> Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.
These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature, increasingly so in the age of LLMs. They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astroturfing the platform and/or manipulating the algorithm (either through paid advertisements or by owning a platform and controlling the algorithm outright). They're places where a small minority of people can become an unstoppable movement that seems to have real support, sucking gullible voters in to join the growing "consensus".
In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent. The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
It’s fascinating to talk to people from different cultures or different political leanings and find out how the internet that they browse is vastly different to the one I experience. Yet we aren’t necessarily seeking out different things. It’s just that tithe things presented to us align with (and reinforce) a different worldview. They’ll get annoyed about hearing about something constantly, and I’ll have little impression of the thing at all. We will have different “facts” established in our heads but not be able to pinpoint where we learned them. We have different realities.
Ironically this is exactly why I think TikTok is so important. Obviously every media site is used for manufacturing content, from NYT to Facebook. Also, obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted. Wouldn't it be good then to have checks and balances to this, by having media not under the US government supervision?
Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the public in harmful ways?
I read what you quoted as a matter of fact statement, not an assertion of what is ethically righteous
But with that, I don't agree that it's a fact, maybe the FCC regulates what you broadcast on radio and TV, but if you don't take federal funding, the government doesn't really have a pull in what is created or prompted AFAIK. Journalists in the press pool may trade subservience for access but that's about it.
FCC is a special cause because private entities are using a public resource that must be managed. The content controls were a way to prevent Hearst style journalism spreading to radio and television. It worked well until the era of entertainment news developed.
How about copyright infringement, false advertising, sharing classified documents, tobacco advertising? There are a LOT of special cases.
Maybe there shouldn’t be and all of those things should be free from government interference, but the status quo is that plenty of speech is regulated.
So basically controls on speech that are good are not censorship and therefore good, but ones that are bad are censorship and therefore bad? That doesn’t feel like an especially defensible view.
> but if you don't take federal funding, the government doesn't really have a pull in what is
Paying chills is anti-democratic. In France, 100% of the media you know is subsidized, and it is unsustainable to do journalism without state sponsorship: France is not a democracy.
Fight me all you want, shower me with Alex Jonesy accusations, or nazi affiliations, but that’s why I wish the left would lose more elections. And it’s 51% of us now.
So let me get this straight - you want to go from a system where:
- the government hands out money to the media
- the law says that they need to give it to everyone without political discrimination
- if they try to withold funding, you can sue them and probably win
To a system where:
- if you have a ton of money, you can be a media outlet
- if you don't have a ton of money, get fucked
I'm struggling to see how the latter is better for anyone other than rich people who want to influence the masses.
Easiest way to spot an authorian is the complaining something is not democratic while also spending time promoting antidemocratic messages.
It is a cop out. I do not believe everyone who argue against some of my views are against everyone of them. I have no idea of what part of the far right pleases you, but the point about a democracy is that nothing is fixed everything ebbs and flows. This is something conservative people have a hard time with, and when the leftwings ebbs they have a hard time.
The media is not left wing. It might be more left than the far right, but it is also along way from the far left.
Just be honest about your ideas and intentions, do not blame others for your failures.
NYT does have a left leaning bias. Here's an example where a conservative person and a liberal person each did the same donation tax avoidance strategy, and the NYT said the conservative got "an enormous personal tax windfall", but the liberal got "no tax benefit". In reality they both got the same benefit. NYT describes the conservative person as greedy and the liberal person as selfless, for doing the same thing.
A few scattered examples of this does nothing to counterbalance the neoliberalism and outright cronyism of NYT. They are probably a big reason why you might even (wrongly) associate neoliberalism with leftist ideology.
Back in 2004 they withheld publishing the fact that the NSA had spliced themselves into every internet backbone. (RIP Qwest).
Back in 2002/2003, they drummed for war like all the good sycophants.
A few examples of them painting some of their toadies in a good light while trashing some of their enemies is hardly evidence of “leftism”.
If the NYT were even moderately leftist, they would have endorsed Bernie Sanders.
No, I will shower you with good old capitalist critiques. The market is not all powerful. Market failures exists because not every market is capable of self-regulation. Some market players can and do abuse their market power. State intervention so that journalists, policeman, waste managers, water distributors, electricity distributors, internet providers, health care providers, health insurance providers, food producers, etc. can do their job effectively, because they provide needs that are too sensitive to leave to private self-interests. That's why many of those are subsidized _and_ regulated.
It can make laws that prohibit or discourage publishing certain content. It can also shape the discourse in such a way that these laws are not viewed as restrictions on free speech.
I think you misunderstand me: I'm not in favor of banning tiktok on its own. I think you're right that that misweights things, further consolidating power in the hands of those who hold the remaining platforms.
What I'm saying is that all of these platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in that they exist to predictably change individual behavior with a high degree of precision, through custom tailored information feeds that can be shaped to alter someone's perspectives on the world in the interests of whoever controls the feed.
I don't think it's better for that power to be in the hands of Elon Musk or of Mark Zuckerberg. I think that that power needs to be banned worldwide if democracy is to survive. Democracy hinges on the idea that voters will in general vote in their own interest, and the ability to individually manipulate voters into measurably changing their behavior breaks that assumption.
And note that this is fundamentally different than traditional media sources, which have a harder time shaping someone's entire life and worldview. WaPo can control what someone perceives the WaPo editorial board as believing. Only a social media platform can control their perspective of what their friends think.
As someone not living the us but regularly reading news from both sides of your media landscape, I can tell you that it's not regulated what they can write or say or what's promoted. Your media is all over the place. There are differences in how far they go on the spectrum and some are definitely insane on what they publish to the level of leaving out all the important details about certain situations to push their agenda. How do you think that there is any regulation at all?
Also for tiktok, the algorithm needs less than an hour to almost fully understand you and it will then push a mix of what you already like and agree with, things that you don't like and absolutely disagree with but in a way that makes it look bad so in the end you also agree with that, and some funny videos to keep you entertained. This way they are maximizing the time you stay in the app to increase their revenue. It polarizes your world view further and further and without people to talk to and discuss, your ideas and beliefs will be turned into religious level thinking, radicalizing you and making it more and more difficult to accept different opinions. If you only consume what you already believe, things will go downhill very quickly. That's the reason people can't talk to each other anymore, the truth in most if not all cases is somewhere in the middle.
What we need is social media that is not algorithm driven, not optimized to keep you at the device for as long as possible but to show you a multitude of opinions to a topic from different angles, not just the one you have already chosen as your truth. We need to talk again, accept that other people can have different opinions without shouting them down. We need to try to look at things from different perspectives not just our own.
And most importantly, we need to accept that we can't have an opinion about facts. We need to listen to people that actually have professional knowledge about a topic. The guy that used to be a fitness trainer but now has a telegram channel to spread some important truths about climate change actually knows shit about how the world works. They want to make money selling you any truth that works for you.
You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
So I'm definitely not saying that TikTok itself provides better checks and balances, but TikTok, in an ecosystem of other media providers under different governments, would be a much healthier for civil society.
For example, US social media companies were vital in kicking off the Arab spring. How different would such movements be if they only had access to a media monoculture controlled by their respective regimes?
US social media companies contributing to widespread social unrest that ultimately led nowhere[0] or created more oppressive Islamic regimes and sectarian violence - well, this seems like an argument against TikTok, not for it.
Despite any personal romanticism towards violent revolution you may have, that is not something that societies actually want against democracies. Even against authoritarian regimes, society often goes from bad to worse (see Iran, Lebanon). You want violent revolution against actual oppressive regimes, not democracies where you can change the society with a vote, but even then, you want it led by pro-democratic factions.
I totally agree that the Arab spring ended in near complete failure, and is not an ideal in and of itself, and violent revolution is in no way desirable for societies like the US. Maybe I should have connected the analogy fully:
Suppose that there was an issue that most citizens would normally feel very strongly about, but which benefits the state: war immediately comes to mind. There should be protests and (non-violent of course) civil unrest against wars the public feels to be unjust or immoral. Such demonstrations could easily be lulled in the right media environment, which is why alternative channels are important. I can easily imagine a future where TikTok is the premier dissonant chord against the drumming of war.
I'm not going to hide by biases here, I rather do romanticize popular anti-war movements.
Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.
But I can say it's far beyond CPC's capability, Americans like talking abt CPC like it's some kind of secret darkness powerful villain in Gotham City, no, it's not that good.
If CPC executed any order to a company operated in US by Americans, there'll be clear and strong evidence about it, CPC is not good at hiding schemes, if you didn't see such evidence, it means there's no such thing, at least for now
I can't speak for Tiktok, but the CCP did explicitly shut down Bytedance's very popular Neihuan Duanzi humor app, and put pressure on them to change the Toutiao algorithm because it was promoting inappropriate content. It's not much of a leap to think that by the time Douyin started getting popular Bytedance had learned their lesson and would proactively moderate their platforms to stay well within the party lines. In theory Tiktok should be independent of that since it targets foreign users, but in practice any media product coming out of a Chinese-owned company is going to be influenced whether explicitly or incidentally by CCP policy.
Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.
ccp bans certain brain rot contents which the algorithms hm happily spreads in the west.
the biggest problem for western competition (insta & co) is the dramatically "better" (more addictive) algorithm. But trump and Co happily use tiktok to grab power, see the most recent Romanian elections.
I can never really tell, but I hope it's not malicious. When I was in college, a dorm neighbor told me that Obama had said/did something bad. I don't remember what, but it was incredibly dubious. I told him I didn't believe it and asked him to prove it; I'd even accept a Fox News article as evidence. He was red in the face because he couldn't find any article suggesting anything close to what he had said. Looking back on it now, I realize he genuinely believed what he had heard, but he had fallen for well-crafted language that created a new reality. It was so well-crafted, all that remained was the idea he was propagandized to believe rather than even a remnant of the title of the original article.
This same thing has happened to me over the years - I read an article and then it becomes relevant in some future discussion. I find the article (which is hard to find, because I'm searching by what the author[s] wanted me to think, not the actual article content) and read it again, only to find out that, upon a more critical reading, it doesn't say what I thought it said at all! Or the conclusion is much weaker than I had originally thought.
It's pretty amazing to see, though. Weak evidence used to support very strong American propaganda about seemingly weak Chinese propaganda. The goal posts inevitably get moved too - oh we have strong evidence of it, but we might tip off the Chinese! Like, huh? What does it matter if they're tipped off if you're going to force the sale?
I also don't think TikTok was ever a national security threat, at least not any more than any other social media platform. What are (were?) all the DoD recruiters and other military influencer accounts on TikTok like Nikko Ortiz (a counter intelligence agent from '18-'23) doing on TikTok? It was wild to see how during certain recruitment pushes, my FYP would be like a direct view into a platoon headquarters. (And yes, before anyone responds, US military social media policies like being aware of adversaries using social media predates the popularization of TikTok, no need to speculate about them not knowing that TT was a threat, especially not after the first ban attempt during the Trump administration)
I think the question is actually asked incorrectly in the reverse.
Maybe start with the not at all controversial position that China is effectively an authoritarian dictatorship who is well known to use censorship and public manipulation as one of its key levers of control and then ask if you have any evidence whatsoever that for some reason they wouldn’t include TikTok in that mix?
The way actual professionals in the field look at this problem is through a lens of:
1. Do they have the capabily to take this specific action? (A resounding yes)
2. Do they have the intent to take this action? I mean this is where you would look at literally all of the other instances where they did choose censorship over free expression and also come to a resounding yes.
3. Do they have the opportunity to take this action? Which is also a clear yes as defined by their own national security laws and other methods of control over what TikTok does.
Thats how people have come to the conclusion that it’s a legitimate threat even in the absence of some smoking gun where people wrote everything down and then conveniently leaked it for you.
At some point you have to be able to make decisions in the absence of perfect information and this is specifically how threat modelling works just to provide some context because some of the comments here are incredibly low quality.
I agree overall with your analysis. Nonetheless when one says that there is good evidence for something, rather than that there is good circumstantial evidence or that there are very reasonable grounds to assume something, one is making a different claim.
We must also ask whether circumstantial evidence or reasonable assumptions alone should be enough to force a company to divest its assets.
This is actually so cool it's the first study I have seen that tries to use numbers kind of hilarious they did not filter scrapped posts by date to account for TikTok being a newer platform. Some data engineer got a promotion off that study too probably :)
Another thing they did not take into account is the presence of social engineering botnets that can be used by both sides (if record labels have them I'm sure anyone rlse can too)
Yes, read about the kind of things employees of TikTok have to agree to. The summary is that they essentially have to uphold the goals of the Chinese government. They also have two different managers, one in America and a second handler from mainland China.
>You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.
It's a cool phenomena tbh if I was rich enough to go to college I would love to do a thesis on it
We know both China and the US are nation states with global ambitions so it would be logical for both to use digital platforms to surveil and perform social engineering.
We also have had whistleblowers on both sides that have come forward and said this is a common practice. We also know based on simple game theory it is in the interest of any nation state to do so not just the US or China
But even on a site like HN that presents itself as rational and factual the sentiment is the US does not do any surveillance or social engineering.
And for the life of me I just don't understand why maybe nationalism? Or the aforementioned social engineering being so effective? But it is so cool to see
A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
This made me chuckle :) it truly is beautiful it's sad its one of those fields you can't take credit for what you do but the people running it deserve all the credit. An impossible ask but would be cool to read about the tech behind it in today's digital age.
The obvious answer is that the US is still a democracy with free media and rule of law. That means you're likely to be found out and have a huge scandal if you try to use government resources to manipulate the public at scale. This is somewhat confirmed by the huge scandals causes by relatively small scale manipulations, which form the somewhat worn examples commenters on this website like to bring up whenever criticism of China is voiced. Note that in China there is no such risk of discovery or pushback as media and courts are fully controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
> Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.
I guess you are trying to muddy the water here by invoking the names of people who are known for their resistance to a certain kind of American misbehaviour.
That behaviour is not really the same as the kind of wide-ranging and complete media restrictions we are talking about, but it sounds kind of similar so this is a good way for you to do some whataboutism with extra steps.
If you think that American media is controlled in the same way at the same scale and intensity as Chinese media please provide your arguments for that view explicitly.
Would they? My understanding is that all their issues stem specifically from dealing in information the government has explicitly classified, rather than simply speech the government doesn't like. You can spend all day ranting about Uncle Sam on the internet, how the President is the worst person ever, etc etc, and the feds really couldn't care less, which is a _sharp_ contrast to China, where you can't share pictures of Winnie the Pooh because some wag once said they thought Xi looked like him.
> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
That's how it's supposed to work in the US. For example, "hate speech" isn't actually one of the things the government is allowed to prohibit under the First Amendment.
But then the government passed a whole bunch of laws they don't actually enforce, and then instead of actually enforcing them, they started threatening to enforce them if platforms didn't start censoring the stuff the government wanted them to, i.e. "take that stuff down or we'll charge you with the antitrust violations you're already committing".
This is basically an end-run around the constitution for free speech in the same way as parallel construction is for illegal searches and the courts should put a stop to it, but they haven't yet and it's not clear if or when they will, so it's still a problem.
> It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa.
> "Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa."
The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, they can access a wide range of national and international media that is quite diverse. It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.
> The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, they can access a wide range of national and international media that is quite diverse.
What you need is not just diversity but independence. You can find all kinds of views on social media, but if there are only a handful of social media sites and the government can lean on the sites themselves to suppress things they don't like, that's not independence.
> It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.
It's obviously not optimal for the only alternative to be the CCP. What you would really like is to have no major platforms at all and instead have thousands of federated independent smaller services hosted in every country in the world. Which was basically the web and email/usenet until Google took 90% search market share and then devastated the former by downranking smaller sites and the latter got displaced by non-federated walled garden social media that actively suppresses third party client interoperability.
So now you practically need the resources of a state to put up a viable rival to that stuff, and maybe the problem you need to solve is that.
First they ousted 8chan because of something-something-terrorism something-pedophilia. Then they have banned RT, because Russia and US are clearly at war (nope). Now they are banning TikTok for "spreading propaganda".
The "wide range of national and international media" you can access is shrinking rather quickly.
Anti-trust laws are the obvious example that was already listed in the post you replied to, e.g. Meta wants to be able to buy Instagram and Apple wants to lock all iPhone users out of third party app stores. But the government has passed so many laws at this point that you can hardly walk down the street without committing a felony, see e.g. Three Felonies a Day, to the point that it's now only a matter of prosecutorial discretion that any given person isn't in prison.
They've also threatened to pass new laws that the targets wouldn't like if the targets don't "voluntarily" do things the law isn't allowed to make them do.
The counter to incorrect information is facts - not trying to hide it.
What's next? Should we prevent giving air time to people from 'adversarial' countries at all? Or only allow it when accompanied by a sanctioned commentary to 'correct' any unwanted information?
While we're at it, how about 'adversarial' parties within our own country? Why should they be allowed to mislead gullible people?
I'm not arguing against incorrect information being spread, I'm arguing against the existence of platforms that are specifically designed to drip feed people information that, true or not, changes their minds about something with a high degree of predictability.
Ad-funded algorithmic feeds exist to change people's behavior. They're indoctrination machines, ostensibly designed to sell products (which is supposedly a good thing in a capitalist world) but very easily turned to indoctrinating about anything else. I don't believe that indoctrination machines should be allowed to exist. We've proven how malleable people are in the face of these machines, and it's simply too much power to let any one entity hold, regardless of who it is in charge.
Making things up is inherently vastly cheaper than flighting misinformation.
Spreading misinformation takes nothing more than being persuasive. Being able to pick and choose stuff out of context or even just say anything without a shred of support makes hours of “content” easy.
And how well did kicking them out of the mainstream social platforms to hide them under the rug do? Rumble, Truth Social, Kick, and how many more echo chambers?
You even gave the example of Alex Jones, he was silenced by the mainstream social media sites.
Yes, fake and misleading news is easier to spread than issuing corrections or fact checking, but that doesn't mean that we should pretend they don't exist, because it's NOT working.
EDIT: Mind you, I'm not advocating for what Twitter has essentially become, but hiding away these people is also not working very clearly based on how well things are going.
> They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astroturfing the platform and/or manipulating the algorithm (either through paid advertisements or by owning a platform and controlling the algorithm outright)
Anyone willing to take a good-faith stab at why this couldn't equally well be a description of traditional media too - say - the WaPo?
I challenge the notion that they're equal. Social media at least provides vox while traditional media is completely one-way. How much is astroturfing and illusion can be debated forever, but any positive value is greater than zero. Traditional media acts as programming first. Journalistic integrity and trust in institutions has been sold off for shareholder value.
There's a major difference with the modern social media platforms, which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus. That illusion makes them much more powerful than anything that came before, to the point where they are different in kind, not just in degree.
When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.
The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.
At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.
> When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position
I hesitate to reference politics here, but read Nate Silver's writings on what he's termed "the Indigo Blob"[0][1]...
> The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions
When I think back to how things went down during the pandemic, I'm convinced that the "real opinions" that most people held were based on blindly following position of whatever media they were consuming (and that media likely blindly following whatever government messaging).
Actual scientists posting actual statistics?[2] No-one wanted to see the data on who was - and wasn't - at significant risk from Covid.
At one point back then, one of my closest friends bluntly told me in a group chat that I was "a sociopath", despite him knowing that out of the two of us, I'm the one with the science PhD + published papers, and (at least science-wise) he's the layman.
It's a shame that this is true for many platforms. Social media platforms have the potential to be incredibly democratic. The more people watch content the more it's shown to other people. Anyone's voice could be amplified in a way that was limited to broadcast networking and printing presses in the past. A million small conversations can occur in such a way that they create a chorus of discussion about public interests. Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
> Social media platforms have the potential to be incredibly democratic.
> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication. For a brief period we had some social media platforms that made gestures in the direction of free communication. Then the investor capital came rolling in, and they were expected to increase revenue. How do you increase revenue of your free communication platform? You sell the messaging. Call it promotion, advertising, whatever. The only thing of value you have at your disposal are people's eyeball, you're going to sell what they see. You could ask your users to pay for the service... but then 80% of them will flake to a rival service that's still free. If there's a way to marry the profit motive and a truly democratic social media platform then our best and brightest have yet to find it. I suspect it doesn't exist.
> It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication.
Exactly.
It seems the only way to sidestep this growing problem is to create a profit free platform, and view it almost as a utility but is openly owned and controlled by "the people."
The vTaiwan and g0v ("gov zero") projects are relevant starter examples for a newer type of distributed governance:
> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
The first step to reform would be to persuade legacy media to stop reporting the opinions trending on X/Twitter as "news". Stop reporting it entirely, it's manipulated, at best unverified, rubbish.
It's their legal out against having to research stuff to prevent libel liability. And they can embed social media photos and videos that weren't even from the rights holder to avoid having to clear rights to anything.
Isn’t that what Facebook is supposed to provide? From anecdotal evidence, people are happy to engage in vitriol online that they would never do face to face, real name or not.
Of course that’s not foolproof and there are millions of bot accounts by facebooks own admission. But at the scale of billions of active users across the globe I’m not sure what approach could be 100%
I'm not asking for Facebook to become a confirmed real-name only network. I am not asking for anyone to be compelled to supply a confirmed real-name only network.
I am saying: I wish that one existed and caught on with consumers.
Google+ famously instituted real name policies before it was cool. You used to get banned on Facebook for using a nickname but I think drag queens pushed back, god bless.
Restricting who can own what, however… that’s long been fair game.
In my dream world we’d get something like the rules we had, until fairly recently, restricting max broadcast media audience control in a given market for a single owner, but for Web platforms. Don’t like being limited to five million users or whatever? Then use a standard that puts control over curation and presentation in the hands of the user. Want to control all that, like all these awful platforms do? Then live with the limit.
You're presuming that these are communication platforms. I argue that they aren't—to the extent that they are useful for communication it's a pure coincidence, not a design choice.
Each of these platforms is fundamentally a propaganda platform—they're explicitly designed to manipulate people into buying stuff, and that capability is frequently turned to voter manipulation. The US government has decided that while US-based billionaires having access to such influence is fine and dandy, the CCP should not. So tiktok must be sold to a US owner.
The state is under no obligation to allow known foreign propagandists attached to a known communist party to engage in activities well outside the protections of the first amendment.
Of course, they don't HAVE to shutter. They can sell their interest in Tiktok and stay open. They have chosen not to do that thus far, and hence they have chosen to shutter.
Privacy legislation isn't going to happen because it's too late.
It's now an industry, with enough companies with enough employees and, more importantly, enough political and economic power to destroy almost any attempts to push legislation that may actually protect privacy in any real way.
But, honestly, I don't think the TikTok ban has any overlap with privacy concerns. It's pure cold war.
It’s less Cold War and more population control. The US government refuses to allow for communist sympathizing or class consciousness, and there’s a lot of that on TikTok.
Privacy laws don't solve the real problem, they would only solve the fig leaf that politicians are hiding behind when it comes to tiktok.
The actual problem is and always has been control over the content being fed to users. It's not an issue of privacy, it's an issue of voter manipulation. It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.
On the one hand that's a very rational position for people who owe their election to algorithmic voter manipulation to take, but that doesn't really make it better ethically.
The voting algorithm needs to change so that destructive (negative) campaigning is not so effective.
Duverger's law makes campaigns devolve into undermining and destroying the competition, with the two parties hosting primaries to see which of them can "turn the wheel" the hardest before the general election where they claim "don't worry I won't crash the car!" despite their prior incentives.
If we used plurality voting for the inputs to a decision problem that follows the classic tragedy of the commons, we'd see a similar result. If instead of just {+1, +0, +0, ...} without repeats, we instead voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, ...} cooperation (or at least constructive competitive frameworks) would at least be at parity with destructive and potentially mutually destructive competition.
>The voting algorithm needs to change so that destructive (negative) campaigning is not so effective.
No algorithm is going to fix this, it's human nature. Negative campaigning has been a constant of elections since elections were invented. At best you can tamp down on the aggressive engagement feedback loops. We should probably do that, but it's good to stay realistic about outcomes.
The difference is that if your party A spends x amount of resources on negative campaigning on another party B instead of on yourself and B is only one of 4 competitors (B,C,D,E) the other 3 will stomp you.
error_logic was referring to the "Voting system" meaning the way we elect politicians: plurality voting vs. ranked choice/approval voting. Not an algorithm in the social media feed sense.
Other voting systems do promote less negativity, among many other benefits such as giving us real choice and a true multiparty system.
> It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.
I think it's more likely that it's able to pass muster when the threat is a foreign state. The US may be more limited in what it can do with it's own entities (I don't know for sure) and would probably receive far more push back from the courts if they tried heavy handed measures before going through the proper legislation regulation (as states are doing) or the FBI route(if it were in their realm of bad). The threat that is more concerning than US owned and operated companies getting US citizens to vote for their prefered US president, is a foreign state slowly radicalizing US citizens(without their knowledge it's happening) against themselves (the US), more than voter manipulation.
The solution for the other half of the problem is anti-trust divestment of client apps from hosted services. Let TikTok (and Faceboot, and so on) keep their own assortments of services. But the mobile and web apps should be spun out into different companies, only communicating with openly documented APIs that are available for every other developer/user.
This won't solve the issue with propaganda that still manages to be compelling in the court of public opinion, but it will at least level the playing field rather than having such topics inescapably amplified for "engagement" and whatnot. There's definitely a mechanic of people realizing specific social media apps make them feel bad, but as of right now it is extremely hard to switch to an alternative due to the anticompetitive bundling of client presentation software (including "the algorithm") with hosted services (intrinsic Metcalfe's law attractors).
This doesn't make any technical sense. The key part of what is at issue with TikTok and other social media companies is editorial control over the ranking algorithm. The ranking algorithm is not done on the client, and I don't see how it can be.
And even if you could do it somehow, that is in direct conflict with the other main complaint people have about social media apps ("selling your data"). FB had an API that they opened up to some degree, then Cambridge Analytica happened.
Discovery algorithms are part of client presentation and should be under control of the client, regardless of beign commonly done where the database lives.
From the technical perspective, for things where your view is limited to friends that is straightforward to do on the client. Global discovery using metadata can be done using deterministic searching which condenses the view of the database enough that the client can then rank those results however it'd like. And global discovery from a pure firehose is likely even within the reach of a modern personal computer.
As far as apps taking a copy of data, the first obvious control is that its only apps you choose which have access to your data. And for the general problem, that is the point of privacy legislation - which was taken as a given by the comment I was responding to.
There's a good argument for separating content from discovery. Originally, Google was pure discovery - all you got was the page's link and maybe a line of description. If antitrust law was used to separate discovery from content, transmission, and aggregation, Google would be forced back into their original niche. They'd be a much smaller company, of course.
> In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent. The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
Which should be a major concerning point. Censoring a powerful media gives more power to the censor than censoring less powerful ones. Now the censor has the power to ensure that only US government and related big tech corporations are allowed to manufacturate consent over the public, with no way of having options of different views. Suddenly the media becomes even more dangerous.
>The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
This logic applies to all media publications, not just internet platforms in the United States. When people say "anti-democratic" in the US I'm pretty certain they take it to mean "the government interfering in the speech of a private entity", not failing to uphold the principle of "1 tweet, 1 impression".
Every newspaper, television station, blog post, what have you consists of a small minority of people both creating and selling reach in unequal ways. If it is anti-democratic and therefore presumably not tolerated for a small minority to exercise or sell speech, then that's just equivalent to saying no private media enterprise should exist.
Needlessly to say the only person who can make this claim with a straight face is Noam Chomsky because he's been saying that about everyone for 50 years, but this is obviously not a position held by anyone currently trying to ban TikTok
There's a major difference with the modern social media platforms, which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus. That illusion makes them much more powerful than anything that came before, to the point where they are different in kind, not just in degree.
When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.
The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.
At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.
> In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent.
Like Hollywood, then.
In other words, some of the Westerners’ hypocrisy when it comes to the views they hold on their socio-economic system never ceases to amaze me, especially now, as we’re in the middle of a new translatio imperii phase.
The "small minority" label has been applied to Trump supporters on social media, yet they have won in the elections twice.
Manufacturing consent still works via the traditional newspapers. That is where "the (current) truth" originates from. That is what is amplified on social media, including here. It takes years of struggle of independently minded people to argue against mainstream. Often after two years mainstream takes the position of independently minded people and takes the credit.
TikTok is different in that it addresses teenagers. They don't have any political power and will change their opinions in their 20s/30s. The data collection and blackmail arguments are still valid. But they also happen in the West, except that three letter agencies collect compromising material on domestic and foreign politicians.
I mean, really? On social media anti-China sentiment is at an all time high. This Chinese manipulation operation must have really failed.
Agreed. And Facebook and Instagram. The US government appears to think that a US billionaire owning an algorithmic mind-shaper is fine, but I disagree.
yes these platforms are BAD. But still, tiktok is a tailored app for US market and bends to US regulations. You think this is bad? There are worse, some US users even chose to signup Douyin or REDnote. How would you ban THAT? Build a national firewall like the communists?
> The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
Personally I don’t think singling them out is anti democratic, because this platform and Chinese run companies in general have issues unique to them.
TikTok lied under oath about the location of data they claimed was stored in the US. That’s fraud and has concerning privacy and national security implications:
This is why divestiture to an American entity with no ties back to a mainland China owner makes sense - it severs the tie that results in illegal surveillance. It’s not a ban on specific content or even the app - just a ban on the owner.
Another issue - it has also come out that TikTok (not Douyin) employees have to uphold the goals of the CCP as part of their job:
And then there’s the basic lack of reciprocity in market access, since all non Chinese social media is banned in China and yet their apps can access consumers outside China.
The Romanian National Liberal Party (opponents of Georgescu) bought the campaign. Their hashtag was "hijacked" (whatever that means) to boost Georgescu instead.
I do not know how TikTok works. Perhaps it is as simple as Georgescu supporters simply using the paid for hashtag for their own messages.
So, according to this article, the Russians did nothing. The Liberal Party engaged in questionable TikTok interference and Georgescu supporters jumped on the bandwagon.
The Western media falling silent on the issue would indicate that this politico.eu is correct.
Debunked? That article says the election was annulled after evidence of Russian interference was provided.
Anyway Russian interference doesn't usually involve the Kremlin giving money to voters directly (unless you are a citizen of Moldova), but through people in the country willing to sell themselves to Russia. Like "Bogdan Peșchir" in the article who donated €1 million to Tiktok users who promoted Georgescu.
That's the campaign that was hijacked by Russia. The PR company tried (and failed) to use a teasing campaign to promote another candidate without naming him. The Russian bots were commenting with the far-right ultranationalist's candidate name the day before the election under the unsuspecting influencers' videos paid for by the PR company.
In parallel there were other campaigns in the ultranationalist's favour, paid for with crypto.
He's also linked to a former secret service figure¹ who betrayed NATO to the KGB in the '60s, so he's either a FSB trojan, an useful idiot, or both.
I was paying attention to telecomix and US forces in-country maintaining cellular infra to fight against the information blackouts but what was going down on 4chan?
Idk tbh never been on 4chan but you ever wonder why that infra was being defended? Ever heard of a guy called Pinochet? Noriega? Videla? Doe? Or my personal favorite Mobutu?
Why are we pretending movements can't be co-opted or engineered or the CIA does things out of love would expect that on Reddit but not on HN. A lot of the countries involved did not recover look at their GDP pre vs during vs now. Look at how power centers have shifted and isolated Iran since then :)
I definitely agree USA was pulling for the revolutionaries, and making sure the powers that be couldn't snuff out all communications was essential in throwing the fight, I just don't believe in inception as far as inspiring a revolt in the first place.
I mention 4chan because I thought it synonymous with anonymous, and I was wondering what you knew that I didn't re: what hacking was happening.
And yes Mobutu with his little leopard hat is my favorite too.
I didn't know anonymous was active on 4chan it's kind of uncomfortable for people of my ilk to be there so I avoid but that kind of checks out
Do you think there is/was any advantage to having a group labelled as a freedom fighter / vigilante perform hacking operations as opposed to official state actors during color revolutions?
I guess I'm thinking of the Guy Fawkes era. I'm scarcely aware of what anonymous means outside of what was reported in mainstream media about it. Now that I think of it that too was a case of one group choosing not to correct anyone when credited with the accomplishments of somebody else. They would produce all these cringe videos about how any day now they'd spill the beans on the powers that be. Kind of a WikiLeaks fan club more than anything.
But you, then, were referencing some other front in the info war with folks that had access to higher tier tools than a Low Orbit Ion Cannon?
And yes plausible deniability goes a long way, perhaps even enabling people to collaborate when they may otherwise be on opposing "sides" as far as states are concerned.
No one who knew enough about the powers that be to spill the beans would live to spill aforementioned beans all we can do is look at and correlate publicly available data to infer plays the aforementioned powers maybe calling such is the life of poor peasants like me lol
Idk how we went from color revolution, hacking, social engineering to Guy and DDoS but now I gotta watch V for Vendetta a peasant can always dream :)
Although i would never put it past the DoD under Clinton to manipulate an election here and a revolution there, my impression of Silicon Valley during the Arab Spring is a bunch of self congratulatory preening over the power of social media.
I always felt the CIAs greatest trick is letting people credit them with overthrowing governments, a power they don't actually possess, except to tip the scales with a little gun-running. Same with the so called Twitter revolution. Assange and Manning can take credit for leaking the cables, but the anger was domestic and already extant.
Force of organization is an interesting phrase, never heard that before. Reminds me of catalyzing crystal seeds, or how at the quark level mass arises out of information/order/entropy in the complexity sense. The more ordered the heavier it is. (Maybe this is fringe/kook/IANAPhysicist).
I guess before social media there would be other sources of order, churches, political organizations, youth groups. Maybe in the absence of that Twitter is all the revolutionaries had left (but my above conjecture is, there were greater sources of organization in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere than that which was legible online. (As an otherwise unaffiliated American I have no way of knowing.)
>In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent
These platforms are much less subject to manufactured consent than the traditional news media, which was controlled by a small number of entities aligned with the elites of the day. Decentralised information transmission is fundamentally better for the people than centralised information transmission controlled by a few gatekeepers who suppress anything not in their interests.
Look at how homogenous in views the baby boomers are relatively to the younger generations, as evidence of how much more effective at manufacturing consent the traditional media are.
>They're places where a small minority of people can become an unstoppable movement that seems to have real support
All other social media platforms are places where a small minority of people silence dissent of what international experts have classed as a genocide, perpetuated by leaders who are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. TikTok is the only platform that allowed footage of this genocide to be spread, so that small minority had to do everything in their power to shut it down.
In a trade war any company is fair game. A trade war thus naturally reaches across multiple values that a nation may hold, bringing them simultaneously under tension. Free speech is just a coincidence to the nature of TikTok, but what about cars, drones, phones, or even soybeans?
When values are in conflict, which should win? In the hierarchy of values, where does economic world position stand in terms of national concerns?
Do people have the prerogative to have successful industries? Do people have the prerogative to cheap energy, food, and other life basics? In the US, this is not actually enshrined anywhere, is it? The right to life simply means you roll the dice with life, doesn't it? One might say that even the beggars on the streets are enjoying their right to speech and life as we speak.
Are we afraid to list the topology of our values? A framework for comparing which values are actually superior? That's all I asked for.
Personally I think if China found the right narrative to pinpoint destroy Apple & Tesla, or moved too quickly to capture Taiwanese industry, then the US would seriously contemplate war.
The US constitution will absolutely permit war as a response to trade conflict. The US has already gone to war for such reasons with smaller countries.
We were speaking on the value of speech. What values should prompt us to send youths to die abroad? What does the constitution say about the hierarchy of values here? I'm just asking for a framework for determining which values are superior under conflict.
A former sausage maker here. I (used to) design these engagement/recommendation engines for a large corp, did academic research in the field, went to conferences, etc.
In general, I wholehearted support the freedom of speech, and if it were any other case, I would agree with the EFF statement here. However, knowing how the sausages are made, I am reluctantly agreeing with the ban, at least for now.
People underestimate how powerful these tools can be. Based on simple, readily available "anonymous" data, we can already impute your demographics data -- age, gender, family relations, occupation, income, etc -- using a decade-old ML techniques. In some cases, we can detect which stage of your emotional journey you are in and nudge you towards our target state. What surprised me about Cambridge Analytica was its ineffectiveness, at least as reported. There are plenty of teams out there that use these techniques to greatly further their gains, whatever those may be.
In Primakov doctrine, information warfare through sowing discontent and/or eroding psychological well-being is very much real and actualizable. I am not claiming that a foreign government is currently single-handedly controlling TikTok to brainwash the American youth; we do not have conclusive proof of that. However, the fact that such a tool is in a foreign country's arsenal is itself a massive danger to America's national security.
I detect an undercurrent of pride that drives you to ascribe undue agency to your work. "Brainwashing" isn't real. Bleak material circumstances sow division, not memes. Oversocialized urban professionals have only pushed this narrative because media is an abstract low-friction environment where they can pretend to still exert control and avoid ever addressing real problems.
A "national security risk" is only a problem for the national security apparatus itself—not actual Americans. Kids don't want to die for their government because its failures have already shaped so much of their personal lives. It's evident in their rents, their student/medical bills, and the character of their neighborhoods. It's rather insulting to say shifty Chinamen are tricking them in all this.
First, it is much easier to blame everything on a boogeyman than to invest actual effort in improving the lives of Americans and investing in their education. Tale as old as time.
Second, the US realizes that it cannot reliably manufacture consent if its citizens are not tuned in to the information sources that it can influence.
yes, and they do. Even the US allies in Europe don't completely trust the US with their citizens data, hence the on-shore data requirements. This is despite the US is footing the bill for Ukraine and, by extension, defending Europe right now.
> This is despite the US is footing the bill for Ukraine and, by extension, defending Europe right now.
Things like this is exactly why we don't trust US media and data management. This is only just enough close to the truth so it doesn't sound absolutely absurd but still is so far from it.
European nations have provided more aid to Ukraine in total in both absolute and relative terms than the US. Hopefully the irony isn't lost on you when we're talking about controlling the narrative here.
More aid in general - yes. But in the battlefield US was much bigger part. While non-lethal aid is important too, without lethal aid there may be no need for non-lethal support anymore.
And even talking about lethal aid, some European countries loved to play the numbers (hi Estonia).
I actually agree that EU should pay more for the war being waged against Europe. I think it would put more pressure on the US to continue being a relevant party in the world politics. Honestly the fight in Ukraine is more important than every war the US has been a part of. ONLY because it is a war, if it was diplomacy that is another thing.
China, North Korea and Iran is supporting Russia in this, the US can choose what they want to do. Repeating 2014 seems like a bad idea.
Facebook and X blocking mostly happens in authoritarian nations, most places are more hands-off so far.
A lot of climate change inaction propaganda for example comes from these platforms and is aligned with the new US presidency and Musk agenda, which is a bigger national security threat than anything in China-US relations or the Ukraine events.
Incredible real time demonstration of how the algorithms deployed by the US social media companies can destroy the brain of and otherwise inteligent person.
> People underestimate how powerful these tools can be.
It's rather you're overestimating it (no wonder the ineffectiveness of CA was a surprise to you). It's such a low-power tool that it couldn't even be used to avoid its ban.
> In some cases
In some cases you don't need any of the ML techniques to do that. But at any rate, that's an irrelevant scale when it comes to "massive danger"
Given that the decision is unanimous just maybe it is in alignment with the constitution. If Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Jackson agree on something, that's some kind of signal.
Neil Gorsuch is though and he signed on too. He even said that while he thought the government had to prove a higher standard than the opinion required, it didn’t matter to the decision because the government in his mind had met that even higher standard anyway.
So you quote the extreme interpretation of the decision by the dissenters to describe what he believes as opposed to using his own words? Seems unfair.
Yes, I believe that in a court case, when someone says "what about Scenario X" and then you write an opinion that fails to preclude Scenario X, you are writing an opinion that can be criticized for allowing Scenario X.
Gorsuch saying "I am not considering Scenario X" does not actually mean his opinion precludes it. His opinion, as written, allows it.
For most of US history people's access to information was controlled by a few powerful news/media corporations and the Supreme Court did nothing to stop that. It's no surprise that when we finally get a decentralised information transmission system not beholden to the elites, the Supreme Court doesn't want to lend it a hand.
The way that it is distributed is centralized and controlled by a single party. You can generate content all day, but unless the algorithm pick you up and make you popular, your content may as well not exists.
Social media algorithms are nuclear bombs for the mind. And they are beholden to whoever holds the detonator. It just happens that a lot of people are happy with China holding it.
When the mind-reading algorithm provides each user with their own reality to live in, then we are talking about editorializing. And allowing a communist, anti-Western government direct control over that power does not seem reasonable.
inb4 "better than my own government" - great, we agree that social media algorithms are a net negative to all society.
Communications is great. Video is great. Social media algorithms controlled by rage-inducing profit seekers and governments is not great.
That pretty accurately describes Twitter and Facebook these days. TikTok, not so much, which you would know if you had used the platform. (Or, you have used the platform, and you prefer rage-inducing crap, so it continues serving that to you)
The proponents of the ban keep mentioning some kind of nefarious "communist" propaganda, and some kind of nefarious privacy data access, but I've yet to see someone show concrete examples of what that would look like.
My TikTok feed contains a ton of funny cat videos, Europeans shitting on clueless American tourists, OF models hawking themselves, the ubiquitous dance videos, people making caricature cringe videos, and a bunch of viral meme videos. And a lady drinking Costco peach juice.
Where's the propaganda? Not in my feed, that's for sure.
Where's the rage-inducing bait? Not in my feed, that's for sure.
What privacy data can the nefarious CCP access about me? That I like cat videos and memes?
I worked at EFF for twenty years, and every iteration or incarnation of EFF would have said that it should be extraordinarily difficult for the government to prevent Americans from using foreign web sites or software. And that it should be extraordinarily difficult for the government to compel tech intermediaries to help block foreign sites or software. This would have been a bog-standard EFF position for the organization's entire existence.
(I would say something even stronger than "extraordinarily difficult", but then I'd be on thinner ice.)
It required specific legislation to ban TikTok. I would say that's pretty extraordinary. I think even the EFF should admit that allowing the Chinese government to control a major American social media app is an unacceptable security risk.
It's amazing that all three arms of the government can come together so quickly to ban an app, but we can't have affordable housing, public healthcare, a higher minimum wage, or send kids to school without bulletproof backpacks.
Not only did it require specific legislation, but it had the near unanimous support of all 3 branches of the government (if you exclude the shifts in presidential opinion)
> The United States’ foreign foes easily can steal, scrape, or buy Americans’ data by countless other means.
True, but that's not the point.
> Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.
Sorry, that might've been true for old media, but social media is way more insidious.
It’s funny how they’re shutting down TikTok because it’s “manipulative and anti-democratic” while that’s a core trait of every algorithmic/engagement social media. Twitter and Threads should be banned as well then.
If the government can’t ban a business entity then doesn’t that say something about control? We have an app controlled by a communist dictatorship. They can keep the app running by selling it, but they won’t.
What’s perplexing to me is leftists love how companies in America can be forced to sell and broken if they are declared monopolies. But if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers suddenly forcing a sale is wrong? It makes me feel even more certain that HN is astroturfed by Chinese bots because who cares
> if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers
I suspect that people pattern-match this declaration to McCarthyism.
Additionally, the US has been invoking national security for a series of extremely dubious moves recently as well -- e.g. Biden's latest decision to block the sale of US Steel to Nippon on shaky grounds of national security, and his administration's recent policy to introduce export limits on GPUs to all countries except 18 (most US allies, NATO or otherwise, are now unjustly being restricted in how many GPUs they can import). Coupled with the incoming Trump administration's threats of trade war and expansionist designs on Greenland, people -- especially non-Americans, also in countries that have historically been friends of the US -- are very quickly running out of goodwill for the US, and in light of these events naturally the TikTok ban is seen as just another draconian attempt by the US to practise (economic) imperialism.
Your last statement is a pretty silly generalization, and I don't think you need to bring in left/right extremes into this. For a lot of folks this is more about precedent on being able to ban anything the current establishment disagrees with, which has its own merits, even if you want to say that it's strictly being done because China controls it, which is not 100% of the reason why.
I despise communism myself, as my country went through 45 years of it. I agree with TikTok being forced to sell, and I'd like to see all social media sites offer more transparency mechanisms to NGOs and government agencies to show how their algorithms really work to have some watchdog be able to check if what we're seeing is heavily manipulated, especially during election years.
It is hard to love the notion that banning a third party’s app is infringing upon my own right to free speech. If it were a ban on the Internet then that seems to make more sense. It’s analogous to a ban on paper, pens, or bullhorns. I can be sympathetic to the idea that, for some people, one particular proprietary app is their main tool for expression, even if that’s hardly ideal.
A ban on routers made by a specific foreign company — when the government knows full well the Internet can’t work without them — feels like a more likely scenario. When Huawei equipment bans were in the news, were there similar First Amendment arguments about that, too?
The first amendment at its core is - if someone wants to say something and someone wants to listen to the first one saying it - the government has no right to prevent or interfere with the process. Banning the app trough which information flows is interference.
And the government doesn't offer any kind of remedy - you can't pick up your whole social cluster and move to another platform.
tiktok didn't had its 1A rights infringed, but every american that wants to listen to clips of old episodes of friends does.
if youtube was being banned instead for the same reason (pretend it was owned by ByteDance), would you feel the same way? what about any other website/platform that you like?
What’s interesting about this argument is that the playing field is highly asymmetric between the us and china. China explicitly firewalls out large amounts of the internet from its population. If you want to do business via an e-commerce in china, you cannot do so without explicit permission, license and partial Chinese equity share - for example https://developers.cloudflare.com/china-network/concepts/icp...
On the other hand, we have much more relaxed restrictions going the other way. Why not consider “fairness” from that perspective as well?
China doesn't pretend to be a democracy, so as they don't are nor pretend to be a democracy the rest of us should abandon democracy? Should be stop begin democratic because China isn't?
I’m not advocating that we abandon democracy. To use your argument the other way around, why should we treat china as a democracy as it doesn’t pretend to be one? They don’t allow our businesses to operate on an equal footing there, so why afford them easy access to our markets?
In the case of any foreign ownership of mass media, it is trivial to weaponize that platform to wage asymmetric war against a political adversary by driving division in between the population through lies, half truths, and selected context. That’s why the US has laws to ban foreign ownership of broadcast media outlets.
What if it was a ban, not on printing presses, but on a specific model of printing press, made in China, that happens to have 99% market share.
I want to try to see an analogy with Freenode, Libera,
and IRC, but that was self inflicted damage by a private entity rather than by a government mandate.
Curious to hear from other people here. I'm UK citizen, and on the whole, my perception is that I'm much more concerned about the effect on democracy from US led fake news and social media (specifically Twitter, Facebook and Truth Social) than TikTok.
I'm not making a case that that is justified, but I'm interested to know if other people in or outside the US share that perception?
I can no longer send money to the EFF due to their obvious misreading of the situation. They will lose $100s/year from me, I hope it was worth it. Clearly, a naive take that doesn't understand the nuances related to Tiktok's situation.
Tiktok can still exist and keep showing their garbage to Americans, but it can't do so while being owned by a foreign adversary that attacks us almost continuously.
Sure, they can still buy our information elsewhere, but this is like saying I shouldn't put a lock on my door because thieves can break in through other means. Just check the looting happening in Los Angeles as a result of the reduction in the barriers for theft. Cost matters and if we increase the costs for China's data theft, their ability to steal from us will be reduced.
Yet when Europeans feel the same way about American manipulative social media and the US sees it as targeting its tech industry, you don’t see a bias? Are you OK with EU banning Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, too, because it goes against its own citizens rights and safety? Or, following your logic, should we demand they are sold to European owners?
Why do you think it’s YOU who decides to be the gatekeeper on all that data and no one else?
Can you expand and on this? Do you think EU should force every successful US company to divest their EU branches. I do not know where I stand on this but you seem to have a clear idea on this..
I think the EU should do whatever the EU wants to do and accept the consequences of their actions. As an American, I might have opinions but no say in EU's matters. Europe has plenty of very smart people to figure out what's best for them.
I say this because I feel the reply to my top post was unnecessarily aggressive. I have friends in Europe and respect their independence. I don't know why an opinion on a purely US matter brought anger from an EU resident.
My best guess is the feeling I sometimes have that Europeans believe Americans keep scheming to subjugate them, when in fact Americans hardly ever think about Europe. Also, when Americans do think about Europe, it's in a positive way as Europeans share many of our values.
The big corporations, with government support, that does try to profit from Europe are the same that do it to American citizens in the US, so we're kind of in the same fight against them.
I think the point is that it's not hypocritical to support the TikTok ban, since they don't care and/or can't influence what the EU does with respect to American social media.
I disagree with the EFF here too but I am so happy that there is a good faith well reasoned argument on the other side. This struggle is what makes democracy work.
Yeah this is a weird one where their m.o. on privacy/security are at odds with their first amendment side of things...sounds like the latter won out. I also disagree with them on this. This isn't something like net neutrality. It's one of many privately-owned social media platforms and one such with deeply privacy-invasive software that has adversarial foreign ties against the US.
There’s a simple, obvious and overwhelmingly popular solution to this problem that respects free speech and privacy. Unlike the current law, it wouldn’t blatantly violate the constitution by targeting a specific group:
Apply reasonable privacy and transparency rules to all social media platforms, regardless of ownership.
I’m not sure the EFF really needs to spell it out at this point.
The fact that only one app is being banned makes it pretty obvious that privacy concerns are orthogonal to the political shift this represents. The law was originally passed before the Gaza ceasefire, and the activism on the app relating to that issue was the specific example that was blamed on Chinese influence. The hypothesis was that teenagers would not know or care about US policy towards the conflict if a foreign communication service was not facilitating the spread of relevant information.
Well at least you can agree with both the state, and as it were at this point, the scary foreign state, on this one.. Probably worth more dollars to donuts to be on those sides anyway!
I’m not sure what order things go in, but I’d have thought national security concerns trump the need of its’ citizens to freely watch cat videos Those people publishing to TikTok were probably on Instagram and if they weren’t, they will be now if they want to reach the same American audience.
> I’d have thought national security concerns trump the need of its’ citizens to freely watch cat videos
You'd be wrong.
What value would a concept like the First Amendment have if it were voidable as easily as "we have national security concerns" or "the information on there isn't valuable." Given that those are pretty much the immediate go-to excuses for any autocrats clamp down on speech, such a right would be totally meaningless.
However forcing TikTok to divest of foreign ownership is not restricting the rights of Americans to express their opinions. Americans are free to widely exercise their first amendment rights- the TikTok order to divest foreign ownership doesn’t affect those users ability to speak. The first amendment does not guarantee you access to a specific platform- it means that the bar for the government to imprison you for speech is very high (you can be held in contempt for lying under oath, for example)
I would argue that in this case the platform itself is expressing speech by ranking, recommending and promoting certain content. A foreign entity has no such first amendment right- we have had restrictions on foreign ownership of news media for decades now.
I think it’s an interesting issue especially now that you have TikTok users who think they’re being treated unfairly moving to a pure Chinese platform RedNote and encountering actual censorship. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-redn....
Forcing American companies not to put an app on their marketplace is impinging their speech. And yes, they do have First Amendment protections.
No, the First Amendment doesn’t just prevent the government from imprisoning you for speech… that is a ridiculously narrow perspective and really discredits you on the matter.
The First Amendment, as a trivial example, prevents the government from fining you for speech. It prevents the government from threatening to imprison you for speech. It prevents the government from seizing your assets for speech.
FWIW, I’m not arguing that TikTok shouldn’t be banned. I think it’s a propaganda weapon. However it is far from clear that it can be banned under our Constitution. Especially since the mechanics of that ban require coercing American companies and individuals to limit their freedom of expression.
I would disagree, the first amendment in fact does protect platforms for speech. If the government tried to ban the New York Times through an act of Congress, the Supreme Court would strike that down.
In this case, the fact that the platform is foreign and that the foreign owner is considered hostile to the US carves out an exception.
Banning foreign ownership of broadcast media companies is not new. It’s just that the laws have lagged the shift from broadcast linear mediums to the internet.
Source: the FCC specifically prohibits certain ownership of broadcast stations by foreign entities:
“Section 310(a) prohibits a foreign government or its representative from holding any radio license.
Section 310(b)(3) prohibits foreign individuals, governments, and corporations from owning more than twenty percent of the capital stock of a broadcast, common carrier, or aeronautical radio station licensee.”
TikTok is used for far more than cat videos which is why it's a considered a threat to those in power. There are freely flowing ideas and narratives which they cannot control - except now they are by restricting access to it.
Instagram doesn't have the same culture at all and it's not a substitute. TikTok is a like a digital "third space" for communities, and just like the real life equivilents, is slowly disappearing. People without community are easier to control.
Why shouldn’t TikTok just divest, then? Bytedance could make a huge amount of money by selling TikTok. And then that huge influx of money could keep TikTok operating forever. The fact that they’d rather shut down is pretty telling.
TikTok is outcompeting its US rivals Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts because their algorithm for choosing which videos to put in front of users is simply superior. Divesting means that they would need to sell that algorithm as well, which is pretty obviously worth a lot more than their US market, which is why they're making this decision.
I agree with the ban on security basis, but could this be abused by countries to sabotage companies? China could buy majority shares of a company and force them out of business.
Right, but an entity or a number of entities could buy shares in a small cap company to own a majority stake without scrutiny. Seems like a good way to do espionage since corporations are global and have protected status.
Extremely weak argument. Just because one platform is shut down does not mean the right to free speech is affected. A platform, mind you, under full control by the Chinese Communist Party, who do not allow ANY form of free speech to exist in the country they have under their thumb.
It's because this isn't a content restriction. Anything that was speakable on TikTok remains speakable on platforms that aren't owned by U.S. adversaries.
The distinction between this and China's "great firewall" and speech restrictions should be obvious.
There are many good reasons to ban TikTok. For example, reciprocity on free trade. Why should Chinese companies get access to the American market when no western social media apps are allowed in China?
Reciprocity would be that American companies can access the Chinese market if they obey the same rules in the Chinese market that Chinese companies have to obey in the Chinese market, and Chinese companies can access the American market if they obey the same rules in the American market that American companies have to obey in the American market.
Facebook and others were in the Chinese market but they got blocked because they would not censor things that the Chinese government wanted censored and would not turn over user information that the government asked for. Chinese social media companies also are subject to those same censorship and user disclosure requirements, and will be banned (or worse) if they do not comply.
Would Facebook be allowed back in if they agreed to the censoring and to turning over user information? As far as I know none of the major American social media companies have been willing to do so, and so we don't know.
So we know the real reason why the government banned Tiktok [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.
Tiktok doesn't push government propaganda to the same degree as Meta and Google.
But whoever pushed for this was smart enough to avoid making it about speech ("content-neutral" in legal parlance). It's strictly commerce-based and there's lots of precedent for denying access to the US market based on ownership. For a long time, possibly still to this day, foreign ownership of media outlets (particularly TV stations and newspapers) was heavily restricted. And that's a good analogy for what happened here.
What I hope happens is people wake up to the manipulation of what you see by US companies.
Huge creds to the EFF for speaking truth even when it is politically inconvenient (see comments here...)
This ban is infringing of IMO fundamental rights of individuals in US to share and use the TikTok app freely. That China is doing similar things to their citizens can't be an excuse.
Yeah I hate TikTok and its effect on society too and good riddance etc but this is a first for something very bad. We have to look at the larger picture.
There's a bigger picture in the question of precedent and risks created by the infrastructure to ban a platform like this.
Unfortunately it seems the powers that be are dead set on pursuing destruction of not just specific competitors but, eventually, the entire notion of constructive competition and its win-win outcomes provided the right safety nets.
There is actual harm done to democracy on these platforms. A democracy requires informed voters to function and the platform does the diametric opposite by misinforming them. Any attempt to regulate this or promote or moderate has failed simply because an actual structured funding source is misinformation. The only option to keep democracy standing is to kill it.
I’d expect the EFF to have some well read social or political staff. Apparently they don’t and are quite happy to spout absolutes.
Damn the servile simp responses here are revealing. They are setting precedence and will use this on other things. Yes TikTok and many apps are used by many hostile foreign governments (Israel/Unit 8200 for example) (btw, RedNote got it's big boost when backed by Israeli investor Yuri Milner and his firm DST) for many psyop types...
That doesn't mean you get to control what Americans can do on their devices.
ISP immunity has absolutely nothing to do with this case, which is a regulatory law having to do with foreign ownership of media corporations. In point of fact TikTok, like all ISPs, relies on section 230 safe harbor to serve their user-generated content without repercussion.
Presumably "provider of service" rather than "service provider"
ie
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by an other information content provider."
> Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.
These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature, increasingly so in the age of LLMs. They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astroturfing the platform and/or manipulating the algorithm (either through paid advertisements or by owning a platform and controlling the algorithm outright). They're places where a small minority of people can become an unstoppable movement that seems to have real support, sucking gullible voters in to join the growing "consensus".
In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent. The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
It’s fascinating to talk to people from different cultures or different political leanings and find out how the internet that they browse is vastly different to the one I experience. Yet we aren’t necessarily seeking out different things. It’s just that tithe things presented to us align with (and reinforce) a different worldview. They’ll get annoyed about hearing about something constantly, and I’ll have little impression of the thing at all. We will have different “facts” established in our heads but not be able to pinpoint where we learned them. We have different realities.
Ironically this is exactly why I think TikTok is so important. Obviously every media site is used for manufacturing content, from NYT to Facebook. Also, obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted. Wouldn't it be good then to have checks and balances to this, by having media not under the US government supervision?
Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the public in harmful ways?
> obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted
That's not at all obvious to me. On what grounds, moral or legal, should the US government tell anyone what to publish or promote?
I read what you quoted as a matter of fact statement, not an assertion of what is ethically righteous
But with that, I don't agree that it's a fact, maybe the FCC regulates what you broadcast on radio and TV, but if you don't take federal funding, the government doesn't really have a pull in what is created or prompted AFAIK. Journalists in the press pool may trade subservience for access but that's about it.
FCC is a special cause because private entities are using a public resource that must be managed. The content controls were a way to prevent Hearst style journalism spreading to radio and television. It worked well until the era of entertainment news developed.
How about copyright infringement, false advertising, sharing classified documents, tobacco advertising? There are a LOT of special cases.
Maybe there shouldn’t be and all of those things should be free from government interference, but the status quo is that plenty of speech is regulated.
Copyright enforcement is not a form of censorship.
So basically controls on speech that are good are not censorship and therefore good, but ones that are bad are censorship and therefore bad? That doesn’t feel like an especially defensible view.
It most certainly is abused that way. See every garbage DMCA takedown request submitted by scumbag corporation du juor.
This doesn't even take into account the endless lobbying by Disney to pervert copyright law into what it is today.
> but if you don't take federal funding, the government doesn't really have a pull in what is
Paying chills is anti-democratic. In France, 100% of the media you know is subsidized, and it is unsustainable to do journalism without state sponsorship: France is not a democracy.
Fight me all you want, shower me with Alex Jonesy accusations, or nazi affiliations, but that’s why I wish the left would lose more elections. And it’s 51% of us now.
Just - be - honest - with - media.
So let me get this straight - you want to go from a system where:
- the government hands out money to the media - the law says that they need to give it to everyone without political discrimination - if they try to withold funding, you can sue them and probably win
To a system where:
- if you have a ton of money, you can be a media outlet - if you don't have a ton of money, get fucked
I'm struggling to see how the latter is better for anyone other than rich people who want to influence the masses.
Easiest way to spot an authorian is the complaining something is not democratic while also spending time promoting antidemocratic messages.
It is a cop out. I do not believe everyone who argue against some of my views are against everyone of them. I have no idea of what part of the far right pleases you, but the point about a democracy is that nothing is fixed everything ebbs and flows. This is something conservative people have a hard time with, and when the leftwings ebbs they have a hard time.
The media is not left wing. It might be more left than the far right, but it is also along way from the far left.
Just be honest about your ideas and intentions, do not blame others for your failures.
NYT does have a left leaning bias. Here's an example where a conservative person and a liberal person each did the same donation tax avoidance strategy, and the NYT said the conservative got "an enormous personal tax windfall", but the liberal got "no tax benefit". In reality they both got the same benefit. NYT describes the conservative person as greedy and the liberal person as selfless, for doing the same thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32847961
A few scattered examples of this does nothing to counterbalance the neoliberalism and outright cronyism of NYT. They are probably a big reason why you might even (wrongly) associate neoliberalism with leftist ideology.
Back in 2004 they withheld publishing the fact that the NSA had spliced themselves into every internet backbone. (RIP Qwest).
Back in 2002/2003, they drummed for war like all the good sycophants.
A few examples of them painting some of their toadies in a good light while trashing some of their enemies is hardly evidence of “leftism”.
If the NYT were even moderately leftist, they would have endorsed Bernie Sanders.
No, I will shower you with good old capitalist critiques. The market is not all powerful. Market failures exists because not every market is capable of self-regulation. Some market players can and do abuse their market power. State intervention so that journalists, policeman, waste managers, water distributors, electricity distributors, internet providers, health care providers, health insurance providers, food producers, etc. can do their job effectively, because they provide needs that are too sensitive to leave to private self-interests. That's why many of those are subsidized _and_ regulated.
It can make laws that prohibit or discourage publishing certain content. It can also shape the discourse in such a way that these laws are not viewed as restrictions on free speech.
I think you misunderstand me: I'm not in favor of banning tiktok on its own. I think you're right that that misweights things, further consolidating power in the hands of those who hold the remaining platforms.
What I'm saying is that all of these platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in that they exist to predictably change individual behavior with a high degree of precision, through custom tailored information feeds that can be shaped to alter someone's perspectives on the world in the interests of whoever controls the feed.
I don't think it's better for that power to be in the hands of Elon Musk or of Mark Zuckerberg. I think that that power needs to be banned worldwide if democracy is to survive. Democracy hinges on the idea that voters will in general vote in their own interest, and the ability to individually manipulate voters into measurably changing their behavior breaks that assumption.
And note that this is fundamentally different than traditional media sources, which have a harder time shaping someone's entire life and worldview. WaPo can control what someone perceives the WaPo editorial board as believing. Only a social media platform can control their perspective of what their friends think.
As someone not living the us but regularly reading news from both sides of your media landscape, I can tell you that it's not regulated what they can write or say or what's promoted. Your media is all over the place. There are differences in how far they go on the spectrum and some are definitely insane on what they publish to the level of leaving out all the important details about certain situations to push their agenda. How do you think that there is any regulation at all?
Also for tiktok, the algorithm needs less than an hour to almost fully understand you and it will then push a mix of what you already like and agree with, things that you don't like and absolutely disagree with but in a way that makes it look bad so in the end you also agree with that, and some funny videos to keep you entertained. This way they are maximizing the time you stay in the app to increase their revenue. It polarizes your world view further and further and without people to talk to and discuss, your ideas and beliefs will be turned into religious level thinking, radicalizing you and making it more and more difficult to accept different opinions. If you only consume what you already believe, things will go downhill very quickly. That's the reason people can't talk to each other anymore, the truth in most if not all cases is somewhere in the middle.
What we need is social media that is not algorithm driven, not optimized to keep you at the device for as long as possible but to show you a multitude of opinions to a topic from different angles, not just the one you have already chosen as your truth. We need to talk again, accept that other people can have different opinions without shouting them down. We need to try to look at things from different perspectives not just our own.
And most importantly, we need to accept that we can't have an opinion about facts. We need to listen to people that actually have professional knowledge about a topic. The guy that used to be a fitness trainer but now has a telegram channel to spread some important truths about climate change actually knows shit about how the world works. They want to make money selling you any truth that works for you.
You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
So I'm definitely not saying that TikTok itself provides better checks and balances, but TikTok, in an ecosystem of other media providers under different governments, would be a much healthier for civil society.
For example, US social media companies were vital in kicking off the Arab spring. How different would such movements be if they only had access to a media monoculture controlled by their respective regimes?
US social media companies contributing to widespread social unrest that ultimately led nowhere[0] or created more oppressive Islamic regimes and sectarian violence - well, this seems like an argument against TikTok, not for it.
Despite any personal romanticism towards violent revolution you may have, that is not something that societies actually want against democracies. Even against authoritarian regimes, society often goes from bad to worse (see Iran, Lebanon). You want violent revolution against actual oppressive regimes, not democracies where you can change the society with a vote, but even then, you want it led by pro-democratic factions.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Long-term_aftermat...
I totally agree that the Arab spring ended in near complete failure, and is not an ideal in and of itself, and violent revolution is in no way desirable for societies like the US. Maybe I should have connected the analogy fully:
Suppose that there was an issue that most citizens would normally feel very strongly about, but which benefits the state: war immediately comes to mind. There should be protests and (non-violent of course) civil unrest against wars the public feels to be unjust or immoral. Such demonstrations could easily be lulled in the right media environment, which is why alternative channels are important. I can easily imagine a future where TikTok is the premier dissonant chord against the drumming of war.
I'm not going to hide by biases here, I rather do romanticize popular anti-war movements.
Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.
> Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP
I can't say it's not at all
But I can say it's far beyond CPC's capability, Americans like talking abt CPC like it's some kind of secret darkness powerful villain in Gotham City, no, it's not that good.
If CPC executed any order to a company operated in US by Americans, there'll be clear and strong evidence about it, CPC is not good at hiding schemes, if you didn't see such evidence, it means there's no such thing, at least for now
I've talked abt how CPC doing propaganda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42429769
I can't speak for Tiktok, but the CCP did explicitly shut down Bytedance's very popular Neihuan Duanzi humor app, and put pressure on them to change the Toutiao algorithm because it was promoting inappropriate content. It's not much of a leap to think that by the time Douyin started getting popular Bytedance had learned their lesson and would proactively moderate their platforms to stay well within the party lines. In theory Tiktok should be independent of that since it targets foreign users, but in practice any media product coming out of a Chinese-owned company is going to be influenced whether explicitly or incidentally by CCP policy.
Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.
ccp bans certain brain rot contents which the algorithms hm happily spreads in the west.
the biggest problem for western competition (insta & co) is the dramatically "better" (more addictive) algorithm. But trump and Co happily use tiktok to grab power, see the most recent Romanian elections.
There is good evidence that topics the CCP does not like are significantly underrepresented compared to other social media platforms.
I would add that if you know the CCP you would be extremely surprised if they did not take such an opportunity for information warfare.
You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence. If you're talking about the study about hash tag counts, that's not good evidence. https://www.cato.org/blog/lies-damned-lies-statistics-mislea...
> You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence
Unfortunately very common these days; people who say this probably hope that they won't ever be asked to provide receipts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok
All the usual trigger topics like Tiananmen and Tibet are suppressed on Tiktok at the behest of the CCP.
I can never really tell, but I hope it's not malicious. When I was in college, a dorm neighbor told me that Obama had said/did something bad. I don't remember what, but it was incredibly dubious. I told him I didn't believe it and asked him to prove it; I'd even accept a Fox News article as evidence. He was red in the face because he couldn't find any article suggesting anything close to what he had said. Looking back on it now, I realize he genuinely believed what he had heard, but he had fallen for well-crafted language that created a new reality. It was so well-crafted, all that remained was the idea he was propagandized to believe rather than even a remnant of the title of the original article.
This same thing has happened to me over the years - I read an article and then it becomes relevant in some future discussion. I find the article (which is hard to find, because I'm searching by what the author[s] wanted me to think, not the actual article content) and read it again, only to find out that, upon a more critical reading, it doesn't say what I thought it said at all! Or the conclusion is much weaker than I had originally thought.
It's pretty amazing to see, though. Weak evidence used to support very strong American propaganda about seemingly weak Chinese propaganda. The goal posts inevitably get moved too - oh we have strong evidence of it, but we might tip off the Chinese! Like, huh? What does it matter if they're tipped off if you're going to force the sale?
I also don't think TikTok was ever a national security threat, at least not any more than any other social media platform. What are (were?) all the DoD recruiters and other military influencer accounts on TikTok like Nikko Ortiz (a counter intelligence agent from '18-'23) doing on TikTok? It was wild to see how during certain recruitment pushes, my FYP would be like a direct view into a platoon headquarters. (And yes, before anyone responds, US military social media policies like being aware of adversaries using social media predates the popularization of TikTok, no need to speculate about them not knowing that TT was a threat, especially not after the first ban attempt during the Trump administration)
I think the question is actually asked incorrectly in the reverse.
Maybe start with the not at all controversial position that China is effectively an authoritarian dictatorship who is well known to use censorship and public manipulation as one of its key levers of control and then ask if you have any evidence whatsoever that for some reason they wouldn’t include TikTok in that mix?
The way actual professionals in the field look at this problem is through a lens of:
1. Do they have the capabily to take this specific action? (A resounding yes)
2. Do they have the intent to take this action? I mean this is where you would look at literally all of the other instances where they did choose censorship over free expression and also come to a resounding yes.
3. Do they have the opportunity to take this action? Which is also a clear yes as defined by their own national security laws and other methods of control over what TikTok does.
Thats how people have come to the conclusion that it’s a legitimate threat even in the absence of some smoking gun where people wrote everything down and then conveniently leaked it for you.
At some point you have to be able to make decisions in the absence of perfect information and this is specifically how threat modelling works just to provide some context because some of the comments here are incredibly low quality.
I agree overall with your analysis. Nonetheless when one says that there is good evidence for something, rather than that there is good circumstantial evidence or that there are very reasonable grounds to assume something, one is making a different claim.
We must also ask whether circumstantial evidence or reasonable assumptions alone should be enough to force a company to divest its assets.
Divest the assets or leave the foreign market they are in that's regulated them out.
This is actually so cool it's the first study I have seen that tries to use numbers kind of hilarious they did not filter scrapped posts by date to account for TikTok being a newer platform. Some data engineer got a promotion off that study too probably :)
Another thing they did not take into account is the presence of social engineering botnets that can be used by both sides (if record labels have them I'm sure anyone rlse can too)
Yes, read about the kind of things employees of TikTok have to agree to. The summary is that they essentially have to uphold the goals of the Chinese government. They also have two different managers, one in America and a second handler from mainland China.
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
>You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.
It's a cool phenomena tbh if I was rich enough to go to college I would love to do a thesis on it
We know both China and the US are nation states with global ambitions so it would be logical for both to use digital platforms to surveil and perform social engineering.
We also have had whistleblowers on both sides that have come forward and said this is a common practice. We also know based on simple game theory it is in the interest of any nation state to do so not just the US or China
But even on a site like HN that presents itself as rational and factual the sentiment is the US does not do any surveillance or social engineering.
And for the life of me I just don't understand why maybe nationalism? Or the aforementioned social engineering being so effective? But it is so cool to see
Their's an old joke about this:
A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
This made me chuckle :) it truly is beautiful it's sad its one of those fields you can't take credit for what you do but the people running it deserve all the credit. An impossible ask but would be cool to read about the tech behind it in today's digital age.
The obvious answer is that the US is still a democracy with free media and rule of law. That means you're likely to be found out and have a huge scandal if you try to use government resources to manipulate the public at scale. This is somewhat confirmed by the huge scandals causes by relatively small scale manipulations, which form the somewhat worn examples commenters on this website like to bring up whenever criticism of China is voiced. Note that in China there is no such risk of discovery or pushback as media and courts are fully controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
I think Hitchens' short "Why Americans Are Not Taught History" (1998) provides a more compelling understanding:
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/history/goodbye-to-all-that-wh...
> Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.
I guess you are trying to muddy the water here by invoking the names of people who are known for their resistance to a certain kind of American misbehaviour. That behaviour is not really the same as the kind of wide-ranging and complete media restrictions we are talking about, but it sounds kind of similar so this is a good way for you to do some whataboutism with extra steps.
If you think that American media is controlled in the same way at the same scale and intensity as Chinese media please provide your arguments for that view explicitly.
Would they? My understanding is that all their issues stem specifically from dealing in information the government has explicitly classified, rather than simply speech the government doesn't like. You can spend all day ranting about Uncle Sam on the internet, how the President is the worst person ever, etc etc, and the feds really couldn't care less, which is a _sharp_ contrast to China, where you can't share pictures of Winnie the Pooh because some wag once said they thought Xi looked like him.
> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
That's how it's supposed to work in the US. For example, "hate speech" isn't actually one of the things the government is allowed to prohibit under the First Amendment.
But then the government passed a whole bunch of laws they don't actually enforce, and then instead of actually enforcing them, they started threatening to enforce them if platforms didn't start censoring the stuff the government wanted them to, i.e. "take that stuff down or we'll charge you with the antitrust violations you're already committing".
This is basically an end-run around the constitution for free speech in the same way as parallel construction is for illegal searches and the courts should put a stop to it, but they haven't yet and it's not clear if or when they will, so it's still a problem.
> It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa.
> "Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa."
The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, they can access a wide range of national and international media that is quite diverse. It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.
> The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, they can access a wide range of national and international media that is quite diverse.
What you need is not just diversity but independence. You can find all kinds of views on social media, but if there are only a handful of social media sites and the government can lean on the sites themselves to suppress things they don't like, that's not independence.
> It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.
It's obviously not optimal for the only alternative to be the CCP. What you would really like is to have no major platforms at all and instead have thousands of federated independent smaller services hosted in every country in the world. Which was basically the web and email/usenet until Google took 90% search market share and then devastated the former by downranking smaller sites and the latter got displaced by non-federated walled garden social media that actively suppresses third party client interoperability.
So now you practically need the resources of a state to put up a viable rival to that stuff, and maybe the problem you need to solve is that.
First they ousted 8chan because of something-something-terrorism something-pedophilia. Then they have banned RT, because Russia and US are clearly at war (nope). Now they are banning TikTok for "spreading propaganda".
The "wide range of national and international media" you can access is shrinking rather quickly.
What laws did they pass that they didn’t enforce but then threatened to enforce? Because from my perspective that statement smells like bullshit.
Anti-trust laws are the obvious example that was already listed in the post you replied to, e.g. Meta wants to be able to buy Instagram and Apple wants to lock all iPhone users out of third party app stores. But the government has passed so many laws at this point that you can hardly walk down the street without committing a felony, see e.g. Three Felonies a Day, to the point that it's now only a matter of prosecutorial discretion that any given person isn't in prison.
They've also threatened to pass new laws that the targets wouldn't like if the targets don't "voluntarily" do things the law isn't allowed to make them do.
The counter to incorrect information is facts - not trying to hide it.
What's next? Should we prevent giving air time to people from 'adversarial' countries at all? Or only allow it when accompanied by a sanctioned commentary to 'correct' any unwanted information?
While we're at it, how about 'adversarial' parties within our own country? Why should they be allowed to mislead gullible people?
I'm not arguing against incorrect information being spread, I'm arguing against the existence of platforms that are specifically designed to drip feed people information that, true or not, changes their minds about something with a high degree of predictability.
Ad-funded algorithmic feeds exist to change people's behavior. They're indoctrination machines, ostensibly designed to sell products (which is supposedly a good thing in a capitalist world) but very easily turned to indoctrinating about anything else. I don't believe that indoctrination machines should be allowed to exist. We've proven how malleable people are in the face of these machines, and it's simply too much power to let any one entity hold, regardless of who it is in charge.
Making things up is inherently vastly cheaper than flighting misinformation.
Spreading misinformation takes nothing more than being persuasive. Being able to pick and choose stuff out of context or even just say anything without a shred of support makes hours of “content” easy.
> The counter to incorrect information is facts - not trying to hide it.
We've seen how well it worked with Fox News, ONN, Alex Jones...
And how well did kicking them out of the mainstream social platforms to hide them under the rug do? Rumble, Truth Social, Kick, and how many more echo chambers?
You even gave the example of Alex Jones, he was silenced by the mainstream social media sites.
Yes, fake and misleading news is easier to spread than issuing corrections or fact checking, but that doesn't mean that we should pretend they don't exist, because it's NOT working.
EDIT: Mind you, I'm not advocating for what Twitter has essentially become, but hiding away these people is also not working very clearly based on how well things are going.
Because none of them really were kicked out, or silenced, or banned.
Though I do agree, it's an insanely slippery slope: where do you draw the line.
> They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astroturfing the platform and/or manipulating the algorithm (either through paid advertisements or by owning a platform and controlling the algorithm outright)
Anyone willing to take a good-faith stab at why this couldn't equally well be a description of traditional media too - say - the WaPo?
I challenge the notion that they're equal. Social media at least provides vox while traditional media is completely one-way. How much is astroturfing and illusion can be debated forever, but any positive value is greater than zero. Traditional media acts as programming first. Journalistic integrity and trust in institutions has been sold off for shareholder value.
I posted this elsewhere:
There's a major difference with the modern social media platforms, which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus. That illusion makes them much more powerful than anything that came before, to the point where they are different in kind, not just in degree.
When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.
The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.
At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.
> When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position
I hesitate to reference politics here, but read Nate Silver's writings on what he's termed "the Indigo Blob"[0][1]...
> The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions
When I think back to how things went down during the pandemic, I'm convinced that the "real opinions" that most people held were based on blindly following position of whatever media they were consuming (and that media likely blindly following whatever government messaging).
Actual scientists posting actual statistics?[2] No-one wanted to see the data on who was - and wasn't - at significant risk from Covid.
At one point back then, one of my closest friends bluntly told me in a group chat that I was "a sociopath", despite him knowing that out of the two of us, I'm the one with the science PhD + published papers, and (at least science-wise) he's the layman.
Hey ho, he and I eventually made up...
[0] https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blo... [1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/how-the-indigo-blob-runs-a-bluf... [2] https://medium.com/wintoncentre/what-have-been-the-fatal-ris...
The Washington Post has changed considerably in the last few months, specifically from being fiercely free to being bought.
> couldn't
Hypothetically, almost anything could happen.
> The Washington Post has changed considerably in the last few months, specifically from being fiercely free to being bought.
I read it every day and hadn't noticed. Can you give examples, beyond having heard of the Presidential Endorsement saga?
Sure! Here’s another that got wide attention, but many journalists have also left recently in quieter protest.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/04/nx-s1-5248299/cartoonist-quit...
It's a shame that this is true for many platforms. Social media platforms have the potential to be incredibly democratic. The more people watch content the more it's shown to other people. Anyone's voice could be amplified in a way that was limited to broadcast networking and printing presses in the past. A million small conversations can occur in such a way that they create a chorus of discussion about public interests. Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
> Social media platforms have the potential to be incredibly democratic.
> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication. For a brief period we had some social media platforms that made gestures in the direction of free communication. Then the investor capital came rolling in, and they were expected to increase revenue. How do you increase revenue of your free communication platform? You sell the messaging. Call it promotion, advertising, whatever. The only thing of value you have at your disposal are people's eyeball, you're going to sell what they see. You could ask your users to pay for the service... but then 80% of them will flake to a rival service that's still free. If there's a way to marry the profit motive and a truly democratic social media platform then our best and brightest have yet to find it. I suspect it doesn't exist.
> It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication.
Exactly.
It seems the only way to sidestep this growing problem is to create a profit free platform, and view it almost as a utility but is openly owned and controlled by "the people."
The vTaiwan and g0v ("gov zero") projects are relevant starter examples for a newer type of distributed governance:
https://www.stearthinktank.com/post/deconstructing-binary-ci...
> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
The first step to reform would be to persuade legacy media to stop reporting the opinions trending on X/Twitter as "news". Stop reporting it entirely, it's manipulated, at best unverified, rubbish.
That would require legacy reporters to get out on the streets and do some reporting.
Can you imagine, holding public servants (a president for example) accountable for their statements… practically unheard of in the last decade…
It's their legal out against having to research stuff to prevent libel liability. And they can embed social media photos and videos that weren't even from the rights holder to avoid having to clear rights to anything.
This is part of why I think there should exist a popular real-name-only network. It'd go far to prevent these types of attacks on the megaphone.
Isn’t that what Facebook is supposed to provide? From anecdotal evidence, people are happy to engage in vitriol online that they would never do face to face, real name or not.
Heck I’ve seen some nastiness on LinkedIn with people’s government name and employer right next to it.
Real names don’t do much to prevent online assholery.
1) No, Facebook does not confirm people’s real names
2) This isn’t a solution to vitriol, it’s a solution to inorganic amplification
They absolutely do require confirmation in some cases - https://www.facebook.com/help/1090831264320592
Of course that’s not foolproof and there are millions of bot accounts by facebooks own admission. But at the scale of billions of active users across the globe I’m not sure what approach could be 100%
> in some cases
some != all
therefore, it is not a real-name only network.
I'm not asking for Facebook to become a confirmed real-name only network. I am not asking for anyone to be compelled to supply a confirmed real-name only network.
I am saying: I wish that one existed and caught on with consumers.
Google+ famously instituted real name policies before it was cool. You used to get banned on Facebook for using a nickname but I think drag queens pushed back, god bless.
(2014) https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/09/28/35...
I blame the Zuck algorithmic feed ruined it all he was my favorite out of all the feudal barons too :(
> These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature
The US Gov has a mandate to preserve and uphold democracy. Shuttering communication is prior restraint - an anti-democratic action.
Platforms have no mandate to preserve and uphold democracy.
Restricting who can own what, however… that’s long been fair game.
In my dream world we’d get something like the rules we had, until fairly recently, restricting max broadcast media audience control in a given market for a single owner, but for Web platforms. Don’t like being limited to five million users or whatever? Then use a standard that puts control over curation and presentation in the hands of the user. Want to control all that, like all these awful platforms do? Then live with the limit.
Creative + precedence, I like it. How can we get the fediverse enough funding to lobby Congress?
You're presuming that these are communication platforms. I argue that they aren't—to the extent that they are useful for communication it's a pure coincidence, not a design choice.
Each of these platforms is fundamentally a propaganda platform—they're explicitly designed to manipulate people into buying stuff, and that capability is frequently turned to voter manipulation. The US government has decided that while US-based billionaires having access to such influence is fine and dandy, the CCP should not. So tiktok must be sold to a US owner.
"Forcing" people to be "free".
If you want peace, you better prepare for war.
It is forbidden to forbid.
The necessary evil.
All that to say, we live in a complicated world, and beautiful ideals are only a direction to keep, never to be reached.
The state is under no obligation to allow known foreign propagandists attached to a known communist party to engage in activities well outside the protections of the first amendment.
Of course, they don't HAVE to shutter. They can sell their interest in Tiktok and stay open. They have chosen not to do that thus far, and hence they have chosen to shutter.
There's a better way: privacy laws. The US government decided not to use it.
Privacy legislation isn't going to happen because it's too late.
It's now an industry, with enough companies with enough employees and, more importantly, enough political and economic power to destroy almost any attempts to push legislation that may actually protect privacy in any real way.
But, honestly, I don't think the TikTok ban has any overlap with privacy concerns. It's pure cold war.
It’s less Cold War and more population control. The US government refuses to allow for communist sympathizing or class consciousness, and there’s a lot of that on TikTok.
Privacy laws don't solve the real problem, they would only solve the fig leaf that politicians are hiding behind when it comes to tiktok.
The actual problem is and always has been control over the content being fed to users. It's not an issue of privacy, it's an issue of voter manipulation. It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.
On the one hand that's a very rational position for people who owe their election to algorithmic voter manipulation to take, but that doesn't really make it better ethically.
The voting algorithm needs to change so that destructive (negative) campaigning is not so effective.
Duverger's law makes campaigns devolve into undermining and destroying the competition, with the two parties hosting primaries to see which of them can "turn the wheel" the hardest before the general election where they claim "don't worry I won't crash the car!" despite their prior incentives.
If we used plurality voting for the inputs to a decision problem that follows the classic tragedy of the commons, we'd see a similar result. If instead of just {+1, +0, +0, ...} without repeats, we instead voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, ...} cooperation (or at least constructive competitive frameworks) would at least be at parity with destructive and potentially mutually destructive competition.
>The voting algorithm needs to change so that destructive (negative) campaigning is not so effective.
No algorithm is going to fix this, it's human nature. Negative campaigning has been a constant of elections since elections were invented. At best you can tamp down on the aggressive engagement feedback loops. We should probably do that, but it's good to stay realistic about outcomes.
The difference is that if your party A spends x amount of resources on negative campaigning on another party B instead of on yourself and B is only one of 4 competitors (B,C,D,E) the other 3 will stomp you.
error_logic was referring to the "Voting system" meaning the way we elect politicians: plurality voting vs. ranked choice/approval voting. Not an algorithm in the social media feed sense.
Other voting systems do promote less negativity, among many other benefits such as giving us real choice and a true multiparty system.
> It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.
I think it's more likely that it's able to pass muster when the threat is a foreign state. The US may be more limited in what it can do with it's own entities (I don't know for sure) and would probably receive far more push back from the courts if they tried heavy handed measures before going through the proper legislation regulation (as states are doing) or the FBI route(if it were in their realm of bad). The threat that is more concerning than US owned and operated companies getting US citizens to vote for their prefered US president, is a foreign state slowly radicalizing US citizens(without their knowledge it's happening) against themselves (the US), more than voter manipulation.
The solution for the other half of the problem is anti-trust divestment of client apps from hosted services. Let TikTok (and Faceboot, and so on) keep their own assortments of services. But the mobile and web apps should be spun out into different companies, only communicating with openly documented APIs that are available for every other developer/user.
This won't solve the issue with propaganda that still manages to be compelling in the court of public opinion, but it will at least level the playing field rather than having such topics inescapably amplified for "engagement" and whatnot. There's definitely a mechanic of people realizing specific social media apps make them feel bad, but as of right now it is extremely hard to switch to an alternative due to the anticompetitive bundling of client presentation software (including "the algorithm") with hosted services (intrinsic Metcalfe's law attractors).
This doesn't make any technical sense. The key part of what is at issue with TikTok and other social media companies is editorial control over the ranking algorithm. The ranking algorithm is not done on the client, and I don't see how it can be.
And even if you could do it somehow, that is in direct conflict with the other main complaint people have about social media apps ("selling your data"). FB had an API that they opened up to some degree, then Cambridge Analytica happened.
Discovery algorithms are part of client presentation and should be under control of the client, regardless of beign commonly done where the database lives.
From the technical perspective, for things where your view is limited to friends that is straightforward to do on the client. Global discovery using metadata can be done using deterministic searching which condenses the view of the database enough that the client can then rank those results however it'd like. And global discovery from a pure firehose is likely even within the reach of a modern personal computer.
As far as apps taking a copy of data, the first obvious control is that its only apps you choose which have access to your data. And for the general problem, that is the point of privacy legislation - which was taken as a given by the comment I was responding to.
There's a good argument for separating content from discovery. Originally, Google was pure discovery - all you got was the page's link and maybe a line of description. If antitrust law was used to separate discovery from content, transmission, and aggregation, Google would be forced back into their original niche. They'd be a much smaller company, of course.
> In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent. The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
Which should be a major concerning point. Censoring a powerful media gives more power to the censor than censoring less powerful ones. Now the censor has the power to ensure that only US government and related big tech corporations are allowed to manufacturate consent over the public, with no way of having options of different views. Suddenly the media becomes even more dangerous.
How exactly does this differ from Facebook and Instagram?
I don't think it does, I think they all should be banned by the same reasoning.
Owners residency/citizenship
Reds under TikTok beds.
>The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
This logic applies to all media publications, not just internet platforms in the United States. When people say "anti-democratic" in the US I'm pretty certain they take it to mean "the government interfering in the speech of a private entity", not failing to uphold the principle of "1 tweet, 1 impression".
Every newspaper, television station, blog post, what have you consists of a small minority of people both creating and selling reach in unequal ways. If it is anti-democratic and therefore presumably not tolerated for a small minority to exercise or sell speech, then that's just equivalent to saying no private media enterprise should exist.
Needlessly to say the only person who can make this claim with a straight face is Noam Chomsky because he's been saying that about everyone for 50 years, but this is obviously not a position held by anyone currently trying to ban TikTok
There's a major difference with the modern social media platforms, which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus. That illusion makes them much more powerful than anything that came before, to the point where they are different in kind, not just in degree.
When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.
The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.
At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.
> which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus
Sounds no different to Fox News and CNN to me.
I hate advertising too, but I'd be troubled if it were banned.
I mean, so are newspapers, but you don't want to ban those either.
(I don't like TikTok and I agree it is damaging, but this is just reasoning I can't get behind)
> In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent.
Like Hollywood, then.
In other words, some of the Westerners’ hypocrisy when it comes to the views they hold on their socio-economic system never ceases to amaze me, especially now, as we’re in the middle of a new translatio imperii phase.
The "small minority" label has been applied to Trump supporters on social media, yet they have won in the elections twice.
Manufacturing consent still works via the traditional newspapers. That is where "the (current) truth" originates from. That is what is amplified on social media, including here. It takes years of struggle of independently minded people to argue against mainstream. Often after two years mainstream takes the position of independently minded people and takes the credit.
TikTok is different in that it addresses teenagers. They don't have any political power and will change their opinions in their 20s/30s. The data collection and blackmail arguments are still valid. But they also happen in the West, except that three letter agencies collect compromising material on domestic and foreign politicians.
I mean, really? On social media anti-China sentiment is at an all time high. This Chinese manipulation operation must have really failed.
Now do twitter.
Agreed. And Facebook and Instagram. The US government appears to think that a US billionaire owning an algorithmic mind-shaper is fine, but I disagree.
yes these platforms are BAD. But still, tiktok is a tailored app for US market and bends to US regulations. You think this is bad? There are worse, some US users even chose to signup Douyin or REDnote. How would you ban THAT? Build a national firewall like the communists?
> The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
Personally I don’t think singling them out is anti democratic, because this platform and Chinese run companies in general have issues unique to them.
TikTok lied under oath about the location of data they claimed was stored in the US. That’s fraud and has concerning privacy and national security implications:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index....
This is why divestiture to an American entity with no ties back to a mainland China owner makes sense - it severs the tie that results in illegal surveillance. It’s not a ban on specific content or even the app - just a ban on the owner.
Another issue - it has also come out that TikTok (not Douyin) employees have to uphold the goals of the CCP as part of their job:
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
And then there’s the basic lack of reciprocity in market access, since all non Chinese social media is banned in China and yet their apps can access consumers outside China.
Precisely how Russia tainted the Romanian presidential elections using Tiktok dormant accounts to hijack another PR campaign.
I'm with the SCotUS on this.
There has been very little public investigation. This is what I could find:
https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
The Romanian National Liberal Party (opponents of Georgescu) bought the campaign. Their hashtag was "hijacked" (whatever that means) to boost Georgescu instead.
I do not know how TikTok works. Perhaps it is as simple as Georgescu supporters simply using the paid for hashtag for their own messages.
So, according to this article, the Russians did nothing. The Liberal Party engaged in questionable TikTok interference and Georgescu supporters jumped on the bandwagon.
The Western media falling silent on the issue would indicate that this politico.eu is correct.
Hasn't the Russia story been already debunked? https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/12/23/romanian-centre-rig...
Debunked? That article says the election was annulled after evidence of Russian interference was provided.
Anyway Russian interference doesn't usually involve the Kremlin giving money to voters directly (unless you are a citizen of Moldova), but through people in the country willing to sell themselves to Russia. Like "Bogdan Peșchir" in the article who donated €1 million to Tiktok users who promoted Georgescu.
That's the campaign that was hijacked by Russia. The PR company tried (and failed) to use a teasing campaign to promote another candidate without naming him. The Russian bots were commenting with the far-right ultranationalist's candidate name the day before the election under the unsuspecting influencers' videos paid for by the PR company.
In parallel there were other campaigns in the ultranationalist's favour, paid for with crypto.
He's also linked to a former secret service figure¹ who betrayed NATO to the KGB in the '60s, so he's either a FSB trojan, an useful idiot, or both.
1. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihai_Caraman
Holy crap
You just exposed(or explained) what Hillary Clinton did using Facebook in Egypt and Tunisia (and HongKong, and others)
Funny it's called democratic in old days, now it's anti-democratic
I mean, at least people not using TikTok as the platform to scheme any violent revolutions, not like what happened in mentioned regions
Or, is this exactly what the US gov fears about TikTok?
This is nothing new. Google's instrumental role in the "Arab Spring" is old hat by now.
If you correlate the hacks of anonymous to that you will get an interesting picture to say the least :)
As someone that loves dev stuff it is so beautiful not a single soldier deployed but an entire region destabilized and so many people killed
I was paying attention to telecomix and US forces in-country maintaining cellular infra to fight against the information blackouts but what was going down on 4chan?
Idk tbh never been on 4chan but you ever wonder why that infra was being defended? Ever heard of a guy called Pinochet? Noriega? Videla? Doe? Or my personal favorite Mobutu?
Why are we pretending movements can't be co-opted or engineered or the CIA does things out of love would expect that on Reddit but not on HN. A lot of the countries involved did not recover look at their GDP pre vs during vs now. Look at how power centers have shifted and isolated Iran since then :)
I definitely agree USA was pulling for the revolutionaries, and making sure the powers that be couldn't snuff out all communications was essential in throwing the fight, I just don't believe in inception as far as inspiring a revolt in the first place.
I mention 4chan because I thought it synonymous with anonymous, and I was wondering what you knew that I didn't re: what hacking was happening.
And yes Mobutu with his little leopard hat is my favorite too.
The leopard hat was indeed the best :)
I didn't know anonymous was active on 4chan it's kind of uncomfortable for people of my ilk to be there so I avoid but that kind of checks out
Do you think there is/was any advantage to having a group labelled as a freedom fighter / vigilante perform hacking operations as opposed to official state actors during color revolutions?
I guess I'm thinking of the Guy Fawkes era. I'm scarcely aware of what anonymous means outside of what was reported in mainstream media about it. Now that I think of it that too was a case of one group choosing not to correct anyone when credited with the accomplishments of somebody else. They would produce all these cringe videos about how any day now they'd spill the beans on the powers that be. Kind of a WikiLeaks fan club more than anything.
But you, then, were referencing some other front in the info war with folks that had access to higher tier tools than a Low Orbit Ion Cannon?
And yes plausible deniability goes a long way, perhaps even enabling people to collaborate when they may otherwise be on opposing "sides" as far as states are concerned.
No one who knew enough about the powers that be to spill the beans would live to spill aforementioned beans all we can do is look at and correlate publicly available data to infer plays the aforementioned powers maybe calling such is the life of poor peasants like me lol
Idk how we went from color revolution, hacking, social engineering to Guy and DDoS but now I gotta watch V for Vendetta a peasant can always dream :)
Although i would never put it past the DoD under Clinton to manipulate an election here and a revolution there, my impression of Silicon Valley during the Arab Spring is a bunch of self congratulatory preening over the power of social media.
I always felt the CIAs greatest trick is letting people credit them with overthrowing governments, a power they don't actually possess, except to tip the scales with a little gun-running. Same with the so called Twitter revolution. Assange and Manning can take credit for leaking the cables, but the anger was domestic and already extant.
Hunger and poverty (mostly caused by sanctions and economic crises) are dry firewood, and social media are the sparks.
The former is the underlying contradiction, and the latter is the force of organization
Both of these elements are required for a successful color revolution
Force of organization is an interesting phrase, never heard that before. Reminds me of catalyzing crystal seeds, or how at the quark level mass arises out of information/order/entropy in the complexity sense. The more ordered the heavier it is. (Maybe this is fringe/kook/IANAPhysicist).
I guess before social media there would be other sources of order, churches, political organizations, youth groups. Maybe in the absence of that Twitter is all the revolutionaries had left (but my above conjecture is, there were greater sources of organization in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere than that which was legible online. (As an otherwise unaffiliated American I have no way of knowing.)
>In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent
These platforms are much less subject to manufactured consent than the traditional news media, which was controlled by a small number of entities aligned with the elites of the day. Decentralised information transmission is fundamentally better for the people than centralised information transmission controlled by a few gatekeepers who suppress anything not in their interests.
Look at how homogenous in views the baby boomers are relatively to the younger generations, as evidence of how much more effective at manufacturing consent the traditional media are.
>They're places where a small minority of people can become an unstoppable movement that seems to have real support
All other social media platforms are places where a small minority of people silence dissent of what international experts have classed as a genocide, perpetuated by leaders who are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. TikTok is the only platform that allowed footage of this genocide to be spread, so that small minority had to do everything in their power to shut it down.
In a trade war any company is fair game. A trade war thus naturally reaches across multiple values that a nation may hold, bringing them simultaneously under tension. Free speech is just a coincidence to the nature of TikTok, but what about cars, drones, phones, or even soybeans?
When values are in conflict, which should win? In the hierarchy of values, where does economic world position stand in terms of national concerns?
What? You're musing that a fucking trade war could possibly be placed above freedom of speech? The answer of which "values" should win is 110% clear.
Do people have the prerogative to have successful industries? Do people have the prerogative to cheap energy, food, and other life basics? In the US, this is not actually enshrined anywhere, is it? The right to life simply means you roll the dice with life, doesn't it? One might say that even the beggars on the streets are enjoying their right to speech and life as we speak.
Are we afraid to list the topology of our values? A framework for comparing which values are actually superior? That's all I asked for.
Personally I think if China found the right narrative to pinpoint destroy Apple & Tesla, or moved too quickly to capture Taiwanese industry, then the US would seriously contemplate war.
This is what you asked:
> When values are in conflict, which should win? In the hierarchy of values, where does economic world position stand in terms of national concerns?
The answer is simple: when economic world position is in conflict with the value of freedom of speech, then freedom of speech wins.
If you disagree you can go amend the Constitution accordingly.
The US constitution will absolutely permit war as a response to trade conflict. The US has already gone to war for such reasons with smaller countries.
We were speaking on the value of speech. What values should prompt us to send youths to die abroad? What does the constitution say about the hierarchy of values here? I'm just asking for a framework for determining which values are superior under conflict.
> The US constitution will absolutely permit war
Right, and it doesn't permit infringement of First Amendment rights.
Just out of curiosity, do you think the 2nd amendment obligates the USA to sell foreign enemies any and all weapons?
You’re going to have to work on that analogy a little more and come back to me
A former sausage maker here. I (used to) design these engagement/recommendation engines for a large corp, did academic research in the field, went to conferences, etc.
In general, I wholehearted support the freedom of speech, and if it were any other case, I would agree with the EFF statement here. However, knowing how the sausages are made, I am reluctantly agreeing with the ban, at least for now.
People underestimate how powerful these tools can be. Based on simple, readily available "anonymous" data, we can already impute your demographics data -- age, gender, family relations, occupation, income, etc -- using a decade-old ML techniques. In some cases, we can detect which stage of your emotional journey you are in and nudge you towards our target state. What surprised me about Cambridge Analytica was its ineffectiveness, at least as reported. There are plenty of teams out there that use these techniques to greatly further their gains, whatever those may be.
In Primakov doctrine, information warfare through sowing discontent and/or eroding psychological well-being is very much real and actualizable. I am not claiming that a foreign government is currently single-handedly controlling TikTok to brainwash the American youth; we do not have conclusive proof of that. However, the fact that such a tool is in a foreign country's arsenal is itself a massive danger to America's national security.
I detect an undercurrent of pride that drives you to ascribe undue agency to your work. "Brainwashing" isn't real. Bleak material circumstances sow division, not memes. Oversocialized urban professionals have only pushed this narrative because media is an abstract low-friction environment where they can pretend to still exert control and avoid ever addressing real problems.
A "national security risk" is only a problem for the national security apparatus itself—not actual Americans. Kids don't want to die for their government because its failures have already shaped so much of their personal lives. It's evident in their rents, their student/medical bills, and the character of their neighborhoods. It's rather insulting to say shifty Chinamen are tricking them in all this.
There's no need to demonize people, soulless systems will do just fine. Game theory is pushing continental powers against maritime ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcVSgYz5SJ8
First, it is much easier to blame everything on a boogeyman than to invest actual effort in improving the lives of Americans and investing in their education. Tale as old as time.
Second, the US realizes that it cannot reliably manufacture consent if its citizens are not tuned in to the information sources that it can influence.
> the fact that such a tool is in a foreign country's arsenal is itself a massive danger to America's national security
This implies people outside the US should relate the same way to Meta, X, etc. (Which seems fine to me, just pointing it out)
yes, and they do. Even the US allies in Europe don't completely trust the US with their citizens data, hence the on-shore data requirements. This is despite the US is footing the bill for Ukraine and, by extension, defending Europe right now.
> This is despite the US is footing the bill for Ukraine and, by extension, defending Europe right now.
Things like this is exactly why we don't trust US media and data management. This is only just enough close to the truth so it doesn't sound absolutely absurd but still is so far from it.
European nations have provided more aid to Ukraine in total in both absolute and relative terms than the US. Hopefully the irony isn't lost on you when we're talking about controlling the narrative here.
this is what happens when people (in the USA) largely get their information from the TikTok :)
More aid in general - yes. But in the battlefield US was much bigger part. While non-lethal aid is important too, without lethal aid there may be no need for non-lethal support anymore.
And even talking about lethal aid, some European countries loved to play the numbers (hi Estonia).
I actually agree that EU should pay more for the war being waged against Europe. I think it would put more pressure on the US to continue being a relevant party in the world politics. Honestly the fight in Ukraine is more important than every war the US has been a part of. ONLY because it is a war, if it was diplomacy that is another thing.
China, North Korea and Iran is supporting Russia in this, the US can choose what they want to do. Repeating 2014 seems like a bad idea.
Facebook and X blocking mostly happens in authoritarian nations, most places are more hands-off so far.
A lot of climate change inaction propaganda for example comes from these platforms and is aligned with the new US presidency and Musk agenda, which is a bigger national security threat than anything in China-US relations or the Ukraine events.
Incredible real time demonstration of how the algorithms deployed by the US social media companies can destroy the brain of and otherwise inteligent person.
> People underestimate how powerful these tools can be.
It's rather you're overestimating it (no wonder the ineffectiveness of CA was a surprise to you). It's such a low-power tool that it couldn't even be used to avoid its ban.
> In some cases
In some cases you don't need any of the ML techniques to do that. But at any rate, that's an irrelevant scale when it comes to "massive danger"
Where does one learn more about these topics? I've been interested in learning just how these apps influence people and would like to learn more.
Given that the decision is unanimous just maybe it is in alignment with the constitution. If Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Jackson agree on something, that's some kind of signal.
Signal of belief in an excessively strong state?
Clarence Thomas is not actually conservative in the small government sense.
Neil Gorsuch is though and he signed on too. He even said that while he thought the government had to prove a higher standard than the opinion required, it didn’t matter to the decision because the government in his mind had met that even higher standard anyway.
Neil “the President can use SEAL Team 6 to eliminate his political opponents” Gorsuch?
He’s not a small government conservative, lol.
So you quote the extreme interpretation of the decision by the dissenters to describe what he believes as opposed to using his own words? Seems unfair.
Yes, I believe that in a court case, when someone says "what about Scenario X" and then you write an opinion that fails to preclude Scenario X, you are writing an opinion that can be criticized for allowing Scenario X.
Gorsuch saying "I am not considering Scenario X" does not actually mean his opinion precludes it. His opinion, as written, allows it.
Pss, dude, nobody is small government anything. They are just want the regulation to apply in a manner that they are content with.
Right, which is why "Justice XYZ agrees" does not (by itself) say anything at all about the moral or political valence of the decision.
The commerce clause has been used since the founding of the country for this sort of thing. I never saw a way for it to be called unconstitutional.
For most of US history people's access to information was controlled by a few powerful news/media corporations and the Supreme Court did nothing to stop that. It's no surprise that when we finally get a decentralised information transmission system not beholden to the elites, the Supreme Court doesn't want to lend it a hand.
Wait, since when is TikTok decentralised?
The information is decentralized (a hundred million different sources...), just not the infrastructure.
The way that it is distributed is centralized and controlled by a single party. You can generate content all day, but unless the algorithm pick you up and make you popular, your content may as well not exists.
Social media algorithms are nuclear bombs for the mind. And they are beholden to whoever holds the detonator. It just happens that a lot of people are happy with China holding it.
When the mind-reading algorithm provides each user with their own reality to live in, then we are talking about editorializing. And allowing a communist, anti-Western government direct control over that power does not seem reasonable.
inb4 "better than my own government" - great, we agree that social media algorithms are a net negative to all society.
Communications is great. Video is great. Social media algorithms controlled by rage-inducing profit seekers and governments is not great.
> rage-inducing profit seekers
That pretty accurately describes Twitter and Facebook these days. TikTok, not so much, which you would know if you had used the platform. (Or, you have used the platform, and you prefer rage-inducing crap, so it continues serving that to you)
The proponents of the ban keep mentioning some kind of nefarious "communist" propaganda, and some kind of nefarious privacy data access, but I've yet to see someone show concrete examples of what that would look like.
My TikTok feed contains a ton of funny cat videos, Europeans shitting on clueless American tourists, OF models hawking themselves, the ubiquitous dance videos, people making caricature cringe videos, and a bunch of viral meme videos. And a lady drinking Costco peach juice.
Where's the propaganda? Not in my feed, that's for sure.
Where's the rage-inducing bait? Not in my feed, that's for sure.
What privacy data can the nefarious CCP access about me? That I like cat videos and memes?
I don't know... The baseball error videos TikTok keeps sending me are making me want to seize the means of production.
It means your psyche has not yet been targeted by explicit reprogramming.
> “which would’ve led to the inescapable conclusion … had to be rejected as infringing … free speech”
When the EFF sounds about as sane as a sovereign citizen…
With friends like these, who needs enemies…
I worked at EFF for twenty years, and every iteration or incarnation of EFF would have said that it should be extraordinarily difficult for the government to prevent Americans from using foreign web sites or software. And that it should be extraordinarily difficult for the government to compel tech intermediaries to help block foreign sites or software. This would have been a bog-standard EFF position for the organization's entire existence.
(I would say something even stronger than "extraordinarily difficult", but then I'd be on thinner ice.)
It required specific legislation to ban TikTok. I would say that's pretty extraordinary. I think even the EFF should admit that allowing the Chinese government to control a major American social media app is an unacceptable security risk.
It's amazing that all three arms of the government can come together so quickly to ban an app, but we can't have affordable housing, public healthcare, a higher minimum wage, or send kids to school without bulletproof backpacks.
Stop talking about that or they'll ban HN next!
Not only did it require specific legislation, but it had the near unanimous support of all 3 branches of the government (if you exclude the shifts in presidential opinion)
The second paragraph of the EFF statement says the ban provides insufficient protection of US security.
> The United States’ foreign foes easily can steal, scrape, or buy Americans’ data by countless other means.
True, but that's not the point.
> Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.
Sorry, that might've been true for old media, but social media is way more insidious.
So is it that it's not antidemocratic now because of new media, or is it antidemocratic but thats ok because of new media?
Probably the latter, if viewed narrowly, but the whole point is to preserve democracy in the end. This ban is the lesser of two evils.
Is chemotherapy not unhealthy now because of cancer, or is it unhealthy but that’s OK because of cancer?
It’s funny how they’re shutting down TikTok because it’s “manipulative and anti-democratic” while that’s a core trait of every algorithmic/engagement social media. Twitter and Threads should be banned as well then.
They had the option to divest into an American entity. But failed or didn't want to do it.
You have the freedom of speech to manipulate and be anti-democratic as long as you are the US government or bound by its control.
Actually, the option to divest is to escape control by the Chinese government, not to enter control by the US government.
If the government can’t ban a business entity then doesn’t that say something about control? We have an app controlled by a communist dictatorship. They can keep the app running by selling it, but they won’t.
What’s perplexing to me is leftists love how companies in America can be forced to sell and broken if they are declared monopolies. But if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers suddenly forcing a sale is wrong? It makes me feel even more certain that HN is astroturfed by Chinese bots because who cares
> if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers
I suspect that people pattern-match this declaration to McCarthyism.
Additionally, the US has been invoking national security for a series of extremely dubious moves recently as well -- e.g. Biden's latest decision to block the sale of US Steel to Nippon on shaky grounds of national security, and his administration's recent policy to introduce export limits on GPUs to all countries except 18 (most US allies, NATO or otherwise, are now unjustly being restricted in how many GPUs they can import). Coupled with the incoming Trump administration's threats of trade war and expansionist designs on Greenland, people -- especially non-Americans, also in countries that have historically been friends of the US -- are very quickly running out of goodwill for the US, and in light of these events naturally the TikTok ban is seen as just another draconian attempt by the US to practise (economic) imperialism.
Your last statement is a pretty silly generalization, and I don't think you need to bring in left/right extremes into this. For a lot of folks this is more about precedent on being able to ban anything the current establishment disagrees with, which has its own merits, even if you want to say that it's strictly being done because China controls it, which is not 100% of the reason why.
I despise communism myself, as my country went through 45 years of it. I agree with TikTok being forced to sell, and I'd like to see all social media sites offer more transparency mechanisms to NGOs and government agencies to show how their algorithms really work to have some watchdog be able to check if what we're seeing is heavily manipulated, especially during election years.
It is hard to love the notion that banning a third party’s app is infringing upon my own right to free speech. If it were a ban on the Internet then that seems to make more sense. It’s analogous to a ban on paper, pens, or bullhorns. I can be sympathetic to the idea that, for some people, one particular proprietary app is their main tool for expression, even if that’s hardly ideal.
A ban on routers made by a specific foreign company — when the government knows full well the Internet can’t work without them — feels like a more likely scenario. When Huawei equipment bans were in the news, were there similar First Amendment arguments about that, too?
The first amendment at its core is - if someone wants to say something and someone wants to listen to the first one saying it - the government has no right to prevent or interfere with the process. Banning the app trough which information flows is interference.
And the government doesn't offer any kind of remedy - you can't pick up your whole social cluster and move to another platform.
tiktok didn't had its 1A rights infringed, but every american that wants to listen to clips of old episodes of friends does.
What’s next, pitting a fence around some field is also freedom-of-speech issue since some people may want to talk in that field?
if youtube was being banned instead for the same reason (pretend it was owned by ByteDance), would you feel the same way? what about any other website/platform that you like?
what if this was YOUR business getting banned?
What’s interesting about this argument is that the playing field is highly asymmetric between the us and china. China explicitly firewalls out large amounts of the internet from its population. If you want to do business via an e-commerce in china, you cannot do so without explicit permission, license and partial Chinese equity share - for example https://developers.cloudflare.com/china-network/concepts/icp...
On the other hand, we have much more relaxed restrictions going the other way. Why not consider “fairness” from that perspective as well?
China doesn't pretend to be a democracy, so as they don't are nor pretend to be a democracy the rest of us should abandon democracy? Should be stop begin democratic because China isn't?
China absolutely does pretend to be a democracy. They call it a "whole-process democracy".
TIL. In 2021 the ccp released a white paper titled “China: democracy that works”
https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/whitepaper/202112/04/cont...
https://news.cgtn.com/news/whitepaper/China+Democracy+That+W...
I’m not advocating that we abandon democracy. To use your argument the other way around, why should we treat china as a democracy as it doesn’t pretend to be one? They don’t allow our businesses to operate on an equal footing there, so why afford them easy access to our markets?
In the case of any foreign ownership of mass media, it is trivial to weaponize that platform to wage asymmetric war against a political adversary by driving division in between the population through lies, half truths, and selected context. That’s why the US has laws to ban foreign ownership of broadcast media outlets.
Yes, that’s a good way to think about it.
What if it was a ban, not on printing presses, but on a specific model of printing press, made in China, that happens to have 99% market share.
I want to try to see an analogy with Freenode, Libera, and IRC, but that was self inflicted damage by a private entity rather than by a government mandate.
> The United States’ foreign foes easily can steal, scrape, or buy Americans’ data by countless other means.
Yes, all they have to do is sign up for the usual services advertisers use.
Curious to hear from other people here. I'm UK citizen, and on the whole, my perception is that I'm much more concerned about the effect on democracy from US led fake news and social media (specifically Twitter, Facebook and Truth Social) than TikTok.
I'm not making a case that that is justified, but I'm interested to know if other people in or outside the US share that perception?
I can no longer send money to the EFF due to their obvious misreading of the situation. They will lose $100s/year from me, I hope it was worth it. Clearly, a naive take that doesn't understand the nuances related to Tiktok's situation.
Tiktok can still exist and keep showing their garbage to Americans, but it can't do so while being owned by a foreign adversary that attacks us almost continuously.
Sure, they can still buy our information elsewhere, but this is like saying I shouldn't put a lock on my door because thieves can break in through other means. Just check the looting happening in Los Angeles as a result of the reduction in the barriers for theft. Cost matters and if we increase the costs for China's data theft, their ability to steal from us will be reduced.
Yet when Europeans feel the same way about American manipulative social media and the US sees it as targeting its tech industry, you don’t see a bias? Are you OK with EU banning Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, too, because it goes against its own citizens rights and safety? Or, following your logic, should we demand they are sold to European owners?
Why do you think it’s YOU who decides to be the gatekeeper on all that data and no one else?
You see the double standards here? The hypocrisy?
You can demand whatever you desire from your government. It's your country.
Can you expand and on this? Do you think EU should force every successful US company to divest their EU branches. I do not know where I stand on this but you seem to have a clear idea on this..
I think the EU should do whatever the EU wants to do and accept the consequences of their actions. As an American, I might have opinions but no say in EU's matters. Europe has plenty of very smart people to figure out what's best for them.
I say this because I feel the reply to my top post was unnecessarily aggressive. I have friends in Europe and respect their independence. I don't know why an opinion on a purely US matter brought anger from an EU resident.
My best guess is the feeling I sometimes have that Europeans believe Americans keep scheming to subjugate them, when in fact Americans hardly ever think about Europe. Also, when Americans do think about Europe, it's in a positive way as Europeans share many of our values.
The big corporations, with government support, that does try to profit from Europe are the same that do it to American citizens in the US, so we're kind of in the same fight against them.
I think the point is that it's not hypocritical to support the TikTok ban, since they don't care and/or can't influence what the EU does with respect to American social media.
I don't often disagree with the EFF. Strange times.
I disagree with the EFF here too but I am so happy that there is a good faith well reasoned argument on the other side. This struggle is what makes democracy work.
Yeah this is a weird one where their m.o. on privacy/security are at odds with their first amendment side of things...sounds like the latter won out. I also disagree with them on this. This isn't something like net neutrality. It's one of many privately-owned social media platforms and one such with deeply privacy-invasive software that has adversarial foreign ties against the US.
There’s a simple, obvious and overwhelmingly popular solution to this problem that respects free speech and privacy. Unlike the current law, it wouldn’t blatantly violate the constitution by targeting a specific group:
Apply reasonable privacy and transparency rules to all social media platforms, regardless of ownership.
I’m not sure the EFF really needs to spell it out at this point.
Yeah the reasonable privacy and transparency rule here is "don't be an arm of the PRC." It applies to all social media platforms.
Adding: commenter @schoen's above comment is making me second guess myself on this. I'm pretty torn.
The fact that only one app is being banned makes it pretty obvious that privacy concerns are orthogonal to the political shift this represents. The law was originally passed before the Gaza ceasefire, and the activism on the app relating to that issue was the specific example that was blamed on Chinese influence. The hypothesis was that teenagers would not know or care about US policy towards the conflict if a foreign communication service was not facilitating the spread of relevant information.
Well at least you can agree with both the state, and as it were at this point, the scary foreign state, on this one.. Probably worth more dollars to donuts to be on those sides anyway!
Funny how the EFF posted an anti free speech article a week ago now they're hand wringing about this.
HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42652882
I think they're too naive wrt to "good guys always follow the rules" stuff
It's the kind of naivety that gets your lunch money taken at school
I’m not sure what order things go in, but I’d have thought national security concerns trump the need of its’ citizens to freely watch cat videos Those people publishing to TikTok were probably on Instagram and if they weren’t, they will be now if they want to reach the same American audience.
> I’d have thought national security concerns trump the need of its’ citizens to freely watch cat videos
You'd be wrong.
What value would a concept like the First Amendment have if it were voidable as easily as "we have national security concerns" or "the information on there isn't valuable." Given that those are pretty much the immediate go-to excuses for any autocrats clamp down on speech, such a right would be totally meaningless.
However forcing TikTok to divest of foreign ownership is not restricting the rights of Americans to express their opinions. Americans are free to widely exercise their first amendment rights- the TikTok order to divest foreign ownership doesn’t affect those users ability to speak. The first amendment does not guarantee you access to a specific platform- it means that the bar for the government to imprison you for speech is very high (you can be held in contempt for lying under oath, for example)
I would argue that in this case the platform itself is expressing speech by ranking, recommending and promoting certain content. A foreign entity has no such first amendment right- we have had restrictions on foreign ownership of news media for decades now.
I think it’s an interesting issue especially now that you have TikTok users who think they’re being treated unfairly moving to a pure Chinese platform RedNote and encountering actual censorship. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-redn....
And now unconfirmed reports that RedNote is considering segregating the new American users from the Chinese users, ironically so Americans couldn’t influence Chinese users - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
Forcing American companies not to put an app on their marketplace is impinging their speech. And yes, they do have First Amendment protections.
No, the First Amendment doesn’t just prevent the government from imprisoning you for speech… that is a ridiculously narrow perspective and really discredits you on the matter.
The First Amendment, as a trivial example, prevents the government from fining you for speech. It prevents the government from threatening to imprison you for speech. It prevents the government from seizing your assets for speech.
FWIW, I’m not arguing that TikTok shouldn’t be banned. I think it’s a propaganda weapon. However it is far from clear that it can be banned under our Constitution. Especially since the mechanics of that ban require coercing American companies and individuals to limit their freedom of expression.
I would disagree, the first amendment in fact does protect platforms for speech. If the government tried to ban the New York Times through an act of Congress, the Supreme Court would strike that down.
In this case, the fact that the platform is foreign and that the foreign owner is considered hostile to the US carves out an exception.
Banning foreign ownership of broadcast media companies is not new. It’s just that the laws have lagged the shift from broadcast linear mediums to the internet.
Source: the FCC specifically prohibits certain ownership of broadcast stations by foreign entities:
“Section 310(a) prohibits a foreign government or its representative from holding any radio license.
Section 310(b)(3) prohibits foreign individuals, governments, and corporations from owning more than twenty percent of the capital stock of a broadcast, common carrier, or aeronautical radio station licensee.”
https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli...
TikTok is used for far more than cat videos which is why it's a considered a threat to those in power. There are freely flowing ideas and narratives which they cannot control - except now they are by restricting access to it.
Instagram doesn't have the same culture at all and it's not a substitute. TikTok is a like a digital "third space" for communities, and just like the real life equivilents, is slowly disappearing. People without community are easier to control.
Why shouldn’t TikTok just divest, then? Bytedance could make a huge amount of money by selling TikTok. And then that huge influx of money could keep TikTok operating forever. The fact that they’d rather shut down is pretty telling.
TikTok is outcompeting its US rivals Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts because their algorithm for choosing which videos to put in front of users is simply superior. Divesting means that they would need to sell that algorithm as well, which is pretty obviously worth a lot more than their US market, which is why they're making this decision.
lol, no it’s not. They’re making this decision because they’re ultimately controlled by the CCP which is not as susceptible to market forces.
I agree with the ban on security basis, but could this be abused by countries to sabotage companies? China could buy majority shares of a company and force them out of business.
We've just seen an example of the US blocking a sale on national security grounds -- we can block sales to China, too: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/us/politics/us-steel-nipp...
Right, but an entity or a number of entities could buy shares in a small cap company to own a majority stake without scrutiny. Seems like a good way to do espionage since corporations are global and have protected status.
The company would have to be specifically added by the President to a list which currently is just ByteDance, it doesn't kick in automatically.
Extremely weak argument. Just because one platform is shut down does not mean the right to free speech is affected. A platform, mind you, under full control by the Chinese Communist Party, who do not allow ANY form of free speech to exist in the country they have under their thumb.
Building your own great Firewall definitely is a thread to your free speech. I don't know how this can't be extremely obvious.
It's because this isn't a content restriction. Anything that was speakable on TikTok remains speakable on platforms that aren't owned by U.S. adversaries.
The distinction between this and China's "great firewall" and speech restrictions should be obvious.
The distinction between an US firewall and a Chinese firewall?
Yes, there's currently a very clear distinction.
Not to mention the app is already banned in China, along with many others.
There are many good reasons to ban TikTok. For example, reciprocity on free trade. Why should Chinese companies get access to the American market when no western social media apps are allowed in China?
Reciprocity would be that American companies can access the Chinese market if they obey the same rules in the Chinese market that Chinese companies have to obey in the Chinese market, and Chinese companies can access the American market if they obey the same rules in the American market that American companies have to obey in the American market.
Facebook and others were in the Chinese market but they got blocked because they would not censor things that the Chinese government wanted censored and would not turn over user information that the government asked for. Chinese social media companies also are subject to those same censorship and user disclosure requirements, and will be banned (or worse) if they do not comply.
Would Facebook be allowed back in if they agreed to the censoring and to turning over user information? As far as I know none of the major American social media companies have been willing to do so, and so we don't know.
Isn't that pure whataboutism?
So we know the real reason why the government banned Tiktok [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.
Tiktok doesn't push government propaganda to the same degree as Meta and Google.
But whoever pushed for this was smart enough to avoid making it about speech ("content-neutral" in legal parlance). It's strictly commerce-based and there's lots of precedent for denying access to the US market based on ownership. For a long time, possibly still to this day, foreign ownership of media outlets (particularly TV stations and newspapers) was heavily restricted. And that's a good analogy for what happened here.
What I hope happens is people wake up to the manipulation of what you see by US companies.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
> Tiktok doesn't push government propaganda to the same degree as Meta and Google.
Do you have a source for this claim?
Huge creds to the EFF for speaking truth even when it is politically inconvenient (see comments here...)
This ban is infringing of IMO fundamental rights of individuals in US to share and use the TikTok app freely. That China is doing similar things to their citizens can't be an excuse.
Yeah I hate TikTok and its effect on society too and good riddance etc but this is a first for something very bad. We have to look at the larger picture.
Never expected to see the EFF siding with a big tech company, and fighting for its right to profit from its users.
Never expected to see the EFF dismiss an argument for user's data privacy as "shaky".
Quite disappointed honestly.
There's a bigger picture in the question of precedent and risks created by the infrastructure to ban a platform like this.
Unfortunately it seems the powers that be are dead set on pursuing destruction of not just specific competitors but, eventually, the entire notion of constructive competition and its win-win outcomes provided the right safety nets.
>Never expected to see the EFF siding with a big tech company, and fighting for its right to profit from its users.
The EFF routinely sides with big tech companies. See their work on copyrights, patents, etc. Tech figures fund them. See https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine
Urgh sorry EFF but you’ve lost me on this one.
There is actual harm done to democracy on these platforms. A democracy requires informed voters to function and the platform does the diametric opposite by misinforming them. Any attempt to regulate this or promote or moderate has failed simply because an actual structured funding source is misinformation. The only option to keep democracy standing is to kill it.
I’d expect the EFF to have some well read social or political staff. Apparently they don’t and are quite happy to spout absolutes.
Damn the servile simp responses here are revealing. They are setting precedence and will use this on other things. Yes TikTok and many apps are used by many hostile foreign governments (Israel/Unit 8200 for example) (btw, RedNote got it's big boost when backed by Israeli investor Yuri Milner and his firm DST) for many psyop types...
That doesn't mean you get to control what Americans can do on their devices.
Boiling the frog...
I was saying the same thing when they decided to take down Silk Road /s
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ISP immunity has absolutely nothing to do with this case, which is a regulatory law having to do with foreign ownership of media corporations. In point of fact TikTok, like all ISPs, relies on section 230 safe harbor to serve their user-generated content without repercussion.
Section 230 has nothing to do with ISPs
Presumably "provider of service" rather than "service provider"
ie
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by an other information content provider."