Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
(cnbc.com)861 points by kjhughes 15 hours ago
861 points by kjhughes 15 hours ago
The TikTok ban is security theater through and through.
Chinese spy agencies don't have to make an app that millions of American teens use to harvest data on them. American companies have been doing the job for them.
They — just like the FBI, NSA, American police departments and almost every TLA — can just buy the data from a broker, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/nsa-finally-admi...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government...
The brokers don't care. They'll sell to anyone and everyone. And the people they sell to don't care either. They'll process and re-sell it too. And on and on, until it ends up in the hands of every interested party on Earth, i.e. everyone.
So don't worry, the Chinese already have a detailed copy of your daily routine & reading habits. Just love this new world that we've created to make $0.002/click.
EDIT — if it makes you feel any better, the Chinese are doing it too!
https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...
> The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals.
- harvesting data: sure the CCP could buy some data from data brokers; but that data is very limited compared to the data that TikTok itself has on its users
but data harvesting is not the real problem
the big problem is that you have a social network to which millions of your citizens are connected and used daily, which is under the control of a foreign adversary; it's a bit like if CBS was owned by the CCP
100% this. Setting the topic of conversation for millions of Americans is absolutely unacceptable to throw to the hands of foreign powers.
> the big problem is that you have a social network to which millions of your citizens are connected and used daily, which is under the control of a foreign adversary; it's a bit like if CBS was owned by the CCP
You mean... like the rest of the world countries are. Look, you make a point here, but the only solution here is to completely cut-off the internet and for the government to run a single TV channel akin to Korea.
The US has been tirelessly working to "infiltrate" other countries media and influence them. That was heralded as "bringing freedom". How the times have changed.
Don't we need to have a pretty low opinion of the average american cognitive skill to feel the need to protect them from foreign propaganda for fear it would take a hold on them?
If the general public is that stupid and that this kind of protection is really needed, then it also means that democracy is no longer a viable form of government because the public is also too stupid to vote.
That's a convenient fig leaf.
There are 2 separate problems:
- Lack of US privacy legislation
- Security-sensitive systems and infrastructure owned by competitor nations
PS: Curious how many total comments there are on this article. Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.
But neither of those problems are addressed by a TikTok ban. If privacy legislation was enacted and it banned TikTok as a result the conversation would be very different.
> Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.
Or maybe this story is hugely relevant to a lot more people than your average story? I find it hard to believe china is waging a huge phsyop on HN
It's less about bare privacy and more about the fact that it's a closed loop system.
Meta collects your data and advertisers can indirectly use that data to serve you ads. In addition, government actors can use Meta's advertising tools to spread propaganda.
But TikTok is an all-in-one solution. The government have direct control over the algorithm in addition to having access to all of the data. They don't have to go through a third party intermediary like Meta and aren't only limited by a public advertising API.
Yeah it's simply an incredibly powerful way to influence US youth in ways that are favorable to the CCP.
I don't understand how or why this is hard for people to grasp? It's no different than Radio Free Europe being secretly funded by the CIA, except it's even more powerful.
Radio Free Europe was covertly funded by the CIA into the 1970s, but your comment should say “having been” instead of “being”, because its current funding is not a secret: that comes from the US Agency for Global Media, an openly acknowledged part of the US government.
> American companies have been doing the job for them.
This right here is the answer. People just don’t care about this type of privacy because they assume some American company already has their data. Combine that with us being two generations removed from the Cold War and the average TikTok user doesn’t see any reason why the owner of this specific data being Chinese matters and frankly I’m sympathetic to that argument. If you live in the US, someone like Musk is going to have a greater influence on your life than the Chinese government and I see no reason to trust him any more or less than the Chinese government. So any discussion of this being a matter of national security just rings hollow.
I worry less about the data and more about how a lot of kids, teens, and young adults get their news from TikTok (and social media in general).
That's the real value of TikTok. Having the eyeballs of young people and being able to (subtly or not) influence their perception of the world is valuable in a way that massive amounts of data aren't.
I do also worry about this with Musk, but I also acknowledge that taking away social media ownership from a foreign company is different than taking it away from a US company.
> If you live in the US, someone like Musk is going to have a greater influence on your life than the Chinese government and I see no reason to trust him any more or less than the Chinese government. So any discussion of this being a matter of national security just rings hollow.
