Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

There is no evidence. This is just blind speculation. 95% of the population just doesn't care about telecom cybersecurity.

I agree, you should be able to install whatever the fuck you want.

Google and Apple shouldn't be helping China get you to do that, by hosting and advertising it in their app store though*. Oracle shouldn't be helping China spy on Americans by hosting their services.

This isn't a law against you installing things on your phone. You're still free to install whatever you want on your phone.

*And if there is a valid first amendment claim here, it would probably be Google and Apple claiming that they have the right to advertise and convey TikTok to their users, despite it being an espionage tool for a hostile foreign government. Oddly enough they didn't assert that claim or challenge the law.

Websites and books are already being banned in the US. Ask anyone who can no longer access PornHub or who has seen books being removed from libraries.

But it's not about what you install, or even what you say. It's what you're told and shown. The US and China want control over that, for obvious reasons.

Meta has been 'curating' - censoring - content for years. TikTok is no different. X isn't even trying to pretend any more.

The cultural noise, cat videos, and 'free' debate - such as they are - are wrappers for political payloads designed to influence your beliefs, your opinions, and your behaviours, not just while consuming, but while voting.

If TikTok turned out to be State sponsored spyware, would you reconsider?

I support your slippery slope argument. I wonder where your red line is relative to "state sponsored spyware" and "typical advertising ID tracking" or "cool new app from company influenced by an adversarial super power".

You can still install the app on your phone. Tik Tok just can't do business in the US any more.

This hasn't been my experience, using TikTok from Switzerland, I almost exclusively see English language, with a focus on my interests

My experience is that it serves you the content that you spent time watching and engaging with.

And it's quite easy to steer it towards a certain topic if you want to

I believe the algo is somewhat timezone based, too.

Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!"

The majority of the content feels regional, though.

Canada and potentially the UK are gonna be having the biggest shock I guess. Potentially Australia too?

The question is, was this a conscious human design decision or did the algorithm learn to do that by itself?

As an American in the US, I get quite a bit of foreign and foreign language content under For You.

This is the inverse to the situation you describe but it makes me doubtful that non-US don't see a lot of American content.

Source?

My anecdotal evidence of watching TikTok usage on others’ phones while riding subway systems in Paris suggest there’s plenty of English-language content out there.

> The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture

The CCP has tried to get their culture out there, it just has not been successful at the visually obvious scale of Japan or Korea. But their culture is definitely getting out there, and I think we often don't spot the Chinese influence on something unless some journalist finds out and writes an article about it.

Some of their influence is leveraged in business deals, with several movies being altered by the demand of the CCP, and these changes persisting in worldwide releases, not just the Chinese-released version of the movies.

Some of their influence is leveraged in video games- Genshin Impact is a famously successful Chinese game. There are some competitive Chinese teams in various pockets of e-sports too. Tencent also owns several video game developers, and occasionally uses their influence to change parts of a game to please the CCP.

There is a Chinese animation industry (print and video), and occasionally they get a worldwide success. I remember being surprised when I found out that "The Daily Life of the Immortal King" was Chinese- you can tell it isn't Japanese but lots of people guess that it is Korean.

As someone who wants to learn Chinese, I think about it all the time. Watching Chinese shows just isn't as fun for whatever reason. I was telling my wife the other day I have met so many people who credit Friends for why they can speak English.

That's soft power right there.

I've had to resort to watching anime on Netflix with Chinese dubs - anime is good because people actually talk slower and usually use simple language. When I watched Three Body (Chinese version) the dialogue was impenetrable lol

Or perhaps you haven't encountered Chinese content because of soft suppression of the content from within the US bubble

What do you mean by "global pop culture" here?

I've never considered there to be one, although I'm open to the idea.

It's easy for me to recognize an Ameican pop culture or an Anglo pop culture, and the favor each show for certain imports over others, but those don't seem nearly so universal as your usage of "global pop culture" suggests.

Latin, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, French, Indian/South Asian, etc each represent huge "pop culture" markets of their own but also each have their own import biases.

For better or worse, I think CCP has long been on the backfoot in international propaganda just because what passes for persuasive narratives in authoritarian contexts falls flat to global audiences fluent in western entertainment and media culture.

Of course they have modernized, but most actual influence obtained thus fair (e.g. international olympic committees covering up investigations, stopping the NBA from venturing criticisms) has come from projection of soft power rather than being on the cultural cutting edge.

True that. My wife watched a few Chinese dramas, but they're quite boring compared to k-dramas or japanese shows. I find them annoying and full of propaganda. Only the historical ones are borderline interesting. Also the CCP crackdown on celebrities didn't help.

