TikTok goes dark in the US

Very possible. Most import tariffs and bans are to protect national industry. Still a "our humans are more important than yours" division of the world.

But yes, countries who impose import restrictions often don't want others to impose them.

> They definitely should do that if they believe that these applications are controlled by US government.

The goal of government entities in these types of spots is to have de facto control and/or influence without appearing to have it.

> AFAIK nobody seriously believes that.

Ummmm…

Especially since those ironically are among the long list of American websites banned in China for decades...

Pretty sure South Korea is considered an ally. That's how political relationships work.

Is China upset about this? This just seems to be a huge American self-own (pun intended).

OP maligns people for not knowing what it means, but it seems like it’s a nebulous term with no concrete meaning.

So it's pretty much a cold war, but we don't want to say that?

So we get down to actual situation - TikTok is way too popular and not under reach nor control.

The hell will sooner freeze that me as an European will believe US government is not weaponizing data of all US companies it can get it hands on, and well, it can get hands on all data. That's decade old story at best.

For an European, this is really funny, fight for who can control general population more. Don't get me wrong, I consider all social networks a brain and societal cancer, but to claim one is weaponized and the other is not, pinky promise... Snowden, NSA, secret courts and rulings that can't be even made public, recording basically whole internet traffic for further analysis including this comment (maybe apart from youtube traffic). Discussion who is doing worse is then just an academic one, lets make an Excel spreadsheet and compare numbers.

As a european, talking to any american, we notice you guys have levels of propaganda that are way way higher than what we get. And we do get propaganda.

The notion that without tiktok you'll now get anything "true" is laughable.

It is?

The problem has no easy solution.

At the end of the day, either users are really in control for what they can or they cannot talk about or it's censored one way or another and thus not free.

Information war is complex and if we don't allow our foes to express their povs then all we're left is our own manipulated media. If we do allow it we might face a spread of a different kind of information.

I wish this was all solved by allowing everybody to spread whatever information and educating citizens since young age about raising a lot of doubt about anything they hear/see in the news/socials.

But again this is also complicated on a social media level especially with those auto feeder algorithms that will either push you controversial content because it makes views or just because you stumbled on few videos on the topic so it's gonna push you even further in the hole.

In any case there's no simple solution.

The issue with China is that our own information and misinformation cannot reach them either.

We allowed Russian state media for long on our platforms because they allowed our on theirs too. Reddit or YouTube or X were never banned there. But again 90% of Russians get informed by tv, and the minority that doesn't gets it on VK or other Russian social media.

Do you have reading material you can recommend on this for someone that wants to learn enough to get an informed opinion on this?

> and flash their baseband processor if you like

Could you please give some source on that info?

In the US we allow significantly more spying on foreigners than US citizens. That’s not as controversial as domestic spying.

Look at the backlash against the US government trying to clamp down on Covid misinformation with a national emergency declaration [1]. There’s exactly zero reason to expect the CCP has an incentive to behave differently, especially when there’s effectively no way for companies to push back in China.

And no that doesn’t excuse the nonsense some US administrations get up to. Like undermining the effectiveness of the Chinese covid vaccine [2].

There is already evidence of pressure being applied to ByteDance by the CCP for data on Hong Kong citizens [3].

So it would be silly to think that: 1) data for different TikTok users is more or less difficult for the CCP to access based on their specific locations (technically or practically) And 2) the CCP has more respect for foreigners than Western governments do.

———

1 - https://hms.harvard.edu/news/whats-stake-us-supreme-court-ca...

2 - https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

3 - https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-china-bytedance-user-data-...

Huh?

So what? People freely chose to vote for Calin. He won. Why does it matter how these voters came to their decisions?

Deep down, the sorts of people who'd ban TikTok and overturn the Romanian election are those who believe they, not the people collectively, get to weigh the merit of ideas. They see democracy as a rubber stamp for elite consensus. If the rubber stamp malfunctions, it's time to fix it. This attitude is a betrayal of centuries of liberal values that made this country and the west generally what it is today.

