solutions, nor could we make shells or screws for our war planes cheaply.

I’d be interested if there’s any objective measure of how much a countries money is passed down back to its citizens or hoarded by people in power. Is there any such measure?

Not to mention the training and development it would give a whole new class of people in China to operate global businesses.

I think in a national security paradigm, you model threats and threat capabilities rather than reacting to threats only after they are realized. This of course can and has been abused to rationalize foreign policy misadventures and there's a real issue of our institutions failing to arrest momentum in that direction.

But I don't think the upshot of those problems is that we stop attempting to model and respond to national security threats altogether, which appears to be the implication of some arguments that dispute the reality of national security concerns.

> Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.

I think this is a great point, but perhaps their hands were tied, because it's a policy decision by congress in the aforementioned national security paradigm and not the kind of thing where it's incumbent on our govt to prove a specific injury in order to have authority to make policy judgments on national security.

But all that only just confirms the priors of the people who are pro-Ban. And unfortunately it's about justifying why we shouldn't ban TikTok, not why we should ban TikTok. They can't provide a good justification for that, the best they can is just poison the well and try to attack those same institutions. But turns out effectively saying "fuck you" to Congress isn't going to work when Congress has all the power here.

For example, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf

Gorsuch pg 3

  According to the Federal Bureau
  of Investigation, TikTok can access “any data” stored in a
  consenting user’s “contact list”—including names, photos,
  and other personal information about unconsenting third
  parties. Ibid. (emphasis added). And because the record
  shows that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can require TikTok’s parent company “to cooperate with [its] efforts to obtain personal data,” there 
  is little to stop all that
  information from ending up in the hands of a designated
  foreign adversary. Id., at 696; see id., at 673–676; ante, at
  3. The PRC may then use that information to “build dossiers . . . for blackmail,” “conduct corporate espionage,” or advance intelligence operations.

https://kvombatkere.github.io/assets/TikTok_Paper_WebConf24....

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04086

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-76520-0_...

https://redfame.com/journal/index.php/ijsss/article/view/566...

https://github.com/SyntaxSparkk/TikTok

https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-122/?utm_source=...

Has anyone scrapped all three to show for a newly created account there is significant difference in topics or something like that?

This is the next one I found (from a high schooler though)

https://www.jsr.org/hs/index.php/path/article/view/2428

It doesn’t look like a well researched area in terms of academia. I am not an expert in this so don’t know why

Your hypothetical clearly implicates the Times' speech, so intermediate scrutiny at least would be applied, requiring that the law serve an important governmental purpose. I think that would be a difficult argument for the government to make, especially if the law was selective about which kinds of media institutions could and could not have any foreign ownership in general. The TikTok law is much more specific.

It's interesting to read the full TikTok opinion https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf and search for "scrutiny" and "tailored" while referencing some of the diagrams from the overview above. It's a good case study of how different levels of scrutiny are evaluated!

(Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)

So quite likely Congress could craft such a law and have it hold up, if it could show that foreign control of the NYT (which is incidentally the case) posed a national security concern.

A large part of the US-China relationship is zero-sum. If America loses, china wins, and vice versa. That relationship is not the same for, say, the US-France relationship.

China and the US have been in a massively successful, mutually beneficial global economic partnership for decades. Zero sum my ass. Take a peace pipe, make friends not war.

To say nothing of extremely adversarial cases of increasingly aggressive hacking, corporate espionage, "wolf warrior" diplomacy, development of military capabilities that seem specifically designed with countering the U.S. in mind, as well as the more ordinary diplomatic and economic pushback on everything from diplomatic influence, pushing an alternative reserve currency, and an internal political doctrine that emphasizes doubling down on all these fronts.

I don't even feel like I've ventured an opinion yet, I've simply surveyed facts and I am yet to meet a variation of the Officer Barbrady "nothing to see here" argument that has proved to be fully up to speed on the adversarial picture in front of us.

I think what I want, to feel reassured, is to be pleasantly surprised by someone who is command of these facts, capable of showing that I'm wrong about any of the above, and/or that I'm overlooking important swaths of the factual landscape in such a way that points to a safe equilibrium rather than an adversarial position.

But instead it's light-on-facts tirades that attempt to paint these concerns as neocon warmongering, attempting to indulge in a combination of colorful imagery and ridicule, which for me is kind of a non-starter.

Edit in response to reply below: I'm just going to underscore that none of the facts here are in dispute. The whataboutism, insinuations of racism, and "were you there!?" style challenges (reminiscent of creation science apologetics) are just not things I'm interested in engaging with.

I don't agree that they are whataboutisms for starters. I don't present them in response to criticisms of the U.S. to deflect away those criticisms, which is an essential, definitional characteristic of a whataboutism. Everything ususal to the critique of whataboutisms is sufficient I think to address the new examples you present in your comment, which I would say just fall in the same old category.

The critiques of China in this context are "interesting" because they relate to democratic norms, human rights, freedom of expression and the security environment that safeguards them.

And perhaps most importantly, I don't regard democratic values and economic transactions to be in a relationship where the loss of one is compensated by the presence of the other. This is a point which I believe is a relatively well understood cornerstone of western liberal democracies.

I’m disputing none of the facts you raise, I just don’t think it’s reason enough to label the entire country as an enemy state and shut the door like a petulant child. Especially in light of the horrifying atrocities that we ourselves are funding.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. China is now grappling with sluggish GDP growth, declining fertility, youth unemployment, re-shoring/friend-shoring, a property crisis, popular discontent with authoritarian overreach (e.g. zero COVID and HK), and increasingly concentrated power under chairman-for-life Xi. Their military spending has hockey-sticked in the past two decades and they're churning out ships and weapons like nobody's business. He realizes that the demographic and economic windows of opportunity are finite for military action against Taiwan (and by extension its allies like the US and Japan). The Chinese military's shenanigans in the South China Sea with artificial islands, EEZ violations, and so forth in combination with Xi's rhetorical sabre-rattling in domestic speeches don't paint a pretty picture.

Before somebody like this poster calls me a "war-mongering [liar]" or something similar let me point out that this is the opinion of academics [1], not US DoD officials or politicians. I have nothing but reverence for China's people and culture. I'd love to visit but unfortunately it's my understanding that I'd have to install tracking software on my phone and check in with police every step of the way. This type of asymmetry between our governments is why this ban has legs.

With the gift of hindsight I think it's safe to say that neoliberal policy (in the literal sense of the term, not the hacky partisan one) is a double-edged sword that got us to where we are today. To say that the US-China relationship is sunshine and puppies is ignorant of the facts.

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/04/china-war-military-taiw...

Uh, what? I've never encountered this in my trips to China.

You do have an ID scanned (like literally, on a photocopier) when you check into a hotel.

This is not a government to be friends with. It's time we go our separate ways from the CCP.

i imagine its much larger for both if you include bitcoin transactions

Either way - even if I concede this, my point stands that starving nations and denying them development isn't a great long term strategy for peace.

This isn't an attempt at whataboutism here, no one is denying that what China is doing to the Uyghurs is terrible, but the US and its allies have no moral high ground to stand on at all in this regard.

>I might as well make this clear.

>Now, regarding the international situation, The biggest wish of most of us Chinese is that the United States disappears completely and permanently from this beautiful earth.

>Because the United States uses its financial, military and other hegemony to exploit the world, destroy the peace and tranquility of the earth, and bring countless troubles to the people of other countries, we sincerely hope that the United States will disappear.

>We usually laugh at the large number of infections caused by the new coronavirus pandemic in the United States, not because we have no sympathy, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.

>We usually laugh at the daily gun wars in the United States, not because we don’t sympathize with the families that have been broken up by shootings, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.

>We usually laugh at Americans for legalizing drugs, not because we support drugs, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.When we scold American Olympic athletes, it's not because we lack sportsmanship, but because we really hope that America will disappear.

>We make fun of Trump and Sleepy Joe, not because we look down on these two old men, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.

>We Chinese are hardworking, kind, reasonable, peace-loving and not extreme. But we really don't like America. Really, if the Americans had not fought with us in Korea in the early days of our country, prevented us from liberating Taiwan, provoked a trade war, challenged our sovereignty in the South China Sea, and bullied our Huawei, would we Chinese hate them?

And that's what Chinese netziens agree without controversy on one of their biggest social media sites. What about the CCP here? Well if we look at Wang Huning, Chief Ideologue of the CCP, he is explicitly an postliberal who draws from the Schmittian rejection of liberal heterogenity, which he sees as inherently unstable, in favour of a strong, homogenous and centralized state based on traditional values in order to guarantee stability. And if it that's just internally, how do you think a fundamental rejection of heterogenity translates to foreign policy? So yes, whether you think China is a problem, China certainly thinks you are a problem.

We're talking about platforms with tens of millions of users; wide appeal is at least a quarter million likes, with mass appeal being at least a million. A local-scale influencer can gather 10-30k likes very easily on such a massive platform.

In what context is 12k likes a low amount? To me this is reminiscent of arguments I heard from neocons that global anti-Iraq war protests, the largest coordinated global protests in history at the time, counted as "small" if you considered them in absolute terms as percentages of the global population.

I think it's the opposite, that such activities are tips of the proverbial iceberg of more broadly shared sentiment.

It would be one thing if there were all kinds of sentiments in all directions with roughly evenly distributed #'s of likes. I'm open to the idea that some aspect of context could be argued to diminish the significance, but it wouldn't be that 12k likes, in context, is a negligible amount. It would be something else like its relative popularity compared to alternative views, or some compelling argument that this is a one-off happenstance and not a broadly shared sentiment.

