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

what types of videos have made that have gone viral?

It's a proper Skinner box. Very well made. And in millions of people's pockets too.

  """ Within such a possible future system, the only command or need
  that the machine would not respond to would be the one command that
  I have a feeling some of us would most want to type into the
  machine. Which is the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that
  would be my problem with the machine. It would meet all the needs
  except my need to see it destroyed. It would take every other
  command well, and meet every other need well, but the need to just
  to just shut it down. Television is something like that now.

  I feel sometimes as though I am plugged into a giant computer that
  will take every command I give it except the one that I want the
  most. The command that the damn machine blow itself up. It will do
  anything else I say. I type in "food", and out comes food. I type in
  "I want to give this talk in Washington". It comes out.  But the one
  command I want is the command for the damn thing to just go "boom!",
  and all the little transistors just to go... """

  Rick Roderick 1990

the tiktok algo is genuinely impressive. What's cool is that the engineers published some works explaining how it functions.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07663

It's an interesting read if you're into recommender systems or AI in general. What amazes me is that despite this published work google and meta still can't produce a decent social media algorithm, so it's either incompetence or malice.

same here. I found myself loosing an hour of just scrolling through short videos, most of them really good and ones that I liked. I had to delete the app because it was working too good.

Same reason I never touched prismatic after its first load.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prismatic_(app)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://youtube.com/shorts/3FISFq_sCH8

The algorithm will spoonfeed you content that you perceive a certain way, whether that's true or not is a different story. Unfortunately for most people, all those hilarious situations that are not-so-obviously staged just fly over their heads as genuine. My wife is smart and well educated, but I even had to keep correcting her when she showed me videos that she believed were genuine.

> the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.

Jesus, this is like a line out of a William Gibson novel. I hope you wrote that aware of the irony inherent in it.

I'm also reminded of this George Burns quote: "The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made."

the TikTok reocmmendation engine seemed to work better with a sparse history and better understood user feedback about content that one wants to see or avoid

Instagram tbh just feels icky but at least you can explicitly like or dislike stuff not that it would fix the feed though

YT shorts is also good but I hate you can't say show me this or do not show me that and it is all based on duration. idk what the powers that be at YT were thinking but I'm sure they did user studies and stuff

so much for free market economics though stuck with two imperfect options because Zuck couldn't fix the feed :(

I had cultivated a FYP that felt authentic to me, especially relative to everything else on the internet, but after a while it looked just as phony to my eyes, without any real change in the content itself. Just a different brand of phony.

Tiktok is serving you better things because

1) more people post there 2) you've used it much more and given them huge amounts of data on who you are and what your like to watch, when.

I can assure you those tiktok things are not the top of everyone's feed, sounds personalized. But your list for reels, and the other one sounds like the basic things they show to new people to try to figure out what they like, possibly somewhat curated by some past swipes.

Each of these are just algorithms. They get better the more you use them because your use = your data and personality and you've just used tiktok enough that they know _exactly_ what you like and who you are. Give it time, the others will come along if people use them

Have you considered that Reels is so bad precisely because you don’t use it?

Mine:

A bit from the SF Chronicle on the LA fires. A comedy/info bit by Alex Falcone. An Ad. A wrestling technique (I’m into judo and BJJ). A card trick. Cooking techniques. An ad.

It’s ad-heavy and frankly I don’t try to spend a lot of time on it. But as somebody who uses it at least some, I get absolutely zero of the kind of garbage you suggest.

I enjoy movies, even though they are staged.

Hm. I’m a grown man and I post reels to all the platforms. I like the tech and enjoy trying to emulate a professional process with prosumer equipment and practices (filming, editing, color grading, sound design, etc.).

After about 30 or so reels this year, I’ve got about 70 followers - half of which are definitely bots, a third are family/friends, and the rest seem to be real people.

My feed has a lot of people like me, and people whose content I think is at the quality I’d like to be at (mostly photographers, videographers, small but full-time YouTubers).

