TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday
(reuters.com)679 points by xnhbx 4 days ago
679 points by xnhbx 4 days ago
The big issue isn't data security; it's propaganda. Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't) there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans. Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
And even if you disagree with the national security reasons for disallowing China to control a major U.S. social network, there is still the issue of trade reciprocity - nearly all of the U.S. Web companies are banned in China.
Looking forward to Europe banning Meta and X considering how their CEOs are meeting weekly with their government overlord, quite clear those social networks are in the pocket of the new US government.
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.
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 .
Musk making threats against the UK government has gone down badly: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/uk-counter-ext...
> Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't)
Posting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook will get your account terminated for "supporting terrorism". The pro-western censorship regime on FB is extremely strong. US lawmakers specifically cited the amount of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok as why they were banning the app.
Sources:
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
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).
Right, what i take issue with is that you hear similarly dehumanizing things said about palenstinians on mainstream news outlets in the US every single day (my friends in group chats share thme). I don't think any dehumanizing language like that is a good thing but really hard to act like there isn't asymmetric policies applied here
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.
>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.
Naturally there is no overt censorship on FB/Meta, but in the wake of October 7th there was a clear difference in what kinds of content was being lifted by the algorithms on both platforms. I think, save for Bella Hadid, you would rarely see "organic" pro-palestine content with millions of views on Instagram, while it was less censored on TikTok.
Human Rights Watch even did a study on it: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
Not just trade reciprocity, but ideological reciprocity. The argument that the US should allow TikTok because “free speech”—while China bans American platforms because of censorship and also dictates content on TikTok because of censorship—seems obviously broken. Seems like the rule should at least be something like “Europe is welcome to blast propaganda at our teenagers for as long as we get to blast propaganda at their teenagers.”
we should probably start banning books from China too, for the same reason
>Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
Yes, there are millions of US citizens that would rather have a Russian TV station in their neighborhood than one run by Democrats. I don't understand it, but that seems to be the way it's going lately. And considering who's POTUS now, a Russia-run TV network in the US isn't that far-fetched. I mean, Fox News practically already is.
i absolutely reject this great firewall style of thinking. I’m an American, an adult, and I can read and watch whatever I want.
But is there actually any evidence that the US's foreign adversaries can more effectively deliver propaganda on Tiktok compared to other platforms?
I understand the concern over foreign propaganda, but this feels like it's not going to remotely impact the ability for foreign governments to deliver propaganda to Americans. It's perfectly possible to deliver propaganda on US-based social networks.
The best outcome of this is just that Americans find the other social networks so boring that they spend less time on social networks altogether, thus reducing their propaganda intake (at least, from social networks).
> 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?
> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans.
I don't think this is a useful distinction in a world where a handful of ultra-billionaires control most of the remaining media channels. People like Rupert Murdoch, Musk, and the others have very different interests than the average American, and at least several of them openly push their own (divisive) viewpoints through their media. Why is Rupert Murdoch less of an adversary to the average person than the CCP?
The Western media are already doing everything that TikTok has been accused of being hypothetically able to do: sowing social division, brainrot, encouraging lawbreaking, undermining confidence in the government, promoting dangerous or fake products, etc.
The real difference is that TikTok threatens to boost an alternative to the consensus message of the political elite. A US with TikTok would see actual pushback against something like the early 2000s media shennanigans that got the Iraq War and Patriot Act smoothly approved with little public debate. That is the real reason Congress banned it and why the homegrown brainrot isn't seen as a threat.
So many people keep missing this. It's not about data harvesting. It is about influencing huge portions of the population and controlling that narrative. Of course any social media app can do this, but ostensibly it is worse coming from a foreign adversary who don't play by the same rules.
> propaganda
It's so amusing seeing the society that lionizes itself as the paragon of open society and can't stop boasting about the effectiveness of free-speech soft-power compared to sclerotic communist propaganda now having panics over short video apps.
Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton could never think that.
Well, maybe we will be on yeltsin-on-supermarket stage soon?
The propaganda on TikTok comes disguised as Americans sharing points of view that just happen to serve CCP interests. Often the creators are expressing a genuine (but rare) viewpoint that China just needs to amplify. This isn't about keeping Americans from reading Pravda.
It's not hard to imagine the messages China will be pushing to weaken support for assisting Taiwan in a conflict. "Don't waste money propping up the corrupt Taiwanese government, spend it on health care /tax cuts at home!"
Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.
We haven't allowed a foreign adversary to own a media company since 1934.
This is just updating the standard. TikTok is clearly a massive threat, how is that not obvious?
https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli....
What? Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton would never have allowed a hostile foreign government to own a major communications platform.
I just want to remind everyone that China/Russia is doing everything you dislike the West doing right now. Please talk when China/Russia opens up. Right now they spew propaganda into our societies with no way for us to retaliate. I don't like censorships but these one-way attacks are a weakness to democracies, not strengths.
Open internet only works as long as everyone is friendly. The world is increasingly becoming not friendly.
Yes, but at least in the USA, I constantly have to hear shouting about how "free" everything is whenever I ask for sane regulations (guns), or something like universal healthcare.
If USA was actually so free, that would at least be consistent. But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to run around with bullet proof vests? I get all the bad, none of the good.
Every voting citizen should remember that this TikTok ban was bipartisan. That means they all cared more about this than ANY other sensible legislation. Banning child marriage? Nah! Protecting the childrens physical bodies in school was not as important as a hypothetical "mind attack" from TikTok.
They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red kid"
Where's the evidence that TikTok is being used by China to spew propaganda?
Conversely there's a mountain of evidence which strongly suggests that US officials are going after TikTok specifically because they're not in control of the truthful narratives that paint the US in a bad light.
> Please talk when China/Russia opens up.
Careful with this sort of rhetoric. China's constitution enshrines freedom of speech as a constitutional right, just like the US, but they're both taking this freedom away by invoking "national security".
Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.
You know the whole idea of “oh, all of our problems are actually because X, Y, Z boogeyman!” thing? Yeah that. Watching from outside, it feels like political landscape of the US knows that they have lost the global competition and scrambling to get back on its feet. Everyone just keeps yelling “no, no, don’t look what’s happening inside, because everything is so much worse in other countries, they’re about to completely fall down! Those europoors with no ACs, China is about to collapse for the 50th time in the last 10 years, Japan is basically dead etc etc.”.
I was referring only to the desired governance structure of the US algorithms, not the general hedging strategies of billionaires. People can diversify their portfolios in whatever way is most advantageous to them and by whatever means they can get away with across the global financial system.
>Speaking of foreign propaganda, does anyone remember when one of the most destructive advocacy organizations in the US was found to be heavily influenced by Russian spies?
"heavily influenced by Russian spies" seems like a stretch. The BBC article you linked basically says she attended some NRA conventions/events, and got some NRA officials to travel to Russia. There's no indication those activities actually changed anything.
> one of the most destructive advocacy organizations in the US was found to be heavily influenced by Russian spies
Your links do not back up this claim. Both indicate that Butina was likely a Russian spy and desired to influence the National Rifle Association (NRA). However, neither article gives any example of successful influence, however minor.
> Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
They don't have to, Fox News does it for free /zing. But for real I wouldn't see a problem with it. Less now that the world is more globalized than ever, I can get news from every corner of the globe both from our allies and enemies.
Could they be subtly pushing a narrative of communism or something, sure but this kind of "news is biased towards its owners" is beyond commonplace at this point. Jon Stewart just did a whole bit about why he couldn't criticize Apple or China.
To be clear, Russia pays those right wing trolls a fat chunk of change
In the words of Noam Chomsky [1]:
> [Manufacturing Consent] argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
The problem with Tiktok, as far as the government is concerned, is the lack of control on narrative when Meta, Twitter and Google are an extension of the US State Department (eg [2]).
The Tiktok ban came together in a matter of days as a bipartisan effort weeks after the ADL said (in leaked audio) that they have a "TikTok problem" [3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[2]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
> 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
If the last four years are indicative of anything, it's that the US government has fairly limited control over the narrative on American social platforms.
I lost count of how many times I saw people typing in "FJB" and "MAGA".
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.
Or, maybe, those things they don't see as a problem.
These shifty foreigners, however... Xenophobia isn't just some old timey things we use to do
Facebook is extremely censored re: the genocide in Gaza
TikTok is not
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.
Totally. I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize China for their protectionism, but as soon as something out-competes US companies, it gets banned: Huawei, DJI, TikTok.
Of course it cannot be said like this, because "free speech" and "democracy", so the official reason is "national security".
well china does it too with google,fb etc back then, and other nation do it too
albeit not outright banned it all together but sometimes they prefer homegrown company/technology
> 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.
