There will be a lot of drama and outrage but this is the right thing to do. At no point would we have allowed the Soviet Union to own a major news outlet and the personalization of the TikTok...
There will be a lot of drama and outrage but this is the right thing to do.
At no point would we have allowed the Soviet Union to own a major news outlet and the personalization of the TikTok algorithm makes it neigh impossible to know how a thumb is being put on the scale. We do have hard evidence that TikTok suppressed videos supporting the Hong Kong protests, suppressed NBA highlights of only the Houston Rockets after their general manager tweeted support of the protests.
In the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan does anyone really doubt that TikTok would be used as a propaganda tool to try to prevent the United States coming to Taiwan’s defense?
There’s a reason that India, who has a disputed border with China with frequent deadly skirmishes has already banned TikTok.
Like it or not we are already moving into a Cold War 2, and we should hope that a Cold War is all we get, because the alternative is world war 3. Autocracies are on the march, and the democracies of the world need to be ready before we sleep walk into something far worse than your favorite app being banned.
This isn’t something I’m gleeful about, I wish we could all just trade, travel, and live in peace between all nations. But we are entering dangerous geopolitical times, and we need to be ready.
As an American, I don't see how it's any better to hand this over to a US-based company that will probably do the same thing, only to the benefit of the United States. Instead of suppressing...
Exemplary
As an American, I don't see how it's any better to hand this over to a US-based company that will probably do the same thing, only to the benefit of the United States. Instead of suppressing information about Hong Kong and Xinjiang, we now have the opportunity to suppress information about Gaza, BLM, and/or whatever future conflict we decide to involve ourselves in? Yay?
We worry about the TikTok algorithm's effect on politics, and, well, our brains, but Facebook and YouTube have been doing the same thing for years. We worry about our data being in the hands of the Chinese government, but every device we own and website we visit knows everything we're doing and thinking. We've known for a decade that our government can access that information. We're worried about the potential for China to be our oppressor from an ocean away, but we have decades of historical evidence that the US actively suppressed groups that advocated for changes that we now celebrate, or at the very least, begrudgingly accept.
There are plenty of places that you can get news that is highly critical of the Chinese government. This is just another step in the anti-China Red Scare 2.0 parade that has been going on for years.
American social media companies do not take marching orders from the US government. The United States has a strong and independent court system and constitution that has routinely protected the...
Exemplary
I don't see how it's any better to hand this over to a US-based company that will probably do the same thing, only to the benefit of the United States.
China has no independent courts and the CCP largely rules by decree. Chinese companies are required to have a seat on their board reserved specifically for the CCP. The Chinese government treats dissent and protest with violence.
Instead of suppressing information about Hong Kong and Xinjiang, we now have the opportunity to suppress information about Gaza, BLM, and/or whatever future conflict we decide to involve ourselves in
No American social media company has suppressed these topics. BLM protests in 2020 were massive with 10’s of millions of people in the streets across all 50 states. While there was some conflict with police they were largely quite peaceful. You can’t spend 5 minutes on Twitter without seeing something about Gaza.
The US is by no means a perfect darling country, but this whataboutism that pretends that the US and China are somehow even close to the same has no basis in reality.
No they take marching orders from the highest bidders, whether that be wealthy owners and shareholders, other corporate interests related to various business dealings, and advertisers, plus other...
American social media companies do not take marching orders from the US government.
No they take marching orders from the highest bidders, whether that be wealthy owners and shareholders, other corporate interests related to various business dealings, and advertisers, plus other interests. So instead of being told what to think by the CCP, you can be told what to think by the oligopolies and wealthy elite in America instead.
Yes, one is almost certainly better than the other if only because the latter still haven't completely dispensed with the usefulness of the population for labor so there is still mutually beneficial interests, whereas the CCP doesn't have much if any mutual interests to benefit the American public, but it's still a grim reality that acknowledges the power of these platforms to influence and doing nothing about the big picture of that and only targeting foreign adversaries ability to misuse that power.
Right, because it's the other way around. US government takes marching orders from their donors. I suspect suppressing controversy isn't the goal here.
American social media companies do not take marching orders from the US government.
Right, because it's the other way around. US government takes marching orders from their donors. I suspect suppressing controversy isn't the goal here.
I should have been more careful with my language in my last comment. "Probably do the same thing" gave the wrong impression, and "have the opportunity" was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Is a...
I should have been more careful with my language in my last comment. "Probably do the same thing" gave the wrong impression, and "have the opportunity" was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Is a US-based social media company going to completely censor a story/topic? No. Does the US give marching orders to media companies a la the CCP? No.
America's method is a lot more subtle. US media companies aren't really going to outright censor people or topics. They certainly have the power to, and social media companies have deplatfromed people in the past, they were just freaks like Alex Jones and Donald Trump. But more often than not, they're just going to flood the zone with shit. It's much easier to see this happen in legacy media. CNN doesn't prevent the climate scientist from coming on air and ringing alarm bells, instead, they bring that person on along with two fossil fuel lobbyists who are presented as though they have the same level of credibility.
Social media companies have the power to do this with their algorithms, and it's a lot harder to detect due to their massive size. We know that Instagram just changed its settings to limit politics right in the midst of the ongoing "conflict" in Gaza. We know that right-wing publications dominated Facebook engagement in 2020. There's been a lot of coverage on the "Alt-right pipeline" on YouTube, and no matter how often I watch breadtube videos and other left-wing content, the algorithm always finds a way to show me Jordan Peterson shorts. Most importantly, we know that all of this can change on a whim. Just look at what happened to twitter after Elon Musk took over
And while the Chinese companies reserve board seats for the CCP, America's regulatory agencies are often headed by former board members of the companies they are supposed to regulate. Those companies are often advertisers or maybe even shareholders of media companies. It's not unusual for the interests of the government to align with the interests of the corporations. It's not unusual to see those interests reflected as the default position in the media. I don't think it's a huge leap for me to assume that whoever takes control of TikTok is going to share similar interests.
As opposed to the United States, which... uh... Oh. Oh. Oh. When you're presented with two horrible organizations, I recommend you don't pick favorites.
The Chinese government treats dissent and protest with violence.
As opposed to the United States, which... uh... Oh.
If one of your main examples is something that happened over 100 years ago, 1 year after women got the right to vote and the republic of China still ruled the country, I don’t think you are...
Date August 25 to September 2, 1921
If one of your main examples is something that happened over 100 years ago, 1 year after women got the right to vote and the republic of China still ruled the country, I don’t think you are seriously engaging the facts of today.
You're simultaneously implying that a historical, important and tragic event has no relevance to today, while also cherry-picking the date of one thing, all while ignoring the one that is more...
You're simultaneously implying that a historical, important and tragic event has no relevance to today, while also cherry-picking the date of one thing, all while ignoring the one that is more recent as well as the one that is actively ongoing.
What’s gross is carrying a water for an authoritarian government today by saying the US did a horrible thing 100 years ago before WW2 had even begun and the current Chinese government didn’t...
What’s gross is carrying a water for an authoritarian government today by saying the US did a horrible thing 100 years ago before WW2 had even begun and the current Chinese government didn’t exist.
The Chinese people deserve far better than the CCP that is currently, today running concentration reeducation camps, destroying human rights and democracy in Hong Kong, and loudly preparing to invade Taiwan.
The US has plenty of problems but simply compare the ability of tens of millions of Americans to protest across all 50 states during the BLM protests of 2020 (while having the worst, most authoritarian president in recent US history at the helm) and the violent destruction of protests and democracy in Hong Kong and I think you might see some differences. Here’s an easy one, the US still had democratic elections in 2020 that forced out that authoritarian president. Hong Kong will never have legitimate democratic elections again.
The United States isn’t loudly shouting that it plans on invading Canada because they both come from English heritage. To pretend that you can justify and equalize the atrocities of China TODAY because the US has done horrible things in its past is disgusting.
Otherwise you might as well say Russia invading Ukraine is justified because the United States had slavery.
If you think my time here has been spent defending China, you haven't been reading what I've been saying. But that wouldn't surprise me. All I've been trying to get you to do is recognize that...
carrying a water for an authoritarian government today
If you think my time here has been spent defending China, you haven't been reading what I've been saying. But that wouldn't surprise me.
All I've been trying to get you to do is recognize that China and the U.S. both spew ungodly amounts of propaganda, and that both of them have abysmal track records with regards to human rights. Their problems differ only in kind, not in severity. But all you've done in response to my arguments is regurgitate things you've heard from U.S.-aligned sources and not question for a second what kind of bias might be present in your worldview. You'll spend all your time worrying about a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan, and none at all reflecting on the very-not-hypothetical invasion of Iraq.
Criticizing China's many horrible acts is good; Tiananmen Square happened, the Great Firewall is a disgusting mistake, etc. But how you can so easily believe everything U.S. corporations tell you about them – when you should very well know how seriously sinophobic and imperialist this nation is these days – I will never understand.
But none of that matters here anymore. I don't believe you have any interest whatsoever in hearing what I have to say, and so I in turn have no interest in discussing this any further.
But none of that matters here anymore. I don't believe you have any interest whatsoever in hearing what I have to say, and so I in turn have no interest in discussing this any further.
As a NON American, I don't see how it's in any better hands in the United States either. I wish EVERY company that trades in your personal data was scrutinized the way TikTok is. Unfortunately, I...
Exemplary
As a NON American, I don't see how it's in any better hands in the United States either.
I wish EVERY company that trades in your personal data was scrutinized the way TikTok is. Unfortunately, I don't think this is about data safety at all. It's about American business interests. Either they want to own all that data, or they want to shut down a competitor that's getting too big for them.
Yeah. Scrutinizing TikTok is not a bad thing, but moving it to some american tech company's control and acting as if everything is suddenly okay is not a viable solution either. Unregulated,...
Yeah. Scrutinizing TikTok is not a bad thing, but moving it to some american tech company's control and acting as if everything is suddenly okay is not a viable solution either. Unregulated, money-driven business interests can be just as dangerous as political pressure. Scrutinizing Google, Facebook, and all the other tech companies running social-media and news-aggregation plattforms is equally necessary.
If you give a subset of corporations within a single public-opinion driven political system unregulated control of all relevant platforms to drive public opinion, it will enable these corporations to use these tools to prevent any future regulation of said tools, effectively giving them near-unlimited political control.
If legislative bodies in a country are effevtively controlled by business interests alone, the corporations become the sovereign. The system in this scenario is not a democracy anymore. In a democracy decisions must be driven by a majority of people, not a majority of money.
So having an authoritarian system enact selective control over opinion-driving platforms is dangerous, but so is letting corporations control these platforms in a largely unregulated manner. Something needs to be done, but this is not it. Or at the very least not all of it.
Bingo. I'd maybe believe the data concern if the elected officials voting to ban it weren't literally on the app. But it's almost as if they're being hypocritical.
Bingo. I'd maybe believe the data concern if the elected officials voting to ban it weren't literally on the app. But it's almost as if they're being hypocritical.
I think one of the things not being pointed out is how dangerous ALL these data scraping companies are, especially in the hands of an enemy in a conflict. It's already a 4th amendment violation in...
There will be a lot of drama and outrage but this is the right thing to do.
I think one of the things not being pointed out is how dangerous ALL these data scraping companies are, especially in the hands of an enemy in a conflict.
It's already a 4th amendment violation in my eyes when any company does this, but the idea that facebook/google/etc can basically figure out your location from all sorts of meta information is concerning. The idea that this information is going straight to a foreign government with which we are on chilly terms and have a looming conflict is insane.
I would be very very curious to know how many times US defense/intelligence forces have gone to our social media companies to get data to help us triangulate someone's position, forces, or capabilities. And I suspect the "wait if we're doing it......" lightbulb came on waaaaaaay too late in the case of tiktok and that's why we're seeing bipartisan support.
We desperately need a digital bill of rights written by someone who actually understands the internet. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but some of the data collection that companies take part in...
We desperately need a digital bill of rights written by someone who actually understands the internet. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but some of the data collection that companies take part in really freaks me out.
A few weeks ago, I went to home depot and bought some stuff. I paid with a debit card and printed my receipt (it asks you if you'd like to print or email your receipt.)
I don't have a home depot account, but I have ordered things as a guest with my main email which is a Gmail account, though I always select checkout as a guest.
A few days later, I got an email on my work email account, which is kept completely seperate from my personal stuff asking me to rate the items that I purchased. It's insane to me that they can someone connect my work email to my personal email on an in-store transaction in which I used neither email for.
As a regular citizen, I'd rather have it go somewhere far away than somewhere closer by where the law could bother me if they wanted. I'm some normie American; what do Xi's toadies care if I'm...
The idea that this information is going straight to a foreign government with which we are on chilly terms and have a looming conflict is insane.
As a regular citizen, I'd rather have it go somewhere far away than somewhere closer by where the law could bother me if they wanted. I'm some normie American; what do Xi's toadies care if I'm getting mouthy? Domestically, the threat isn't 4th A violations and parallel construction so much as—government influence or not—the domestic social media companies deciding my rants aren't brand-safe and downranking (not even banning) such posts in favor of advertizer-friendly drivel.
They want you getting mouthy because discontent and anger that can’t be productively resolved through the political system is what ruins nations. This is explicitly the Russian PsyOp playbook to...
I'm some normie American; what do Xi's toadies care if I'm getting mouthy?
They want you getting mouthy because discontent and anger that can’t be productively resolved through the political system is what ruins nations.
This is explicitly the Russian PsyOp playbook to astroturf online arguments to turn up the tension and polarize people against each other. China almost certainly is aware of the tactic and employs it themselves. You, specifically, being mouthy is part of that. But the bigger part with general political polarization and stochastic terrorism also comes from this.
Ahhhh, so that's the playbook Facebook used to divide US, UK, Myanmar and all other nations' societies! Remember Trump being elected? Remember Brexit? Or Rohingya genocide? Read about Cambridge...
Ahhhh, so that's the playbook Facebook used to divide US, UK, Myanmar and all other nations' societies! Remember Trump being elected? Remember Brexit? Or Rohingya genocide?
Read about Cambridge Analytica, there's good article about it in Wikipedia. Then come back to this case of banning Tiktok and think if all other corporate social media shouldn't be banned alongside Tiktok.
This is the same logic that leads to erosion of privacy and totally ignores how insanely powerful and dangerous mass data, and communication, is. You're right, no one in the CCP cares who you are...
This is the same logic that leads to erosion of privacy and totally ignores how insanely powerful and dangerous mass data, and communication, is.
You're right, no one in the CCP cares who you are or what you say. They will care however if LOTS of people say something, and they'll make absolutely sure it's only their side of the argument that gets seen, based in reality or not. Don't like how they've handled their housing crisis/covid policies/hong kong/taiwan/LBGTQ/uyghur's/whatever? Fine, we'll make sure no one ever hears you say anything about it.
There's already a ton of problems with how money influences things (Lebron's apology...), there shouldn't be yet another way for foreign governments to do it.
And yes, it's bad when our government does it or when companies do it , but that doesn't somehow mean that we should just throw our hands up and say "oh well". I don't understand how people who are often the most critical of local governments find these weird edge cases to ignore.
Sure, but it doesn't change the fact that this is, from a military/intelligence gathering perspective, a MASSIVE failure, and the fact it was even allowed from that perspective is absurd.
Sure, but it doesn't change the fact that this is, from a military/intelligence gathering perspective, a MASSIVE failure, and the fact it was even allowed from that perspective is absurd.
But does this law actually change any of this? All this law does is force the sale of Tiktok. It doesn't ban the collection of such data. ByteDance can sell TikTok to a US company, and that...
But does this law actually change any of this? All this law does is force the sale of Tiktok. It doesn't ban the collection of such data. ByteDance can sell TikTok to a US company, and that company can just keep right along with all those privacy violations. And they can sell that data right to the CCP if they want. This law does NOTHING to protect the privacy of US citizens. Ultimately, nothing is really going to change about how TikTok operates. Most likely, the US government just wants in on that data hoard. The US holding company can sell user data to the CCP, but now the US government can also demand access to it.
I mean it's a nice idea, but the US government already made it illegal to sell US consumer data to China, Russia, Iran, etc. You're right that countries should be improving data privacy and...
I mean it's a nice idea, but the US government already made it illegal to sell US consumer data to China, Russia, Iran, etc. You're right that countries should be improving data privacy and collection laws regardless of Tiktok.
And can be charged with a variety of laws if they do. Having a chinese owned company sending data back means that your options to investigate and use that data is limited. It absolutely changes...
The US holding company can sell user data to the CCP, but now the US government can also demand access to it.
And can be charged with a variety of laws if they do. Having a chinese owned company sending data back means that your options to investigate and use that data is limited. It absolutely changes things.
Does it change everything it should? No, but that's a different argument from the perspective of the house/senate about the rights of citizens, not the security of the country.
I don't think the lightbulb ever came on. This all started up again after Congress received a classified intelligence briefing. And some Congressmen said they were so troubled by the brief that...
And I suspect the "wait if we're doing it......" lightbulb came on waaaaaaay too late in the case of tiktok and that's why we're seeing bipartisan support.
I don't think the lightbulb ever came on. This all started up again after Congress received a classified intelligence briefing. And some Congressmen said they were so troubled by the brief that they wanted it declassified.
I’ll bet that briefing was the location data of the congressmen, their staff, their families, and maybe even their mistresses all neatly compiled and sent off to intelligence agencies. And if they...
I’ll bet that briefing was the location data of the congressmen, their staff, their families, and maybe even their mistresses all neatly compiled and sent off to intelligence agencies.
And if they know that about the congressmen they know it if the entire federal bureaucracy, and they also have all their background check information since the OPM hack in 2015. There’s a lot of very effective spear phishing and blackmail material you can pull about basically anywhere you want.
Perhaps there’s something in that briefing that would make me change my mind. Until it’s declassified and I can read it, it’s reflexive principled unthinking contrarianism from me. No amount of...
Perhaps there’s something in that briefing that would make me change my mind. Until it’s declassified and I can read it, it’s reflexive principled unthinking contrarianism from me. No amount of “surely it must’ve been important” without actually sharing the contents will inspire reactions other than spreading further anti-government distrust.
To add on to this, TikTok content has a pro-china tilt with notably less content related to topics objectionable to the CCP, and videos supporting the side of world events that China supports. In...
To add on to this, TikTok content has a pro-china tilt with notably less content related to topics objectionable to the CCP, and videos supporting the side of world events that China supports. In response to these findings, TikTok simply removed the search tools that let the analysis take place.
And as I've commented before TikTok has historically been very porous, leaking data from the US operations to Chinese based platforms.
And the history of the bill shows that as lawmakers on both sides learned more their support for the ban only increased. It was probably a bad look for TikTok to fight accusations of weaponizing their platform, by pushing an alert to their users to call Congress and pressure them. I get why they did, but talk about acting out the exact scenario some were warning about.