Maybe you’re just finding what you’re looking for.

My TikTok feed is full of very much adults and who own small businesses. I’ve seen some people in college, but there’s no kids in my feeds.

It's commensurate with how China treats foreign companies. Nobody can do serious business in China without the CCP's blessing, often involving a "partnership" with a local company.

I genuinely have no idea what Zuckerberg is responsible for at Facebook other than hijacking credentials (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433) and stealing/copying ideas

Anyone with half a brain ought to have come up with a better system than Reels is

I would use the word 'fresh' for TikTok; like old school YouTube, there's quirkiness and variety.

The timing of this with the Israeli crimes in Gaza is clear.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-g...

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

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

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

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

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

Lots of countries have made it illegal to listen things like Radio Free Europe. I'm guessing you can't in North Korea. On the other hand, a US citizen that wants to get the Chinese perspective on anything has lots of ways to legally find that and repeat it. I am not saying a lot of people in the US are interested in a foreign point of view, or that the US doesn't have tons of propaganda. But I don't think you can convince anyone that the two countries treat speech the same way.

Radio Free Europe is nothing like TikTok. Not only is broadcast media not able to be pinpoint targeted in real time to individuals, but the connection of who was behind RFE and other similar propaganda is pretty obvious, unlike tiktok.

Feels a little bit like the Chinpokomon episode of South Park - innocent kids being brainwashed and whatnot. (I know the target in that ep is Japan, but still)

I think that China is working to control left-wing activism in the U.S and TikTok is the perfect trojan horse to split the Democratic party and elevate their bribed proxies. I'd rather not go into how they're doing it, but certainly massive focus on the Gaza war in TikTok did do a number on the unity of the Democratic party.

Speaking of China influence I keep getting these stories on my social media feeds: Isn't this overpass, road, or this building, or this city in with lots of LED lights in China just great? China is the future, and so on!

...except that the "extremely precise targeting" is a new thing.

The DoD banning an app on their network is a lot different than banning it competely in the US. I would think DoD should ban most apps connecting to their networks that aren't work related. I feel this whole effort is either in bad faith or isn't being transparently communicated to the public.

NatSec should not even be needed. A simpler reason could be that China bans foreign social media apps from operating in China, so Chinese apps should be treated as such.

It was not for show. It acknowledged its success and was to limit its success. Then limit it as a "potential" vector for intrusion. Kaspersky was removed from the US on the same basis.

most bases still block twitter, facebook, flickr, etc too

https://www.wired.com/2009/06/despite-army-order-some-bases-...

well, probably yes

Wrong

1. China asked American SNS companys to 'obey Chinese laws', which mostly refer to content control and data ownership, these companys refused, China didn'tforced them to sell 2. Are you sure to play the 'same as what China does'? hey, we are a totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial regime, are we same? think twice

It's unfortunate that this comment is buried so deep and that generally this topic is under discussed.

Media has always been a force for controlling popular opinion, but in the age of social media it's going to new extremes. There are forces that try to control how you see the world on all social media platforms and do so to attempt to shape your opinions of the world and modify your actions.

You can visibly see Reddit has been completely taken over by bot, shills, and other controlled accounts. There is no sincere, real human opinion posted on the front page.

Even HN is not immune. "Bad news" has long been forbidden here, and there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.

The US owned all the newspapers in the run-up to Iraq war II…

Imagine if one company owned all the local news papers and replaced all the content with wire stories and the lowest quality local content or a fox news like company bough local news to run a propaganda operation. Oh wait that's real.

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

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

"Imagine if a handful of ultra-billionaires controlled almost all social media in the US." doesn't feel less threatening. The fact that Congress doesn't consider this a problem feels like the bigger problem.