Mercantalism begets Mercantalism. If their mercantalist policies become successfull then unfortunately we'll need to also assume similar policies to protect ourselves, aka Beggar Thy Neighbour, and everyone loses in an arms race of tariffs and subsidies.
That's exactly why free trade proponets oppose those policies, but the CCP didn't want to reform so we'll go the opposite way.
It's important to say that the US had TikTok with Vine, but is so corrupt that it let Facebook buy it to shut it down.
I cannot argue on the TikTok as strongly but I can see strong arguments on why Huawei and DJI are national security risks. Some of this is more educated guesses so not defensible with numbers. We know most major companies in the Chinese market have extremely close ties to the CCP. No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms but I believe the CCP takes it to a next level. We know for a fact that the CCP and chinese entities play extremely hardball when it comes to corporate espionage. Some of the stories we have seen almost read like a spy novel. Certainly Huawei and DJI make some incredible products but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure, I do believe it warrants major concern for national security.
I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy compared to the easier explanation, China is a fairly crafty bad actor in a lot of cases. 99% of the imported products from China are not getting blocked, just the ones that have very significant national security risks.
> 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.
Yup. China has been kicking Silicon Valley's butt for some time now, and I don't see any signs of that changing any time soon.
This drives the point home:
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38242135-ai-superpowers
It was with the 2020 version of the algorithm till they changed things see https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
> how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers
A law passed at the same time as the tiktok ban attempts to address this:
> a) Prohibition It shall be unlawful for a data broker to sell, license, rent, trade, transfer, release, disclose, provide access to, or otherwise make available personally identifiable sensitive data of a United States individual to— (1) any foreign adversary country; or (2) any entity that is controlled by a foreign adversary.
To echo what other comments have said about it being propaganda related, we can already see this occurring today:
https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/A-Tik-Tok-ing-...
it's not the same data or data quality. the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of the american public (psyops). What russia is doing through their trollfarms, china is doing through tiktok.
> the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of the american public (psyops).
I don't buy it. If that were actually the concern, we would be talking about banning Facebook and X for manipulating Americans to vote against their own interests and hand over more power & money to the platforms' owners. Facebook has done way, way, way, way more harm to America and Americans than Tiktok ever did. The Tiktok ban is an illegitimate handout to America's oligarchs to protect them from having to compete. It's nothing to do with protecting Americans from manipulation.
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.
Mitt Romney basically came out and admitted that the reason for the TikTok ban was that young people were getting unfiltered access to information about the genocide in Gaza.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
In support of (2): https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
I personally see this as the beginning of a slippery slope - a move that follows in the footsteps of China.
Wrong - it's practically impossible to buy video and audio data at the PII level like Tiktok is getting.
it's been said many times, it's a national security risk, and it is very obviously one. Tiktok has already gone against the wishes of the US, there's evidence Chinese engineers accessed Tiktok data hosted in the US (related: project Texas). It's so easy to sway public opinion when you own the largest megaphone to the people... That's literally what's happening right now on tiktok.
> The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a domestic one
China certainly engages in security theater for their own economic advantage as well. It's no coincidence that any American internet company that tries to operate in China gets throttled or "accidentally" blocked by the great Chinese firewall. And no, economic retaliation against China isn't "stooping down" to censorship of China. That would be like framing the EU's retaliatory tariffs against Trump as a punishment to European bourbon lovers.
> The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
Yes, but people do not appreciate what that really means. Countries need to eat the consequences of influencing domestic media, so you at least need to maintain a weak form of checks and balances. For example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.
On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...
> 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
This was the case for the first attempt, but then TikTok gave the US government access to everything. So the effort completely stalled, and the only people still banging the drum about it were R's who had run on anti-China rhetoric.
Then Oct. 7th happened, and the followup genocide that the US decided to go out of its way to participate in. The most, and most influential, anti-genocide activity was on TikTok, simply because TikTok has a hold on the young audience and young content producers, and being young they aren't cynical and hollowed out inside, and can't justify being silent in order to protect their own incomes and families (which they don't have yet.) The Lobby quickly picked up the dropped ball and carried it over the line, and Biden continued his unbroken record of being completely humiliated by Bibi, a regular criminal before he was a war criminal.
Now the ban is a zombie, because opposition to (and support for) the genocide is now set in stone, and it already looks like Trump has ended it even though he isn't in office yet through the technique of placing the slightest amount of pressure on Bibi.