I am not naive enough to think that China does not have access, if they wanted it, to TikTok data. That being said, the first link you provide demonstrating Chinese influence on content is flawed...
I am not naive enough to think that China does not have access, if they wanted it, to TikTok data. That being said, the first link you provide demonstrating Chinese influence on content is flawed in its comparisons. I would be willing to believe it happens, as is thought to happen in UScompanies, but that article does not convince me.
I think it is fair to ask questions of a study and recognize its limitations. However, the CATO blog post doesn't really add much to the discussion other than raising the issue of lifetimes of the...
I think it is fair to ask questions of a study and recognize its limitations. However, the CATO blog post doesn't really add much to the discussion other than raising the issue of lifetimes of the platforms and differences in users.
They don't address that the findings weren't present for control topics or the consistency of the underrepresentation for China sensitive topics, including topics that were internationally relevant during the lifetime of both platforms.
So that blog post, while a helpful perspective, is hardly a point by point refutation of the findings.
Edit: I also think it is important to scrutinize the source for conflicts of interest or bias, in addition to weighing the merits of the message. CATO is a partisan think tank, where Rutgers and NCRI don't have an official political affiliation. That said, you should scrutinize for bias from any source. In this case, Rutgers and NCRI provided a methodology to scrutinize, including replicating Tiktoks own methods and using their tools as part of the analysis. In contrast, the CATO institute gave very vague criticisms and no subsequent analysis to assess. Of course, they couldn't replicate the analysis very easily, because TikTok decided to neuter their tools rather than provide a counter analysis. Which is rather sus, I believe is the term the kids use today.
So my partisan bias detector goes off a bit more with CATO blog than the Rutgers paper.
You definitely present good points. One thing I definitely believe is that finding the answers to these questions (i.e. to what degree does TikTok censor political content unfavorable to China) is...
You definitely present good points. One thing I definitely believe is that finding the answers to these questions (i.e. to what degree does TikTok censor political content unfavorable to China) is difficult, and that is by design, which is already quite concerning.
I agree. The CCP has stated that they wouldn't approve the sale of the algorithms in TikTok, which might be for very pedestrian reasons of disincentivizing a sale, or could indicate there is...
I agree. The CCP has stated that they wouldn't approve the sale of the algorithms in TikTok, which might be for very pedestrian reasons of disincentivizing a sale, or could indicate there is something to the claims.
Either way, I agree that it is hard to really get a sense of the inner workings and objectively categorize what is happening.
Which is exactly why they should assume the worst case scenario here. I don't think it strains credulity to suggest that perhaps the reason that anti-government voices are more successful on...
I agree that it is hard to really get a sense of the inner workings and objectively categorize what is happening.
Which is exactly why they should assume the worst case scenario here. I don't think it strains credulity to suggest that perhaps the reason that anti-government voices are more successful on TikTok relative to other platforms is that they are promoted by design.
Data concerns aside, letting a rival manipulate narratives in your country seems like a terrible idea. It's not unthinkable the US and China find themselves in (at the very least) a cold war in the coming decades. Imagine if one of the major American newspapers in the 30s was run by Nazi Germany, history could look a lot different.
I very much agree. I think people are so used to the Pax Americana and after glow of the end of the cold war, that they aren't sensitive to the developing animosities and need to protect national...
I very much agree. I think people are so used to the Pax Americana and after glow of the end of the cold war, that they aren't sensitive to the developing animosities and need to protect national interests. As much as I wish it wasn't the case, we seem to be entering a period of international unrest.
I won't say we need the "gerontocracy," but this is why having old people in positions of power can be good. They remember when the world was not the way it is now. I'm not sure the current...
I won't say we need the "gerontocracy," but this is why having old people in positions of power can be good. They remember when the world was not the way it is now. I'm not sure the current generation of octogenarians actually benefit us with their wisdom in this specific scenario, but you may notice that it seems that tensions started growing once the people who remember WWII started dying off.
You're absolutely right about the impact of declining living memory of global conflict. My family ran to long generations, so both of my parents lived through WWII as young adults. I lived through...
You're absolutely right about the impact of declining living memory of global conflict. My family ran to long generations, so both of my parents lived through WWII as young adults. I lived through peak Cold War (Reagan/Bush years) as a young adult.
Both the oral history from my parents (and their FBI files), and my own recall of Russian and Chinese imperialism/totalitarianism, predisposed me to distrust governments that seek to monitor their citizenry.
To some extent, we have to worry about tit-for-tat revenge for the U.S.' own wholesale spying on data connections.
But people are so unguarded in their app usage... It's hard to believe that people consent to having Big Brother in their pockets all day long, or on their nightstands listening. I wonder, since I haven't seen it mentioned yet, if anyone has looked at the TikTok app permissions? I wouldn't trust anyone with that extensive collection of data and device access.
I've declined several things on multiple apps and I'm aware that things get more granular but this is what I can see easily Tiktok: Camera, Microphone, Music and audio, notifications, photos and...
I've declined several things on multiple apps and I'm aware that things get more granular but this is what I can see easily
Tiktok: Camera, Microphone, Music and audio, notifications, photos and videos. Declined: Contacts, Location, Nearby Devices
When put that way, I'm glad it exists. People (as a whole) are content to trust official truths otherwise. Imagine if we had a large anti-government echo chamber when the powers that be were busy...
I don't think it strains credulity to suggest that perhaps the reason that anti-government voices are more successful on TikTok relative to other platforms is that they are promoted by design.
When put that way, I'm glad it exists. People (as a whole) are content to trust official truths otherwise. Imagine if we had a large anti-government echo chamber when the powers that be were busy getting the public hyped up to invade Iraq.
There's plenty of ways of building your own authentic echo-chamber free from government control. There's no reason to turn to a provider that signal boosts the most divisive parts of that and is...
There's plenty of ways of building your own authentic echo-chamber free from government control. There's no reason to turn to a provider that signal boosts the most divisive parts of that and is opposed to your own self-interests. Start a Email list, telegram group, message board or something. That way at least domestic anti-government self-interest will dictate the terms of the discussion (such as moderation, recommendation systems, etc), and not foreign hostile interests.
I don't think sorting yourself into a foreign-controlled echo chamber does anyone but Xi any good.
Building an echo chamber for you and your 100,000 closest friends is easy. Building recruitment funnels and megaphones that can reach normies is massively challenging. Some interlocking reasons...
Building an echo chamber for you and your 100,000 closest friends is easy. Building recruitment funnels and megaphones that can reach normies is massively challenging. Some interlocking reasons why a group of malcontents may partner with potentially hostile foreign powers as a host.
Access to the masses. The problem with building your own home is that it tends to be too focused to invite passers-by to stay. Sure, the forum may have an off-topic section, but that's for people who already know each other. Instead, like TikTok, there's plenty of other stuff—perhaps even competing mutually exclusive fringe narratives—on the platform. There's something for everyone here, so people might stop by your stall to chat.
Money. The hosting bills for all the regular people's content and mass adoption require state-level actors or sympathetic billionaires (Musk using Twitter as his personal playground is the closest example) to foot.
The sympathetic billionaire problem: just because the billionaire is willing to hand you a megaphone now doesn't mean they will still share their platform once our material interests diverge. Perhaps the ideology you wish to spread is anathema to the billionaire class.
Ideological governments end up on the spectrum of the sympathetic billionaire problem to building yet another echo chamber no one visits. Even if they had the money of China, North Korea could not make the moderation decisions necessary to let TikTok grow in the west.
Both American social media & TikTok run on an attention model where anyone who can rile up others is handed the megaphone. The big difference I see is the definition of "wrong kind of riled up" they use to decide when to remove someone's megaphone. TikTok will turn off the engagement for direct CCP criticism and for making it anything other than a happiness hug box. There's a reason people threaten they'll be "unalive" if this ban is implemented. Domestic social media isn't as ideologically driven in whose amplifier it turns off; it seems more to do with creating too much stink in newspaper headlines or advertiser-unfriendly content than any political strategy.
Tangental to the original point of this post, but TikTok's straightforward censorship feels far more comprehensible: if you want to discuss the joy of s-x without silly substitution letters or whatever it was that happened on 4 June 1989, don't do it there. If you were to be targeted for muting (not necessarily YOU in particular, but your general content category got on the advertising shitlist for the week) by a domestic social platform, it would be impossible to distinguish from a string of bad luck.
If all of your media is essentially propaganda for one side, getting foreign propaganda feels like a breath of fresh air. And that is just proof of the garbage odor of the current media moment I...
If all of your media is essentially propaganda for one side, getting foreign propaganda feels like a breath of fresh air. And that is just proof of the garbage odor of the current media moment I suppose but it does feel like slamming the window shut on the breeze is fixing the wrong problem first.
We actually did allow the Soviet Union to publish papers in the US. They never had wide circulation, but the 1st Amendment didn't go out the window just because the Cold War was on. Many of these...
At no point would we have allowed the Soviet Union to own a major news outlet
We actually did allow the Soviet Union to publish papers in the US. They never had wide circulation, but the 1st Amendment didn't go out the window just because the Cold War was on. Many of these papers are archived in the Library of Congress..
Yes, TikTok has a bias. So does Al Jazeera, Haaretz, any every other foreign and domestic journalism source. Did the Soviet Union censor US newspapers? Yes. But we used to take pride in not stooping to the level of authoritarian dictatorships.
Is TikTok a data privacy nightmare? Yes. But Congress didn't pass a law banning those privacy invasions; they just banned one specific app. As long as TikTok is sold to a US company, they can keep right on doing all the privacy violations. TikTok will be sold to a US company, and nothing will fundamentally change about how it violates its users privacy. There also isn't really anything in the bill that will affect its filtering/editorial decisions. They can just sell it to some US citizens who are friendly to China and keep things all the same.
As a non-American, I see American sites spread all kinds of liberal propaganda, American supremacist propaganda, right-wing extremism, etc. So, it is deeply contradictory to turn a blind eye to...
As a non-American, I see American sites spread all kinds of liberal propaganda, American supremacist propaganda, right-wing extremism, etc. So, it is deeply contradictory to turn a blind eye to those, especially considering how "free" laws of US allow an extremely great deal of manifactured consent. Even in the worst case, in this context, China just does more overtly what US does more covertly.
It honestly surprises me, for US, how much even "progressive" spaces revert to nationalist lines when it comes to "national security" or "democracy". This move is nationalism. Endorsing it only plays into reifying the current powers structures and escalating conflict.
When I was younger, I used to look up to countries like USA, because they seemed more progressive and rational. But in time I realized how much nationalism and dehumanization is within its structures, and how much "the average goodhearted Joe" or "progressive and rational liberal" would endorse nationalist lines, detriment to the people from "shithole" countries like me. Even if fatally detrimental. This is partially why most people outside of the """Western""" ones don't give any credence to humanist and egalitarian claims of the "The West", even if they sometimes make sense. Because, if you don't stand to benefit from it, the deeply self-serving double standards dominate and color the perceptions.
Let me be more direct. When vast majority toes the line like this, we fear you. Your nationalism is terrifying. Your wars are terrifying. Your "democracy" is terrifying. Your "freedom" is terrifying. I don't want to be scared of people, and I don't want to reify the fucked up status quo, but if you continue to support moves like this, that is where the world will move toward. And, even from a self-serving perspective, USA is a failing empire. Its dominance will eventually pass away. A failing empire needs friends, more peace, not reigniting old flames of hostility. Not to mention that the world is only just starting to face several ecological systems crises that require a great deal of international cooperation.
Your comment and the support it got both saddened me and made me anxious. Apparently, even Tildes is not exempt from this. It's a melancholic and bitter feeling.
I do not support this move because of “nationalism” or some desire for America alone to dominate the world. America needs to work closely with the democracies of the world to prevent and deter the...
I do not support this move because of “nationalism” or some desire for America alone to dominate the world. America needs to work closely with the democracies of the world to prevent and deter the authoritarian countries of Russia, China etc. from dominating their neighbors through their nationalistic desires for conquest.
I want all nations to live in cooperative peace but as the Ukrainians know better than anyone, your strong desire for peace doesn’t mean anything when an authoritarian drives tanks across your border. At that point you either fight or die.
We should be doing everything we possibly can to make sure the people of Taiwan, South Korea, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, etc are not the next ones to be forced to fight or die. And you don’t do that by allowing authoritarians a direct propaganda tool.
I believe you believe this, but I don't believe the players of US politics believe this. There are several reasons. If the hearing in March was really that mindblowing about Tiktok's ability to...
I believe you believe this, but I don't believe the players of US politics believe this. There are several reasons.
If the hearing in March was really that mindblowing about Tiktok's ability to gather data, why not declassify the meeting? Why the secrecy? Surely it would be a giant supporting evidence to their case.
If the problem is Tiktok's data-gathering abilities, why not create laws to amend that, like EU did, instead of forcing a sell?
These aren't answerable by US lawmakers and their narrative. I think there are two reasonable explanations for this.
US government wants the data-gathering abilities of Tiktok, both for its own citizens and people from other countries, instead of letting it remain in the hands of China. This explains why they don't reveal the secrets, and why they are insistent on a US firm buying Tiktok.
It's empty posturing to score nationalist (patriotic) points, while also feeding the Red Scare. Former public hearings and such didn't give the impression that US senators were knowledgeable about internet and such, and it could be that they just saw some usual data-gathering activies in the March hearing (like practically every big US tech company does), and decided it was awful. It could be a mix of both Red Scare politics and ignorance. However, this does not explain why they didn't declassify.
This is partially why I think it's nationalist and self-serving. Time and again I saw US politicians (and citizens) talk about values and democracy and such, while fucking up the world for self-serving reasons. The citizens may believe the reasons put forward by politicians, but that is the thing with ideology. It disguises things so that they are easier to defend or attack. I don't see any particular reason why this is different. The things that you mentioned are the Great Euphemisms of US international politics. US, as a state, is not a "force of good" many US citizens think it to be. And it's not because it doesn't defeat its enemies.
Edit: Again, to be more clear, the scary part is that you sincerely believe you are supporting something good. The self-righteous US international politics did and does so much harm.
I don’t know why you think data gathering is the primary concern when at every point I have articulated that the problem is TikTok’s use as a propaganda tool directly controlled by the CCP. I...
I don’t know why you think data gathering is the primary concern when at every point I have articulated that the problem is TikTok’s use as a propaganda tool directly controlled by the CCP.
I don’t know why you are quoting “force for good” when I never stated that America is somehow always righteous and good in any of my posts.
I feel like you are arguing with an idea of America and Americans that you have in your mind and not what I am saying. Vague statements about how America isn’t always good is not engaging with the issue at hand, given the active threat of authoritarian countries to peace.
Is your solution that America should sit and watch China conquer Taiwan and Russia subjugate Eastern Europe because America did things you didn’t like in the past? I’m not sure what you really want here other than pretending that the United States is the only country with agency.
If China were still acting as friendly as it did under rulers previous to Xi Jinping this wouldn’t even be on the table, regardless of the fact that American social media has been banned in China for over a decade.
You don’t see the the United States forcing the sale of Spotify because they’re owned by Europeans or shouting about how they are going to invade Canada because they both come from English heritage.
The 90’s are over, the United States is no longer the superpower that can basically single handily determine the outcome of international events. That is why I have said over and over and over that America must work with democracies around the world against authoritarian states.
You won't necessarily like the answer, but the reason the decisions and planning didn't happen in public was to avoid lobbying from Tiktok. There have been behind the scenes bipartisan...
You won't necessarily like the answer, but the reason the decisions and planning didn't happen in public was to avoid lobbying from Tiktok. There have been behind the scenes bipartisan negotiations and informal assurances about data security from Tiktok for more than a year. The thing is, no one involved trusted a corporation to just protect US data out of good will, and there were fears about Tiktok developing a PR and legal strategy to fight the bill if they watched the sausage being made.
I’m a government contractor with a security clearance, and actually am a derivative classifier. Classification is complicated. Here is one of our marking resources. This doesn’t even go into...
On the political side, a TikTok ban is what both sides can agree on. Both the GOP and the Silicon Valley Dems would oppose a GDPR-type regulation, whereas only certain progressive Dems oppose a TikTok ban.
The irony is a little thick there. Switch the word 'Ukraine' for 'Iraq' or 'Honduras' (I won't say the G word) and the actor portraying the antagonist in your story is... Well.. thus the irony.
The irony is a little thick there. Switch the word 'Ukraine' for 'Iraq' or 'Honduras' (I won't say the G word) and the actor portraying the antagonist in your story is... Well.. thus the irony.
Nope. That's not what Whataboutism is. You're trying to make an argument based on evocative language, invoking scary ideas like 'Nationalism,' 'Authoritarianism' to describe 'the bad guys,' while...
Nope. That's not what Whataboutism is.
You're trying to make an argument based on evocative language, invoking scary ideas like 'Nationalism,' 'Authoritarianism' to describe 'the bad guys,' while evoking 'nice sounding' words like 'cooperative peace' to describe 'the good guys,' and I am, politely, calling horseshit.
The US can't have it both ways. It's either driven by principle or acting in self interest. And, for the record, I think all nations act in self interest. The destabilization of the Middle East and Central America were driven by an economic 'need.' So it is. I'm not one to judge... But wrapping that history up in a warm fabric of principled idealism? It's disingenuous, at best. Or, to refrain my earlier descriptor, horseshit.
China is bad for having designs on Taiwan? Yes! It is! But how exactly do you think your gas prices are what they are? The kettle is black. So is the pot.
And neither pot not kettle are doing much for this 'cooperative peace' you're evoking.
It is Whataboutism to the letter. The United States is a democracy that depending on it's leadership has acted both in principle and self interest at different times in history. That the US...
That's not what Whataboutism is.
It is Whataboutism to the letter.
The US can't have it both ways. It's either driven by principle or acting in self interest.
The United States is a democracy that depending on it's leadership has acted both in principle and self interest at different times in history. That the US engaged in a stupid, pointless war in Iraq does not change the facts of today that authoritarians are seeking to conquer their neighbors and pushing the world dangerously close to another world war. Opposing that horrific cause is in fact a very good and right thing to do regardless of bad actions of the past.
The United States has led the global coalition of support against Russia working with worldwide allies to impose sanctions, providing massive amounts of military aid and intelligence to Ukraine. That the US did bad things in it's past does not take away from doing good right now TODAY when it matters most.
"You can't be doing a good thing now because you did a bad thing before" is a ridiculous argument, it's like saying the US can never have done any wrong because it did good in joining the cause to defeat the axis in World War 2. It's nonsensical false equivalence.
Alternatively: The US is using Ukraine to engage in a proxy war with the USSR and prevent a loss of geopolitical influence in East Europe. Like Vietnam. Like Afghanistan. Like Korea. Still not...
