TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday

First, people say things like they can't not use Facebook because it has marketplace, etc. shows there has clearly been an issue of not enforcing any kind of anti-trust laws for the past 20 years since US v Microsoft in the browser wars days.

The FTC over the past four years has taken a turn here and is starting to do that work again, it's slow but it needs to continue.

Second, these companies behave as publishers without any of the responsibilities/liability. This has to stop. If you publish just a chronological feed that's one thing. But when you algorithmically decide what people see when, and now introduce your own AI bots into the mix, you're 100% a publisher and need to be legally responsible for it. That legislation needs to be updated to reflect this.

Third, much of the root issues stem from advertising. These companies are driven to get and keep as much of your attention as possible simply so they can sell that attention to advertisers. If we all paid for it, the design of these services would be different. I'm not sure how to tackle that but it seems a start is privacy legislation to prohibit user tracking and sale or sharing of personal data.

basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s of known people. I thought about this recently… It was really better times.

Even decentralized mastodon is too big and it makes it far too easy to post BS and hateful / unhealthy stuff. Plus there are far too many posts you can’t relate to or just don’t want to read („algorithm“ or not), without even mentioning the bubble effect, much worse there than on X to be honest.

Smaller communities which you can connect to /disconnect from plus a good combo of RSS feeds to get news. That’s probably it.

> Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones.

Herein lies the rub. How do you decide what the threshold is? Who gets to decide what that threshold is, and how do you do it without inviting accusations of regulatory capture?

If you make it blanket all social networks, then things like discord and even public slack orgs will inadvertently become collateral damage. If you make it focussed on only a few large ones, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, then something else will pop up to take it's place. It'll become a game of whack-a-mole. Users are supposedly already migrating in droves to some other TikTok clone.

I'm not really sure what the solution is though. Regulate the shit out of it to the extent where it becomes a government-provided utility or something?

The reality is people want social media because they are addicted to it. Getting rid of social media will be like the war on drugs: completely ineffective. The danger here is that the drug is very easy to create, impossible to control and extremely lucrative.

> early Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.

This was really a fun time and it was a whole new vista for interaction. It was really something to enter a new age.

That feeling didn't last long, but I still got value from Facebook until the early 2010s.

I'm in favor of letting people pay for their own smaller instances, like something Facebook esque, and you can invite all your relatives. They can join your instance. But someone (or maybe its a group effort) has to pay for it. Zero ads, just friends and family.

I've thought about this a lot.

I don't think I'll ever build it (I have another idea in the works consuming all my time), but I'll go a step further and share my other thought on it:

The less they use it, the less they should pay for using it. So if your goal is to keep up with relatives via sharing photos / videos, you can do that, and bug right out. So now there's a financial incentive to use it less, but it serves its purpose, like email.

The real issue with Facebook is the inability to tune easily. One of the reasons I use Instagram and Threads is because I feel I can easily tune the algorithm with likes. I can keep up with my friends via stories. I dont need to post on my "wall" stupid stuff like the beer im drinking. Instagram + Stories feels like the best medium to see what my friends are upto with short stories and images. The explore feed can be tuned so I get content and threads fills the void on X and its terrible algorithms. I agree, "deleting" facebook or simple just leave it on deprecated mode and never use it besides market place is the best thing you can do. I dont give a crap what person's political view is and dont need to see a news feed based on triggers.

The problem is not the social network in itself, but the fact that companies are manipulating what you see to maximize the bad aspects of the network. Companies should have strict limits on the kind of algorithms they use to generate a feed.

The early waves of most communities is 'better'. Strangely this is really consistent, even if you've been on sites quite a bit.

One of the rules of moderation I believe in, is that the workload depends on the nature of the people in your community.

Oh, so communities follow the rules of subculture founding and decline ???

So there should be a point where things that were not cool, become cool again?

In English, it seems to be called rednote. But I doubt that it will be a real successor. At the moment it's a funny meme, and for some people satisfied cultural curiosity. But we already see the problems appearing, from the poorly localized interface, to people getting banned for reasons outside their understanding.

My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.

Well it's more... Xiaohongshu is for cosmo PRC cool kids (read: lean wealthy), and also a large ecommerce portal that targets that demographic. Not sure if the userbase is interested in... western and RoW "riff raff" shitting up the content for too long. I say this more as an insult to Xiaohongshu, I like TikTok (or Douyin) because I like seeing entrepenurs sell neon signs and industrial glycerine between my swipes.

> it's the place for Luigi Mangione memes

I read a lot about TikTok the last few months from users all over the web. Trust me, that's not what TikTok is actually full of, its just what algorithm you got sucked into, for whatever reason. I assume there's some specific bubble for "current viral thing" that you're locked into. Make an alt and like completely different content, you'll see that your feed will be night and day.

As a casual observer, I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious successor? The UI is better than TikTok ever was and a lot of the most popular creators are already mirroring their content there?

It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information, is to give your data to another Chinese app instead. Not that I'd feel any less safe with Chinese companies having all my cat picks & ranting than I feel with American companies having the same (particularly under the upcoming regime).

Not that it makes a lot of difference to me, facebook is the only social-media-y thing I use and that is just under sufferance (only way to easily keep tabs on what is happening with some people, mainly family) and because I sometimes like to “breakfast with Lord Percy”. I might try bluesky at some pint as many contacts are moving from fb to there (though that seems rather twitter-like and that has never appealed to me even before I even knew Musk existed).

