> I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
> I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
You mean you want... the cable TV bundle again? Literally the thing that the article rails against, because cable TV inherently produces "sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting."
No, that's why I didn't write that. Spotify allows nearly everyone to put their music on the platform. Just this week I listened to some music with <1000 plays that I found in a random video somewhere. I choose what I want to listen to and a part of the fee I pay gets transferred to the creator. I don't need to buy 100 different subscriptions to labels and musicians, it's centralized.
(Yes, I know Spotify isn't perfect and that there are valid criticisms of the platform. I'm not using it as an example of a perfect end goal, I'm using it as an example of the only thing right now that gets somewhat in the neighborhood. And in the industry there are multiple platforms who distribute mostly the same content with only some 'exclusive' releases. Which is what I'd like to see for the web.)
Is that really how Spotify works? What if you listened only to that one creator, would all of the artists' portion of your subscription go to that creator? I was under the impression that with Spotify everybody's subscription goes into a big pool of money which is then distributed between all of the artists based on total plays. So actually as a listener of niche music, I am mostly paying for exactly the mainstream artists whose music I am not listening to and who don't need my support anyway. This is why I prefer to use Bandcamp, where I know there is a direct relationship between what I buy and who gets the money for that.
> Yes, I know Spotify isn't perfect and that there are valid criticisms of the platform.
I wrote that paragraph for a reason.
> So actually as a listener of niche music, I am mostly paying for exactly the mainstream artists whose music I am not listening to
That mostly depends on how much you listen. If you listen more than average, your niche band will actually get more than they would've otherwise. At least if I have my brain math correct.
It was totally predictable that many of the same people who hated on the cable bundle also hate on a fragmented streaming landscape even though they probably pay significantly less than they did for cable TV unless they also pay for live TV anyway. (And they'd also hate on an all-inclusive integrated streaming service for the hundreds of dollars a month it would cost.)
> though they probably pay significantly less than they did for cable TV
Might be a bit of a cultural difference though. I'm in the Netherlands. TV was never as expensive over here as in the US. We also got spoiled, I guess, because the hits from the US were also on TV over here but the smaller shows weren't, so we'd get the biggest shows from Fox, CBS and Comedy Central on the same channel in some cases. And from what I remember this was <$20 a month.
I paid about $100/month for cable TV in the US and that wasn't with a bunch of premium content. (Maybe just HBO.) That was Comcast so I assume that was pretty typical. And then any streaming channels, movie rentals (which were mostly not on standard cable), etc. were on top of that.
And when I canceled cable TV I decided to just go cold turkey and do without the occasional sporting event on live TV. So depending upon how you count I'm probably paying less than $50/month for all my video entertainment these days.
It is more of content owner trying to get what they can from different part of the world. There are places in third world where HBO would be $1 / month , same thing in US is like 15-20 dollars. Buyers/local networks can always say this is price local market can pay else they will pirate.
Maybe you should actually check the facts, instead of just making a witty remark? The EC has regulated Microsoft into product decisions to make third-parties as unrestricted as Microsoft itself. See here:
> (11) Microsoft shall make available to interested undertakings Interoperability Information that enables non-Microsoft server Software Products to interoperate with the Windows Client PC Operating System on an equal footing with Microsoft Server Software Products. Microsoft shall provide a warranty with respect to this Interoperability Information (including any updates), as specified in the general provisions in Section B.I of this Undertaking, effective 1 January 2010 for Windows Vista and Windows 7, and effective 15 March 2010 for Windows XP.
As someone that worked at MS, on a team that worked directly on this issue (among other things) some years ago, MS did figure out better solutions and did discuss it with industry.
Kaspersky was running an SSL/TLS Proxy in the kernel IIRC and didn't want to have to move it elsewhere due to the fact it would require them to rework their product quite a bit.
The solutions MS (we) proposed were agnostic and overall better, the anti-malware industry simply doesn't want to make the changes as these things do impose technical work on existing products.
No worries. That wasn't at all evident from the above complaint.
Was the drive for this industry forum coming from dealing with the EU, or was it more from MS trying to make things better without needing the prodding?
There is literally a ton of existing software out there that is keeping MS from doing exactly that. When it comes to avoiding breaking legacy applications MS scores far higher than any other operating systems out there.
And that has absolutely nothing to do with them coming up with better approaches then discussing them with industry for potential roll out, adoption, etc.
But instead, now they're in trouble they're trying to blame the EU for stopping their monopoly.
Do you honestly believe MS being unhindered by competition restraints would lead to better results?
Are you forgetting MS has already demonstrated how that goes, and been literally convicted for it?
Let me try to make it extremely simple so that maybe you might understand something.