Alternatively: The US is using Ukraine to engage in a proxy war with the USSR and prevent a loss of geopolitical influence in East Europe. Like Vietnam. Like Afghanistan. Like Korea.
Still not wrong, it's a fine thing to do in self interest, we just get there without all the posturing and huffpuff...
If you truly believe that self interest is the only motivation that exists in geopolitics I don't know what to tell you, it's never in anyone's self interest to have a world war but we've already...
If you truly believe that self interest is the only motivation that exists in geopolitics I don't know what to tell you, it's never in anyone's self interest to have a world war but we've already had two of those. Russia and it's people would be far better served trading their oil with the world and using that money to develop the country and economy rather than being cut off from world trade and sending hundreds of thousands of people to die because Putin wants to rebuild the Russian empire. China would be better served to continue it's economic rise by being the world's manufacturing powerhouse rather than throwing it all away to take over Taiwan.
The EU has sent almost as much aid to Ukraine at this point as the US, is the EU also engaged in a self interested proxy war for geopolitical influence? Or do you think maybe they have legitimate concern that they are the next target of an authoritarian on a warpath of conquest? Is it possible that things that are in your self interest are also morally right?
I don't want to get too deep into the weeds here, but I just want to add that self-interest can come in many competing ways, some of which very much aligned-by-design with principles. It is in the...
I don't want to get too deep into the weeds here, but I just want to add that self-interest can come in many competing ways, some of which very much aligned-by-design with principles.
It is in the EU's short term interest to play nice while Russia conquers Ukraine. No added defense expenditure. No problems with gas prices. It is also in our long and medium term interest to quickly aid Ukraine in defending itself, because in a longer term, the Russian bear will be hungry again. So you could either argue that the EU assisting Ukraine is in violation of its interests, or not, depending on which interests you identify. "A stable democracy" "sovereignty from China" "no WW3" are all interests of the US, and are all nicely aligned with stated idealist goals.
The interests that drive decisions like these are too complex to simply point at the first thing that seems plausible and run with it. And yes, if you drill down deep enough, every idealist motivation is always just dressed up self-interest. But that's neither a bad thing nor a surprise: If a hypothetical very-idealist country wanted peace, love and trade for all of mankind, they get a benefit out of that: Their people get to export their goods to a large market, buy from a variety of international goods and travel all over without fear. Plus they don't die in wars. Very selfish indeed. Perhaps it behooves us to consider whether those selfish interests affect others positively or negatively.
Every country exists to preserve the power of the government. In democracies, they exist to improve the lives of their citizens. Every democracy should be aligning its foreign policy to improve or...
Every country exists to preserve the power of the government. In democracies, they exist to improve the lives of their citizens. Every democracy should be aligning its foreign policy to improve or maintain the quality of life of its citizens. The US thinks that international cooperation can be a good way to maintain the current global order, but ultimately the US is trying to maintain its global power. If a different strategy becomes more effective, an effective government will adopt it.
I think many individuals in "The West" do want better lives for everyone around the world, but I don't think the majority are willing to sacrifice their quality of life for it.
I don't think 'because India did it' gives weight to your argument here... India's trendline over the last decade or so has been, at best, debatable, and at worst troublesome, when it comes to...
I don't think 'because India did it' gives weight to your argument here... India's trendline over the last decade or so has been, at best, debatable, and at worst troublesome, when it comes to their freedom of press, the relationship between press and government, and how certain kinds of thinking are systematically suppressed by the two.
India banning Tiktok, in my opinion, says more about the current power structures in India than it does about Tiktok.
To be clear, I'm not defending Tiktok. I just want to separate the viable arguments from the chaff.
From the perspective of an EU citizen, I think most people can somewhat agree on the content of the decision, but not on the true reasoning behind it. The US decision, I think, seems to outsiders...
From the perspective of an EU citizen, I think most people can somewhat agree on the content of the decision, but not on the true reasoning behind it.
The US decision, I think, seems to outsiders to have put economic interests first, and national security a close second, despite the public claims.
And since the EU bodies do appear to
not have a or multiple potential competitor companies
have less of a military presence for a potential attack on Taiwan1
not have fully realized the threat of cyber-propaganda yet
typically be the first party to decide such bans or regulations, ahead of the US
… I somehow don’t see a ban here coming so soon, if at all. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, though.
1: Despite having just as much, if not higher, of an interest in its independence than the US. Seriously, we should do more to both defend Taiwan and drastically (more-than-planned) increase independent chip production.
Seeing people's reactions to this online really goes to show how addicting these platforms are. Lots of people are bringing up valid concerns that I don't want to discredit, but other people seem...
Seeing people's reactions to this online really goes to show how addicting these platforms are. Lots of people are bringing up valid concerns that I don't want to discredit, but other people seem to be having meltdowns over not being able to watch TikTok anymore.
Separate from any concerns over censoring free speech, I wonder how many former TikTok users will feel happier once the app has been unavailable for a while.
Totally anecdotal, but it really does feel like tiktok is constantly pushing whatever anti-US narrative is trending at the time really hard. Right now its some of the most insane pro-hamas,...
Totally anecdotal, but it really does feel like tiktok is constantly pushing whatever anti-US narrative is trending at the time really hard. Right now its some of the most insane pro-hamas, anti-israel talking points that keep flooding my feed despite me literally never engaging with them, swiping off them immediately, and never subscribing to those types of channels. And, of course, the whole 'a message from tiktok about how the US is trying to trample your rights' stuff that people unironically believe.
I do fear the effect of a super popular platform being controlled by a hostile foreign power, that has the compounding affect of swaying public opinion, causing more anti-US content, causing more swaying of opinion, ad infinum. And having read about how China operates, one would be delusional to think they are not in control of Tiktok
I was going to make this a top-level comment, but since there are enough of those and my point is relevant here… Pretty much everyone who supports the divestiture in this thread is concerned about...
it really does feel like tiktok is constantly pushing whatever anti-US narrative is trending at the time…
compounding affect of swaying public opinion, causing more anti-US content, causing more swaying of opinion, ad infinum
I was going to make this a top-level comment, but since there are enough of those and my point is relevant here…
Pretty much everyone who supports the divestiture in this thread is concerned about propaganda as if the main threat is that studios in Xinjiang and Bejing start cranking out short dances supporting an invasion of Taiwan. That's not how TikTok would be used to influence American opinions. Instead, they'd be given the order to spotlight domestic malcontents who oppose the current thing, whatever the current thing is, using their 1A rights to express their genuine (even if insane) opinions. Far more effective than "How do you do, my fellow patriotic Americans?"
You seem to be the first one to spell it out clearly.
'a message from TikTok about how the US is trying to trample your rights' stuff that people unironically believe.
They unironically believe it because it's true. The bill is trampling on the right of free association, for starters. They want to corral everyone to view the regime-approved narrative as the truth (same as Xi's government does to the Chinese people: the difference is that the US doesn't get as petty and aggressive about punishing domestic malcontents to anywhere near the same degree as China or the USSR or the CCCP).
Which narrative is that? Each side has some radically divergent narratives right now, and the argument that each side is saying the same thing in different ways has never been remotely convincing...
They want to corral everyone to view the regime-approved narrative as the truth
Which narrative is that? Each side has some radically divergent narratives right now, and the argument that each side is saying the same thing in different ways has never been remotely convincing when one side is claiming that they need to purge the federal government of the other side's traitors who "stole" an election.
In the US, it depends on who won that various elections as well as the personality priority quirks of executive branch appointments; in (or from, if we’re discussing foreign influence) China, it’s...
In the US, it depends on who won that various elections as well as the personality priority quirks of executive branch appointments; in (or from, if we’re discussing foreign influence) China, it’s the message Xi & his CCP friends wishes to push.
They should just close it rather than sell it, and throw down messages explaining what happened so ~170M people will be very pissed off and know where to direct their anger. The whole thing has...
They should just close it rather than sell it, and throw down messages explaining what happened so ~170M people will be very pissed off and know where to direct their anger.
The whole thing has been another transparent attempt at Republican media takeover anyway. The Facebook/Instagram empire is in the hands of a conservative, Musk seized control of Twitter recently, and now this. It's clearly an attempt at partisan control of mass communications to shape discourse away from left-leaning talk.
I mean both votes are bipartisan. If it passes into law, Democratic president Biden needs to sign off on it. The idea that it’s a Republican plot of some kind doesn’t really make sense. Is the...
I mean both votes are bipartisan. If it passes into law, Democratic president Biden needs to sign off on it. The idea that it’s a Republican plot of some kind doesn’t really make sense.
Is the Zuck a conservative? While I wouldn’t call him bleeding heart liberal, seems a bit strong to say it’s “in the hands of a conservative”?
The democratic party is a conservative party. While this is done under the guise of a republican conservative bill, the fact that it is bipartisan is testament to how conservative the democratic...
The democratic party is a conservative party. While this is done under the guise of a republican conservative bill, the fact that it is bipartisan is testament to how conservative the democratic party really is. I don't disagree with you that the aforementioned narrative doesn't make sense I just think it was worded in a way that presumes understanding that the democrats aren't actually left leaning. I do agree with the sentiment that it is pushing media and communication into conservative control to as redwall said shape discourse away from left-leaning talk.
From TFA: A sinister plot? Maybe not. I could certainly say that it's some garbage added on to something actually important. Funding Ukraine is important. Now the Biden admin is at risk of 170m...
The idea that it’s a Republican plot of some kind doesn’t really make sense.
From TFA:
In a move that helped fast-track the measure, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson bundled it with funding for Ukraine, creating a package that most senators would be very unlikely to oppose.
A sinister plot? Maybe not. I could certainly say that it's some garbage added on to something actually important. Funding Ukraine is important. Now the Biden admin is at risk of 170m people getting politicized against it via the tiktok app because of this bundling.
We’ve needed an amendment to enforce single subject bills for my entire life. Too much gets snuck through in budget bills and other doorstopper legislation.
We’ve needed an amendment to enforce single subject bills for my entire life. Too much gets snuck through in budget bills and other doorstopper legislation.
I mean single subject bills just wouldn't get passed. At least in the case of this bill that banned Tiktok and funded US defence priorities, each section was a separate vote in the house.
I mean single subject bills just wouldn't get passed. At least in the case of this bill that banned Tiktok and funded US defence priorities, each section was a separate vote in the house.
If there's one unilateral bipartisan issue, it's insuring the military industrial complex always gets its cut. The tiktok ban probably wouldn't have gotten traction though.
If there's one unilateral bipartisan issue, it's insuring the military industrial complex always gets its cut.
The tiktok ban probably wouldn't have gotten traction though.
It's a bit off topic, but I'm actually in favor of increasing defence funding for Taiwan and Ukraine. Israel is a whole can of worms, and I'd rather we stopped giving them offensive weapons as...
It's a bit off topic, but I'm actually in favor of increasing defence funding for Taiwan and Ukraine. Israel is a whole can of worms, and I'd rather we stopped giving them offensive weapons as long as Bibi is in charge and actively telling the US to fuck off.
US military funding in absolute, inflation-adjusted terms has been flat-ish since WW2 ended, and it has mostly dropped as a percentage of GDP...ignoring Bush's misadventures in the middle east.
I think a Tiktok sale bill probably would've passed even without the defence funding based on the vote margins. Turns out ByteDance telling users to call their legislators just made lawmakers more suspicious of Tiktok's influence in the US.
That's a much more convoluted view than what's really happening. As the poster below notes, this bill has broad bipartisan support, Zuck isn't really a conservative, and Google, a company that...
That's a much more convoluted view than what's really happening. As the poster below notes, this bill has broad bipartisan support, Zuck isn't really a conservative, and Google, a company that most people regard as left of center, owns one of the major competitors to tiktok.
The real reason is just good old fashioned protectionism. US companies don't want domestic dollars going to foreign platforms, and they've spent a ton of money to try to get the US government to step in on behalf of their profits, which they've done. No one with deep pockets is going to stand up for tiktok except bytedance, and because bytedance can't vote and is legally severely limited in how much they can influence American politics, this is the result.
Or it could be exactly what it says on the tin and TikTok is actually tied closely to a foreign influence operation and is funneling sensitive information, including location data about US...
Or it could be exactly what it says on the tin and TikTok is actually tied closely to a foreign influence operation and is funneling sensitive information, including location data about US government officials, to Chinese intelligence.
I don't know why it would have access to US government officials data. It's already banned on US government phones. And yeah, maybe it is tied to a foreign influence operation, but the US is...
I don't know why it would have access to US government officials data. It's already banned on US government phones.
And yeah, maybe it is tied to a foreign influence operation, but the US is ostensibly a free country, and that means that its people are generally allowed to use products made by whoever they want. We don't block rt.com to prevent Americans from being influenced by dangerous Russian ideas, we don't stop people from watching Al Jazeera to prevent Quatari influence in the US, and we shouldn't block free citizens from using an app they choose to engage with. It's a dangerous path to go down when US approved media and platforms are the only ones Americans are legally allowed to interact with, with nebulous security concerns and hypotheticals as justifications. I think most lawmakers would agree on the face with that statement.
On the other hand though, the US gov is not exactly shy about protectionism when it comes to China. We already have heavy tarriffs on many Chinese imports. It's not a coincidence that China's one major export that can't effectively be tariffed is instead functionally banned.
We’d all like it if people only did business on their business phones but we all know that’s not how the world works. Not if the application is breaking laws we can’t. We also can’t do anything...
I don't know why it would have access to US government officials data. It's already banned on US government phones.
We’d all like it if people only did business on their business phones but we all know that’s not how the world works.
And yeah, maybe it is tied to a foreign influence operation, but the US is ostensibly a free country, and that means that its people are generally allowed to use products made by whoever they want.
Not if the application is breaking laws we can’t. We also can’t do anything with outlets that operate in sanctioned countries.
If anything we should also be slapping Facebook and Twitter with fines for enabling these things too.
It's a dangerous path to go down when US approved media and platforms are the only ones Americans are legally allowed to interact with
Less dangerous than having a foreign influence operation acting as a disinformation funnel. The security concerns are hardly nebulous, they have literally been caught exfiltrating data to intelligence services.
On the other hand though, the US gov is not exactly shy about protectionism when it comes to China. We already have heavy tarriffs on many Chinese imports.
About time. China’s been playing fast and loose with its currency markets and monetary policy, in violation of WTO rules, to goose its current accounts balance. A correction is long overdue and well within the American national interest.
I like to phrase it this way: "In the free market of ideas, stop having sour grapes that foreign propaganda won out over domestic propaganda."
And yeah, maybe it is tied to a foreign influence operation, but the US is ostensibly a free country, and that means that its people are generally allowed to use products made by whoever they want.
I like to phrase it this way: "In the free market of ideas, stop having sour grapes that foreign propaganda won out over domestic propaganda."
Correct. CCP won't let Bytedance divest it as that would be considered selling the company to a foreign entity, which isn't allowed. It's why there's tons of shell company games just to get a...
Correct.
CCP won't let Bytedance divest it as that would be considered selling the company to a foreign entity, which isn't allowed. It's why there's tons of shell company games just to get a Chinese company stock on the US stock exchange. CCP won't budge, let it go down as a lesson to other Chinese companies not to lean so heavily on US consumers.
This is more tit-for-tat about not having so much data in a non-allied country. Anyone complaining about fairness should go look at what it takes for a US tech company to have access to the Chinese market and pretty much every non-Chinese social media company is already banned in China. US and allied nations have to follow GDPR, a divestiture from a non-allied government owned data sink is a reasonable ask.
Yes, it does assist and is supported by US social media companies, but it's not the whole picture.
If a US citizen's data is going to be mined, it'll be mined by a US company and you'll like it!
What should happen is data not being weaponized, economized, against consumers and citizens. Obviously, that won't be addressed. This is what regulatory capture looks like. The many companies busy...
What should happen is data not being weaponized, economized, against consumers and citizens.
Obviously, that won't be addressed. This is what regulatory capture looks like. The many companies busy collecting and selling information are making sure Congress doesn't meddle. They use the profits and proceeds from all that data revenue to keep Congress critters, staffers, courts, agencies, agency staffers, and so on, they keep all those people on the payroll in some form. To make sure no meddling happens.
With TikTok, clearly the governments' data people eventually figured out all of TikTok's data was going to China. The US government figured it out and said "oh my, um, problem!" while the Chinese government figured it out and said "oh my, opportunity!" And China only gives a shit about China, which they've spent literally centuries demonstrating. Currently they're a somewhat hostile, somewhat xenophobic, possibly expansionist government. All a recipe for international conflict of some form.
One of the reasons all our data (individual consumers') needs to be firewalled and screened off to prevent it being used against us is what's happening with TikTok. All that data could be used to make money, which is what Facebook and Twitter and Microsoft and Google and Apple and about five dozen other companies do with it. Or, or rather and, that data can also be used to shape opinion.
It's one thing for opinion to be shaped to favor Apple, or favor a new VR headset, or annoying bullshit like that. It's quite another matter entirely for data to be used to shape global politics from the bottom up, which is what China has, is, and will be using it for. It's what Russa has been doing for several decades, and has gotten pretty good at in the past decade. China's doing it too now. Basically, every country's going to be doing it. Fucking Micronesia will be doing it, just it'll take them a little longer to spin up, and they probably won't be able to have the sway (resources) to elevate themselves to being the Crown Jewel of the Planet in the public's eyes.
We're past the era where you have to have your diplomats yell at their diplomats. Now we're in an era where your Office of Information takes a directive to ensure Government Initiative XYZ improves its favorables in the public image. Foreign public, domestic public, whatever. OI then does that, using all that data to shape and mold and tug public opinion accordingly.
No one should be doing it. But like AI it's out of the bag. The US government is doing it, even if they won't admit it. Right now they're probably only doing it a little to Americans, but that's not gonna hold. It's too much power, too alluring to disregard.
Political campaigns are starting to do it; that's one of the things some of AOC's crop of Congresscritters have been railing against their parties about. They're of the Information generation, having cut their teeth on Social Media, and have used their new ways to obtain office. Soon enough it'll be all the government departments. Sure it's sweet to think the Department of the Interior might use that power to ensure National Parks continue to be treasured and beloved by Americans, but the exact same power can ensure people who object to a new policy initiative, or a war, are shaped out of being opposition before they even have a chance to build an opposition movement.
Denying foreign governments direct access into American citizens via TikTok is, however distasteful, a matter of national security. Yes it sucks that our government is going to use that power against us, but that's a separate issue from letting China or Russia have such direct access. Sure they can get some of it, maybe even most of it, indirectly via the free market by purchasing it; but it complicates the path from source to them. Makes it more possible to monitor and measure what they're getting, when, how often, and makes it possible to become aware of what initiatives they're trying to use it all for.