Just because Musk is a f*ing problem for all Americans, doesn't mean that the CCP isn't a problem. Not much you can do about "President" Musk -- so you have to work with what you can control.
I am in favor of banning TikTok, but not strictly because they harvest data. I am far more concerned about them manipulating people on a large scale, I think TikTok is an effective tool for manipulating public opinion and I have no doubt that they're actively engaged and consciously engaging America in a form of psychological warfare. We are facing the very real threat of a military conflict with China, I do not want the Chinese government in this position of power.
I frankly don't understand why I keep seeing on social media people like yourselves push the idea that it's okay because other companies are also harvesting the data. It is obviously not about the data. It is about China being in a position to manipulate information flow.
The rationalizations and justifications are more a window into people's thought process than they are actual arguments. This person has decided that TikTok isn't that bad, and you are witnessing how they reverse engineer from that view point back to the argument.
That's why arguing in this sense never works. Someone isn't trying to work something out, they've already decided and are trying to explain the decision to you. That's not the same thing as thinking through something.
For anyone reading this who is knowledgeable about this topic, where, specifically, can a regular citizen buy personal data about people from data brokers?
It's unlikely you can. They're generally only willing to set up corporate deals to sell data in massive bulk. You could buy a domain name, set up a decently real looking website with a corpo looking email, then go to any broker like https://www.acxiom.com/customer-data/ (not affiliated, first one i found on google) and do the whole corporate dance of signing a contract to get what you want.
I mean let's not pretend that an app on the vast majority of peoples phones isn't a non-trivial vector for a zero-day attack.
If there is an invasion of Taiwan, I don't think it would be unthinkable that everyone's phones being broken wouldn't be a major tactical and political advantage of shifting the US's priorities and political will in the short run.
Sure, it burns the asset in the process, but I mean... this has been a priority for an entire century.
i dont think fhats the right attack? the influential use of tiktok sould be sharing propaganda like the US did about the iraq war "we did it and the taiwanese people are excited to be liberated and reunified with china"
along with details about how the US has no defensive alliance with taiwan, and that the US does not need to intervene
> just buy the data from a broker
A surprising (and funny) example of this is how the open-source intelligence community and sites like Bellingcat used purchased or leaked data from private Russian commercial data brokers to identify and track the detailed movements of elite Russian assassination squads inside Russia as well as in various other countries. They learned the exact buildings where they go to work every day as well as who they met with and their home addresses. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-bellingcat-unmas...
Volunteer open-source researchers also used these readily available data sources to identify and publicly out several previously unknown Russian sleeper agents who'd spent years hiding in Western countries while building cover identities and making contacts. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/25/socialite-widow-j...
To your point, if volunteer internet hobbyists can use commercial broker data to identify and track elite Russian assassins and undercover sleeper agents, in Russia and around the world, China having direct access to US Tiktok data, which Tiktok sells to anyone through brokers anyway, doesn't seem like an existential intelligence threat to our national security. Forcing TikTok to divest Chinese ownership would, at most, make Chinese intelligence go through an extra step and pay a little for the data.
If politicians were really worried about foreign adversaries aggregating comprehensive data profiles on everyone, just addressing China's access to TikTok is a side show distraction. Why didn't they pass legislation banning all major social media services from selling or sharing certain kinds of data and requiring the anonymization of other kinds of data to prevent anyone aggregating composite profiles across multiple social platforms or data brokers? That would actually reduce the threat profile somewhat.
Obviously, they aren't doing that because the FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, INS, IRS, Homeland Security and their Five Eyes international partners are aggressively buying data broker info on all US residents at massive scale every day and aggregating it into comprehensive profiles - all with no warrants, probable cause or oversight. The US Constitution doesn't apply because it's just private commercial data, not government data. Any such law would have to explicitly carve out exceptions allowing US and allied intelligence agencies to continue doing this. Alternatively, they could put such use under the secret FISA intelligence court. US intelligence has thoroughly co-opted FISA oversight but jumping through the FISA hoop is extra work and filling out the paperwork to be rubber-stamped is annoying. They much prefer remaining completely unregulated and unsupervised like they are now, collecting everything on everyone all the time without limit. They've certainly already automated collecting all the data they want from every broker.
