Comment by spencerflem 4 days ago
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
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 .
>Europe is an ally
Was? Isn't a threat of invasion of Nato territory something that ended that situation.
Sure "it's Trump being an insane dickhead", but y'all elected him, then suspended rule of law for him.
Europe is sitting waiting to be shafted if we don't assume Trump will continue to do the absolute worst, most hostile things. We should be taking the threats of invasion seriously despite them appearing to be a way to, for example, invade Panama and not look as insane as was expected.
> Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella
That's an absolute illusion. And definitely absolutely wrong to call it ally. Most govs don't want to have anything to do with trump, musk and all this bullshit.
Most European countries will basically make no deals or anything for 4 years just like we did last time.
There is a literal war thread open of trump claiming to invade parts of Europe. We are pissed. Not allies
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?
Can nation states ban email or bittorrent? Entities can be targeted, protocols less so. Where the algorithm is matters.
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
That isn't even a remotely realistic propaganda threat, while tick tock arguably is.
I mean, Chinese people should be allowed to post videos for Americans, the issue is editorialization.
Like how newspapers and other media can use editorial discretion to create the impression that “all reasonable people” hold some opinion X by only publishing the voices of reasonable people who believe X (manufactured consent), social media platforms can do the same thing, but x1000 thanks to automation and personalization (“the algorithm”)
So editorialization, including the algorithmic editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of speech separate from the speech of the authors on these platforms. If the editors are independent, and part of the same public discourse as their readers and authors, then you wind up with a diverse media ecosystem where the liberal machinery of people working out complex issues through public discourse can hopefully still more or less proceed.
If one part of the ecosystem isn’t letting outside voices in, the feedback mechanisms are broken and you don’t have a healthy public discourse anymore. And growing and maintaining a diverse media ecosystem in a society that does still have a healthy public discourse is slow and fragile (as the posts below comparing the risk of books to TikTok observe).
Not at all the same thing.
Comparing books to TikTok algo is like comparing rifles to ICBMs.
This is what people seem to be ignoring: the algorithms are damned near mind reading, and these algos put members of society into separate realities. We would be better off if they were all banned, but at least it should be agreeable that a hostile foreign government should not be allowed to deploy this on Americans without oversight.
>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
Is the argument itself correct or not? Or do we evaluate it based on motivation, i.e. it's ok when we do it because we have good reasons for it? Sounds like the ends justify the means to me.
The correct approach would be to increase the critical thinking skills of the population, increase transparency, require corporations to make algorithms fair and equitable. Require all feeds to be chronological or some other uniform, fair rule for showing posts. No boosting certain viewpoints, or paid promotions. But these things would bother corporations and politicians in the west as well as the external forces with "bad motivations", so just ban the external social networks.
The EU I think has a better approach, of course made possible because we don't have any powerful social networks of our own, and so nobody lobbies against these rules. I'm sure the DSA and DMA would be different (if they existed at all) if at least one of FAANG was European. Nevertheless, the concept is better.
> 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.
Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually. Hospitals running out of medical supplies will hit WAY sooner than your existing 4090 needs to be replaced by a new Taiwanese product.
This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline. Surely you can at least admit this. It's just a battle of propaganda, except China unfortunately has common sense on its side in many of these arenas:
USA should not be spending hundreds of billions maintaining a WW2 power projection strategy, 80 years later.
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"
This is real though- the only other bipartisan bill they passed was the "Crucial Communism Bill" ie. a mandate to teach anticommunist propaganda in schools
> But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to run around with bullet proof vests?
WTF? In no way do kids have to wear bullet proof vests. That is a very odd statement.
> They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red kid"
They have not literally said that.
They have passed a law to force every schoolkid to:
(B) understand the dangers of communism and similar political ideologies; and
(C) understand that 1,500,000,000 people still suffer under communism.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5349...
And yet nothing is being done for school shootings. Make of that what you will
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.
TikTok has repeatedly shown to nuke political topics on TikTok that China doesn’t like.
Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet all get black holed by the algorithm.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
> 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.
Why would we wait for TikTok to continue to have greater and greater social influence before we cut off their propaganda tool? Do we have to wait until Taiwan has been leveled by China? And TikTok is being used to push the narrative that the US must not come to the aid of a peaceful nation being brutally conquered? By then it’s 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.
No, I do not think China's bugaboos are allowed on TikTok for the exact same reason the US's are not allowed on Facebook
Wait, but I like the issue being amplified. Do you not?
there's a billion people on facebook, i am sure people talk about it
tiktok is extremely censored re: genocide in xinjiang. facebook is not.
Great, so we have TikTok where we can access information that's being censored by the West, and Facebook to access information that's being censored by the East. What's the problem? Information wants to be free.
Not disagreeing, that's exactly my point, the govt wants to be able control the narrative
There are places in the west where you risk losing your job just by mentioning the ongoing genocide that is happening now in Gaza. I'm not defending the CCP in any way, it's just that power corrupts and abuse of power happens pretty much everywhere.
i feel that we overuse the word genocide nowadays, in a way that almost amounts to holocaust trivialization
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.
But we are, there is no irony. China has the great wall and massive corporate espionage games to steal state and corporate secrets. The US and its various federal intelligence agencies have certainly done nefarious things but never quite as documented at the level as China's. They actively monitor all of their Social Media, block most foreign social media. I can easily go to any Chinese social media/website from the US.
In some ways, this is still true, even surrounding this decision.
Do you think there were many people standing outside of government buildings in Beijing protesting the potential ban of Facebook and Google while politicians of different political parties were debating the ban in the country's primary legislative body? Do you think you could launch a campaign for office on repealing said ban in China?
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...
I am not sure I follow your point. There have been both National Security risks as well as protectionist economic policy enforced against china that benefits domestic players. In a lot of those protectionist cases, there is either a case of China flooding the market or there are cases where the government makes a choice that its beneficial to keep domestic manufacturers alive.
In the above provided examples its quite clear that there are possible national security risks involved with China being involved in US infrastructure and technology. If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
If you have better example beyond hyperbole I am all ears.
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.
Did you read my comment? I explicitly called out backdoors, you should read comments closer. It most definitely happens within the US but the ties between the US government and corporate entities are no where as perversely intertwined as they are in China.
> 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.
American corporations have free propaganda rights. Chinese corporations shall not.
You have essentially repeated the argument you are replying to while removing the very substance of that argument.
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...
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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.
In a free market, there are monopolies, by definition.
If you're saying that capitalists will inevitably contort a free market to an unfree one, via whatever means (often mergers) then we agree.
IMO. a common misconception is that allowing all mergers is a "free market" policy when it is not
> 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?
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.