Say I am running a shop, the EU tells me that under no circumstance can I not allow a product to be sold in my shop, even if that product is a ticking time bomb that can blow up the shop. And so hearing this, I create a document “Good approaches to sell time bombs”, and I mention helpful stuff like ensure the timer in your bomb is switched off when it is in shop. I also create an industry wide forum with all time bomb manufacturers and discuss best practices and time bomb methods with them to best sell it in the shop etc.
In spite of all this, there exists an idiot timebomb manufacturer who ignores all best practices, does not consider industry and builds a shitty time bomb that blows up the shop.
Now please educate me, apart from doing the only surefire thing and banning shitty time bomb manufacturers from selling in their shop, what should MS do?
It's not a controversial take. You just lack understanding of the English language.
OP: Looking at two countries in an actual long running war...
You: This isn’t really all hell breaking loose actual war.
Nobody used the term "all hell breaking loose". You did. You redefined the conversation to be about 100% mobilization (from Russia), and then got all pissy that people called you out.
I hope nothing I wrote could be considered “pissy.” I thought I was articulating my point well enough but I guess a nerve was struck given how many people pounced to say my opinion is wrong, using throwaways to boot. Opinions are opinions, they are neither right or wrong.
Is it surprising that the audience for "serious investigation into misallocated funds in local county" is extremely small? Is it really wild that you don't see this is a niche, that most people don't care enough to pay for someone to do that work?
It's not the web. It's democratization. And unfortunately, people would rather watch dancing cats then pay someone to tell them what their local county is doing. That's called consumer choice and fighting it is like fighting nature.
> If companies would respect the spirit behind GDPR and not store data that is not needed to fulfill a user's requests and protect the data that they must have in a way that makes dragnet searches impossible, this would not be a problem.
This is ridiculous. Literally the authorities are the one demanding information, so that they can abuse that power.
And you're blaming the people with information?
Stop fighting the wrong war: hold the people with power accountable. That's the government here. They can use force and put you in jail. That's power.
Anyone collecting data needs to consider how the data can be misused. Whether that be by a (repressive) government, a hacker, or a future purchaser of the data
Is there any evidence it's been used for propaganda? I don't use TikTok a lot, but it seems very non-political (maybe it's my filter bubble). The real cesspool of hatred and madness is Facebook - but of course Congress doesn't care too much about that.
As far as I remember from the previous elections the Russian bots were operating on US based platforms
Here is a study which compares the prevalence of topics on Instagram with the prevalence of topics on TikTok, and shows that topics which are sensitive to the CCP (Tibet, Hong Kong) occur 5-10x less frequently than comparable topics which are not sensitive to the CCP
What a strange study... They seem to just count the number of videos on certain hashtags. The huge discrepancy would require a very large fraction (but not all) of videos under certain hashtags to be banned/removed entirely. That would be immediately obvious when just uploading videos under that hashtags (which they don't do)
They simply dismiss the alternate explanation .. that it's a demographic difference or a time difference. Uygher stuff was a hot topic before Tiktok became popular. And people that are super pumped about that issue and are posting about Chinese political issues probably are I'm guessing not the kind of people to be using Tiktok. Those are just wild guesses.. but there are a lot of ways to explain the difference observed here.
In any case.. just mildly muting topics is pretty benign.. I was expecting promoting conspiracy theories or bots posting AI generated videos. The stuff the Russians (and I think Chinese as well?) botfarms do on Facebook is way crazier
The 60 minutes episode last year (?) insinuated that the CCP's main goal is social disorder eg they heavily restrict the Chinese version for kids to be education oriented where the American version is basically all ages softcore porn and ragebait.
> American version is basically all ages softcore porn and ragebait.
My own experience, as well as my partner's, disputes this. My content is generally creators in the neurodivergant, LGTBQIA+, power generation for Alaska towns, wildlife rescues, D&D, cosplay, and news.
Only the last can occasionally contain ragebait, but it's generally not. Most of the things that make me angry are those like Nex Benedict's death, the death toll in Gaza strip, women being treated poorly by doctors, etc. Actual issues brought up in real time, not manufactured outrage.
My partner's content is generally "customer states", cats, dogs, ferrets, and couples sharing the amusing parts of their lives.
A data sample of only two, to be sure, but the absence of softcore porn and ragebait entirely makes 60 minutes' claims suspect.
As someone who has actually used douyin (about one or two years ago) I can say for certain that that isn't true in the general case. Perhaps the rules are a bit stricter but I saw absolutely zero educational content at all in any form. I did see some military videos which seemed like propaganda as they showed up randomly but its hard to say if those only showed up because I watched the first one to its end for example. The only possibility is that they only enable the education mode if you are actually located in China or if you sign in as a child or something. But it didn't seem to be the default experience from what I saw first hand. It shows you want you want to see.