What's probably going to happen over the next quarter century is every government does something similar. Every European Union country, for example, (if not the EU as a whole, as a directive to member countries), will probably attempt to set up guardrails and such to control what data about their people leaves the country. That might mean banning some large international companies, but it could just mean those companies each have to set up in-country offices to funnel their data through, or something vaguely in that ballpark.
But right now, TikTok is an arm of the Chinese Government. There is no private in China. The shit they do to their citizens is already bad enough. Letting them have an easy way to do it to Americans is not in American interests. It just isn't. If they want to do things with that data, they need to work harder to get it, one way or another. We shouldn't be standing by letting it be easy for them.
"In Communist China, they ban social media platforms to prevent citizens from seeing anything outside the government narrative!" Thus making it clear how often national security is in direct...
"In Communist China, they ban social media platforms to prevent citizens from seeing anything outside the government narrative!"
a matter of national security
Thus making it clear how often national security is in direct opposition to the freedom and security of the citizens contained therein.
As you point out, the US government almost certainly does this to Americans already. They don't like competition from foreign propaganda. Far better to have a well-regulated marketplace of ideas where wrongthink can be expunged before it spreads too far.
Unless it's labor, then they don't care if the platform is ultimately 99% outsourced to cheaper countries. As long as the CEO can vote in the US everyone else is expendable and just needs to...
US companies don't want domestic dollars going to foreign platforms
Unless it's labor, then they don't care if the platform is ultimately 99% outsourced to cheaper countries. As long as the CEO can vote in the US everyone else is expendable and just needs to consume.
I'm tired of the notion that America cares about it's people. Could have been a good opportunity to make its own version of GDPR, but this makes it clear what government really cares about, or at least is lobbied to care about.
Also, I discussed it beforehand, but reading precise bull shows a slight overreach. Technically, "platforms" is broad enough that there's a non-zero chance stuff like Genshin impact can also have such a target on its back.
I don't use TikTok, but I have come to agree with this. The time to ban it for being spyware was when it was first launched. Now it's one of the most liberal news sources, especially for the youth...
I don't use TikTok, but I have come to agree with this. The time to ban it for being spyware was when it was first launched. Now it's one of the most liberal news sources, especially for the youth vote. Biden signing this into law is not going to go well for younger voters who are TikTok users.
I'm a Democrat and a youth and I don't think this is going to silence liberal voices. TikTok didn't even exist 10 years ago and liberal voices were still being heard. I don't even use TikTok or...
I'm a Democrat and a youth and I don't think this is going to silence liberal voices. TikTok didn't even exist 10 years ago and liberal voices were still being heard. I don't even use TikTok or traditional social media and I feel plenty informed about politics and current events. Social media isn't even a good source of news. Algorithms don't allow for nuanced discussion. Issues get simplified down to black or white conflicts and it increases division in society.
I think all social media should have increased regulations to protect against polarization, but when TikTok is owned and operated in a foreign country, how could we enforce new regulations?
How can you say this so confidently right after you say that you don't even use TikTok? I do use it, and I see loads of nuanced discussion from a wide range of the political spectrum. I also see...
Algorithms don't allow for nuanced discussion. Issues get simplified down to black or white conflicts and it increases division in society.
How can you say this so confidently right after you say that you don't even use TikTok? I do use it, and I see loads of nuanced discussion from a wide range of the political spectrum. I also see so much good science content, so much clever comedy, so many differing views on gender, mental health, and economic issues. There are many many passionate creators making high quality content for TikTok – the only way one ends up in an echo chamber is if one creates it for themself, and that can just as easily be done on Reddit or Tildes or whatever other non-"traditional" social media you refer to.
Yeah I've said before that I get more adult ADHD education and affirmation, as well as more queer content (and fun D&D and nerd shit) on Tiktok than anywhere else. I am deeply suspicious of the...
Yeah I've said before that I get more adult ADHD education and affirmation, as well as more queer content (and fun D&D and nerd shit) on Tiktok than anywhere else. I am deeply suspicious of the protectionism involved here. There is not a viable replacement for the information and entertainment I get from Tiktok - I truly find Instagram incomprehensible and frustrating and YouTube works differently and the algorithm is bad. I don't trust Bytedance but I don't trust Google or Meta either.
The concern about possible propaganda if the US squares off with China over Taiwan is wild. As if the US and everyone else wouldn't be using propaganda too. As if people that disagree with a war must inherently be victims of propaganda but not the people that agree with it.
Maybe government officials should stop using it if it's so unsafe and reporting on their whereabouts.
That said, apparently the Senate legislation is poorly written and questionably enforceable.
I get where you're coming from in a moral perspective, but I don't think this is a strong argument as to why the US shouldn't force the sale of TikTok, from a national security perspective. It's...
As if the US and everyone else wouldn't be using propaganda too.
I get where you're coming from in a moral perspective, but I don't think this is a strong argument as to why the US shouldn't force the sale of TikTok, from a national security perspective. It's sort of like "why should the US try to stop someone from winning the war - as if the US wouldn't be trying to win the war too," you know?
As if people that disagree with a war must inherently be victims of propaganda but not the people that agree with it.
Same here. There's a big difference between a country's citizens having X opinion and a foreign government trying to covertly spread X opinion, from a national security perspective.
This is an argument for cutting the US from all external media though ultimately I also think all of this presupposes that being on Tiktok gets you propaganda AND that we're in a hot war with...
This is an argument for cutting the US from all external media though ultimately
I also think all of this presupposes that being on Tiktok gets you propaganda AND that we're in a hot war with China. Sure if that last bit happens (which, absolutely no thank you) there are wartime arguments to be made. But the hypothetical isn't compelling.
But personally I'd rather us act morally as a country as well. I know better but it'd be nice.
I'm not sure I agree with that - or at least, that's not what I meant to imply. There are degrees of justification; just because the US perceives a chinese media company as a threat, that doesn't...
This is an argument for cutting the US from all external media though ultimately
I'm not sure I agree with that - or at least, that's not what I meant to imply. There are degrees of justification; just because the US perceives a chinese media company as a threat, that doesn't mean that, say, the BBC is likewise threatening.
And finally, I don't think it needs to be a hot war, either. Just look at Russia's attempts to influence the elections of multiple European powers - this is all pre-war (e.g https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep21009.6.pdf).
But if the UK is opposed to US actions, Americans might be influenced by their coverage. And since Russia absolutely did try to do this without RussiaTok shouldn't all social media be controlled...
But if the UK is opposed to US actions, Americans might be influenced by their coverage. And since Russia absolutely did try to do this without RussiaTok shouldn't all social media be controlled too? I still don't see how blocking an app but not the website where you can view all the same videos as the app makes any sense, but if we want to be thorough you really have to block everything.
I'm not saying I don't think there is any possibility for harm in TikTok, on the contrary it's clear Facebook has facilitated harm and been a venue for propaganda daily, but I don't see anything that make me think "I shouldn't use this app, and it's existence is a danger to the US". I feel like first the argument was about the data of government officials, then the safety of our data is citizens, but the possibility of propaganda is really uncompelling to me. Especially after the past 8 years. (I'm not saying you're moving goalposts, but that the broader conversation keeps shifting)
And it feels like the conversation is shifting in part because those elected officials who even voted for the ban are still using the app. So now it can't be safety, it has to be hypothetical propaganda.
And it feels like most of it comes from people who've never used the app, and so it feels very much like old people talking about The YouTubes. If nothing else, this means that our government officials have done a really poor job of convincing their constituents that this makes sense. But people who disagree with this decision are accused of being teenagers. I actually really just think it's a ridiculous curtailing of freedom for very nebulous potential national security claims. And maybe I'm naive. But I also really don't want us to get into any sort of war with China. I'm pretty over wars in general. And it's very difficult to overcome individual experience without strong data.
I do suspect that much like Amazon directing you to purchase your Kindle books in a browser rather than in the app, all of a sudden Americans will find a very nice mobile web experience. Maybe not. I don't know how easy it is to upload from the web. Bytedance owns Capcut too, and that didn't get banned either afaik so they'll still have all that video data.
I'm sorry for rambling I just find the whole thing. Frustrating and truly. I'm unconvinced. I know that they theoretically would not be able to tell us everything. I don't feel like anyone's actually told us anything. Tildes should not be trying harder to argue for this law than the elected officials. And since it seems the strategy was intentional to avoid public backlash (if another post's claim was correct) then we should be mad about that.
Europe doesn’t seem to have a problem doing this. A company doesn’t have to based within a country for its operations within that country to be regulated.
I think all social media should have increased regulations to protect against polarization, but when TikTok is owned and operated in a foreign country, how could we enforce new regulations
Europe doesn’t seem to have a problem doing this. A company doesn’t have to based within a country for its operations within that country to be regulated.
Europe is a collection of like-minded democracies that we can negotiate and compromise with. China is not. We have lost many times in the past with intellectual property, foreign ownership of...
Europe is a collection of like-minded democracies that we can negotiate and compromise with. China is not. We have lost many times in the past with intellectual property, foreign ownership of companies, and Facebook being banned. This would not have been any different.
My point is that Europe has been successful at regulating tech companies not based within their borders, including TikTok. The mere fact that TikTok is operated by a foreign country, even one that...
My point is that Europe has been successful at regulating tech companies not based within their borders, including TikTok. The mere fact that TikTok is operated by a foreign country, even one that is at best a competitor and at worst an adversary, does not preclude regulation from working. The examples you give are a very different thing: an attempt by the US (for example) to influence how China interacts with western businesses within their own borders. I do not think you can extrapolate that to the converse, i.e. the US influencing how Chinese companies operate outside of China's borders. Europe has seen success so far in doing so.
Maybe that would all change down the road if the US and China continue to escalate their competition. But I see no reason to think that for the time being it would not work. That is my only point here.
That you use the word "regulate" tells me that we see the US's fears here differently. Europe being successful or not with regulating TikTok is not the beacon that the US should be looking toward....
That you use the word "regulate" tells me that we see the US's fears here differently. Europe being successful or not with regulating TikTok is not the beacon that the US should be looking toward. Sure, there's some concerns about data collection and regulating where data is stored helps alleviate, but not eliminate, the potential that personal data on a massive scale can be used for targeted blackmail. The real fear, however, is that TikTok's reach right now and in the future can enable the Chinese government to push an agenda.
If the owners of TikTok were subject to US jurisdiction, then they could be held liable for any egregious acts. If TikTok remains owned by a foreign government that has repeatedly demonstrated that they do not want to conduct business on reasonable terms, then what will we do when TikTok is used for propaganda in the future? If we wait even longer to ban it, the backlash becomes greater. It's best to nip it in the bud now while we still can.
Put another way, TikTok can be regulated all you want up until there's a China-Taiwan showdown and then it can be flipped to spewing propaganda. What then, and how did regulations between now and that future help?
We have an entire rightwing media system that lied so long and so hard that a substantial portion of the country was, and is still, convinced that the 2020 election was stolen. This resulted in...
The real fear, however, is that TikTok's reach right now and in the future can enable the Chinese government to push an agenda.
We have an entire rightwing media system that lied so long and so hard that a substantial portion of the country was, and is still, convinced that the 2020 election was stolen. This resulted in the literal storming of the US Capitol building by a massive crowd of angry, violent rioters and militants.
When Fox News is shut down by the US government, I will be willing to consider if we should next regulate TikTok. Note, there isn't an allegation that TikTok has actually engaged in a massive psyop against the US population; it's just all hypotheticals. Meanwhile, the right wing media sphere literally engaged in a massive psyop that almost overthrew our democracy. And we're here worrying about hypotheticals.
There are two separate concerns here. One is US customers' data being controlled and accessible by "foreign adversaries", to use the bill's language, and the other is China having a way to reach a...
There are two separate concerns here. One is US customers' data being controlled and accessible by "foreign adversaries", to use the bill's language, and the other is China having a way to reach a large number of Americans and the potential use of that reach for propaganda purposes in the event of a hot war between China and Taiwan (and/or the US). The former concern is very much addressable by regulation that has not even really been attempted yet, let alone attempted and failed. The latter is not relevant until a hot war actually occurs.
Put another way, TikTok can be regulated all you want up until there's a China-Taiwan showdown and then it can be flipped to spewing propaganda. What then, and how did regulations between now and that future help?
Ban it then. I completely disagree the backlash would only grow until then. A large majority of Americans support Taiwan and would be completely opposed to a Chinese takeover. In the event that happens, I suspect there would be almost no backlash to banning the app then. There is of course no way of knowing for sure, but history shows us that Americans are very much inclined towards "rally around the flag" type reactions to global conflicts. Even a bill in which a ban is triggered by the outbreak of hostilities I think would have very little opposition.
Anyway, I remember when the "Great Firewall of China" was a thing people talked about, or China banning Facebook as you mentioned, and there the reasons were also concerns about foreign information (or propaganda). The logic here is exactly the same, and it doesn't sit well with me.
The latter is not relevant until a hot war occurs, but you have to prepare before the hot war occurs. Russia, the EU, and Nordstream as an example of not preparing. Maybe China-Taiwan is enough to...
The latter is not relevant until a hot war occurs, but you have to prepare before the hot war occurs. Russia, the EU, and Nordstream as an example of not preparing. Maybe China-Taiwan is enough to convince people at that time that TikTok can be banned. But what about situations that aren't as clear cut?
If China at least played by a similar ruleset as the US, then I would agree with you, but they don't. You can't let another country ban you from bringing in information while they get to export whatever they want. It's a no-win-only-lose scenario for the US if they did so.
Single issue voters are extremely myopic and I can definitely see a lot of youth turning over this issue. But I guess that's why this all happens after the election. That's for future democrats to...
Single issue voters are extremely myopic and I can definitely see a lot of youth turning over this issue. But I guess that's why this all happens after the election. That's for future democrats to handle!
It's almost as if they don't believe their own marketing team that a fascist takeover is imminent if they lose this most important election in our lifetimes. As if the last election wasn't also...
It's almost as if they don't believe their own marketing team that a fascist takeover is imminent if they lose this most important election in our lifetimes. As if the last election wasn't also the most important election in our lifetimes. They're aware that it'll cost votes (that's why the due date is after Election Day), but feel safe that they'll still be around to win office again if news that it passed with bipartisan support costs too many and they lose the election.
That’s why the deadline is after the election. Biden is re-elected? He’s already won. Trump pulls a Grover Cleveland? Look at this mess that happened under the fascist orange man (pay no attention...
That’s why the deadline is after the election. Biden is re-elected? He’s already won. Trump pulls a Grover Cleveland? Look at this mess that happened under the fascist orange man (pay no attention to who signed the law or the fact Congress voted on it)!
NYT's Hardfork podcast did a discussion on the reasons for the banning of Tiktok (episode here but obv use whatever podcast platform you enjoy). It occurs about 19 min in and to me the most...
the idea of a foreign entity having such a huge influence over US media is troubling. The last time this came up was with well known Aussie asshole and piece of shit Rupert Murdoch and he had to comply by becoming an American citizen. We have laws in the US banning foreign ownership of media outlets which 100% applies to Tiktok
the fact that similar US companies don't have the same kind of access to China that we allow Chinese firms. Facebook, for all it's shit, is banned in China.
Side note, I've heard people stating that their concern is that this will further dampen youth vote turnout, which was already struggling before Gaza/Israel, but to be honest, I doubt there will be that many single issue voters on Tiktok and if they are, like... really? Tiktok is the most important thing in your life?
True. I guess my expectation is that those who are a single issue voter on Tiktok probably aren't that politically engaged. The straw that breaks the camels back? I could see that but as a...
True. I guess my expectation is that those who are a single issue voter on Tiktok probably aren't that politically engaged. The straw that breaks the camels back? I could see that but as a singular issue, I personally can't see it moving the needle. Though given how close things were in 2016 and 2020, I suppose that matters.
For sure. Can't forget about the real stolen election, 2000, either when it comes to close votes. fun factIf Ohio had gone D by a slim majority in '04, we could have had two elections in a row...
Though given how close things were in 2016 and 2020, I suppose that matters.
For sure. Can't forget about the real stolen election, 2000, either when it comes to close votes.
fun factIf Ohio had gone D by a slim majority in '04, we could have had two elections in a row where the Electoral College disagreed with the popular vote AND made it a bipartisan problem.
I have bad news, that wasn't a fun fact at all and something I buried long ago. Fun facts are like... broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts and even gai lan are cultivars of the same plant species,...
I have bad news, that wasn't a fun fact at all and something I buried long ago. Fun facts are like... broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts and even gai lan are cultivars of the same plant species, brassica oleracea!
I don't believe so but I think the term they used was broadcast outlet vs media outlet. Regardless, the nature of Tildes vs Tiktok is quite different so there's likely some legal daylight between...
I don't believe so but I think the term they used was broadcast outlet vs media outlet. Regardless, the nature of Tildes vs Tiktok is quite different so there's likely some legal daylight between the two, though I am not a lawyer. I'm also trying to think of any other foreign owned company that has a similar kind of ginormous market share in the US like Tiktok but I'm drawing blanks.
If Murdoch owned Instagram I don't think the law would have required him to be a citizen. I guess I'm saying I don't see how Tiktok is lumped in there and let's say Reddit or Tildes isn't. Tildes...
If Murdoch owned Instagram I don't think the law would have required him to be a citizen. I guess I'm saying I don't see how Tiktok is lumped in there and let's say Reddit or Tildes isn't. Tildes is obviously much smaller but size doesn't change the type of website it is. All of these, function off of primarily user created posts/videos/discussions, with tiktok's main functional difference of having a built in shop that they presumably get a cut of. But Facebook definitely has that option too. Tiktok pays some creators (sometimes) a cut of their revenue but other media sites have that. Is YouTube in this category?
If we reclassify TikTok but not the others - and yeah text based Reddit and Tildes would count if newspapers would count - I think we're being intellectually dishonest. Regardless of whether the ban is the right move or not.
And after all this if I can watch Tiktok on my browser, what has been achieved? If I can't, then we want our government blocking websites too?
Form and function wasn't the point as media has evolved. Web 2.0 is barely 20 years old and user generated content at this scale is only the newest form which will be replaced once we move into...
Form and function wasn't the point as media has evolved. Web 2.0 is barely 20 years old and user generated content at this scale is only the newest form which will be replaced once we move into Zucks apocalyptic metaverse hell or some shit. The point is the fact that Tiktok is owned and operated by a foreign company with ties to a government that used it to crack down on domestic dissent and who regularly uses companies to execute political deeds. There's a reason why China is considered by the US government to be an adversary.
I'm not saying Meta/Reddit/Google are "better" than Tiktok, they're all kinda shit and have made the world a worse place. But Meta/Facebook/IG is US owned as are Reddit and Google/Youtube. Tildes, while Canadian owned, is a speck in the landscape internet landscape and barely scrapes above the top 8,000 sites visited per day. If Tildes reached a similar sized audience and influence as Tiktok, I'd absolutely want it the US to force it to transition to US ownership.