Remember when we overthrew Saddam’s government because Iraq had WMDs?

They don't need to, people share and watch the content voluntarily because it has novel value.

"Why wasn't I told this before?" Is a common sentiment in those videos.

belief laundering, as if “network contagion research institute” is some long-standing research org and not basically an extension of the state like the “Atlantic Council”

anyone with half a statistics brain can see the problems in this analysis

That's not a scientific study but a report from a no profit and the method and data has not been reviewed.

It's not like those hashtags were even banned, so what's the point here?

It's also likely that demographics between the apps are different.

The mistake is in thinking that there is no need for an American (or Canadian, or EU) firewall. The reality is that either due to corruption or naivety, western countries let foreign information attacks and foreign propaganda spreads completely unchecked.

One could argue in the US that this was very useful to the new regime gaining popularity.

Semantics aside, there's an objective list of who bans or censors more, and it's not even close. Not by an order of magnitude. Source: the great firewall's existence.

GFoC specifically filters not only sites (banning) but specific topics, keywords, discussions, and participants (censorship).

Because it isn't censoring. Censoring is selective removal of information. This is wholesale. The tiktok ban isn't even about suppressing information. If you search for e.g. the Moscow Times, you'll also find words like "banned", "declare illegal foreign agent" in the Western press. Censorship already applied to that news outlet, but after the feb 2023 offensive, the Russian state simply forbade the whole publication.

> You do not seem to find any commonality between censoring different categories of websites or apps.

The fact that they're different is important. Pornography is really different from journalism. Aversion against public nudity and sexual acts is deeply ingrained in many cultures, if not all. It also doesn't serve any democratic goal. Freedom of porn isn't a human right.

You mean like the DPDPA [1]?

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

huge false equivalency. true India is maybe not a model image of a democracy but they are way more free than China. take a look at the freedom house reports for more details.

> I know for a fact you get propaganda videos shoved in between your feed of 'good stuff' that you enjoy watching

No idea how you could know this. I have never seen any concrete evidence that there are propaganda videos interlaced into people’s feeds. Everything I have heard is hypothetical. “China could” do this or that. If there were anything more than conjecture it would be huge news.

Casey Newton said on Hard Fork that he started a new account recently as an experiment and didn’t mention anything about China propaganda videos.

What do these "propaganda" videos look like and how do I recognize them?

I did once see a cat that was named "Chairman Meow" in one video, which might have been very subtle CCP reprogramming now that I think on it.

> I know for a fact you get propaganda videos shoved in between your feed of 'good stuff' that you enjoy watching,

I have been using TikTok for months and I didn't see any propaganda at all. I only get content about my interests (3d printing, game dev, tech stuff). Sometimes it shows random stuff like animals and camping and funny videos or something but nothing like heavy politics at all.

I guess if I started engaging with "slightly political stuff" and started searching for it, it may be possible to get that kind of content, but yeah it's definitely not shown to me.

I expect that to stay unless I start to show intentions to the algorithm that I care about that kind of content.

So, when my feed dipped into politics, it was all anti-trump (though I'm traditionally conservative) and if it were my only news, I would have been flabbergasted by the Trump win. But apparently the app was pushing Trumps victory?

So you're saying then that because TikTok could refuse lawful orders from the United States government, the US had to ban it?

Oh but we are allies! The USA will never ever use the information gathered on allies for their own profit!

Non allied nations should absolutely ban US apps. Additionally, all government devices should have strict security features. It would be wise to also protect certain places from all electronic monitoring.

I presume meta is banned in China.

> Meta services especially since they don't have any competing service that is popular in the US

Meta won't tinker with the algorithm to push propaganda. TikTok will.

Are you saying the United States is a bastion of democracy? It's not even classified as a full democracy. The list of full democracies are Canada, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, and Mauritius.

United States is classified as a flawed democracy. Partly because sweeping decisions like this one are made by Supreme Court Justices who nobody voted for and who hold their position for life.

Or maybe that's what you meant and you were being sarcastic with the quotation marks around "bastion of democracy"?