By contrast, there's now a very good k-drama with Lee Min-ho happening in space or the Gyeongseong Creature horror drama with Park Seo-joon. I did see some good Chinese movies, mostly out of Hong Knog. Wong Kar-wai directed a bunch of good ones.

I'm resentful for not having BYD here to offer affordable vehicles. The vast numbers of people who are now boxed out of the middle class could desperately use the help of a vehicle that doesn't cost them $700 a month.

They'll be on RedNote within 2 weeks.

Other's have said it; but TikTok was such a nice format for media. It emphasized what the creator can provide its users; what content was legit; entertaining, informative, etc.

Whereas Instagram and FB are more about personal "branding". You post the best version of yourself and it's rewarded with engagement. Where on TikTok the emphasis is on the content; even creators I follow and have seen dozens of videos on I couldn't tell you what their account name was.

On TikTok you put up or you were shut up.

The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks. Maybe YouTube shorts.

I have a lot of Japanese friends and travel between Japan and here frequently. TikTok is huge in Japan and a lot of my For You Page is content trending in Japanese spheres. I don't live in Japan so being able to plug into Japanese media is a very, very convenient thing.

I'll probably continue trying to use the app if possible since I mostly connect with Japanese content, but I will say there's also a fun world of Japanese creators who straddle the English and Japanese speaking words who are about to lose an outlet to the English speaking world, and I feel really bad for that too.

The "algorithm" is also just so much better than Reels and others. I spent an afternoon of PTO training my algorithm a couple years ago and it's been great ever since. My partner and I share TikToks with each other all the time and. we shape each other's algorithm and interests. Reels fixates too much on your follows and Youtube Shorts is honestly a garbage experience. Both platforms really reward creators building "brands" around their content rather than just being authentic or silly. I treat Reels as the place for polished creators or local businesses who are trying to sell me something and TikTok as the place for content. I find that I get a lot less ragebait surfaced to me than I do on other platforms, though I admit my partner gets more than I do. We both skip those videos quickly and that has helped keep this stuff off our FYP.

An important thing to remember is TikTok was one of the first platforms that was opt-in for short-form content. Both Reels and Shorts was foisted upon users who had different expectations of the network and as such had to deal with the impedance mismatch of the existing network and users who didn't want short-form content. TikTok's entire value proposition is short-form content.

I'm pretty upset about it honestly. TikTok's algorithm has always done a fantastic job of providing interesting clips in a way that Facebook and Instagram has never been able to provide. I will say that upon a new account, it's mostly garbage, but it quickly learned what I was interested in and what I would tend to engage with. It also does this while showing me considerably fewer ads than the meta platforms.

I've found something like a very efficient sorting into communities of shared interest, and something egalitarian in being able to see people with 0 views and get reactions from them.

It's by contrast to say, Youtube and X, where The Algorithm (tm) sustains a central Nile river of dominant creators and you're either in it or you're not.

That said, I think the political questions are rightly the dominant ones in this convo and those color my lived experience of it.

Not a content creator and use it regularly. My algorithm is mostly silly stuff, music, etc. I'm not convinced there's a discernible risk to national security, and as someone with a lot of libertarian views, I think the ban is an overstep by the US government.

The "sticky"-ness is real, but many will flock to the TikTok copies in other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, anyway.

Regardless, I enjoy the platform. It's fun to reference the viral sounds/trends on the platform with other friends that use it.

> I was really surprised that my daughters (avid teenage TikTok users) are much more relieved than mad.

A sense of relief may be a coping mechanism. I've heard laid-off colleagues inform me they felt relief in the immediate aftermath; granted, the lay-offs were pre-announced before they communicated who would be "impacted", and it was at a high-pressure environment; but the human mind sometimes reacts in unexpected ways to loss outside of one's control. Rationalization is a mechanism for ego defense.

TikTok has replaced Reddit for me (I can expand more on why I stopped using Reddit, but it's not related to TikTok) in terms of "checking what's up on the internet" or as Reddit would put it "Checking the homepage of the internet".

I trust TikTok's "algorithm" to give me quick and entertaining short-bits about what's going on, what's interesting, etc. It learns what I'm into effortlessly, and I appreciate how every now and then it would throw in a completely new (to me) genera or type of content to check out. Whenever I open it, there is a feed that's been curated to me about things I'm interested in checking out, few new things that are hit or miss (and I like that), and very few infuriating/stupid (to me) things.