But you said: My point explicitly wasn't whether we should ban the app or how bad China is. It was that this wasn't consistent and that makes it dishonest. If Tiktok is a media outlet, then so are...
But you said:
We have laws in the US banning foreign ownership of media outlets which 100% applies to Tiktok
My point explicitly wasn't whether we should ban the app or how bad China is. It was that this wasn't consistent and that makes it dishonest.
If Tiktok is a media outlet, then so are the other companies you mentioned AND so is Tildes. Yeah Tildes is much smaller, but that is irrelevant to whether it's a media outlet. Maybe the law cares about the size but that's why I asked if the podcast clarified why Tiktok is a media outlet by the applicable legal standards.
I'm not great at reading FCC regs, but my understanding is that a) it definitely applies to broadcast ownership and b) that the FCC really doesn't regulate apps or the internet basically at all. Reuters mentioning this during a previous "ban Tiktok" news moment
And I can't even find evidence this applies to newspapers for example so it isn't even a media outlet policy because the FCC doesn't regulate that. I couldn't find comparable regulations through other agencies for newspapers, but instead found a lot of concern about foreign ownership of farmland.
So I don't think this applies to Tiktok at all, unless it's a different reg than the FCC one. I don't think Tiktok qualifies as either a broadcast station or media outlet. This new law is the only thing that makes it illegal.
Temu and Shein are still allowed though, so it doesn't seem to be the ownership, or the access to location and shopping habits and financial information either.
At this point, I'm not sure we're going to come to any agreement on this so I'm going to leave it here with this clarification on foreign ownership of media. Concerning the FCC's primacy, the "FCC...
At this point, I'm not sure we're going to come to any agreement on this so I'm going to leave it here with this clarification on foreign ownership of media.
Concerning the FCC's primacy, the "FCC has regulated the ownership of mass media outlets since the 1920s.". Part of the problem is that the speed of regulation and thus the purview/enforcement of the FCC has not kept up with how quickly communications has changed. As previous stated, rules for old media required Murdoch to become an American citizen and revoke his Australian citizenship back in 1985 in order to own US television stations. As the story states
Under federal regulations an alien may not own more than 20% of a broadcast license.
Concerning new media, the issue is the fact the laws haven't kept up with the times. FCC chairwoman discussed this
FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel finds it shocking that U.S. law prevents foreign ownership of old media assets but has nothing to say about new media — including wildly popular TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company.
“We don’t have authority over apps like TikTok,” she told a gathering at the Paley Center in NYC today. “That being said, what strikes me most is that for decades we’ve had policies in the Communications Act that would prevent, for instance, a Chinese national or a Chinese company from owning our nation’s broadcast television stations. We would say that’s unacceptable, right? I’d be kicked out of my job if I decided otherwise. And yet here we have something that’s arguably one the newer forms of media and there there is zero oversight. I think that is stunning.”
So you're right, doesn't regulate internet content (free speech and what not) but it does absolutely regulate media ownership. In addition, it appears that since the 1996 Telecom Act, enforcing whatever regulations exist concerning the internet fall under the FCC. So given the previous precedent with old media, it's clear to me that same rules should apply to new media. The point here is foreign ownership over media. Temu and Shein are foreign, yes, but they aren't media. Youtube/Facebook/Meta/Instagram are new media but they're domestically owned.
Do I feel this is the best approach to address this problem? Not really. Something like internet and data privacy laws would be way better. Hell banning of Tiktok isn't even on my priority of things I'd wish this government would address.
It was not clear to me that this was just your opinion and not what the podcast said. I understand your opinion on what you'd like to be the case but I thought you were stating authoritatively...
It was not clear to me that this was just your opinion and not what the podcast said.
I understand your opinion on what you'd like to be the case but I thought you were stating authoritatively that Tiktok was covered by the above provisions. But if Tiktok were covered, AFAICT Tildes would have to be covered too. The FCC covers radio stations of all sizes.
I think that's not what we want broadly on the internet, and while I don't agree that the clock app should be banned (and I think the US is about to get a nice mobile website experience) my only point in this thread was that the quoted original statement was not an accurate description of the current facts.
I hope this somehow eventually leads to the downfall of the algorithmic internet. I absolutely despise social media over the last couple of years. I first noticed it on Instagram with the "for...
I hope this somehow eventually leads to the downfall of the algorithmic internet. I absolutely despise social media over the last couple of years.
I first noticed it on Instagram with the "for you" page, but now those types of videos pop up when you're just scrolling through your feed. Then reddit started doing the "posts you might like". Now, every time I open Facebook I get bombarded with posts from flat earth groups and no-name "influencers" sharing homophobic memes. I hate how these sites think they can give us content based on what they think we like. Just because I'm a 30 something white male who likes science doesn't mean I want to see all this anti science bullshit.
Then, when I block the groups, and click "see less like this", it gives me posts from those groups a few weeks later. I'm fucking tired of it, let me cater my online experience to how I want it instead of shoving these posts I obviously don't like down my throat.
I agree that most of the companies are shit at this, and tbh I think that's why they see Tiktok as a threat. Their algorithm is widely considered excellent and in my experience that holds up. I...
I agree that most of the companies are shit at this, and tbh I think that's why they see Tiktok as a threat. Their algorithm is widely considered excellent and in my experience that holds up. I very rarely get weird recommends and if I do, a "dislike" pretty much stops it (ads get a bit wonkier but the majority of the time it's things I already pay for like Dropout. Meanwhile YouTube thinks I speak Spanish and have an infant. )
I get why that isn't appealing for some but I'd rather get to see things I enjoy (including spooky lake month) and topics I'm interested in when I'm casually scrolling. I can seek out specific info there or elsewhere when I'm trying to broaden my perspectives. And tbh things like anti-racism is absolutely did broaden my perspectives on Tiktok
I understand the appeal, I just wish there was a way to stop it. If only they had a setting to turn off suggested content. I also extremely dislike the way that Facebook has made "pages" into...
I understand the appeal, I just wish there was a way to stop it. If only they had a setting to turn off suggested content.
I also extremely dislike the way that Facebook has made "pages" into influencer content, and then allow those pages to comment on articles and other stuff. Facebook was really about connecting with your friends, now it feels like just another influencer social media site.
Yeah I get that. Facebook is a place I am mostly because most of my family and friends are there. And it's easier to stay in touch there than anywhere else. And local neighborhood/city groups with...
Yeah I get that. Facebook is a place I am mostly because most of my family and friends are there. And it's easier to stay in touch there than anywhere else. And local neighborhood/city groups with (surprisingly) less racism than Nextdoor.
If it weren’t for pages and groups, the blue app (as it’s called by Meta employees) would be about as culturally relevant as MySpace. I first noticed the shift sometime around 2015Q3. That’s when...
If it weren’t for pages and groups, the blue app (as it’s called by Meta employees) would be about as culturally relevant as MySpace. I first noticed the shift sometime around 2015Q3. That’s when my news feed stopped being a place for fun(ny) updates from my friends. At first, it got taken over by wedding & baby photos from people I haven’t thought about in five years: their friends & family understandably went nuts on that like button and pushed the posts as highly engaging popular content to my screen. However, once the people who got married were married and the couples who wished to reproduce have reproduced, there wasn’t anything left from organic content made by real (former) acquaintances. Enter meme pages with names like “Memes so dank they make you commit suicide” and their associated groups. They filled the void of no new content when refreshing the News Feed. That era peaked by 2019 but had a long plateau before declining thanks to the pandemic. Now, it seems most pages have degraded to Taboola and Outbrain level chum boxen. There are still good groups to be found, but one must be on the lookout for new groups to join as the old ones become stale or taken over by political ranters.
As our non-Fey friend pointed out, the main uses of the Blue App are as a neighborhood calendar and as the rolodex login service for Messenger. Anything in the News Feed is filler.
This is mostly about trying to maintain a us economic hegemony on the world. It also just seems unlikely to succeed. China has shown again and again they don't really need us.
This is mostly about trying to maintain a us economic hegemony on the world. It also just seems unlikely to succeed. China has shown again and again they don't really need us.
On one hand, this casts a shadow across any online outreach by the Biden campaign, and the youth vote will be skeptical forever, especially if you don’t elaborate on what TikTok is doing that is a...
On one hand, this casts a shadow across any online outreach by the Biden campaign, and the youth vote will be skeptical forever, especially if you don’t elaborate on what TikTok is doing that is a matter of national security and not just “trust me bro.” On the other hand, youths are notorious for staying home, and the campaign so far has been a series of “triple dog dares” to not vote and let the country fall to darkness or whatever. It a good thing that the 2024 election is the only one that matters and no other election will decide the fate of the country.
Figures the one thing we get bipartisan support on in this country is to cut off access to social media the United States doesn’t have soft power over. Really shows what the score is on this whole World Wide Web experience.
I'm curious to see what kind of impact this has on the economy when all that income stops. That's a lot of side-hustles, main jobs, and advertising for small businesses that's just going to disappear.
I'm curious to see what kind of impact this has on the economy when all that income stops. That's a lot of side-hustles, main jobs, and advertising for small businesses that's just going to disappear.
Strange question. Can or does this impact how other countries will treat Tiktok ?. If I remember correctly, over here (Australia) our government banned the use of the app in any government offices.
Strange question. Can or does this impact how other countries will treat Tiktok ?. If I remember correctly, over here (Australia) our government banned the use of the app in any government offices.
Might also lead the EU to take digital sovereignty in social media more seriously. Maybe we'll see more support for homegrown networks that are based less on US hypercapitalist views of social...
Might also lead the EU to take digital sovereignty in social media more seriously. Maybe we'll see more support for homegrown networks that are based less on US hypercapitalist views of social media and actually offer something useful to its users or something. Which could be beneficial to the US too, if it catches on there. Particularly since Americans seem to feel (looking at this thread here) that their media landscape is under too tight control by the government. Having EU alternatives might offer a perceived counterweight there too. (I say perceived not because it's a fake solution to a real problem, but because I think it might not even be a real problem. Not sure.)
Genuinely in awe that anyone is celebrating this, especially from angles of privacy. The law itself is vague and allows for the U.S. government to assert any entity as adversarial or foreign....
Genuinely in awe that anyone is celebrating this, especially from angles of privacy. The law itself is vague and allows for the U.S. government to assert any entity as adversarial or foreign. Right now state officials are openly calling student protestors "terrorists." The room and opportunity to abuse this is wide open, and only endangers people's privacy and first amendment rights...
There will be a lot of drama and outrage but this is the right thing to do.
At no point would we have allowed the Soviet Union to own a major news outlet and the personalization of the TikTok algorithm makes it neigh impossible to know how a thumb is being put on the scale. We do have hard evidence that TikTok suppressed videos supporting the Hong Kong protests, suppressed NBA highlights of only the Houston Rockets after their general manager tweeted support of the protests.
In the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan does anyone really doubt that TikTok would be used as a propaganda tool to try to prevent the United States coming to Taiwan’s defense?
There’s a reason that India, who has a disputed border with China with frequent deadly skirmishes has already banned TikTok.
Like it or not we are already moving into a Cold War 2, and we should hope that a Cold War is all we get, because the alternative is world war 3. Autocracies are on the march, and the democracies of the world need to be ready before we sleep walk into something far worse than your favorite app being banned.
This isn’t something I’m gleeful about, I wish we could all just trade, travel, and live in peace between all nations. But we are entering dangerous geopolitical times, and we need to be ready.
As an American, I don't see how it's any better to hand this over to a US-based company that will probably do the same thing, only to the benefit of the United States. Instead of suppressing information about Hong Kong and Xinjiang, we now have the opportunity to suppress information about Gaza, BLM, and/or whatever future conflict we decide to involve ourselves in? Yay?
We worry about the TikTok algorithm's effect on politics, and, well, our brains, but Facebook and YouTube have been doing the same thing for years. We worry about our data being in the hands of the Chinese government, but every device we own and website we visit knows everything we're doing and thinking. We've known for a decade that our government can access that information. We're worried about the potential for China to be our oppressor from an ocean away, but we have decades of historical evidence that the US actively suppressed groups that advocated for changes that we now celebrate, or at the very least, begrudgingly accept.
There are plenty of places that you can get news that is highly critical of the Chinese government. This is just another step in the anti-China Red Scare 2.0 parade that has been going on for years.
American social media companies do not take marching orders from the US government. The United States has a strong and independent court system and constitution that has routinely protected the press from interference from government.
China has no independent courts and the CCP largely rules by decree. Chinese companies are required to have a seat on their board reserved specifically for the CCP. The Chinese government treats dissent and protest with violence.
No American social media company has suppressed these topics. BLM protests in 2020 were massive with 10’s of millions of people in the streets across all 50 states. While there was some conflict with police they were largely quite peaceful. You can’t spend 5 minutes on Twitter without seeing something about Gaza.
The US is by no means a perfect darling country, but this whataboutism that pretends that the US and China are somehow even close to the same has no basis in reality.
No they take marching orders from the highest bidders, whether that be wealthy owners and shareholders, other corporate interests related to various business dealings, and advertisers, plus other interests. So instead of being told what to think by the CCP, you can be told what to think by the oligopolies and wealthy elite in America instead.
Yes, one is almost certainly better than the other if only because the latter still haven't completely dispensed with the usefulness of the population for labor so there is still mutually beneficial interests, whereas the CCP doesn't have much if any mutual interests to benefit the American public, but it's still a grim reality that acknowledges the power of these platforms to influence and doing nothing about the big picture of that and only targeting foreign adversaries ability to misuse that power.
Right, because it's the other way around. US government takes marching orders from their donors. I suspect suppressing controversy isn't the goal here.
I should have been more careful with my language in my last comment. "Probably do the same thing" gave the wrong impression, and "have the opportunity" was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Is a US-based social media company going to completely censor a story/topic? No. Does the US give marching orders to media companies a la the CCP? No.
America's method is a lot more subtle. US media companies aren't really going to outright censor people or topics. They certainly have the power to, and social media companies have deplatfromed people in the past, they were just freaks like Alex Jones and Donald Trump. But more often than not, they're just going to flood the zone with shit. It's much easier to see this happen in legacy media. CNN doesn't prevent the climate scientist from coming on air and ringing alarm bells, instead, they bring that person on along with two fossil fuel lobbyists who are presented as though they have the same level of credibility.
Social media companies have the power to do this with their algorithms, and it's a lot harder to detect due to their massive size. We know that Instagram just changed its settings to limit politics right in the midst of the ongoing "conflict" in Gaza. We know that right-wing publications dominated Facebook engagement in 2020. There's been a lot of coverage on the "Alt-right pipeline" on YouTube, and no matter how often I watch breadtube videos and other left-wing content, the algorithm always finds a way to show me Jordan Peterson shorts. Most importantly, we know that all of this can change on a whim. Just look at what happened to twitter after Elon Musk took over
And while the Chinese companies reserve board seats for the CCP, America's regulatory agencies are often headed by former board members of the companies they are supposed to regulate. Those companies are often advertisers or maybe even shareholders of media companies. It's not unusual for the interests of the government to align with the interests of the corporations. It's not unusual to see those interests reflected as the default position in the media. I don't think it's a huge leap for me to assume that whoever takes control of TikTok is going to share similar interests.
As opposed to the United States, which... uh... Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
When you're presented with two horrible organizations, I recommend you don't pick favorites.
If one of your main examples is something that happened over 100 years ago, 1 year after women got the right to vote and the republic of China still ruled the country, I don’t think you are seriously engaging the facts of today.
You're simultaneously implying that a historical, important and tragic event has no relevance to today, while also cherry-picking the date of one thing, all while ignoring the one that is more recent as well as the one that is actively ongoing.
Doesn't that feel gross to you?
What’s gross is carrying a water for an authoritarian government today by saying the US did a horrible thing 100 years ago before WW2 had even begun and the current Chinese government didn’t exist.
The Chinese people deserve far better than the CCP that is currently, today running concentration reeducation camps, destroying human rights and democracy in Hong Kong, and loudly preparing to invade Taiwan.
The US has plenty of problems but simply compare the ability of tens of millions of Americans to protest across all 50 states during the BLM protests of 2020 (while having the worst, most authoritarian president in recent US history at the helm) and the violent destruction of protests and democracy in Hong Kong and I think you might see some differences. Here’s an easy one, the US still had democratic elections in 2020 that forced out that authoritarian president. Hong Kong will never have legitimate democratic elections again.
The United States isn’t loudly shouting that it plans on invading Canada because they both come from English heritage. To pretend that you can justify and equalize the atrocities of China TODAY because the US has done horrible things in its past is disgusting.
Otherwise you might as well say Russia invading Ukraine is justified because the United States had slavery.
If you think my time here has been spent defending China, you haven't been reading what I've been saying. But that wouldn't surprise me.
All I've been trying to get you to do is recognize that China and the U.S. both spew ungodly amounts of propaganda, and that both of them have abysmal track records with regards to human rights. Their problems differ only in kind, not in severity. But all you've done in response to my arguments is regurgitate things you've heard from U.S.-aligned sources and not question for a second what kind of bias might be present in your worldview. You'll spend all your time worrying about a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan, and none at all reflecting on the very-not-hypothetical invasion of Iraq.
Criticizing China's many horrible acts is good; Tiananmen Square happened, the Great Firewall is a disgusting mistake, etc. But how you can so easily believe everything U.S. corporations tell you about them – when you should very well know how seriously sinophobic and imperialist this nation is these days – I will never understand.
But none of that matters here anymore. I don't believe you have any interest whatsoever in hearing what I have to say, and so I in turn have no interest in discussing this any further.
Feel exactly the same
As a NON American, I don't see how it's in any better hands in the United States either.
I wish EVERY company that trades in your personal data was scrutinized the way TikTok is. Unfortunately, I don't think this is about data safety at all. It's about American business interests. Either they want to own all that data, or they want to shut down a competitor that's getting too big for them.
Yeah. Scrutinizing TikTok is not a bad thing, but moving it to some american tech company's control and acting as if everything is suddenly okay is not a viable solution either. Unregulated, money-driven business interests can be just as dangerous as political pressure. Scrutinizing Google, Facebook, and all the other tech companies running social-media and news-aggregation plattforms is equally necessary.
If you give a subset of corporations within a single public-opinion driven political system unregulated control of all relevant platforms to drive public opinion, it will enable these corporations to use these tools to prevent any future regulation of said tools, effectively giving them near-unlimited political control.
If legislative bodies in a country are effevtively controlled by business interests alone, the corporations become the sovereign. The system in this scenario is not a democracy anymore. In a democracy decisions must be driven by a majority of people, not a majority of money.