Id like to see the Uighar camps but sure as heck known that isn't happening. /s
It's hard for me to imagine a lot isn't filtered out. There is a reason they have a separate app. It's likely one is heavily filtered and the other is their propaganda tool but I'd like to see more evidence to indicate that but it's a hard thing to track given they could be just feeding kids the worst things for them or favorable views to their party and we wouldn't even know.
The YouTube and Facebook short-video recommendations I got when those features launched were mostly young women wearing very little and doing something that I'm guessing is not the main point of the video. YouTube knows I like music, so it gave me women playing violin in tiny skirts, though I think this stopped happening at some point.
I didn't even watch the videos, they insisted on putting them on the home page despite me giving 0 engagement. I finally adblocked the element.
In other words they have content restrictions in their country as with TV and other media, while the international version is more similar to its competition in Instagram?
This is 100% anecdotal and lacks any kind of research, but... I heard it was a more subtle propaganda. The American feeds could have messages about how bad the economy is, how futile working is in a corrupt system, how depressed and traumatized your peers are.
On the opposite side you would fill it with messages about the virtues of hard work, stories of success and happiness, etc.
That seems possible, but that might just have to do with the state of the culture before TikTok anyways. Maybe the doom and gloom among young people in North America is because of other factors and content relating to it just happens to get more popular. China might have a more positive population right now, that makes and supports more positive content.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by “propaganda”. Personally I think it can be convincingly argued that any message transmitted to you from a State is propaganda
(Note: that means that I don’t believe that all propaganda is inherently evil, sometimes your interests align with a State. For example governments paying for advertising to discourage smoking is a great thing, IMO!)
I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have and my understanding is that allegiance to the State (eg, the State’s sole stewards the CCP) is a big part of life there. I’ve even been told that staying in the good graces of the State’s only official political party is important if you want to do things like buy property or start a business.
TikTok is administrated by humans, many of whom live in China.
Those humans are, I assume, ambitious and want to do well for themselves and therefore likely want to appease the State.
Therefore, when I read articles about how the administrators of TikTok can effectively decide what goes viral it makes me fear what I’ve begun calling ‘incidental’ propaganda.
Probably those China-based administrations at TikTok don’t want to actively harm American society, but it’s certainly true that America and China have different interests in the world. I assume that any administrators in China will never choose to make something go viral if it is critical of the Chinese State or its interests.
You can see how that might skew things for those that only get their news from TikTok, right?
(This is my understanding and thinking on things right now given the information I have. I gladly welcome any new information if someone reads this and disagrees. But please be kind :))
I am a Chinese that has been living in the West for a few years.
> I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have
IMO, these opinions are a bit biased.
1) those are probably the people who chose to stay in the West;
2) Chinese people (incl. me) sometimes talk extravagantly about life in a "communist country", since to some degree it pleases the Western audience and adds some fun to the talk.
Maybe a CCP member has to show their allegiance from time to time, but I am not and I can not recall I was asked to do so in any form. Probably asked to sing the national anthem every morning when I was in the school? And despite the censorship, people, especially young netizens, invent all kinds of altered words mocking domestic politics, often to my surprise how much they are aware of, given that I already live in the West out of the bubble, that people usually think Chinese internet is.
Taking a particular different mindset as unconscious propaganda and thinking it's harmful seems to support the Chinese internet firewall project and the opinion that people are not able to make "correct" opinions on their own.
Having lived there for several years I didn't find the state some ever-present aspect of life - but it doesn't seem particularly relevant
Your line of reasoning seems fine, but it basically applies to any "other". If some European decides what goes viral, he is going to subject poor stupid american viewers to their nefarious European biases - and those biases may harm our society!
Furthermore the biases of US based company executives may harm our society as well. I'll grant you that they may be less inclined, but gosh, rage bait and selling sweets to children does make them a whole lot of money.
So the logic isn't wrong, but it seems to be applied selectively in cases that just happen to benefit large American tech companies - who are incapable of providing US consumers a product that's nearly as good as Tiktok
Maybe biases in algorithms need to addressed.. But that should be done in a thoughtful unbiased holistic that applied equally to everyone - instead of this embarrassing kneejerk "the commies are taking over" kind of way
I’ll certainly agree that the ‘red scare’ vibe to this bill makes me uncomfortable — even if I agree with the action overall.
I certainly am biased towards companies that operate in a way that I’m familiar with. In the companies I’ve worked in delivering value to shareholders trumps all else at the end of the day. (I don’t love it but it’s predictable)
As you allude to that causes some quite nefarious behavior, but it’s predictable to me for the most part.