Even Top 1 in the german app store where TikTok isn't banned. People identify on Red as TikTok refugees

Looks like that app may have a backdoor https://x.com/d0tslash/status/1878959715033694492

It depends on how they respond over the next 1-2 weeks.

The big issue isn't data security; it's propaganda. Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't) there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans. Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?

And even if you disagree with the national security reasons for disallowing China to control a major U.S. social network, there is still the issue of trade reciprocity - nearly all of the U.S. Web companies are banned in China.

> 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok

If the last four years are indicative of anything, it's that the US government has fairly limited control over the narrative on American social platforms.

I lost count of how many times I saw people typing in "FJB" and "MAGA".

> how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers

A law passed at the same time as the tiktok ban attempts to address this:

> a) Prohibition It shall be unlawful for a data broker to sell, license, rent, trade, transfer, release, disclose, provide access to, or otherwise make available personally identifiable sensitive data of a United States individual to— (1) any foreign adversary country; or (2) any entity that is controlled by a foreign adversary.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/9901

it's not the same data or data quality. the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of the american public (psyops). What russia is doing through their trollfarms, china is doing through tiktok.

In support of (2): https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...

I personally see this as the beginning of a slippery slope - a move that follows in the footsteps of China.

> The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a domestic one

China certainly engages in security theater for their own economic advantage as well. It's no coincidence that any American internet company that tries to operate in China gets throttled or "accidentally" blocked by the great Chinese firewall. And no, economic retaliation against China isn't "stooping down" to censorship of China. That would be like framing the EU's retaliatory tariffs against Trump as a punishment to European bourbon lovers.

> The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok

Yes, but people do not appreciate what that really means. Countries need to eat the consequences of influencing domestic media, so you at least need to maintain a weak form of checks and balances. For example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.

On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...

In the words of Noam Chomsky [1]:

> [Manufacturing Consent] argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.

The problem with Tiktok, as far as the government is concerned, is the lack of control on narrative when Meta, Twitter and Google are an extension of the US State Department (eg [2]).

The Tiktok ban came together in a matter of days as a bipartisan effort weeks after the ADL said (in leaked audio) that they have a "TikTok problem" [3].

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

[2]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

[3]: https://x.com/TaylorNoakes/status/1766612105426596297

Totally. I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize China for their protectionism, but as soon as something out-competes US companies, it gets banned: Huawei, DJI, TikTok.

Of course it cannot be said like this, because "free speech" and "democracy", so the official reason is "national security".

The US gov's intention was not at all to shut down TikTok. It was to force ByteDance to sell it.

The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt, and their unwillingness to sell under the circumstances kinda proves their whole First Amendment claims are made in bad faith. Something deeper is going on, and it's not about your social security number.

Funnily enough, the lawyer who quit Meta has resorted to doomposting on .. Linkedin. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/meta-lawyer-lemley-quit...

> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect

I feel like this is what so many people (including myself) are missing about TikTok.I'll be honest I saw TikTok largely as an "extension" of Reels and vice-versa where folks with a following on one will post to the other because they are so similar and that would increase their reach.

>TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness...

LMAO

The comment and quote is telling of the zeitgeist. I would be more aghast by it, but then I remember that my SSN has been a subject to multiple data breach notices in past year.. so.. what is one more bad actor at this point?

I think part of the problem is everyone thinks they are the "adult in the room" and everyone else is the "primates". I agree policy discussions are a bit of a farce though (in a sorta funny twist places like TikTok are responsible for that since the engagement metrics have a tendency to promote nonsense and lies)

> US citizens do not want this

Ha ha, I guess you are discovering, many many people do want this.

Americans finally discovering their constitution is interpreted all day every day is the funniest thing on the internet. You also don't have free speech, and your rights to bear arm are very restricted.

There are still a million places online people can organize and assemble so I don't really see how this right is being meaningfully infringed here. It definitely doesn't seem clear to me that this clause means the government needs to maintain every avenue of assembly to the point this is a constitutional issue.

Congress does have the power to regulate foreign commerce however. Not that I disagree with you, but rarely can something be distilled to a single concern.

Foreign corporations do not have free speech rights.

Don't underestimate the human ability to "settle for less" if said less requires less effort from them. There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality ; Netflix is just easier. They will settle for the "easy" solution, which will be any one of the TikTok clones already existing (YT shorts, reels, whatever).

If it works on 75% of the population, that’s good enough. The other 25% will give up and move on as well, because people flock to social media where the others are.

how would this actually work? iOS is so dominant among US teens it's crazy, and the ability to sideload on that platform is nonexistent even to very technically savvy users.

> Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for existing users?

What business would choose to keep operating if it can't gain new customers? Think about it. The law makes it impossible for tiktok to grow or be profitable. What advertiser would be interested in a platform that will lose users every day and won't gain more in the future?

The law was sneakily and intentially written to outright ban tiktok. It would be like congress creating a law saying you specifically cannot buy more gas. You can keep using the gas in the car, but you can't fill up your tank anymore. Would you spend thousands to fix your car? Change the oil or the tire? No. You'd either sell the damn thing or just throw it away.

The obvious play would be to incite those active users to take action by letting their congress critters know their opinions in an effort to have them reverse their vote

Political pressure. There are more Americans on TikTok than voted in the last election. I think the parent company is calculating that they can draw attention to the government taking away something the users love and turn that into political pressure to undo the law. We’ll see what happens, but I’d imagine they are right. Taking away the opiate of the masses has not worked out for governments in the past.

The downloading your data thing is actually part of what is required by law.

Drawing attention to the stupidity and agenda-driven approach of the USG by causing pain to millions of users, is my guess.