So having an authoritarian system enact selective control over opinion-driving platforms is dangerous, but so is letting corporations control these platforms in a largely unregulated manner. Something needs to be done, but this is not it. Or at the very least not all of it.
Bingo. I'd maybe believe the data concern if the elected officials voting to ban it weren't literally on the app. But it's almost as if they're being hypocritical.
Summarized my feelings perfectly and far more eloquently than I could have.
I think one of the things not being pointed out is how dangerous ALL these data scraping companies are, especially in the hands of an enemy in a conflict.
It's already a 4th amendment violation in my eyes when any company does this, but the idea that facebook/google/etc can basically figure out your location from all sorts of meta information is concerning. The idea that this information is going straight to a foreign government with which we are on chilly terms and have a looming conflict is insane.
I would be very very curious to know how many times US defense/intelligence forces have gone to our social media companies to get data to help us triangulate someone's position, forces, or capabilities. And I suspect the "wait if we're doing it......" lightbulb came on waaaaaaay too late in the case of tiktok and that's why we're seeing bipartisan support.
We desperately need a digital bill of rights written by someone who actually understands the internet. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but some of the data collection that companies take part in really freaks me out.
A few weeks ago, I went to home depot and bought some stuff. I paid with a debit card and printed my receipt (it asks you if you'd like to print or email your receipt.)
I don't have a home depot account, but I have ordered things as a guest with my main email which is a Gmail account, though I always select checkout as a guest.
A few days later, I got an email on my work email account, which is kept completely seperate from my personal stuff asking me to rate the items that I purchased. It's insane to me that they can someone connect my work email to my personal email on an in-store transaction in which I used neither email for.
As a regular citizen, I'd rather have it go somewhere far away than somewhere closer by where the law could bother me if they wanted. I'm some normie American; what do Xi's toadies care if I'm getting mouthy? Domestically, the threat isn't 4th A violations and parallel construction so much as—government influence or not—the domestic social media companies deciding my rants aren't brand-safe and downranking (not even banning) such posts in favor of advertizer-friendly drivel.
They want you getting mouthy because discontent and anger that can’t be productively resolved through the political system is what ruins nations.
This is explicitly the Russian PsyOp playbook to astroturf online arguments to turn up the tension and polarize people against each other. China almost certainly is aware of the tactic and employs it themselves. You, specifically, being mouthy is part of that. But the bigger part with general political polarization and stochastic terrorism also comes from this.
Ahhhh, so that's the playbook Facebook used to divide US, UK, Myanmar and all other nations' societies! Remember Trump being elected? Remember Brexit? Or Rohingya genocide?
Read about Cambridge Analytica, there's good article about it in Wikipedia. Then come back to this case of banning Tiktok and think if all other corporate social media shouldn't be banned alongside Tiktok.
I should've specified
This is the same logic that leads to erosion of privacy and totally ignores how insanely powerful and dangerous mass data, and communication, is.
You're right, no one in the CCP cares who you are or what you say. They will care however if LOTS of people say something, and they'll make absolutely sure it's only their side of the argument that gets seen, based in reality or not. Don't like how they've handled their housing crisis/covid policies/hong kong/taiwan/LBGTQ/uyghur's/whatever? Fine, we'll make sure no one ever hears you say anything about it.
There's already a ton of problems with how money influences things (Lebron's apology...), there shouldn't be yet another way for foreign governments to do it.
And yes, it's bad when our government does it or when companies do it , but that doesn't somehow mean that we should just throw our hands up and say "oh well". I don't understand how people who are often the most critical of local governments find these weird edge cases to ignore.
“It’s bad when the people in power are for it” is as deep as the logic goes.
I don't think the added specifics changes anything Nara said.
The added specifics make Nara’s response tangential, at best, to my point.
Sure, but it doesn't change the fact that this is, from a military/intelligence gathering perspective, a MASSIVE failure, and the fact it was even allowed from that perspective is absurd.
But does this law actually change any of this? All this law does is force the sale of Tiktok. It doesn't ban the collection of such data. ByteDance can sell TikTok to a US company, and that company can just keep right along with all those privacy violations. And they can sell that data right to the CCP if they want. This law does NOTHING to protect the privacy of US citizens. Ultimately, nothing is really going to change about how TikTok operates. Most likely, the US government just wants in on that data hoard. The US holding company can sell user data to the CCP, but now the US government can also demand access to it.
I mean it's a nice idea, but the US government already made it illegal to sell US consumer data to China, Russia, Iran, etc. You're right that countries should be improving data privacy and collection laws regardless of Tiktok.
And can be charged with a variety of laws if they do. Having a chinese owned company sending data back means that your options to investigate and use that data is limited. It absolutely changes things.
Does it change everything it should? No, but that's a different argument from the perspective of the house/senate about the rights of citizens, not the security of the country.
I don't think the lightbulb ever came on. This all started up again after Congress received a classified intelligence briefing. And some Congressmen said they were so troubled by the brief that they wanted it declassified.
I’ll bet that briefing was the location data of the congressmen, their staff, their families, and maybe even their mistresses all neatly compiled and sent off to intelligence agencies.
And if they know that about the congressmen they know it if the entire federal bureaucracy, and they also have all their background check information since the OPM hack in 2015. There’s a lot of very effective spear phishing and blackmail material you can pull about basically anywhere you want.
I'm confused by your take? That to me is the lightbulb moment.
Being told exactly what China is doing is pretty much the opposite of realizing "wait, if we're doing x, then they must be doing x."
Perhaps there’s something in that briefing that would make me change my mind. Until it’s declassified and I can read it, it’s reflexive principled unthinking contrarianism from me. No amount of “surely it must’ve been important” without actually sharing the contents will inspire reactions other than spreading further anti-government distrust.
To add on to this, TikTok content has a pro-china tilt with notably less content related to topics objectionable to the CCP, and videos supporting the side of world events that China supports. In response to these findings, TikTok simply removed the search tools that let the analysis take place.
And as I've commented before TikTok has historically been very porous, leaking data from the US operations to Chinese based platforms.
And the history of the bill shows that as lawmakers on both sides learned more their support for the ban only increased. It was probably a bad look for TikTok to fight accusations of weaponizing their platform, by pushing an alert to their users to call Congress and pressure them. I get why they did, but talk about acting out the exact scenario some were warning about.
I am not naive enough to think that China does not have access, if they wanted it, to TikTok data. That being said, the first link you provide demonstrating Chinese influence on content is flawed in its comparisons. I would be willing to believe it happens, as is thought to happen in US companies, but that article does not convince me.
I think it is fair to ask questions of a study and recognize its limitations. However, the CATO blog post doesn't really add much to the discussion other than raising the issue of lifetimes of the platforms and differences in users.
They don't address that the findings weren't present for control topics or the consistency of the underrepresentation for China sensitive topics, including topics that were internationally relevant during the lifetime of both platforms.
So that blog post, while a helpful perspective, is hardly a point by point refutation of the findings.
Edit: I also think it is important to scrutinize the source for conflicts of interest or bias, in addition to weighing the merits of the message. CATO is a partisan think tank, where Rutgers and NCRI don't have an official political affiliation. That said, you should scrutinize for bias from any source. In this case, Rutgers and NCRI provided a methodology to scrutinize, including replicating Tiktoks own methods and using their tools as part of the analysis. In contrast, the CATO institute gave very vague criticisms and no subsequent analysis to assess. Of course, they couldn't replicate the analysis very easily, because TikTok decided to neuter their tools rather than provide a counter analysis. Which is rather sus, I believe is the term the kids use today.
So my partisan bias detector goes off a bit more with CATO blog than the Rutgers paper.
You definitely present good points. One thing I definitely believe is that finding the answers to these questions (i.e. to what degree does TikTok censor political content unfavorable to China) is difficult, and that is by design, which is already quite concerning.
I agree. The CCP has stated that they wouldn't approve the sale of the algorithms in TikTok, which might be for very pedestrian reasons of disincentivizing a sale, or could indicate there is something to the claims.
Either way, I agree that it is hard to really get a sense of the inner workings and objectively categorize what is happening.
Which is exactly why they should assume the worst case scenario here. I don't think it strains credulity to suggest that perhaps the reason that anti-government voices are more successful on TikTok relative to other platforms is that they are promoted by design.
Data concerns aside, letting a rival manipulate narratives in your country seems like a terrible idea. It's not unthinkable the US and China find themselves in (at the very least) a cold war in the coming decades. Imagine if one of the major American newspapers in the 30s was run by Nazi Germany, history could look a lot different.
I very much agree. I think people are so used to the Pax Americana and after glow of the end of the cold war, that they aren't sensitive to the developing animosities and need to protect national interests. As much as I wish it wasn't the case, we seem to be entering a period of international unrest.
I won't say we need the "gerontocracy," but this is why having old people in positions of power can be good. They remember when the world was not the way it is now. I'm not sure the current generation of octogenarians actually benefit us with their wisdom in this specific scenario, but you may notice that it seems that tensions started growing once the people who remember WWII started dying off.
You're absolutely right about the impact of declining living memory of global conflict. My family ran to long generations, so both of my parents lived through WWII as young adults. I lived through peak Cold War (Reagan/Bush years) as a young adult.
Both the oral history from my parents (and their FBI files), and my own recall of Russian and Chinese imperialism/totalitarianism, predisposed me to distrust governments that seek to monitor their citizenry.
To some extent, we have to worry about tit-for-tat revenge for the U.S.' own wholesale spying on data connections.
But people are so unguarded in their app usage... It's hard to believe that people consent to having Big Brother in their pockets all day long, or on their nightstands listening. I wonder, since I haven't seen it mentioned yet, if anyone has looked at the TikTok app permissions? I wouldn't trust anyone with that extensive collection of data and device access.
I've declined several things on multiple apps and I'm aware that things get more granular but this is what I can see easily
Tiktok: Camera, Microphone, Music and audio, notifications, photos and videos. Declined: Contacts, Location, Nearby Devices
Snapchat: camera, contacts, location, microphone, Notifications, Photos and videos. Declined: nearby devices, phone
Facebook: calendar, camera, contacts, location, microphone, notifications, phone, photos and videos. Declined: Nearby Devices, call log
Instagram: photos and videos. Declined: (everything else listed under Facebook, I hate Instagram)
Discord: Camera, Microphone, music and audio, nearby devices, notifications, photos and videos. Declined: Contacts
When put that way, I'm glad it exists. People (as a whole) are content to trust official truths otherwise. Imagine if we had a large anti-government echo chamber when the powers that be were busy getting the public hyped up to invade Iraq.
There's plenty of ways of building your own authentic echo-chamber free from government control. There's no reason to turn to a provider that signal boosts the most divisive parts of that and is opposed to your own self-interests. Start a Email list, telegram group, message board or something. That way at least domestic anti-government self-interest will dictate the terms of the discussion (such as moderation, recommendation systems, etc), and not foreign hostile interests.
I don't think sorting yourself into a foreign-controlled echo chamber does anyone but Xi any good.
Building an echo chamber for you and your 100,000 closest friends is easy. Building recruitment funnels and megaphones that can reach normies is massively challenging. Some interlocking reasons why a group of malcontents may partner with potentially hostile foreign powers as a host.
Tangental to the original point of this post, but TikTok's straightforward censorship feels far more comprehensible: if you want to discuss the joy of s-x without silly substitution letters or whatever it was that happened on 4 June 1989, don't do it there. If you were to be targeted for muting (not necessarily YOU in particular, but your general content category got on the advertising shitlist for the week) by a domestic social platform, it would be impossible to distinguish from a string of bad luck.
If all of your media is essentially propaganda for one side, getting foreign propaganda feels like a breath of fresh air. And that is just proof of the garbage odor of the current media moment I suppose but it does feel like slamming the window shut on the breeze is fixing the wrong problem first.
Might have gotten lost in that metaphor.
We actually did allow the Soviet Union to publish papers in the US. They never had wide circulation, but the 1st Amendment didn't go out the window just because the Cold War was on. Many of these papers are archived in the Library of Congress..
Yes, TikTok has a bias. So does Al Jazeera, Haaretz, any every other foreign and domestic journalism source. Did the Soviet Union censor US newspapers? Yes. But we used to take pride in not stooping to the level of authoritarian dictatorships.
Is TikTok a data privacy nightmare? Yes. But Congress didn't pass a law banning those privacy invasions; they just banned one specific app. As long as TikTok is sold to a US company, they can keep right on doing all the privacy violations. TikTok will be sold to a US company, and nothing will fundamentally change about how it violates its users privacy. There also isn't really anything in the bill that will affect its filtering/editorial decisions. They can just sell it to some US citizens who are friendly to China and keep things all the same.
As a non-American, I see American sites spread all kinds of liberal propaganda, American supremacist propaganda, right-wing extremism, etc. So, it is deeply contradictory to turn a blind eye to those, especially considering how "free" laws of US allow an extremely great deal of manifactured consent. Even in the worst case, in this context, China just does more overtly what US does more covertly.
It honestly surprises me, for US, how much even "progressive" spaces revert to nationalist lines when it comes to "national security" or "democracy". This move is nationalism. Endorsing it only plays into reifying the current powers structures and escalating conflict.
When I was younger, I used to look up to countries like USA, because they seemed more progressive and rational. But in time I realized how much nationalism and dehumanization is within its structures, and how much "the average goodhearted Joe" or "progressive and rational liberal" would endorse nationalist lines, detriment to the people from "shithole" countries like me. Even if fatally detrimental. This is partially why most people outside of the """Western""" ones don't give any credence to humanist and egalitarian claims of the "The West", even if they sometimes make sense. Because, if you don't stand to benefit from it, the deeply self-serving double standards dominate and color the perceptions.
Let me be more direct. When vast majority toes the line like this, we fear you. Your nationalism is terrifying. Your wars are terrifying. Your "democracy" is terrifying. Your "freedom" is terrifying. I don't want to be scared of people, and I don't want to reify the fucked up status quo, but if you continue to support moves like this, that is where the world will move toward. And, even from a self-serving perspective, USA is a failing empire. Its dominance will eventually pass away. A failing empire needs friends, more peace, not reigniting old flames of hostility. Not to mention that the world is only just starting to face several ecological systems crises that require a great deal of international cooperation.
Your comment and the support it got both saddened me and made me anxious. Apparently, even Tildes is not exempt from this. It's a melancholic and bitter feeling.
I do not support this move because of “nationalism” or some desire for America alone to dominate the world. America needs to work closely with the democracies of the world to prevent and deter the authoritarian countries of Russia, China etc. from dominating their neighbors through their nationalistic desires for conquest.
I want all nations to live in cooperative peace but as the Ukrainians know better than anyone, your strong desire for peace doesn’t mean anything when an authoritarian drives tanks across your border. At that point you either fight or die.
We should be doing everything we possibly can to make sure the people of Taiwan, South Korea, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, etc are not the next ones to be forced to fight or die. And you don’t do that by allowing authoritarians a direct propaganda tool.
I believe you believe this, but I don't believe the players of US politics believe this. There are several reasons.
These aren't answerable by US lawmakers and their narrative. I think there are two reasonable explanations for this.
This is partially why I think it's nationalist and self-serving. Time and again I saw US politicians (and citizens) talk about values and democracy and such, while fucking up the world for self-serving reasons. The citizens may believe the reasons put forward by politicians, but that is the thing with ideology. It disguises things so that they are easier to defend or attack. I don't see any particular reason why this is different. The things that you mentioned are the Great Euphemisms of US international politics. US, as a state, is not a "force of good" many US citizens think it to be. And it's not because it doesn't defeat its enemies.
Edit: Again, to be more clear, the scary part is that you sincerely believe you are supporting something good. The self-righteous US international politics did and does so much harm.
“The US is self interested therefore it should allow other self interested geopolitical rivals to undermine its stability” is certainly a take.
I don’t know why you think data gathering is the primary concern when at every point I have articulated that the problem is TikTok’s use as a propaganda tool directly controlled by the CCP.
I don’t know why you are quoting “force for good” when I never stated that America is somehow always righteous and good in any of my posts.
I feel like you are arguing with an idea of America and Americans that you have in your mind and not what I am saying. Vague statements about how America isn’t always good is not engaging with the issue at hand, given the active threat of authoritarian countries to peace.
Is your solution that America should sit and watch China conquer Taiwan and Russia subjugate Eastern Europe because America did things you didn’t like in the past? I’m not sure what you really want here other than pretending that the United States is the only country with agency.
If China were still acting as friendly as it did under rulers previous to Xi Jinping this wouldn’t even be on the table, regardless of the fact that American social media has been banned in China for over a decade.
You don’t see the the United States forcing the sale of Spotify because they’re owned by Europeans or shouting about how they are going to invade Canada because they both come from English heritage.
The 90’s are over, the United States is no longer the superpower that can basically single handily determine the outcome of international events. That is why I have said over and over and over that America must work with democracies around the world against authoritarian states.
You won't necessarily like the answer, but the reason the decisions and planning didn't happen in public was to avoid lobbying from Tiktok. There have been behind the scenes bipartisan negotiations and informal assurances about data security from Tiktok for more than a year. The thing is, no one involved trusted a corporation to just protect US data out of good will, and there were fears about Tiktok developing a PR and legal strategy to fight the bill if they watched the sausage being made.
See this article: ‘Thunder Run’: Behind Lawmakers’ Secretive Push to Pass the TikTok Bill
I’m a government contractor with a security clearance, and actually am a derivative classifier. Classification is complicated. Here is one of our marking resources. This doesn’t even go into decisions on why something should be classified. But as to why the TikTok intel isn’t being declassified (or hasn’t been yet), the main reason is likely intelligence sources and methods. These are some of the most protected bits of information the United States has. Hypothetically, if there is a Bytedance executive feeding info to the CIA, or if there is a reconstituted intelligence network in China, then protection of that is essential. If they aren’t careful, the identities of the assets may be compromised.
On the political side, a TikTok ban is what both sides can agree on. Both the GOP and the Silicon Valley Dems would oppose a GDPR-type regulation, whereas only certain progressive Dems oppose a TikTok ban.
The irony is a little thick there. Switch the word 'Ukraine' for 'Iraq' or 'Honduras' (I won't say the G word) and the actor portraying the antagonist in your story is... Well.. thus the irony.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Nope. That's not what Whataboutism is.
You're trying to make an argument based on evocative language, invoking scary ideas like 'Nationalism,' 'Authoritarianism' to describe 'the bad guys,' while evoking 'nice sounding' words like 'cooperative peace' to describe 'the good guys,' and I am, politely, calling horseshit.
The US can't have it both ways. It's either driven by principle or acting in self interest. And, for the record, I think all nations act in self interest. The destabilization of the Middle East and Central America were driven by an economic 'need.' So it is. I'm not one to judge... But wrapping that history up in a warm fabric of principled idealism? It's disingenuous, at best. Or, to refrain my earlier descriptor, horseshit.
