Tiktok isn't "some website", it is partially owned and controlled by the CCP, which influences what content gets shown to Americans. A majority of zoomers get most of their news and information primarily from this platform, which again is under the influence of a hostile foreign government. (TikTok also spies on US citizens for the CCP, but let's keep this restricted to the free speech argument about the ban).
We actually don't have to shrug and say "oh well, first amendment" with respect to propaganda outlets of foreign countries.
What most of the posters in this thread don't realize is that US is effectively at war with China. China is working in front of the scenes to be the major funder of Russia's war [1] against Europe, which is US's ally amongst the coalition of democratic countries. China is working behind the scenes to stop the supply of artillery shells to Ukraine. [2]. and it is increasingly and more visibly supplying Russia with military supplies. [3]
People need to stop being so naive and realize that it's the aligned democratic countries (Ukraine, Europe, US, Australia, Canada, UK, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) fighting against the last survival of dictatorships (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea). If you wish the dictatorships to win, please by all means, move there.
Please don’t act like people who are against top down banning of apps in the usa are aligned with autocracy. That’s precisely the opposite of accurate.
This would be like if someone were against the government suppressing leftist groups and barring radicals from hollywood and such during the red scare because of the violation of civil liberties, then you walked up and said they were pro russia. Completely reductive.
Current trading activities doesn't mean much by themselves. Europe also still trades with Russia. This is sort of missing the forest for the trees. You have to look at whether there are concerted efforts from Europe/US to REDUCE trade with Russia/China, which is yes. And whether US/Europe is restricting China's military capability, which is yes.
We might not be in a direct, conventional, people-shooting-each-other war, but the trade war with them is absolutely raging and we are pretty evenly matched. It's a nightmare. One of the CCP's greatest strengths is to exploit/play our economics game better than ourselves, with all the advantages that brings.
Doesn’t matter as far as the Constitution is concerned. It says “Congress shall make no law …”. Doesn’t add anything about “except in time of war” or “when it’s really inconvenient” or “when parents fail to monitor their child”.
US is not at war with China. We are in a period of escalating tension, but have broad and far reaching economic, political, and social ties. Despite our disagreements, we have in the past and continue to cooperate on mutually beneficial terms.
That said, the CCP is not hoping for the United States to suddenly become politically stabilized. They are not hoping for the US populace to embrace the current social and economic order which stands at odds to Chinese goals. The CCP is an extremely disciplined predator organization with a long-term outlook, and should be dealt with appropriately.
1. China was originally a significant importer of goods from Russia. Over the past two years, due to the lower oil prices from Russia, the import volume has increased by 30%.
2. The total purchasing amount from the European Union and India surpasses that of China, with no single entity making significant purchases of Russian energy.
3. Perhaps you should look into the historical records of energy procurement by India. In 2021, trade with Russia was essentially negligible, but it now constitutes 36%. The main financier behind the scenes should be clearer now.
> Imagine trying to suspend the 2nd amendment because of school shootings.
2A is for well regulated militias, from an era when the government struggled to raise and maintain a standing army, and wasn't sure an army could even be trusted. 2A was antiquated long before schools started having to teach toddlers survival tactics.
Many times constitution was suspended in US during wartime [1]. Also, school shooting has a very low likelihood of causing US to collapse. Losing an adversarial war against a rival of similar size with nuclear weapons and a brainwashing mechanism via TikTok will. I for one do not want to live in a world controlled by China, where the state can weld me inside my apartment [2], find random reasons to jail me then extract organs from me [3] or many of the atrocious things China does.
You are absolutely right. Turning the other cheek when facing an opponent which is pointing at you as an source of ultimate evil and acting like it is plainly stupid.
Just curious why the marketplace of ideas won't solve this? If people don't want to be influenced or want to avoid it, won't they? Or if a competitor wants to deliver a more engaging product, shouldn't consumer choice result in the best possible outcome?