Didn't something similar happen with Grindr? It was Chinese owned and sold without nearly as much excitement. Given the inevitable bidding war from multiple interested parties I would be surprised if they couldn't get a fair price for TikTok

Do you think that ByteDance is primarily concerned with the economic considerations for TikTok, or do you think that it is something else?

Do you think that there is a price at which they would be willing to sell it?

It wouldn't have been at a bargain basement price if they started trying to sell it when the law passed. It could have been the highest market price they could get from the US's largest buyers.

Obviously they don't have the same leverage when they're otherwise going to be shut off in a few days.

it's still much harder for overseas scams to succeed against someone who's tech savvy vs domestic identity fraud. There's simply a lot more barriers to moving money outside of the country

> Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users

Historically speaking this is actually the opposite. Many critics of globalization have pointed out that you can directly track trade deals to massive spikes in border funding, much stronger enforcement of intellectual property laws, etc. Research actually shows a huge decrease in the dissemination of ideas, language, etc across borders where trade deals have been enacted. Paradoxically, globalization has made us more siloed off from each other

I use tiktok every day. Maybe I don't know what 'authentic' means, but I don't think most content on tiktok is authentic. I think it is a particular type of fitting to an ideal or trend.

> Equal shot at virality

What makes you think that? The process is not open and fully controlled by the company running the show

As a native Chinese I can assure you 小红书 and 红宝书 are as close semantically to each other as the words constipation and constitution. Few would relate those two.

Even the most leftist Chinese entrepreneurs avoid having their brand names associated to politics; it's just common sense.

Maoism-Bainism with Stanford characteristics

> I would guess that the association to Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for plausible deniability.

Yeah, I mean "Every Chinese citizen has a Little Red Book in their pocket!" is pretty compelling for a social media app.

It's not necessarily political beyond that, but the connection is obviously there.

Reality is stranger than fiction. That’s the reason I would expect to be reported by The Onion aha

Chinese in general love the color red, and the number 8. Luck, wealth, love connotations.

> an actual Chinese person

None of the "actual" Chinese people I know were confused about the terminology. The average Chinese does not care one lick about anything related to communism or the history of communism in this country. Mao's book is largely a relic of their great (or even great) grand parents age.

However most of my Chinese friends were confused about why something that most Chinese find to be a relatively uninteresting app in mainland China is suddenly so popular in the US.

It's also worth pointing out that this isn't some serendipitous accident, 小红书 has been working to become a TikTok replacement for awhile now.

I don't know which Chinese person you are talking about. I've never associated 小红书 with whatever Mao did back in the day. Hell, I don't think anyone I know made that connection. I only get that idea after watching a video made by a youtuber, who's not Chinese.

Antiestablishment-types supporting an ideology like Maoism is at least something I can understand. Antiestablishment-types expressing their loyalty to the establishment of a foreign adversary is significantly more concerning.

it probably isnt, and is just a random name, but it feels like the name is a joke about the red scare

> The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia.

Is it paranoia if Mao Zedong is still revered? If the government is the communist party? I realize the CCP is not perfectly communist in many ways but they are unapologetic about communism and their roots.

It is a coincidence that the original work did not mean little red book. But thats how it was translated, and the translation of the app is correct. So obviously now when you have the same name coming from a country that doesn't denounce communism I think it's fair to be concerned about communist influence.

[dead]

I can't believe TikTok is not just getting around this by using the philosophy many people use when they are forced to change passwords. Just add an "!". TikTok: "We arn't TikTok, we are now TikTok!"

Well technically I am in high school and Neither have you used ever instagram (okay maybe for that one time , I wanted to propose to my crush , (turns out she didn't have insta , so I had to talk to her friend asking her on my behalf where they said no [aww man])

and I live in India , so tiktok's banned. There are many indian alternatives to tiktok's that I have seen , But rednote being chinese just makes me wonder if its gonna survive.

Y'know things are just different yet so the same. The same fomo happened during the facebook time is now happening with red note.