Its recommendation engine is the best I have used. It's baffling how shitty YouTube's algorithm is. I discover YouTube channels I'm into form TikTok. Sometimes I'd discover new (or old) interesting videos from YouTube channels I already follow from TikTok first. For example, I follow Veritasium and 3Blue1Brown on YouTube but I certainly haven't watched their full back catalog. YouTube NEVER recommends to me anything from their back catalog. When I'm in the mood, I have to go to their channel, scroll for a while, then try to find a video I'd be interested in from the thumbnail/title. And once I do, YouTube will re-recommend to me all the videos I have already watched from them (which are already their best performing videos). Rarely would it recommend something new from them.

On TikTok, it frequently would pull clips from old Veritasium or 3Blue1Brown videos for me which I'd get hooked after watching 10 seconds, then hob on YouTube to watch the full video. It's insane how bad YouTube recommendation algorithm is. Literally the entire "recommended" section of youtube is stuff I have watched before, or stuff with exactly the same content as things I have watched before.

Here is how I find their recommendation algorithm to work:

YouTube: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? Here is that video again, and 10 other "brisket smoking videos". These are just gonna be stuck on your home page for the next couple of weeks now. You need to click on them one by one and mark "not interested" in which case you're clearly not interested in BBQ or cooking. Here are the last 10 videos you watched, and some MrBeast videos and some random YouTube drama videos.

TikTok: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? How about another BBQ video, a video about smokers and their models, some videos about cookouts and BBQ side dishes, a video about a DIY smoker, another about a DIY backyard project for hosting BBQ cookouts, a video about how smoke flavors food, a video about the history of BBQ in the south, a video about a BBQ joint in your city (or where ever my VPN is connected from), etc. And if you're not interested in any of those particular types, it learns from how long you spend watching the video and would branch more or less in that direction in the future.

Another example is search. Search for "sci fi books recommendations":

YouTube: Here are 3 videos about Sci-Fi books. Here are 4 brisket smoking videos. Here are some lost hikers videos (because you watched a video about a lost hiker 3 weeks ago). Here are 3 videos about a breaking story in the news. Here are 2 videos about sci-fi books, and another 8 about brisket.

TikTok: Here is a feed of videos about Sci-Fi books. And I'll make sure to throw in sci-fi book videos into your curated feed every now and then to see if you're interested.

Are Weibo and Xiaohongshu used widely outside of China? Given the names alone I'd imagine their adoption is fairly limited to China.

> creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization

Seems people are already mass migrating to Rednote. I’m not sure how that plays out though.

Re. copycats -- VK was also a blatant copycat of Facebook, down to copy-pasted CSS styles.

> For who? UK users?

Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.

> TikTok users who use the Chinese version

The what now? There are no Chinese nationals using TikTok. It's banned there. Like it's now banned in the US.

Ah yes, USA, UK and China. The 3 countries that exist.

Exactly. And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat. Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.

What if Congress passed a law that said "The New York Times must shut down unless all foreign owners divest"? That's effectively impossible for a publicly traded corporation. Is that just a ban, in practice?

That would be like telling Facebook to "divest" from the US government. Which, in this case, means ignoring all government requests for data and censorship. Facebook obviously cannot do that.

> There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law

It’s also not a ban on the content. It’s a ban on hosting and the App Store. TikTok.com can still legally resolve to the same content.

quote from tiktok's webiste https://usds.tiktok.com/usds-myths-vs-facts/: ``` Myth: TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd., is Chinese owned.

Fact: TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Ltd. was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, but today, roughly sixty percent of the company is beneficially owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group. An additional twenty percent of the company is owned by ByteDance employees around the world, including nearly seven thousand Americans. The remaining twenty percent is owned by the company’s founder, who is a private individual and is not part of any state or government entity. ```

So why is Apple being forced to evict a free app from their store?

It doesn’t label ccp. It denigrates four countries as foreign adversaries. And then allows the president to remove any company located in those adversaries.

Kaspersky was banned this way. Tiktok was hard coded in the law to be banned. The law allows for sale. It doesn’t enforce sale.

Wait is it actually controlled by the CCP? Did they present evidence for policies implemented by TikTok directed by the CCP?

Does divest in this context mean sell it to a non Chinese owner?

Like such cannot be enforced for example against foreign radio stations or print publications.

Then how do court justify that it stands in the case of an app.

My reading of it is they didn't bother to take the motivation of the law into account (suppression of speech), and only took the law "as written" to decide.