All we'll have left is a horrible soon-to-come Supreme Court decision that enshrines the idea that bills of attainder explicitly intended to limit free speech are ok now because China. Which is also because Russia and also because Hamas, and because Maduro, and because hate, and because sowing discord, and because, because, because...
-----
edit: and if the Trump peace fails, and all the kids migrate to some other platform, that platform will be attacked. They lucked out that TikTok was owned by China, and Americans are such racists that they could use that racism to get them to agree to silence Americans speaking to Americans. But before, they were attacking every social network for allowing speech from Trump supporters, people criticizing covid policy, always Palestinians, women who don't accept transwomen (to get the libs onboard), etc...
3. The government is concerned that having a company that's beholden to a foreign government control the algorithm that feeds the rising generation much of their worldview may not be a good long term plan.
This has a passing resemblance to (2), but the key difference is that the government doesn't believe they have control over the narrative on Facebook, they just know that a foreign government doesn't. It's strictly better from the perspective of the US government to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism (after all, that's how all of the older generations' world views were shaped) than to risk the possibility that an adversary is tipping the scales.
What I don't understand is why the politicians insist on talking about spying as the concern. The people who are pro-TikTok are pretty clearly skeptical either way, and "think of the children" is usually the most effective political tool they have.
Funny you mention Raw Capitalism:
It shows a point I like to bring up often that Capitalism and The Free Market are directly opposed. What capital (a fancy word for shareholders) want is an infinite money machine and that is easiest with a monopoly. Hence, banning a competitor that's doing too well in the free market.
To the other part, I consider your 3 and my 2 the same, the US doesn't want us getting Chinese info and has their own perfered sources instead.
In the free market the monopoly buys out the competitors. No need for banning. Shareholders, the embodiment of greed, will just follow the money.
> to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism
.. by the guy sitting next to the President? It's not yet clear what this "DOGE" thing that Musk has been given by Trump actually is, but it sounds like part of the government to me and has "government" in the name?
I'm fine with this, based on the simple principle of Turnabout Is Fair Play.
China already bans practically all the popular US social media apps and similar apps/websites. I'm for free trade, but it ought to be fair trade too, as in, roughly similar/equal policies. If another country bans X imports from your own, it's hardly unfair to respond in kind.
This is exactly it. If China allowed fully uncensored American social media to operate in China I’d had zero issue letting them do the same in the US.
But the CCP wants to have their cake and eat it too. Fully repressive social media lock downs and censorship for their citizens but exploiting the west’s values of free speech and debate.
To be clear, it's not just that China won't let Western websites operate uncensored as businesses within China targeting the Chinese market.
It's also that people within China can't access the foreign websites and apps (without using a VPN), because China's Internet firewall blocks that access! That's what makes it an incontrovertible ban!
Even if a company has no interest in operating as a business within China in the first place, China may still block the websites and apps. That's a ban no matter how you slice it.
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.
China doesn't allow uncensored Chinese social media to operate in China either, so it doesn't really make much sense to say that they should have to allow uncensored American social media in order for Chinese social media companies to operate in the US.
That would be like saying that an Israeli publisher should not be allowed to publish in the US because US publishers cannot publish holocaust denial books in Israel. Or saying that a UAE restaurant should not be allowed to operate in the US because the UAE doesn't Wendy's there to serve the Baconator.
The sensible rule is that X should allow companies from Y to operate in X subject to the same rules that domestic X companies must follow if Y allows X companies to operate in Y if they follow the same rules as domestic Y companies.
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.
This is like saying, "well sure they invaded us with their military, but we don't want to be like them, so let's not take any military action in response."
Fundamentally, aggressive action as a response is not equivalent to being the initiator of aggression. Hence: turnabout is fair play. If someone punches you economically, it's entirely fair and reasonable to punch them back. It does not make you "just like them" to defend yourself.
That's a poor analogy. It's more like they censor their citizens so we should censor ours!
No, it's a perfect analogy, you just don't like it. If you actually had a valid point, you'd bother to explain the issue, but you didn't. Telling.
The US isn't censoring it based on content anyway -- in fact, the US government's ability to censor much of anything based on content is severely constrained by the First Amendment -- the US doesn't like the fact that it's controlled by the PRC. But blocking businesses from a rival nation is a trade issue, not a speech issue.
China is a rival and opponent of the US on the geopolitical stage. It's entirely reasonable to respond to trade restrictions with trade restrictions.