This has a feeling of paternalism that rubs me the wrong way. I'd be happy to hear of a case where large scale paternalism worked out, but so far it seems like paternalism is a failed ideology whose proponents continue to not realize that, "just one more try; it will work."
What I'm hearing is an argument for cultural-Sakokuism and I have to remind the reader that it never works.
Sorry, but this just has an air of "My concerns are the only valid ones," that makes it hard to take seriously. I don't want to live in a world where my kids can get shot at school. I guess we just have different priorities, but I think it goes too far when we start saying, "Mine are right."
That's quite alright, I didn't expect to convince someone who believes that in a war for survival, an opposing dictatorship can freely operate the most powerful propaganda weapon humankind has known against the democracy. Just because you know, it's idealistic.
Can you walk me through the scenario you're envisioning? I'm having a hard time following the series of events that starts with the status quo of TikTok ownership and results in the Chinese state being able to harvest your organs. Can you paint me a picture of a timeline or a series of key turns that would lead to that outcome?
Anything's possible I guess, I mean, did anyone expect that China would allow the release of the man made covid virus from its Wuhan biolab (intentionally, or unintentionally) out to the world, killing millions in the process and giving long covid to millions more? And US and UK would be the ones that developed the vaccine successfully, and allowed the rest of the world to fully function after 2 years? And China would be the one that couldn't come up with its own vaccine, and just decided to release it into the wild in 2022 and bury any sort of mention of mass covid deaths [1]? I mean, if it were the other way around, and US and the rest of world was still shut down after 2 years while China was fully functional, TikTok could have been used by China to incite civil unrest in democratic countries, leading some to its downfall.
I mean, there's no way China would release a covid 2, right?
Ok, but can you be specific about the scenario you're envisioning that begins with China's current ownership of TikTok and ends with organ harvesting? It sounds like a specific concern you have and you've given it careful consideration.
> can freely operate the most powerful propaganda weapon humankind has known against the democracy.
if we think is a true, accurate and non-hyperbolic description of tik-tok (and by extension social media) i don’t want anyone with power to operate them. whether it’s a billionaire from any country or any government.
it isn’t clear to me why we would treat a billionaire, a mega corporation, or a government any different with anything this powerful. again, if we were to agree this description is accurate no organization or person should have this kind of influence.
i agree, we have to start somewhere. and if we think it’s the most powerful propaganda weapon ever developed, the place to start is by regulating _all_ social media.
A US citizen distributing foreign media themselves is quite different than what is effectively a directly controlled broadcast owned by a foreign government.
It's not even content per se, it's much more insidious than that.
The comment I originally replied to likened tiktok to a printing press, but that's not quite right.
Imagine a printing press owned by an enemy that would subtly manipulate the text of whatever you tried to print. Or maybe it would omit entire articles from certain recipients of the newspaper, or reorganize the page layout to emphasize different things than the editor intended.
We wouldn't allow this hypothetical printing press controlled by a hostile foreign government to be sold in the US, we would be crazy to.
Actually, yes, we would allow such a thing. Plenty of our news organizations are foreign – owned, and many of them are very elegant to your hypothetical printing press. The US simply doesn’t have the constitutional or legal framework to regulate content reproduction for ideological reasons.
The content is not what is being outlawed, only the distribution mechanism. ISIS wouldn't be allowed to own a publishing company in America; nobody thinks that somehow curtails freedom of speech. If somebody so chooses, they could distribute content from ISIS, and restrictions on that would indeed be a restriction on speech. But it wouldn't be a restriction to make it illegal to give money to ISIS.
So if you want to make the same argument, you will have to declare china's CCP to be a terrorist organization - and all of the legal implications that entails.
That's not a constitutional requirement. There's no law that says the government can only do this to terrorists. In fact, even if somebody is a terrorist, if they're American, it would still be unconstitutional to deprive their freedom of speech. ByteDance, as a foreign entity, enjoys no such protection.