If it is based on one post I'm sure i can find a Reddit post talking about how non white people should be slaves it's the internet lol

look man, i'm not saying china is some heavenly force of justice. but the thing about peace is that it's bigger than both sides, and it's maintained by the grace of those who understand that often the real threat isn't the enemy, it's your fear of the enemy.

But how do you know that? Do you any such examples of how the CCP or China is dicussing politics amongst themselves to support that claim, their ideological leanings and papers or their own national strategies?

If the NYT were seen as being under significant control of and risking sharing too much user data with the Chinese government then it would indeed make sense to apply the same ban.

Personally, I'm still on the fence about the ban. On one hand having asymmetry in one side banning such things and the other not is going to be problematic. On the other the inherent problems of banning companies by law. Such things work out in other areas... but will it work out in this specific type of example? Dunno, not 100% convinced either way.

I wouldn't worry about that, as FB, twitter, reddit etc are banned in China. To the extent that we want equilibrium here, banning Tiktok would reprsent a step toward parity.

ByteDance is; TikTok is not. TikTok is headquartered in USA and Taiwan. Why is that not part of the analysis? The CCP can control/influence ByteDance, the US can't do anything about that. But it could do a number of things to prevent ByteDance control/influence on TikTok, and it jumped directly to "must divest".

Congress could have passed a law banning TikTok from transmitting any user data back to ByteDance/China, for example. Why not do that, if that was the actual concern?

Guarantees of insulation from bad actors from major tech companies unfortunately are not generally credible, and what is credible, at least relatively speaking, are guarantees imposed by technology itself such as E2E encryption and zero knowledge architecture, as well as contextual considerations like the long term track record of specific companies, details of their ownership and their physical locations.

This all suggests to me that the 'Operation Texas' technical controls were actually in place and pretty good (or dude in China would have just run some SQL himself), and what isn't in place is hard process control to prevent US workers from emailing stuff to China. Which, you know, is exactly what Congress could pass a law to deal with.

Which I suppose is a different way of making the same point as you.

Anyways, who do you think China would say their #1 geopolitical adversary is?

My advice? Stop using words like "geopolitical adversary" to mask what you really want to say. This is life, not a chessboard.

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

This already exists in some ways. Foreign companies are not allowed to own American broadcasters. That's why Rupert Murdoch had to become a (dual?) American citizen when he wanted to own Fox television stations in the United States.

Ostensibly, the US government honors the 1st and 4th amendments, and only restricts speech on the platform in rare instances where that speech is likely to incite or produce imminent lawless action, and only issues warrants for private data which are of limited scope for evidence where the government has probable cause that a crime has occurred.

The accusation is that the CCP and Bytedance have a much more intimate relationship than that, censoring (or compelling) speech and producing data for mere political favors. Whether or not this is true of Facebook's relationship with US political entities is up for debate.

The single party domination, the great firewall, the authoritarian surveillance are without comparison in scale and I think that has to be among the explicitly agreed upon facts that sanity check any conversation on this topic.

Edit since I can't reply to the comment below: all the examples mentioned below appear to involve the very equivocation between differences in scale that I spent this whole comment talking about, or attempt to equate past vs present, or are too vague to even understand the nature of the comparison, and collectively are so disorganized and low effort that they are degrading the focus and quality of the conversation as a whole.

lingchi vs waterboarding/black sites

NSA vs Great Firewall

provincial one party system vs micro nation based two party system both favoring the rich

TikTok vs Instagram/YouTube

when both sides consider you sub human kind of easy to compare them without emotion :)

but truly curious where have the facts been misrepresented? I would expect this on Reddit but not on a site like HN tbh

The equivalent in Facebook (Meta) terms would be China requiring Facebook, if it wished to continue operations in China, to sell the Chinese Facebook product to a Chinese or other, as to be defined by China, non-American entity. In some sense this is already the case.

2) US and China regulatory burdens and rule of law aren't equivalent, and I'm not going to grant that equivalency.

It’s also not a ban on the content. It’s a ban on hosting and the App Store. TikTok.com can still legally resolve to the same content.

I can see, say, Coca-Cola refusing to sell a local subsidiary if they would be forced to hand over their recipe.

Kaspersky was banned this way. Tiktok was hard coded in the law to be banned. The law allows for sale. It doesn’t enforce sale.

Does divest in this context mean sell it to a non Chinese owner?

How is it self-incrimination? That logic doesn't work.

80% of TikTok's users are outside of the U.S., why would they sell the whole thing?

And the law is written in a way that there is no value to just sell the American operation without the algorithm, they have to sell the whole thing, including the algorithm, in order for there to be a serious buyer.

It's technology highway robbery. Imagine if China told Apple "sell to us or be banned", we'd tell them to pound sand too.

Not sure that changes much but you seem to be talking about non US users, which wouldn't fall under this ruling.

I found the first three alone quite compelling:

> ByteDance is Closely Connected to China’s Military-Industrial Complex

> ByteDance is Bound by Chinese State Surveillance Laws

> ByteDance’s Board is Beholden to Beijing

The above is based on a linked research paper but the numbers may actually be much higher as it can't really account for proxy ownership, various CCP committees influencing these companies, state banks providing loans only for companies that play ball, etc.

While more democratic nations are not entirely flawless on this, the separation of powers, independent judiciary, and free press do offer protections against this, as does having a general culture where these sort of things aren't accepted. Again, not flawless 100% foolproof protections, but in general it does work reasonably well.

> However, like most other Chinese companies, ByteDance is legally compelled to establish an in-house Communist Party committee composed of employees who are party members.

> In 2018, China amended its National Intelligence Law, which requires any organization or citizen to support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work. > That means ByteDance is legally bound to help with gathering intelligence.

I would say yes.

"Another way the Chinese government could assert leverage over a deal involving TikTok would be by exercising its “golden share” in a unit of ByteDance. In such an arrangement, the Chinese government buys a small portion of a company’s equity in exchange for a seat on its board and veto power over certain company decisions.

In 2021, an investment fund controlled by a state-owned entity established by a Chinese internet regulator took a 1 percent stake in a ByteDance subsidiary and appointed a director to its board."

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/17/us/tiktok-ban-suprem...

https://www.seafarerfunds.com/prevailing-winds/party-committ...

You can read the full "Opinion on Strengthening the United Front Work of the Private Economy in the New Era" here[1] in English, though I suspect you don't need the translation.

Excerpts from what the Party says openly:

> Strengthening united front work in the private economy is an important means by which the Party’s leadership over the private economy is manifested.

> This will help continuously strengthen the Party’s leadership over the private economy, bring the majority of private economy practitioners closer to the Party

> Strengthening united front work in the private economy is an important part of the development and improvement of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics.

> Educate and guide private economy practitioners to arm their minds and guide their practice with Xi Jinping’s Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era; maintain a high degree of consistency with the Party Central Committee on political positions, political directions, political principles, and political roads; and always be politically sensible. Further strengthen the Party building work of private enterprises and sincerely give full play to the role of Party organizations (党组织) as battle fortresses and to the vanguard and exemplary role of Party members.

> Enhance ideological guidance: Guide private economy practitioners to increase their awareness of self-discipline; build a strong line of ideological and moral defense; strictly regulate their own words and actions

[1]: https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publi...

Imagine if all Fortune 500 companies were required to have Trump appointees on their boards. That would sound crazy here, but that's how things still work in China.

In the future, the owners of a free press will be permitted to operate if and only if there is board seat made out to a CIA member. Unions will be permitted to congregate as long as they register with the Office of Trade Security

All in all, a huge blow to the potential power of individual rights (essentially goes to the Founding Fathers' point that having a list of rights set in stone is NOT the end-all, be-all, it's who decides the rights that count)

> Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.

That was explicitly brought up in oral arguments by the court, and the response by the US Gov was: "The act is written to be content neutral."

The court's opinion explains that they agree the law is "appropriately tailored" to remain content neutral. Whether it's "enemy propaganda" or not is, in their view, irrelevant to the application of the law. TikTok can exist in America, using TikTok is not banned, the owner just can't be a deemed "foreign adversary", which there is a history of enforcement (to some degree).

Then how do court justify that it stands in the case of an app.

In order to comply with the law, Apple and Google cannot distribute the app because it is deemed to be unlawfully owned by a foreign adversary; that's the ban. But anyone who wants to get it through other means can still do so. Presuming that's how it works, it doesn't seem to be logically different from radio/print media.

According to Wikipedia (yes I am linking directly to it and not a source, sorry to all of my teachers.) it seems that the magazines were distributed by news stands in many major USA cities, you did not need to go to the Embassy. But it also go on to note that this was because of an inter-governmental agreement which muddies the water. E.g. "Was it because of the agreement or because of the constitution and we just _said_ it was because of the agreement."

So whatever the exact legal situation was the time, a free speech utopia where even enemies of the US had free reign did not exist. De-facto free speech was significantly more restricted on this topic.

In that particular case, it was a result of an agreement with the Soviet government that allowed us to publish Amerika magazine in the USSR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(magazine)

If the law and acts calling for their divestiture were deemed "content neutral" then they could. But an app, with algorithmic profiling, delivery, and data capture, for the purposes of modeling and influence, is not the same as a radio station or a publication, so it would probably not be easy or even possible to the SC's standards to write a content neutral law in that way. But they have deemed that with apps like TikTok, when done so carefully, it is possible and divestiture can be enforced neutral of content.