It may be a "bastion of democracy" but that says nothing about how it interferes with other countries. Democracy is only for citizens anyway.

Said 'bastion of democracy' is a flawd democracy [1] who voted in a president who allegedly (facepalm) initiated a coup and got away with it. Also, a convicted criminal.

You could say it is a bastion of liberty but I'm from Europe and women here have reasonable abortion and sexuality rights.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Inde...

Bytedance chose this by not doing as requested.

I wouldn't refer to USA as very democratic or China as a center of human rights violation.

If there is no blanket ban, there would have to be many laws, rules, regulations and restrictions prohibiting the software from government buildings, etc.

In addition to the data points: contacts, location, audio, video, etc, malicious actors can learn a lot through deduction. That's before any sort of manipulation.

American companies absolutely do aid in intelligence gathering. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A for an example

Last I checked NSLs didn't require a court order, not even one from a secret one with zero effective accountability.

> * Young people have the least say in elections

While this is true from the perspective of voting laws (you can vote after 18 but you don’t need to be 18 to see how f’d ip things are…), it’s also true that the age bracket 18-29 has the lowest participation in elections. I didn’t do the math but I would not be surprised if the last elections turned differently if this bracket increased to percentage levels seen amongst older ages.

https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/half-youth-voted-20...

> Young people now give up the app they use that actually makes them happy

Citation needed - social media seems to be very bad for young people's health, if anything.

I agree that young folks feel the pain more acutely - inflation, education and housing costs hurt the most as they have the least amount of income/savings.

I’m not sure I would elevate TikTok to that degree though - we have some serious issues especially for young men. Not sure that scrolling through TikTok videos is actually fixing any of that- it’s like saying “don’t take away the heroin, it’s the only thing that makes me feel happy”

Thanks for pointing their position out. I work with and have these kids they have a lot to offer. They manage a lot of complexity - thus practicing for the always increasingly complex world. I know it’s cliche for prev generations to be down on the next. I have seen such an uptick in talking heads blaming them for {something}. e.g. Bill Maher They have little power! Lacking enough to execute what they are supposedly the cause of. Those who do should wield theirs to improve their education system or whatever deficit they believe the “kids” have instead of blaming.

Then either participate in your government or, at the very least, vote. Take control of your destiny.

Just because I think it’s interesting to mention given your perspective about how the youth feel, here is how they’ve changed voting patterns [1]:

  In past years, voters under 30 have proved essential on the margins, especially for Democrats, where even minimal shifts in support can decide an election.

  It was a group that Vice President Harris had hoped would be part of her winning coalition this year. Instead, she underperformed, and President-elect Trump made gains.

  Since 2008, winning Democratic candidates have received at least 60% support from young voters, but Harris did not meet that threshold, getting 54%, according to early exit polls.

> This is why i think that this is a case where the interests of the american people may not necessarily align with the "national" interests of wanting to ban tictoc

Your home country at least has some incentive to work towards your interest. No matter how evil they are because they have to pay the consequences of these actions. Even in autocratic China, 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.

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

This is 100% what it is. The establishment types are upset that they can’t just lean on a handful of major media organizations anymore to maintain a uniform narrative (e.g. Iraq having WMDs).

Some weapons are "NOBUS" (nobody but us). Imho you nailed it. When in Facebook and Twitter the content was manipulated, the US government did not complain, as they were (again, imho) manipulating the content (e.g. Hunter Biden laptop)(don't involve me in the politics, I don't have a care in the world on the subject, I merely find this very Stasi-ist that unnamed, faceless, unelected people lurking in the shadows, wearing black uniforms and black hoods, control what civilians are 'allowed' to watch).

Since TikTok became massive, US gov & agencies lost that oligopoly/monopoly and now China (or any other country for that matter) could define the narrative, form and destroy opinions.

Simple Porter's Five Forces model of analysis. People despised censorship (I will not debate whether this 'content moderation' and/or 'censorship' was good or bad). The "New Entrants" took over. And since it is clear that TikTok cannot be defeated in the foreseeable future, and it cannot be purchased, then it must die.

