"I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead than go back to using Instagram Reels"
I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and telling everyone to go to LinkedIn.
As someone who's been on TikTok for years now, it's extremely fake, the algorithm is a total ruse, as most of what trends is based on seeing news stories repeated hundreds of times, and most other content has the same repetitive music behind it... Far too much repetition and subtle seminaries in trending content, down to the way videos are color graded to be honestly real & organic... I've had a few videos go viral, but most things that do go viral are memes, the minute you want to push out anything remotely serious or related to business, they want money to let it pass the visibility gate.
I won't miss it if it does get banned. It's stressed so many people out for no good reason, and sucked up millions of hours of free labor from unrecognized & unpaid creators that deserve better.
That doesn't mean that any Meta product is good for content creators mind you.
The algorithm is genuinely very good. That's why I deleted it.
It's very addictive and not always just shoveling slop.
I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian. Neo-china...
""" Within such a possible future system, the only command or need
that the machine would not respond to would be the one command that
I have a feeling some of us would most want to type into the
machine. Which is the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that
would be my problem with the machine. It would meet all the needs
except my need to see it destroyed. It would take every other
command well, and meet every other need well, but the need to just
to just shut it down. Television is something like that now.
I feel sometimes as though I am plugged into a giant computer that
will take every command I give it except the one that I want the
most. The command that the damn machine blow itself up. It will do
anything else I say. I type in "food", and out comes food. I type in
"I want to give this talk in Washington". It comes out. But the one
command I want is the command for the damn thing to just go "boom!",
and all the little transistors just to go... """
Rick Roderick 1990
It's an interesting read if you're into recommender systems or AI in general. What amazes me is that despite this published work google and meta still can't produce a decent social media algorithm, so it's either incompetence or malice.
same here. I found myself loosing an hour of just scrolling through short videos, most of them really good and ones that I liked. I had to delete the app because it was working too good.
Back in the day when I was using Windows Mobile (2002-2008) there was an app (RSS basic) that was pulling the news from various websites (I had added BBC, CNN, some with IT news, etc.). Before I would leave home I'd sync it, and it would give me 'many' news articles, just the text ofc.
At some point I got addicted into reading news, so out it went. So yes, anything that gives you dopamine hits (cat videos, semi-naked men/women, news of the world), must go!
Prismatic was even worse (better?), IIRC it scanned your twitter feed and then gave you a set research articles, academic websites, etc. To say I have a breadth of interests is an understatement. My twitter feed looks like arxiv and and a british tabloid had a baby.
What prismatic gave me was pages and pages of Art, Design, Philosophy, Mathematics, Literature and all of it hours to days old. Every single article it back I wanted to read and there was pages of it, never ending. There was no way I could even filter out what read and even what to be aware of, there was simply too much.
I closed it and never went back. I also realized that even knowing of knowing is itself a Faustian bargain, we are all on a temporary atoll in a giant sea.
I disable them with a browser addon (and Revanced on mobile) because I seriously never want to watch a 30 second video on Youtube. Having to scroll past useless snippets when I'm looking for something had borderline-ruined Youtube for me.
there's some astoundingly good shit on there. some japanese cabinet maker who does phenomenal stuff and conveys it all in 30 secs. so much more. but so much more, in fact, that i can't risk my life/time by stepping into the stream.
first time i did that, i finally realized that this is probably the tiktok experience that so many other people are talking about. utterly terrifying.
Your perception of TikTok likely depends on your TikTok for you page. If you spend time cultivating it, the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.
This seems to be less true on YouTube and Reels unfortunately.
The algorithm will spoonfeed you content that you perceive a certain way, whether that's true or not is a different story. Unfortunately for most people, all those hilarious situations that are not-so-obviously staged just fly over their heads as genuine. My wife is smart and well educated, but I even had to keep correcting her when she showed me videos that she believed were genuine.
> A lot of people are simply pessimists and will dismiss real authenticity because they don't have the tools to recognize it.
Do you think you have those tools? And if you do, do you actually have them?
You are purposely being shoveled content that's expected to be engaging. Your feedback is used to tune your own personal model to maximize the volume of content you swallow.
The mistake you're making is presuming that these recommendations are pushed to you with your best interests in mind. Read up on propaganda attacks such as the infamous alt-right pipeline.
If we believe people can't be trusted with free access to ideas because they might become 'radicalized' or potential ’useful idiots’, we're advocating for more social control, not less. The ability to think critically isn't threatened by exposure to ideas - it's threatened by a broken social contract that deprives people of the conditions for self-actualization and genuine autonomy. Banning platforms or content just scapegoats symptoms while ignoring this deeper crisis.
I don’t know that it’s people trying to make a buck - and that seems a bit silly of a thing to say to begin with. I presume you try to make your buck doing whatever it is you do.
What I will say is that it’s definitely a different form of expression from what we’ve had beyond recent history and - at the same time - artists, photographers, painters, jesters, philosophers, and playwrights have been trying to live off their form of expression for a while now too.
My TikTok For You Page is almost entirely made up of Veritasium videos, sci-fi authors, some standup, lock picking lawyer and "how is it made" style videos. I don't get any of that brain-rot slop. If I did, I wouldn't use it. Which would be a slight improvement to my life. Although I'm not negatively impacted by the current level of my TikTok use, I can definitely see it takes an extra level of willpower to stop (i.e. close the app, put down the phone) than almost any other of my extra curriculars. From enjoyable hobbies to other fun time wasting activities such as gaming. Barring Factorio which is the biggest time warp I've ever encountered, with an almost perfect dopamine extracting game loop.
The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
>The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
So, based on your description, the algorithm gives you almost exactly what you like, in terms of authenticity and legitimate interest on your part, instead of force feeding you crap that tries to change your perception of X or Y, and this is... bad? How exactly is it dangerous for doing what you want it to instead of pouring slop onto your brain?
An endless supply of content you like is infinitely more problematic than just shovelling irrelevant slop at you. With the latter you’re going to put it down.
The funny thing is I think you're misunderstanding the scale. You wife likes videos that are not-so-obviously staged. Somone else would get purely staged videos. Someone else would get actual real videos. If you like real pilots landing planes on runways where the wheels make sudden noises, it will give you that.
There are tens of billions of pieces of content there. TikTok is the furthest thing from a monolith possible.
It has to start somewhere, so it recommends the things that the most people like, but it's not the only content there, that's just common sense and good business (recommend The Beatles/Taylor Swift before you recommend Arch Echo/Aesop Rock)
the TikTok reocmmendation engine seemed to work better with a sparse history and better understood user feedback about content that one wants to see or avoid
Instagram tbh just feels icky but at least you can explicitly like or dislike stuff not that it would fix the feed though
YT shorts is also good but I hate you can't say show me this or do not show me that and it is all based on duration. idk what the powers that be at YT were thinking but I'm sure they did user studies and stuff
so much for free market economics though stuck with two imperfect options because Zuck couldn't fix the feed :(
Connecting people to other people, to life changing art, places and things that they end up loving and wouldn’t know about otherwise? That has to be one of the best uses for technology. I’d like to see more of it.
I think you and others here are focusing on the stereotypical “influencer” faking authenticity for views but there are literally millions of human beings posting on TikTok about all kinds of things. A lot of them are pretty cool. Just click “not interested” on influencers and click like on the stuff you want to see instead.
I think it's fair to say after a decade or so social media does not "connect people to other people", what you are describing are parasocial relationships. People are lonelier than ever, not just in America but worldwide.
Besides, for any hobby, recommendations are only really relevant for newcomers without solidified preferences and knowledge, after that the space of available content quickly dwindles as one seeks increasingly ambitious and avant-garde works to their preferences. Amateur stuff can be quite generic after all, what not with the lack of resources and experience. If you're still relying on an algorithm, I'd see it more as a vapid surface-level engagement with a hobby/medium than a genuine interest to dive further.
Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
> Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
You’re just getting older. You’ve seen it before in another place, another medium, a different author, actor, photographer, director, philosopher, painter. You just haven’t realized that the internet isn’t just for you, and that reel you saw that just rehashed something well-known to you, was new info to someone else, somewhere. I can assure you, in 2010, there were plenty oh people bitching about bloggers retelling the same old things they learned decades prior.
“Everything old is new again” is a centuries-old expression. Every generation tells their tales, and shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right now, people express themselves in short-form video. I’m curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won’t like it.
On the other hand, kids don't seem to have great mental health, attention spans, or academic attainment right now, and this type of social media is one of the likely factors behind this change.
would you like to serve up some comparative evidence showing just how much these things have degraded in kids these days vs. some particular point in the past?
This reminds me of people harping about the pervasiveness of misinformation in social media today, while completely forgetting how narrowly propagandized and baited toward yellow journalism the much more restricted media sources of the past often were, helping create all kinds of absurdly ignorant belief systems from which escape into alternative viewpoints was much harder.
Time series data is always confounded in many ways; lots of stuff changes, and as a society we change what we're paying attention to and that itself changes things like emergency room visits or perceptions of being anxious. At the same time, a whole lot of different measures moved in a negative direction suddenly (after slowly moving that way for many years). Of course, to be fair: these time series seem to show more the effect of social media in general and smartphones than short form video content on social media/smartphones.
There is no shortage of comparative evidence, though.
There's also evidence that short form video use is correlated with shorter attention span and that it is addictive. Of course, correlation ain't causation: maybe it's just the most naturally attention-challenged that consume a lot of it. I personally suspect it's a little of both.
We also have research that shows that if you show people lots of short form video and then test their attention span later, it's worse. But this, of course, isn't the same as the effect of voluntarily watching short form video. This is all trivial to find, but if you want links to specific things, let me knwo.
Kids complain that the other kids who are on tiktok all the time will do something like ask a peer a question, and then drift off to something else during the answer if it's longer than a single short sentence.
I've been doing youth programs for quite awhile now, and there's been a definite qualitative shift in the past several years, and various kinds of quantitative shifts in my own data aligned with this trend, too.
There will never be perfect evidence, unfortunately. We have to act on the information we have, and when we're studying humans it's going to include time series data and artificial studies of the phenomenon in lab conditions.
One person's short attention span is another person's intolerance for bullshit. One person's poor mental health is another person's emotions appropriate to the actual state of the world. The kids these days are doing great in all the ways that matter.
Put a short straight-to-the-point instructional video on youtube, gets praised for being the best of humanity, "You win the internet today sir". Put the same video on TikTok, suddenly it's brain rot.
> One person's short attention span is another person's intolerance for bullshit.
If a student asks a friend a question, and then drifts off into space before the two sentence answer has been delivered, that's not great.
> One person's poor mental health is another person's emotions appropriate to the actual state of the world.
Perhaps being prone to anxiety attacks, panic, and self-harm are what we need to meet today's challenges head-on.
> The kids these days are doing great in all the ways that matter.
Hey, not everything is negative-- we live in a world with more interpersonal kindness and tolerance than a few decades ago, and that's great. But the kids aren't alright.
Especially teen girls. It's impossible to escape curated content encouraging social comparison to edited, perfectly curated standards of perfection.
>“Everything old is new again” is a centuries-old expression. Every generation tells their tales, and shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right now, people express themselves in short-form video. I’m curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won’t like it.
You know it's interesting to frame these arguments because it's exemplar of the clash of worldviews here, between the classic view of an cyclical history, and the modern linear view of historical continuity. The latter was birthed in reaction against the former, yet as the inheritors of Rennaisance conquered the world, it eventually became the norm, the "old" of which the "present" would be compared against.
So if the present now cycles the past, is this an abberation or the norm here? The past is the "future", and the present is "stagnation". It is both revolutionary and regressionary. The TikTok Bill, the need to retake the Narrative by the Establishment thus represents itself the Past reasserting Continuity, and thus the Future, while Present pushes back to the very denial of the Future itself, to establish it's totalizing dominance of an endless now. So for the question of whether I would like the future, well that depends on which of the two sides win.
> You’re just getting older. You’ve seen it before in another place .. You just haven’t realized that the internet isn’t just for you.. same old things decades prior..
This reads as both extremely condescending and extremely naive at the same time.
An earlier version of the internet had blogs and meme lords sure, and a generation consumed that stuff and found that it was good. And after that consumption, it turns out kids still wanted to grow up to be doctors, astronauts, or whatever.
Another generation consumed another kind of content which was mostly leaning towards short-format, after many years spent researching/weaponizing dopamine and misinformation. Almost all of that content was mediated by corporations really, with as little involvement from people as the corporations could manage. That generation wanted to be influencers and "content creators" when they grew up.
The basic incentive structures are radically different now, for companies, creators, and consumers, and we're sort of past doing things for the lulz. There's a difference here that actually makes a difference, and writing it off as "yawn, more of the same if only your perspective was as wide as mine!" seems more ignorant than enlightened.
It's pretty creative and funny stuff, imo. If you consider that to be "good" or "bad" that's up to you I guess.
The way people choose to spend their lives is largely up to them, I'm not sure it's good to be labeling things as a "waste of time" when they're deriving something from it that you simply do not understand. Particularly when they do it in a way that is pretty harmless.
I don't know if you have pets, but if you spend time observing them you'll see most of what they do is simply letting time pass and for them, that's enough. Believe it or not, for many people the same is the case. Finding meaning in the acts we do is a personal endeavour so I think rather than telling people they're wasting their time instead try to understand what they're seeing in such things that you don't see.
I think a lot of people find creative acts very rewarding, there's an element of surprise that comes from it. The unexpected can be enjoyable. I think one of the reasons why the TikTok algorithm is so powerful is that it really succeeds in giving people the feeling of constant surprise.
Personally, I've found really inspiring art on Tiktok, as well as new music and also a lot of simple but engaging content in german (which I'm trying to learn).
I think you inadvertently made an entirely different point: it's all fake, but you just swallow some content acritically believing it's something personal that speaks to you.
In the end, you're just complaining that some sirens are fake but others really do love you.
'authenticity' in the sense of content made by normal people without any strong goals other than 'some other people might like that' (and for some, maybe eventually getting some income from monetization) rather than highly produced content with the goal of reaching the largest possible audience and extracting the largest possible amount of money from that, which is what reels feels like. if you want to see that type of 'more authentic' content, tiktok's approach to populating your feed will be much more responsive to that than instagram's. there also seem to be a lot more people creating content on tiktok aimed at that level.
I had cultivated a FYP that felt authentic to me, especially relative to everything else on the internet, but after a while it looked just as phony to my eyes, without any real change in the content itself. Just a different brand of phony.
1) a guy telling me in my native language (not english) how to spot phishing scams
2) another guy doing a short video about how much you need to invest to retire in my native language
3) Donald's AG not answering simple questions directly
4) video about 2CV ice racing where people leisurely drive old Citroens
5) A skit by an Australian dude who has a wall full of Milwaukee tools
Instagram Reels
1) A couple doing a very much scripted skit
2) A stolen clip from an old 90s sitcom
3) one-liner joke
4) A dude farting
5) A homophobic "joke" video
Youtube Shorts
1) pro skier made up to look old doing tricks on the slope
2) A couple I don't know showing what they looked like in 1988
3) A skit by a couple
4) One of those weird youtube-only dating channels reposting a clip of their stuff
5) Americans not knowing how to drive on icy roads in 2022
The quality difference is so clear that it's not even funny. In my experience all of the good content in Reels is just reposted/stolen TikTok content. Shorts has the same or snippets of bigger YT videos.
FB Reels is so bad I don't even want to give them the engagement metrics.
1) more people post there
2) you've used it much more and given them huge amounts of data on who you are and what your like to watch, when.
I can assure you those tiktok things are not the top of everyone's feed, sounds personalized. But your list for reels, and the other one sounds like the basic things they show to new people to try to figure out what they like, possibly somewhat curated by some past swipes.
Each of these are just algorithms. They get better the more you use them because your use = your data and personality and you've just used tiktok enough that they know _exactly_ what you like and who you are. Give it time, the others will come along if people use them
It's not the algorithm, it's the accounts and people in there.
I actually tried reels for a good while, but the content is just tits&ass (a major part of instagram), "funny" videos reposted so many times they're grainy from all the recompression and crap like that. Very very few people I would like to follow do actual original content on Instagram Reels.
Have you considered that Reels is so bad precisely because you don’t use it?
Mine:
A bit from the SF Chronicle on the LA fires. A comedy/info bit by Alex Falcone. An Ad. A wrestling technique (I’m into judo and BJJ). A card trick. Cooking techniques. An ad.
It’s ad-heavy and frankly I don’t try to spend a lot of time on it. But as somebody who uses it at least some, I get absolutely zero of the kind of garbage you suggest.
My wife hates it when I don't enjoy the TikTok videos she sends me, because it's very easy for me to tell how staged and fake they are. She, on the other hand, neither notices nor cares.
This would be concerning, if I didn't know that this way of thinking was incredibly common these days—instead, it's mildly terrifying.
Everybody knows movies are staged, even the ones that are "based on a true story". From what I can tell, people seem to think those short videos are genuine.
Everyone knows movies are staged, and they expect this. No one in their right mind wants to go to a theater and pay $20 for some crap that someone shot on their phone with no script.
With the short videos, people expect them to be genuine, and not highly staged productions meant to entertain.
No, I watch these kind of videos expecting them to be fake. Why would I expect otherwise when I have every reason to expect them to be non-genuine? If people's expectations are not right, that is on them.
If every time I watched a movie with my SO they said "you do know this is completely fake, why do you even like movies?", I would probably get a bit annoyed
It's where the young kids who don't know any better overshare. Instagram is where the perfectly manicured young adults put out a phony facade to make their money.
Hm. I’m a grown man and I post reels to all the platforms. I like the tech and enjoy trying to emulate a professional process with prosumer equipment and practices (filming, editing, color grading, sound design, etc.).
After about 30 or so reels this year, I’ve got about 70 followers - half of which are definitely bots, a third are family/friends, and the rest seem to be real people.
My feed has a lot of people like me, and people whose content I think is at the quality I’d like to be at (mostly photographers, videographers, small but full-time YouTubers).
Maybe you’re just finding what you’re looking for.
It's commensurate with how China treats foreign companies. Nobody can do serious business in China without the CCP's blessing, often involving a "partnership" with a local company.
You're both right! There was a good article/discussion on on this yesterday, but tldr: They are authentically fake! As in, the creators are not putting up a show with a 'real' person behind the persona, the algorithms have remade whatever person there use to be such that their 'authentic' self has become the persona.
I don't know if I would characterize TikTok as 'authentic' first and foremost, but it's a platform where real people go to perform. When I scrolled TikTok, I would often get poorly-shot videos from average folks trying to put their spin on the day's joke format, or reacting to that day's outrage. It was junk food, but at least somewhat 'real'.
My Reels feed, on the other hand, is 100% bot drivel. It's all stolen viral videos by artificially-boosted accounts, and the comments appear to be fake comments that were 'paid for'. I assume there must be some sort of financial incentive to gaming the system this way.
The end result is that TikTok feels like scrolling through (attention-grabbing, reactionary) stuff by real people, and Reels feels like scrolling through some sort of bot wasteland.
I guess I should add that, due to its size, TikTok almost certainly also has a bot problem, but if it does it's not as clearly evident in a way that is detrimental to the platform.
I genuinely have no idea what Zuckerberg is responsible for at Facebook other than hijacking credentials (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433) and stealing/copying ideas
Anyone with half a brain ought to have come up with a better system than Reels is
Exactly. In other threads on hacker news people have bemoaned the loss of the old weird web. I don't think anyone believed me that the same spirit exists in some sides of TikTok.
The lady with the rug story, the tik tok recipes... All felt very real, down to earth to me. Versus IG's obsession with glamor, travel stories, other hucksters.
Strange. Until about a month ago, my IG feed was almost all independent and amateur musicians, interesting tech makers (NOT reviewers or “influencers”, and some alt comedy. Suddenly, in the past 4 weeks, my feed is all political propaganda from the far right, ads, and more ads.
I deleted Instagram because of the change. I’m done. Never used TikTok, it seemed totally fake to me.
You have to break it in, strangely enough. When I first used it it was like being logged out and watching Reels. But overtime it really understood what might interest me, even topics I didn't think I'd be interested in but was
Fake compared to what? Alt-right Zuck with a fresh perm?
Seriously. US social media is taking a massive turn to the right while its owners are swearing allegiance to Trump. To most of the world that is a much more real danger than the Chinese communists.
The US gov's intention was not at all to shut down TikTok. It was to force ByteDance to sell it.
The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt, and their unwillingness to sell under the circumstances kinda proves their whole First Amendment claims are made in bad faith. Something deeper is going on, and it's not about your social security number.
This isn't rocket science. What's going on is having the keys to the kingdom with regards to serving videos to influence the mind of a user with extremely precise targeting.
China doesn't want USA doing that, and banned their social media. USA doesn't want China doing it because they've been doing it all over the world to everybody since Radio Free Europe, and likely before.
Lots of countries have made it illegal to listen things like Radio Free Europe. I'm guessing you can't in North Korea. On the other hand, a US citizen that wants to get the Chinese perspective on anything has lots of ways to legally find that and repeat it. I am not saying a lot of people in the US are interested in a foreign point of view, or that the US doesn't have tons of propaganda. But I don't think you can convince anyone that the two countries treat speech the same way.
Radio Free Europe is nothing like TikTok. Not only is broadcast media not able to be pinpoint targeted in real time to individuals, but the connection of who was behind RFE and other similar propaganda is pretty obvious, unlike tiktok.
Feels a little bit like the Chinpokomon episode of South Park - innocent kids being brainwashed and whatnot. (I know the target in that ep is Japan, but still)
I think that China is working to control left-wing activism in the U.S and TikTok is the perfect trojan horse to split the Democratic party and elevate their bribed proxies. I'd rather not go into how they're doing it, but certainly massive focus on the Gaza war in TikTok did do a number on the unity of the Democratic party.
Speaking of China influence I keep getting these stories on my social media feeds: Isn't this overpass, road, or this building, or this city in with lots of LED lights in China just great? China is the future, and so on!
The DoD banning an app on their network is a lot different than banning it competely in the US. I would think DoD should ban most apps connecting to their networks that aren't work related. I feel this whole effort is either in bad faith or isn't being transparently communicated to the public.
They famously failed to ban strava and some military assets were unintentionally disclosed on the strava heatmap by soldiers logging their cardio jogs through facility hallways.
NatSec should not even be needed. A simpler reason could be that China bans foreign social media apps from operating in China, so Chinese apps should be treated as such.
There’s no adversary here. There’s no ongoing war. In fact, up until the US started imposing restrictions on China, the US was one of China’s largest trade PARTNER.