We don't need to stick our head in the sand and act like TikTok is the same as a print publication.

The SC's decision, and Gorsuch's opinion in particular, is carefully written to not fundamentally rewrite the First Amendment, I'd urge you to read it.

> We need not decide whether that exclusion is content based. The question be- fore the Court is whether the Act violates the First Amend- ment as applied to petitioners. To answer that question, we look to the provisions of the Act that give rise to the effective TikTok ban that petitioners argue burdens their First Amendment rights...

The "exclusion" referred to in this quote is not the exclusion of tiktok. The court is responding to one of the arguments that tiktok made. Certain types of websites are excluded from the law, and (tiktok says) if you have to look at what kind of website it is, then obviously you're discriminating based on content.

the court is saying that this would be an argument that this law is unconstitutional, period. That's a very hard thing to prove because you need to show that the law is bad in all contexts, and to whoever it applies to, very hard. So tiktok is not trying to prove that, that's not how they challenged the law - instead tiktok is trying to prove something much more limited, ie that the law is bad when applied to tiktok. It's an "as-applied" challenge. In which case, the argument about looking at other websites is irrelevant, we already know we're looking at tiktok. As the opinion says "the exclusion is not within the scope of [Tiktok's] as-applied challenge"

> At what point in the ruling did they wonder what motivated the effective ban? "5 why's" it, so to speak. Did they ever say, "because X, Y, and Z, it is clear the intent of the law is not to prevent speech of certain parties"?

ie what you're saying...the Court replies:

"the Government need not address all aspects of a problem in one fell swoop...Furthermore, as we have already concluded, the Government had good reason to single out TikTok for special treatment"

Congress can solve one problem without needing to solve all problems.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_challenge

At what point in the ruling did they wonder what motivated the effective ban? "5 why's" it, so to speak. Did they ever say, "because X, Y, and Z, it is clear the intent of the law is not to prevent speech of certain parties"?

Sure, although they do discuss TikTok's challenge to the motivation ("Petitioners further argue that the Act is underinclusive as to the Government’s data protection concern, raising doubts as to whether the Government is actually pursuing that interest"). I just don't think the quote you had stands for what you were saying.

> At what point in the ruling did they wonder what motivated the effective ban?

Above is at page 15. Also, I think you're probably looking for the paragraph starting with "For the reasons we have explained, requiring divestiture for the purpose of preventing a foreign adversary from accessing the sensitive data of 170 million U.S. TikTok users is not 'a subtle means of exercising a content preference.' Turner I, 512 U. S., at 645." (at 12).

I saw elsewhere you likened this to the Trump muslim ban. I don't think that comparison is apt. The First Amendment issues there were not decided by the 9th circuit in the first one (“we reserve consideration of [First Amendment religious discrimination] claims until the merits of this appeal have been fully briefed.” State v. Trump, 847 F.3d 1151, 1168 (9th Cir. 2017)) the stay there was issued due to likelihood of success on the merits wrt due process issues; I don't know offhand about the second one; and the third attempt was upheld.

Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42742762 for this same thread

I would be a bit careful about trying to liken motivation for something like an EO to a law though; many members of congress voted to pass the exact language in the final bill, and they might not all have agreed with _why_. So I would put to you that the text itself is the primary thing one should consider, especially more in the legislative case than the executive one.

Read the decision. They thought the act was content-neutral, and they thought that the espionage concerns were sufficient to reach a decision w/o having to involve the First Amendment. Gorsuch and Sotomayor weren't quite so sure as to the First Amendment issues, but in any case all nine justices found that they could avoid reaching the First Amendment issues, so they did just that.

It absolutely does. (It’s in the opinion.)

It just isn’t the Wild Draw 4 some people imagine it to be. You can’t commit fraud or libel or false advertising and claim First Amendment protection. Similarly, there are levels of scrutiny when the government claims national security to shut down a media platform.

The opinion actually assumes without deciding that First Amendment scrutiny applies, so I don't think it "absolutely" does. (But yes, it probably does and Sotomayor and Gorsuch would decide as much)

So question if government has power to do so.

Can they ban RT? Or even the BBC, if the government found it wise to do so?

Apparently the owners of the operation are not US citizens operating in the USA and don't have any first amendment rights because that's part of the US Constitution and doesn't apply to other countries.

Read the opinion, the law was upheld on intermediate scrutiny. It doesn't ban based on content, it bans based on the designation of the foreign parent as an adversary. Since it's not a content ban, or rather because it's a content-neutral ban, strict scrutiny does not apply.

Without strict scrutiny, the law merely needs to fulfill a compelling government interest.

The motivation is largely irrelevant to the analysis of this case. What matters is what effects the law has and what services it provides the government.

So for example, the law technically doesn't ban TikTok at all, but rather mandates divestiture. However, the timeline wasn't realistic to manage such a divestiture, so the court recognized that the law is effectively a ban. The effect is what matters.

Similarly, the law provides a mechanism for the President to designate any application meeting a set of criteria a "foreign adversary controlled application". The court recognizes that the government has a compelling interest in restricting foreign adversaries from unregulated access to the data of US citizens, and the law services that interest.

The law represents a restriction on freedom of expression, TikTok is banned, but the law also represents a compelling government interest. To determine the winner of these two motivations, the court has established various thresholds a law must overcome. The relevant threshold in this case was determined to be Intermediate Scrutiny, and a compelling government interest is sufficient to overcome intermediate scrutiny.

Let's agree to disagree.

You can say whatever you want on a telephone call.

BUT:

The telephone network is regulated. Your cell phone must comply with FCC regulations. You personally may have a restraining order that prohibits you from calling certain people.

IE, if a phone is found to violate FCC rules, pulling it from the market has little to do with the first amendment.

> US bans sale of Huawei, ZTE tech amid security fears

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63764450

This was an FCC rule

This decision doesn't tell people they can't speak any more than, say, shutting down a specific TV station or newspaper which has been used for money laundering or which is broadcasting obscene content.

You are more removed from the content because everything is in the physical world. And even within a single newspaper there are so many different topics that it is hard to be in a bubble.

The Internet automatically leads to bubble creation, 200 character messages and indoctrination.

It is more like loudspeakers they had in villages during Mao's tenure blaring politically correct messages. Or like the Volksempfänger (radio) during the Nazi era. Interestingly, many of the most destructive revolutions happened after the widespread use of radio.

Of course the Internet isn't nearly as bad, but most people are completely unable to even consider a view outside of their indoctrination bubble.

If the option wasnt there, it would have stricter first amendment scrutiny

They could have still banned it other ways though

and the first amendment aspect is also torn apart in other ways in the court ruling

The first amendment doesn't have any provision regarding the potential reach or enablement of distribution of the speech of the people.

For anyone who does consider these algorithms speech, I challenge you to share a single person at any social media company who has taken direct responsibility over a single content feed of an individual user. How can speech exist if nobody is willing to take ownership of it?

It is, and the court acknowledged that editorial control is protected speech.

The ruling was made based on data privacy ground, not First Amendment Speech ground.

They could have a week of the teacher repeating that single sentence for the entire period

It seems incredibly logical from a state perspective. Sucks for users who can't choose to use a major highway without it being owned by an technofeudal oligarch. That statement holds true regardless of any platform. What were those blockchain people up to again?

Like the CCP?

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Speech is in no way being limited or compelled - you can say the exact same thing on dozens of other platforms without consequence. You can even say it on tik tok without consequence. You can even publish videos from tik tok in the US just fine.

This law is about what types of foreign corporation can do business in the US, and what sorts of corporate governance structures are allowed.

https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/post/what-the-first-amendmen...

Any person that has ever gotten a security clearance has given up some of their first amendment rights to do it and if they talk about the wrong thing to the wrong person they will absolutely go to jail.

And as always the classic example of free speech being limited still stands. Go yell FIRE in a crowded movie and see how your dumbass 1st amendment argument keeps you out of jail.

It almost seems like any hazard or danger from a false alarm (intentional or otherwise) should be the liability of the owners or operators of a property for unsafe infrastructure or improper safety briefing.

Anyway, I don't expect that to appear as a major legal issue, given this is primarily used as a rhetorical example.

Just look at US social media sites. It’s not like they push MINT content, do they?

First ammendment protections have no National security caveats.

A classic example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threatening_the_president_of_t...

My point is, the First Amendment tells Congress not to do that.

What exactly does "shall make no law" mean to you? Be specific.

It doesn't say "Congress shall make no law regulating any kind of speech"

The difference between these two, if it isn't already obvious, is that people do not have a right to all types of speech.

Congress can, always could, and always has regulated speech for which people do not have a recognized right to make. Things like fraud or threats are not legal, and Congress is absolutely within their right to make these types of speech illegal, and it would be silly and unfounded to suggest that they couldn't.

Furthermore, your personal interpretation of the text is irrelevant. The Constitution itself delegates the judiciary as the body which can interpret it. And they have, many times, ruled that the 1st has exceptions.

So you may have a strong opinion about what you want the law to be, but you are not correct about what is actually is.

For the last 4 years, TikTok has been my primary music discovery engine. Probably is for a large chunk of users.

What effect will this have on the music industry?

And I agree, even for me, music discovery is (was) via TikTok.

I'd love to be corrected, but I haven't been provided any evidence or information that suggests this ban was justified at all.

They said ByteDance is as disorganized as any other big tech company, and it would be approximately impossible for them to discretely pull that off.

