Comment by 34679
Comment by 34679 12 hours ago
That would be like telling Facebook to "divest" from the US government. Which, in this case, means ignoring all government requests for data and censorship. Facebook obviously cannot do that.
Comment by 34679 12 hours ago
That would be like telling Facebook to "divest" from the US government. Which, in this case, means ignoring all government requests for data and censorship. Facebook obviously cannot do that.
No. The relationship between the US government and large US companies is nothing at all like the relationship between the Chinese government and large Chinese companies; the latter exist at the will of the CCP, and if you step out of line you will be shut down. Recently Jack Ma, who would be like Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezos in the US, got slapped down big time -- with significant repercussions for his companies -- recently because he made a comment critical of the government -- and what he said wasn't even bad (so probably it was some other reason that they came after him, but come after him they did).
Vaguely like that.
Ostensibly, the US government honors the 1st and 4th amendments, and only restricts speech on the platform in rare instances where that speech is likely to incite or produce imminent lawless action, and only issues warrants for private data which are of limited scope for evidence where the government has probable cause that a crime has occurred.
The accusation is that the CCP and Bytedance have a much more intimate relationship than that, censoring (or compelling) speech and producing data for mere political favors. Whether or not this is true of Facebook's relationship with US political entities is up for debate.
The only reason it isn't widely known that social media platforms in the US share information with the government regularly is because it's illegal for said platforms to disclose those requests. It used to be that platforms would have canaries, similar to a dead man's switch, that would be removed once they were subject to these types of requests. None of them do it any more because the requests are commonplace.
Cross the US government and see how fast that turns into shadow bans, your loved ones getting tortured, someone else working with your SSN, dummy up and fish, imprisoned algorithmically etc you won't even have to cross them just be guilty by association
No horse in this race as both horses hate and will trample me but just saying lol
Of all the arguments in all directions, by far the least compelling have been the ones that attempt to both-sides equivalences between the U.S. and China on question of free speech and democratic norms. It's not that there's no offenses on the U.S. side, it's just the game of whatabouting reeks of JV debate team sophistry that is very discouraging to engage with.
The single party domination, the great firewall, the authoritarian surveillance are without comparison in scale and I think that has to be among the explicitly agreed upon facts that sanity check any conversation on this topic.
Edit since I can't reply to the comment below: all the examples mentioned below appear to involve the very equivocation between differences in scale that I spent this whole comment talking about, or attempt to equate past vs present, or are too vague to even understand the nature of the comparison, and collectively are so disorganized and low effort that they are degrading the focus and quality of the conversation as a whole.
Ughyhur Camps vs Reservations/Slavery/Jim Crow/Internment Camps/Operation Paperclip
lingchi vs waterboarding/black sites
NSA vs Great Firewall
provincial one party system vs micro nation based two party system both favoring the rich
TikTok vs Instagram/YouTube
when both sides consider you sub human kind of easy to compare them without emotion :)
but truly curious where have the facts been misrepresented? I would expect this on Reddit but not on a site like HN tbh
lol @ the edit could not be more specific and factual than this I thought HN was about facts
if any false equivalences were made or scales underestimated prove it with data to further the conversation not some hand wavy righteous comment that's for Reddit as they say :D
This is completely incorrect. Divestment in this context means the selling of an asset by an organization. You cannot "divest" in this sense from a government. That's nonsensical.
The equivalent in Facebook (Meta) terms would be China requiring Facebook, if it wished to continue operations in China, to sell the Chinese Facebook product to a Chinese or other, as to be defined by China, non-American entity. In some sense this is already the case.
Not really. There is no analogous concept in the US of the CCP's relationship with large companies.
1) TikTok was already theoretically a US company, but the strings were being pulled by the parent org in China.
2) US and China regulatory burdens and rule of law aren't equivalent, and I'm not going to grant that equivalency.
To fix your analogy, it would be like EU passing a law that Facebook in the EU would have to be divested so they are not owned by Facebook in the US