So yeah... let's very publicly make a big show of slapping just China and only about TikTok - and loudly proclaim we really did something to protect citizen privacy and reduce our national data aggregation attack surface. This is the intelligence community cleverly offering a fig leaf of plausible deniability to politicians who can now claim they "did something", while leaving the US intelligence community free to pillage every last shred of citizen privacy in secret.
Again, how does this change any of the realities of TikTok? "Leave them alone because other abuses exist" is not an argument.
this is a rabbit hole I can jump down with a good cup of tea tonight thanks bud
It’s this - anyone saying otherwise simply does not know, or is pushing some kind of an agenda. I fully believe some people in the US government buy the whole “security” angle, but it’s very obviously bogus. So is the idea of selling it - china is very protective of chinese user data, there’s no way they are going to trust an american investor to play by their rules, even if a serious price was offered, which it hasn’t been. this entire thing feels like theater, honestly.
I am of 100% of the same opinion as you. I have told people for years about the cyber warfare going on and that we're losing it, and they just don't seem to care and want that serotonin hit and ignore the rest. I also want curbs on other social media, but TikTok and the war of China against the US on the internet is in a league of its own. The CCP are no doubt funneling the data to their servers, and no doubt have plans for further damaging our youths' minds through brain rot of tiktok diverting them from far more productive activities. There's a reason CCP has strong curbs on similar apps regarding young people in their nation.
It's one of those things. If you asked most Hacker News readers how they feel about the authoritarian government of a single party state literally controlling the algorithm that determines everything you see, most would swear up and down that they would never stand for it.
But yet what happens in practice is people line up to defend it. I can only guess most of the people defending it are active users and aren't aware of how distorted their perception of the world is by the content they see there.
There's some defending it in general, but it's also just a really tough precedent to allow when it could, so easily, be used to shut down any other service they want by just waving the magic "national security" flag.
It's possible to believe TikTok is bad and that the pathway the US just proved out to banning it in the US has shown that no US court will seriously question the "security reasons" fig leaf. Telegram and Signal are both used by plenty of people the US could easily paint as "security threats" and it's unclear there's any defense to a ban that they could mount at this point.
> Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.
Is there any evidence of this? FWIW, I saw plenty of tiktoks talking about the China hack
It's completely irrelevant whether they have done it or not. The only thing that matters is the fact that they can do it.
We're not going let you have nukes just because you haven't nuked anybody yet.
Also the idea that a country that has built the most extensive digital surveillance apparatus in the world will somehow avoid the temptation to use TikTok to monitor people abroad..
It's beyond naive.
There is no evidence. This is just blind speculation. 95% of the population just doesn't care about telecom cybersecurity.
I agree the evidence is weak, and circumstantial, but it is not true that there none. Quick overview of some of it (which includes critique of it):
We just don't care. We know the all the American TLAs are on our phones, so what's a few more Chinese ones? It's a problem for Washington war wonks to freak out about, not teens in Omaha.
Those teens in Omaha will eventually become voting adults in Omaha and then will eventually come into positions of leadership in both the public and private sector. I can guarantee that 0% would appreciate being blackmailed or unknowingly used as pawns in spycraft. Teens in Omaha may not understand the full scope of what it means.
Can you definitively point to something TikTok collects that can be used for blackmail that isn't collected by any other social media app?
I've heard it put that, if you're not a government official, having your own government spy on you could be more consequential than a foreign one.
This is like saying that you don't care about free speech because you don't have anything to say right now. It's no where close to being a justification.
So, should we also ban Chinese companies Alibaba, Baidu, Haier, Lenovo, Tencent, and ZTE from operating in the United States? Why just TikTok (Who is ironically also banned in China)?
And should Israeli companies, like those associated with NSO Group, face similar scrutiny after reports of their tools being used to hack U.S. State Department employee phones?
On unfair trade practices and ethical violations, yes. Ban them all. Nothing of value will be lost.
> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones
Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.
I can think that China is up to no good with my data and still be mad at my own Govt for doing the exact same thing. The outrage is not that TikTok is banned, it's that Zuckerburg is doing the exact same harms to America that China is alleged to be doing, but only 1 app is banned. Hence people flocking to Rednote rather than using Reels.
There is no legal way to ban FB -- nor would there be any way to ban TT if it were not owned and controlled by a foreign power.
> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening
This. It's this. Don't waste your time thinking past this answer, you already nailed it.
There's at least three separate reasons that justify banning TikTok. If Trump bails them out, it's a complete betrayal of his base and the country at large.
1. Competitive balance. China does not allow US social media companies. If we allow theirs, our industry is essentially fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
2. China controls the algorithm for determining who sees what. This gives them tremendous ability to influence public opinion, and consequently public elections. That cannot be allowed to stand as long as China is hostile to the US.
3. China gets extremely detailed data about the interests and proclivities of millions of Americans, including military personnel and elected officials. This data is not otherwise publicly available and can be used for blackmail and other manipulation. Which is completely unacceptable when we have no mechanism to punish them from doing this short of global nuclear war.
Even ignoring the enormous threat to national sovereignty, TikTok has no redeeming qualities. It's an addiction machine that profits off people wasting away in front a screen. That alone is not a reason to ban it, but it sure does make the case stronger.
Banning TikTok is a clear-cut positive for the American people. Every American adult should be in support.
All of your points except 1. are true of American social media companies. 2., in particular, is widely documented: the Facebook mood manipulation fiasco, Cambridge Analytica, Musk's personal tweaking of the Twitter trending hashtags, and YouTube's heavy-handed censorship of legitimate medical advice during Covid are just a few of the higher profile instances of this.
> If Trump bails them out, it's a complete betrayal of his base and the country at large.
There is no wall. The Trump "tax cuts" raised taxes on most Americans and cut them for the 1%. Trump has not faced any consequences for betrayal in the past, why would he now?
In fact, TikTok helps promote the lack of awareness of all the above. If anything he'll want to keep it in place, to keep the public misinformed.
Everyone outside of the US already knows the American three letter agencies and their allies like the Mossad can access, hack or destroy all their networks if push comes to shove. Most network services all over the world are run on infrastructure owned by a handful of American companies with deep defense and government ties - AWS, Google, MS.
As other powers arise, they will naturally want equivalence. The American government may decide that is not in their interest to make this easy - but I'd suggest as Hacker News community, we retain the ability to see beyond propaganda and balance contrary viewpoint.In this case (or the case on Nippon steel),how does one differentiate between "security" considerations and potentially a straightforward cash grab attempt by rich American investors?
I think the fallout from this is many Americans like myself don’t see China as our enemy. Based on the recent RedNote phenomenon, Chinese citizens don’t see it that way either.
Maybe the uniparty in the USA should make it a priority to improve the life of everyday Americans and not Zuck and Elon. Young people don’t care who the establishment is warring with because they know the establishment doesn’t represent them, they represent themselves.
> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.
I would say both at the same time
> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones
This paternalistic framing is the disconnect between you and those opposed to the ban. The idea that it's TikTok insidiously worming its way onto American phones like a virus. In reality, people download the app and use it because they like it. This ban will, in effect, prevent people from accessing an information service they prefer. You must acknowledge this and argue why that is a worthy loss of autonomy if you want to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it.
If it helps, reframe the ban as one on a website rather than an app. They're interchangeable in this context, but I've observed "app" to be somewhat thought-terminating to some people.
For the record - I would totally support a ban on social media services that collect over some minimal threshold of user data for any purposes. This would alleviate fears of spying and targeted manipulation by foreign powers through their own platforms (TikTok) and campaigns staged on domestic social media. But just banning a platform because it's Chinese-owned? That's emblematic of a team-sports motivation. "Americans can only be exposed to our propaganda, not theirs!" How about robust protections against all propaganda? That's a requirement for a functional democracy.
Sure, but why can't my teenager smoke cigarettes?
The point of my response is: sometimes you have to be paternalistic, and the federal government doesn't need to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it because those people don't matter. They meaningfully defended the ban to the courts.
I don't think we really disagree in general. I specifically said that I would favor a broader ban. Just that if you're going to be paternalistic you need a good reason. In the case of smoking, "it's literal poison" is a pretty good reason to ban it (which we haven't done, lol).
My point is that I don't think "access to this information services will stoke negative sentiment towards the US government" is a good reason to ban access to said service in a liberal democracy. It would be a good reason to ban the service in an autocracy of some sort, but standards for individual freedoms are higher (though not infinitely high) here. At least, they ought to be higher. That's where the disagreement comes from: I do not care that access to TikTok threatens the US Government. I care about US citizens generally. The interests of these two parties are increasingly disconnected, a sign of a decaying democracy.