To me, this is in contrast with what I see happening in the Chinese market. Again, this is colored by my experience. From the outside looking in it appears that companies based in China bend much further to appease their government than in the markets I’ve worked in (US, UK and Japan) and that makes me less inclined to trust them.
I remember seeing a study that compared the content TikTok served to children in China vs other countries. I would have to look and find it again.
But basically, Chinese children got lots of science, engineering, and other educational content, while other countries got your run of the mill generic time-wasting nothingburger nonsense kind of content.
Check out the difference between CNN International and CNN US. One is a proper news channel covering US and Intl affairs and competing for influence with BBC, NHK, France 24 and DW.
The other is a editorial banter from talking heads discussing 2 political parties like they're competing with ESPN.
Well yeah I don't rely on any major media outlets to stay informed. At least various perspectives are allowed to exist in America as opposed to bringing "black-vanned" in China
non-political is political. Do you imagine that there aren't people making political TikToks? Or that non-political themes don't affect politics? Or that bubble control doesn't affect politics?
Is that what I'm doing? I thought I was making an Orwell reference to imply that a peculiar kind of very public gaslighting he warned about is not confined to the slogans of 1984's Party.
catskul2's comment was very ambiguous, but a charitable interpretation of the first part
> non-political is political. Do you imagine that there aren't people making political TikToks?
is that you are indeed in a filter bubble of non-political content which exists alongside political content. One example of political content on TikTok within the larger Israel-Hamas war topic was the brief trend of commenting on Osama bin Laden's manifesto called "Letter to America" [1]. If you were (not saying that you are) knowingly ignoring the existence of political content on a specific topic on TikTok, then you would be making an inherently political decision (which does not mean that you should change your decision).
It's confusing, but I think I can explain. If you are able to enjoy your life and not worry about something for any period of time, you are actually making a political statement that everyone else is wrong and you think they deserve to die. Every problem in the world must be your problem too, forever and always.
Gosh, no politics in my relaxing doom-scrolling video app. Is it some nefarious plot to pacify the evil capitalists.. or wait... maybe they just know what consumers want?
Another way to look at it is the fact that China does not let American social media in its market. Why should America give China access to it's markets when that's not reciprocated?
No, we shouldn't. Be we also shouldn't be schmucks that give market access that isn't reciprocated. Most free trade agreements work on reciprocity. We agree not to put tariffs on country X's cars because they agree not to put tariffs on ours. A ban is essentially an infinite tariff. If that's how a foreign country is going to treat American companies, why not respond in kind?
Because it goes against one of our purported values. I'd hope that this action had some inherent merit (I'm not claiming it doesn't), and it's not just retaliation.
Are we protecting America's trade interests with this bill? I don't think so...
What purported value is it going against? Allowing market access to countries that don't reciprocate is not one of our values. Nor is it one of China's. Or most countries, for that matter. When other countries erect tariffs, we usually respond on kind. And when we raise tariffs other countries - including close friends like Canada - they respond with their own tariffs against American imports too.
You've got it backwards: reciprocal trade agreements are the norm not just in US politics but across the world.
We're banning the company not the ability to express. They can upload the exact same videos to YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, and who knows how many alternatives.
ByteDance is a Chinese corporation. The US federal government does not govern it and has no responsibility to allow a Chinese corporation to express itself in the US by publishing propaganda.
This is the foundation of reciprocal trade agreements:
We don't put tariffs on your cars if you don't put tariffs on ours. We don't ban your social media companies if you don't ban ours.
Americans have more than one value at a time. Americans also claim to value fairness, and they conduct trade with all kinds of people. If some of those people fail to conduct trade fairly, Americans do not need to oblige those failures.
> all 160 million US TikTok users install a PWA of TikTok and everything is fine
I’m not saying the bill is performative. The app-store and hosting ban will be effective. The point is nothing will be censored. Distribution will have been curtailed.
TikTok is Douyin with a different coat of paint. They're near identical apps run by the same company, ByteDance. It's not banned in China, it just has a different name.
Sure, by virtue of China's stricter regulation of social media. But for all intents and purposes, Douyin is TikTok in China. Or rather TikTok is Douyin in the rest of the world outside of China.
Douyin is TikTok in China. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that TikTok is the export version of Douyin.
Reasons for having two apps are rife with speculation. One is that censorship in Douyin is more prevalent than on the export version (that one is pretty obvious). There's also speculation that the export version of Douyin has an algorithm tuned to be more addictive.
But let's be clear, by ByteDance's own statements the two apps have shared management and technology.