> We need not decide whether that exclusion is content based. The question be- fore the Court is whether the Act violates the First Amend- ment as applied to petitioners. To answer that question, we look to the provisions of the Act that give rise to the effective TikTok ban that petitioners argue burdens their First Amendment rights...

You mean Sottomayor and likely Gorsuch acknowledge the 1st amendment issues at play. The rest just assume it without deciding.

> first amendment doesn't apply here

It absolutely does. (It’s in the opinion.)

It just isn’t the Wild Draw 4 some people imagine it to be. You can’t commit fraud or libel or false advertising and claim First Amendment protection. Similarly, there are levels of scrutiny when the government claims national security to shut down a media platform.

That is not the point of the First Ammendment, it is that Government cannot stop anyone from saying/printing/dissemination of content.

So question if government has power to do so.

Can they ban RT? Or even the BBC, if the government found it wise to do so?

The motivation was based on content, so the actual text of the law shouldn't matter. Such acts have been overturned before (see the Muslim ban) based on motivation.

1) to be honest, when I see how russia, Iran and other states influence all other networks (especially when it comes to voting), not sure how tiktok is worse than all of them - just think of Facebook & Cambridge Analytica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

2) yes, that is an issue.

3) fair point.

> 1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans.

There is no credible argument that the CCP doesn't directly control the alg as it's actively being used for just that in tawain/etc.

Does the US really want a (hostile?) foreign govt to have clear direct access to influence 170m americans, an entire generation - completely unfettered? Incredible national security implications. Bot farms can influence X/Meta/etc, but they can be at least be fought. TikTok itself is the influence engine as currently constructed.

> 1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans

More to the point: it removes the ability of the existing American establishment to monopolise the viewpoints presented to Americans.

0) Protectionism- TikTok is eating Meta's lunch. Meta can't make a social app as good as TikTok in the same way GM can't make a car as good a value as BYD.

It has blown my mind how "free Palestine" has become a meme. That war started with a bunch of terrorists kidnapping/raping/murdering college-age kids at a music festival, and college kids around the world started marching _in support of_ the perpetrators.

At some point, I realized that I avoid social media apps, and the people in those marches certainly don't.

I know that there's more to the Israel:Palestine situation than the attack on the music festival, but the fundamental contradiction that the side that brutalized innocent young people seems to have the popular support of young people is hard to ignore. I wonder to what degree it's algorithmically driven.

> TikTok collects massive amounts of data on 100s of millions of Americans. Opens many avenues for spying, extortion of influence, etc.

you can buy all of that from data brokers

Bravo, perfect summary of the issue at hand.

It'll be revealing to see which political actors come out in favor of keeping tiktok around.

Nail in the head with reciprocity. I think the US honored its end of the bargain over the past four plus decades since China started manufacturing goods for US companies. China clearly benefited since they are now the second largest economy. Along the way China grew ambitious which is fine but they made an idiotic policy error in timing. They should’ve waited a couple more decades to show teeth.

> That same year, Douyin imposed a 40-minute daily limit for users under 14. Last year, Chinese regulators introduced a rule that would limit children under age 18 to two hours of smartphone screen time each day.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-china/story?id=108111...

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-china/story?id=108111...

Anecdotally, I have heard from people who lived in China at the time that there was a significant shift in content a few years back.

The entire app is banned. They use a different one called Douyin.

https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe...

"It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,”

His comment is obvious propaganda

[flagged]

Indeed, it's all protectionism. They want the money to go to American companies instead. Why do you think the EU, which is generally far more aggressive about these things, has not yet banned TikTok? It's also the same reason Huawei are thriving elsewhere but banned in the US. It's all just trying to protect their big companies with deep pockets.

Well said. Only if we start looking at both of these issues separately, owner and algorith and deal with each one appropriately.

It wouldn't be the same algorithm, it would suppress pro-Palestine content more aggressively as Meta does. The US's problem is with the algorithm

>> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.

> Source?

The same source as everything Covid related: Trust me, bro.

TikTok itself is banned in mainland china. Do you need much more of a source?

Yes, you could say Douyin is available in place of TikTok, but have you asked yourself why they have 2 separate apps? One for mainland China, and another for everyone else?

Another source (see the section "How is Douyin different from TikTok?"): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/business/china-tiktok-dou...

Multiple reps publicly said TikTok needed to be banned because they couldn't control the narrative around Gaza as easily. TikTok is the only platform I regularly see content about Gaza fed from the algorithm.