Your argument sounds like it's straight out of a CCP playbook.
Ah yes, CCP, the glorious protectors of autonomy and independent thought.
Parent sort-of has a point. Pro-autonomy messaging could be promoted cynically overseas in order to stoke negative sentiment towards policy that would hurt the CCP's interests. Never assume honesty when it comes to messaging.
> They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department.
Please cite your sources. After decades of watching American propaganda, we know all too well that it is trivial to make up shit from thin air and have a large segment of the population eat it up.
I'm tempted to say: what's the point if you've preemptively disregarded it as made up "American propaganda."
But here you go anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon
I'm not sure about "all our major telco's, but there is this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
> On January 12, 2010, Google revealed on its weblog that it had been the victim of a cyber attack. The company said the attack occurred in mid-December and originated from China. Google stated that more than 20 other companies had been attacked; other sources have since cited that more than 34 organizations were targeted.
> They hacked all of our major telco's
Can I see the evidence?
Yes, whether you understand it or not is a different question.
Search for Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon.
>I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.
Exactly. Everyone is having fun bidding adieu to their Chinese spys. And I think they're losing sight of the fact that there's abundant reporting on harrassing expats and dissidents internationally, pressuring countries to comply with their extradition requests, to say nothing of jailing human rights lawyers and democratic activists and detaining foreigners who enter China based on their online footprint.
Most of the time I bring this up I get incredulous denials that any of this happens (I then politely point such folks to Human Rights Watch reporting on the topic), or I just hear a lot of whataboutism that doesn't even pretend to defend Tiktok.
Here's one from October of last year:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/09/japan-chinese-authoritie...
And here's their overall 2025 page on China which details, among other things, harassment of critics based out of Italy, detention of U.S. based artist, and even harrassment of protestors in San Fransisco.
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/china
I think their suppression of criticism on Uighur forced labor has also encompassed harassment of extended support networks people from the region as well, but that's just off the top of my head and not necessarily on that page.
Not a link to the Human Rights Watch report; however, at oral argument this was stated by the US government (https://www.oyez.org/cases/2024/24-656 @ 1:58:32):
Elizabeth B. Prelogar: And the one final point on this is that ByteDance was not a trusted partner here. It wasn't a company that the United States could simply expect to comply with any requirements in good faith.
And there was actual factual evidence to show that even during a period of time when the company was representing that it had walled off the U.S. data and it was protected, there was a well-publicized incident where ByteDance and China surveilled U.S. journalists using their location data --this is the protected U.S. data --in order to try to figure out who was leaking information from the company to those journalists.
Tbh I think this has a lot more to do with sympathy for Palestinians and the last year of protests on college campuses.
Besides, who cares if China is listening to us through the app. China and I have no beef with one another. China feeds me and clothes me and builds most of the stuff in my life and I give China my money. It's a good relationship! Much better than my relationship with this state, tbh.
> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.
No, it's just information asymmetry shaping public opinion. The US lets its dirty laundry air out. US whistleblowers, press, and historians dig up every shitty thing the US has ever done and US citizens are free to discuss it, sing about it, turn it into movies and viral memes, etc. China doesn't allow this. No one in China is going to become famous by calling for justice for those killed by Mao or exposing MSS-installed backdoors in Chinese telecoms. That kind of talk is quelled immediately. The result is that public discourse trends more anti-American than anti-China.
Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone. Regardless of which apps I choose to rot my brain with, neither the US nor Chinese government should have any say in it, period.
If a red line is not drawn, websites will be next, then VPNs, then books. And then the Great Firewall of America will be complete.
I agree, you should be able to install whatever the fuck you want.
Google and Apple shouldn't be helping China get you to do that, by hosting and advertising it in their app store though*. Oracle shouldn't be helping China spy on Americans by hosting their services.
This isn't a law against you installing things on your phone. You're still free to install whatever you want on your phone.
*And if there is a valid first amendment claim here, it would probably be Google and Apple claiming that they have the right to advertise and convey TikTok to their users, despite it being an espionage tool for a hostile foreign government. Oddly enough they didn't assert that claim or challenge the law.
That's not a problem in my mind.