(q.e.d.)

Nothing in your comment changes this:

"If China controls the recommendation system that decides what content people consume that, then they can influence the narrative of the country."

US government is literally accountable to US citizens. If it is not, you have a bigger problem.

If only we trusted in people to make their own decisions, but that's crazy talk.

Its widely known at this point that TikTok is a Chinese owned business and that the CCP has a history if forcibly influencing companies to do their bidding. If people still want to use TikTok I don't see what the real problem is.

U.S. government isn't perfect, therefore we should let some other government just run wild in our country. I follow your logic.

At the cost of China controlling the recommendation system that decides what content US people consume?

the same argument was about Russia and west relationship with it in the last 20 years, look what we have now

Better for everyone but american labor, you mean.

Citation for the real example: https://stratechery.com/2019/the-china-cultural-clash/

Ben Thompson's 2020 piece about banning TikTok: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/

Note it's not a plan to invade, just a plan to be ready: https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2024/05/07/how-dc-becam...

The American voter shouldn't be treated like a mere link in a strategic chain of cause and effect. They're the legitimate authority in the US.

> Do we want the Chinese government to have the ability to do this?

yes. If too many people started reading aljazeera should we ban that too? Do we want the US government to have the ability to do this?

Most geopolitical rivals already blocked US social media - Russia, Iran, China. Brazil blocked and forced X to censor opposition Brazilian politicians. It's already happening.

EU/NATO members can't outright block US social media for obvious reasons (military protection is not free). They try to do sneaky things to control social media with DSA, etc.

India/Indonesia and a few other countries are already debating banning foreign social media companies. India was the first to ban TikTok (for the same reason that US is banning TikTok now). US and India are not really rivals and US can retaliate against India if US companies are blocked so math is that it's not worth it to block for now but it can change in future.

Most other countries are not capable/do not have economy and critical number of people to have viable clone of social media. They block social media from time to time during elections, etc.

probably not for the guy who gets the few billion dollars.

Word, I imagine there are all kinds of shenanigans at play, I'm just not spending that much effort thinking about it. We'll never know the complete story on any of this stuff. Maybe in tens of years, if ever.

Yes, but really, not much more than what a cult leader will demand for access.

This message about Trump saving TikTok is just wishful thinking from TikTok.

1.) It's pointless, TikTok is officially banned in US. Even if trump decides to find a US buyer for it, it will go under strict ownership investigation. So there's no way Chinese government has any influence anymore.

2.) This means that any future Chinese apps that get popular will get banned, and no need to go through any court challenges since there's precedent and law

3.) A lot of people already left TikTok and will not come back - why would they when they know the app could be gone at any minute? The traffic from the original TikTok will just keep getting split and syphoned, until the magnificent seven claims most of it

You mean more money?

Because in the end it's always about money.

Well about power really, but money is the main means to get that.

That's a lot of confidence, you must know something I don't. I'm but a bystander Canadian without much of a dog in this race, but it's a pretty serious allegation to suggest that tomorrow's World's Most Powerful Man is on the ByteDance/TikTok payroll.

Are you able to expand a bit?

Exactly. It's in their best interest to offer the incumbent a free political win

There's still some cost to shutting down now like this.

Decisions will be consistently made in favor of the highest bidder.

Yeah I was thinking that too! Plus the "look how we made you look like the hero" aspect. Shady stuff all around.

The law does not disallow Americans from accessing this service. It only disallows Apple and Google from distributing the app on their stores. This shutdown of the service is a publicity stunt.

They didnt have to shut down the app.

In which case, the question is: what were other Republicans told that they didn't sign off on this plan? It seems quite a bit like a coordinated arrangement between China and ONE guy who was running for office.

Since he was running as a Republican, why are they not also signing off on all this? Why is the completely Trump-friendly Supreme Court not signing off on all this?

Circa 1968 America:

We have a TV problem, more specifically, lots of coffins on TV problem.

Circa 2003 America:

We have TV problem, a media problem, specifically coffins all over the media problem

Worth noting: > In a phone call leaked by the Tehran Times

[flagged]

If ByteDance's interest in TikTok was purely commercial, they would have made the commercial decision to spin out the US market into a US-listed public company or sold it to a US buyer.

The fact that they chose to shut down instead, strongly suggests, that they have interests in TikTok beyond financial.

Alternatively, it's a single national security bill.

But actually, it is a standalone peice of legislation - the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

Thanks, I hate it

If what you say is true then we should've expected a buyer to come forward, or at least signal some interest in buying the platform, surely?

He is populist second, and transactional first and foremost. He always has put himself, namely his vanity, first.

And loves being the hero. When the app was taken down, there was a generic message about the ban. Then 1 hour later, it was changed to include:

“We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!”

I wonder what happened behind the scenes. This gives me flashbacks of the signed stimulus checks

[flagged]

It baffles me that people can seem to comprehend that only the United States government has interests in its media outlets, and the authoritarian second to the US in the global stage don’t. 1. TikTok in the westernized form is banned in China. 2. When some people tried to move to rednote (the in the open Chinese app), they were getting banned in the first few hours for being gay and other ideas that came with them, so it’s very entirely plausible that also TikTok is heavily regulated from the officials of a foreign actor.

For those who don't know, Mitt Romney said this.

"Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."

This reminds me of the Al Jazeera America (“AJAM”) news channel. They weren’t banned per sé, but it’s obvious they were doomed from the start. An Arab news network operating in the United States… if you think TikTok had a target painted on its back for being Chinese-owned… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_America

The process to ban it was started years earlier.

"unbiased" as in: maximally biased to serve Chinese interests.

[flagged]

What evidence do you have that preexisting news coverage was biased regarding Israel/Palestine? From many Israeli perspective, much of MSM is biased against Israel! And funny enough, I can see that repeating pattern for every interest group. Left-Wingers say MSM is all Right-Wing and biased against them, Right-Wingers say MSM is taken over by the Woke Mob.

There are dozens of contradictory narratives depending on who you ask, what makes your paticular narrative more compelling than the competing narratives?

People will downvote you for revealing this, but it's the truth. I saw it on TikTok, after all.

America is looking more and more like a fascist dictatorship.

No it wasn't. The law specifically states that the president can only enact an extension in the event that TikTok is credibly attempting to negotiate a sale. They are not doing that, hence an extension will not happen.

I don't see it in the law. [0]

If you mean section 2.1.a.2.a, it just allows the president to add additional apps to the ban list, not to lift TikTok, which is "hardcoded" into the law.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...

The law quite clearly states bytedance aka tiktok so yea tiktok is 100% banned and the penalty is massive fines that would essentially bankrupt them.

I'm no fan of trump, but the law explicitly states that the president can exempt a platform.

> The Act exempts a foreign adversary controlled applica- tion from the prohibitions if the application undergoes a “qualified divestiture.” §2(c)(1). A “qualified divestiture” is one that the President determines will result in the appli- cation “no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.” §2(g)(6)(A).

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf

I was googling for $100m and didn't find it but there was some interesting other stuff:

>So far, Yass has contributed $46 million to conservative causes and PACs, but nothing to Trump directly. If Trump wins Yass over, it could open the floodgates to a torrent of cash. (Mar 24, Vanity Fair)

>If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!” Trump posted to Truth Social on March 7. It was a stunning policy reversal, in no small part because Trump had attempted an earlier TikTok ban himself.

>Susquehanna’s roughly 15% stake in the privately held ByteDance is worth some $40 billion (also mar 24)

So it seems quite plausible even if they haven't published details.

Why are you asking for citation? Shouldn’t the person making the claim provide the evidence, instantly remove account if named man said “I take bribes.” So I believe he took a bribe. Why would you believe otherwise?

The name will remain the same; most users probably won't even notice any difference.

It will be obvious when the feed will change and be alliged with the other actors.

I feel like I see so much negative, anti-America news I am not sure what propaganda you are even talking about. It's all over Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok. I would say Reels is suspiciously missing unless you subscribe to people directly.

[flagged]

What, I can't be happy about just one of the many faucets of garbage being briefly turned off?

From the POV of the users it doesn't really make any difference whether the government bannd tiktok, vine went bankrupt, google decided wave was not worth it or any other reason a service becomes unavailable. They will cope by moving to a different service or changing their consumption habits

Your response is very unempathetic. I am not a "content creator," and hn is the closest thing I use to social media, until TikTok a year or more ago. I won't be following anyone anywhere; I'm not on those platforms.

I listened to the final, farewell videos of several people. Some have leveraged TikTok on other platforms, but for a great many, TikTok was the only platform that let them reach an audience.

TikTok was eating the competition because it was simply better at matching content. It is a completely different beast in that regard.

Calling people stupid who leveraged an unrivaled technology to build a community and/or a business feels particularly anti-human.

That certainly doesn’t reflect my experience with authors selling their books, musicians their music. Things I would never have found on my own.

the state as such consists of many entities, all these entities are not all pulling into the same direction.

divesting was never a real option, why would you spawn a US-based competitor - and it would cut you off from all the global content? just never a real good option

Hard to tell if the sanctions are targeted at the population or at the military industrial complex of Russia. I am not an expert in these matters.

Fair enough, but you should post your content elsewhere too, as a backup, and to reach more people perhaps.

While platforms dominate, instead of content dominating (see podcasts where this seems to be happening), you will always be a prisoner to what happens on the platform.

That you idly watched learning nothing retaining nothing because after all, it was what the platform picked for you, not what you sought out?

What prevents JohnSavesEnergy from posting content on any other platform?

China isn't going to send me to death camps for posting an authorized opinion. Most Americans don't care if China has any of our data and would prefer to be protected from US corporations than random far away countries with no physical reach.

The law would literally allow an EU entity to own it, or a Brazilian entity, or a South African entity.

Facebook needs to be banned too if disinformation is your concern

This article is just reporting that people on social media believe it to be about Gaza, it adds zero information on the veracity of that belief.

As an American who has more power over me, powerful people in China or powerful people in America?

Who is more likely to give my data to my government to adverse affect?

Who is more likely to lobby my government to adverse affect?

What is the point of App Store rules if your privacy continues to be at risk. Oh yes, every single app must declare if it uses name, or email, or address, or camera, but all of them are exempt except TikTok? If you want to make the App Stores more stringent, sure, go for it.

The issue is ability to manipulate people. However, should not the NSA monitor how the algo is working, and be empowered to cut off TikTok if for example you start seeing a million videos saying "Taiwan, the eastern province of China". I am sure we will still have control, we just need to be smart enough to "tap" into what content is being fed.

What are China going to do to with my data that US companies haven't already done?

Data collection is a worry of the previous decade, the recommendation algorithm is the battle ground, the US has decided that it much prefers having Meta push its white supremacist and gender wars drivel non stop than what was being shown in TikTok (Israeli atrocities)

[flagged]

As demonstrated by this ban, we're objectively worse now.

The true threat to our democracy is a foreign power. It's just not China.

Please share a source that's not a CIA funded NGO or think tank.

What can China do to our social networks that is materially different than what American tech companies are already doing today?

Maybe I'm being naive because I don't use TikTok, but all the partisan misinformation I see is being spread by either Americans on American social networks or maybe Russian disinformation bots operating on American social networks.

Nice substitution, now let’s try it in “ByteDance or US Govt” form.

(Please don’t ask naively how US controls mass-media, no desire to follow up on that.)

What do you suppose is gained by making CCP pay Zuckerberg for the privilege? Or are you proposing that he'd turn their money down?

The US has done plenty of that sort of thing in south America and the middle east, but it has always had the extra burden of maintaining a narrative under which it was not doing those things. If we let the US ban services that are contrary to its narratives, what's left to stop the US from behaving like China even more than it already does?

America has genocided 10s of millions for what it is worth. From Native Americans to slaves to all the wars in the last years to "export democracy". If any country can rival China in killing people needlessly it is the USA for sure.

See Myanmar for what Facebook has done.

Then don't use it.

Tibet was a feudal society. The only people who were "crushed" were the people landowners and the elite monks.

Both sides of the strait want the status quo in Taiwan for various reasons. Detent would be the correct approach instead of further military armament. It would be like if the Soviet Union continued to militarize Cuba from the Cuban missile crisis until the current day.

I'm more concerned about the genocide in Gaza than some CIA assets in Germany playing make-believe.

Well if you want to talk about genocide & Facebook... https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...

Why not just use RedNote? It has all the freedom that is deprived in the US [1]. /s

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-rednote-...

That’s not the point.

Where does it stop? Should my company by eyeing a switch to Oracle services because SAP is German?

First time I hear about this, have you got anything to read about it?

With enough of the proper training the fnords are invisible.

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

Exactly.

So what is the tiktok ban really about? If it's about the lack of narrative control, we should see the same ban being applied to RedNote.

As a Chinese, you know what you can't talk about. As an American we are "surprised" when our "free speech" results in overt government-sponsored censorship.

You are very wrong.

It's almost like you've never been to a school or post office in the US.

I mean, I get that the "pledge of allegiance", "the Texas History curriculum", and the "POW/MIA" flags aren't "propaganda", they are just "completely normal things that any country does to maintain a cohesive citizenry".

This line of thinking is just a revisit of MKUltra's obsession with the idea that folks, in general, are highly manipulated.

If you look at the arc of that very motivated thinking, and if you look at the work that the US government did to try and implement the kind of control you're describing here, I feel the only correct conclusion is that it's almost impossible to actually fabricate what folks think with any systematic success.

The best you can do is, maybe, "Coke is it", and even that is more of a product of peoples' material tastes and dislike of New Coke.

I don't think there actually is much evidence to support the idea that "social media feeds can shape personal behavior" in the granular and targeted way that you (and many folks) are implying here, in which someone's worldview is shaped for the short-term goals of XYZ actor.

I think you probably understand this, which is why you hedge into the abstract idea that social media is simple "shaping" via altering a statistical means.

I agree that it is possible to expose extant impulses as "legitimate" in ways that open folks to acting differently (I certainly wish I had understood how flexible gender expression could be when I was 14 instead of 40- I would have probably led a much different life). I think that kind of exposure to larger communities really does have an effect on people, because it certainly had an effect on people.

However, I find that to be very different than creating impulses that aren't there- I think that kind work requires, for instance, a system of bullies in school to beat folks when they don't conform to "accepted" gender roles.

But even if it were true that actors could create ideas, it begs an obvious question: how do you tell the difference between your "authentic" views and the "implanted" ideas of the media you consume?

I (personally) don't think that you (personally) have completely had your opinions actively shaped by some state actors.

I think a historical dialect merges our lived experiences with the communication we get from the folks around us: fundamentally we are drawing conclusions based on information from our surroundings in toto. Since it's very difficult to get people to ignore their lived experiences for very long, and the cost of doing that work requires the largest military and prison system in the 300k year long history of homo sapiens, I have a hard time believe that "media" can do that work very effectively. Doubly so in a world where there are multiple televisual streams and no one takes the NY Times seriously.

But if it were possible to easily, through media, manipulate whole populations, it really does beg that question stated above:

if "brainwashing" is possible, why haven't you assumed that you personally, have been the long-term target of those kinds of programs by the state which rules you?

For the same reasons US is doing now ;)

Economic Hitmen

I'm pretty sure most Americans didn't really care, outside of some bubbles like HN.

lol no, as an American it’s always made me think that they weren’t utterly incompetent over there. With how it looks like TikTok might be reinstate here, it’s unclear I can say the same about us.

Also, American social media companies and all others need far more regulation. But that is really a separate topic.

If russia were to try to buy meta, that deal should be blocked. If china were to try to buy meta that deal should be blocked.