China is bad for having designs on Taiwan? Yes! It is! But how exactly do you think your gas prices are what they are? The kettle is black. So is the pot.
And neither pot not kettle are doing much for this 'cooperative peace' you're evoking.
It is Whataboutism to the letter.
The United States is a democracy that depending on it's leadership has acted both in principle and self interest at different times in history. That the US engaged in a stupid, pointless war in Iraq does not change the facts of today that authoritarians are seeking to conquer their neighbors and pushing the world dangerously close to another world war. Opposing that horrific cause is in fact a very good and right thing to do regardless of bad actions of the past.
The United States has led the global coalition of support against Russia working with worldwide allies to impose sanctions, providing massive amounts of military aid and intelligence to Ukraine. That the US did bad things in it's past does not take away from doing good right now TODAY when it matters most.
"You can't be doing a good thing now because you did a bad thing before" is a ridiculous argument, it's like saying the US can never have done any wrong because it did good in joining the cause to defeat the axis in World War 2. It's nonsensical false equivalence.
Alternatively: The US is using Ukraine to engage in a proxy war with the USSR and prevent a loss of geopolitical influence in East Europe. Like Vietnam. Like Afghanistan. Like Korea.
Still not wrong, it's a fine thing to do in self interest, we just get there without all the posturing and huffpuff...
If you truly believe that self interest is the only motivation that exists in geopolitics I don't know what to tell you, it's never in anyone's self interest to have a world war but we've already had two of those. Russia and it's people would be far better served trading their oil with the world and using that money to develop the country and economy rather than being cut off from world trade and sending hundreds of thousands of people to die because Putin wants to rebuild the Russian empire. China would be better served to continue it's economic rise by being the world's manufacturing powerhouse rather than throwing it all away to take over Taiwan.
The EU has sent almost as much aid to Ukraine at this point as the US, is the EU also engaged in a self interested proxy war for geopolitical influence? Or do you think maybe they have legitimate concern that they are the next target of an authoritarian on a warpath of conquest? Is it possible that things that are in your self interest are also morally right?
I don't want to get too deep into the weeds here, but I just want to add that self-interest can come in many competing ways, some of which very much aligned-by-design with principles.
It is in the EU's short term interest to play nice while Russia conquers Ukraine. No added defense expenditure. No problems with gas prices. It is also in our long and medium term interest to quickly aid Ukraine in defending itself, because in a longer term, the Russian bear will be hungry again. So you could either argue that the EU assisting Ukraine is in violation of its interests, or not, depending on which interests you identify. "A stable democracy" "sovereignty from China" "no WW3" are all interests of the US, and are all nicely aligned with stated idealist goals.
The interests that drive decisions like these are too complex to simply point at the first thing that seems plausible and run with it. And yes, if you drill down deep enough, every idealist motivation is always just dressed up self-interest. But that's neither a bad thing nor a surprise: If a hypothetical very-idealist country wanted peace, love and trade for all of mankind, they get a benefit out of that: Their people get to export their goods to a large market, buy from a variety of international goods and travel all over without fear. Plus they don't die in wars. Very selfish indeed. Perhaps it behooves us to consider whether those selfish interests affect others positively or negatively.
Every country exists to preserve the power of the government. In democracies, they exist to improve the lives of their citizens. Every democracy should be aligning its foreign policy to improve or maintain the quality of life of its citizens. The US thinks that international cooperation can be a good way to maintain the current global order, but ultimately the US is trying to maintain its global power. If a different strategy becomes more effective, an effective government will adopt it.
I think many individuals in "The West" do want better lives for everyone around the world, but I don't think the majority are willing to sacrifice their quality of life for it.
I don't think 'because India did it' gives weight to your argument here... India's trendline over the last decade or so has been, at best, debatable, and at worst troublesome, when it comes to their freedom of press, the relationship between press and government, and how certain kinds of thinking are systematically suppressed by the two.
India banning Tiktok, in my opinion, says more about the current power structures in India than it does about Tiktok.
To be clear, I'm not defending Tiktok. I just want to separate the viable arguments from the chaff.
From the perspective of an EU citizen, I think most people can somewhat agree on the content of the decision, but not on the true reasoning behind it.
The US decision, I think, seems to outsiders to have put economic interests first, and national security a close second, despite the public claims.
And since the EU bodies do appear to
… I somehow don’t see a ban here coming so soon, if at all. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong, though.
1: Despite having just as much, if not higher, of an interest in its independence than the US. Seriously, we should do more to both defend Taiwan and drastically (more-than-planned) increase independent chip production.
Seeing people's reactions to this online really goes to show how addicting these platforms are. Lots of people are bringing up valid concerns that I don't want to discredit, but other people seem to be having meltdowns over not being able to watch TikTok anymore.
Separate from any concerns over censoring free speech, I wonder how many former TikTok users will feel happier once the app has been unavailable for a while.
Totally anecdotal, but it really does feel like tiktok is constantly pushing whatever anti-US narrative is trending at the time really hard. Right now its some of the most insane pro-hamas, anti-israel talking points that keep flooding my feed despite me literally never engaging with them, swiping off them immediately, and never subscribing to those types of channels. And, of course, the whole 'a message from tiktok about how the US is trying to trample your rights' stuff that people unironically believe.
I do fear the effect of a super popular platform being controlled by a hostile foreign power, that has the compounding affect of swaying public opinion, causing more anti-US content, causing more swaying of opinion, ad infinum. And having read about how China operates, one would be delusional to think they are not in control of Tiktok
I was going to make this a top-level comment, but since there are enough of those and my point is relevant here…
Pretty much everyone who supports the divestiture in this thread is concerned about propaganda as if the main threat is that studios in Xinjiang and Bejing start cranking out short dances supporting an invasion of Taiwan. That's not how TikTok would be used to influence American opinions. Instead, they'd be given the order to spotlight domestic malcontents who oppose the current thing, whatever the current thing is, using their 1A rights to express their genuine (even if insane) opinions. Far more effective than "How do you do, my fellow patriotic Americans?"
You seem to be the first one to spell it out clearly.
They unironically believe it because it's true. The bill is trampling on the right of free association, for starters. They want to corral everyone to view the regime-approved narrative as the truth (same as Xi's government does to the Chinese people: the difference is that the US doesn't get as petty and aggressive about punishing domestic malcontents to anywhere near the same degree as China or the USSR or the CCCP).
Which narrative is that? Each side has some radically divergent narratives right now, and the argument that each side is saying the same thing in different ways has never been remotely convincing when one side is claiming that they need to purge the federal government of the other side's traitors who "stole" an election.
In the US, it depends on who won that various elections as well as the personality priority quirks of executive branch appointments; in (or from, if we’re discussing foreign influence) China, it’s the message Xi & his CCP friends wishes to push.
Are you pretending to not know which election I'm talking about?
They should just close it rather than sell it, and throw down messages explaining what happened so ~170M people will be very pissed off and know where to direct their anger.
The whole thing has been another transparent attempt at Republican media takeover anyway. The Facebook/Instagram empire is in the hands of a conservative, Musk seized control of Twitter recently, and now this. It's clearly an attempt at partisan control of mass communications to shape discourse away from left-leaning talk.
I mean both votes are bipartisan. If it passes into law, Democratic president Biden needs to sign off on it. The idea that it’s a Republican plot of some kind doesn’t really make sense.
Is the Zuck a conservative? While I wouldn’t call him bleeding heart liberal, seems a bit strong to say it’s “in the hands of a conservative”?
The democratic party is a conservative party. While this is done under the guise of a republican conservative bill, the fact that it is bipartisan is testament to how conservative the democratic party really is. I don't disagree with you that the aforementioned narrative doesn't make sense I just think it was worded in a way that presumes understanding that the democrats aren't actually left leaning. I do agree with the sentiment that it is pushing media and communication into conservative control to as redwall said shape discourse away from left-leaning talk.
From TFA:
A sinister plot? Maybe not. I could certainly say that it's some garbage added on to something actually important. Funding Ukraine is important. Now the Biden admin is at risk of 170m people getting politicized against it via the tiktok app because of this bundling.
We’ve needed an amendment to enforce single subject bills for my entire life. Too much gets snuck through in budget bills and other doorstopper legislation.
I mean single subject bills just wouldn't get passed. At least in the case of this bill that banned Tiktok and funded US defence priorities, each section was a separate vote in the house.
If there's one unilateral bipartisan issue, it's insuring the military industrial complex always gets its cut.
The tiktok ban probably wouldn't have gotten traction though.
It's a bit off topic, but I'm actually in favor of increasing defence funding for Taiwan and Ukraine. Israel is a whole can of worms, and I'd rather we stopped giving them offensive weapons as long as Bibi is in charge and actively telling the US to fuck off.
US military funding in absolute, inflation-adjusted terms has been flat-ish since WW2 ended, and it has mostly dropped as a percentage of GDP...ignoring Bush's misadventures in the middle east.
I think a Tiktok sale bill probably would've passed even without the defence funding based on the vote margins. Turns out ByteDance telling users to call their legislators just made lawmakers more suspicious of Tiktok's influence in the US.
I feel like nobody knows that it was Facebook that politicised and helped Trump to become president las time.
That's a much more convoluted view than what's really happening. As the poster below notes, this bill has broad bipartisan support, Zuck isn't really a conservative, and Google, a company that most people regard as left of center, owns one of the major competitors to tiktok.
The real reason is just good old fashioned protectionism. US companies don't want domestic dollars going to foreign platforms, and they've spent a ton of money to try to get the US government to step in on behalf of their profits, which they've done. No one with deep pockets is going to stand up for tiktok except bytedance, and because bytedance can't vote and is legally severely limited in how much they can influence American politics, this is the result.
Or it could be exactly what it says on the tin and TikTok is actually tied closely to a foreign influence operation and is funneling sensitive information, including location data about US government officials, to Chinese intelligence.
I don't know why it would have access to US government officials data. It's already banned on US government phones.
And yeah, maybe it is tied to a foreign influence operation, but the US is ostensibly a free country, and that means that its people are generally allowed to use products made by whoever they want. We don't block rt.com to prevent Americans from being influenced by dangerous Russian ideas, we don't stop people from watching Al Jazeera to prevent Quatari influence in the US, and we shouldn't block free citizens from using an app they choose to engage with. It's a dangerous path to go down when US approved media and platforms are the only ones Americans are legally allowed to interact with, with nebulous security concerns and hypotheticals as justifications. I think most lawmakers would agree on the face with that statement.
On the other hand though, the US gov is not exactly shy about protectionism when it comes to China. We already have heavy tarriffs on many Chinese imports. It's not a coincidence that China's one major export that can't effectively be tariffed is instead functionally banned.
The US has had laws for years regulating foreign ownership of broadcast stations. This feels like the digital equivalent.
We’d all like it if people only did business on their business phones but we all know that’s not how the world works.
Not if the application is breaking laws we can’t. We also can’t do anything with outlets that operate in sanctioned countries.
If anything we should also be slapping Facebook and Twitter with fines for enabling these things too.
Less dangerous than having a foreign influence operation acting as a disinformation funnel. The security concerns are hardly nebulous, they have literally been caught exfiltrating data to intelligence services.
About time. China’s been playing fast and loose with its currency markets and monetary policy, in violation of WTO rules, to goose its current accounts balance. A correction is long overdue and well within the American national interest.
I like to phrase it this way: "In the free market of ideas, stop having sour grapes that foreign propaganda won out over domestic propaganda."
Correct.
CCP won't let Bytedance divest it as that would be considered selling the company to a foreign entity, which isn't allowed. It's why there's tons of shell company games just to get a Chinese company stock on the US stock exchange. CCP won't budge, let it go down as a lesson to other Chinese companies not to lean so heavily on US consumers.
This is more tit-for-tat about not having so much data in a non-allied country. Anyone complaining about fairness should go look at what it takes for a US tech company to have access to the Chinese market and pretty much every non-Chinese social media company is already banned in China. US and allied nations have to follow GDPR, a divestiture from a non-allied government owned data sink is a reasonable ask.
Yes, it does assist and is supported by US social media companies, but it's not the whole picture.
If a US citizen's data is going to be mined, it'll be mined by a US company and you'll like it!
What should happen is data not being weaponized, economized, against consumers and citizens.
Obviously, that won't be addressed. This is what regulatory capture looks like. The many companies busy collecting and selling information are making sure Congress doesn't meddle. They use the profits and proceeds from all that data revenue to keep Congress critters, staffers, courts, agencies, agency staffers, and so on, they keep all those people on the payroll in some form. To make sure no meddling happens.
With TikTok, clearly the governments' data people eventually figured out all of TikTok's data was going to China. The US government figured it out and said "oh my, um, problem!" while the Chinese government figured it out and said "oh my, opportunity!" And China only gives a shit about China, which they've spent literally centuries demonstrating. Currently they're a somewhat hostile, somewhat xenophobic, possibly expansionist government. All a recipe for international conflict of some form.
One of the reasons all our data (individual consumers') needs to be firewalled and screened off to prevent it being used against us is what's happening with TikTok. All that data could be used to make money, which is what Facebook and Twitter and Microsoft and Google and Apple and about five dozen other companies do with it. Or, or rather and, that data can also be used to shape opinion.
It's one thing for opinion to be shaped to favor Apple, or favor a new VR headset, or annoying bullshit like that. It's quite another matter entirely for data to be used to shape global politics from the bottom up, which is what China has, is, and will be using it for. It's what Russa has been doing for several decades, and has gotten pretty good at in the past decade. China's doing it too now. Basically, every country's going to be doing it. Fucking Micronesia will be doing it, just it'll take them a little longer to spin up, and they probably won't be able to have the sway (resources) to elevate themselves to being the Crown Jewel of the Planet in the public's eyes.
We're past the era where you have to have your diplomats yell at their diplomats. Now we're in an era where your Office of Information takes a directive to ensure Government Initiative XYZ improves its favorables in the public image. Foreign public, domestic public, whatever. OI then does that, using all that data to shape and mold and tug public opinion accordingly.
No one should be doing it. But like AI it's out of the bag. The US government is doing it, even if they won't admit it. Right now they're probably only doing it a little to Americans, but that's not gonna hold. It's too much power, too alluring to disregard.
Political campaigns are starting to do it; that's one of the things some of AOC's crop of Congresscritters have been railing against their parties about. They're of the Information generation, having cut their teeth on Social Media, and have used their new ways to obtain office. Soon enough it'll be all the government departments. Sure it's sweet to think the Department of the Interior might use that power to ensure National Parks continue to be treasured and beloved by Americans, but the exact same power can ensure people who object to a new policy initiative, or a war, are shaped out of being opposition before they even have a chance to build an opposition movement.
Denying foreign governments direct access into American citizens via TikTok is, however distasteful, a matter of national security. Yes it sucks that our government is going to use that power against us, but that's a separate issue from letting China or Russia have such direct access. Sure they can get some of it, maybe even most of it, indirectly via the free market by purchasing it; but it complicates the path from source to them. Makes it more possible to monitor and measure what they're getting, when, how often, and makes it possible to become aware of what initiatives they're trying to use it all for.
What's probably going to happen over the next quarter century is every government does something similar. Every European Union country, for example, (if not the EU as a whole, as a directive to member countries), will probably attempt to set up guardrails and such to control what data about their people leaves the country. That might mean banning some large international companies, but it could just mean those companies each have to set up in-country offices to funnel their data through, or something vaguely in that ballpark.
But right now, TikTok is an arm of the Chinese Government. There is no private in China. The shit they do to their citizens is already bad enough. Letting them have an easy way to do it to Americans is not in American interests. It just isn't. If they want to do things with that data, they need to work harder to get it, one way or another. We shouldn't be standing by letting it be easy for them.
"In Communist China, they ban social media platforms to prevent citizens from seeing anything outside the government narrative!"
Thus making it clear how often national security is in direct opposition to the freedom and security of the citizens contained therein.
As you point out, the US government almost certainly does this to Americans already. They don't like competition from foreign propaganda. Far better to have a well-regulated marketplace of ideas where wrongthink can be expunged before it spreads too far.
Unless it's labor, then they don't care if the platform is ultimately 99% outsourced to cheaper countries. As long as the CEO can vote in the US everyone else is expendable and just needs to consume.
I'm tired of the notion that America cares about it's people. Could have been a good opportunity to make its own version of GDPR, but this makes it clear what government really cares about, or at least is lobbied to care about.
Also, I discussed it beforehand, but reading precise bull shows a slight overreach. Technically, "platforms" is broad enough that there's a non-zero chance stuff like Genshin impact can also have such a target on its back.
I don't use TikTok, but I have come to agree with this. The time to ban it for being spyware was when it was first launched. Now it's one of the most liberal news sources, especially for the youth vote. Biden signing this into law is not going to go well for younger voters who are TikTok users.
I'm a Democrat and a youth and I don't think this is going to silence liberal voices. TikTok didn't even exist 10 years ago and liberal voices were still being heard. I don't even use TikTok or traditional social media and I feel plenty informed about politics and current events. Social media isn't even a good source of news. Algorithms don't allow for nuanced discussion. Issues get simplified down to black or white conflicts and it increases division in society.
I think all social media should have increased regulations to protect against polarization, but when TikTok is owned and operated in a foreign country, how could we enforce new regulations?
How can you say this so confidently right after you say that you don't even use TikTok? I do use it, and I see loads of nuanced discussion from a wide range of the political spectrum. I also see so much good science content, so much clever comedy, so many differing views on gender, mental health, and economic issues. There are many many passionate creators making high quality content for TikTok – the only way one ends up in an echo chamber is if one creates it for themself, and that can just as easily be done on Reddit or Tildes or whatever other non-"traditional" social media you refer to.
Yeah I've said before that I get more adult ADHD education and affirmation, as well as more queer content (and fun D&D and nerd shit) on Tiktok than anywhere else. I am deeply suspicious of the protectionism involved here. There is not a viable replacement for the information and entertainment I get from Tiktok - I truly find Instagram incomprehensible and frustrating and YouTube works differently and the algorithm is bad. I don't trust Bytedance but I don't trust Google or Meta either.
The concern about possible propaganda if the US squares off with China over Taiwan is wild. As if the US and everyone else wouldn't be using propaganda too. As if people that disagree with a war must inherently be victims of propaganda but not the people that agree with it.
Maybe government officials should stop using it if it's so unsafe and reporting on their whereabouts.
That said, apparently the Senate legislation is poorly written and questionably enforceable.
I get where you're coming from in a moral perspective, but I don't think this is a strong argument as to why the US shouldn't force the sale of TikTok, from a national security perspective. It's sort of like "why should the US try to stop someone from winning the war - as if the US wouldn't be trying to win the war too," you know?