It's easy to see "CCP" and think bogeyman, but it is interesting to think about how achievable it would be to pull off something shady at Google or Facebook, and apply that same thought process to ByteDance.

The CCP could mandate that the TikTok algorithm display certain types of political content, then further mandate that any criticism of the CCP be limited, especially discussion of the said censorship. Most users wouldn't know about it and leakers at ByteDance wouldn't be able to change that. It's not the US - they are punished in China in a way that doesn't happen in the US.

I've worked for AT&T, and letmetellyou about disorganization and corporate ineffectiveness.

And yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Incidentally, I feel almost controversial for seeing more ads for alcohol and gambling than anything else, and thinking "when did we agree it was a good thing to be more permissive about encouraging objectively addicting risky behavior?".

There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China, then Britain introduced stronger, more disruptive versions, forcing a stronger social reaction.

Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that social media is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans.

2) Data- TikTok collects massive amounts of data on 100s of millions of Americans. Opens many avenues for spying, extortion of influence, etc.

3) Reciprocity- Foreign tech companies are essentially banned from operating in China. Much like with other industries, China is not playing fair, they’re playing to win.

Insofar as TikTok has offered a “superior” product, this might be a story of social media and its double edge. But this far more a story of geopolitics.

There is no credible argument that the CCP doesn't directly control the alg as it's actively being used for just that in tawain/etc.

Does the US really want a (hostile?) foreign govt to have clear direct access to influence 170m americans, an entire generation - completely unfettered? Incredible national security implications. Bot farms can influence X/Meta/etc, but they can be at least be fought. TikTok itself is the influence engine as currently constructed.

Apparently, American users want this? Approximately 700k users have joined RedNote, a Chinese platform. It's out of the frying pan and into the fire for Americans.

As the SCOTUS said itself:

“At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence.” Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC

2. A core principle of the constitution is that those rights apply to noncitizens as well as citizens. They are human rights, not citizen rights. It's significantly more ridiculous for corporations to have free speech than a government. They don't have less of a right to free speech because we don't like them.

2) yes, that is an issue.

3) fair point.

*Source: https://www.emarketer.com/content/political-ad-spend-nearly-...

And elections are decided by margins, pushing them even slightly has massive, irrevocable consequences.

More to the point: it removes the ability of the existing American establishment to monopolise the viewpoints presented to Americans.

The key point here is that an algorithm can invisibly nudge those viewpoints, and a foreign adversary controls the algorithm.

Insofar as your claim is that powerful people and institutions care most about power, I agree. It’s very telling that TikTok would shutdown instead of divest. (Meanwhile, U.S. companies have routinely taken the other side of the deal in China: minority stake joint ventures in which “technology transfer” is mandated. AKA intellectual property plundering.)

The reality is they live in an establishment controlled media bubble, that is itself full of propaganda.

Being free does not mean free to live in a lie constructed for the benefit of someone else, it means being free to live in reality, and that freedom is being denied to Americans. At least the Chinese are aware of their reality.

That’s to say nothing of censorship. I can post “f** Joe Biden” on any social platform in the U.S. Meanwhile, a Chinese netizen compares Xi to Winnie the Pooh and gets a visit from the police. And their post never sees the light of day.

These aren’t differences of degree. They are differences of category.

The reason you can is that very few people actually do. As the Tik Tok affair shows, the moment the US suspects it might have some real competitor in controlling the narrative, it shuts them down. Maybe it's the right thing to do, but it's worth taking note that it's how things are.

The whole point is to remove anything that may cause a passive media consumer to question what is presented to them.

They’ve each run ads on billboards in New York. I distinctly remember Xinhua’s in Time Square.

Al Jazeera America closed down some years ago. (2016 apparently).

My parents used to be addicted to Al Jazeera, then some unspecified incident occurred and we were never to speak of it again. All very strange.

Al Jazeera is widely known across the country, and during the time I had cable television was available in every city in which I lived.

RT is available over-the-air on free regular broadcast channels in some American cities. You can't get less restricted than that.

You speak like someone who's never even been to the United States.

In fact, even the idea of allowing CNN or BBC to broadcast into people's homes in Russia is so laughable, I don't know why you even brought it up, or what your point is.

No one's talking about availability in Russia except you.

And to add some substance about why AJ and RT can be accessed I will quote another commenter who put it better than I did: "The reason you can is that very few people actually do. As the Tik Tok affair shows, the moment the US suspects it might have some real competitor in controlling the narrative, it shuts them down. Maybe it's the right thing to do, but it's worth taking note that it's how things are."

That's the other side of the coin. Why do you expect one country to be totally open and allow the other to be totally closed? How is that a standard that makes any sense?

> "The reason you can is that very few people actually do."

I don't see what consumption habits have to do with anything. This is also contradicting what you just said, that people in the US don't have access to this content.

> As the Tik Tok affair shows, the moment the US suspects it might have some real competitor in controlling the narrative, it shuts them down.

Who is the "US" here? The U.S. government? A specific company? Without specifics you aren't really saying anything at all, just implying some greater unfalsifiable conspiracy.

The point is that their other media so promotes a lack of curiosity by providing a false impression of being comprehensive. If you risk bursting that bubble suddenly you are first mocked, then they try to buy you, then they block you, and tell you it is your fault.

The US is held to higher standards because that is how it promotes itself. Many of us outside the US are actually saddened by a betrayal of these values, because we are all too aware of how lacking many places are, and we need the US to be better than this.

I'm not being funny but I honestly couldn't follow that.

> The US is held to higher standards because that is how it promotes itself.

You are right, they are. That's why they didn't prevent TikTok from operating and growing domestically for years. Then the Chinese government starting using it as an asset of their espionage apparatus, so in response the U.S. STILL didn't ban the content in contains, but rather told the (apparently) independent company operating TikTok that the content is free to remain as long as it's not controlled by a hostile foreign government. The refusal to sell is the most obvious public facing proof that they are in fact Chinese government controlled.

All of that is how the U.S. is different, but as evidenced by this conversation and multiple other threads, no one really cares about the nuance.

And the greater context to this discussion is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

> if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.

The application of this principle can be seen when closed societies maintain complete control over their domestic media, while spreading as much toxic nonsense as possible abroad[1].

At the same they are completely intolerant of speech at home, they exploit the openness of the west by pushing disinfo they know to be wrong (and harmful) aboard. They continue to muddy the waters by pretending their information warfare is "just asking questions" (RT's moto is "Question More"). It's an extension of their hybrid warfare efforts, and shouldn't be seen as anything less.

[1] For example, domestic Russian media encourages citizens to get vaccinated against COVID19, while promoting anti-vaccine conspiracies abroad. This is one of thousands of examples. https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/russia-china-iran-covid-...

Darn it, then decade I spent in Asia and the 100+ trips to Europe and the Middle East didn't prepare me for the rapier banter of some rando on the internet.

How appropriate.

You have to accept that the era of American exceptionalism is over and we’ll all be measured by our actions rather than the dreamy stories told.

Compared to all the other algorithmic social media in which domestic adversaries control the algorithm.

TBF; The CCP passed laws that likely make it illegal for TikTok to sell/export that kind of information (the algo). They can't divest without also neutering the sticking power of the service.

He can just blame it on Biden and use his time productively.

There is no evidence this exists.

This is not new behavior between the two countries, the only thing new is the direction. US is finally waking up to the foreign soft power being exercised inside our own country, and it isn't benefiting us.

Google was operating in China until 2010 when they got banned because they stopped censoring search results. Other Western search engines like Bing continue operate in China.

The domestic companies lost some attention share to TikTok sure, and a ban or domestic sale would generally be in their interests, but it's not like they were about to be Myspaced. They've remained among the most valued companies -- presently and in forecasts -- even while it was "eating their lunch"

It hasn't been an overnight switch, but the trajectory did not look good for US companies. TikTok was even eating into TV viewing time. There's a fixed amount of attention and TikTok was vacuuming it up from everywhere.

Where? Stockholders have been vocally livid about it.

We should treat social media as the addictive, mind altering drug it is, and stop acting like a free market saturation of them is a good thing.

China having their more potent mind control app pointed at the brains of hundreds of millions of people is not something to celebrate.

you can buy all of that from data brokers

> If, for example, a user allows TikTok access to the user’s phone contact list to connect with others on the platform, TikTok can access “any data stored in the user’s contact list,” including names, contact information, contact photos, job titles, and notes. 2 id., at 659. Access to such detailed information about U. S. users, the Government worries, may enable “China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf

It seems farcically ridiculous to me to ban the app because it somehow could let china blackmail CEOs.

What ZTE were up to was way more nefarious, but couldn't be done with just apps.

It'll be revealing to see which political actors come out in favor of keeping tiktok around.

>that the side that brutalized innocent young people

…

Now if you wanted to compare atrocities—which honestly you shouldn’t—you would compare the Palestinian children that were brutalized both in the Gaza genocide, and in any one of the number of IDF incursions into Gaza and the West Bank before and after oct 7. That is compare victims to one side, to the victims of the other side.

But people generally don’t pick sides like that. They don‘t evaluate the atrocities committed by one armed group to the atrocities committed by the other and favor one over the other. And they certainly don‘t favor one civilian group over another based on the actions of their armed groups. People much more simply react to atrocities as they happen. And Israel has committed enough atrocities during the Gaza genocide that social media will be reacting—both in anger and horror—for a long time to come.

3. Then what is Microsoft doing in China? What is Apple doing in China? Etc. No tech company is banned from China, the only companies that choose not to operate in China are those that do not agree to follow Chinese laws.