Only because it effected the share price.

They tried the bill of attainder argument too.

The court of appeals thought about it and decided it wasn't. Start on page 59 of their ruling [0].

They tried to appeal this to the supreme court, the supreme court declined to hear that part of the case. See bottom of page 34 on their petition for a writ of certiorari [1].

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cadc.40...

[1] http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A587/335257/20241...

I don’t think it’s even close to a bill of attainder.

For one, it targets a class of companies operating from a collection of countries, not an individual person (and SCOTUS has never ruled on corporate personhood for the purposes of being a bill of attainder).

Secondly, the law in question does not declare a corporation guilty of any crime, it just offers restrictions on foreign control of certain businesses.

Third, the law targets non-American holdings, making it less likely that it could be considered a bill of attainder, since laws directly targeting foreign countries and agents thereof have been accepted in American law.

> It’s interesting that they didn’t press the constitutionality of this. They fought over “free speech” where it’s more clear that this might be a bill of attainder or violation of the 14th amendment.

Please explain in layman's terms why do you believe the 14th amendment applies to the federal government rejecting a corporation owned and controlled by a totalitarian regime from operating within the US.

The thing is that those companies are very much under the power of American law, so we can (and have) taken less drastic (and less effective, imo) measures to restrict adversaries from using them for propaganda.

> He is saying thay specifically demanding a sale to the USA is the odd move; it wouldn’t even fix the issue of concentration of power, just shift it to someone else.

The problem is that right now the power is yielded by the CCP, which is clearly unacceptable. The problem is not TikTok per se but how a totalitarian regime that has a long track record of actively engaging in espionage and psyops against the US is controlling that platform. Forcing the CCP to sell it's position mitigates or eliminates the impact on the remaining shareholder's interests. The fact that the CCP opts for scorched earth tactics is already telling.

But that's not what the law says.

It need not be someone in the US, just a country which is not one of a few named adversaries. A Singaporean owning company would comply with the law just as well.

In this case the democratically elected US Congress.

> Who decides what is propaganda and what is not? EU commissariat?

Like most things in the EU it’s overly complicated, but I think sanctions are decided unanimously by the Council, which in this case would be assembled national ministers of foreign policy or security.

These people think that minimum wage "fact checkers" who delete posts that don't agree with their handbook are "freedom", not "censorship". So they think they have principles.

This is an absolutely unhinged take. The US doesn't allow more than 25% foreign ownership of broadcast media. That's not some "free speech" violation. If a foreigner wants to say something, they have many ways to do it. But they don't have those privileged ways.

All principles have exceptions.

Just like how all normal people love free speech until it comes to CP and death threats (which of course should be banned).

Which principles are we talking about?

If everyone under the age of 30 was using an app run by Nazi Germany would you be okay with that?

Propaganda is a weapon and no principle says that you should let an enemy army into your country.

And if you have free speech without exceptions, foreign actors will see it as a weakness and use it to brain rot your society.

The Chinese government does not have the right to free speech in this country. And since they are the ones controlling the algorithm that controls what people see on the app, then it's China speaking not the people who are posting.

The black box algorithms that are at the heart of TikTok and Instagram are very powerful and have the potential to be very dangerous mind control weapons, quite literally. It should all be blown up, but keeping that weapon from China is good.

Shout fire in a crowded theater. Its literally the first example in that you aren't allowed to say anything you want whenever you want. You only have protection against government retaliation.

Or at least you're supposed to

This is just the paradox of tolerance, if you allow everything you won't be free for long.

[flagged]

Guess we're not going to mention McCarthy...?

However, these rights should be guaranteed to a company operating in the USA and strictly adhering to US law. Of course, if the law is (arbitrarily) changed to make this illegal due to the Chinese government's stake, then it could be forced to shut down, but that would be inconsistent with the constitution.

Isn't this like saying a popular newspaper should be banned because of what they choose to put on the front page?

Which they exert through promotion or demotion of speech. In the end it's still a free speech issue in my mind.

French company paying bribes is utterly believable.