I'd agree that forbidding individuals from installing it would be an overreach, because it would be a more restrictive step then is reasonably necessary to eliminate the legitimate government interest of counter espionage.
I don't think that the governments actions here are more restrictive than necessary for that. The fact that they make some legitimate actions more difficult is completely acceptable (inevitable even).
For most people the Venn Diagram of cars they can acquire, and road legal cars, is a single circle. The government mandating all cars, even those driven solely on private property, be road legal would be an absurd overreach. At the same time they have no obligation to make it easy to acquire non road legal cars just because their legitimate regulations have happened to make that difficult.
The problem is that the rhetoric around this law from its promoters is that of an app ban, not a business sanction. And indeed, the app is being banned from Apple and Google's app stores despite it being free to download and use.
The government currently lacks the ability to yank a binary from computing devices en masse, but the technology to do so is already mostly in place. (See Apple’s notarization escapades in the EU, for example. And I think Microsoft is working in a similar direction: https://secret.club/2021/06/28/windows11-tpms.html) I have a sickening feeling that this is only step one, and that the government will eventually mandate the ability to control and curate all software running on desktop and mobile devices within the country for “security” reasons. National security goons are salivating at the prospect, to say nothing of US corporations that are getting clobbered by foreign competitors.
I believe Google Play does actually have the ability to remove apps if it wants to, intended for malware.
If the government were to mandate that they use that feature, or Apple use that feature, especially to prevent future side-loaded installs, I'd be much more sympathetic to the overreach arguments. But that's not what they did. Rather this is a narrow law that prevents these companies from assisting in wide scale espionage. The fact that they could do some other bad thing doesn't mean the thing they did is bad.
The courts use phrases like "narrowly tailored to achieve the governments legitimate interest" to describe the balancing test here...
I think a democratic nation is well within its rights to restrict its citizens access of certain systems.
There is no such thing as unlimited liberty, especially with regards to systems under control of hostile nations such as China and Russia. Would you be comfortable allowing mass release of unrestricted Hamas / ISIS, Russian propaganda content to North American teenagers? National security is a real thing and geopolitics always play a critical role in people's lives.
One could perhaps argue that we must educate our citizens better, however I think rather than being naive, it's better to implement realistic regulations (within _democratic_ means of course) to contain the threats.
> Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone.
Like every other right, your freedom ends where other peoples freedom begins. You can install whatever you'd like on your phone... unless it prevents others from exercising their rights. That's how we all get to stay free from the "might makes right" crowd.
Joining your phone to a botnet belonging to a hostile foreign power might very well prevent others from enjoying the very rights you're trying to preserve.
You have a point about avoiding the slippery slope though. I do hope that the deciders are taking that risk seriously.
Websites and books are already being banned in the US. Ask anyone who can no longer access PornHub or who has seen books being removed from libraries.
But it's not about what you install, or even what you say. It's what you're told and shown. The US and China want control over that, for obvious reasons.
Meta has been 'curating' - censoring - content for years. TikTok is no different. X isn't even trying to pretend any more.
The cultural noise, cat videos, and 'free' debate - such as they are - are wrappers for political payloads designed to influence your beliefs, your opinions, and your behaviours, not just while consuming, but while voting.
A library choosing not to carry a book isn't a ban. The government making it ILLEGAL for anyone to distribute the book would be a ban. As far as I know that is not happening anywhere in the US with some extremely narrow exceptions like CSAM.
If TikTok turned out to be State sponsored spyware, would you reconsider?
I support your slippery slope argument. I wonder where your red line is relative to "state sponsored spyware" and "typical advertising ID tracking" or "cool new app from company influenced by an adversarial super power".
All spyware should be illegal. A law to reign in the ubiquitous data collection on everyone's computing devices would be great. Maybe start by requiring all data collection to be opt-in and for a specific purpose. Make it illegal to deny functionality that doesn't strictly require the requested data. "Paying with your privacy" shouldn't be a thing. Crush every data broker.
This law is different to that, it's all about specific actors, not about behavior and actions. A "people we don't like" list. CNN could be on a similar list soon. All constitutional of course - the law will specifically mention how this is all for national security. And no one's speech is being suppressed, the journalists can always write for a different news channel.