Source? I could only find this.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-china/story?id=108111...

Limiting use to 40 minutes is not a ban but it still shows a view that extended exposure to it is harmful. To turn it on its head, if more than 40 minutes is viewed harmful for Chinese youth, why not American?

https://apnews.com/article/gaming-business-children-00db669d...

Anecdotally, I have heard from people who lived in China at the time that there was a significant shift in content a few years back.

It’s a similar product. We don’t have any server-side code so we don’t know.

You chose a bad analogy, that's all.

I think it is form of compartmentalizing Internet and social networks, to keep Chinese internet and social media separate from the US.

the red book app, where tiktok refugees are flocking to right now, also want to introduce geofence and compartmentalize Chinese users and US users separately

Every social media app or website in China is required to ask for your real name and ID number, and implement any censorship requested by the party. If you post something that rubs the government the wrong way, your identity is readily available.

I don't believe this level of content control, censorship and user prosecution is there for all American media. And if it were, you are allowed to set up your own channel or social media app in America to be the exception.

I didn't know this. Do you have any reading on the subject you can recommend?

(Although that No is getting a bit blurry with US social media bending over for commander cheeto)

"It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,”

I worked on some language in the bill for my Senator. The unifying concern—and my and their concern—was China.

I know when you have a pet war you tend to see everything through its lens, but most Americans—including electeds—couldn’t care less about what’s going on in Gaza or Ukraine.

And legislators have zero requirement to explain to the public the real reason a policy proposal happens. The language used in a bill doesn’t have to be the reason it exists. This is how lobbying works.

I get that people have pet issues they want to protect, but Israel was a big enough reason to force Joe Biden out of office: https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling

Wow, people really believe Joe Biden wouldn’t have bombed his debate if he just changed his policy on Israel. (Or more seriously, that Kamala was kept out of the White House by this. What a myopic worldview.)

You may not agree with the 10% of the population that sides with Hamas, but that’s enough to cause an election to flip from Democrat to Republican or Independent, causing a 1.5% win for Trump.

The world doesn’t operate in majorities. Small groups do have power over you.

I wouldn't say TikTok is a "nice thing" ..

The same algorithm in US possession isn’t a problem.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok-...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/tiktok...

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2024/3/...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/business/tiktok-israel-ha...

"enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health ... capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”

Source?

Are you referring to the completely scientifically-untrained "bros" who were touting ivermectin and other treatments or cures with little to no scientific evidence of efficacy?

No ones impressed by your ignorance bro. Get help.

There are many reasons why there are two separate apps and not necessarily related to how addictive the algorithm is. The "source" you linked gives one such reason:

> Like other social media services in China, Douyin follows the censorship rules of the Chinese Communist Party. It conscientiously removes video pertaining to topics deemed sensitive or inflammatory by the party, although it has proved a little harder than text-based social media to control.

Also have you used Douyin? It's really feels like basically the same thing.

Respectively, heavily regulated, heavily regulated, poorly regulated but really has to toe the line to not fall into the first bucket, fairly regulated (with shifting attitudes about what they should be, but definitely not unregulated), probably only a problem because this is "gambling" again lately and has been regulated in the past and I suspect may well be more heavily regulated in the near future, and people probably would not generally agree this belongs in the list.

Another way could be limiting feed algorithms to chronological order only.

Another could be limiting what data can be collected from users on these platforms. Or limiting what data could be provided to other entities.

Who knows if these are the best ways to regulate social media, but they would like help mitigate some of the clear harms.

Gambling, alcohol, and gacha games are clearly addictive and frequently are not set up to be in the best interests of the users.

There are billions of casual drinkers / gamblers / gamers who do not show any sign of addiction. I’m really tired to hear the same nonsense repeated again and again. Do a pyschology study of any casino employee that spends 40 hours a week in a gaming venue, or any manufacturer of gaming devices that professionally play games 40 hours a week, and none of these employees exposed to so much gambling / drinking are addicted.

Psychology studies have not established that these items are “addictive”, because if they were, they would be banned all over the world. Nowhere in the western world are they banned, ghey are regulated for “fairness”. There are some individuals that throw the word addiction around without justification, please dont be one of them.

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/cycle-alcohol-addicti...

You also basically observed that the people selling the addictive thing don't get addicted, which is sort of obvious. You don't get addicted by being near e.g. alcohol and providing it to others. You get addicted by regularly drinking it.

Scientific studies have established nicotine is addictive yet purchase and smoking of cigarettes is legal in most countries.

Those two types of content are about the cheapest TV to produce. Per second of video produced (counting all the unpopular content), short videos might be more expensive, but the costs are very distributed.

> Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that gambling is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

Not really. TikTok isn't a gambling app.

Here, the payment is your attention, you swipe to the next video to play the game, and the prize if you land on a good video is a small hit of dopamine.

Where are they being regulated at all?

There was a bill introduced in the US that didn't go anywhere. Of course gambling has recently been heavily deregulated in the US so I suppose we can't expect much to be done about gambling in video games right now. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/162...

I vaguely recall it in at least one of those state bills to regulate social media for kids (listing it as an addictive behavior that's "harmful to minors" or whatever), but can't find specifics. I don't know whether something has passed anywhere in the US.

https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~hchsiao/pub/2024_ACSAC_lootbox....

"Verifying Loot-box Probability Without Source-code Disclosure"

Just read the abstract

Justice Gorsuch in his concurrence specifically commended the court for doing so, believing that a content manipulation argument could run afoul of first amendment rights.

He said that "One man's covert content manipulation is another's editorial discretion".

EFF's stance is that SCOTUS's decision based on national security ignores the First Amendment scrutiny that is required.

> The United States’ foreign foes easily can steal, scrape, or buy Americans’ data by countless other means. The ban or forced sale of one social media app will do virtually nothing to protect Americans' data privacy – only comprehensive consumer privacy legislation can achieve that goal. Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.

I think it's more about the fact that users of platform are able to connect and share their experiences and potential action for resolving class inequality. There's an entire narrative that is outside of US govt/corp/media control, and that's a problem (to them).

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-fentanyl-pipeline-and...

To be fair, trying to consider the other way around, I wonder what Chinese people could point to as disastrous stuff (in terms of the well-being of their population) coming from the US.

Nicotine being legal but TikTok is not tells you everything you need to know about government wanting to control the "addictiveness" of social media.

The US social media billionaire class is ostensibly accountable to the law, but they're also perfectly capable of using their influence over these platforms to write the law.

One plausible theory for why the politicians talk about fears of spying instead of the real fears of algorithmic manipulation is because they don't want to draw too much attention to how capable these media platforms are of manipulating voters, because they rely on those capabilities to get into and stay in power.

We can't really jail the CCP. Additionally, Zuck and Musk don't have armies to back up their propaganda. We shouldn't let foreign powers own the means of broadcast...

The people who can do something about it are the people who are already in power in the US. They understandably don't want to share with the CCP, but most of them came to power by manipulating enough voters into voting for them. They stay in power by ensuring that enough voters continue to want to vote for them. Which means that someone like Zuckerberg or Musk has an insanely inordinate amount of influence over whether these people who are in power stay in power.

Yes, I think it's marginally better that that influence remain out of the hands of the CCP, but I would rather that that influence not exist at all. It's too dangerous and too prone to corruption.

Isn't this true for literally all problems in a democracy? Do you have a better solution?

Hopefully we'll get AGI soon and it'll take over and rule as a benevolent overlord. Short of that, everything in your comment feels like it has always applied to every societal problem, and always will.

Create a level playing field where money does not amplify speech. Our existing democracy is basically a spending contest with a very small component of eloquently persuading voters to vote against their own interest. The richest of the rich have voices and can manipulate the platforms on which others express their voices, and so those rich people either pick the victors or become them.

For democracy to survive we have to get past the idea that a "free market" approach to speech leads to democratic outcomes. It doesn't, it leads to plutocratic outcomes, which is painfully obvious on both sides of the aisle right now. Americans haven't had a true representative of the people in generations.

  - the electoral college where winner takes all, so minority opposition vote is always suppressed
  - gerrymandering that dilutes and suppresses the minority opposition vote
  - oligopoly of two parties
  - unchecked financial influence by allowing unlimited funding via PACs
  - legalized lobbying/bribery
  - influence of special interest groups
  - the influence of legal system with expensive lawyers (that only rich can afford)

But they're about to have all three branches of government to back it up.

We can? Like what? What's the chance of that happening?

> Zuck and Musk don't have armies to back up their propaganda.

I'd like to note the seating arrangements published for the upcoming presidentia inauguration ceremony.

Unlike Zuck, Musk, and Bezos, Chew did not found the company with which he is most associated, and his net worth is somewhat less than a billion dollars.

I, personally, have views that would lean towards being labeled by HN users as supporting a “nanny state” (at least far departure from younger libertarian phase), but even I struggle with a “why” on banning these platforms in general.

I think the government could fix it with a screen time limit. 30 mins for under 18's, and 1 hour for everyone else, per day.

Maybe allow you to carry over some.

After that, it's emergency calls only.

What's happening to TikTok is not a good proxy for the trajectory of social media companies in the US, esp Meta. They've got plenty of tailwind.

Come on. We all know that TikTok was banned because the US regime couldn't control it.

If they really wanted to ban vice, they would have banned Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and their kin a long ago.

The law is fine with TikTok being owned by a Nigerian.

Take a step back and consider how ridiculous this is. Every country in the world other than these six [1] is controlled by the U.S.?