“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” as Mark Twain is often reputed to have said. (I’ve found no compelling evidence that he ever uttered that nifty aphorism. No matter — the line is too good to resist.) (source https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/)

That's surprising to me. I'm 23 and Reels is, as far as I was aware, a big complimentary app to TikTok in my generation. To frame it as a Reel I saw;

"TikTok is vape and Reels are cigarettes".

TikTok's algorithm is _super_ curated and targeted, like a Mr. Beast video. Instagram's is pretty good but if you can get your algorithm to the brainrot cluster with everyone else then you'll get a lot of out-of-left-field, grungier content you might not find on TikTok.

I think once RedNote gets banned or the meme fades people will mainly flock to IG. There's still a void of creator based features that IG can't fill, so maybe a competitor will pop up if IG can't replicate the environment well enough.

Pretty much Insta/X is for genx and millennials, Facebook is for the boomer gen. Tiktok was for zoomers, when i was a teen till like 23 i hated being on the same cringe ass social media platform as my mom. Another teen trait is rebellion.

I use none of these things and that still hurts more than it should.

> and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it

"Little Red Book" is the literal translation of the original name but that's not the only way companies approach global markets, especially with longer to say names. It looks like they sometimes use "REDNote" (as it appears in App Stores), "RedNote", and sometimes just "RED" depending on the context (e.g. their advertisement/promotional email address is red.ad@xiaohongshu.com).

As to how they got there with it? "Little Red Book" is just an awkward mouthful to refer to compared to the alternative forms they used.

What law is that exactly?

"Protecting Americans’ Data From Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024"

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520...

https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7520/BILLS-118hr7520eh....

One could argue, and I think with a strong case that if this law applies to TikTok, it would also apply to Twitter (Saudi investment) and Snapchat (also Saudi investment).

> > In English, it seems to be called rednote.

> I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.

I'll tell you a funny one like that in another language:

Instagram reels are well... short-form videos usually with music/audio and effects.

It's pronounced something like "real" but longer.

Anyway, in French that word "reel" is printed the same but since most people don't practice spoken English it's read and pronounced "réel". Something like ray-hell (notice the é). And it annoys me to no eeeend :D.

So, among French-speaking community management crews and social network teams you hear "réel"/ray-hell all the time instead of "reel".

And how do you translate "réel" into English ? You guessed it: it's "real".

> and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.

It's actually just what it's called in the US app stores: "REDnote—小红书国际版"

Little red book means something different in 1970s China. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...

People are trying to do away with that association, but it still boggles my mind why the app is called LRB in the first place.

Yeah but "little red book" (xiaohongshu) in mandarin is not actually how the original Mao Little Red Book is called in Mandarin, either formally or informally. Informally in mandarin it's called hongbaoshu (literally "red cover book" and formally, as you can imagine, is like Quotes from Chairman Mao).

So this is a case of translators with an agenda translating two phrases with different original mandarin renditions (hongbaoshu and xiaohongshu), and picking and choosing the style of translation (base on usage vs based on character) to get the English translation to merge both of them as "Little Red Book".

> If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.

We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds. Unless they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.

Because the posts are called notes and the book is a notebook, capiche?

Not disagreeing with you as TikTok obviously works for a lot of people, but its recommendation algorithm never came anywhere near working for me after several attempts at it over fairly long periods of time.

I can't say I like YouTube shorts a lot, but there's often some I find interesting in a long enough window of time — the problem there is more the signal to noise ratio than the volume of the signal. TikTok just feels like my personal signal is just nonexistent.

Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on under the hood. There's such a huge difference between how much people like TikTok and how I feel about the content, and I don't understand why TikTok would have such a hard time with me in particular.

In general I'm kind of souring on algorithmic-driven social media, or at least short format (video or text). I don't have anything against it in principle, I just find I enjoy longer format posts and articles more in experience.

Same with Instagram Reels. Occasionally I'd be scrolling going "man my Tiktok feed is bad today", and then I realise it's IG.