Is it? When you're saying that, I think you're imagining your neighbor, not your oligarch.
When one country tries to cause chaos in another, they use a two pronged approach. (1) they offer a country's aristocracy the ability to enrich themselves at the cost of their people. This could be things like cheap labor, gas pipelines, or being the guarantor of loans. (2) They tell a countries peasantry that the worlds problems are simple and that their government is their enemy and failing them. This is only empowered by having compromised their aristocracy, so their government is failing them.
Then they put their fingers on the scale by providing resources (weapons, funding, press, intelligence, etc.) to an aligned entity capable of promoting their interests.
It's worth considering that the great firewall of china exists explicitly because the Chinese government (rationally) thinks it's risky to subject people who were subsistence farming a generation ago to foreign influence.
The cost of freedom is responsibility, and if you have an irresponsible (read: poorly educated/non critical thinking) populace, then people will unwittingly surrender their freedom. Freedom means the freedom to do the wrong thing, but that can result in bending or breaking.
Rationally...I don't find that that is implied. China is doing that rationally from a completely self interested, in the animal sense, way. The point of freedom is freedom, it's an end unto itself, if people are fooled or liable to control given such freedom, let them be. Control hardly ever "works" (in the ultimate sense), maybe in children, but we're not talking about children. Children also grow old.
Foreign nationals present on US soil only. This is why we Europeans have such a problem with having our data transferred to you, i.e. because we don't actually have any rights in the US.
I would characterise our lack of rights as complete. Some years ago Americans began torturing people who had been handed over to them on the promise that they would not be tortured already at Bromma airport, so here in Sweden, and this was presumably legal. I assume that if it had been done to me, it would have been legal as well.
The American constitution prohibits torture [1] so no one should be getting tortured by the government anywhere in the world. Of course, you could get around this by redefining what constitutes torture and getting a pliant attorney to sign off and away you go.
Data rights are not embedded in the constitution and so the US is currently in the process of creating a patchwork of (mostly state driven) legislation to define how user data can be treated. Hopefully, the Federal government will step in at some point and create some consistency and clarity with rules that are both practical and efficacious.
No, only Americans and US permanents residents are protected from torture outside of the US. Others have no constitutional protections whatsoever.
There is an inferred right to privacy though, and that is for this same reason not something applicable in cases of non-Americans and non-US residents when outside of the US.
There are already rules, there's the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, but it's implemented by an executive order, so there's nothing preventing there existing some other executive order secretly negating it.
If the first amendment actually protects TikTok here, as may be the case, then the courts can strike this down.
On the other hand, perhaps the first amendment doesn't block this. In that case, that relevant consideration would seems to be rare broad bipartisan support (as evidenced by a very lopsided 352-65 vote, but we'll see what happens in the Senate) to limit the potential harm that can be done by the information warfare capabilities of a genocidal authoritarian regime with whom it is certainly plausible that the US will be at war with in the next decade.
It is really unclear, absent a successful constitutional challenge, why the free speech maximalism preferences of a throwaway account on HN should hold more weight than lopsided bipartisan vote by democratically elected legislators.
Nope. The first amendment protects the speech of US citizens and only to a certain extent. This is why the US has a torture center in Guantanamo. To avoid issues of constitutional rights.
This is also, btw, what allows the CIA and NSA to spy on data you send overseas in violation of the 4th amendment.
First Amendment also protects visitors, resident aliens, undocumented workers, and everyone else within the jurisdiction (with some nuance for prisoners, soldiers, etc).
If someone wants to subject themselves to CCP propaganda, why stop them? If they’re that lacking in critical thinking, then maybe they’re getting what they deserve. It’s not like anyone is forcing people to use TikTok.
The funny thing is there's not really that much propaganda on TikTok, much less pro-CCP. Sure there's the potential, but it's really not even much of a thing IRL.
It doesnt have to be pro CCP. All they have to do is slightly boost anti US or anti Israel or anti Ukraine and it is the same thing. Slowly boiling the frog by boosting fringe voices and promoting them as common views.
It doesn't even have to be anti-US, all it needs to do is make the factions inside the US fight each other even more. Push two sides that are both "pro-US". That is, after all, also how CIA overthrows governments...
Yes and for this reason I support a similar ban in my country of large scale American owned social media. Given they are all guilty of the above claims.
What the American owned social networks have done to my countries populace, including its youth, is nothing short of a disaster. It’s induced complete brain rot.
Promoting fringe voices is perfectly legitimate, both in terms of politics and free speech. That is literally how all social progress comes about. It's also how we elected our previous President. Like it or not, those are the rules of the game.
> The funny thing is there's not really that much propaganda on TikTok
I recommend that you sit down in front of your computer with your beverage of choice and do a deep dive into psyops.
To address your comment, there are psyops actors in every significant (and some less significant) social media platform, even our own Hacker News. Whether you want to call their work “propaganda” or something else is mostly semantics — they are operating with an agenda, sometimes/often one that conflicts with the will and/or best interest of our nation (in my case, the US).
Fair enough... I consider that all propaganda. Anyone acting with an agenda, especially when they're trying to persuade without openly disclosing their agenda. Even more so, there's plenty of people who post stuff (like the fringe violence or whatever) who aren't necessarily psyops, but then the algo can promote it in a way that influences people. And I know this can all be done gradually and subtly.
But you should do a deep dive on tiktok if you aren't already on it! It's almost all fun/bizarre/educational videos. When you have so many people (lawmakers) critiquing it who don't use it regularly, it all just comes across as McCarthyism.
(edited to remove a sentence I started and didn't finish)
Because I'm not fancying getting what they deserve together with them. Some brainless zoomers might be casually destroying the West and causing our doom, but I don't want to suffer from their stupidity. I would rather limit their fun than my life.
An interesting phenomenon is people in the US who already got manipulated, and then spread the manipulation from within the US, eagerly and voluntarily, as US citizens
While you lost cred at “partially owned and controlled by the CCP”, I’ll bite. You seem to have knowledge that those at TikTok USDS (and TikTok Inc.) do not. Please share your data/sources on how the “CCP influences the content shown to American “zoomers””.
There’s a similar operational and data island for UK TikTok users as part of project Clover. Share your data on how the CCP is manipulating content shown to UK users while you’re at it.
At the end of the day, my opinion is that after all the changes made to segregate and protect US users this is now all political theater and posturing, and potentially setting a very dangerous precedent.
On the one hand, leaving the potential for CCP propaganda to reach citizen's eyes can be a threat model for insurgency. On the other hand, leaving it monitoring the data coming in, then earmarking when there's an uptick in "flagged" packets or whatever could be a valuable heuristic. It all depends on the point of view.
The US government working with social media companies to censor Americans (and other people) on those platforms is also pretty bad, yes. My impression is that their influence is much weaker and more marginal than is the case with the CCP and tiktok, though. But I would be sympathetic to other countries banning US social media on the ground of US govt influence.
How can you acknowledge that the USG colludes with domestic platforms to censor Americans and not think that it is targeting foreign platforms because they make that censorship more difficult?
You know, the obvious explanation that doesn’t require an unseen CCP bogeyman.
Fox News and MSNBC are propaganda for American political parties not foreign governments. They have a much stronger constitutional argument for 1st Amendment protection than Russia Today or China Central TV would.
The US government absolutely has its own government run media outlets such as Voice of America and foreign governments do ban them. For example, the Taliban has attempted to ban VOA in Afghanistan:
No, it's owned & controlled by an American family (from Australia), has its headquarters in New York City and is not beholden to any foreign governments.
Whatever you think of our home-grown propaganda outlets, the US govt taking different approaches to foreign outlets should be uncontroversial. Unlike the CCP, US citizens have first amendment rights.
Bullshit. This isn't "conservative politics". This is right-wing hate behind the thinnest veil of "political entertainment".
They don't really talk about small government or fiscal conservatism anymore. They talk about the "threat" that is posed by LGBTQ+ people and immigrants.
I can't even talk to my own father anymore without him getting angry. Angry about nothing. That's one of millions of very real relationships that have been very directly damaged by Fox News. They don't get to do that, then just shrug it off as it it's an accident, and not their primary business model.
Dude, you are very angry and I'd suggest you readjust.
My father watches fox news 24/7. I used to be angry like you anytime we touched close to politics. Now, I just don't talk about it, it's not worth it and doesn't add any value to the relationship, and never did before.
Hopefully you'll see this as you get older. Fox news didn't damage your relationship, sorry.
Ah yes, the "don't talk about politics" approach. The one fundamental/procedural union of all with all, the thing that wretches all of us out from tribal/segregated animal existence. The biggest decision tree impacting our planet and the universe at large. That thing? Yeah just ignore it, if dad thinks killing the gays should be part of the law and I don't...well ya know, let's just lobotomize ourselves psychically so we never have to broach the truths of morality, ethics, justice, and never discuss the two paths humanity and walk down. Very well. Leave it to the others, what do we know anyways, it's not like we can do anything...
I don't talk about it either. He insists we talk about it, or he silently stews over the lack of engagement, while disengaging from everyone else in the room. Sure, it didn't destroy our relationship, but I'm not going to pretend everything is just as good as it was 6 years ago: it's not.
That's just one personal example, too. You would be hard-pressed to find a random 20-minute span of the Fox News network where the primary subject of discussion isn't hate or fear. Very rarely is the primary subject actually a political position. Fox News is a constant barrage of why you should be afraid of and angry at the very existence of every person who has interests or goals that don't match the interests and goals of a right-wing transphobic christian nationalist.
Even if it were about presenting and supporting the political position of right-wing transphobic christian nationalism, it would be better. Fox News does not focus on any political position. Instead, they focus on the engagement of fear and hate that implies that position.
I'm not too worried about their opinion. I just want to do what I can to show people the reality of the situation. Fox News doesn't get to maximize the engagement of its audience and minimize the engagement of its critics.
I think when dealing with 'the other side' so to speak, a good many of us (me included) are against the forces of shear ignorance, scientific illiteracy, undo/thinly veiled racism, and a general disunion amongst men (a war of all against all). I certainly wouldn't put you in this category, but you must admit your original comment came in hot, which instinctively makes people put their shields up. I hope we can all be like the Buddha, but for me, it's exceedingly hard to embody
If you really care about who spies on who, check with AIPAC and similar groups that said that openly, and no one gave a dime.
TikTok is less censored compared to FB, Instagram, X.com etc..
Look how many Israel supporter funded this action (banning/buying Tiktok) Always look for the one with most interest in having Tiktok controlled, you will know who are are the lobbyistes behind. (Follow the money)
It's a peeve of mine when people talk about the "CCP" like this, almost universally in a negative context--like they're trying to invoke the specter of communism in a scary way. Maybe you didn't mean it that way? Why say "CCP" rather than just "China"?
Maybe because not all of China supports the CCP's goals, means, and ideology? Substantial numbers of people disagree with some or all of those, and nobody gets to influence the CCP so it hardly represents anyone besides Party members. (And even some of those have serious disagreements.)
A majority of right-wing Boomers get their news from sources controlled by corporation and politicians interested in overthrowing a legit government and could therefore be considered a threat to national security.
I could be convinced that banning both would be good.
Buddy if some meaningful proportion of your population is finding foreign propaganda convincing, your problem isn’t foreign propaganda.
USA in terminal decline and, in typical fashion, it flatly refuses to look at itself and wonder why. American power elite has no one to blame but itself.
We actually don't have to shrug and say "oh well, first amendment" with respect to propaganda outlets of foreign countries.