[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII...

Like Facebook, the "algorithm" is nothing special. TikTok made some smart design decisions that collect more interaction data that legacy social sites like Instagram and YouTube. They use that data to effectively recommend content.

I don't think this is true. Everyone that is reading this forum might even be too strong. The majority of people happily eating the pablum up as the users of TikTok can't even tell the blatantly false content from just the silly dancing videos.

And generally speaking as a culture we are too liberal to ban things for being too addictive. Again, showing that it is not relevant in this case since it will not inspire bans of other addictive (pseudo) substances on those grounds.

It's hard to see how the government would tackle algorithmic addiction within running afoul of First Amendment issues. Such an effort should also apply to Meta and Google too if it were attempted.

IMHO reciprocal market access was the most defensible position but wasn't the argument the government made.

That being said, the government did make a strictly commerce-based argument to avoid free speech issues. As came up in oral arguments (and maybe the opinion?) this is functionally no different to the restrictions on foreign ownership of US media outlets.

The hard part is de-googling.

I do have some hopes for a digital euro and, maybe, maybe, even Wero. But i fear it will never take off because too many players are involved and there is no clear marketing strategy to get it to people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)

What is China for Americans, for us Europeans, is the USA.

Some argue that it's even worse for Europeans because the Chinese military and government can't reach you while in the USA. And there is no safe place for Europeans from the US government, unless they move to China or Russia.

But it's a problem when your biggest ally treats you like an ally, says you're living off him militarily and spies/hacks you non stop.

China is not a military threat to Europe, it's literally on the other part of the globe. It's only a threat to US geopolitical ambitions.

Is that correct?

They're saying (that other people are saying) that in the US, you are safe from the Chinese government/military. In the EU, you are not safe from the US government/military.

Also note that the claim is not that the US is worse than China for Europeans. The claim is that the US is worse for Europeans than China is for Americans.

The last part about relocating is saying that you can only be safe from the US government/military in China or Russia.

Based on extradition agreements, this conclusion seems true enough on the surface. And maybe US military bases in Europe play a role as well. But this is a thread about national security concerns via social media, and I think it's hard to make a broad and definitive conclusion due to the wide variety of soft and hard powers that countries exert internationally.

But it's worth the effort.

I think politicians have scrutinized american social media and they're 100% fine with the misery they induce so long as they are personally enriched by them.

> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China

TikTok isn't anywhere near as destructive as opium was. Hell, purely in terms of "mis/disinformation" surely facebook and twitter are many times worse than TikTok.

Surely the appropriate modern parallel is fentanyl.

See this for more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855

EDIT: the link above doesn’t work for others for reason, so here is the source story: https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...

Could not be more wrong. "Society" is not deciding anything here. The ban is entirely because of idelogical and geopolical reasons. They have already allowed the good big tech companies to get people hooked as much as they want. If you think you are going to see regulation for public good you will probably be disappointed.

In a democracy, this is how "society decides" what's in the "public good." This is not a case where legislators are going behind the public's back, hiding something they know they public would oppose. Proponents of the law have been clear in public about what the law would do and what the motivations for the law are. There is nothing closer to "society decides" than Congress overwhelmingly passing a law after making a public case for what the law would do.

Yes, they're doing it for "ideological and geopolitical reasons"--but those things are important to society! Americans are perfectly within their rights to enact legislation, through their duly elected representatives, simply on the basis of "fuck China."

One could take the position that this process is so flawed as to be illegitimate. In this case it would be a valid position to believe that society had not fairly decided these things, and they were instead decided by a certain class of people and pushed on to the rest of us.

See: A Propaganda Model, by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky: https://chomsky.info/consent01/

Sorry but I don't believe this in the slightest.

As a tech person who already understood the system, it's refreshing that I now often see the comment "I need to change my algorithm"- meaning, I can shape the parameters of what X/Twitter / Instagram/ YouTube / TikTok shows me in my feed.

I think there's growing meta-awareness (that I see as comments within these platforms) that there is "healthy" content and that the apps themselves manipulate their user's behavior patterns.

Hopefully there's momentum building that people perceive this as a public health issue.

The mental health angle of support for the bans is a way the change gets accepted by the public, which posters here are doing free work toward generating, not a motivating goal or direction for these or next regulations

You want a political body to make decisions apolitically?

> mental health angle of support

This was de minimis. The support was start to finish from national security angles. There was some cherry-on-top AIPAC and protectionist talk. But the votes were got because TikTok kept lying about serious stuff [1] while Russia reminded the world of the cost of appeasement.

[1] https://www.blackburn.senate.gov/services/files/76E769A8-3ED...

BTW you're the one who cast doubt on me for suggesting UnitedHealth is incentivized to raise prices to get around profit caps, which turned out to be exactly the case despite your sense-making of the rules in place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42716428

Sorry, could you link to my comment?

THis situation is another data point and is a net good for society (whether or not the ban sticks).

Discussion around (for example) the technical implementation of content moderation being inherently political (i.e., Meta and Twitter) will be good for everyone.

While many have a love hate relationship with it, there are many who love it. I know people who aren’t too sad, because it’ll break their addiction, and others who are making really decent money as content creators on it. So generally, you’re exactly right. “Society” is not lashing back at TikTok. Maybe some are lashing back at American social media companies (eg some folks leaving Twitter and meta products).

But if we wanted to actually protect our citizens, we’d enact strong data privacy laws, where companies don’t own your data — you do. And can’t spy on you or use that data without your permission. This would solve part of the problem with TikTok.

Which is why a viable solution for TikTok was selling it to a US company. If it was just about the population "being hooked", a sale would not be an acceptable outcome.

To sell you shoes. Not for whatever nightmarish future application of this technology and relationship between private sector and the state represents: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/15/documents...

This is evidenced by the fact that ByteDance could've sold TikTok in the US for a huge amount of money to comply with the recent legislation, but the Chinese government won't allow the sale. They aren't interested in the money, which to me sounds like they only ever cared about the data and influence.

Side note: I used Perplexity to summarize the recent events to make sure I'm not totally talking out my butt :). Just a theory though, happy to be proven wrong!

If it was a business they would have sold it.

Second, how does your comment change the fact that there are multiple politicians on record saying this is why they are going after tik tok?

some US oligarchs wanted to buy tiktok at deep discount while it was private, and make money off of making it public company

About 45% of the US population uses TikTok and 63% of teens aged 13 to 17 report using TikTok, with 57% of them using the app daily

Hell of a product, there would be a crazy bidding war for that kind of engagement

The sell or be banned part, instead of just banned, was most certainly lobbied for by the US social media companies hoping to get it on the off chance it had served its purpose, wasn't as useful as China had hoped, or the slim chance they really did just want Americans to copy dance trends.

For me, it's very hard to conceive of any concrete way that would work. It's a brand, some partnerships, and a network of users that would all go to whatever buyer, and would give that buyer a huge benefit over their existing domestic competitors. So under what circumstances would those domestic competitors allow that instead of aggresively trying to secure it for themselves?

I'm open to believing you, I just don't see what you have in mind.

Campaign with the president, offer large amounts of money to the presidents campaign, donate huge sums to a small inauguration party, and then just be picked to get it at a deep discount. The entire point of bribes is that corruption let's you get away with things at a lesser cost. You just screw over everyone else except for the bribe receiver.

Larry Ellison (since he is CIA/MIC friendly and tiktok is already running on Oracle cloud)

Zuck has too much conflict to acquire tiktok, but other oligarchs like Musk/bezos/gates can pull it off, given their recent meetings with Trump

Why do you assume only a natural person can buy TikTok? Why do you assume you need political capital?

The law doesn’t provide that much executive deference in enforcement.

Plus FTC will review the acquisition process as well.

Do you have a counter example?

Why?

> Political capital is needed because the tiktok question is politicized heavily (national security as a reason)

This is entirely meaningless. You don’t need political capital to maintain the status quo.

> Do you have a counter example?

To your hypothetical? My example is the law. FACA is tightly defined. Bytedance needs to divest to a non-FAC to return to the status quo. Trump could do something else to fuck with them. But that’s true of anyone anywhere.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

It doesn’t. The courts do. TikTok could be sold to a Hungarian businessman. As long as it can’t be proved they aren’t controlled by China, they should be allowed to reënter app stores.

Generally speaking, we tend to refer to governments in countries with independent judiciaries as being separate from their courts. The same way we refer to the government in parliamentary democracies separately from their parliaments. (Or governments separately from a country’s people, even though one is a subset of the other.)

> Do you think there isn't any collusion between Supreme Court and the other branches of government?

Not super relevant here. This SCOTUS barely upheld the ban with Bytedance as the owner.

As a rich person I’d rather get 30% of tiktok with 99% certainty by committing 30% of capital needed, rather than 100% of tiktok with 30% certainty and committing 100% of capital needed.

Apparently?

What's the obvious about it?

I don't buy it.

China is wise to have such laws to protect their citizens.

1) I sell to you my special and cherished resource. You may live in the fever dream of "market rules all", but a cold surprise may come that not everyone does.

2) You can afford what I sell - especially if political winds blow so that your benevolent rulers choose to impose 1000% tariffs on my good tomatoes

3) That you even _know_ there's a difference, and that tomatoes come from a farm and not the store or a can.

Also, even if they were differently monetizing by region, you are also missing the non-monetary reasons this might happen: Manipulation & propaganda. Even aside from any formal policy by the Chinese govermnent self-censorship by businesses and individuals for anything the Party might not like is very common. Also common is the government dictating the actions a Chinese company may take abroad for these same efforts in influencing foreign opinions.