Same here. There's a big difference between a country's citizens having X opinion and a foreign government trying to covertly spread X opinion, from a national security perspective.
This is an argument for cutting the US from all external media though ultimately
I also think all of this presupposes that being on Tiktok gets you propaganda AND that we're in a hot war with China. Sure if that last bit happens (which, absolutely no thank you) there are wartime arguments to be made. But the hypothetical isn't compelling.
But personally I'd rather us act morally as a country as well. I know better but it'd be nice.
I'm not sure I agree with that - or at least, that's not what I meant to imply. There are degrees of justification; just because the US perceives a chinese media company as a threat, that doesn't mean that, say, the BBC is likewise threatening.
And finally, I don't think it needs to be a hot war, either. Just look at Russia's attempts to influence the elections of multiple European powers - this is all pre-war (e.g https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep21009.6.pdf).
But if the UK is opposed to US actions, Americans might be influenced by their coverage. And since Russia absolutely did try to do this without RussiaTok shouldn't all social media be controlled too? I still don't see how blocking an app but not the website where you can view all the same videos as the app makes any sense, but if we want to be thorough you really have to block everything.
I'm not saying I don't think there is any possibility for harm in TikTok, on the contrary it's clear Facebook has facilitated harm and been a venue for propaganda daily, but I don't see anything that make me think "I shouldn't use this app, and it's existence is a danger to the US". I feel like first the argument was about the data of government officials, then the safety of our data is citizens, but the possibility of propaganda is really uncompelling to me. Especially after the past 8 years. (I'm not saying you're moving goalposts, but that the broader conversation keeps shifting)
And it feels like the conversation is shifting in part because those elected officials who even voted for the ban are still using the app. So now it can't be safety, it has to be hypothetical propaganda.
And it feels like most of it comes from people who've never used the app, and so it feels very much like old people talking about The YouTubes. If nothing else, this means that our government officials have done a really poor job of convincing their constituents that this makes sense. But people who disagree with this decision are accused of being teenagers. I actually really just think it's a ridiculous curtailing of freedom for very nebulous potential national security claims. And maybe I'm naive. But I also really don't want us to get into any sort of war with China. I'm pretty over wars in general. And it's very difficult to overcome individual experience without strong data.
I do suspect that much like Amazon directing you to purchase your Kindle books in a browser rather than in the app, all of a sudden Americans will find a very nice mobile web experience. Maybe not. I don't know how easy it is to upload from the web. Bytedance owns Capcut too, and that didn't get banned either afaik so they'll still have all that video data.
I'm sorry for rambling I just find the whole thing. Frustrating and truly. I'm unconvinced. I know that they theoretically would not be able to tell us everything. I don't feel like anyone's actually told us anything. Tildes should not be trying harder to argue for this law than the elected officials. And since it seems the strategy was intentional to avoid public backlash (if another post's claim was correct) then we should be mad about that.
Europe doesn’t seem to have a problem doing this. A company doesn’t have to based within a country for its operations within that country to be regulated.
Europe is a collection of like-minded democracies that we can negotiate and compromise with. China is not. We have lost many times in the past with intellectual property, foreign ownership of companies, and Facebook being banned. This would not have been any different.
My point is that Europe has been successful at regulating tech companies not based within their borders, including TikTok. The mere fact that TikTok is operated by a foreign country, even one that is at best a competitor and at worst an adversary, does not preclude regulation from working. The examples you give are a very different thing: an attempt by the US (for example) to influence how China interacts with western businesses within their own borders. I do not think you can extrapolate that to the converse, i.e. the US influencing how Chinese companies operate outside of China's borders. Europe has seen success so far in doing so.
Maybe that would all change down the road if the US and China continue to escalate their competition. But I see no reason to think that for the time being it would not work. That is my only point here.
That you use the word "regulate" tells me that we see the US's fears here differently. Europe being successful or not with regulating TikTok is not the beacon that the US should be looking toward. Sure, there's some concerns about data collection and regulating where data is stored helps alleviate, but not eliminate, the potential that personal data on a massive scale can be used for targeted blackmail. The real fear, however, is that TikTok's reach right now and in the future can enable the Chinese government to push an agenda.
If the owners of TikTok were subject to US jurisdiction, then they could be held liable for any egregious acts. If TikTok remains owned by a foreign government that has repeatedly demonstrated that they do not want to conduct business on reasonable terms, then what will we do when TikTok is used for propaganda in the future? If we wait even longer to ban it, the backlash becomes greater. It's best to nip it in the bud now while we still can.
Put another way, TikTok can be regulated all you want up until there's a China-Taiwan showdown and then it can be flipped to spewing propaganda. What then, and how did regulations between now and that future help?
We have an entire rightwing media system that lied so long and so hard that a substantial portion of the country was, and is still, convinced that the 2020 election was stolen. This resulted in the literal storming of the US Capitol building by a massive crowd of angry, violent rioters and militants.
When Fox News is shut down by the US government, I will be willing to consider if we should next regulate TikTok. Note, there isn't an allegation that TikTok has actually engaged in a massive psyop against the US population; it's just all hypotheticals. Meanwhile, the right wing media sphere literally engaged in a massive psyop that almost overthrew our democracy. And we're here worrying about hypotheticals.
There are two separate concerns here. One is US customers' data being controlled and accessible by "foreign adversaries", to use the bill's language, and the other is China having a way to reach a large number of Americans and the potential use of that reach for propaganda purposes in the event of a hot war between China and Taiwan (and/or the US). The former concern is very much addressable by regulation that has not even really been attempted yet, let alone attempted and failed. The latter is not relevant until a hot war actually occurs.
Ban it then. I completely disagree the backlash would only grow until then. A large majority of Americans support Taiwan and would be completely opposed to a Chinese takeover. In the event that happens, I suspect there would be almost no backlash to banning the app then. There is of course no way of knowing for sure, but history shows us that Americans are very much inclined towards "rally around the flag" type reactions to global conflicts. Even a bill in which a ban is triggered by the outbreak of hostilities I think would have very little opposition.
Anyway, I remember when the "Great Firewall of China" was a thing people talked about, or China banning Facebook as you mentioned, and there the reasons were also concerns about foreign information (or propaganda). The logic here is exactly the same, and it doesn't sit well with me.
The latter is not relevant until a hot war occurs, but you have to prepare before the hot war occurs. Russia, the EU, and Nordstream as an example of not preparing. Maybe China-Taiwan is enough to convince people at that time that TikTok can be banned. But what about situations that aren't as clear cut?
If China at least played by a similar ruleset as the US, then I would agree with you, but they don't. You can't let another country ban you from bringing in information while they get to export whatever they want. It's a no-win-only-lose scenario for the US if they did so.
Single issue voters are extremely myopic and I can definitely see a lot of youth turning over this issue. But I guess that's why this all happens after the election. That's for future democrats to handle!
It's almost as if they don't believe their own marketing team that a fascist takeover is imminent if they lose this most important election in our lifetimes. As if the last election wasn't also the most important election in our lifetimes. They're aware that it'll cost votes (that's why the due date is after Election Day), but feel safe that they'll still be around to win office again if news that it passed with bipartisan support costs too many and they lose the election.
That’s why the deadline is after the election. Biden is re-elected? He’s already won. Trump pulls a Grover Cleveland? Look at this mess that happened under the fascist orange man (pay no attention to who signed the law or the fact Congress voted on it)!
NYT's Hardfork podcast did a discussion on the reasons for the banning of Tiktok (episode here but obv use whatever podcast platform you enjoy). It occurs about 19 min in and to me the most compelling argument in this discuss was
the idea of a foreign entity having such a huge influence over US media is troubling. The last time this came up was with well known Aussie asshole and piece of shit Rupert Murdoch and he had to comply by becoming an American citizen. We have laws in the US banning foreign ownership of media outlets which 100% applies to Tiktok
the fact that similar US companies don't have the same kind of access to China that we allow Chinese firms. Facebook, for all it's shit, is banned in China.
Throw on the fact Tiktok has documented cases of spying on individuals like journalists, and I'm ready for this.
Side note, I've heard people stating that their concern is that this will further dampen youth vote turnout, which was already struggling before Gaza/Israel, but to be honest, I doubt there will be that many single issue voters on Tiktok and if they are, like... really? Tiktok is the most important thing in your life?
It doesn't matter how much of a nonsensical loser it makes the voter; if they're a single-issue voter, a vote is a vote.
True. I guess my expectation is that those who are a single issue voter on Tiktok probably aren't that politically engaged. The straw that breaks the camels back? I could see that but as a singular issue, I personally can't see it moving the needle. Though given how close things were in 2016 and 2020, I suppose that matters.
For sure. Can't forget about the real stolen election, 2000, either when it comes to close votes.
fun fact
If Ohio had gone D by a slim majority in '04, we could have had two elections in a row where the Electoral College disagreed with the popular vote AND made it a bipartisan problem.I have bad news, that wasn't a fun fact at all and something I buried long ago. Fun facts are like... broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts and even gai lan are cultivars of the same plant species, brassica oleracea!
Does the podcast discuss why tiktok is considered a media outlet but for example tildes isn't?
I don't believe so but I think the term they used was broadcast outlet vs media outlet. Regardless, the nature of Tildes vs Tiktok is quite different so there's likely some legal daylight between the two, though I am not a lawyer. I'm also trying to think of any other foreign owned company that has a similar kind of ginormous market share in the US like Tiktok but I'm drawing blanks.
If Murdoch owned Instagram I don't think the law would have required him to be a citizen. I guess I'm saying I don't see how Tiktok is lumped in there and let's say Reddit or Tildes isn't. Tildes is obviously much smaller but size doesn't change the type of website it is. All of these, function off of primarily user created posts/videos/discussions, with tiktok's main functional difference of having a built in shop that they presumably get a cut of. But Facebook definitely has that option too. Tiktok pays some creators (sometimes) a cut of their revenue but other media sites have that. Is YouTube in this category?
If we reclassify TikTok but not the others - and yeah text based Reddit and Tildes would count if newspapers would count - I think we're being intellectually dishonest. Regardless of whether the ban is the right move or not.
And after all this if I can watch Tiktok on my browser, what has been achieved? If I can't, then we want our government blocking websites too?
Form and function wasn't the point as media has evolved. Web 2.0 is barely 20 years old and user generated content at this scale is only the newest form which will be replaced once we move into Zucks apocalyptic metaverse hell or some shit. The point is the fact that Tiktok is owned and operated by a foreign company with ties to a government that used it to crack down on domestic dissent and who regularly uses companies to execute political deeds. There's a reason why China is considered by the US government to be an adversary.
I'm not saying Meta/Reddit/Google are "better" than Tiktok, they're all kinda shit and have made the world a worse place. But Meta/Facebook/IG is US owned as are Reddit and Google/Youtube. Tildes, while Canadian owned, is a speck in the landscape internet landscape and barely scrapes above the top 8,000 sites visited per day. If Tildes reached a similar sized audience and influence as Tiktok, I'd absolutely want it the US to force it to transition to US ownership.
edited for clarity
But you said:
My point explicitly wasn't whether we should ban the app or how bad China is. It was that this wasn't consistent and that makes it dishonest.
If Tiktok is a media outlet, then so are the other companies you mentioned AND so is Tildes. Yeah Tildes is much smaller, but that is irrelevant to whether it's a media outlet. Maybe the law cares about the size but that's why I asked if the podcast clarified why Tiktok is a media outlet by the applicable legal standards.
I'm not great at reading FCC regs, but my understanding is that a) it definitely applies to broadcast ownership and b) that the FCC really doesn't regulate apps or the internet basically at all. Reuters mentioning this during a previous "ban Tiktok" news moment
And I can't even find evidence this applies to newspapers for example so it isn't even a media outlet policy because the FCC doesn't regulate that. I couldn't find comparable regulations through other agencies for newspapers, but instead found a lot of concern about foreign ownership of farmland.
So I don't think this applies to Tiktok at all, unless it's a different reg than the FCC one. I don't think Tiktok qualifies as either a broadcast station or media outlet. This new law is the only thing that makes it illegal.
Temu and Shein are still allowed though, so it doesn't seem to be the ownership, or the access to location and shopping habits and financial information either.
At this point, I'm not sure we're going to come to any agreement on this so I'm going to leave it here with this clarification on foreign ownership of media.
Concerning the FCC's primacy, the "FCC has regulated the ownership of mass media outlets since the 1920s.". Part of the problem is that the speed of regulation and thus the purview/enforcement of the FCC has not kept up with how quickly communications has changed. As previous stated, rules for old media required Murdoch to become an American citizen and revoke his Australian citizenship back in 1985 in order to own US television stations. As the story states
Concerning new media, the issue is the fact the laws haven't kept up with the times. FCC chairwoman discussed this
So you're right, doesn't regulate internet content (free speech and what not) but it does absolutely regulate media ownership. In addition, it appears that since the 1996 Telecom Act, enforcing whatever regulations exist concerning the internet fall under the FCC. So given the previous precedent with old media, it's clear to me that same rules should apply to new media. The point here is foreign ownership over media. Temu and Shein are foreign, yes, but they aren't media. Youtube/Facebook/Meta/Instagram are new media but they're domestically owned.
Do I feel this is the best approach to address this problem? Not really. Something like internet and data privacy laws would be way better. Hell banning of Tiktok isn't even on my priority of things I'd wish this government would address.
It was not clear to me that this was just your opinion and not what the podcast said.
I understand your opinion on what you'd like to be the case but I thought you were stating authoritatively that Tiktok was covered by the above provisions. But if Tiktok were covered, AFAICT Tildes would have to be covered too. The FCC covers radio stations of all sizes.
I think that's not what we want broadly on the internet, and while I don't agree that the clock app should be banned (and I think the US is about to get a nice mobile website experience) my only point in this thread was that the quoted original statement was not an accurate description of the current facts.
If they don't sell, the ban happens after the election, so I expect shenanigans.
I hope this somehow eventually leads to the downfall of the algorithmic internet. I absolutely despise social media over the last couple of years.
I first noticed it on Instagram with the "for you" page, but now those types of videos pop up when you're just scrolling through your feed. Then reddit started doing the "posts you might like". Now, every time I open Facebook I get bombarded with posts from flat earth groups and no-name "influencers" sharing homophobic memes. I hate how these sites think they can give us content based on what they think we like. Just because I'm a 30 something white male who likes science doesn't mean I want to see all this anti science bullshit.
Then, when I block the groups, and click "see less like this", it gives me posts from those groups a few weeks later. I'm fucking tired of it, let me cater my online experience to how I want it instead of shoving these posts I obviously don't like down my throat.
I agree that most of the companies are shit at this, and tbh I think that's why they see Tiktok as a threat. Their algorithm is widely considered excellent and in my experience that holds up. I very rarely get weird recommends and if I do, a "dislike" pretty much stops it (ads get a bit wonkier but the majority of the time it's things I already pay for like Dropout. Meanwhile YouTube thinks I speak Spanish and have an infant. )
I get why that isn't appealing for some but I'd rather get to see things I enjoy (including spooky lake month) and topics I'm interested in when I'm casually scrolling. I can seek out specific info there or elsewhere when I'm trying to broaden my perspectives. And tbh things like anti-racism is absolutely did broaden my perspectives on Tiktok
I understand the appeal, I just wish there was a way to stop it. If only they had a setting to turn off suggested content.
I also extremely dislike the way that Facebook has made "pages" into influencer content, and then allow those pages to comment on articles and other stuff. Facebook was really about connecting with your friends, now it feels like just another influencer social media site.
Yeah I get that. Facebook is a place I am mostly because most of my family and friends are there. And it's easier to stay in touch there than anywhere else. And local neighborhood/city groups with (surprisingly) less racism than Nextdoor.
If it weren’t for pages and groups, the blue app (as it’s called by Meta employees) would be about as culturally relevant as MySpace. I first noticed the shift sometime around 2015Q3. That’s when my news feed stopped being a place for fun(ny) updates from my friends. At first, it got taken over by wedding & baby photos from people I haven’t thought about in five years: their friends & family understandably went nuts on that like button and pushed the posts as highly engaging popular content to my screen. However, once the people who got married were married and the couples who wished to reproduce have reproduced, there wasn’t anything left from organic content made by real (former) acquaintances. Enter meme pages with names like “Memes so dank they make you commit suicide” and their associated groups. They filled the void of no new content when refreshing the News Feed. That era peaked by 2019 but had a long plateau before declining thanks to the pandemic. Now, it seems most pages have degraded to Taboola and Outbrain level chum boxen. There are still good groups to be found, but one must be on the lookout for new groups to join as the old ones become stale or taken over by political ranters.
As our non-Fey friend pointed out, the main uses of the Blue App are as a neighborhood calendar and as the rolodex login service for Messenger. Anything in the News Feed is filler.
This is mostly about trying to maintain a us economic hegemony on the world. It also just seems unlikely to succeed. China has shown again and again they don't really need us.
On one hand, this casts a shadow across any online outreach by the Biden campaign, and the youth vote will be skeptical forever, especially if you don’t elaborate on what TikTok is doing that is a matter of national security and not just “trust me bro.” On the other hand, youths are notorious for staying home, and the campaign so far has been a series of “triple dog dares” to not vote and let the country fall to darkness or whatever. It a good thing that the 2024 election is the only one that matters and no other election will decide the fate of the country.
Figures the one thing we get bipartisan support on in this country is to cut off access to social media the United States doesn’t have soft power over. Really shows what the score is on this whole World Wide Web experience.
I'm curious to see what kind of impact this has on the economy when all that income stops. That's a lot of side-hustles, main jobs, and advertising for small businesses that's just going to disappear.
Strange question. Can or does this impact how other countries will treat Tiktok ?. If I remember correctly, over here (Australia) our government banned the use of the app in any government offices.
I suspect the biggest impact would be precedent. The U.S. banning it would encourage other western countries to ban it.
Might also lead the EU to take digital sovereignty in social media more seriously. Maybe we'll see more support for homegrown networks that are based less on US hypercapitalist views of social media and actually offer something useful to its users or something. Which could be beneficial to the US too, if it catches on there. Particularly since Americans seem to feel (looking at this thread here) that their media landscape is under too tight control by the government. Having EU alternatives might offer a perceived counterweight there too. (I say perceived not because it's a fake solution to a real problem, but because I think it might not even be a real problem. Not sure.)
archive link
Genuinely in awe that anyone is celebrating this, especially from angles of privacy. The law itself is vague and allows for the U.S. government to assert any entity as adversarial or foreign. Right now state officials are openly calling student protestors "terrorists." The room and opportunity to abuse this is wide open, and only endangers people's privacy and first amendment rights...
"It seems that TikTok is on the clock, but will the party ever stop? No."
-Kesha, probably
So help me, if this is the central point in which it rests that an actual cyberpunk dystopia comes to pass...