That's false, American social media simply refused to follow Chinese law. (I believe facebook specifically refused to remove accounts belonging to ETIM/TIP, an organisation recognised by the UN, EU and at the time the USA as a terrorist group)
Zuckerberg tried damn hard to get his crap into China, he even asked the Chinese president Xi in person to name his unborn baby. He became quite "unfriendly" to China/CCP after all those efforts got him nothing in return.
Incorrect, Facebook is flat out banned in China no matter whether they comply with CCP censorship. I'm very interested in sources to substantiate the claim that Facebook is refusing to ban groups that even the US designates as terrorists.
One, this article was published years after Facebook was blocked in China so it can't be the cause of the block. Also, China daily is a propaganda outlet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Daily
It's literally run by the "Central Propaganda Department".
It's not even just about propaganda. Watch Tik Tok videos in China and it's all young people helping the elderly, learning job skills, and doing other socially virtuous things. Watch Tik Tok videos outside of China and it's all videos of kids stealing cars, eating Tide pods, and pranking people in Home Depot.
TikTok shows you what you want to see. I see a lot of musical covers, dumb jokes about the Dune films, standup comedy clips. I don't know what first ~20 videos a brand new account with no history sees but this caricature of TikTok (Tide Pods? really?) is pretty outdated.
But if Western people are generally not dumb, are patriotic and think rationally, they won't believe foreign propaganda, and so there is no need to ban TikTok, right?
> 1. you don't want govt to act for children because "parents"
> 2. you don't want govt to act for adults because they are "rational".
Yes. This is absolutely correct from my perspective. Parents have agency over their children. They are there to guide or, if necessary, inact tyrannical laws.
Adults have agency. Nobody is a victim of TikTok involuntarily. Adults are making a choice to use it or allow their children to use it.
From what exactly is the government saving US citizens by banning TikTok from the app store, or more generally? And how can we be sure that this banning power won't expand over time?
> But I contest that people are freely and knowingly giving that data to the CCP
I contest otherwise. Even if that is the case, how does that prevent the govt from acting correctly or morally?
People would love to pay no taxes, should the govt then tax no one? What kind of logic is that?
> The US government isn't saving their citizens from the CCP. They just don't want the CCP to have the data that Americans want to give them.
Strawman argument. Once again it is not just data! It is an oppressive foreign adversary that can push harmful propaganda. And has done so as pointed above!
> Regarding propaganda, it's obvious that it's content Americans want. They would leave the platform if they didn't.
Not all Americans. Americans want to ban TikTok. Thats who democracy works. The house has proportional representation.
> it's obvious that it's content Americans want
Nope, it is not obvious at all. In fact, the other way is more obvious given the majority (352-65-1) with which this passed in the House.
It is obvious Americans want TikTok banned or divested from China.
(You may be unfamiliar with democracy and how it works, if so, my apologies.)
> I contest otherwise. Even if that is the case, how does that prevent the govt from acting correctly or morally?
The govt already acts profoundly immorally. Social security is unconstitutional! My view of the government is that it exists to enrich itself, regardless of morals. While this legislation is narrowly worded, which I appreciate, it still goes so far as to prohibit a voluntary transaction. To me that is immoral.
> Not all Americans. Americans want to ban TikTok.
The Americans that want to ban TikTok aren't trying to ban it because they don't like the content. If that was the case, they could simply not use it. Instead they want to ban it because they don't like others using it, and that is categorically different.
> Democracy
I do understood how democracy works, especially federalism. This does fall under the purview of the commerce clause as it has often been interpreted by the Supreme Court, so I fully expect it to withstand legal challenges. I just think it's bad policy and hypothesize the precedent is what's needed to push for more and more.
Thank you for your response. We disagree, and that's okay.
I think it's both. You don't think it's possible TikTok usage data is being accumulated for prominent Americans and/or their children for the purpose of intelligence gathering? I'd actually be surprised if it wasn't happening.
Can you really not imagine how a nation state could get valuable intelligence by having an intimate knowledge of how a large portion of another nation states population is thinking?
It's an election year. Intelligence can include things like your political affiliation and level of engagement, and can be (ab)used by targeting specific areas/demographics with supportive/decisive content. Think Theil's Palantir, but controlled by a foreign government.
Quite a lot! There are articles ad infinitum about how specifically tailored the TikTok algorithm is for many users.
I certainly think that knowing very specifically what a substantial portion of a county/market’s population is interested in qualifies as intelligence.
How effectively you make that information actionable is up to the creativity of your intelligence/advertising apparatus.
Name, age, location, politics, device, amount of time spent, interests, etc.
The easiest actionable thing would be propoganda of some sort, but there's a chance of a lot of smart people working on something that I can't imagine. I'm not saying this happening, but looking at Youtube and Meta, it's not hard to imagine.