> What about the people who want TT?
Well, unlike Chinese nationals, Americans live in a democracy, so they could write to representatives or vote.
But realistically, few care enough for this to sway who they're voting for.
> You can not hold them hostage to Chinese people not having TT or other apps.
You actually can! As long as one nation is being shitty on trade and that starts a trade war, yeah that will hurt some regular people, but the alternative would be to become a total doormat and just let other countries get away with doing whatever they want.
I am genuine interested in details why and how US media didnt abide to China laws?
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.
> tiktok goes out of its way to abide by US laws and still were banned
I'm guessing they decided there was no effective legislation Tiktok couldn't weasel around via loopholes, deception, or some combination of the two.
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
Indeed, there's much bias here in favor of the PRC for some reason.
The PRC bans tons of US websites and apps all the time, much more stringently than the US is doing, but people keep drawing these false equivalences regardless.
Unlike China's typical banning policy, the US isn't implementing a full website block, which means the app would continue to work for a while, and Americans would still be able to get to the website or get to the app if it's hosted on foreign servers. I see nothing about blocking Americans from getting to the content, only from hosting the content.
In contrast, China outright blocks its residents from even being able to get to Google or Facebook or the New York Times, period, even if they're hosted in another country. It's a full ban.
So the US is implementing a weaker ban with one website even as China has blocked thousands, but people are still freaking out.
> refuse to abide by chinese laws
Honest question: what laws?
Never ever say anything bad about The Glorious Leader, of course.
More misinformation from the PRC defense squad!
They are, in fact, banned. It's not just that they can't operate like a normal business within China, you can't even reach the foreign servers from within China...because they're banned.
If a new social media network opens in Denmark, it might not operate in the US yet -- which means US laws wouldn't even be applicable -- but I could still reach it from the US without needing a VPN, because it wouldn't be banned either. Maybe it wouldn't be useful for me as an American yet, but I could still get to the website, because the US government isn't stopping me.
Many popular US websites are actually banned in China, whether you want to admit it or not.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Maybe this soundbite applies in an information vacuum like North Korea or ironically, and to a lesser extent, China. But in an environment where there is too much information for people to process, and truth is drowned out by lies and nonsense on social media feeds, it works against society.
It's bad enough that US based social media corporations are allowed to wash their hands of responsibility for the content on their platform and add to the executive bonus pool in the process. But having a hostile government control a platform is just insane.
There is a middle ground between being bundled into the back of a police car if someone speaks against their government, and freely allowing enemies to manipulate your population.
> hostile government
I don't recall us being at war or anything with China. For example, most of our crap is made there and shipped here with barely a look. If China were truly hostile and combative like everyone claims, they could literally import bombs and spies via those means.
Is this just the Red Scare 2.0? I've had way more issue with American oligarchs and politicians fucking over America's values and our way of life than China in the past few years/decades, that is for sure.
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.
> Most of the stuff we buy from China is plastic junk.
You're making an error by discounting China's manufacturing prowess these days. There are plenty of companies there making products that you would be amazed about, and the plastic crap is simply because of momentum at this point. Japan used to make a lot of crap in the post-war era, until they started making the best electronics and blew the US companies away.
There's nothing free-flow about TikTok, though. Like Twitter/X, Instagram, etc it's actually a carefully curated experience that can be tuned opaquely by whoever runs it to control the flow of information. The US took umbrage to this being in the direct hands of a foreign adversary.
TikTok is a restricted information environment controlled and manipulated by literal tyrants. Subjects that are disfavored by the CCP are heavily penalized by their algorithm [1]
if you are looking to safeguard against tyranny step 1 is to not have the CCP be in full control of your country's public square
[1] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...
Google the phase "flood the zone with shit". Your strategy only works if most of the people speaking/writing are genuinely trying to make the world a better place. If state actors are trying to flood the zone with anything and everything, then it becomes impossible for John Everyman to distinguish signal from noise.
The "War on Drugs" ensured that when an American dies from a drug overdose it is an American company, like Purdue Pharma, that made money killing them.
And when an American is brainwashed into believing a lie, it better damn well be an American company that sold them that lie.
That is the dream this country was built on.
Given how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers and how similar the functionality of TikTok and YouTube Shorts, I feel like the only explanations are:
1. The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a domestic one
Or more likely, given that there are so many other industries that didn't get a ban:
2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok