It's not the app, it's the audience and regulations.
Chinese companies can spend a zillion dollars to promote an app willy nilly as a strategic interest.
And then ban competitors on home turf.
So the CIA could make 'USATikTok' and spend $2B promoting downloads in China, but it would be banned anyhow.
Zoom is an American company with operations in China.
The US's 'propaganda arm' is Hollywood. The US does not have the hyper specific and organised legions of propaganda/influencers that China has, nothing close to that. Surely there are some operational capabilities; the US Gov. has close ties with major press outlets and can place stories, and surely has influence in foreign media outlets, and uses major American corporations as cover, but nothing remotely on the scale and purpose of what China is up to.
It would be better to just ban Chinese apps related to social media. It's fair because it's tit-for-tat, but also because there are legit influence concerns.
We can sick to trading plastic toys and alarm clocks.
Edit: I should add what I assumed most people knew, and that is TikTok is a propaganda channel. Matthew Tye, an American ex-pat based in China has an interesting set of videos where he deconstructs a lot of the narrative being pursued on TikTok [1]. It's funny and scary.
You folks do realise that in every nation, Media is a protected industry? Just like finance and telecoms?
It's practiced everywhere, especially China.
Why do you think there is no 'CNN China?' or 'Disney China - Digital Entertainment China?' Or that China only allows X number of Hollywood films every year of course, subject to censorship? [1]
Or that Canada has rules over media ownership and content [2]
What do you think would happen if China tried to buy the 5 largest American Banks or Telecoms? Or visa versa?
TikTok is a media company, it should be treated as such.
If China wants to buy/promote a media company in the US, partly as a means to advocate CCP propaganda, then it can be subject to controls.
And FYI the conversation is moot from a trade perspective, since China wouldn't allow any such thing remotely to happen over there, there's simply no reason to allow it here.
And of course Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat etc. etc. are all banned in China, why on earth the US allows Chinese social media companies in America? Purely from a trade perspective makes utterly no sense.
The US should fairly and simply enact China's own media policies for foreign apps tit-for-tat: straight up bans, censorship, rules on ownership, make it impossible for them to compete. That would be fair.
When China wants to allow Snapchat unfettered access to China, then possibly TikTok can have unfettered access to the US.
Completely disagree: censorship is bad by itself, even censorship against an entity which engages in censorship itself.
> The US should fairly and simply enact China's own media policies for foreign apps tit-for-tat: straight up bans, censorship, rules on ownership, make it impossible for them to compete. That would be fair.
Sorry, but "retaliation" is not a good justification for censorship.
First - you're confusing 'censorship' with issues of competitive concern. Protecting industries, is not about 'censorship' it's about controlling systems.
Take some time to grasp why 100% of nations protect their financial systems at a very minimum - and usually communications and media.
If a nation left its financial system, comms and media 'open' - it would be very quickly taken over by competitive or totalitarian forces.
For example, any South American country that left those systems open would be almost entirely under the control of the US, Soviets/Russians or China.
Second - it's incredibly naive. Everything is 'censored' on some level - and I mean everything, for a variety of reasons.
Violence and Terrorism. Are we going to allow people to start putting "Kill All the Blacks/Whites/Chinamen" on Twitter, or FB, or on their own websites? And have their little meetings on how to coordinate this? Seems like we're going to have to censor that.
And what about the Jihadis in ISIS showing beheadings, asking young Muslims to "Come on over and you can behead infidels as well!". Because in where I live, 11 young men were nabbed by the Feds trying to get on a plane to go to Syria to do just that.
Have you spent time in Germany? Do you know that Mein Kampf is still effectively banned there? Do you know why? And how sensitive that subject is, and for good reason?
More subtly - we have foreign propaganda and political influence.
China is spending very heavily to convince the world that they have no responsibility towards the spread of COVID. We know factually, that it seems very clear there was at least some degree of coverup in the early stages and that they failed to inform the WHO of important issues, and have lied and not been transparent in their reporting. They jailed and condemned medical staff trying to pull the alarm.
But 'facts don't matter' if they can simply confuse people otherwise and it's not that hard at all - they can completely erase the truth. With the right controls, China can absolutely convince large swaths of the world for example, that 'Coronavirus originated in the USA, and was brought to China by the CIA' - which is absurd, but it's a pretty easy truth to preach if there's no 'censorship'.
Would you be willing to allow China to completely misinform most of the world as to the reality of Coronavirus? Because that's what they want to do.
More poignantly, interference in elections. Thankfully, Google is a fairly ethnical entity, because they could, if they wanted to, shift the outcome of elections in a lot of places. Russia has a program specifically designed to influence America, to try to manipulate outcomes that meet their strategic objectives. RT is a direct attempt at this, it was created by Russian intelligences services, specifically for the purpose of controlling what people believe, and towards promoting Putin's objectives. It's not a 'news agency' it's literally a propaganda arm in the most pure sense of that term.
Media, just like financial services, is power - and that power, were it up for grabs, would be enable certain forces to basically do anything they want.
This is not a new idea, it's as old as time, and the game has been going on for thousands of years.
So the solution could look something like this:
1) China should be banned from selling any products or services in the US that are likewise banned in China. That's actually pretty basic fair trade.
2) Because China censors products of its own companies and uses them as propaganda Channels, any Chinese media company will have to demonstrate quite clearly how they are free from political influence both in terms of political censorship, and especially from promoting political narratives. Some degree of control is fine (nobody is concerned that TikTok is taking down hate speech), but whatever they are doing has to be publicly defined and transparent.
What authority does the Australian government have to ban an app? And would this authority also apply to apps built by Australians or only foreign apps?
The most recent example I know of is "The Peaceful Pill Handbook", which was banned around '07 by giving it a "Restricted Classification", which makes distributing or owning a copy illegal in most state and territories.
Australia is unique amongst its peers in that it has no bill of rights, and instead largely relies upon common law to determine what can and cannot be done; making rights subject to legislative authority.
Kind of similar, kind of, Canada has a notwithstanding clause that allows the Government to temporarily override protected rights with legislation.
>Australia is unique amongst its peers in that it has no bill of rights, and instead largely relies upon common law to determine what can and cannot be done; making rights subject to legislative authority.
Is this really unique among British Commonwealth countries? Besides this, it's a rather interesting situation, in which scholars on free speech and the US 1A use America as an extreme example - even questioning why there should be an explicit constitutional right to freedom of speech. I think the arguments are pretty interesting.
The Australian Customs Act allows them to ban just about anything they like, and force any company operating inside their borders to comply, such as making Google and Apple remove an app from their store.
Australia banning it might only be the start. It might extend to other FVEY countries. Think of the other intelligence related laws they passed over the years in a coordinated fashion. There are plenty of influential people in the US who are very critical of TikTok, e.g. Josh Hawley.
There's no legal mechanism in the US by which TikTok could be outright banned. Apple and Google could drop it from their app stores if pressured enough, but even that wouldn't be a government action.
It's an American company that hasn't done anything wrong and that other American companies are also doing. We're in this situation because American businesses have lobbied to kill privacy legislation and Congress let them have their way.
There's actually several mechanisms by which it could be banned under Australian law, if they really do consider it a security threat. Practically speaking, there are very few things the government is not legally allowed to censor in Australia.
They could require ISPs to block access to the servers, as they've done (poorly) for a range of websites.
They could classify TikTok as entertainment, and then it give it the dreaded "Refused Classification", making it illegal to distribute or make use of.
They could ban it under the Australian Customs Act, forcing places like Google Play to remove it from their stores, as they've done for a wide variety of books, and other media.
That's true. Following the Christchurch shootings, Telstra pre-emptively blocked 4chan, 8chan, Zero Hedge, Liveleak and others. (Vodaphone and Optus had similar blocks with slightly differing lists of sites they put in place after Telstra had enacted theirs).