I think forcing a sale of TikTok is fine -- after all China effectively does the same thing for all US companies in China.
But H.R. 7521 gives power to handle more than TikTok. (g)(3)(B) [1] certainly looks to me like it can be used by any President to pressure or outright censor many foreign sites and apps.
You know they can both be true simultaneously, right?
It’s a perfectly well understood fact that our nations use businesses, and literally every other avenue possible to spy on and propagandize each other’s populations
As a result, each nation has to counter that it does so mostly privately, but sometimes very publicly.
This is all part of the totally broken, absolutely run by children, international relations system.
It’s exceptionally mundane and exceptionally bad for all citizens as a result. However it’s great for business. So you’re not going to see a change until citizens demand different international economic, political, communications and relations structure that isn’t based on competition.
US national security adversaries are platform neutral. If TikTok is banned, they'll just put more resources into the things that aren't banned. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, who by all accounts spouts Russian propaganda daily, and changed the algorithm to where it makes up a solid 50% of my "For You"...and I have yet to see many, if any, Republicans or Democrats saying we should ban it, or even yank Elon's security clearance, or sever his government contracts. I don't see how you can have it both ways.
TikTok shouldn't be banned, and if it is, it could eventually open the door for US owned companies without "direct" ties to also be forced "divest." Some of Facebook and Twitter's biggest investors are not exactly US allies. To me, it's a slippery slope. The "tit for tat" argument also falls flat to me, the US shouldn't try to mimic being China. China's attempts to wall itself off from the world have hurt it more than helped it.
If we really wanted to address this, we'd just have legislation on personal data in general, not this company targeting nonsense; but we'll never do that because Facebook/Twitter/Google/Microsoft/etc all have their hands lining the pockets of plenty of lobbyists in DC. They just maybe don't realize, or care, at the moment that eventually their own allegiances will be called into question.
> TikTok is a propaganda threat controlled by a non-friendly state to the US
Yes. Would you have been offended when during the Revolutionary War we restricted British propaganda? German and Nazi propaganda in the World Wars? Soviet propaganda in the Cold War?
Let’s reverse the roles. How thrilled would we be if we could have had a propaganda arm active and accepted in Nazi Germany or the CCCP? If we had person-by-person profiles of interests and affiliations for every person in Russia or Iran?
I wouldn't be offended but we didn't really do any of that, at least not as a systematic government effort. We required registration of foreign agents which the government used as a basis to stop Nazi propaganda newspapers when they didn't register. But they had the option to register. Sputnik radio is registered and broadcasting today in the US. The strict interpretation of the Espionage Act that Wilson et al wanted was later overturned.
We absolutely restricted distribution of state-controlled news.
We didn’t block it. Same as, even if ByteDance refuses to divest, this bill wouldn’t block TikTok from being accessed on the web. It’s just taking it out of American app stores and off American hosting services.
If nobody wants to kill TikTok, then what is the point of removing it from the app store?
Has anyone considered that the content pushed on TikTok is actually the content Americans want? Perhaps the reason TikTok is super popular is precisely because of their tailored content.
Besides if your country is strong enough you should be able to shrug it off. France recently put the right to abortion in the Constitution despite American media.
You've been breaking the site guidelines a lot lately. Can you please not? I recognize that you're representing a minority point of view and I know how frustrating that can be (believe me, I know). But if you keep breaking the site guidelines, we can't suspend moderation because of that.
Also, it's not in your interest to do this because it makes your comments less persuasive and indeed gives people an easy reason to dismiss them. So if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Also, in case it's helpful, here is a list of moderation posts I made for a user who was in a similar position a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. It's old(ish) now but the principles are all still the same.
explain to me how this isn't all xenophobic ? If any of this was real or legit all users would be clamoring for data privacy laws, not a forced sale of some fake boogey man bs.
If you're a mod then please why are you allowing for this. Half this xenophobic speach and anti chinese rhetoric is worse than calling it out.
(I'm a mod, yes.) I'm not defending anyone else's bad comments. I'm saying we need you to follow the rules, regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are. The same goes for everyone.
I've put in countless hours, over the years, trying to do just what you're demanding here. That's why I gave you that last link to look at. We've learned the hard way that there are limits to what moderators can do about this, unfortunately—and when you post comments that are egregiously breaking the site guidelines, you make this problem harder.
Just to be clear, I don't want you to stop posting! I'm saying we need you to make your substantive points thoughtfully, in keeping with the HN guidelines. I realize how hard that is when feeling the pressure of being outnumbered by an ignorant majority. But if you post things like "you sound as ridiculous as the politicians", "jfc the absolute garbage rhetoric", and so on, you make it impossible for the mods to do much about the comments on the other side—people will simply point to your posts and say "but it's ok for them to break the rules?"