Legally, there is no issue with TikTok being Japanese, Korean, Indian, Saudi, Polish, Ugandan, Brazilian or Mexican. Just not owned by a foreign adversary country.

Which politician argues China is a friend?

We bought Soviet oil in the 1970s [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_trade_of_the_Soviet_...

As you said, we trade with them extensively. We didn’t tighten the screws on Russia until it actually invaded Ukraine. Until Xi actually invades Taiwan, it’s profitable to pretend.

From app stores and American hosting. Only if Bytedance doesn’t sell TikTok to e.g. a French or Indian or American owner. TikTok.com will still resolve (unless Bytedance blocks it).

China literally blocks information.

2) Multiple agencies investigate and make a determination that a real threat exists, the threat and measures to resolve it are debated strongly in two houses of Congress between strongly opposing parties, an passes with bi-partisan support, the law is signed by the President, then the law is upheld through multiple challenges in multiple courts and panels of judges, finally being upheld by the Supreme Court of the country. And no, this is not yet a situation where the country has fallen into autocracy so the institutions have all been corrupted to serve the executive (I.e., not like Hungary, Venezuela, Russia, etc.).

If you think these are the same... I'll just be polite and say the ignorance expressed in that post is truly stunning and wherever you got your education has deeply failed — yikes.

Sounds like they tried.

You're talking about Propaganda but you are spreading straight up fake news.

ByteDance initially released Douyin in China in September 2016. ByteDance introduced TikTok for users outside of China in 2017.

There was no "split", let alone one "forced by the US".

There was no split? You wrote: "ByteDance initially released Douyin in China in September 2016. ByteDance introduced TikTok for users outside of China in 2017."

You say there was no split while explicitly proving that there was split? You're not that stupid are you?

Why do you think "tiktok" was created in 2017 when bytedance already had douyin( aka tiktok ) in 2016?

Why is there a "tiktok" for china and a "tiktok" for everyone else? Because the "tiktok in china ( duoyin ) was influenced by the chinese government and to appease the US, bytedance branched off tiktok from "douyin".

And it obviously is not a split if they are seperate apps from the beginning. Why do you lie so much btw?

No. It had everything to do with it. How can you say that when tiktok is getting banned? Even after bytedance bent over backwards to appease the US?

> the Chinese version is heavily filtered and tilted towards CPP prefered activities and worldview, such a platform would never work on the international market and they know it.

Sure. But nothing prevents tiktok from catering their app to other nations differently. You do realize that most nations get different versions of tiktok, facebook, youtube, etc right?

> And it obviously is not a split if they are seperate apps from the beginning.

But they weren't separate apps from the beginning. Your fellow bot/propagandists wrote: "ByteDance initially released Douyin in China in September 2016. ByteDance introduced TikTok for users outside of China in 2017."

If someone is born in 2016 and another person is born in 2017 are born in the same year? Are they the same person?

> Why do you lie so much btw?

Everyone can read this thread and see that you are lying. Not me.

That statement is misleading, as the differences between these platforms across various countries are typically minor—mostly due to copyright restrictions—so users can still access roughly 99% of the same content. This situation isn’t remotely comparable to TikTok’s China-only counterpart, Douyin, which exists in a separate and completely different ecosystem. I suspect you’re aware of this, yet you brought it up anyway. What is your motivation for such dishonesty?

> “No. It had everything to do with it. How can you say that when TikTok is getting banned? Even after ByteDance bent over backward to appease the US?”

Could you explain exactly what the United States did before 2017 that caused ByteDance to launch a separate app for every country outside of China (not just in the US)? You seem to be muddying the waters by referring to this potential 2024 ban, but that obviously can’t be the reason ByteDance created a separate platform for every non-China country back in 2017.

> “But they weren’t separate apps from the beginning.”

Actually, they were. Douyin is geo-restricted to China (requiring a Chinese phone number to register) and was never accessible to users outside the country. This restriction was put in place to limit the information available to Chinese users, clearly separating Douyin from TikTok right from the start.

> "Everyone can read this thread and see that you are lying. Not me."

Well, I certainly agree that everyone can read this thread and make a judgement on who is more honest.

> Even after bytedance bent over backwards to appease the US?

In 2017 when TikTok was launched, there were no US government rules towards it, there were no demands made by the US government about TikTok - that part is the absolutely wrong part of your argument. You either didn't know that, or you are lying about it. Either way it's misinformation.

ByteDance didn't do anything to appease the US in 2016 or 2017. Bytedance offering Douyin for China, and a separate app TikTok for other markets is specifically about controlling the content that people see in China. TikTok is banned in China because content on TikTok isn't as filtered and strictly controlled in the same ways that China's government wants it to be for their own people - TikTok was specifically made for markets outside of China for this reason. The US had NOTHING to do with that, it is strictly about China controlling China's population with Douyin, or more specifically, not losing control of Chinese people by allowing anti-China videos to appear in Douyin. It's far easier for China to control the narrative they want if there are two separate apps that essentially provide the same user experience. The Chinese government controls TikTok, and I have not seen a single anti-China video in my wife's TikTok feed, so I'm willing to believe that they do have some control over content in the US too.

I hope that's not too complicated for you to understand.

>> Why do you lie so much btw?

>Everyone can read this thread and see that you are lying. Not me.

The other person is not lying. You may not be lying, but you really don't have your facts straight.

No. TikTok was forced to put its data on American servers [1].

Douyin was launched in 2016 as musical.ly, and is unrelated to U.S. pressure. (EDIT: Douyin was launched in 2016, TikTok in 2017. Musical.ly was acquired in 2017 and merged into/basically became TikTok. TikTok has never been in China.)

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-moves-us-user-data...

Musical.ly was acquired by Bytedance in 2017 and merged into TikTok in 2018 [1]. TikTok itself “was launched internationally in 2017” [2].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191005154207/https://beebom.co...

[2] https://chinagravy.com/what-is-douyin-an-introduction/

> What nonsense.

Obviously experiences will vary, but I think this is actually pretty well-established.

Not many studies, but here's one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9486470/

What is very well established is that the british fought a war , literally called the opium war by Western historians themselves with the main objective of keeping their opium distribution into China open after the emperor banned it

Their action was akin to if some majority owner of Purdue pharma invades US and forces US government to "keep the oxy market open" while letting "people make their own decision".

  >> Like britain invaded china ( opium wars ) and forced opium on china's population.

  > how did Britain force the Chinese population to consume Opium?

I'd argue that it is an emotional decision for both, and it does seem ironic that the US would be following China in restricting a platform that people see as a major tool for free speech. Whether you agree with that or not the optics are terrible, and the users are very aware of it. If this is really a big concern then they would also ban facebook/instagram/snapchat, but they aren't being included in this, despite having a worse track record.

I think there would need to be some basis in fact for these claims, right?

"enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”

(Also later Didi got kinda screwed imo right after their IPO in IMO a retaliatory move by the Chinese gov). So, is this TikTok ban one more shot in a new form of economic warfare? Is this type of war even new? Again, IMO, I think in instituting this law, this kind of stuff was on at least some of congress' minds.

At a high level, chinese tech culture is an insane no holds barred cage match with very little legal structure to protect IP or employees or anything and most companies who enter fail at participating in this.

Didi did a lot of corporate espionage and sabotage at uber china. They'd have "double agents" working for uber they'd pay to f stuff up. This type of thing is not practices in america because it is extremely illegal, but it was fine in China at not something that uber could do "back" to didi. There were people on the uber china fraud team paid by didi to tip off fraud networks on how to fraud. In the last year in china, they moved a ton of important work back to US offices because the china office was "compromised".

Instead of banning TikTok, we should be trying to compete with them and make a better product that wins customers over. It's sad to see the US becoming more authoritarian and follow China's example.

Have witnessed first-hand the threats by foreign state actors penetrating US-based cloud infrastructure. And it’s not like any of our domestic corporations are practicing the type of security hygiene necessary to prevent those intrusions.

So idk, the whole thing feels like a farce that will mainly benefit Zuck and co while doing very little to ultimately protect our interests.

We would be much better off actually addressing data privacy and passing legislation that regulates every company in a consistent manner.

You obviously don't mean "democracy," but some other word. We don't see mass data collection as a problem because most Americans don't care about privacy. The only reason this Tik Tok thing is even registering is because of the treat of China, which Americans do care about.

LOL

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582

Not defending what FB did in your example, but when you have to start redefining terms in order to make your argument, you're on shaky ground.

The US government, on the other hand, desires to control all narratives widely disseminated among its citizens. They can do that with Facebook. They can do that with Twitter. They cannot do that with a foreign company. So they shut it down.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

I still think having something on the books for general data protection is a net good, as it forced all the biggest US-based companies to at least start implementing data privacy controls.

Textualism might give the court some useful definitions, but it is after all still called, quite literally, an opinion.

Another example that highlights the distinction: Justice Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court's preeminent textualists, is also one of the biggest proponents of criminal rights. Those cases similarly involve defining the contours of pre-existing legal concepts, such as "unreasonable search or seizure." Nobody denies that such questions are subjective--in referring to what's "unreasonable," the text itself calls for a subjective analysis.

Common law is basically just the US, UK, AU, and NZ. Outside the anglosphere it's mostly civil law.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)

I guess civil law gives you less room to explore ideas like "living" statutes and laws that gain and change meaning over time; if there was such a change, you'd write it down?