How can you call Americans naive when over and over again for the past 2 decades there have been non-stop news stories about how the US Gov spends insane amounts of effort ensuring the technology Americans use is not fully secure? Maybe you should understand that the public can actually recognize Machiavellianism.
edit: before you downvote me, how many of you remember:
- Bullrun
- PRISM
- Dual EC DRBG and the Juniper backdoors, that too also were exploited by secondary adversaries
- FBI urging Apple to install a backdoor for the govt after the San Bernardino shootings
- the government only recently mandating that partnered zero-day vendors must not sell their wares to other clients who would then target them against Americans
- Vault7
- XKeyscore
- STELLARWIND
- MUSCULAR
etc.?
> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones
Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.
It's not hard to see the pattern: any Chinese tech champion that does as well as, or better than American companies will find itself in legal peril. Huawei didn't get in trouble after hacking Nortel, but they got sanctioned much later, when their 5G base equipment was well-received by the markets. TikTok had the best ML-based recommendation systems when it burst in the scene, Google and Meta still haven't quite caught up yet.
This would have been a great opportunity to regulate and prohibit massive data collection on mobile phones, by writing a law that requires the platforms (iOS,android) to architect differently and police this aggressively. Takes care of a lot of the TikTok worry and cleans up ecosystems from location tracking/selling weather apps as well.
There's no compelling argument or evidence of data collection with TikTok, to my knowledge. Theres more evidence of data collection and aggregation with American platforms than TikTok. Additionally, TikTok is operated independently within the USA and hosted on American servers. I think if there's any opportunity to regulate data collection, TikTok seems to have positioned itself defensively and seems to be distant from being used as an example. The only thing that seems to matter with this ban is that TikTok is mostly owned by a Chinese company.
I'd love to be corrected, but I haven't been provided any evidence or information that suggests this ban was justified at all.
No evidence? You’re seeing what you (and TikTok) wants you to see. Any business and I mean ANY business at its core should act in its own self interest of survival. TikTok could have easily gone public in the USA to protect the company and employees. But they didn’t. Unless you can give me a reason why they are allowing the company to die, instead of survive, you have all the evidence you need about how suspicious the company is at its core.
> No evidence?
No
> You’re seeing what you (and TikTok) wants you to see.
No, they can show me anything, but I decide to click or not to click on it - just the same thing as HN.
Not every company should be a public one. Valve is not a public company, so what?
I met someone who did some high-level work for ByteDance. I asked them what they thought of the worries that TikTok was a CCP spying instrument.
They said ByteDance is as disorganized as any other big tech company, and it would be approximately impossible for them to discretely pull that off.
It's easy to see "CCP" and think bogeyman, but it is interesting to think about how achievable it would be to pull off something shady at Google or Facebook, and apply that same thought process to ByteDance.
Given the Cambridge Analytica scandal, why wouldn't it be achievable at Facebook, let alone TikTok.
The CCP could mandate that the TikTok algorithm display certain types of political content, then further mandate that any criticism of the CCP be limited, especially discussion of the said censorship. Most users wouldn't know about it and leakers at ByteDance wouldn't be able to change that. It's not the US - they are punished in China in a way that doesn't happen in the US.
> ByteDance is as disorganized as any other big tech company, and it would be approximately impossible
I've worked for AT&T, and letmetellyou about disorganization and corporate ineffectiveness.
None of the litigants proposed that, and neither did the act in question. The court doesn't usually address matters outside the controversy in question, so it's no surprise that they didn't here.
Nobody is talking about music?
For the last 4 years, TikTok has been my primary music discovery engine. Probably is for a large chunk of users.
What effect will this have on the music industry?
And just yesterday I saw a news where UK had best music revenue ever, and I do not think US is published but first 1/2 of US also had record sales. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/cn858xgng2vo)
And I agree, even for me, music discovery is (was) via TikTok.
I’m hoping https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ takes off
I imagine you'll get the same content on YouTube shorts or Facebook reels? I don't like using apps, so I never bothered with Tiktok, but tiktok watermarks are still on most of the short videos I view, content creators are either putting their work on multiple platforms, or someone else is ripping it off and putting it on different platforms.
The United States is currently in the middle of a cyber cold-war with China.
They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department. Specifically they used the telco hacks to gather geolocation data in order to pinpoint Americans and to spy on phone calls by abusing our legally mandated wiretap capabilities.
Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones.
I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.