We cut people slack for being under the pressure of holding a minority view in an argument, but there's a limit to how far we can take that, and your comments are unfortunately beyond that limit. That's why I responded to you, in the hope of persuading you to understand this dynamic. I have a lot of sympathy for your position—not because I agree or disagree about the underlying topic, but because I know what it feels like to be outnumbered on the internet.
What's your point? China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns? "The supreme art of war is to defeat the enemy without fighting", e.g. to undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions, to gain the ability to compromise our critical infrastructure, and to influence our politics. All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.
> Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?
Because we are not China and our institutions are built on presumption of freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. If we start emulating China, we will become China. Our institutions are supposed to be robust enough to handle local and foreign propaganda and if they are not, then censorship is certainly not a solution that would be compatible with the liberal democratic values that we are supposed to hold.
US Citizens still have the same freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. Those rights don't extend to foreign adversaries. If you want to relay Chinese or Russian or Ukrainian or Israeli or Hamas propaganda, you are completely free to do it, without censorship. Limiting the ability of any of those countries to project it within the US is reasonable stance.
You're limiting the information US Citizens can get from the outside world - therefore you are limiting their freedom of thought and access to information.
I think it's a dangerous road to go down, the US is already extremely inwards facing and suffers from not knowing much about the outside world. I've had hundreds of US Citizens talk to me face to face who don't know what language we speak in Australia, don't know we use different money, not know the seasons are backwards, not know it's a 15 hour flight, not know we don't have a president, etc. etc. (this list is endless). US Citizens are not very well educated about how things work in other countries, clearly to their own detriment.
Just yesterday I was talking to a friend in the US saying my friend has 18 months fully paid maternity leave and he almost fell over. His wife got 10 weeks.
Many countries do things better than the US, and it's dangerous to limit US Citizens learning about that, else they will have no notion things can be (and are) better elsewhere, and should be improved.
Free trade generally does not mean you have to let foreign companies operating in your country do things that domestic companies are not allowed to do.
Most of those sites are not in China not because China says that they cannot operate there but rather because China say they would have to obey the same rules Chines companies do. That generally involves things like storing data on Chinese citizens only on servers in China, censoring things the government wants censored, and giving the government easy access to information including identifying information to unmask anonymous posters.
This is post hoc nonsense. China blocked US tech companies so that they could copy what the US companies do without any threat of superior competition.
The point is that they get to access the Western market with their dancing video app, but Westerners aren't allowed to access their market with the apps they make. That gives those Chinese companies an unfair advantage in potential market reach.
A simplistic economic model that overlooks hundreds of important factors may provide a basic Econ 101 understanding but it does not reflect how the world truly operates and proves nothing.
Sure it's a simple model. But the burden of proof lies with the person claiming that free trade needs to be bilateral. That's not some inherent property of it, or something immediately obvious. A basic look at it past "It's not faaiiiiiir" actually shows quite the opposite
>> China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?
Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.
>> undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions
It seems like Americans did a pretty good job of this themselves at the last election cycle. A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result. How much worse can TikTok make things?
>> Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.
The paradox of tolerance.
>> A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result.
2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions, so yeah, prohibiting foreign-owned social media networks in advance of the upcoming election is definitely a step in the right direction.
>> 2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions
Why is nothing being done about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Truth Social, etc. etc? There are more users on Facebook alone.
The point is that the West painted itself as the defender of freedom, democracy and free markets. Going beyond, it claimed that (in the post Reagan/Thatcher era) that free markets are a prerequisite for being a rich country. Yet, the moment free markets became inconvenient, the west dropped that narrative and went full protectionist. As a result, China gets a propaganda victory in the eyes of non-Western nations.
All things considered, it's a minor problem for the US/West. Just looking like hypocrites. Compared to, say, the 2003 Iraq war it's a nothingburger.
West painted itself as the defender of freedom, democracy and free markets
China is not free, not a democracy, and not a free market, so there no hypocrisy. What was crazy was supporting the one sided relationship where we export our industry and production capacity to China while they block and steal from our businesses.
I'd support TikTok in the US if China gets rid of their firewall.
This is the paradox of tolerance [1]. It’s a worn discussion and far from hypocritical.
In any case, I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people and allies. More pointedly when the other side is a dictatorship.
> the exact argument e.g. Turkey used to ban Wikipedia/Youtube/Twitter etc.
Which one(s)? (Genuinely curious.)
Also, was it a ban or divestment requirement? What wins me over on this bill is it isn’t a ban. It isn’t even a requirement to be controlled by an American. ByteDance could sell TikTok to a Korean or Hugarian or Middle Eastern country—even Turkey—and be in compliance with the law.