They did later lift some of those blocks after everyone stopped sharing the video of the shootings, but not all of them. (And if the government ordered blocks on some of those, I actually would be fairly comfortable with it, if it were done with process and transparency.)
This isn't a judgement of whether their actions were morally right or wrong. However, an ISP should probably be pre-emptively calling MPs to make a decision, rather than controlling access directly.
Certainly the US government could make a logical case for that, couldn't they? If China controls the algorithms of TikTok, they can manipulate what messages or content gets amplified or suppressed, right? And that would present a risk for meddling or tampering in domestic politics by a foreign government, right?
I have no idea what legal mechanisms the US govt has to pursue something like this, nor am I a user of TikTok, so I may be speaking from a point of ignorance here.
There is a similar argument for FB and Twitter on other countries. If this happens the side-effect might be every country creating their own local social apps and banning US-based social networks.
Does the Herald Sun (which seems to be the source of this sparse article, but which I cannot read because their website is trash) give more details than this?
> There are calls for popular video app TikTok to be banned in Australia.
The passive voice here is obnoxious, who is calling for it?
The Herald Sun is a Rupert Murdoch publication, which means that it has a comparable relationship to the conservative political party in Australia as Fox New has with the Republicans.
I would recommend viewing all its content from this frame of reference.
The Herald Sun is Melbourne’s leading trash tabloid newspaper. With headlines like “Chinese Virus Panda-monium”, they were stoking racist sentiment long before Trump did.
And just today, the Daily Telegraph (the Sydney paper with the same owner) reported the closing of the Victorian border with the headline “Mexicans Shut Out” (Victoria sits on the southern border of New South Wales): https://twitter.com/echewy/status/1280285466521034752
Definitely view their content from this frame of reference.
The papers are trash but complaints against the last one seem misguided. The phrase itself is just a reference to 'south of the border', and I've heard people in both states use it as a light-hearted joke to refer to Victorians. It has been used for many years in a non-racist context as a play on words.
Though it does straddle the line a bit, I think it was worth clearing up that it's not just a reference to shutting borders.
None of those things are racist... It's part of Australian culture to have a laugh and poke fun at things. You need to view these things in an appropriate cultural context. Painting an entire group of people as racist makes you kind of a bigot tbh. Not a good look.
The Herald Sun is one of Murdoch's mouthpieces.
There may be a source, but with the Sun I believe the use of the passive voice allows the editor to hide that the source of the article is the article itself, and perhaps, the article should be written as:
'This article is calling for the ban of Tik Tok which is a competitor for your attention. It may be that a ban is in the national interest, but that's not of interest to us. Our editorial policy is to provoke strong emotional reactions that drive sales and our political agenda, not critical thinking. '
A lot of Australian media is written in a passive voice. Everything is too touchy of a topic to ever confront.
It is very frustrating if you're actually out of the loop and are trying to figure out what anyone is actually talking about.
Who/What/Why/When/Where and How are frequently just missing from editorials, but there IS a controversy, related to something, like immigrants, or Tik Tok, immigrant apps.
It means you can't use weasel words to say one thing and imply another. I personally think 'truth' applies to more than just the letter of what is said and that's in keeping with the concept of 'the spirit of the law' so I don't see a real problem.
The US seems stricter on these matters and takes things more literally, so the legislation reflects that.
> Committee chair Senator Jenny McAllister said she hopes TikTok will comply with the Australian government’s request for their cooperation in a probe into the platform.
> “I think Australians will expect to hear from them,” she told the Herald Sun.
> “Part of the job of this Committee is to get all of those stakeholders in the room and create a forum where we can have a really good discussion about what are the boundaries, about what is and isn’t acceptable on these types of matters.”
That seems to be the substance / source of the article.
Outside of those quotes, there's 4 paragraphs of background regarding India's decision to ban it, and Scott Morrison (Australian Prime Minister) recent announcement regarding a big cyber security funding announcement (part of wider national defense announcement).
The source in the original article is a federal MP. News Corp are the government mouth piece, they're definitely briefing this as part of the increasing tensions with China.
Sucks to see so many engineers on board with locking down the internet. “Made in China” should not be a magical phrase that subverts your normal instincts.
India made up 40%+ of their user base, when they banned it, China are taking it to court in India. The monetary impact must be big for their advertising revenue.
On the US, you have data to make money for business. In China, you have the same to regulate thought crime, reduce financial scores and make people disappear.
While you are right about "data is data" and nobody can predict the future, there is no question right now about which one you should be more concerned about.
I don’t think “making money for business” is such an innocent activity. Actually “making money” it is the reason and justification behind most the US abuses around the world.
Also, we may not see it, but marketing, commerce, and media are also brainwashing people with the consequences we see today.
I'm right on the older limit of zoomer. I understand perfectly and think it would be a good idea to ban it. But I also think every privacy destroying social media app should be shut down.
I think the Australian government should bring in a GDPR set of laws. To me it seems that the GDPR has improved the internet globally. So many sites added in automated data export tools and ways to opt out of tracking.
Companies not following these laws should be fined or if the fine is unenforceable they should be banned from doing business in the country.
“We place the highest importance on user privacy and integrity.”
Sensible chuckle.
Mr Hunter said the concerns over user data getting into the hands of the CCP are overblown and the data isn’t stored on Chinese servers.
“TikTok Australia user data is stored in Singapore,” he said.
> The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012.[22] The speaker's notes in the briefing document reviewed by The Washington Post indicated that "98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft".
Along with the Great Firewall, restrictions raise concerning voices, especially among foreign companies.[11] Regarding the requirements for spot-checks and certifications, international law firms have warned that companies could be asked to provide source code, encryption, or other crucial information for review by the authorities, increasing the risk of this information being lost, passed on to local competitors, or used by the authorities themselves.[1] The Federal Bureau of Investigation warned that the law could force companies transmitting data through servers in China to submit to data surveillance measures.[12]
If a Chinese IP requests a public static video file on Singapore AWS S3 (Or whatever the CDN tiktok use) and stored it on a Chinese server, does this mean duplication?
TikTok steals kids attention and is completely useless for society. Sorry, but fuck it. We don't need more useless apps that steal peoples' attention span.
Yes, I realize you're being sarcastic (at least I think you are), illustrating the point.
A government which bans things because they aren't deemed "healthy" (by said government) is not the right course of action (in my humble opinion). When it comes to something like alcohol, it's only "unhealthy" when its consumption is not moderated. Not to mention, what nutritionists recommend (and subsequently, what governments adopt) as health guidelines for food consumption is widely subject to change. The food pyramid that some of us were taught in the '90s is greatly recognized as being largely incorrect and is no longer taught.
Of course, the question becomes, where do we draw the line? Is it better for society for something like cocaine to be outright banned by the government or is it better for society that the government legally allows its distribution but regulates it similar to the way that it does tobacco and alcohol (effectively cutting out the market share and profits of the black market and cartels)? I don't have the answer to this question.
My point was that society/people by and large don't care about unhealthiness and/or the negative effects of addition, they simply want things that they dislike or disagree with (usually from a weird moral or intellectual high horse) to be banned. Else Americans would all be on the streets protesting the continued legality of alcohol consumption or the ridiculous amount of sugars pumped into so much of their food and drink; why the pearl-clutching over teenagers being teenagers and fooling around on a frivolous app compared to the monumental damage to society those two things inflict?
The only point I've made is that something being addictive and harmful is a reasonable quality to ban something for. This was in response to the user who said "there are plenty of reasons to ban tiktok, but this ain't it" (from memory, but close enough).
This doesn't mean that I think all things which are addictive and harmful should be banned. A total ban on alcohol would probably not be effective, and would lead to more harm than good, so I wouldn't support it.
Philosophers have regularly been persecuted by the ruling class, whether it's Socrates or Jesus. Most have an acute ability to convey a message that is often counter to popular narratives of the time.
The ability for people to organize and communicate ideas, whether through printing press or social media, can be very powerful indeed.