5-10mins seems like a perfect algorithm to me.

If you have more time, then you can watch normal youtube videos or TV shows...

It's strange to me everyone acting as like TikTok's algorithm is completely unassailable and will always be better than the competition for years and decades to come. Tech moves fast and Meta/YT aren't just standing around.

If their only differentiating feature is the algorithm, Insta would eat them for lunch eventually the same they did for Snapchat after knocking off that app's big/only claim to fame (stories).

The discussion seems to be TikTok's algorithm is so good no one could ever possibly compete. I really don't think that's the case and TikTok really has no moat whatsoever.

there are so many low quality shorts, really makes it feel like a waste of time. never had that feeling on tiktok

It doesn't need to be better than TikTok though, just better than xiaohongshu

Main reason besides the algorithm is in my opinion that TikTok has wide but hard boundaries when it comes to content. This leads to diverse but relatively safe content.

It is not 4chan where you think twice before clicking a link to avoid emotional damage. It is also not Reddit or Youtube where you do not bother to go because you permanently encounter stuff that is inconsequentially blocked and you are still not safe from trauma. I think most platforms other than TikTok try to be too strict, fail to enforce their unrealistic rules in any comprehensible form and therefore suck for most intellectually curious users.

reels cannot seem to give me anything other than America’s funniest home videos style content and thirst traps, while on tiktok I get critical analysis of todays events, planet money-esque content, discussion of analytic philosophers i’m interested in, etc. it’s truly no contest.

Reels just wants to basically treat me as a generic male with some bias towards what my social graph likes. I also hate that my likes are public on reels.

e: not sure why this is downvoted, just trying to provide color to an earnest question

I've never saw Luigi or Aaron Bushnell suggested to me by YouTube, unless I search them

I think that's why, just saying

Rednote and TikTok has 'novelty' content type that originally cultivated in mainland China. The memes, reactions pic, etc don't really exist on reels/shorts.

I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.

Of course an app you have used for thousands of hours is going to know you better than the one you tried for half an hour

I suspect that the algorithm is taking in inputs that maybe we don’t consider. Not just swipes or likes, but maybe even how still the phone is while you watch it or if you blink less, signs you’re more focused on the video. Maybe they don’t have access to that telemetry but I think that’s kind of the vein of how they measure attention more than just touchscreen actions

Also, Tiktok don't even require you to be a user to use, exactly because it's kinda irrelevant for them. They will build the algo based on which videos you liked, for how many seconds, replays, etc etc.

His accent is fascinating. It's like he learned English as a second language in Rural Georgia.

It's also TIGHTLY controlled, with people complaining on Twitter and elsewhere that their posts are under 48 hour review before posting. The rules are also quite strict around LGBT issues etc, and not in favor.

Most of all though it's just a very silly protest, given that the "tiktok ban bill" is really a "hostile foreign-power controlled platform divestment bill" so Xiaohongshu will just be next on the block in the unlikely event that it becomes popular.

XHS is for cool GenZ, bias female, urban, has money / disposable income, think coastal elite. I guess more lifestyle/gram, pushes beauty, fashion, wellness, food, luxury goods etc. Douyin (TikTok) is for masses... "less cultured" audience, more working class / hillbilly, pushes some of the above occasionally but also everything else from cheap widgets to industrial equipment.

For more down to earth contents I heard that Kuaishou (They made KLING AI video maker) is more suitable.

well-traveled kids from well-connected families

tiktok easily lets you reset your algo, not sure if reels does the same

It’s not why they use TikTok but it’s why they don’t use other social media apps. Once an app becomes too popular with older people the quality and vibes decrease, plus everyone feels awkward about posting.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about outside of generational gaps, new social media apps are fun because you add all the people you’re comfortable with. After some years you now have a ton of connections from past stages of life, and start feeling restricted again in your personal expression.

Plus there’s the dual use issue – IG is too commonly shared now so I have current and former coworkers there plus everyone I’ve ever been interested in as friends or more at a party. So it’s not the place I’d want to feel free and creative.

IG tries to solve some of this with Close Friends and other lists but people don’t really want to spend their time constantly organizing a list of friends.

No, but rebellion definitely has to do with why there is a shift towards Xiaohongshu, which is obviously even more Chinese than TikTok ever was.

Also, Bluesky is in no way mainstream. It's a niche platform used by a handful of terminally online people who really hate Elon. Most Twitter users who aren't hung up on ideology are still there.

Discord is more of a small-group or individual communication platform. I don't think it's suited as well for the one-to-many or feed-based appeals of social media such as TikTok. (Large, public Discord servers absolutely exist, but they're often themed around something specific; and even if they weren't, you can't just have an algorithm determine which messages in a channel you do or don't see.)

No one is one discord because its UI is impenetrable. Amazing VOIP though.

No, no, you can't do that. Than they'll come after you and claim how you're not free, you don't support free market and whatnot. Banning is tool for them, but not for you.

The US didn’t “ban” anything. If the EU required Meta to divest I imagine they would do that rather than shut down and lose billions.

This ban only applies to foreign adversaries (e.g. China, Iran, and Russia).

Hum... Brazil already demanded explanations about the new Meta moderation rules. I remember reading the same about the UK, but I'm not sure.

1. CEOs meeting the President is not evidence of govt. control.

2. Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella .

You know this was happening before elon bought Twitter, right? Secretly?

Members of congress were texting and emailing with execs from Twitter and Facebook to request post suppression. During an election.

Musk making threats against the UK government has gone down badly: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/uk-counter-ext...

The US is not an enemy to the EU, while China is a clear enemy to the US.

The difference is quite easy to easy to spot.

The HRW report’s list of complaints starts with censorship of praising Hamas (a designated terrorist org) and “from the river to the sea” (a call for the elimination of Israel, which lies between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea).

Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider has to bake American policy position into its algorithm, what's going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own algorithm?

Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.

Attempting to reconcile that with HRW's article: on the one hand I think HRW might be unrealistic about what FB should be expected to tolerate (for instance, they criticize FB for taking down posts praising designated terrorist organizations); on the other, Meta's approach to content moderation - which combines automated systems with overworked and underpaid humans exposed non-stop to awful content - is notoriously fickle and subject to abuse (including, perhaps, by state actors).

Beyond Israel/Palestine, I regularly encounter content on Facebook that the Powers That Be would censor if "the pro-Western censorship regime on FB [were] extremely strong". I think I subscribe to only one political (left-leaning) group (along with a bunch of local and meme pages), but nevertheless my feed is full of tankies demanding we bring back the guillotine and install full communism.

[flagged]

we should probably start banning books from China too, for the same reason

Cherish it while you still can.

> Literally same arguments used by Iran.

All governments/nations have some level of self-interest. That doesn't mean they are all equal in their motivations or approaches.

China is literally controlling the narrative through TikTok. Why shouldn't the US respond to that?

I mean, if you want to ignore the fact that the JB was Joe Biden and he was quite literally President of the United States when that was a trend, sure.

Same with MAGA after January 6th.

Is it censored, or do most people just not talk about it on Facebook?

It's interesting how incredibly supportive of human rights that a platform in bed with the CCP became, no? Do you think that China's human rights bugaboos are often discussed on their internal social networks?

It's amplified.

tiktok is extremely censored re: genocide in xinjiang. facebook is not.

Trump won, the Russian misinformation campaign is over now. You can stop making stuff up about Jews now.

Also Japanese cars

> albeit not outright banned it all together

No they absolutely do just ban them.

It's not just that Google or FB can't operate Chinese-specific sites as a business within China, from within China you can't even get to the foreign/international versions of those sites, because they're blocked by China's firewall. Wikipedia has a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...

Sure. I just noted the irony that the US discourse has sounded a lot like "we are better than China, we are more free" for decades.

I mean, let's be clear: Facebook and Google are very much banned in Mainland China.

> 99% of the imported products from China are not getting blocked

because it's impossible.

the US offloaded low-added-value manufacturing to China, exchanging paper dollars for cheap industrial goods. When China tries to upgrade to high-added-value industries, like chips, guess what? National security risks!

just enjoy cheap goods and nature resources from 3rd world...

Read some of the many stories out there about the NSA, please. They have backdoors into internet infrastructure. If any country is a threat to information security, it’s the USA.

> I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy

I am not proposing a conspiracy, I am merely noting some irony in the fact that the US are doing protectionism here.

> No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms

Well, most of the Western Internet goes through the US, and we know for a fact that the US try to extract as much as they can from whatever they can (remember Snowden?). Also the US are very fine with US companies owning all the data of a big part of the world, and they would be really pissed if some country started banning them "for national security reasons".

> but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure

You don't need to connect the drone to the Internet. Technical solutions would most definitely exist, I am convinced of that. The reason DJI is being banned is because DJI is 7 years ahead of anyone else, and the gap is getting bigger every year. It really, really sounds like the US drone companies have been lobbying a ton because they just can't compete.

> But TikTok seems to be uniquely about censorship.

Censorship, or protectionism because TikTok is eating the lunch of the big US social media?

It was with the 2020 version of the algorithm till they changed things see https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Well FB is American. Even though I and many people agree FB is also a problem, I think it’s pretty clear why those in Washington are more okay with an American company that they have some power over and also should ostensibly care for America versus a company that is ostensibly beholden to an adversary. (To be clear, I don’t think FB cares about America.)

I don’t really see why it’s hard to see the reasoning behind the ban even if one disagrees with it.

Take it to an extreme, imagine there were zero American social media companies in our modern world where most people get there news from social media. That obviously would be a huge security risk, having one’s population’s news being controlled exclusively by foreign states.

American social media is banned in China and if used against americans by its leadership, it would be a domestic threat not a foreign threat. Twitter was bought by Elon and used to influence an election successfully. if we're honest in this discussion, we shouldn't pretend the threat isn't real. Foreign companies get banned from owning american companies all the time. Biden just banned US steel's takeover by a japanese company.

You know what scares me? how the actual majority on HN is critical of the tiktok ban despite all what I have just said being obvious things a critical thinker can deduce. I'm concerned the influence of tiktok (foreign actors) is already too pervasive and damaging. You all should know the US by any historical metrics is at the precipice of a civil war as it is.

American corporations have free speech rights. Chinese corporations do not.

> we would be talking about banning Facebook and X for manipulating Americans vote

in fact, there is alot of talk about this. wasn't that the main reason Musk bought Twitter?

On the other hand, the reason these bans are in place have very specific origins. Facebook for example refused to provide Chinese authorities with information on domestic terrorists in 2009. Facebook has never pulled that off in a western country.

Meanwhile TikTok has worked very hard to work with authorities in the US for pretty much any of their demands.

I don't support any of these bans but I don't think its fair to equate these.

Ah, so because China severely represses their own people, that means outright banning foreign web platforms even when they're hosted on foreign soil isn't really a ban for some reason.

The logic of PRC defenders never ceases to amaze.

That's a poor analogy. It's more like they censor their citizens so we should censor ours!

It requires cooperating with domestic Chinese censorship and providing personal details/actions of users by default to the Chinese government to an extent that Western companies generally aren't okay with.

However, this is all a deflection, because blocking a company from operating as a business within China is not the same thing as banning them by blocking all access to their foreign websites/apps.

If China didn't want Wikipedia operating fully within China as a nonprofit, but you could still access foreign countries'/languages' Wikipedias, I wouldn't necessarily describe Wikipedia as "banned in China". I'd maybe describe it as a partial ban at most.

What legislation are you talking about? They've been extremely transparent about their business through this whole process. They've been asked to do things no other companies are asked to do and they still abide

I'm not a fan of TikTok but its silly not to see the bias here

Never ever say anything bad about The Glorious Leader, of course.

If buying a plastic toilet bowl cleaner, I don't care where it comes from. If buying a 5G network equipment, we do care. Most of the stuff we buy from China is plastic junk.

If you know the words “yandex” and “adblocker” you are already 90th percentile ability to pirate content

Netflix is absolutely easier to use than any form of pirating for the vast majority of their userbase.

Everyone in this thread talking about how people will “just get a VPN” to use TikTok have zero concept of the technical abilities of TikTok’s user base

I used to pirate, went to Netflix because it was easy, and recently went back to pirating. Not because pirating became easier... but because Netflix became shit enough for pirating to be worth the bother.

I wouldn't mind paying if it wasn't setup in a way like "oh want to watch that movie? subscribe to this service" at one point I was paying for maybe 5 different providers eg. Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax, etc...

> Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results.

Did you just confirm the parent poster point while also denying it.

I wonder how many Android users would actually sideload it. Same happened with Fortnite for a few years, and idk how many people did that.

you won’t

> foreign ownership alone isn't a sound reason for a ban

You're right -- but foreign ownership by a repressive regime with undemocratic ideals certainly is. For example, I don't think anyone would be too concerned if a European country was the one that founded & owned TikTok.

Or should it be reason enough. The EU should ban Meta as well, no question. This foreign propaganda, risking mental health in teenagers and all that stuff is US propaganda shoved down our eyes.

Part of it is almost certainly due to the FCC controlling licenses for what is broadcast over the air.

It's like the non-addicts banning heroin. You don't have to be a Tik Tok user to understand that it's bad for it to be PRC-controlled!

You're getting it. It is like vegans banning steak!

> "lower primate improv troupe"

> "No one who actually uses it or understands it wants this."

"Everyone's generalizations are stupid, except mine."

US citizens elected representatives to make laws for them. Even more so, this is a bipartisan law.

Tiktok US users of voting age are already accounted for in that process, they don't get extra sway just because they use the app.

Of course the users don’t want it. Asking a fanbase if the thing they are a fan of should be banned and ignoring all other groups doesn’t make much sense. Nothing would be banned.

> it's about banning dissent

On the contrary, I think it is about banning a propaganda and social engineering vector that is under the thumb of an adversarial foreign government. That, for me, is enough of a reason to ban it and justify it under our constitution.

The fact that I am in favor of banning all social media should tell you that it is not ideological, but rather that I think social media is extremely addictive, and has huge negative externalities.

I'm not a lawyer, and therefore I am not qualified to make that kind of definition.

Well let's not talk in abstract phrases, who did YOU vote for, and did you not find it probable that they would support such actions?

One of those scenarios is much more likely than the other.

What if, by nature, any type of conspiracy information is much better at hitting dopamine centers and attracting viewers than the "real" news can ever be? What if PBS could never come close to what misinformation can do and who it can attract...

Totally agree with this.

When did they say you can't read or watch? The same video producers on Tiktok can move to the multitude of platforms that are allowed. They can produce the exact same stuff.

The ban has nothing to do with the material, it has to do with the platform that is used to distribute and curate it. CCP by controlling the algorithm would allow it to do exactly what you say, at the push of a button.

Your comparison to Putin's Russia falls very short.

> There was nothing on vine that was addicting

Well that sounds like a selling point to me.

> There was nothing on vine that was addicting

Did we use the same app??

RIP Vine

vine could only do 7 second videos which hurts long-term

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/28/extreme...

Still can't fix the fact that videos randomly pause every 2 seconds though

Like?

I just opened a new twitter account as an experiment. What features are you talking about? Nothing is obviously new. Also seems much more buggy than I remember.