"anything you don't like (gambling, alcohol, gacha games, convenience foods, televised sports, reality TV)"

Respectively, heavily regulated, heavily regulated, poorly regulated but really has to toe the line to not fall into the first bucket, fairly regulated (with shifting attitudes about what they should be, but definitely not unregulated), probably only a problem because this is "gambling" again lately and has been regulated in the past and I suspect may well be more heavily regulated in the near future, and people probably would not generally agree this belongs in the list.

The GP's statement doesn't work with reality TV or televised sports. Both of those are produced with a lot of human effort, and the cycle time for new content is way too large to form addictions.

Gambling, alcohol, and gacha games are clearly addictive and frequently are not set up to be in the best interests of the users.

> TikTok is perhaps the most impressively addictive gambling app ever created.

> Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that gambling is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

Not really. TikTok isn't a gambling app.

I love to drink. Absolutely adore it. Putting on a great recors, open 2 bottles of wine and call 10 different people during the span of 4 hours. I wouldn't trade it for social media any day of the week. I am drinking right now actually

Yes? The person you replied to was pretty explicit in drawing a comparison to vices like gambling and alcohol, which are indeed usually regulated. Gacha games are also being recognized as thinly veiled gambling and regulated as such.

I met someone who did some high-level work for ByteDance. I asked them what they thought of the worries that TikTok was a CCP spying instrument.

They said ByteDance is as disorganized as any other big tech company, and it would be approximately impossible for them to discretely pull that off.

It's easy to see "CCP" and think bogeyman, but it is interesting to think about how achievable it would be to pull off something shady at Google or Facebook, and apply that same thought process to ByteDance.

Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat are not functionally owned & operated by an unfriendly foreign government that would have incentive to destabilize the USA via civil unrest by influencing our algorithms.

There's nothing preventing China from buying mass data from Facebook or one of the many data brokers. This is about censorship and the ability to control public narratives.

I am not an "America bad" type of fellow, but US democracy is clearly reaching a local minimum. I suspect "never more functional" is an idea with which even your representative would disagree. There are multiple major issues that Congress should have addressed decades ago and instead they've only become more intractable. The country is more than its government, but the core democratic component, Congress, simply gets very little done. I do not think it can go much longer before some series of events forces broad compromises and realignment.

I mean, however flawed the EU may be, I think they are earnestly trying to protect the average person from the current paradigm of abusive data collection. Perfect can’t be the enemy of good.

It's absolutely a risk because these databases are unregulated honey pots. They're a total liability

For anyone curious to dig into this more, the terms to read up on are "common law" [0] vs "civil law" [1].

Common law is basically just the US, UK, AU, and NZ. Outside the anglosphere it's mostly civil law.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)

[flagged]

> Another example that highlights the distinction...

No, that just highlights the hypocritical picking-and-choosing they do to justify it. Gorsuch is a textualist when he wants to be, just like the others.

> Textualism is a formalist theory in which the interpretation of the law is based exclusively on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as intention of the law when passed, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law.

Textualism in modern context is a tool used by conservative justices used to uphold laws that serve business interests and conservative causes.

Yeah it’s funny MAGA still wants to encourage more H1b from China because you know apparently Americans are smart enough and are lazy. (Thanks for your vote though we will get rid of trans migrants!)

Well gosh, that sentence makes it seems like Congress could do anything!

However, this case is about something else. The opinion states that there is a first amendment interest, but that interest is secondary to a compelling national security interest that, in the court’s view, is valid. That may or may not be correct - but it is a subjective interpretation.

Whether Congress has jurisdiction here is not at issue. The court is deciding a different question, which is whether the ban would violate the first amendment. We look at their ruling:

>We granted certiorari to decide whether the Act, as applied to petitioners, violates the First Amendment.

This is about as much foreign commerce as it is me buying a Xiaomi phone.

I know there's court precedent, but corporations aren't people. It's yet another Chinese platform that Americans use to communicate with other western companies.

That’s actually my point. I don’t think strict textualism really has anything to do with any case. As soon as you say it’s the rule of law that drives every case, you find yourself somehow interpreting an awful lot.

Let's not forget that the US government has forced US companies to secretly hand over user data for "national security" purposes. Anyone who denies that China does similar things either doesn't know how the world works or is consciously denying reality.

Congress isn't banning TikTok either. The law says US businesses can't work with TikTok. TokTok is choosing to shut down to try and force the issue politically. TikTok can choose stay running, the app will still be on your phone, no IP addresses are being blocked. The laws impact comes from choking off revenue and marketing (access to app stores).

EU is among the most restrictive legislations when it comes to data leaving European ground already.

Oh look: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/european-union-o...