Regardless: whether you're a textualist or realist, in the US you're still operating in a common law system.

No, that just highlights the hypocritical picking-and-choosing they do to justify it. Gorsuch is a textualist when he wants to be, just like the others.

Much of the decision is indeed based around an analysis of the words written by the legislature.

For example, Chinese nationals can enter our country and gather information on our infrastructure, corporations, and people with relative ease because English is prevalent, and foreign nationals have, with the exception of certain military/research areas, the same access that US citizens have. On the other hand, foreign nationals in China are closely monitored and have very few rights, assuming they know Chinese, are physically in China (Great Firewall), and know how to get around in the first place.

China has unfettered access to our media ecosystem, research, patents, etc., and they do their best to create an uncompetitive/hostile environment for any other country to attempt the same on their territory. Some of this has to do with trade—to be fair, these are intertwined—but the situation regarding intelligence is bleak.

>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; . . .

This is foreign commerce. It falls under the explicit jurisdiction of Congress.

However, this case is about something else. The opinion states that there is a first amendment interest, but that interest is secondary to a compelling national security interest that, in the court’s view, is valid. That may or may not be correct - but it is a subjective interpretation.

Yeah, it's the perhaps most powerful clause in the constitution. A large number of laws are formed like "[actual law ...] in commerce." That is the hook needed for a lot of laws to be constitutional. Technically those laws only apply to interstate or international commerce.

There are even supreme court cases discussing this:

>Congress uses different modifiers to the word “commerce” in the design and enactment of its statutes. The phrase “affecting commerce” indicates Congress’ intent to regulate to the outer limits of its authority under the Commerce Clause. [...] Considering the usual meaning of the word “involving,” and the pro-arbitration purposes of the FAA, Allied-Bruce held the “word ‘involving,’ like ‘affecting,’ signals an intent to exercise Congress’ commerce power to the full.” Ibid. Unlike those phrases, however, the general words “in commerce” and the specific phrase “engaged in commerce” are understood to have a more limited reach. In Allied-Bruce itself the Court said the words “in commerce” are “oftenfound words of art” [...] The Court’s reluctance to accept contentions that Congress used the words “in commerce” or “engaged in commerce” to regulate to the full extent of its commerce power rests on sound foundation, as it affords objective and consistent significance to the meaning of the words Congress uses when it defines the reach of a statute.[0]

[0] Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams, 532 U.S. 105 (2001) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/532/105/case.pdf

Only because the Court wants it to be, so they can play Calvinball.

Marijuana grown, sold, and consumed entirely within one state? Still interstate commerce! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

It's worth noting that many conservative lawyers and activists have been calling for a more limited interpretation of interstate commerce, as a way of shifting power away from Congress to individual states.

>We granted certiorari to decide whether the Act, as applied to petitioners, violates the First Amendment.

>Petitioners argue that such a ban will burden various First Amendment activities, including content moderation, content generation, access to a distinct medium for expression, association with another speaker or preferred editor, and receipt of information and ideas.

Sotomayor expands on this in her concurrence:

>TikTok engages in expressive activity by “compiling and curating” material on its platform. Laws that “impose a disproportionate burden” upon those engaged in expressive activity are subject to heightened scrutiny under the First Amendment. The challenged Act plainly imposes such a burden: It bars any entity from distributing TikTok’s speech in the United States, unless TikTok undergoes a qualified divestiture. The Act, moreover, effectively prohibits TikTok from collaborating with certain entities regarding its “content recommendation algorithm” even following a qualified divestiture. And the Act implicates content creators’ “right to associate” with their preferred publisher “for the purpose of speaking.”

That might be technically true, but if (1) you're the lawyer representing a party in an important case, (2) you've already appealed that case up to the highest appelate court and lost, and (3) you think there's any chance that the Supreme Court might change the ruling in your favor, then wouldn't it basically be professional malpractice to not petition for certiorari? Of course, they only accept a tiny percentage of the petitions they receive.

Because obviously changing the owner-editor of a media outlet has everything to do with their editorial policy. The SCOTUS just said that censorship is ok (and forcing the change of the editor is censorship, there is no doubt about it), as long as it's against another state's editorial preferences potentially having a significant audience in the country.

I know there's court precedent, but corporations aren't people. It's yet another Chinese platform that Americans use to communicate with other western companies.

Corporate personhood is irrelevant to this case.

You can’t marry a child or your cousin (in most states), that doesn’t mean they aren’t people.

See https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1787288209963290753

Isn't that obviously foreign commerce?

SCOTUS didn't have much to work with aside from level of scrutiny. They defer to Congress regarding national security.

I keep seeing this claimed, but these aren't hypothetical risks. China has managerial control over ByteDance. China has laws that require prominent companies to cooperate in their national security operations, and they've recently strengthened them even more. China has already exercised those powers to target political dissidents. This is the normal state of affairs in Chinese business; this is how things work there. It isn't like the west where companies have power to push back, or enjoy managerial independence.

But China is a bit different in that they don't simply have the authority to request data, they have the authority to direct management of the company.

Regardless, "someone associated with the government got a job at your company" is entirely different in consequence than "the government requires you to have government interests on your board"

I don't think you understand SCOTUS' decision here. They are not banning TikTok. Congress is doing so (actually forcing a sale of TikTok or be banned). They are simply ruling whether Congress acted unconstitutionally by doing so. In other words, if they overrule Congress, they would have to show how Congress' ruling contravenes the Constitution, when the Constitution grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce and decide matters of national security.

I think it's understandable, in a Chesterton's Fence sort of way - they better make sure that if they're going to start using a new methodology, it works better than what they use now, (these weird judge-created levels of scrutiny), but there's so much 1A precedent that is hard to be confident.

For 2nd amendment, they have used 'originalism' already. There isn't nearly as much precedent in that area, and so they were able to start more or less from scratch.

What changed now?

Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.

Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.

Lmao these people are rubes. It's like every other bs "national security" argument.

Expect Yandex, VK, RT, Sputnik, SCMP, etc. to be banned as well under similar pretenses.

"Comrades! We can not let these Western dogs infect our proud Soviet minds with this 'Radio Free Europe'!"

Legal precedent holds that source code (the expressive part of software) is speech, but that executing software (the functional part) is not speech. Even when the operation conveys speech, the ban is on the functional operation of the software, so the First Amendment doesn't apply.

> Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.

It's not an erosion because it was already true and has been true for centuries.

Isn't the inquiry made MORE subjective by incorporating extratextual considerations?

Or do you just mean that textualism is oversold, and delivers less than it advertises?

First, the court was not asked to reconsider the meaning of the First Amendment. In the US, we generally hew to the rule of "party presentation," which generally provides that courts will consider the parties' arguments, not make up new ones on their own.

TikTok's claim was that application of the statute in question to it violated the First Amendment's clause that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." The Supreme Court has considered the interpretation and application of that clause in...well, a whole lot of cases. TikTok asked the court to apply the logic of certain of those precedents to rule in its favor and enjoin the statute. It did not, however, ask the court to reconsider those precedents or interpret the First Amendment anew.

Since the court was not asked to do so, it's no surprise that it didn't.

Second, as noted, the court has literally decades' worth of cases fleshing out the meaning of this clause and applying it in particular circumstances. Every textualist, so far as I'm aware, generally supports following the court's existing precedents interpreting the Constitution unless and until they are overruled.

Third, even if one is of the view that the Court ought to consider the text anew in every case, without deferring to its prior rulings interpreting the text, this would have been a particularly inappropriate case for it to do so. A party seeking an injunction, as TikTok was, has to show a strong likelihood of success on the merits. That generally entails showing that you win under existing precedent. A court's expedited consideration of a request for preliminary relief is not an appropriate time to broach a new theory of what the law requires. The court doesn't have the time to give it the consideration required, and asking the court to abrogate its precedents is inconsistent with the standard for a preliminary injunction, which contemplates only a preview of the ultimate legal question, not a full-blown resolution of it.

Fourth, what exactly was the court supposed to do with the text in question, which is "abridging the freedom of speech"? The question here is whether the statute here, as applied to TikTok, violates that text. Well, it depends on what "the freedom of speech" means and perhaps what "abridging" means. It's only natural that a court would look to precedent in answering the question. Precedent develops over time, fleshing out (or "liquidating," to use Madison's term) the meaning and application of ambiguous or general language. Absent some compelling argument that precedent got the meaning wrong, that sort of case-by-case development of the law is how our courts have always functioned--and may be, according to some scholars, itself a requirement of originalism.

>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;[0]

(The actual law may not have relied exclusively on the Commerce Clause, you would have to read it to find out. But from a high level there is nothing stopping congress from regulating any instance foreign trade.)

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...

Democratic outcomes that don't agree with our politics are officially deemed illegitimate, even if the elections are certified as fair.

It would be crazy to believe the US is somehow shy about running psyops when we openly arm rebels and bomb countries.

I'm a Canadian. Almost every major Canadian newspaper is owned by American ideologically-conservative hedge funds, the only variance is how activist they are in their ownership. Our social media (like everyone's) is owned by Americans, men who are now kowtowing to Trump.

And meanwhile, Trump is now incessantly talking about annexing our country. The Premier of Alberta is receptive to the idea.

So, how should a Canadian federal government responsibly react to that?

They have a web version that's surprisingly capable. Not sure if tiktok.com will be blocked on Sunday.

But there is also lot of OC rage-bait.

Edited for word choice.

…same as TikTok. Removed from app stores.