> I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people
Turkey's constitution also guarantees free speech etc. However, there are also laws that say you cannot insult people's religious sensibilities or serve sexually explicit content. The motivation for these laws is that this type of content degrades the moral fabric of society.
Politicians whipped up moral panics and judges (who were in many cases appointed by those very same politicians) issued rulings requiring these platforms to remove the offending content. The platforms refused, and were banned. When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country".
> When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country"
When the facts change our opinions should, too. I used to be a free-trade absolutist. It’s become clear that doesn’t work.
I remain a strong free-speech advocate. Which is why I was against Trump’s proposed TikTok ban. This, however, is different. There is an out in divestment—to an American or non-American. And even if ByteDance refuses to sell, TikTok.com won’t be blocked. Moreover, the entire process is subject to judicial oversight. If ByteDance’s Constitutional rights are being abrogated, they have a forum in which to find relief.
Turkey’s tale is cautionary. We should be mindful when we find we were previously wrong. But I think this is different. Free trade (in its absolute sense) isn’t a core American value. Free speech is. The First Amendment protects ByteDance’s speech. It does not guarantee its distribution.
> All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.
Those campaigns mostly took part on platforms owned and operated by US companies.
There's something hilarious about your framing of "get too big to be shut down".
You actually said "if you get popular enough that the public will vote against people who threaten to enforce the law".
So someone builds a product that the public likes, something they demand that politicians allow, and somehow this is "too big to be shut down". Do you forget that modern democracies pretend that their authority derives from the will of the people?
Modern ( and ancient) democracies are not direct democracies.
There are many reasons why popularity alone of the voting public does not translate into policy. The dangers of tyranny of the majority is well known, will of the people is a necessary but not sufficient reason.
There are also some pre-requisites for a functioning democracy like a well-informed electorate which is questionable today at best.
You are correct, but so is the parent (although I wouldn’t have put it quite like that).
Laws are there to serve society. Some of the ways it serves society is when it restrains society, but people are not stupid and understand when they’re being unreasonably restrained. Unreasonably being the key word, as I’d like to think we’re all generally anti-murder around here, even if we can argue to death about things like AirBnB.
Let me put it like this: the laws of San Francisco (and other cities) protected Taxi drivers from competition, and by the late aughts the local taxi services here were godawful magnets for complaints every weekend that the relevant regulatory authority (the SFMTA) didn’t do a goddamned thing about. If you wanted to go out and enjoy a nice weekend night, the responsible thing was not to drive. But good luck getting home, and if you could get a cab, it would be filthy and the driver would unlawfully insist his card reader was broken (it wasn’t, and it never was, the card reader was probably the most reliable thing in that car given how little wear and tear it would have seen in life).
Uber didn’t walk into a well regulated transportation marketplace. They and Lyft drove headfirst into a marketplace where the existing laws and regulations were suppressing supply and killing the market, and not in service of the passengers (i.e. the voters). They won the battles that mattered which were the political battle by upending a status quo that had favored this shitty little taxi medallion system and the market battle by just being better at a price people were willing to pay than their competition.
Popularity doesn’t always translate to policy in a democracy, but it often does.
While I agree taxi regulation was done badly, effectively removing all regulation I don't think is the answer. There are huge negative externalities to people who are neither drivers nor riders that should be protected by the law as much as the 'customers' wishes are. (just like the airbnb example, imagine someone cycling in a busy commercial area dodging uber drop-offs throwing open doors, double parking, etc)
The environmental hazards to cyclists are far beyond any extra danger Uber and Lyft provide and they lose to more popular constituencies regularly because most people in America even in the cities are not cyclists and often resent cyclists.
We prioritized cars a long time ago, and we’re still paying for it. I’m not happy about that fact either. You can absolutely argue that cyclists are victims to a tyranny by majority much as I can argue that that the presence of Uber and Lyft is a net benefit versus the status quo that existed prior to their coming onto the scene, and I’ll just say both things can be true. People also lose in democracies.
Actually, yes, the American tech companies are working hard to enrich humanity. They enrich themselves too. But they've given off tremendous consumer surplus just in comparison to the previous decade, and you'd have to argue in bad faith to suggest otherwise.
But hey you can complain about Americans tech companies. It fits right into the GP's point that attacking American tech companies is hot for governments.
This answer is incredibly technocratic, and misses the mark on what a digital signature is.
A digital signature is a legal construct that stands up in court.
The movement might have begun, but you need to change your perception. You have to stop talking like a technocrat and address the business problem that signatures solve.
> I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
You mean you want... the cable TV bundle again? Literally the thing that the article rails against, because cable TV inherently produces "sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting."
Amazing.