US social media is banned in China because it doesn’t comply with local censorship laws, nor because it is American. They impose the same censorship on local individuals and organisations too.
But China banning foreign apps also plays into their stranglehold on their domestic media and economy, so it's not a purely adversarial move against the US.
Or to put it another way, should the US also ban/censor Chinese art and cinema within it's borders?
> Sometimes it is. Especially, if an adversary is bad to you, you should not be good to him. You should be equally bad, or sometimes worse.
Every little thing the West does is already played up in China and spun as an intentional attack aimed directly at China because the West wants to destroy China. Usually this is conveyed in news broadcasts set to a backdrop of video of various US military exercises.
A lot of the support the Chinese government enjoys comes from people in China generally seeing the country as much better off than it was a few decades ago, and a sense of nationalism and conflating the government, country, and people as one. An attack on China is an attack on all of us is an attack on me.
Whatever you do in retaliation is just building the public and political will, or even public demand, within China for them to take harsher measures or escalate things further.
Despite the government's efforts, the populace is not exactly entirely isolated from the outside world. There are many people who, while maybe not fully distrusting of the government, definitely smell something fishy. They're curious, and they want to and are able to learn more.
Heading into the 2030s, China itself is already forecasting China's going to enter a period of negative population growth. Combined with a variety of cultural forces, this could be even more impactful than in some other countries. And it will only get worse with time. "Better off than we were a few decades ago" may soon become clearly untrue to a lot of people. The government knows this is coming and is trying to prepare by strengthening their grip.
I think a smarter long term move here would be to just... not. Let them yell at the clouds. Make whatever information we can freely available to the curious in any way we can. Welcome those that want to embrace Western values with open arms. Model the world that we think is best.
Rather than giving China the government the tools and ammunition needed to unify the people and rally them behind China the government... let's just wait. When the people feel the government is failing them, instead of leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable... let them see they have somewhere else to turn.
Or, y'know, escalate this towards an economically and politically unstable nation of 1.5 billion people who think the West is the cause of all of their woes and see how it all shakes out. That'd definitely show everyone we have the biggest dick.
and why on earth would China want to start a war with us? We are a huge trading partner and yes there's a lot of posturing and conflicting geo-political interests, cultural views etc but that doesn't mean that war is their goal.
Reciprocity is a great idea. It takes the emotion out of the decision: we don’t allow X from Y because Y doesn’t allow X from us. It makes sense for trade at least.
Then there is no need to find another excuse that might be offensive.
If you can’t make a decision always, it works out. Besides, this is a simple reciprocal trade sanction, which are rarely so straightforward. No one in China is seriously going to admonish the USA for banning TikTok when even China blocks it (since it allows content banned in China), while most Americans who would care probably don’t vote.
It seems like an approach that begs to be gamed, though. Country A bans something, Country B reciprocally bans the something. Years later, Country B realizes it's at a severe disadvantage because County A has hoarded all the something and now there's a something shortage in Country B that was planned and executed by a Country A.
Obviously not probably an issue with social networks, but mindlessly banning something just because somebody else banned something seems like a recipe to be tricked.
It took us 5 years to go from “let’s ban TikTok” to actually banning TikTok. I don’t think it’s going to be very exploitable, and it’s not like China where Facebook works one day and then just doesn’t (China doesn’t publicize what it bans and for what reasons, even a list of banned sites is orobably considered a state secret).
If you made a literal mindless robot to reciprocally ban anything another country banned, yes, that would probably be exploitable. Normalising reciprocal bans and applying even a little bit of human oversight seems fine though.
The difference is, of course, that only one of those countries CONSTANTLY bangs on about being the "free" world, about "free" markets, about how not saying the n-word is censorship etc.
In short, it's only hypocritical for one of those countries.
In both cases though, for normal citizens your own country and it's companies are far more dangerous than some random country halfway across the globe.
It was not for show. It acknowledged its success and was to limit its success. Then limit it as a "potential" vector for intrusion. Kaspersky was removed from the US on the same basis.
Tiktok has access to photos and videos on the device, and user data on interactions. This was seen as a vector for compromising the individual's integrity via embarrassment and blackmail.
I just installed tiktok for the first time on my Android device and it asked for no permissions and even let me use it without creating an account. How is it getting photos and videos on my device?
Normal practice is a prompt-on-first-attempt: when you click on various things, it'll ask; I've never given it access to anything, and so I get a prompt asking for permission to see my contacts about once a week.
i think there are obvious reasons why bytedance would not want to spawn a US-based competitor and why a US only social media network would be ineffective.
this is exactly the same as what China does with their gfw, they allow american apps to divest and be owned by a chinese company.
1. China asked American SNS companys to 'obey Chinese laws', which mostly refer to content control and data ownership, these companys refused, China didn'tforced them to sell
2. Are you sure to play the 'same as what China does'? hey, we are a totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial regime, are we same? think twice
2. The game can be slightly different. "hey, we are open by default. but if an authoritarian regimes wants to exploit our openness by marketing their apps while at the same time banning our apps from their market, then we will strike back".
If we played the same as China does, we'd be hacking Baidu through a vulnerability in a Microsoft web browser until they withdrew completely from the American market.
Let me tell you a cruel fact - Uber is completely unable to compete with Didi. You have no idea how fierce the competition in this industry in China is.
> If Uber had become a commercial success in China, Chinese authorities ultimately would have clamped down to protect their domestic competitors.
> firms that do occasionally find success often face headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access to the domestic market.
> Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-wealth fund.
> "Uber China" sought local investors. The hope was that, with local investors, the Chinese operation would be spared some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed on foreign businesses.
China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism. Not sure where the profit is in denying that, given your own sources seem to clearly state it and even name a number of channels through which the state puts their thumb on the scale, not just regulatory but also through financing.
You can ignore my following comments if this will make you feel better...
> *If* Uber had become a commercial success in China, Chinese authorities ultimately *would* have clamped down to protect their domestic competitors.
classic demonizing and loser's execuse
> firms that do occasionally find success often face headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access to the domestic market.
every other demestic companys face headwinds from Chinese regulators, just like I mentioned above, and Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, they all in same situation, some of them couldn't handle this so they leaved, some stays
Also, DiDi once were banned more than 2 years by authorities, it survived
> Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-wealth fund
The 'STATE-BACKED' is a typical word used by certain people, it's just some kind of gov investment funds, there're dozens and invested thousands private companys, it's a Socialism country, it's called socialism, what do you expect? Didi is not even a state-owned enterprise. And is this equals to "force to sell"?
> some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed on foreign businesses.
Bruh
> China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism.
That's true, and? many Chinese people also have intense domestic favoritism
BTW, Apple is losing market share in China. However, take it easy, I don't think Apple will be sold to Huawei. Moreover, Apple is produced by Chinese and Indian, why bothered?
It's unfortunate that this comment is buried so deep and that generally this topic is under discussed.
Media has always been a force for controlling popular opinion, but in the age of social media it's going to new extremes. There are forces that try to control how you see the world on all social media platforms and do so to attempt to shape your opinions of the world and modify your actions.
You can visibly see Reddit has been completely taken over by bot, shills, and other controlled accounts. There is no sincere, real human opinion posted on the front page.
Even HN is not immune. "Bad news" has long been forbidden here, and there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.
Large portions of the things posted to the Oakland subreddit get flagged and removed. Almost anything mentioning the city in a negative light gets flagged. Crime reports / trends, anything.
Sarcastically chuckling about the state of the city as a long time resident gets the ban hammer.
Imagine if one company owned all the local news papers and replaced all the content with wire stories and the lowest quality local content or a fox news like company bough local news to run a propaganda operation. Oh wait that's real.
"Imagine if a handful of ultra-billionaires controlled almost all social media in the US." doesn't feel less threatening. The fact that Congress doesn't consider this a problem feels like the bigger problem.
>The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt
Um, what? There is zero chance that ByteDance could get a fair price for TikTok. VC calculations can be disregarded, TikTok as a platform is more valuable than Facebook. How much money would it take for Zuckerberg to sell FB to a Chinese company?
Didn't something similar happen with Grindr? It was Chinese owned and sold without nearly as much excitement. Given the inevitable bidding war from multiple interested parties I would be surprised if they couldn't get a fair price for TikTok
China didn’t need to fight to keep Grindr because all the value from the acquisition was realized as soon as they ran a database query to compile a list of closeted Republican senators. No need to hold on once you got the spy treasure.
It wouldn't have been at a bargain basement price if they started trying to sell it when the law passed. It could have been the highest market price they could get from the US's largest buyers.
Obviously they don't have the same leverage when they're otherwise going to be shut off in a few days.
I think this is untrue. The government wanted to shut down TikTok, but it can't just outright ban it because that's a clear violation of the first amendment, so it came up with a way to ban it indirectly. That was their intention all along.
I don't see how people don't see what is their most likely rationale - the ban will be temporary. Trump's already come out against it and is going to work to reverse it once in office. If it can't be done directly, it'll be done like usual - as an addon to some must-pass bill.
I think they would probably refuse to sell in a situation where they had reason to expect the ban to persist (for different reasons), but in this case they probably didn't even consider selling when there's a high probability they'll be back legally operating in the US within a year.
Acts of congress can only be blocked by the supreme court's power of judicial review. The supreme court held a 2.5 hour hearing this past week and the only two justices who voiced skepticism of the law were Gorsuch and Thomas.
Or another act of Congress! But given that the Supreme Court is waiting to the last second to issue their ruling, I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them. The nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not apply to a company legally operating within the country, because of its nationality, has extremely broad implications as a precedent - well beyond corporations alone, even for a judge who might be more than okay with the ban in and of itself.
Beyond this, there's the matter of enforcement and implementation. The former is discretionary and the latter is not specified by the bill. An effective ban would effectively require the creation of a Great Firewall of China type mechanism to effectively implement (which is what I thought this law was always a sort of 'trojan horse' for). Otherwise the "ban" will be trivially sidestepped by using a web app, downloading an APK from their site/mirrors instead of the marketplace, etc. Let alone things like VPNs! As Chinese companies are increasingly banned from the US, we're likely to see more adversarial setups where these companies will make no effort to prevent US customers no matter how much the US government madly gesticulates, though again with the current administration said gesticulation will not even happen in the first place.
>The nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not apply to a company legally operating within the country, because of its nationality, has extremely broad implications as a precedent
The law (PAFACA) doesn't directly apply to TikTok, but only to TikTok's ownership by ByteDance, due to ByteDance being a corporation located in a foreign adversary nation. Foreign corporations are not protected by the first amendment as domestic corporations are. Case law clarifying separate first amendment protections for domestic vs foreign entities such as Citizens United v FEC (2010) and Bluman v FEC (2011), already established the precedent for this.
>I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them
Did you watch the hearing or read the transcript? The opinions of the majority of the justices on both sides, including the chief justice, were not ambiguous. As referenced in the hearing by the justices, the first amendment only applies to communication on the platform, not the ownership of the platform. Given that TikTok's parent company is ByteDance, and as the first amendment does not apply to foreign corporations as it does to domestic corporations, which multiple justices pointed out, the law is not in conflict with the first amendment. The law is referred to as the "TikTok ban law", but it doesn't ban the platform explicitly, it only bans its ownership by a foreign adversary located corporation, which are not protected by the first amendment, which is how the law avoids a conflict with the first amendment while potentially still effectively banning the platform.
The case you cited is not really appropriate here because it's about elections which are one of the few domains where citizenship plays a critical and very well established role. In this case, you're talking about broadly restricting the constitutional rights of an entity legally within the US based on its ties to a nationality, given that ByteDance is legally not even a Chinese company, as it's incorporated in the Cayman Isles. The implications of this seem huge.
Don't trust regular media to give you fair assessments of this case. ScotusBlog generally has excellent and impartial analysis of cases from experienced lawyers, and this is no exception. [1] They described the overall court as skeptical of the claims. Skeptical does not mean fully in bed with one side or the other, but simply that - skeptical. It's also important to bear in mind is that hearings are, by their very nature, off the cuff. And the implications (or factualness) of what the justices believe may change as they consider the implications of a decision, and factualness of their assumptions.
Again the thing I would say is that if this was an obvious case, the justices would not be waiting to the last second. My guess is that we'll probably see an announced delay+injunction on Friday.
Did you read that blog post? Despite the post being titled as it is, the post contains more examples of justices voicing skepticism to the TikTok lawyers' arguments than it does examples of justices who were voicing skepticism to the law:
"Some justices, however, were unconvinced that the law necessarily raises a First Amendment issue. Justice Clarence Thomas asked Francisco how a restriction on ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok created any limitations on TikTok’s speech.
Justice Elena Kagan echoed Thomas’s skepticism. If the law only targets ByteDance, which does not have any First Amendment rights because it is a foreign corporation, she asked Francisco, how does that implicate TikTok’s First Amendment rights? TikTok can still use whatever algorithm it wants, Kagan observed.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett also appeared to agree at times. The law, she simply requires ByteDance to divest TikTok. A shut-down by TikTok, she suggested, would be the consequence of ByteDance’s choice not to do so.
Other justices appeared persuaded by the government’s invocation of national security concerns. Chief Justice John Roberts observed that, although Francisco contended that TikTok is a U.S. company, Congress had concluded that the “ultimate company that controls” TikTok is subject to Chinese laws, including an obligation to assist the Chinese government with intelligence work. “Are we,” Roberts queried, “supposed to ignore that?”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted the government’s contention that China is using TikTok to access information about millions of U.S. citizens, and in particular young people, and could in the future use that information to try to recruit spies or manipulate future U.S. officials. That “seems like a huge concern for the future of” the United States, Kavanaugh observed."
In a Supreme Court case the burden of proof is on the petitioner, and it's the duty of the Court to critically question that evidence and proof. See, for instance, comparable coverage on the Roe vs Wade case, where you will see similar grilling. [1] Something quite important is how the judges responded to the claims and the follow ups. For instance in the transcript [2] follow the dialogue from the quotes you gave versus the grilling of Prelogar, representing the government.
She was, at times, being overtly mocked with quotes from judges like, "That's your best argument is that the average American won't be able to figure out that the cat feed he's getting on TikTok could be manipulated, even though there's a disclosure saying it could be manipulated?" Prelogar in general found herself struggling to defend the claim that the attempted ban was based on data access and not content (which would be unconstitutional), why there were no alternatives if the claims were based solely on data access, and the implications for any other foreign company that has access to user data (which is basically all of them). TikTok was met with some tough questioning but generally responded competently.
I read the transcript also, and from what I read, I don't disagree that Francisco answered competently, but he may have been given an impossible task. The law was upheld, as I suggested the justices were leaning towards. I didn't see the decision being unanimous, but that's the way it came down.
Yip, gotta say I'm extremely surprised - not that it passed per se, but by 9-0?! I wish more of the justices wrote opinions. Gorsuch's opinion was pretty enlightening, but simultaneously even more confusing. Apparently the judges deemed the law of a "compelling interest" and "content neutral" which enabled it to sidestep a "strict scrutiny" of Constitutional appropriateness.
Yet his opinion was almost entirely critical of the arguments that justified such. And it also seemed to include misinformation (unless it happens that I'm misinformed) suggesting that the TikTok app could access "any data" - a term which he himself put in quotes and also italicized - about anybody in a user's contact list. He said it included, but was not limited to photos and personal information. And this leaking of data of non-consenting users was apparently a significant part of the case. I'd be beyond surprised if the Android/Apple APIs bleed any substantial amount of information through contact access alone.
> I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead
Somewhat paradoxically, I am actually more comfortable giving out private data to foreign countries than my own. I mean, what is Xi Jinping going to do with a US social security number? If I am in the US, it will be hard for bad people in China to reach me, because there is a border between the two countries, in every sense of the word. There is no such protection if me and my data are both in the same country.
Xi Jinping can have my social security number, in fact, he can have my whole life, it is not like he is going to do anything to an random guy who lives in a foreign country. I will definitely won't give these data to a neighbor I barely know because my neighbor can do something I don't want him to do with it and may find some motivation to do so.
Are you aware that almost all of the scam calls, phishing emails, and other attempts to separate you from the currency in your bank account arise from outside of the US?
Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users. You can imagine how well they are up to that task.
it's still much harder for overseas scams to succeed against someone who's tech savvy vs domestic identity fraud. There's simply a lot more barriers to moving money outside of the country
> Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users
Historically speaking this is actually the opposite. Many critics of globalization have pointed out that you can directly track trade deals to massive spikes in border funding, much stronger enforcement of intellectual property laws, etc. Research actually shows a huge decrease in the dissemination of ideas, language, etc across borders where trade deals have been enacted. Paradoxically, globalization has made us more siloed off from each other
This is a rather poor take. Individually it's "probably" not much, but when you start putting the data together in bulk you have a social network graph of huge parts of an entire country. That and everything they like and probably work on. If you can get things like location data, then you can figure out what entire companies are doing. You can get insight into secret projects. You can figure out what small companies/contractors to install moles in.
It is literally the biggest spy data gold mine on earth.
It's infinitely worse for someone abroad to have your SS because it is worth it for them to try for several days to scam you for just a few dozen dollars. There's an entire industry of scam farms run in Cambodia by CH gangs.
Exactly. There are people deleting menstrual tracker apps in the US because the information might be used against them by law enforcement. But what's the risk to them of the Chinese government having that? Other than turning it over to the US authorities, of course.
My tiktok feed was night and day better compared to IG reels. IG reels is simply attrocious memes. Like the same recycled crap over and over again. Where my tiktok feed always felt fresh. Makes me embarrassed that Zuck and co can't make the feed better. I thought this was America!
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect
They're very different, and I understand what you're getting at comparing it to the hyper-manufactured perfectly glossy Instagram culture, but I wouldn't call TikTok 'authentic'.
Of course, Tiktok is large and there's many different subcultures there, but overall I think TikTok is heavily drenched in Irony. It's a stark difference to the very fake Instagram, but that doesn't make it authentic.
Are tiktok dances 'authentic'? They might have started as just innocent kids doing a fun little dance, but the moment anything turns into a trend I think it loses authenticity. The whole NPC live streaming trend[1] from a few years ago was anything but authentic. TikTok 'suffers' from the exact same paid 'influencers' promoting whatever garbage of the day, and even has its own version of affiliate marking spam with 'TikTok shop' junk.
You said a lot of words that are a litmus test proving you almost never use TikTok nowadays. First of all this is not 2020 anymore, you're 5 years late if you think TikTok is still filled with "dances". "Paid influencers" mean nothing in TikTok since everyone has an equal voice and equal shot at virality, see you're still seeing it from the lens of Instagram here.
The NPC live streaming is weird yeah but you cherry picked a trend and then make it about all TikTok. Literally hundreds of trends spawn up in TikTok every month and some of them are damn more authentic than whatever happens in IG reels. Some of the successful original trends even pick up in Instagram or YouTube.
I use tiktok every day. Maybe I don't know what 'authentic' means, but I don't think most content on tiktok is authentic. I think it is a particular type of fitting to an ideal or trend.
yes but those types stick to live and tiktok lets you completely remove live from your feed. In fact if i don't want to see joe rogan, peterson, or other such horsemen of the misinformation apocalypse outside of live, I can make that decision on tiktok in a meaningful way. I can actually remove that content from my feed. Good luck getting that to work on youtube or instagram. You'll get that content if you like it or not. Good luck blocking all the random alphanumeric account names posting the deluge of that kind of content, reels / youtube shorts will force feed it to you anyway, no matter what you do.
The best account on TikTok is that old man who champions his cause of stopping circumcision. One must ask oneself why it's not considered on the same plane as genital mutilation in our so called modern civilized society.
A glaring example of the fakeness of insta reels I saw yesterday was comments regarding the LA fires. On multiple reels, I saw the exact same back and forth exchanges between a handful of accounts. I thought maybe it was some kind of caching issue but there were different accounts commenting on in the fake threads across reels. Good way to boost engagement for the bot accounts.
>TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
Probably the most bizarre thing I've read on here in the last few days. You actually believe that what you're seeing on TikTok is real? It's literally the antithesis of base reality. It's a living, breathing delusion.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
I'm shocked how easily manipulated people are by social media. The vast majority of TikTok content is very intentionally produced, largely to attempt to generate revenue or, at the very least, to feed ones ego.
The "real" people you see on there are all, to different degrees of success, actors. Nearly all of the spontaneous/I can't believe this happened!/caught on camera style content is entirely staged.
Likewise all of the "freedom of speech must be protected" posts are laughable. Everything on TikTok is ultimately created for and prompoted to ultimately drive profit.
This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Virtually all media you see is very heavily filtered and manipulated to ensure you're getting the right message.
> This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Provide literally one source for this. literally any source.
They completely revamped the UX from being essentially an instagram clone focusing on pictures and written content, to increasingly a tiktok clone focusing on browseable short form video?
Are you going to need similar evidence if I claim that YouTube has been working on being a TikTok replacement as well? It's pretty clear that YouTube created the "shorts" feature as an attempt to allow TikTok creators to trivially repost content.
Considering the TikTok UI is a clone of 抖音's UI, it's more likely that 小红书 copied 抖音 rather than TikTok. 小红书's primary market has always been China and overseas Chinese, foreigners were an afterthought up until this past week.
No 小红书 is literally not a TikTok replacement. The app is only very partially short form video, while most of the posts are more like pinterest. If you are talking about the recent UI changes that made it look like TikTok, I'm sorry to break it to you but I think that's just a coincident.
The comment and quote is telling of the zeitgeist. I would be more aghast by it, but then I remember that my SSN has been a subject to multiple data breach notices in past year.. so.. what is one more bad actor at this point?
Exactly. They keep fear mongering about China stealing our data but when these companies leak every single piece of sensitive data about hundreds of millions of americans they get a slap on the wrist. Tells you exactly where their priorities are.
What I don't understand is what's with all the China apologists around here, it's absolutely insane to me to see how even here, but also on reddit, for example, there is this wave of praising everything that a dictatorship does, do people really believe that what China does is ok and something to follow, or is it just propaganda? And no, I'm not ignoring all the bad stuff in the west, but I'm a bit afraid of the Chinese model appreciation.
Honestly I don't see a lot of people praising China who are against the tiktok ban. It's not just that our opinion of China is high, it's that our opinion of the US government is very low and they are our government, so why be worried about a foreign power when you feel like your own government is actively setting you up to fail, lying to your face and doing horrible shit.
I'll definitely admit that China is doing some horrible shit. I'm not the most educated on all of their issues but from what I've seen it's not great. But I'm also not convinced that TikTok is as much of a critical intelligence/espionage tool as much as the government claims it is, and I've seen a very real positive influence on people's connection with each other, and a frankly insane amount of mutual aid content on tiktok.
I am seeing a lot of people talking about how they have discovered that Chinese people are very welcoming and polite when you talk to them online. IDK, maybe I'm just missing the pro-chinese government stuff you are.
Strange, I found Instagram Reels' algorithm to be much better suited to my interests than TikTok's, and I've tried both multiple times, deleting them multiple times and seeing if it would improve, but TikTok's never did.
Very interesting. To me TikTok is nothing but memes and useless stuff. Whereas Instagram has been an amazing community for many of my passions. And now Threads is gaining in popularity as well (it really feels like hope scrolling in comparison to X's doom scrolling). I wish it wasn't owned by Meta, but if TikTok actually gets banned I would say good riddance. Something about Instagram/Threads is just perfect to me.
"“I would rather stare at a language I can't understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday."
Is it actually Instagram Reels that is inauthentic, or is it the content that people post there? The Instagram Reels service is just that - a service people can use to post videos, same as TikTok. It's the people who choose to use the service that cause it to seem inauthentic, not the service itself. If everyone migrated from TikTok to Reels overnight, then wouldn't Reels become more "authentic"?
The content doesn't matter. There's more than a lifetime supply of I'll relevant kinds of content on both platforms. The algorithm for curating your feed matters.
"The algorithm" doesn't matter as much as you think it does. If all the videos have metadata, it's quite simple to suggest another video to someone if they just watched a similar video. I watch how my wife uses TikTok, and "the algorithm" is hit or miss. Most of the time it's a hit, but that's because the metadata from the preceding videos (and how long she watched them, or didn't) makes it easy to figure out what she'll most likely want to watch next. Without metadata, there is no "algorithm", and with metadata, it's trivially easy for anyone to produce "an algorithm" that does the same thing, maybe even better than TikTok does it now. I mean, if you do a search about how to put on makeup, then the next 10 videos you see are going to be about how to put on makeup - that isn't exactly an irreplaceable algorithm.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect
I feel like this is what so many people (including myself) are missing about TikTok.I'll be honest I saw TikTok largely as an "extension" of Reels and vice-versa where folks with a following on one will post to the other because they are so similar and that would increase their reach.
that would be an extremely interesting experiment. Young people would probably feel completely lost, unsure of where to get "news" from. Actually having to go websites and search for stuff :)
"At this point, we have to accept that younger generations—precisely the people who have been raised on quantified audience feedback for their every creative gesture—have an unrecognizable conception of authenticity."[0]
The migration app of choice appears to be .. xiaohongshu, or "little red book". I'm guessing this won't last since it wasn't intended to have lots of Westerners using it and neither government is going to be happy with that scale of unfiltered contact between ordinary Chinese citizens and US citizens.
In the meantime, it's the place for Luigi Mangione memes.
for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book despite the association, obviously they could have been better about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in either language:
The social media app Xiaohongshu (小红书) does literally translate to "little red book" in English. However, this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was informally known as "Hongbaoshu" (红宝书) meaning "red treasured book" and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (毛主席语录).
The apparent connection in English comes from translators using "Little Red Book" for both terms (maybe due to training or an agenda? who knows, choosing word-by-word translation for one and popular translation for another), even though they're distinct and unrelated in the original Chinese, and of course in the official desired English "RedNote" too.
> The Chinese name was inspired by two pivotal institutions in its co-founder Charlwin Mao's career journey that both feature red as their primary color: Bain & Company, where he worked as a consultant, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA.
I would guess that the association to Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for plausible deniability.
As a native Chinese I can assure you 小红书 and 红宝书 are as close semantically to each other as the words constipation and constitution. Few would relate those two.
Even the most leftist Chinese entrepreneurs avoid having their brand names associated to politics; it's just common sense.
The guy went to university in the US and his name is literally Mao.
He knows Americans call Mao's book the Little Red Book. He back-translated it to Chinese word by word. Anyone who would have an obviously perfect product name like that and not use it would be dumb.
There's zero chance a dude named Mao had an idea for a little red book app and thought "Yeah, I'll call it this because I went to Stanford and they're red." It'd be like Google saying they named themselves after googly eyes and not spelling the number googol differently.
The guy didn't pick the name. "Mao" is the family name he inherited from his father. In the case of Mao Zedong and Mao Wenchao, they have the same family name, but that's about it. The two people aren't even from the same province.
Please, at least learn your lessons first. It's like suspecting everyone with the family name "Manson" to be a serial killer aspirant.
And in case someone wants to hear a linguistic opinion outside of English and Chinese: As a Japanese, I can confirm that those two words indeed have about as much to do with each other as constipation and constitution.
None of the "actual" Chinese people I know were confused about the terminology. The average Chinese does not care one lick about anything related to communism or the history of communism in this country. Mao's book is largely a relic of their great (or even great) grand parents age.
However most of my Chinese friends were confused about why something that most Chinese find to be a relatively uninteresting app in mainland China is suddenly so popular in the US.
It's also worth pointing out that this isn't some serendipitous accident, 小红书 has been working to become a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
I don't know which Chinese person you are talking about. I've never associated 小红书 with whatever Mao did back in the day. Hell, I don't think anyone I know made that connection. I only get that idea after watching a video made by a youtuber, who's not Chinese.
The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia, trying to tie anything Chinese to scary, nefarious communists. I doubt that they were thinking of Mao at all when making the app, Xiaohongshu is an app tailored for young, wealthy, cosmopolitan Chinese as an alternative to Douyin which is more for the masses, I wouldn't call that very Maoist.
Antiestablishment-types supporting an ideology like Maoism is at least something I can understand. Antiestablishment-types expressing their loyalty to the establishment of a foreign adversary is significantly more concerning.
This nihilistic outlook may make you feel better, but at the end of the day only creates a void in government that megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill in.
In case if you weren't merely being facetious, your home country at least has some incentive to work towards your interest, no matter how evil they are because they have to pay the consequences of these actions. Even in autocratic China, for example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.
On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
The people who want to unite Americans might find more success meeting the outliers where they're at rather than framing it as needing them to conform. That approach is what made the outliers cynics in the first place. What would it look like to make real change to address the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?
> What would it look like to make real change to address the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?
Real change will come when those who actually put work into it. Nobody will do it for you. Not China, not Trump, not the DNC. When the NAACP noticed that even the Senators who supported Civil Rights were too apathetic to put together a coalition to pass the Civil Rights Act, they created that coalition themselves. This is level political organizing that actually gets things done, and likely how Meta and Alphabet got this TikTok ban through as well.
What a truly insane take. Do you honestly think the Chinese government looks out more for your interests as an American citizen? The fact that you couldn't make the reverse claim in China without being censored speaks volumes.
When you've exhausted legitimate means for change, you begin searching for illegitimate means. Sorry, but at the end of the day, leverage is leverage and if a person in power says "this really hurts," congratulations they've told you their weakness.
> The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia.
Is it paranoia if Mao Zedong is still revered? If the government is the communist party? I realize the CCP is not perfectly communist in many ways but they are unapologetic about communism and their roots.
It is a coincidence that the original work did not mean little red book. But thats how it was translated, and the translation of the app is correct. So obviously now when you have the same name coming from a country that doesn't denounce communism I think it's fair to be concerned about communist influence.
he'll be revered forever the same way geroge washington is. theyre both warlords who founded a country, casting away the prior government and foreign invaders
washington is still liked even though he was a notable slave owner
I can't believe TikTok is not just getting around this by using the philosophy many people use when they are forced to change passwords. Just add an "!". TikTok: "We arn't TikTok, we are now TikTok!"
In English, it seems to be called rednote. But I doubt that it will be a real successor. At the moment it's a funny meme, and for some people satisfied cultural curiosity. But we already see the problems appearing, from the poorly localized interface, to people getting banned for reasons outside their understanding.
My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.
Well technically I am in high school
and Neither have you used ever instagram (okay maybe for that one time , I wanted to propose to my crush , (turns out she didn't have insta , so I had to talk to her friend asking her on my behalf where they said no [aww man])
and I live in India , so tiktok's banned. There are many indian alternatives to tiktok's that I have seen , But rednote being chinese just makes me wonder if its gonna survive.
Y'know things are just different yet so the same. The same fomo happened during the facebook time is now happening with red note.
“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” as Mark Twain is often reputed to have said. (I’ve found no compelling evidence that he ever uttered that nifty aphorism. No matter — the line is too good to resist.) (source https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/)
Wait, you proposed to your crush? Proposed as in marriage proposal and crush as in romantic feelings for someone seemingly unattainable? You also asked her friend to ask for you via Instagram?
I know we come from very different cultures and I have no intention of judging you, but can you perhaps give me a clue as to how this would work? I'm intrigued, to say the least.
I'm from India too (but at-least a generation older than this kid) and to clarify:
proposed = asking for a date or if he's too forward / self-centered then asking her to "be my girlfriend"
crush = a girl I like but haven't told that to her or shown it in public
And yes for kids in school it's quite common to initiate conversations through mutual friends because otherwise gossip spreads too quick and can sometimes be damaging (both emotionally and socially).
That's surprising to me. I'm 23 and Reels is, as far as I was aware, a big complimentary app to TikTok in my generation. To frame it as a Reel I saw;
"TikTok is vape and Reels are cigarettes".
TikTok's algorithm is _super_ curated and targeted, like a Mr. Beast video. Instagram's is pretty good but if you can get your algorithm to the brainrot cluster with everyone else then you'll get a lot of out-of-left-field, grungier content you might not find on TikTok.
I think once RedNote gets banned or the meme fades people will mainly flock to IG. There's still a void of creator based features that IG can't fill, so maybe a competitor will pop up if IG can't replicate the environment well enough.
Counterpoint here, I'm 32 and would have to disagree on the complimentary piece.
In my group of friends, the reels/shorts crowd have eased off on keeping up with the latest fads/memes. Its similar to the old meme cycle of them starting on 4chan and some filtering down to Digg/Reddit, you end up with them being watered down or receive them extremely late in the fad cycle.
Reels have a few problems, the biggest one is randomly getting served gore/death videos. This has never happened to me on tiktok. I feel like (cant substantiate this) reels pushes sex/thirst content more than tiktok does. The final one is the actual social aspect of tiktok vs reels, the comments and interactions on reels are very abusive and spammy compared to tiktok.
I do agree with you about RedNote being a fad, its artificially inflated but its possible the astroturfing of "interaction" will lead to a sustainable level of organic/real interaction with the app. IG is not great for communities.
He's likely to have more disposable incomr and go through a crisis of some sort that many people fill with buying, whilst also deluding themselves they're still in their 20s. I think mid 30s is a pretty hot market for advertisers.
I really hope people will unflock from most social media, at last for now that it is really at its worst. Perhaps in time, after building some open source social media platforms that does not have these big corporations in charge, things will change for the better.
Pretty much Insta/X is for genx and millennials, Facebook is for the boomer gen. Tiktok was for zoomers, when i was a teen till like 23 i hated being on the same cringe ass social media platform as my mom. Another teen trait is rebellion.
I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
> My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.
If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.
> and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it
"Little Red Book" is the literal translation of the original name but that's not the only way companies approach global markets, especially with longer to say names. It looks like they sometimes use "REDNote" (as it appears in App Stores), "RedNote", and sometimes just "RED" depending on the context (e.g. their advertisement/promotional email address is red.ad@xiaohongshu.com).
As to how they got there with it? "Little Red Book" is just an awkward mouthful to refer to compared to the alternative forms they used.
You're being facetious. The name Xiaohongshu is clearly a reference to Mao's book. And it's incorrectly translated as "Red Note" specifically to avoid the reference, not because it's a "mouthful".
If there was a German app called "My Strawberry" and you found out that the original German name translates to "My Struggle" you'd be very curious as to why the English name is so different and what they're trying to hide.
I'm not sure where the humor or joke was supposed to be nor where I claimed the original name lacked said association. Similarly, I don't particularly see "RedNote" as a well aimed choice for a rebrand set about for the purpose of distancing the app from communist associations.
TikTok doesn't use their literal translation either. Not because the name had a certain association but because it'd've also been a terrible way to market the app globally. I could give some credit to the idea there may have been more than a singular reason for changing the name but I can't buy the reason other apps also do is not at least a major factor, if not the largest.
One could argue, and I think with a strong case that if this law applies to TikTok, it would also apply to Twitter (Saudi investment) and Snapchat (also Saudi investment).
As written there are several problems with your theory:
A) The bill is about transfer of user information, not investment in a company.
B) Saudi Arabia owns a small, non controlling interest in Twitter/x
C) Saudi Arabia is not on the list of foreign adversary countries
So you’d have a hard time making that ‘strong’ argument.
We are trying to get away from Saudi influence and control so much that we look the other way while we pump poison into our water. So much so that the Simpson's even have an episode devoted to it where Marge exclaims, "the water is on fire!"
> I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
I'll tell you a funny one like that in another language:
Instagram reels are well... short-form videos usually with music/audio and effects.
It's pronounced something like "real" but longer.
Anyway, in French that word "reel" is printed the same but since most people don't practice spoken English it's read and pronounced "réel". Something like ray-hell (notice the é). And it annoys me to no eeeend :D.
So, among French-speaking community management crews and social network teams you hear "réel"/ray-hell all the time instead of "reel".
And how do you translate "réel" into English ? You guessed it: it's "real".
Yeah but "little red book" (xiaohongshu) in mandarin is not actually how the original Mao Little Red Book is called in Mandarin, either formally or informally. Informally in mandarin it's called hongbaoshu (literally "red cover book" and formally, as you can imagine, is like Quotes from Chairman Mao).
So this is a case of translators with an agenda translating two phrases with different original mandarin renditions (hongbaoshu and xiaohongshu), and picking and choosing the style of translation (base on usage vs based on character) to get the English translation to merge both of them as "Little Red Book".
Not really. Mao's book has been known as the "Little Red Book" in English for decades, well before the app existed.
And the characters for "小红书" directly and literally translate to "little", "red", and "book". It's the most literal and obvious translation of the name, no agenda needed. Go ask any Chinese person.
The app didn't even have an English name until recently. It was just "小红书" which any Chinese person would render in English as "Little Red Book". "RedNote" is a recent branding exercise.
> If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.
We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds. Unless they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.
> We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds. Unless they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.
The way the law is written, any adversary-controlled social network with more than 1 million MAU could be affected.
I think they'd ban it if it started gaining traction outside of Chinese immigrant communities. And it'd make sense to do it early, now that they have the legal power to do so, since it'd avoid controversy. No one would have cared about the TikTok ban if they did it when it was at 1-2 million MAU.
As a casual observer, I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious successor? The UI is better than TikTok ever was and a lot of the most popular creators are already mirroring their content there?
Shorts has a way worse algorithm, I don’t use TikTok because it’s too addictive but I get bored of YouTube shorts after like 5-10mins most times, which actually for me is a Feature but for YouTube itself is a drawback.
Not disagreeing with you as TikTok obviously works for a lot of people, but its recommendation algorithm never came anywhere near working for me after several attempts at it over fairly long periods of time.
I can't say I like YouTube shorts a lot, but there's often some I find interesting in a long enough window of time — the problem there is more the signal to noise ratio than the volume of the signal. TikTok just feels like my personal signal is just nonexistent.
Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on under the hood. There's such a huge difference between how much people like TikTok and how I feel about the content, and I don't understand why TikTok would have such a hard time with me in particular.
In general I'm kind of souring on algorithmic-driven social media, or at least short format (video or text). I don't have anything against it in principle, I just find I enjoy longer format posts and articles more in experience.
Tiktoks algorithm takes a while to get used to but it is pretty tameable. Quick way that works for me:
- avoid attempts based on "unliking" things, I'm pretty sure it treats it as engagement. Instead swipe bad content away.
- avoid "accidentally engaging", like replying to a comment you feel is wrong or watching something you don't like because you were trying to see where the speech was going. Disengage ASAP with unwanted.
- positive feedback for whatever video starts getting close to what you want.
- positive implies staying the whole clip, liking, viewing comments, commenting, liking comments and the strongest of all, sharing the video (you can send it to a telegram conversation with yourself or whatever, not sure if the link you shared ever being opened is accounted for but I think nope). Do this on purpose, like if a video is cool just open the comment section and like all comments without looking.
-try to "navigate". If you want to see tech and it's currently showing you music, maybe engage with music production or Spotify tricks when they appear. It might not be the tech you're looking for, but it's closer to tech than a teenage girl dancing. You'll eventually be shown things more relevant to you, at which point you grab that current.
Also do not try to rush the process. I think updating your interests is not instant, and session time might be a metric as well.
This is fascinating, I'm curious -- do you find yourself generally thinking in this way when using TikTok? Do you find that your peers that use TikTok do something similar?
This is just completely foreign to how I consume media. The idea that I need to try and "trick" an algorithm into showing me what I want is just completely unappealing. I'd much rather go somewhere else and actively seek out the content that I want, rather than trying to fight a system that seems like it would prefer me to be a passive consumer.
"Passive" not in the sense that I shouldn't be engaged, clearly, as the algorithm rewards engagement. But passive in the sense that I should not be seeking out what I want to see, I should just be reactive based on what I am shown, and then the platform will decide from that what I really want.
Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why would I want to bother with that?
>do you find yourself generally thinking in this way when using TikTok? Do you find that your peers that use TikTok do something similar?
Yup. It was new to me, as I learned from younger friends. To them it's obvious it's ride or be taken for a ride - not doing this active navigation, they'd compare it with surfing reddit using just the default frontpage unlogged.
In fact people even troll each other, for example by sending someone a mormon speech or an untranslated meme from India to screw with their feeds.
I have to say that in a way it's way better than YouTube or Instagram, where you can't really tame the thing and it will suddenly decide for a month that you like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro because you watched a video about bodybuilding.
>Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why would I want to bother with that?
Because a huge amount of interesting content is there. I also prefer the old style, but I'd rather begrudgingly adapt than be left behind in progressively decaying platforms - it is what it is.
You don't have to do any of this. He's just explaining more about how the algorithm works.
To a first approximation, TikTok simply shows you more of what you watch. If you swipe away a lot of stuff in the first second or two, it stops showing you that kind of stuff. If you watch complete videos, it shows you more like that.
I'm aware that this is how the algorithm works, but the parent comment is not just explaining how it works, they gave suggestions based on things that "work for me".
So I am specifically trying to sus out how common it is among tiktok users to have this sort of strategic thinking around the algorithm, since it's not something I've heard much of before.
This is very common and I would even say a necessary part of using algorithmic social media now, basically awareness of the algorithm and interacting with content in a way that keeps your algorithm tuned to what you want. For example I avoid clicking anything political on YouTube because as soon as I do, my suggestions become full of political ragebait.
My cynical take is that a lot of the people for whom the tiktok algorithm "didn't work" simply weren't pleased by what the algorithm (correctly) thought of them. It's like the 40 year old truck driver that complains it's just hot girls dancing. No, my dude, you just ALWAYS stay to watch the girls dance, you just don't want to admit it.
In general, it "just works" after a short period of maybe searching for specific terms just to "seed" the algorithm.
Or maybe it's precisely because one will just watch hot girls dance if given the opportunity, that one would not want a social media feed that caters to your most base desires.
I'm in your boat. I tried out TikTok out a few times, including making a new account, but it never showed me good content. I had maybe one or two longer sessions, but never felt the need to go back, like I (unfortunately) do with Reddit or Youtube. I could never understand why it was so popular, but maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.
I think that's part of why it's always been a little bit of a head scratcher for me — I didn't really go into it curmudgeonly, I was genuinely interested in it, people seemed to like it, and I was interested in something new. It just never worked out at all for me.
I even had people telling me in all seriousness "I must secretly like the content", as in the algorithm knows better than I do what I like. Which is kind of a weird and maybe even disturbing idea to buy into if you think about it.
I was told to keep at it, which I did. I'd put aside for a long time, go back to it, repeat the process over and over again. Eventually I just gave up. I always felt like it was targeting some specific demographic by default and never got out of that algorithmic optimization spot for me.
Anecdotally TikTok has the best content for me as well. I can’t even place my finger on why I like it more than IG. I don’t know if it’s the slight differences in the content if surfaces. Even if I am just looking through music on both apps (I play guitar) something about TikTok is more pleasant and I really am not sure what.
At least between Subway Surfer Reddit narrations and other garbage, TikTok shows me stuff I know I want to see. Instagram reels will start with something I'm interested in and very quickly pivot to people seemingly in the midst of psychosis, or literal porn. No matter how much I manually report as not interested.
It's strange to me everyone acting as like TikTok's algorithm is completely unassailable and will always be better than the competition for years and decades to come. Tech moves fast and Meta/YT aren't just standing around.
If their only differentiating feature is the algorithm, Insta would eat them for lunch eventually the same they did for Snapchat after knocking off that app's big/only claim to fame (stories).
The discussion seems to be TikTok's algorithm is so good no one could ever possibly compete. I really don't think that's the case and TikTok really has no moat whatsoever.
> It's strange to me everyone acting as like TikTok's algorithm is completely unassailable and will always be better than the competition for years and decades to come.
I'm not seeing this sentiment. More that none of its competitors are so obviously ahead of the pack that we can easily predict TikTok's natural successor.
I feel a lot of people have compare TikTok that they have used for countless of hours and where the algorithm has zero'd in in their preferences to a more vanilla YT Shorts. I used shorts for a few months heavily, and pretty much every video was in some way relevant to my interests (which is also why I don't consume short form video anymore, it's waaaay to addictive).
"Fetish" is the wrong way to look at it, but it does seem connected. The explanation I've seen is basically a unified "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me, so instead I'm going to give my data to China even harder". It's a generation of kids who grew up (mostly correctly) assuming all of their data was already all controlled by corporations in league with the government. Worrying about data privacy is too quaint to even consider.
There's of course a chance of algorithmic meddling, nudging people to a different Chinese app, but I think spite is a far simpler answer.
My wife is exploring RedNote for this very reason. "You're telling me I have an easy way to make the US government upset and the more I use RedNote, the more upset they are?" was her line of thinking. She explained that it makes her feel like she has a morsel of control over a group that previously didn't give a damn.
Her father would also be upset if she starts learning Chinese because of his political tendencies. It's basically a two-for-one deal of learning about another culture and learning a foreign language.
> if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me?
Flip the question around to your familiar villain. You’re a U.S. intelligence chief, and have a trove of embarrassing—possibly worse—information about ordinary Chinese citizens. How can you use this to make them useful to you?
This is a very first level consideration of things like this. In general it would not be particularly useful because exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement which would not only curtail these efforts (or even completely backfire in the case of double agent stuff), but could also blow up into a giant international controversy.
And for what? What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"? The risk:reward ratios are simply horribly broken in this sort of case. By contrast when your own government is doing this to you, you have nobody to turn to, and they can completely destroy your life in ways far worse than the threat of somehow revealing your taste in videos.
> exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement
Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
> could also blow up into a giant international controversy
Like if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM? Or India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil? What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)" [1]?
> What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"?
Everything needs grunt work. Taking pictures. Accepting and transferring funds as part of a laundering operation. Driving an operative around.
The ladies who killed Kim Jong-un's uncle thought they were "making prank videos at the airport and she was required to 'dress nicely, pass by another person and pour a cup of liquid on his/her head'" [2]. Being able to arrange that from afar, with limited outreach, is something Cold War-era spooks could only dream of.
> Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
It does, quite often. Which is why blackmail is done mainly by those who law enforcement would think twice about going after, and/or those who have nothing to lose.
> if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM?
Plausible deniability, and who is there to rally around?
> India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil?
I don't know what incident you're talking about, but the fact you say specifically "American citizen" suggests to me you're talking about someone who had strong connections to India and would be generally perceived as Indian.
> What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)"
That sounds like a propaganda framing. In what sense was this a "police station", much less an illegal one? All they apparently did was "help locate a Chinese dissident living in the US". So the ground facts are more like "the MPS had a private eye working in New York". Which, well, sure; so what?
The options available to that intelligence chief in your scenario are probably bad for China, but are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
I kinda get why the US is banning tiktok, I don't get why you'd expect most of tiktok's users to care about those reasons.
You only need to look at the news for how many Russian citizens are tricked by Ukrainian telephone con-men into giving away all their money and then setting fire to banks/trains/various military installations in the hope of getting it back. I'm already expecting to see that in the US and elsewhere when the inevitable happens. Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens, how easier would all of this be?
You can't make extraordinary claims like that without providing a source. Especially considering Wikipedia has this to say:
> In August 2023, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued official warnings about a new form of phone fraud in which Russians are forced to set fire to military enlistment offices through pressure or deception. The authorities claim that scammers call from the territory of Ukraine and choose elderly Russians as their victims. The Russian government has not yet offered any evidence of their claims. Russian business newspaper Kommersant claims that fraudsters support the Armed Forces of Ukraine and organize "terrorist attacks".
Emphasis mine.
> Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens
As a US citizen living in the US, I think it's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the US government. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to even consider, and seems just as ridiculous that a Chinese citizen could feel the same.
Even leaving aside the state's monopoly on violence, agents at any of multiple three-letter agencies could easily ruin my life. An IRS agent could randomly decide to audit my last decade of tax returns. A law enforcement agent (local, state, or federal) could deliberately incorrectly mark my vehicle as stolen. They could SWAT me on a trumped up basis. They could just black bag me, and throw me in some dark pit.
China could probably hack me, and fuck up my digital presence, including my finances. But the US government could easily skip a few steps and just declare those finances illegitimate in a variety of ways much more difficult to undo.
> it's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the US government
Sure, individually. If you think about more than yourself, you should recognise a collective threat that requires a modicum of sacrifice to protect against.
id consider that the sacrifice is the opposite - the local government is a collective threat, and we sacrifice locally built products to mitigate that threat
> are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
Yes. It's riskier for the FBI to fuck around with an American than it is for the CIA to fuck around with someone in Russia or China. Particularly when we're dealing with extorting someone using embarassing, but not necessarily criminal, information.
Or just, you know, sowing chaos. Again, if the CIA had a list of Chinese citizens who may be mentally unstable and are obsessing over e.g. the Uyghurs, could that not be put to use in a way that's harmful to China and that person?
Your risk of being fucked with by either Beijing or D.C. is incredibly low. ("Fucked with" meaning being harassed for legal behaviour.) Given the existence of such a database, however, the chances of fuckery at the population level is almost 100%. What President wouldn't want a call they could make that would tumble a foreign adversary into chaos for a few days?
I don't think that's true anymore. In NYC, at least, the people who are into Japanese culture tend to be black/Hispanic teenage girls, not the classic "basement-dwelling white guy" stereotype. Visit a big Japanese store like Kinokuniya or Bookoff sometime if you have one in your area - I think you'll be surprised!
A large part of it is obviously negative polarization: you tell people they can't use a Chinese app, they're going to use a different Chinese app. Hence the pictures of Luigi.
It's worth asking why Reels/Shorts didn't take off and those companies had to ask for their competition to be banned instead. Everyone agrees that "the algorithm is better", but this is very hard to quantify. Perhaps something about surfacing smaller creators? Quantity/quality of invasive advertising? Extent to which people feel particular kinds of rage content is being forced on them?
Main reason besides the algorithm is in my opinion that TikTok has wide but hard boundaries when it comes to content. This leads to diverse but relatively safe content.
It is not 4chan where you think twice before clicking a link to avoid emotional damage. It is also not Reddit or Youtube where you do not bother to go because you permanently encounter stuff that is inconsequentially blocked and you are still not safe from trauma. I think most platforms other than TikTok try to be too strict, fail to enforce their unrealistic rules in any comprehensible form and therefore suck for most intellectually curious users.
This has been my experience and it is what people are reporting from red note.
In comparison to instagram I have found it far easier to explore, for instance, black women making leftist political critiques of Harris engaged in long conversations with black women who were actively supporting Harris.
Similarly, it has been much easier to find discussions about Palestine, labor rights, indigenous US culture, and numerous other topics.
I think those conversations are probably find-able on Ig or Yt, but I have had much more difficult time with those platforms. It's been hard for me to find much engaging content that is close enough to my (admittedly anarchistic) political and cultural views that the conversation changes what I think in useful ways, so I avoid that work on things like FB. These platforms do suck for doing anything other than keeping up with pictures of my nieces.
My feeling is that in general the TT algo doesn't really care about US politics so it just shows me engaging content, whatever that might be for me.
People here can call that "addictive", but in doing so it quickly discards any agency for people who have any actual political disagreements with the radically centrist US political mainstream.
I am used to that flippant dismissal- Allen Dulles would have rather believed in mind control than believe that US military personal who encountered Koreans were swayed by genuine empathy for a legitimate political-economic position.
By contrast, my feeling is that various other governments don't really care what folks in other countries think about the world so as long as it's not objectively porn or gore they just let conversations happen.
That is, of course, quite dangerous if your power relies on maintaining narrative consistency for the population you rule- that's why China and other authoritarian folks do things like limit what can happen on social media in their countries...
The whole concept that one's views can be changed by what they were compelled to watch is what leads to the circus of absurdity in modern times. The fact that the media, corporations, and political establishment will all aggressively repeat a statement only to be rebuffed by the public at large seems to have no affect on their insistence on believing in this nonsense.
If it were true than the countless nations which turned to extreme censorship and propaganda to try to maintain themselves would be still standing. Instead, they invariably lose the faith of their people who simply stop believing anything (or supporting their own government) and at that point their collapse is already imminent - even if it might only happen decades later. See: Soviet Union.
Or for some predictive power - once China's economy reaches its twilight years where you have to juke the books and redefine exactly how things are measured just to keep eeking out that 1 or 2% growth per year, their entire political system will collapse. People would be happy being ruled by a group of authoritarian mutated frogs who demanded you ribbit in loyalty 6 times a day, so long as their economy and society was booming from the average person's perspective. It's only when things slow down that people start looking more critically at the systems they live under.
A large part of the effectiveness of the media is normal people think they don't know this.
Media has absolutely wised up to the fact that contrarian attitudes are common amongst Americans. These companies know that if they repeat something nonstop and make it as obnoxious as possible, a large number of people will quickly adopt the opposite viewpoint. That's the desired result.
Reverse psychology is something elementary school kids learn about and use to torment others or do their bidding. It doesn't end in elementary school.
This is nonsense. The media constantly runs overt level 0 propaganda that directly furthers the interests of the US political establishment. It's certainly not some secret 5d chess ploy to turn everybody into jaded anti-establishment types.
Even more so because once you do realize how silly things are (on both sides of the aisle) your favorite media outlet quickly becomes NOTA.
They focus on the most ridiculous "controversies" about some politicians that they know people will think are ridiculous, while completely ignoring their actual problems. They say "oh no, definitely don't vote for this person, or that means you're against us!!!" Lots of people then think "I hate this group, so I'm going to do the opposite just to own them." Then you see that these companies are donating millions to those candidates that they're giving fake criticism of.
It's very transparent.
A decade ago, people on the internet said big corps will never advertise on places like reddit because people say bad words there and they don't want their brand associated with it. Turns out companies just stopped posting banners and paid people to do stealth marketing and it's much more effective.
Advertising and propaganda works best when there's plausible deniability. And half the country very strongly believes they can't be advertised to and will never believe any propaganda--they're free thinkers who do the opposite of what the media tells them.
If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
> If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
It's not that they give up, it's that they keep posting level 0 things because that's what their manager wants and can understand.
Do you think the Tokyo Rose broadcasts were some 5D chess ploy to make sure Japan lost the war faster? No, they were people who had a job doing their job. Large organisations are barely capable of getting their members to pull in the same direction. You occasionally see a level 1 reverse psychology ad campaign, but they're inevitably done by a small agency working for a small department and get pulled as soon as they collide with someone higher up who doesn't get it.
Media an entire lifetime ago and media today aren't even worthy of being compared. The methods employed aren't a fraction as complex. WW2 propaganda being ineffective would mean Russia would make zero effort to influence western thinking today. Yet western governments are absolutely panicking because Russian operations are targeting westerners, and they're working.
You could also take the reverse point of view and claim Russians aren't targeting westerners at all, and any propaganda they do make isn't working. Which is possible. But that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
An honest proposition: if these media companies are dumb and completely ineffectual, then you have a multi-hundred-billion dollar opportunity. They're missing out on hundreds of millions of people in America alone. It'd be silly to not take advantage of that by simply starting a network saying what everyone else is "really" thinking, because people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it. [1] Surely media companies aren't documented to be doing this intentionally and some commenters online have realized they're merely dumb and not really trying to just get people outraged so they take the opposite point of view. They certainly wouldn't do that.
You're not considering one simple alternative - and that's the best "propaganda", by an overwhelming margin, is the truth. US propaganda worked during the Cold War era because it was mostly just pointing out true things, like having store shelves stocked full of really cheap and diverse goods. Soviet propaganda, by contrast, failed because the truth was not on their side.
And now we've basically swapped roles. So a lot of Russian propaganda is effective because it is the truth - Ukraine isn't winning, the sanctions are improving Russia's economy (and uniting the Global South) while wrecking Europe's, they didn't blow up their own oil pipeline, and so on endlessly. And vice versa, US propaganda isn't really working, because it's often left trying to make claims that are simply false - the opposite of all of the above would be an example.
As for governments freaking out - it's because of self interest. As everything comes crashing down, people are holding them accountable and anti-establishment candidates/parties are surging (and in many cases taking high office) pretty much everywhere. We're simultaneously living through a geopolitical inflection point with the decline of one great empire and the rise of [something else] (which hopefully isn't just another great empire), and the likely end of globalism. It's a shift that will likely geopolitically define the next century.
> So a lot of Russian propaganda is effective because it is the truth /.../ the sanctions are improving Russia's economy
This is not the truth, very far from it. Western observers are fooled by the official statistics because they've literally never experienced a government blatantly lying and posting completely fabricated numbers. They recognize when governments tweak definitions and try other manipulations, but they are utterly unequipped to recognize completely made up numbers.
For Russian economists, this is nothing new. They are openly sarcastic when they reference figures like the official inflation rate (9.5%), because they estimate the true number to be far worse, 20-25%. They used to base their opinions on independent market research companies like ROMIR that tracked consumer spending habits, but Russian government shut them all down in late 2024.
Russia is getting hit with a similar inflation wave like the world saw during and after Covid, but unlike the rest, Russia cannot climb out of the hole, because they are unwilling to stop the war against Ukraine. War spending is the main cause of the inflation. Russian government is flooding the economy with insane payouts to mercenaries for their utterly unproductive "work" on the battlefield while the production of goods is stalling and the availability of foreign goods is much lower as well due to sanctions. Growing amount of money in the system + less goods available = money loses value relative to goods (inflation).
It's not like Russia is a closed country, nor is inflation difficult to measure. Third parties don't simply take Russian figures at face value, which is why the numbers from e.g. the World Bank will vary slightly from those of the IMF and then vary once again from the official figures, and so on.
When the Russian economy was briefly under substantial strain when the huge sanctions attack first landed and the ruble fell rapidly, not only did their official numbers reflect this, but they had a more negative expectation than third parties!
For that matter there are a zillion videos you can watch on YouTube of people doing walking tours through various supermarkets and places looking at the availability/prices of stuff. Here's one from some lady a month ago that clearly leans ideologically Western, but nonetheless affirms prices to be somewhat lower than would be expected from the official rates, while complaining about it -
https://youtube.com/watch?v=m01-iYSPDt0
Made even sillier if you're aware of Russia's economic history since the end of the 90s. Their economy has for decades been seeing substantial inflation (5-10%) yet even more substantial wage growth. So complaining about prices without even mentioning the change in wages is the sort of behaviour one should expect from people of this sort of bias.
> that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
I don't think anyone believes that they're being successfully targeted by Russian propaganda. A lot of people believe, or claim to believe, that their political opponents have been successfully targeted by Russian propaganda, or that ideas that they don't like are Russian propaganda. But that's not really because they've been convinced of something that strongly goes against their interests/predispositions; it only requires them to believe that their opponents are stupid and they are smart, which they were already predisposed to believe. (And I suspect most of them know on some level that this is something they're professing rather than something they think is literally true)
> people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it
Oh no, people enjoy righteous indignation and so media serves it to them. But the media establishment is not organised enough to direct that, certainly not through some 5D chess logic. Yes you do occasionally see false/slanted stories spread as outrage bait by people on the other side, but when those happen they're done by, like, literally 3 guys, and one of them spills the beans shortly after.
If you want a contemporary example, look at the UK media suppressing coverage of muslim child rape gangs for the past 10 years or so that's now kind of bubbling over into the mainstream discourse. Yes, it's creating a backlash effect, but if that was the deliberate intention then a propaganda payload that takes 10+ years to deliver results is not going to be useful for day-to-day politics (is Russia still going to be at war in 10 years, and if so, with who? Will e.g. Belarus be an ally or an enemy at that point?). And even at level 0 it was never really effective in changing minds - maybe it gave the people who wanted to pretend it wasn't happening an excuse to pretend it wasn't happening, but the people who cared about it managed to find out.
Theories of propaganda masterminds are comforting in the same way that conspiracy theories are - the idea that there's actually some competent entity that's got it all worked out. But in fact any entity large enough to spread propaganda is ipso facto too unwieldy to push anything but the simplest messages.
The reason they lie to the point of absurdity is because media giving up any notion of impartiality and going full ideological has led to a polarization in society (or perhaps it was vice versa - in any case, it is what has happened) and this has gradually led to people believing in caricatures of the "other side" which exist in only extreme cases. E.g. - conservatives believing liberals want to have children reading gay literature and defund the police. Or liberals believing that conservatives want to completely ban immigration and turn the US into some sort of white Christian ethnostate.
Each "side" does share clips of the other sides absurdities to galvanize themselves and their rightness, while simultaneously unquestioningly believing the absurdities their side posts. It's not reverse psychology.
You miss the direction of causality. People, especially in modern times, are attracted to media that 'identifies' with their worldview. So you end up with a viewership that matches the ideology of the medium. But it's not because the medium 'converted' anybody.
Or consider things like the USSR where the government strictly controlled all media, there was no media, and even entry/exit from the country was strictly (and generally ideologically) controlled. If media affected people, you'd have had a country of mindless drones of the system. But it was anything but. One of my favorite jokes from the time is, "Why do we have two newspapers, "The Truth" and "The News"? Well that's because there's no truth in The News, and no news in The Truth!" And indeed once they started allowing some degree of expression, it was basically all anti-establishment, leading to some notably great Soviet music from the 80s-90s that parallels the 60s-70s in the US.
I do think media can have an influence on things people know nothing about, but even that comes with an asterisk. War propaganda is the obvious example. Each time we go invade somewhere, or enjoin a conflict, there's a propaganda blitzkrieg about it being the most just action ever against the most evil guy ever. And it does usually work, at first, because people know nothing whatsoever about the conflict. But then over time people begin to learn more and formulate their own views and learn more about the conflicts and opinion starts to shift, even if the media continues the propaganda party 24/7.
And in cases where people already have preformed opinions, this is completely futile from day 0. The obvious example in recent times would be the media effort to try to paint Israel's actions as positively as possible. People simply didn't buy it, because they already had their opinions and so the media propaganda was mostly completely ineffective.
I don't miss the causality at all. I think you greatly overestimate people's willingness to critically examine ideas that are surfaced within their affinity group.
Causality works both ways. People are drawn to their affirming media, but they are also assimilated into it. And it's not like they are unformed lumps of clay before they "choose" what media to consume -- often this is a product of their developmental environment to begin with.
Where they might not have preexisting biases, a framework for thought is provided to them by the group. These groups are sometimes tightly, and sometimes loosely, defined. There is always a fringe. But independent thought is far far from the strongest influence in 99% of people.
This is such a blindingly obvious truth of the world (to me) that I can't formulate a serious counterargument. Can you?
Again there are obvious and mostly endless counter-examples to this. A couple of examples from both sides of the aisle - when Fox News fired Tucker Carslon, their ratings plummeted and he ended up getting [far] more viewers on X than FoxNews gets during prime time broadcasts! When the NYTimes published an editorial from Senator Tom Cotton suggesting that the George Floyd riots and violence should be brought to an end by deploying of the military, their readers freaked out to the point that the director of editorials was "retired", and they publicly announced they would be rethinking about what they publish.
People pick their worldview and biases, and media (in current times) sees it as their role to deliver on those biases. When they don't - the audience leaves and moves on to somebody who will.
The only real superpower media has is to overtly lie to people. And on issues that people know nothing about it is generally effective. But as they learn more about the topic, the views shift more towards what people again choose to individually think about an issue. And as a longer term side effect of this, this superpower is completely self defeating because people begin to completely distrust the media. I could show polls on that but I'm sure you already know trust in media is basically nonexistent. The funnier one is this. [1] The perceived ethics of journalists lies literally right between lawyers and advertisers.
While it's true that people follow their affirming media (e.g. Tucker Carlson), they also accept a lot of what he says, without critical thought.
The "facts" he presents are the basis for their beliefs, and since he is very selective and slanted about the information he presents, they believe it to be further affirmation of their preexisting beliefs or biases.
This is the essence of propaganda and manipulation. Fill in the gaps of people's knowledge/belief with something that's plausible and favorable to you, even if it's only part of the story.
Content generation is Propaganda 101. Editorial control of a trusted entity is a higher level. Algorithm manipulation of a (perceived) neutral/noninvolved source is a higher level yet. And personalized algorithm manipulation is basically spear phishing. Which works extremely well!
Well, again I'd look at the examples where a media (or in this case) a media source falls outside what is expected. With Tucker this is easy - he's a very religious person and quite regularly makes his religion a significant part of his arguments, yet few people who follow him support or advocate those claims. In fact he has some order of magnitudes greater viewers than his entire religious group has followers! People follow him mostly for the multipolar and anti-hegemony stuff, but accept (while not embracing) embracing his own distinct takes outside of that because they don't generally run too hard against these worldviews.
Contrast this against the NYTimes. People follow it for the woke, pro-hegemony, pro-establishment stuff. But as per the example with Senator Tom Cotton, if they veer to far from this ideology, far from just accepting it - they rant and rave, and if NYTimes didn't promise to get back on track - they would also have left.
I don't think anyone doesn't believe media impacts how people think.
I do think that you have toan incredibly reductive view of belief formation to think that simply showing someone a series of short videos is enough to change how they think about the world.
There's a whole dialect in our existence within language, but most folks I know think that they are the sole authors of their beliefs while other folks are entirely a product of whatever happens to be in front of them. It's very reminiscent of the Fundamental Attribution fallacy...
Well-executed propaganda does not need to attempt direct change in thought.
It sows ideas that are net-beneficial to the propagandist. Leans into the ones that get traction. Manipulates the conversation. Provides simplistic (but advantageous) refutations of more complex (but more true) criticisms.
This is Psych 101 material here. Not at all complicated. You just need to think on a wider horizon and a longer time frame. Stereotypically, this is a cultural weakness of US Americans. Certainly of its leaders. Other cultures have contrasting reputations, some of which appears to be earned.
reels cannot seem to give me anything other than America’s funniest home videos style content and thirst traps, while on tiktok I get critical analysis of todays events, planet money-esque content, discussion of analytic philosophers i’m interested in, etc. it’s truly no contest.
Reels just wants to basically treat me as a generic male with some bias towards what my social graph likes. I also hate that my likes are public on reels.
e: not sure why this is downvoted, just trying to provide color to an earnest question
This is exactly my problem. Instagram thinks they can just apply your demographics to an algorithm and find what you like. Tiktok figures out your demographic based on what you like. Tiktok listens, ineffectually tries to sell you things, and gives you what you enjoy; Instagram tries to fit you to a mold, and then sell things to that mold, then give you slop popular within that mold.
Planet, money, style economic analysis, is that the vibes woman?
But I would be curious how to make sure I get that kind of content I would love philosophy and current events.
Somehow I’ve trained my algorithm is only show me superhero clips, I think because I was watching all the Marvel movies during the pandemic and then didn’t really use it again since then
I don't understand your first question at all, but tiktok lets you reset your algorithm and try again.
Be diligent about not spending too much time watching something if it's not what you want your algo to be, sometimes I can get in loops where I watch something because I'm confused by it and then just get a lot of confusing content.
Rednote and TikTok has 'novelty' content type that originally cultivated in mainland China. The memes, reactions pic, etc don't really exist on reels/shorts.
I don't use TikTok, but my understanding is that they are just a lot better than anyone else with the algorithm. Somehow where Meta built a social graph, TikTok built a graph of videos (no need to know who you are, they can just suggest videos based on other videos you watch). And it's apparently difficult to catch up (presumably because they have more users so more data to make better predictions).
That would, IMO, explain why people use TikTok and not something else.
As to where they go after TikTok is banned... I feel like there is also a factor of "Oh you want to ban chinese apps? Let me show you". Not sure whether it will last, though.
I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.
Of course an app you have used for thousands of hours is going to know you better than the one you tried for half an hour
Then be prepared to be surprised? I don't know why its better but it actually is night and day different. The best uneducated way I can describe it is YouTube sticks you into a model that only classifies people in large groups. Oh you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-right talking heads. TikTok has a model that is tailored just for you. Oh you like video game streamers that play Tarkov? Here are some videos of other games similar to Tarkov.
> you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-right talking heads
This is something that infuriates me about youtube, to the extent that I wonder if it's deliberate. Those guys feel like the propaganda the platform wants to sell me, whereas on the Chinese platforms there isn't the sense of HERE IS THE TWO MINUTE HATE PROPAGANDA VIDEO CITIZEN you sometimes get on other platforms.
I wonder if its simply just a pattern over the last N years with Google where they maximize everything for ad revenue. I honestly don't know how TikToks ad revenue looks like but from a consumer point of view it appears for whatever reason they have mostly corporate ads where YouTube has the lowest value garbage (perhaps highest paying) ads on MLM and getting rich through real estate.
Edit: As a weak comparison I think about Prime Streaming vs YouTube or Hulu. Ignoring that ads suck. Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it. YouTube throws whatever highest paying garbage at you as much as possible. I tried Hulu once with ads, painful, every like 7mins you are getting an ad and often the same ad over and over.
It's also worth noting that TikTok has the "TikTok Shop" that allows people to sell directly through the app. Perhaps this allows them to rely less heavily on advertising. I certainly see virtually zero ads on the app. Ideally this is because they've identified that I'm a terrible person to sell ads to, but perhaps they're just less aggressive about pushing them.
> Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it.
Sure, I just stopped using prime when they introduced ads. It's also the number one complaint about the service and it regularly shows up any time the service is mentioned. I also can't remember a single ad played that was actually relevant to me.
Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.
> Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.
I feel like Hulu established early enough that they were partially (or fully) ad-supported. I watched a show for free on Hulu with ads many years before I ever would have considered paying for a streaming service at all. Prime, on the other hand, is something people already pay for (usually for reasons other than just streaming, but that also reinforces that they're paying), so the ads probably come off as worse because of that, even though it's kind of backwards in some ways.
Reminder that YT used to be pretty decent about (music) recommendations until, I’d say, 2015-ish, that’s how I discovered lots and lots of very cool and interesting (music) stuff that I listen to this day.
Not sure how they managed to screw that up, but screw it they did, and nowadays the sidebar, or even the plain search, has become unusable.
Try it. I've been using Youtube for a decade and its recommendations are a total crapshoot these days. TikTok figured out my preferences within 15 minutes just based on which videos I liked and watched, and it can change course extremely quickly if you get bored of a certain topic.
The total number of hours I spent Youtube must outnumber the total number of hours I spent on TikTok by at least 100:1.
That's interesting. YouTube's gotten me fairly pinned algorithm-wise over the past few years (I used to never use recommendations at all before that). But my Shorts recommendations seem to just be the regular recommendations, but Shorts versions of them. Sometimes as far as the same channels, or the same people in clips even if it's on a different channel.
it absolutely is, i routinely do a vanilla algo run on reels vs tiktok to compare and it’s crazy how much better it is.
reels is really, really bad - it is surprisingly hard to get it to stop showing you some combination of “funny prank videos” and onlyfans funnel content.
> I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.
I've watched probably 1000s of hours of youtube and it's still pushing crap at me that I would never watch in a million years (edit: eg "How to create Smart Contracts using ChatGPT" or "Abusive tough guy picks fight w the WRONG GUY!"). Maybe it's better if you like a specific genre of video essays or whatever but in terms of a replacement for tiktok it's completely irrelevant.
Reels is at least in the conversation, but the UX is ass and the culture there is a dumpster fire. Granted, I haven't had a meta account for about a decade (the ad obsession just destroys the experience) so this is all hearsay.
> not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes
Well, and what about the actual content? If all you have is a bunch of garbage it doesn't matter how good your algorithm is if all it can do is find the best garbage to push at the user.
I've put Tik Tok on my phone three different times now and used it each time over a few days and it seemed like I was scrolling endlessly and finding nothing.
YouTube's recommendations are terrible, but I usually open YouTube when I'm looking for something specific and it's amazing in that regard.
Instagram is somewhere in the middle. I mostly follow people I actually know so the videos are interesting because of that.
Are you "liking" videos? That's how I steered it in the right direction because it wasn't doing much for me when I first started using it. It only took a few minutes for it to latch onto my interest and then the watch time took over.
I only ever find something interesting on tiktok by searching for it. I can only watch the people i follow, the "FYP" has totally irrelevant stuff. I too have been trying to like and follow to get it to perform this magic people talk about but the "FYP" doesn't show me stuff I'd like to see like what I intentionally like and follow from searches.
It seems to have just about everything. I use it mostly for bodybuilding, foreign language lessons, and music. FWIW it's known for the short-form stuff, but it also has plenty of long-form content as well.
I suspect that the algorithm is taking in inputs that maybe we don’t consider. Not just swipes or likes, but maybe even how still the phone is while you watch it or if you blink less, signs you’re more focused on the video. Maybe they don’t have access to that telemetry but I think that’s kind of the vein of how they measure attention more than just touchscreen actions
Also, Tiktok don't even require you to be a user to use, exactly because it's kinda irrelevant for them. They will build the algo based on which videos you liked, for how many seconds, replays, etc etc.
I use both and YouTube Short produces mostly just garbage for me. AI voice videos that will get your attention, but has little content. TikTok's algorithm on the other hand is much better and provides quality, half-long-form content.
I spend a lot of time on YT, and less time on Instagram... and 0 time on TikTok, where I never created an account.
YT Shorts exist exclusively for YT creators who want to publish bite-sized pieces of content for their audience with a much lower expectation of polish than their normal longer form content. Perhaps the algorithm also presents "random" YouTubers', too, but the vast majority of what I see is put out by the publishers I'm already following (or other very similar publishers in the same ecosystem).
I would suggest that TikTok's successor is Insta Reels. Reels are almost exclusively entertainment and because they tie into Instagram's broader user/connections network the UX is much better than TikTok. Nobody goes to Instagram to figure out how to replace their garbage disposal -- this is squarely YT domain. If YT Shorts can make inroads in the entertainment market [without feeling like a commercial break between pieces of actual content, which is the impression I have and the way I use it].
I cannot disagree more. I just scroll on tiktok and tiktok populates the scrolling with videos I want to see, and it takes about ten minutes to signal to tiktok what content you like and don't like. Youtube, meanwhile, is an exercise in a far too-busy UI with thumbnails and comments and text and buttons—it's inherently a desktop app shoved into a web browser. Nice if you want to search for a specific topic and watch a four-hour video on it, but terrible for entertainment or killing time.
The only use I have for youtube are in solving these two problems: 1) where can I find a music video and 2) how do I do x
...but the focus on the interface obscures why youtube shorts won't ever take off: youtube is extremely bad at pushing content I want to watch. I've heard this over and over and over again and I know it's true for me, too.
Yes, although Capcut is a separate piece of software. You can in theory make content with it for any app. In practice, Tiktok is so dominant that a lot of popular Reels content has Tiktok watermarks on it.
Every time in the last year that anyone has shared me a link to a short video on Facebook or Instagram, it has a TikTok watermark on it. This leads me to assume that most of the content on FB or Insta that I would actually want to see originally comes from TikTok.
Because Youtube shorts is awful, at least me, as a user.
Most of the content there, it's, well, "shorts", cuts from full videos of podcasts, etc. It lacks real users. It's basically the current youtube creators doing content for Youtube Shorts.
Let alone how the algo it's worse, and you can't download videos :)
Shorts is absolute trash. It does not have critical mass and will repeat the same videos to you over and over.
EDIT: I want to overemphasize just how bad it is. It feels like a project someone whipped up in coding bootcamp over a week. It feels like it has zero ability to pick the next video correctly and it genuinely repeats videos between sessions.
Part of it is intentional spite from the users switching; a big part of the push for banning TikTok was based on the fact that it's based on China, so purposely seeking out a Chinese alternative is making a statement. Whether or not you think the ban is justified, I think it's hard not to see the obvious inconsistency in banning only a single app on those grounds that this migration points out.
I've never personally used TikTok, so it's possible my perception is flawed, but to me it almost seems like a dare to the government to prove how serious their rationale is. If the government truly thinks that having data collected by Chinese apps is so dangerous, are they willing to flat out ban _all_ Chinese apps? If so, is that more extreme step still something the courts consider constitutional? If not, was TikTok just a convenient political target rather than something actually dangerous?
Because for 5-20 dollars you can drive hundreds of thousands of people if not millions of people to your video, product, meme, whatever... Youtube, not so much.
Well it's more... Xiaohongshu is for cosmo PRC cool kids (read: lean wealthy), and also a large ecommerce portal that targets that demographic. Not sure if the userbase is interested in... western and RoW "riff raff" shitting up the content for too long. I say this more as an insult to Xiaohongshu, I like TikTok (or Douyin) because I like seeing entrepenurs sell neon signs and industrial glycerine between my swipes.
Rest of World had an informative article about Xiaohongshu few months ago, it seems indeed to be a combination of Instagram and Tripadvisor. Chinese people that are able to travel are using it to find the "authentic" places.
It's also TIGHTLY controlled, with people complaining on Twitter and elsewhere that their posts are under 48 hour review before posting. The rules are also quite strict around LGBT issues etc, and not in favor.
Most of all though it's just a very silly protest, given that the "tiktok ban bill" is really a "hostile foreign-power controlled platform divestment bill" so Xiaohongshu will just be next on the block in the unlikely event that it becomes popular.
XHS is for cool GenZ, bias female, urban, has money / disposable income, think coastal elite. I guess more lifestyle/gram, pushes beauty, fashion, wellness, food, luxury goods etc. Douyin (TikTok) is for masses... "less cultured" audience, more working class / hillbilly, pushes some of the above occasionally but also everything else from cheap widgets to industrial equipment.
Not really. Little Redbook is like if everyone on Reddit was upper middle class instead of Reddit's low middle class. Plus Instagram daily life and friend photos. Plus TikTok algorithm videos. Plus Tumblr microblogging. We don't have a 1:1 equivalent.
I read a lot about TikTok the last few months from users all over the web. Trust me, that's not what TikTok is actually full of, its just what algorithm you got sucked into, for whatever reason. I assume there's some specific bubble for "current viral thing" that you're locked into. Make an alt and like completely different content, you'll see that your feed will be night and day.
Additionally, what's worse is, I've seen posts of people unable to get out of the algorithm bubble on TikTok no matter how many videos they dislike. I think some people even try blocking the accounts. It's the weirdest algorithm. I assume it works for MOST users (when its not a "MEME" Bubble, its likely content you actually like), but if you shove someone into a niche meme bubble, it can get weird.
Teens are rebellious & want to be far away from parents.
It disqualifies mainstream apps like Twitter, Reddit, BlueSky, Reels & now Snapchat as well. This leaves Tiktok and now international apps like Xiaohongshu as the obvious alternatives.
The more the US govt. forces youths to use American mega-corps, the less they want to use it.
It’s not why they use TikTok but it’s why they don’t use other social media apps. Once an app becomes too popular with older people the quality and vibes decrease, plus everyone feels awkward about posting.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about outside of generational gaps, new social media apps are fun because you add all the people you’re comfortable with. After some years you now have a ton of connections from past stages of life, and start feeling restricted again in your personal expression.
Plus there’s the dual use issue – IG is too commonly shared now so I have current and former coworkers there plus everyone I’ve ever been interested in as friends or more at a party. So it’s not the place I’d want to feel free and creative.
IG tries to solve some of this with Close Friends and other lists but people don’t really want to spend their time constantly organizing a list of friends.
> IG tries to solve some of this with Close Friends and other lists but people don’t really want to spend their time constantly organizing a list of friends.
Agreed. IG's UI for this is horrible.
I really liked Google+'s "Circles" feature back in the day that let you drag and drop people into different groups really easily and 'assign' posts/content to those circles.
Exactly, Instagram started as a way for me to interact with my social circle. Show people I personally know what is going on in my life and see what is going on in their life. Instagram later on has slowly tried evolving into something else, but mentally I still view it as a place to share with people in my life. On the other hand, Tiktok is a both a global community and a small niche of people who share the same interests as you where you can make memes, enjoy the same content together, converse and witness trends and ideas in real time
> It’s not why they use TikTok but it’s why they don’t use other social media apps. Once an app becomes too popular with older people the quality and vibes decrease, plus everyone feels awkward about posting.
What is the point about the "best algo in town" if the universally popular app can not curate each person's feed differently?
Maybe it is because old people can comment on young people's posts and vice versa?
Also, Bluesky is in no way mainstream. It's a niche platform used by a handful of terminally online people who really hate Elon. Most Twitter users who aren't hung up on ideology are still there.
Discord is more of a small-group or individual communication platform. I don't think it's suited as well for the one-to-many or feed-based appeals of social media such as TikTok. (Large, public Discord servers absolutely exist, but they're often themed around something specific; and even if they weren't, you can't just have an algorithm determine which messages in a channel you do or don't see.)
I have a friends group where everybody is hopping to this in the group chat. They are so eager to run from one addiction to another - and I told them so. They are so eager to give China all their data and to focus their own lives around an addictive app. It's baffling. Go live your life, enjoy not being indoctrinated by bullshit and having your time wasted by manipulative algorithms.
It's pretty wild in there...I remember seeing the comment 'IN THE CLERB, WE ALL LEARN MANDARIN'...I went in there and started commenting about Tienenman...curious if I'll get banned. It's very wild to see so many CCP memes and Chinese military people making content. Very odd experience so far.
It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information, is to give your data to another Chinese app instead. Not that I'd feel any less safe with Chinese companies having all my cat picks & ranting than I feel with American companies having the same (particularly under the upcoming regime).
Not that it makes a lot of difference to me, facebook is the only social-media-y thing I use and that is just under sufferance (only way to easily keep tabs on what is happening with some people, mainly family) and because I sometimes like to “breakfast with Lord Percy”. I might try bluesky at some pint as many contacts are moving from fb to there (though that seems rather twitter-like and that has never appealed to me even before I even knew Musk existed).
Well, the US government has just successfully antagonized a bunch of their citizens...
It's amusing on the "interesting times" sense, no doubt. But it's not something unexpected. They have been antagonizing their citizens for a while by now.
At some point, something breaks and you get either an autocracy or real change. Some people claim they are already there but this is really still not clear.
> It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information
my guess is that nigh 100% of tiktok users think the app is getting banned because the government is some combination of capricious, bought, and incompetent. their stated reasons for banning it barely register.
I think that the law "banning" TikTok applies to any Chinese app with over 1 million US users, so Xiaohongshu/Rednote or anywhere else the TikTok refugees flee will be a target - except YouTube shorts and Facebook/Instagram reels of course.
No, the law doesn't give a users threshold: it names ByteDance and TikTok specifically, and provides a mechanism for the President to add new companies controlled by a "foreign adversary country" to the list. So anything at all by ByteDance is banned, but RedNote is owned by a different company that would have to be targeted separately under this law.
> (ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on which a relevant determination of the President is made pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);
So if it stays unpopular, it's protected from this law.
> but RedNote is owned by a different company that would have to be targeted separately under this law.
I think that's a foregone conclusion if it actually gets popular with Americans.
Ah, you're right—it's not a threshold that automatically kicks in at a certain number of users, but the president can't add one to the list until they reach that threshold. Thanks for clarifying.
I would be amazed if the company who runs that application wasn't working around the clock to make it a better tiktok replacement and to retain this swath of new users.
It definitely won't last because even the medium is different. TikTok is all about short videos, but most of the content on Xiaohongshu are static images, and some even an image of text.
Nah, I don't buy it. Chinese as plenty of programmers who can read code as well as you. This dude is literally dumping symbols. There's no proof that it's actually a backdoor.
Given how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers and how similar the functionality of TikTok and YouTube Shorts, I feel like the only explanations are:
1. The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a domestic one
Or more likely, given that there are so many other industries that didn't get a ban:
2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
The big issue isn't data security; it's propaganda. Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't) there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans. Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
And even if you disagree with the national security reasons for disallowing China to control a major U.S. social network, there is still the issue of trade reciprocity - nearly all of the U.S. Web companies are banned in China.
Looking forward to Europe banning Meta and X considering how their CEOs are meeting weekly with their government overlord, quite clear those social networks are in the pocket of the new US government.
No, no, you can't do that. Than they'll come after you and claim how you're not free, you don't support free market and whatnot. Banning is tool for them, but not for you.
Yes, it's region banned (not just by IP so VPNs don't even really work well). You'll get a 404, if you try connecting, and your packet rate won't support video through a VPN. Note that it's also banned in HK and India and parts of Europe so it's not really anything new to ban it when you're talking about almost half the world's population.
Couldn't people just say "but Instagram" is just TikTok? Is it really the "same thing" just, because the same people have control, if the algos, servers, content, moderation/censorship, and promotion are different? Like BlueSky, Twitter, and TruthCentral are all the same thing? Or if we want the "same company" company Allo and Hangouts? I mean everyone loved Allo, right, you can have that one.
TikTok's main user base is the USA. If TikTok sells their US app, they can't support themselves on the rest of the world. TikTok isn't even the leader in China.
US Meta can definitely support itself at it's current size without EU Meta.
Was? Isn't a threat of invasion of Nato territory something that ended that situation.
Sure "it's Trump being an insane dickhead", but y'all elected him, then suspended rule of law for him.
Europe is sitting waiting to be shafted if we don't assume Trump will continue to do the absolute worst, most hostile things. We should be taking the threats of invasion seriously despite them appearing to be a way to, for example, invade Panama and not look as insane as was expected.
> Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella
That's an absolute illusion. And definitely absolutely wrong to call it ally. Most govs don't want to have anything to do with trump, musk and all this bullshit.
Most European countries will basically make no deals or anything for 4 years just like we did last time.
There is a literal war thread open of trump claiming to invade parts of Europe. We are pissed. Not allies
Musk, is a representative of Trump's government, right?
A senior member of Trump's government is trying to mess with our political system - how is this not catastrophic for diplomatic relations, coming on top of the threats to our NATO allies?
> Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't)
Posting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook will get your account terminated for "supporting terrorism". The pro-western censorship regime on FB is extremely strong. US lawmakers specifically cited the amount of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok as why they were banning the app.
The HRW report’s list of complaints starts with censorship of praising Hamas (a designated terrorist org) and “from the river to the sea” (a call for the elimination of Israel, which lies between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea).
Right, what i take issue with is that you hear similarly dehumanizing things said about palenstinians on mainstream news outlets in the US every single day (my friends in group chats share thme). I don't think any dehumanizing language like that is a good thing but really hard to act like there isn't asymmetric policies applied here
Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider has to bake American policy position into its algorithm, what's going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own algorithm?
Nation states definitely can by using port targeting, traffic heuristics, and DPI. The US historically has not done this but several other states have. Even if protocols are preserved, I wouldn't want to be in a situation where I have to run a client on my local machine that consumes from the protocol. I want to be able to use a hosted client.
A user should be able to use another person's hosted Mastodon instance or Bluesky AppView/Relay.
Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.
Attempting to reconcile that with HRW's article: on the one hand I think HRW might be unrealistic about what FB should be expected to tolerate (for instance, they criticize FB for taking down posts praising designated terrorist organizations); on the other, Meta's approach to content moderation - which combines automated systems with overworked and underpaid humans exposed non-stop to awful content - is notoriously fickle and subject to abuse (including, perhaps, by state actors).
Beyond Israel/Palestine, I regularly encounter content on Facebook that the Powers That Be would censor if "the pro-Western censorship regime on FB [were] extremely strong". I think I subscribe to only one political (left-leaning) group (along with a bunch of local and meme pages), but nevertheless my feed is full of tankies demanding we bring back the guillotine and install full communism.
>Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.
Naturally there is no overt censorship on FB/Meta, but in the wake of October 7th there was a clear difference in what kinds of content was being lifted by the algorithms on both platforms. I think, save for Bella Hadid, you would rarely see "organic" pro-palestine content with millions of views on Instagram, while it was less censored on TikTok.
Not just trade reciprocity, but ideological reciprocity. The argument that the US should allow TikTok because “free speech”—while China bans American platforms because of censorship and also dictates content on TikTok because of censorship—seems obviously broken. Seems like the rule should at least be something like “Europe is welcome to blast propaganda at our teenagers for as long as we get to blast propaganda at their teenagers.”
I mean, Chinese people should be allowed to post videos for Americans, the issue is editorialization.
Like how newspapers and other media can use editorial discretion to create the impression that “all reasonable people” hold some opinion X by only publishing the voices of reasonable people who believe X (manufactured consent), social media platforms can do the same thing, but x1000 thanks to automation and personalization (“the algorithm”)
So editorialization, including the algorithmic editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of speech separate from the speech of the authors on these platforms. If the editors are independent, and part of the same public discourse as their readers and authors, then you wind up with a diverse media ecosystem where the liberal machinery of people working out complex issues through public discourse can hopefully still more or less proceed.
If one part of the ecosystem isn’t letting outside voices in, the feedback mechanisms are broken and you don’t have a healthy public discourse anymore. And growing and maintaining a diverse media ecosystem in a society that does still have a healthy public discourse is slow and fragile (as the posts below comparing the risk of books to TikTok observe).
> So editorialization, including the algorithmic editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of speech separate from the speech of the authors on these platforms.
I certainly agree that editorial discretion is speech. I'm an adult and I think it is my prerogative to participate in as many broken ecosystems I want. Nor do I trust you or 300 million of my peers to accurately assess what is a broken ecosystem.
Comparing books to TikTok algo is like comparing rifles to ICBMs.
This is what people seem to be ignoring: the algorithms are damned near mind reading, and these algos put members of society into separate realities. We would be better off if they were all banned, but at least it should be agreeable that a hostile foreign government should not be allowed to deploy this on Americans without oversight.
I don't take this as a given and I believe the US government has caused more harm to its own people than China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly enforces laws against people, create laws that benefit 1% of its citizens to the detriment of the rest, forces its people to go wars they doesn't support, create rules that target certain genders and races, and so on.
Importantly, the US government is able to enact more harm on its citizens than China when it feels like.
> the US government has caused more harm to its own people than China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly enforces laws against people,
Maybe, maybe not. But when the PRC decides the time is right to take Taiwan, it will have prepared the ground by making sure lots of Americans saw TikToks (made by other Americans) saying basically this.
>Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
Yes, there are millions of US citizens that would rather have a Russian TV station in their neighborhood than one run by Democrats. I don't understand it, but that seems to be the way it's going lately. And considering who's POTUS now, a Russia-run TV network in the US isn't that far-fetched. I mean, Fox News practically already is.
But is there actually any evidence that the US's foreign adversaries can more effectively deliver propaganda on Tiktok compared to other platforms?
I understand the concern over foreign propaganda, but this feels like it's not going to remotely impact the ability for foreign governments to deliver propaganda to Americans. It's perfectly possible to deliver propaganda on US-based social networks.
The best outcome of this is just that Americans find the other social networks so boring that they spend less time on social networks altogether, thus reducing their propaganda intake (at least, from social networks).
> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans
Is the argument itself correct or not? Or do we evaluate it based on motivation, i.e. it's ok when we do it because we have good reasons for it? Sounds like the ends justify the means to me.
The correct approach would be to increase the critical thinking skills of the population, increase transparency, require corporations to make algorithms fair and equitable. Require all feeds to be chronological or some other uniform, fair rule for showing posts. No boosting certain viewpoints, or paid promotions. But these things would bother corporations and politicians in the west as well as the external forces with "bad motivations", so just ban the external social networks.
The EU I think has a better approach, of course made possible because we don't have any powerful social networks of our own, and so nobody lobbies against these rules. I'm sure the DSA and DMA would be different (if they existed at all) if at least one of FAANG was European. Nevertheless, the concept is better.
> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans.
I don't think this is a useful distinction in a world where a handful of ultra-billionaires control most of the remaining media channels. People like Rupert Murdoch, Musk, and the others have very different interests than the average American, and at least several of them openly push their own (divisive) viewpoints through their media. Why is Rupert Murdoch less of an adversary to the average person than the CCP?
The Western media are already doing everything that TikTok has been accused of being hypothetically able to do: sowing social division, brainrot, encouraging lawbreaking, undermining confidence in the government, promoting dangerous or fake products, etc.
The real difference is that TikTok threatens to boost an alternative to the consensus message of the political elite. A US with TikTok would see actual pushback against something like the early 2000s media shennanigans that got the Iraq War and Patriot Act smoothly approved with little public debate. That is the real reason Congress banned it and why the homegrown brainrot isn't seen as a threat.
So many people keep missing this. It's not about data harvesting. It is about influencing huge portions of the population and controlling that narrative. Of course any social media app can do this, but ostensibly it is worse coming from a foreign adversary who don't play by the same rules.
It's so amusing seeing the society that lionizes itself as the paragon of open society and can't stop boasting about the effectiveness of free-speech soft-power compared to sclerotic communist propaganda now having panics over short video apps.
Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton could never think that.
Well, maybe we will be on yeltsin-on-supermarket stage soon?
The propaganda on TikTok comes disguised as Americans sharing points of view that just happen to serve CCP interests. Often the creators are expressing a genuine (but rare) viewpoint that China just needs to amplify. This isn't about keeping Americans from reading Pravda.
It's not hard to imagine the messages China will be pushing to weaken support for assisting Taiwan in a conflict. "Don't waste money propping up the corrupt Taiwanese government, spend it on health care /tax cuts at home!"
Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.
Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually. Hospitals running out of medical supplies will hit WAY sooner than your existing 4090 needs to be replaced by a new Taiwanese product.
This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline. Surely you can at least admit this. It's just a battle of propaganda, except China unfortunately has common sense on its side in many of these arenas:
USA should not be spending hundreds of billions maintaining a WW2 power projection strategy, 80 years later.
I disagree (I don't know what "military power projection over China's coastline" even means - do you think the U.S. has military bases in Taiwan?), but the point is that these issues need to be debated by Americans without the other side surreptitiously trying to sway public opinion.
Yo can we drop the whole “our government executes on the will of the people charade”. If you think your average American has any say in their governments foreign policy I have a bridge to sell you.
>> Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.
> Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually.
Yes, but let's not use that as a justification for letting it get worse.
> This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline.
The whole f*ing modern economy runs on semiconductors, and the most advanced ones are fabbed in Taiwan. You might have a point if Intel wasn't falling on its face, but it is, so you don't
The way we stop making this worse, i.e. reducing our trade deficit with China and in general, is by doing virtually the opposite of what Washington is currently doing.
Rebuild the republic instead of wasting everything on hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion.
I can't admit this and have no idea what you're talking about. You're right that Taiwan isn't more important to the US than China or any other major trading partner; the key difference is that China is not threatening to invade and conquer any of the other trading partners. Demanding that belligerent countries should not invade their neighbors is not a "WW2 power projection strategy", as China understood perfectly well when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
I just want to remind everyone that China/Russia is doing everything you dislike the West doing right now. Please talk when China/Russia opens up. Right now they spew propaganda into our societies with no way for us to retaliate. I don't like censorships but these one-way attacks are a weakness to democracies, not strengths.
Open internet only works as long as everyone is friendly. The world is increasingly becoming not friendly.
Yes, but at least in the USA, I constantly have to hear shouting about how "free" everything is whenever I ask for sane regulations (guns), or something like universal healthcare.
If USA was actually so free, that would at least be consistent. But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to run around with bullet proof vests? I get all the bad, none of the good.
Every voting citizen should remember that this TikTok ban was bipartisan. That means they all cared more about this than ANY other sensible legislation. Banning child marriage? Nah! Protecting the childrens physical bodies in school was not as important as a hypothetical "mind attack" from TikTok.
They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red kid"
This is real though- the only other bipartisan bill they passed was the "Crucial Communism Bill" ie. a mandate to teach anticommunist propaganda in schools
Where's the evidence that TikTok is being used by China to spew propaganda?
Conversely there's a mountain of evidence which strongly suggests that US officials are going after TikTok specifically because they're not in control of the truthful narratives that paint the US in a bad light.
> Please talk when China/Russia opens up.
Careful with this sort of rhetoric. China's constitution enshrines freedom of speech as a constitutional right, just like the US, but they're both taking this freedom away by invoking "national security".
Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.
> Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.
Why would we wait for TikTok to continue to have greater and greater social influence before we cut off their propaganda tool? Do we have to wait until Taiwan has been leveled by China? And TikTok is being used to push the narrative that the US must not come to the aid of a peaceful nation being brutally conquered? By then it’s too late.
> Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet all get black holed by the algorithm.
None of those threaten US national security - that's what the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake. US social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't like, that's not news.
How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition of the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US citizens express those views if every popular non-US owned/aligned platform is banned on the grounds of national security?
> None of those threaten US national security - that's what the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake. US social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't like, that's not news.
Read the last paragraph of my comment again and you’ll find your answer.
> How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition of the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US citizens express those views if every popular non-US owned/aligned platform is banned on the grounds of national security?
This isn’t a reality that exists. Did you spend any time at all on Twitter in the last year? You literally could not go a day without hearing about it. It was front page news on US news sites constantly. Protests against both Biden and Harris were constantly in the news and all over social media. The student protests were all over the news and social media. I don’t know what world you’re living in where you think Americans can’t talk about Gaza because it’s all I’ve been hearing about for a year. And here you are, talking about it on an American social media website.
I'll just go ahead and quote my sources. The suppression and narrative shaping are very real, but doesn't mean that nobody on the internet has said anything about it.
Isn't this exactly what you're worried about with TikTok - that an adversary is going to shape the conversation by purposefully biasing the conversation? I'd appreciate it if you applied the same standard to both sides.
> Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel. The documented cases include content originating from over 60 countries around the world, primarily in English, all of peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways. This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship. Hundreds of people continued to report censorship after Human Rights Watch completed its analysis for this report, meaning that the total number of cases Human Rights Watch received greatly exceeded 1,050.
> The CNN staff member described how the policy works in practice. “‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words,” the person said. “Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”
And where is the United States government directing any of this? Nowhere.
Even your own source says
“Despite the censorship documented in this report, Meta allows a significant amount of pro-Palestinian expression and denunciations of Israeli government policies.”
Just because you dislike the way CNN is covering a conflict doesn’t somehow mean the shadowy US government is pulling the strings behind the scenes.
The Intercept is also an American news organization that is clearly not being censored on this topic, so I’m not sure you’re really making your point here.
You know the whole idea of “oh, all of our problems are actually because X, Y, Z boogeyman!” thing? Yeah that. Watching from outside, it feels like political landscape of the US knows that they have lost the global competition and scrambling to get back on its feet. Everyone just keeps yelling “no, no, don’t look what’s happening inside, because everything is so much worse in other countries, they’re about to completely fall down! Those europoors with no ACs, China is about to collapse for the 50th time in the last 10 years, Japan is basically dead etc etc.”.
> Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
They don't have to, Fox News does it for free /zing. But for real I wouldn't see a problem with it. Less now that the world is more globalized than ever, I can get news from every corner of the globe both from our allies and enemies.
Could they be subtly pushing a narrative of communism or something, sure but this kind of "news is biased towards its owners" is beyond commonplace at this point. Jon Stewart just did a whole bit about why he couldn't criticize Apple or China.
> [Manufacturing Consent] argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
The problem with Tiktok, as far as the government is concerned, is the lack of control on narrative when Meta, Twitter and Google are an extension of the US State Department (eg [2]).
The Tiktok ban came together in a matter of days as a bipartisan effort weeks after the ADL said (in leaked audio) that they have a "TikTok problem" [3].
> 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
If the last four years are indicative of anything, it's that the US government has fairly limited control over the narrative on American social platforms.
I lost count of how many times I saw people typing in "FJB" and "MAGA".
I mean, if you want to ignore the fact that the JB was Joe Biden and he was quite literally President of the United States when that was a trend, sure.
Is it censored, or do most people just not talk about it on Facebook?
It's interesting how incredibly supportive of human rights that a platform in bed with the CCP became, no? Do you think that China's human rights bugaboos are often discussed on their internal social networks?
Yes? I've seen plenty of Facebook posts about how CEOs are greedy, criminal, ripping us all off, etc. I'm really not sure how you could have gotten the impression that it's not allowed to talk about CEOs on Facebook.
It's possible, but ultimately it's hard to tell, especially in regard to the American users.
The results of the election would point to the idea that most American voters aren't so perturbed by what's happening in Gaza as to want an administration that would be at least as effective in reeling in the Israelis as the Biden administration was. Whether that's right or wrong, well, that's another discussion.
It's a chicken-or-the-egg problem. Do people not talk about Gaza on Facebook because it's censored, or do people not talk about Gaza on Facebook because no one was talking about it to begin with?
Given the history I'd say that the incoming administration will be less sympathetic to the Gazans than the outgoing, but, again, it doesn't matter at this point.
>that most American voters aren't so perturbed by what's happening in Gaza as to want an administration that would be at least as effective in reeling in the Israelis as the Biden administration was.
It's not hard to be at least as capable as somebody who's completly incapable. Think what you will of Trump, but in one meeting he had a solid deadline for implementing the ceasefire agreement the Biden admin has had floating since May. There weren't even any changes to it, so what the heck has Biden been doing?
More likely than Biden's incompetence is that Bibi now has a variable solved for in the geopolitical calculus: the American election now has a winner. He finds a kindred spirit in Trump and thinks he is now working with an American administration that will let him do whatever he wants without even the appearance of trying to rein him in. There is no Rashida Tlaib in Trump's party.
But that's on a different subject than the greater thread discussion.
People in Gaza are celebrating the proposed ceasefire and Zionists are angry about it. I’m no Trump fan but it does indeed look like he’ll be better than Biden (who was the worst).
The people in Gaza are probably desperate enough to accept anything at this point and everyone involved has a long history of going back on their word.
Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and supports West Bank settlements. To suddenly give an Iran-backed militia a win goes against literally everything in the grand scheme of things.
I'm with you that Biden has been doing worse than nothing, and has been stringing us along with this ceasefire that will never come, while at the same time using UN to block any sort of resolution.
But don't kid yourself that Trump is better. He supports the settlement of the West Bank and has recognized Jerusalem as exclusively Israeli.
The question is whether it's a ruinous empathy thing. It's much too early for me to be confident that the current ceasefire is actually going to work better than the last one. But if it does, it's a pretty strong data point for the idea that credibly taking either side is better for the Palestinian people than flailing around trying to support both.
Biden has been as empathetic towards Palestine as it's possible to be without opposing Israel. That's how we ended up with things like the crazy floating aid pier. Trump's position is much less empathetic, complete with overt threats of "all hell to pay" if they don't release the hostages soon, and if the current ceasefire holds then it's hard to avoid concluding it's better for the Palestinian people overall.
Great, so we have TikTok where we can access information that's being censored by the West, and Facebook to access information that's being censored by the East. What's the problem? Information wants to be free.
There are places in the west where you risk losing your job just by mentioning the ongoing genocide that is happening now in Gaza.
I'm not defending the CCP in any way, it's just that power corrupts and abuse of power happens pretty much everywhere.
if the Rohingya genocide is a genocide, then I can see the case for Gaza (the UN definition of genocide is quite broad) - but still feel that there should be a word distinguishing the stuff that happened in the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide from less systemic killings occurring in the background of conflict. A lot of the power of the word “genocide” comes from the implicit comparison to the Holocaust, but none of the events we are discussing really come all that close barring Rwanda.
Yeah when the Palestinians say they want to murder all the Jews that's what genocide is. When there are no Jewish people in Palestine because they killed them all, that's what genocide is. If people didn't hate Jews and support terrorism, Palestinians wouldn't be dying. When Arabs are allowed to vote, participate in government, and join the military, that's the opposite of what genocide is.
fair. they are guilty of arresting specific ethnicity for the crime of gathering in groups, and targetting men and forbidding men to have children, and forcing women to take han husbands to dilute their ethnicity. but not genocide.
Totally. I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize China for their protectionism, but as soon as something out-competes US companies, it gets banned: Huawei, DJI, TikTok.
Of course it cannot be said like this, because "free speech" and "democracy", so the official reason is "national security".
It's not just that Google or FB can't operate Chinese-specific sites as a business within China, from within China you can't even get to the foreign/international versions of those sites, because they're blocked by China's firewall. Wikipedia has a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
But we are, there is no irony. China has the great wall and massive corporate espionage games to steal state and corporate secrets. The US and its various federal intelligence agencies have certainly done nefarious things but never quite as documented at the level as China's. They actively monitor all of their Social Media, block most foreign social media. I can easily go to any Chinese social media/website from the US.
In some ways, this is still true, even surrounding this decision.
Do you think there were many people standing outside of government buildings in Beijing protesting the potential ban of Facebook and Google while politicians of different political parties were debating the ban in the country's primary legislative body? Do you think you could launch a campaign for office on repealing said ban in China?
I think they could, and fundamentally won't because they can be accessed via VPN, but ultimately aren't necessary because those companies are not exactly interesting for any purpose but talking to Americans or studying Americans.
> I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize China for their protectionism
The irony I see is that we criticize their protectionism, but we also do some kind of protectionism. More largely, we criticize the fact that they ban US companies, and then we do the same. How in the world is that not ironic?
It would be perfectly fine to admit it and acknowledge that actually, sometimes protectionism makes sense. But if you look at the answers in this thread, it seems like nobody wants to do that. "We are never wrong, it is not ironic, it is obviously national security".
So let's talk about national security. TikTok is a userspace social media app, just like Instagram or Snapchat. If collecting that kind of data is an obvious national security risk, then every single country in the world should ban them. What would the US say if all the western countries banned their social media? Would you say "we understand, it's a national security issue"? My guess is that you would say "but for us it's different: we are the good guys".
What about Huawei? Fair enough, infrastructures like antennas are very sensitive, don't let a Chinese company own them on your soil. But the smartphones? Really? Any government can buy stuff like NSO's Pegasus and get access to any mobile phone (iPhones included). Let's not pretend that someone buying a Huawei phone makes that worse, shall we? And it's still obviously fine to ask sensitive personalities (like politicians) to use a non-Chinese smartphone, but that's very different from banning the brand entirely.
DJI then? The drones don't have an Internet connection: you have to connect them to your WiFi (be it at home or a mobile hotspot from your phone). That means that if you fly above government facilities, the drone is not streaming the video to China. That also means that if it wanted to, it would have to go through your mobile hotspot, through your ISP. Doesn't seem that hard to ask government drone operators to connect through a firewall, does it? Every big company in the world asks all of their employees to do that.
And when did it start being seen as a security issue? Precisely when western companies started lobbying against them because they could not compete. Nobody complained about DJI for years, especially not when the view in western startups was "we are better, we will make a better drone". It took us to realise that DJI was actually a lot better than us to start looking for other ways. Look at who's been lobbying a lot for the ban: western drone companies that have no reason to know about security, but that are struggling because - let's be honest - DJI drones are a lot cheaper and a lot better than anything else.
And now we have US billionaires and owners of the biggest tech companies in the world publicly interfering with politics in allied countries. How the hell is that not ironic?
The criticism is that China has a ton of protectionism. We know the US does it a little.
Btw, Huawei in particular stole a ton of technology over the past couple of decades, from Cisco and others. Not sure if the smartphone ban had the same cause, but at this point I don't really care, the company deserves it.
Mercantalism begets Mercantalism. If their mercantalist policies become successfull then unfortunately we'll need to also assume similar policies to protect ourselves, aka Beggar Thy Neighbour, and everyone loses in an arms race of tariffs and subsidies.
That's exactly why free trade proponets oppose those policies, but the CCP didn't want to reform so we'll go the opposite way.
Huawei has been caught stealing more than enough trade secrets to justify a ban. I'd be happy if they banned a lot more Chinese firms for that, or just in response to China's own bans. But TikTok seems to be uniquely about censorship.
I cannot argue on the TikTok as strongly but I can see strong arguments on why Huawei and DJI are national security risks. Some of this is more educated guesses so not defensible with numbers. We know most major companies in the Chinese market have extremely close ties to the CCP. No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms but I believe the CCP takes it to a next level. We know for a fact that the CCP and chinese entities play extremely hardball when it comes to corporate espionage. Some of the stories we have seen almost read like a spy novel. Certainly Huawei and DJI make some incredible products but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure, I do believe it warrants major concern for national security.
I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy compared to the easier explanation, China is a fairly crafty bad actor in a lot of cases. 99% of the imported products from China are not getting blocked, just the ones that have very significant national security risks.
> 99% of the imported products from China are not getting blocked
because it's impossible.
the US offloaded low-added-value manufacturing to China, exchanging paper dollars for cheap industrial goods. When China tries to upgrade to high-added-value industries, like chips, guess what? National security risks!
just enjoy cheap goods and nature resources from 3rd world...
I am not sure I follow your point. There have been both National Security risks as well as protectionist economic policy enforced against china that benefits domestic players. In a lot of those protectionist cases, there is either a case of China flooding the market or there are cases where the government makes a choice that its beneficial to keep domestic manufacturers alive.
In the above provided examples its quite clear that there are possible national security risks involved with China being involved in US infrastructure and technology. If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
If you have better example beyond hyperbole I am all ears.
> If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
1. of course there'll be no 'national security risks' because EU is an ally, and the US is spying on it
2. even though, troubles come to US's allies sometimes, like what Alstom and ASML met
3. EU products are mostly less compatible, overall, it cannot challenge the position where the US holds in the global value chain, so pose less
of threat
Like the way your irony works? I listed my arguments as why you can make a case that they are national security threats. You are more than welcome to call it a fake pretense but the fact remains that the majority of Chinese imports are not restricted and that includes tech/high-tech related items. If you have nothing more than America is ironic I can see where your endless questions stem from.
The burden of proof lies on the accuser. If you are not able to provide a proof of national security threat from tiktok or dji, then don't treat it like it's a fact. All the "ifs" don't constitute as a proof.
You obviously have a bias here so its going to be impossible to have any real discussion. There are very simple facts that I will restate for you. The CCP has seats at every major mainland corporation. Chinese corporations have in recent years been caught in some very spy like espionage, this is happening globally. China is an adversary to the US and Europe. There is no further burden of proof needed when talking about sensitive industries. You don't need to catch DJI in the act, similar to TikTok, if you cannot sever data/ties with the mainland there are real risks. Geopolitics suck but its a real risk that has to be snipped before it becomes a problem.
Do the five eyes and other countries have national intelligence that are collecting data, absolutely. I cannot recall any recent published articles about overt Western corporate espionage and especially any that were supported by a parent country.
Are any of those corporate espionage? Those seems to fall under government spying which I acknowledged exists for all companies and especially so with the five eyes.
So you justify the ban of TikTok, Huawei and DJI for strong national security reasons, but when we talk about the US spying on the government of allies, you say "spying on a government is okay, the problem is corporate espionage"?
Can you tell me - in your logic - why the hell there is a need to ban DJI if it's okay for the CCP to spy on the US government? Or will you now say "It's not okay because it's not the US"? Or maybe "It's okay to spy on allies, but not on adversaries, except if you are the US because then it's okay to do both"?
I was going to type out my rationale again but came to the thought that it wouldn't matter on you. You are emotional and slightly biased either in an angle that supports China or negatively towards the US. I am honestly not sure where your quotes/thought process is going other than its confusing. Enjoy your weekend bud.
Actually, that's probably the one thing that I would find interesting.
I didn't expect so many people to attack me when I said it was ironic. I find it ironic, period. It doesn't mean that I support China or that I hate the US. It only means precisely what I said: I find it ironic to criticise China's ban on US companies and end up banning Chinese companies for what seems to be protectionism.
Now you've been repeating that it is obviously a strong national security threat, but whenever I asked you to elaborate on that, you avoided it. Would that mean that it's maybe not that obvious?
Read some of the many stories out there about the NSA, please. They have backdoors into internet infrastructure. If any country is a threat to information security, it’s the USA.
Did you read my comment? I explicitly called out backdoors, you should read comments closer. It most definitely happens within the US but the ties between the US government and corporate entities are no where as perversely intertwined as they are in China.
So you would say for sure that the NSA has definitely never been used to give advantages to US companies? I could totally imagine Boeing receiving information in order to win a contract against Airbus.
After all, we know for a fact that the US have been spying on European politicians.
You are making up stories now. We have proven news article of flagrant corporate espionage happening from Chinese actors. We know that CCP upper leadership holds seats at the major mainland corporations. Will I say never has US intelligence participated in corporate espionage? There are documented cases of the US meddling but as far as we have evidence, not at the level of Chinese interference. So nope, I won't say for sure but I am also not fabricating stories.
Sorry I don't follow. What did I make up? That I don't believe that the US are "always fair" either? That I don't need to believe it, because it has been documented many times?
> We know that CCP upper leadership holds seats at the major mainland corporations.
And who holds seats/has major influence in the US government?
Sorry I am not sure what 1) your point is or 2) what you are arguing. This thread is simply DJI poses a real national security threat as there has been demonstrable issues in recent history.
Depends on where you start the thread. Before your comment, this thread was simply "this is US protectionism and not really national security".
After your first comment, this thread was "the USA are an information security risk".
My point is that of course, from the US point of view, China abusing its power is worse than the US abusing their power. But if you take a step back... why should a European citizen consider that what China is doing is worse than what the US are doing?
It has been proven that the US have been targeting European politicians with spying. It has been proven that the NSA was collecting private information about just everything they could (including US citizen BTW). The richest people on Earth control the biggest tech companies on Earth and are getting closer to the US president every day. Some of those people are actively trying to influence politics in Europe (e.g. promoting neo-nazis in Germany, I don't know if you understand what it means there). The US president is talking about invading Greenland, Panama etc. And you talk about links between the Chinese government and Chinese companies?
If TikTok is a strong national security risk for the US, then Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple are all strong security risks for Europe. But what would the US say if Europe banned those companies? Probably more "it's a free market, it's democracy, it's capitalism, you can't do that!" than "fair enough, we do it too, and China does it too", right?
That's where I find it ironic. The US promote free market when it's about having their companies in other countries. But when the roles are inverted, then the US behave a lot more like China than like Europe (by banning companies), don't they?
Lots of ideas but you are missing the simple point. The CCP is partnered with their companies and actively support corporate espionage. Its a fact that the five eyes spy on lots of people including their own citizens. Some of this is certainly based off recent history but the way I frame it is China adulterates almost every piece of data they release. They limit their incoming internet. They aggressively monitor their citizens and will cull information on social media proactively. They participate in corporate espionage that sounds like its from a fiction story. Corporations in China are in some form or another tightly partnered with the government once they reach a massive scale. To find irony is to ignore everything China is doing. Again, absolutely everyone is running foreign intelligence. The difference is I don't believe anyone is as worried of drones made outside of China but its an obvious threat vector that drones made in China have the opportunity to phone home data and with the increased use of drones in industrial settings there are real risks to be thought about.
Feels like your view is "whatever we do is okay, as long as we can point to someone else doing worse". Is that what you are saying?
> its an obvious threat vector that drones made in China have the opportunity to phone home data and with the increased use of drones in industrial settings there are real risks to be thought about.
Okay, let's take drones. Can you articulate concretely one of those "obvious threat vectors"? For instance, a DJI drone does not come with an Internet connection magically embedded into it. So you can be completely offline while you fly your mission.
Are you scared that the drone may save a 4K video in a hidden storage, and then upload GBs of it when you connect it to the Internet without you having a chance to see it? Why not instructing government operators to only connect through a router that filters the network? And that would be on top of the DJI Local Data mode that you don't have to trust.
Or are you scared that the drone may store few bytes of critical information? What would that be, a location? Why wouldn't the CCP just hack the smartphone of the employee, e.g. using something like NSO Pegasus (which is western technology, but I won't call any irony there)?
If it is obvious, please explain the national security threat caused by DJI drones that couldn't be solved with a simple external firewall.
I think you’re biased if you don’t believe the USA is also doing domestic corporate espionage. Cisco probably has multiple NSA sleeper agents silently inserting backdoors into their routers.
> On July 3, 2014, the former Technical Director of the NSA, William Binney, who had become a whistleblower after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, testified to the committee. He said that the NSA has a totalitarian approach that has previously only been known from dictatorships and that there is no longer such a thing as privacy.
But no, there is absolutely no reason to think that the US may be doing corporate espionage /s.
And you don't seem to understand what Binney meant when he said "the NSA can basically access anything anywhere, and they don't have to justify it to anyone other than the US President in person".
> I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy
I am not proposing a conspiracy, I am merely noting some irony in the fact that the US are doing protectionism here.
> No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms
Well, most of the Western Internet goes through the US, and we know for a fact that the US try to extract as much as they can from whatever they can (remember Snowden?). Also the US are very fine with US companies owning all the data of a big part of the world, and they would be really pissed if some country started banning them "for national security reasons".
> but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure
You don't need to connect the drone to the Internet. Technical solutions would most definitely exist, I am convinced of that. The reason DJI is being banned is because DJI is 7 years ahead of anyone else, and the gap is getting bigger every year. It really, really sounds like the US drone companies have been lobbying a ton because they just can't compete.
> how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers
A law passed at the same time as the tiktok ban attempts to address this:
> a) Prohibition It shall be unlawful for a data broker to sell, license, rent, trade, transfer, release, disclose, provide access to, or otherwise make available personally identifiable sensitive data of a United States individual to—
(1) any foreign adversary country; or
(2) any entity that is controlled by a foreign adversary.
it's not the same data or data quality. the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of the american public (psyops). What russia is doing through their trollfarms, china is doing through tiktok.
> the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of the american public (psyops).
I don't buy it. If that were actually the concern, we would be talking about banning Facebook and X for manipulating Americans to vote against their own interests and hand over more power & money to the platforms' owners. Facebook has done way, way, way, way more harm to America and Americans than Tiktok ever did. The Tiktok ban is an illegitimate handout to America's oligarchs to protect them from having to compete. It's nothing to do with protecting Americans from manipulation.
Well FB is American. Even though I and many people agree FB is also a problem, I think it’s pretty clear why those in Washington are more okay with an American company that they have some power over and also should ostensibly care for America versus a company that is ostensibly beholden to an adversary. (To be clear, I don’t think FB cares about America.)
I don’t really see why it’s hard to see the reasoning behind the ban even if one disagrees with it.
Take it to an extreme, imagine there were zero American social media companies in our modern world where most people get there news from social media. That obviously would be a huge security risk, having one’s population’s news being controlled exclusively by foreign states.
American social media is banned in China and if used against americans by its leadership, it would be a domestic threat not a foreign threat. Twitter was bought by Elon and used to influence an election successfully. if we're honest in this discussion, we shouldn't pretend the threat isn't real. Foreign companies get banned from owning american companies all the time. Biden just banned US steel's takeover by a japanese company.
You know what scares me? how the actual majority on HN is critical of the tiktok ban despite all what I have just said being obvious things a critical thinker can deduce. I'm concerned the influence of tiktok (foreign actors) is already too pervasive and damaging. You all should know the US by any historical metrics is at the precipice of a civil war as it is.
I'm not sure that's true, and even if it was, the law as passed requires American companies to not serve the app from their app stores, which is a restriction of American company speech.
Mitt Romney basically came out and admitted that the reason for the TikTok ban was that young people were getting unfiltered access to information about the genocide in Gaza.
it's been said many times, it's a national security risk, and it is very obviously one. Tiktok has already gone against the wishes of the US, there's evidence Chinese engineers accessed Tiktok data hosted in the US (related: project Texas). It's so easy to sway public opinion when you own the largest megaphone to the people... That's literally what's happening right now on tiktok.
> The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a domestic one
China certainly engages in security theater for their own economic advantage as well. It's no coincidence that any American internet company that tries to operate in China gets throttled or "accidentally" blocked by the great Chinese firewall. And no, economic retaliation against China isn't "stooping down" to censorship of China. That would be like framing the EU's retaliatory tariffs against Trump as a punishment to European bourbon lovers.
> The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
Yes, but people do not appreciate what that really means. Countries need to eat the consequences of influencing domestic media, so you at least need to maintain a weak form of checks and balances. For example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.
On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
> 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
This was the case for the first attempt, but then TikTok gave the US government access to everything. So the effort completely stalled, and the only people still banging the drum about it were R's who had run on anti-China rhetoric.
Then Oct. 7th happened, and the followup genocide that the US decided to go out of its way to participate in. The most, and most influential, anti-genocide activity was on TikTok, simply because TikTok has a hold on the young audience and young content producers, and being young they aren't cynical and hollowed out inside, and can't justify being silent in order to protect their own incomes and families (which they don't have yet.) The Lobby quickly picked up the dropped ball and carried it over the line, and Biden continued his unbroken record of being completely humiliated by Bibi, a regular criminal before he was a war criminal.
Now the ban is a zombie, because opposition to (and support for) the genocide is now set in stone, and it already looks like Trump has ended it even though he isn't in office yet through the technique of placing the slightest amount of pressure on Bibi.
All we'll have left is a horrible soon-to-come Supreme Court decision that enshrines the idea that bills of attainder explicitly intended to limit free speech are ok now because China. Which is also because Russia and also because Hamas, and because Maduro, and because hate, and because sowing discord, and because, because, because...
-----
edit: and if the Trump peace fails, and all the kids migrate to some other platform, that platform will be attacked. They lucked out that TikTok was owned by China, and Americans are such racists that they could use that racism to get them to agree to silence Americans speaking to Americans. But before, they were attacking every social network for allowing speech from Trump supporters, people criticizing covid policy, always Palestinians, women who don't accept transwomen (to get the libs onboard), etc...
3. The government is concerned that having a company that's beholden to a foreign government control the algorithm that feeds the rising generation much of their worldview may not be a good long term plan.
This has a passing resemblance to (2), but the key difference is that the government doesn't believe they have control over the narrative on Facebook, they just know that a foreign government doesn't. It's strictly better from the perspective of the US government to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism (after all, that's how all of the older generations' world views were shaped) than to risk the possibility that an adversary is tipping the scales.
What I don't understand is why the politicians insist on talking about spying as the concern. The people who are pro-TikTok are pretty clearly skeptical either way, and "think of the children" is usually the most effective political tool they have.
It shows a point I like to bring up often that Capitalism and The Free Market are directly opposed. What capital (a fancy word for shareholders) want is an infinite money machine and that is easiest with a monopoly. Hence, banning a competitor that's doing too well in the free market.
To the other part, I consider your 3 and my 2 the same, the US doesn't want us getting Chinese info and has their own perfered sources instead.
They're strictly not equivalent—yours believes the US has a substantial amount of control over Facebook, mine does not. I can't change your belief, but I can draw a distinction between our beliefs.
I think it's better to say it the other way round: Facebook and to a much greater extent X has a substantial amount of influence over the US government.
> to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism
.. by the guy sitting next to the President? It's not yet clear what this "DOGE" thing that Musk has been given by Trump actually is, but it sounds like part of the government to me and has "government" in the name?
I'm fine with this, based on the simple principle of Turnabout Is Fair Play.
China already bans practically all the popular US social media apps and similar apps/websites. I'm for free trade, but it ought to be fair trade too, as in, roughly similar/equal policies. If another country bans X imports from your own, it's hardly unfair to respond in kind.
This is exactly it. If China allowed fully uncensored American social media to operate in China I’d had zero issue letting them do the same in the US.
But the CCP wants to have their cake and eat it too. Fully repressive social media lock downs and censorship for their citizens but exploiting the west’s values of free speech and debate.
To be clear, it's not just that China won't let Western websites operate uncensored as businesses within China targeting the Chinese market.
It's also that people within China can't access the foreign websites and apps (without using a VPN), because China's Internet firewall blocks that access! That's what makes it an incontrovertible ban!
Even if a company has no interest in operating as a business within China in the first place, China may still block the websites and apps. That's a ban no matter how you slice it.
On the other hand, the reason these bans are in place have very specific origins. Facebook for example refused to provide Chinese authorities with information on domestic terrorists in 2009. Facebook has never pulled that off in a western country.
Meanwhile TikTok has worked very hard to work with authorities in the US for pretty much any of their demands.
I don't support any of these bans but I don't think its fair to equate these.
What exactly do you think Wikipedia did that was so wrong? Or Voice of America -- that's an American propaganda outlet sure, but I can get to Xinhua (Chinese state media) as an American easily enough, so why not the other way?
In any case, refusing to provide info on domestic terrorists could be a legit case for bannning a company from operating within your country...but what does that have to do with banning everyone residing in your country from being able to access the foreign versions of those websites on foreign servers?
The simple reality is that China is extremely ban-happy when it comes to foreign websites and apps, even for companies that have never tried to operate their business from within China.
China doesn't allow uncensored Chinese social media to operate in China either, so it doesn't really make much sense to say that they should have to allow uncensored American social media in order for Chinese social media companies to operate in the US.
That would be like saying that an Israeli publisher should not be allowed to publish in the US because US publishers cannot publish holocaust denial books in Israel. Or saying that a UAE restaurant should not be allowed to operate in the US because the UAE doesn't Wendy's there to serve the Baconator.
The sensible rule is that X should allow companies from Y to operate in X subject to the same rules that domestic X companies must follow if Y allows X companies to operate in Y if they follow the same rules as domestic Y companies.
Ah, so because China severely represses their own people, that means outright banning foreign web platforms even when they're hosted on foreign soil isn't really a ban for some reason.
Couldn't you argue the opposite? That is, if we are so opposed to China then shouldn't we do the opposite of them? I don't think it seems very American to change our policy to be more like the "enemy"
This is like saying, "well sure they invaded us with their military, but we don't want to be like them, so let's not take any military action in response."
Fundamentally, aggressive action as a response is not equivalent to being the initiator of aggression. Hence: turnabout is fair play. If someone punches you economically, it's entirely fair and reasonable to punch them back. It does not make you "just like them" to defend yourself.
No, it's a perfect analogy, you just don't like it. If you actually had a valid point, you'd bother to explain the issue, but you didn't. Telling.
The US isn't censoring it based on content anyway -- in fact, the US government's ability to censor much of anything based on content is severely constrained by the First Amendment -- the US doesn't like the fact that it's controlled by the PRC. But blocking businesses from a rival nation is a trade issue, not a speech issue.
China is a rival and opponent of the US on the geopolitical stage. It's entirely reasonable to respond to trade restrictions with trade restrictions.
What about the people who want TT? You can not hold them hostage to Chinese people not having TT or other apps. That's what the current Red Note revolt is all about.
Well, unlike Chinese nationals, Americans live in a democracy, so they could write to representatives or vote.
But realistically, few care enough for this to sway who they're voting for.
> You can not hold them hostage to Chinese people not having TT or other apps.
You actually can! As long as one nation is being shitty on trade and that starts a trade war, yeah that will hurt some regular people, but the alternative would be to become a total doormat and just let other countries get away with doing whatever they want.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Maybe this soundbite applies in an information vacuum like North Korea or ironically, and to a lesser extent, China. But in an environment where there is too much information for people to process, and truth is drowned out by lies and nonsense on social media feeds, it works against society.
It's bad enough that US based social media corporations are allowed to wash their hands of responsibility for the content on their platform and add to the executive bonus pool in the process. But having a hostile government control a platform is just insane.
There is a middle ground between being bundled into the back of a police car if someone speaks against their government, and freely allowing enemies to manipulate your population.
I don't recall us being at war or anything with China. For example, most of our crap is made there and shipped here with barely a look. If China were truly hostile and combative like everyone claims, they could literally import bombs and spies via those means.
Is this just the Red Scare 2.0? I've had way more issue with American oligarchs and politicians fucking over America's values and our way of life than China in the past few years/decades, that is for sure.
If buying a plastic toilet bowl cleaner, I don't care where it comes from. If buying a 5G network equipment, we do care. Most of the stuff we buy from China is plastic junk.
> Most of the stuff we buy from China is plastic junk.
You're making an error by discounting China's manufacturing prowess these days. There are plenty of companies there making products that you would be amazed about, and the plastic crap is simply because of momentum at this point. Japan used to make a lot of crap in the post-war era, until they started making the best electronics and blew the US companies away.
There's nothing free-flow about TikTok, though. Like Twitter/X, Instagram, etc it's actually a carefully curated experience that can be tuned opaquely by whoever runs it to control the flow of information. The US took umbrage to this being in the direct hands of a foreign adversary.
TikTok is a restricted information environment controlled and manipulated by literal tyrants. Subjects that are disfavored by the CCP are heavily penalized by their algorithm [1]
if you are looking to safeguard against tyranny step 1 is to not have the CCP be in full control of your country's public square
Google the phase "flood the zone with shit". Your strategy only works if most of the people speaking/writing are genuinely trying to make the world a better place. If state actors are trying to flood the zone with anything and everything, then it becomes impossible for John Everyman to distinguish signal from noise.
The "War on Drugs" ensured that when an American dies from a drug overdose it is an American company, like Purdue Pharma, that made money killing them.
And when an American is brainwashed into believing a lie, it better damn well be an American company that sold them that lie.
Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban access to a popular website? I imagine this ban will go down exactly the same. Never underestimate a bored teenager's ability to bypass tech restrictions. Heck maybe this is what is needed to finally get a new generation out of the comforts of their tech walled garden and get their hands dirty.
Don't underestimate the human ability to "settle for less" if said less requires less effort from them. There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality ; Netflix is just easier. They will settle for the "easy" solution, which will be any one of the TikTok clones already existing (YT shorts, reels, whatever).
> There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality; Netflix is just easier
I'm slightly annoyed how this comment completely ignores the moral and ethical reasons someone might want to avoid making an illegal copy of something while denying it's creators any compensation. I need more coffee.
Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results. Some random pirating streaming site is unknown and probably not even easily discoverable on google (you have to use yandex for that).
I stick to pirating with adblockers because it is more convenient, there is a much bigger library of content and I don't have to share any personal info or pay for anything.
If you know the words “yandex” and “adblocker” you are already 90th percentile ability to pirate content
Netflix is absolutely easier to use than any form of pirating for the vast majority of their userbase.
Everyone in this thread talking about how people will “just get a VPN” to use TikTok have zero concept of the technical abilities of TikTok’s user base
What's amazing about this comment chain is that it's totally wrong. Netflix is missing tons of content, like older movies, and tries to replace them with store-brand "originals" that everyone knows are garbage or only have a couple seasons before being cut. It lost its most popular product, The Office. Netflix literally cannot serve the product its users want the most, so the "easiness" of using netflix to get that product is 0.
The particular shows don't matter to most of Netflix's customers. Piracy to them is someone in a dark room wearing a balaclava with a laughing ASCII skull on their laptop. The ones that care about "The Office" will either throw up their hands and watch whatever suggestion Netflix has for them, or they'll subscribe to Peacock.
Netflix has succeeded in diluting what product its users want from "The Office" to "something funny". Why hunt for one specific show when it will throw a million options at you?
Or piracy is a somewhat tech-savvy person searching "The Office 123movies 321 123" on Google, then trying on Bing cause Google hid some DCMA takedowns, giving up on 9 results that only pretend to work, then finally getting a working one. Except episode 2 is weirdly quieter than the others, episode 11 is missing, and the whole website disappears a month later.
This person may have also had uBlock Origin, or maybe they got duped into the fake uBlock that still shows ads, or Chrome disabled uBO.
Netflix's death has been greatly exaggerated on HN. It's not popular with us, and for good reasons, but it's ever more popular both in terms of subscribers and viewer hours. It's not the easiest to always get the exact and best content you want but it's the best to get okay content any time. The latter tends to drive the average user.
Even then that was a scare of what people's perception of the future of the company was was, not actual negative performance metrics. Netflix continued to gain subscribers despite the concerns of the time (covid ending, changes in competition, changes in content) hence the quick stock recovery as the doubts evaporated.
I used to pirate, went to Netflix because it was easy, and recently went back to pirating. Not because pirating became easier... but because Netflix became shit enough for pirating to be worth the bother.
I wouldn't mind paying if it wasn't setup in a way like "oh want to watch that movie? subscribe to this service" at one point I was paying for maybe 5 different providers eg. Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax, etc...
Popular creators will leave, if they can't monetize their content anymore. Then, everyone else will follow the creators to whatever platform they will end up on.
The only reason social media is popular is Americans are too lazy to find stuff on the open web. They'd prefer the lazier option of the single web site deciding for them what to see and think about.
There's zero chance most will put in effort to access TikTok.
Exactly. There was a blog post a couple years ago called “The Tyranny of the marginal user” that states this principle succinctly. If it’s anymore effort than a thumb swipe, you’re losing users in a hurry.
This ban does nothing about the mobile tick tok website. You don’t need to be a techie to use the browser on your cellphone. Yet it is a point of friction compared to an app with native notifications. And given the expectations of the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade into safe app store apps instead of the scary web, people are legitimately concerned.
This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?
In any case, yeah, I'm not sure that "the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade" knows what a web browser is. I've observed some user behavior among family members that indicates a pretty bizarre mental model of how the Internet, web, and mobile applications work.
how would this actually work? iOS is so dominant among US teens it's crazy, and the ability to sideload on that platform is nonexistent even to very technically savvy users.
Fortnite never had even a hundredth of the smartphone screentime as Tiktok. I honestly think a lot (at least 5 million) Android users will sideload it once it comes to that.
Or DJI. Side loading is so easy, we usually just call it "installing an app" there is no hacking or magic around that, works just like a .exe with some extra protections.
I don't think it would be as unlikely as you'd think. It's not impossible for a significant amount of people to get a cheap Android for these apps, after all iPhones are a result of iMessage.
Most US teens probably already have a second smartphone-like device, and large portions of them have purchased them purely for one specific social media app.
I'm not saying it's more likely that not, but I am saying I wouldn't be surprised. If you replace "one specific social media app" with "iMessage", it has already happened.
Not only this - my observation is that having a secret backup phone is not an unusual practice for kids who might get their primary phone taken away at times by parents, school officials, etc. Or if their primary phone is subject to technical parental controls.
Yes, anecdotally many of my friends (and I) had a backup phone. Second hand Android phones are so cheap that why not? By the time the app has to be reinstalled it may make sense, if sideloading on Android takes off.
Many of your high school aged friends had a secondary backup phone with a separate cellphone plan they pay for? That’s wild!
I don’t think the average American high school student has two smart phones one of which is a secret from their major source of income (their parents).
No, why would they pay a cellphone plan for it? For most of them it was their or their siblings' previous phone, or their first phone they paid for themselves when they got a job, for others it's a cheap 60$ used phone they bought when their parents took theirs away at some point. That's like money for going out for lunch three times.
There's no use for a cellphone plan, we would just use wifi or hotspot from their main phone.
That is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that if I have a tiktok channel, and the only way for people to see it is through a hack, then obviously my channel won't do that well.
The bored teenager will learn ways to get tiktok. But the bored tiktokker won't learn ways to get the audience on tiktok
All they're really banning is the app on the App or Play store basically. Anyone who still has tiktok on their phone can continue on and even make a new account. Anyone who cares enough can probably get a cracked APK too
The duopoly of app store and play store makes this kind of ban much more effective. India banned TikTok and nobody uses it over here now. It's simply too hard to download the app. Google won't let me download it even when I'm traveling abroad.
Banning websites has been very hard, but today's closed marketplace ecosystems make banning apps much easier and people are not motivated to find loopholes.
When Ukraine banned russian social networks in 2015, all the teens had free FSB-sponsored VPNs running on their phones in no time. Like, almost 100% of them. In mere days. Now leaking not just the social network data to russia, but rather the entirety of their traffic.
Let's see if US teenagers are as savvy and motivated.
If it works on 75% of the population, that’s good enough. The other 25% will give up and move on as well, because people flock to social media where the others are.
> Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban access to a popular website?
Uhhh there are many websites that are banned in the USA. Otherwise working URLs that wont work in the USA. Mostly hostile state actor stuff.Iran, NK, etc. The fact that you don't know about it just says how effective it is.
Sure, VPN. But (serious question, not rhetorical) is that going to get the app on your phone? And are you going to go to the trouble when the algorithm thinks you're eastern european? When the user base is smalelr?
AFAIK most teenagers use iPhones in US. What are they going to do? I'm Apple fanboy but this is the exact type of power they shouldn't have.
Maybe you agree with the ban, I'm curious how would many people be feeling around year of 2028 after a few years of oligarchs consolidating their power and designing an obedient society through full control of the communications. Maybe you have ideas against H1B or maybe you use birth control, whatever your current opinions oh these are there's non-zero chance that you will be enforced into the correct opinions.
Every news article descending into tangents on any other point than that is part of why we can't have nice things.
The whole country has turned into some sort of lower primate improv troupe where whatever stupid thing comes up gets a "Yes and let's" diversion instead of an adult in the room standing up and cutting the crap.
We certainly _do_ want this. I think the fact that we let a foreign company own a social media platform in the first place is preposterous. As others have said, we would never let the CCP own a TV broadcast, why should we let china own a major social media platform? That's just absurd.
“We” do not want surveillance propaganda targeted towards children. The US government does not want Chinese surveillance propaganda targeted toward children. They’re perfectly happy when it’s done on US soil under US jurisdiction.
If we don't want this then we simply won't make an account on those platforms...
YOU want this ban and you don't like that OTHER PEOPLE like TikTok. Clearly you don't have a TikTok account and that's not enough. You want to make sure no one else is allowed to have a TikTok account either
Instead of spreading the message about possible harms you'd rather ban other people's abilities
> foreign ownership alone isn't a sound reason for a ban
You're right -- but foreign ownership by a repressive regime with undemocratic ideals certainly is. For example, I don't think anyone would be too concerned if a European country was the one that founded & owned TikTok.
Or should it be reason enough. The EU should ban Meta as well, no question. This foreign propaganda, risking mental health in teenagers and all that stuff is US propaganda shoved down our eyes.
That is a fine take, but the assumption that all other forms of media masses of people are exposed to aren’t also propaganda is a foolish one to make. We have an entire advertising industry in this country. Something like $300 billion in ad spend a year in the US. Ad spend is literally propaganda lest we forget.
It's not that other propaganda doesn't exist, it's that a likely intended effect of Chinese propaganda is destabilization and/or delegitimization of hostile governments. Ad spend is more about destabilizing consumers' savings.
Why is it bad when China (supposedly) creates propaganda on tiktok but it’s good when the US creates propaganda on facebook?
You’re not a government, you’re a person. Either way you’re being manipulated, and the US government definitely doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
Because we live in a world of Sovereign States, where the point of discrimination very much is between Citizen and Non-Citizen? You free to renounce your citizenship and live without the Protections of the Government, there are many who would be quite happy with that to take your wealth freely then :)
The only people thinking in such a arrogantly privileged manner ironically are Westerners, try saying this crap in China or India and people will laugh at you all day. Or I doubt this poster has the best interests of Americans in mind either.
Is this a serious question? China has its best interests in mind, the US government has its best interests in mind. Which one of those two adversaries are more likely to align with your interests?
Why do we have to choose one? I'm not going to trust US-owned media on the topic of Israel and Palestine, I'm not going to trust Russian media on Ukraine, or Chinese media on Taiwan.
By stifling freedom of expression under the guise of "national security" you're creating blind spots that allow atrocities to go unchallenged. I thought we learned from history but maybe I was wrong.
I honestly believe the answer is China—by living in the US, its interests and my own are more likely to come into conflict, whereas China’s interests are more likely irrelevant to me.
Huh. What are your interests? I'm curious why you think they would come in conflict with those of the US.
I'm confused why you think China's interests are irrelevant to you, unless you truly believe geopolitics is a zero-sum game. We compete in markets, militarily in the indo-pacific, and technologically in ways that are not mutually beneficial.
The US government generally works to maintain harmful institutions like health insurance, gun manufacturing, prisons and policing, etc., and will oppose me through violence if I work to weaken these. They can restrict my access to things online and control what online services I can run via laws like SESTA/FOSTA and this TikTok ban. China can't do any of that to me. I'm less concerned about geopolitics given our massive military and the position of the dollar, not to mention our cultural influence via the Internet (which bans like this directly weaken).
> Why is it bad when China (supposedly) creates propaganda on tiktok but it’s good when the US creates propaganda on facebook?
Because this imaginary world where the US somehow equally controls Facebook on the level that China directly influences TikTok isn’t one that exists?
This low resolution view of the world is grating. “Facebook is a US based social media company so it’s exactly the same as China and TikTok” is completely devoid of the context of reality.
Not only does Facebook actually have 1st amendment speech rights with a judicial system empowered to enforce them. But even the slightest appearance that the US government was attempting to influence speech on Facebook would be a career ending scandal.
Compared to TikTok where the CCP literally has a seat on ByteDance’s board by law and has for its entire existence had its algorithm nuke political topics that China does not want discussed.
Honestly, I don’t believe China has as much control over TikTok as you claim, and I believe the US government has much higher control over FB than you.
So from where I’m standing it’s the same thing.
And to give you some perspective, there’s plenty of content critical of China on TikTok even though that stuff gets banned on DouYin.
> US citizens elected representatives to make laws for them. Even more so, this is a bipartisan law.
A majority of American citizens want affordable healthcare, housing, and education, net neutrality, an arms embargo vs Israel, an end to illegal forever wars, stronger environmental protections, cleaner water, less fossil fuel use and an end to fracking, etc - and there's still bipartisan resistance in our politics and media against all of those.
I don't understand this. In my view most people don't want this otherwise they would have implemented a government where the majority is heard, but they didn't. And don't even seem to try.
Either it's a dictatorship or it's listening to the majority. There is nothing democratic about acting against the majority. Never was
Nevertheless, the voters made their choice and actively voted for these representatives.
If everyone is so outraged and there's so many TikTok users, they can rally and vote out the people who voted for this.
I for one support this ban fwiw. You'll find out a lot of people do too. So in this instance and quite a few others, my representative has voted in my favor.
That’s not how voting works in practice. The people I vote for do not match my views on every single topic. Just enough (weighted) that they are the better choice.
It is possible that every single candidate on the ballot is in agreement on a topic that every single non-candidate voter has the opposite view on. That doesn’t mean nobody gets elected.
Of course the users don’t want it. Asking a fanbase if the thing they are a fan of should be banned and ignoring all other groups doesn’t make much sense. Nothing would be banned.
Pew has it at 32–28 in support of the ban[0]. I think that's pretty low for a bipartisan effort where the opposition hasn't really had a chance to air it's case.
I'm for the ban chiefly on the grounds of economic fairness in access to markets. China doesn't allow access to any US social media products. We should only open our doors to Chinese companies conditioned on reciprocation.
On the contrary, I think it is about banning a propaganda and social engineering vector that is under the thumb of an adversarial foreign government. That, for me, is enough of a reason to ban it and justify it under our constitution.
The fact that I am in favor of banning all social media should tell you that it is not ideological, but rather that I think social media is extremely addictive, and has huge negative externalities.
The problem of allowing government banning propaganda is it allows government to ban anything they label as propaganda. There is no law defining what's propaganda, so you just end up with the government being able to ban any information they don't like.
Imagine the government drums up for another illegal war like Iraq using fake evidence, and we ban all counter evidence as "foreign propaganda". Do you not see how dangerous that gets?
>That, for me, is enough of a reason to ban it and justify it under our constitution
The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled in the past foreign propaganda is protected speech under First Amendment.
You cannot strip American citizens' rights to receive foreign propaganda if they choose to do so.
You left a few words off in my first quote. I did not say anything about banning propaganda! I am talking about the system of dissemination, not its content.
> The fact that I am in favor of banning all social media should tell you that it is not ideological,
I'm not accusing you of being ideologically motivated, I just think that your (otherwise understandable) support for banning social media is inadvertently helping a bad actor in stifling freedom of speech.
Could China be using TikTok to spread propaganda in the US? Sure, but I haven't seen any evidence supporting this and if there was concrete proof I'd support the ban. Meanwhile the US government is labeling truthful discussions about Israel's genocide "antisemitic propaganda" and using them as motivation for the TikTok ban.
On one side we have vague communist boogeymen, on the other there's expressed desire to take control of unpleasant narratives. That tells me that they're really just trying to take away people's ability to discuss their dissenting ideas.
What criteria define social media that's ban-worthy for you? Does it require the combination of user-generated content and a personalized algorithmic feed which characterizes modern corporate social media, or do you extend it to a broader range of ways people can interact over the internet?
I'm not asking for a legal definition. This is Hacker News; in looking for a definition that would enable hackers to correctly classify things most of the time.
I think there is probably some combination of the following aspects:
-Content is user-generated
-Content is curated by the company (i.e., users don't have the ability to fully turn off what is shown to them)
-Content is not universal (i.e., users don't see the same thing)
I voted for a Democrat; and I also was a loud fighter against previous attempts at a TikTok ban. That
* my representatives didn't vote in line with my requests *and*
* that they tend to vote in line with me for other issues *and*
* that there are no other viable options either due to no competition or worse competition
Does not negate that my "representative" is not representing me.
I think part of the problem is everyone thinks they are the "adult in the room" and everyone else is the "primates". I agree policy discussions are a bit of a farce though (in a sorta funny twist places like TikTok are responsible for that since the engagement metrics have a tendency to promote nonsense and lies)
How many of those people voted? The young people who don't vote don't want this and the old people who do vote do want this. The outcome is predictable.
When it comes to *restricting* rights (not growing them), it's very concerning that such a large percentage of people can _not_ want something and still have it forced upon them.
My opinion on this has not changed since Trump tried to ban TikTok in his first term [0]: if the USA wants to ban TikTok for XYZ reason, they need to pass a general purpose law in Congress that applies equally to all foreign-owned companies.
Singling out TikTok without a universal principle or law leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, and the US gov. will just be playing whack-a-mole with whatever the TikTok successor is.
We all live in a bubble that consists of the people and things we interact with. People in your bubble not wanting this doesn't mean other people outside of your bubble don't.
Banning individual apps in this manner is wrong, IMO. In a country where concepts like freedom of speech and restrictions on government censorship are not insignificant considerations (in theory, at a minimum) a decision like this is unfortunate. China bans apps... tons of apps... in order to maintain strict control over the content and identity of users. This strategy is not something the US should be mimicking.
The claim that it's a "national security" risk and the ban is needed to mitigate that is silly. If it is really that then ban it from government facilities and devices. The actual risk from TikTok is no greater than the risk from Facebook, Instagram or any of a myriad of apps.
The correct thing to do would be to strengthen laws that address the core concerns so that we are protected from ANY app that represents a threat to privacy or security. Just banning a single app (and then another, and another...) is ridiculous and goes against a number of things this country is supposed to stand for.
So what if a conflict breaks out and the CCP essentially use TikTok as a pathway directly into the brains of millions of Americans. Let's say they tweak the algorithm with a button press to create confusion and public discord when we should be united to protect taiwan.
hm, create a law which gives government emergency powers to delete apps / ban ip networks in case of a war
---
now that I think about it more banning foreign websites is the perfect way to brain wash
1. ban all foreign websites, because clearly it's a foreign influence on your people. "What if the war breaks" and so on
2. now you only have your local websites. Their owners are here and can be forced to mangle / edit content and bend it to your will. Where the foreign actor can ignore your requests local one can not
We already have it in Russia. People use the ugly and banned Facebook because they know that at least it's less censored in regards to Russian topics than locally owned VK or dzen. And Facebook is less likely to provide your messages to the russian police
Counterbalance to misinformation is, just, information. Strengthen the institutions that provide valuable and quality information and use them as counter. Why aren't PBS and such institutions funded to produce shorts that inform users and put those on Tiktok et all?
This is so fucking sad. As a russian american who lived through russian transition from relatively free country to an authoritarian one I'm getting dejavu vibes here(Putin started with taking over of all independent news sources like newspapers/tv and radio channels etc). This is not up to the government or some other people to decide what I read, what I watch where I get my information/news from. America has a beautiful concept of free speech, stick to it. I personally think that TikTok is a brain rot, but I still don't want any government involvement into this. Don't like it? - Don't use it.
I broadly agree with this, but there was a path for the Tiktok app to not be banned, which is basically the China playbook of handing over control to a domestically controlled entity. Which in the case of a social media company with the reach of Tiktok i don't think is unreasonable.
Strengthened laws would be welcome, but all the social media companies would resist this as hard as they can. I don't see any real regulation happening until there is a crisis of some sort that will push it through against all the lobbyists and bought politicians.
Lots of American social media are banned here by the Russian government (all for the same reason of protecting citizens from foreign avdersaries), and we just use VPN. We're used to it, and if a service is popular (like Instagram), it's practically impossible to ban it. Monetization provided by the service is replaced by embedding sponsors' videos directly in the video (and getting money directly from the sponsor without third parties), or by selling merchendize to fans.
I wonder how many Americans will just use VPN? Is it common to use VPN in the US? Here, almost everyone uses it now. A few weeks ago they suddenly banned Viber for some reason and I barely noticed it.
As someone in Australia which I assume is fairly similar, we really don't use VPN's, at the very least the average person doesn't and their use isn't common knowledge. However I have friends in China like you, where VPN's are used by the majority.
We are used to having access to pretty much everything we want access to.
The most popular apps and services used around the world are largely readily available in the US and do not need VPN's to use.
A Tiktok ban is in my memory probably the first time that a major platform used by the masses has been banned for use in the US. Because of the lack of VPN usage by every day people, I'd say everyone will flock to Instagram rather than continuing to try accessing Tiktok. If nobody else you know is using Tiktok, then why use it would be the question.
I’m puzzled too. By the rationale I read here, Europe should ban all non-European social networks (which would be great since we don’t really have any). Whilst TikTok based propaganda is clearly being used to wage war on European elections, US propaganda targeting Europeans is equally being peddled by US tech giants as well. Social media is truly the worst widely accepted invention of the internet.
I've been wondering for the past couple of years, why did Vine fail but TikTok succeed? Based on my increasingly fuzzy memories of Vine and my rough understanding of TikTok as a non-user, they appear to be pretty much the same app.
TikTok’s algorithm for the feed and their data science and recommenders are pretty amazing. You can tune it to show you what you like really quickly and it’s effective. Mine is tuned to old house preservation and restoration, a couple guys doing skits as blue collar workers that are some of the funniest parts of my day, motocross videos, and some dog/animal content. I’ve never liked a video or commented on a video, it’s just so effective using dwell time and they have so much data that they can give you exactly what you want and little that you don’t. There is no politics on my feed. I challenge you to get that with twitter, reels, threads, Facebook, vine… any of them
Lack of variety in videos. 6s videos limited the amount of content that could be included to the point where all videos were essentially short comedy skits. TikTok keeps you engaged by showing you a variety of different genres of video. This includes comedy, but also educational videos, sports highlights, video game clips, etc.
Add to this TikTok's algorithm for deciding what content to show you based on how engaged you were in the previous videos and you end up with a "For you" feed that drastically varies from person-to-person. This keeps it fresh and enjoyable at all times.
Youtube tries to do a similar thing by presenting you videos that are similar to your interests, but in my experience it usually trends towards what is likely "more profitable". Meaning longer videos from well-established creators to juice as much ad revenue as possible from the user.
TikTok feels night-and-day in comparison. On TikTok, I can watch a 3 minute educational video on how elevators work, and then scroll once and see 3 second video of a grown man pretending to be a duck
I think we remember Vine through rose colored glasses. There was nothing on vine that was addicting, other than some very famous videos, that are still treated as relics. And everyone knew about those videos, because of how the feed was organized. TikTok is way more tailored-to-the-user.
IIRC people didn’t spend multiple hours a day on Vine. That was one of the reasons why it shut down — they couldn’t grab attention span of the aging users like Instagram and Snapchat did at that period (2012-2016). They also couldn’t get the fomo feeling that younger people nowadays get without TikTok et al.
Until 2020, most TikTok videos were 15 seconds or so. They only switched to 30 seconds and later 1min+ after gaining huge traction. I guess 7 seconds is pretty short, but it the algorithm that was pretty simple.
7 seconds was great for certain types of videos especially quick comedic ones and brevity being the soul of wit means you have to be intentional with the little time you have
doubling the max duration length added greater versatility for creators while minimizing bloat.
making longer videos beyond a certain length can add to rambling and bloat which is why they've since added speed controls.
The precursor to TikTik (Musical.ly) "failed" as well. I think it's because while apps of that era were able to achieve the viral moment, they failed to convert that into advertising and sponsorship $$$. TikTok, Instagram etc. have perfected that pipeline.
Right idea, wrong time. The number of people with phones and data plans capable of recording, uploading, and viewing good quality video is near 100% now.
I doubt they have the engineering experience to launch anything at this point. They try to do a weird tiktok like thing where watching a video on mobile will randomly scroll to another video, but I think this probably has more to do with juicing "unregretted user seconds" than anything.
I am not saying that it's good or bad, and the geopolitical situation has changed a lot, but I miss the relative innocence, openness, and sense of unity that characterised the 2000-2010s internet.
We are slowly going in the direction of European internet, American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
The 1990s-2010s Internet was a golden age in the sense that even though the Internet was a child of the US military-industrial-research complex, political powers didn't yet perceive it as a potential threat vector or even comprehend it at all ("the internet is a series of tunes"). Many of its users also came from academic or technical backgrounds, which helped to maintain shared cultural values (although this was constantly eroding over time - see "Eternal September").
Social media and "Web 2.0" were probably the death knell for this era - while they were wonderful for democratization of the Internet's benefits, the merger of Internet culture and non-Internet culture meant that all the ills of the latter were inflicted on the former.
It was the golden age because from the 1990 to 2010, the internet was majority american. For the entire 90s, the internet population was something ridiculous like 95% american. Fun times.
> in the sense that even though the Internet was a child of the US military-industrial-research complex, political powers didn't yet perceive it as a potential threat vector or even comprehend it at all ("the internet is a series of tunes").
Comprehend it at all? Are you joking. Maybe the dumb politicians didn't know it but certainly the real people in charge certainly knew it's potential.
> Social media and "Web 2.0" were probably the death knell for this era
The death nell of the era was the smartphone which allowed millions of computer illiterate peoples around the world to join the internet. The demographics of the internet was definitely changing in the 2000s, but the arrival of the smartphone toward the end of the decade accelerated the demographic shift. Now americans make up a small portion of the internet population.
> European internet, American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
Not sure about the European one. Unlike Russia or China, we don't seem capable to produce our own services, or to not use the US ones. Maybe it'll change with the increased hostility of US government and tech CEOs?
> seem capable to produce our own services, or to not use the US ones.
Like the China/US situation, as soon as there's friction against using the US ones people will switch to local competitors. There was a UK competitor to Facebook around the time of its launch called "Friends Reunited". Technologically these things are not as hard as recruiting users, overcoming the natural monopoly effects, and handling moderation.
A confrontation has long been brewing over the Microsoft Ireland "safe harbor" case.
> We are slowly going in the direction of European internet, American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
That has always existed, you just may not be aware of it if you are from an English speaking country, because those other parts are not easily accessible without knowledge of the respective languages.
I 100% agree, I think social media has been a complete mistake, facebook's creation is my version of eternal november since I joined the web in 1999
The big reason I think it changed is that the internet went from being a place for nerds and geeks, when there was a technical barrier to getting online, to a place where there is essentially no barrier. As a result the web now reflects the innocence, openness, and intellectual curiosity of the average person, since the internet has become a daily part of everyone's life not just a subsection of the world that appeals to us.
I miss that too. I was in China before 2005 and the Internet was pretty much free. I used to speak to the quake editing group on IRC about mapping until deep into the night.
I think it's going to get more segmented. And not only that, the hardware, the OS, everything.
That said, I believe HN is a good platform. I don't think it's banned in China and people here can keep politics out of technical discussions, at least for now.
Bound to happen when the internet becomes weaponized, unfortunately. It's kind of crazy to begin with that we put all of our public infrastructure on a network Russia and China have wired access to from their home countries and it's lasted this long when you think about it.
It wasn't possible to share videos with the world in 2000 unless you owned a television broadcasting network. In 2000 you could not freely socialize with Chinese people on the Internet.
That shrinks by the minute, thanks to AI-assisted translators.
I had a long-distance relationship with someone when I was in my very early 20s who does not speak English nor my first language. I do not think language barrier is a difficult obstacle to overcome today if it was not much of an issue 10 years ago.
One thing that would make social media much better, is forcing providers by law to ensure everybody sees the same content.
Example:
I can be on Reddit in subreddit A.
You can be on Reddit in subreddit B.
We would obviously still see different content.
But ALL members of subreddit A MUST see the exact same topics in the exact same order with the exact same comments and likes/dislikes.
This would help build up a more shared “worldview” like mediums such as radio and TV did; you chose the channel, but everybody on the same channel gets the same information.
This would then allow the service provider and potentially government agencies, as well as users themselves, to moderate harmful content or false information more reliably.
Originally (and I don't know if this is still the case) the case for randomizing the content view on Reddit a bit (fuzzy numbering) was as a layer which helped prevent vote manipulation and brigading/bandwagoning. There may be similar reason for other platforms where not being exactly the same is unrelated to tuning the types of information presented to people. I.e. I don't know how much it matters that "all member absolutely must see the same exact order" as much as "the ordering defaults are not gamed for individual engagement"
Even then, I'd settle for "must have the option to use chronological/absolute vote based/similar type by default" type option. I'm not as convinced I know what others need to do to save themselves as much as I'm I think it'd be nice if it to be easy for us to be able to choose how we engage with content feeds (regardless what the platform is).
And then there is a matter of content groups when it comes to exposure rather than the addictive nature. Does it really make a difference if people end up seeing only /r/MyEchoChamberA and /r/MyEchoChamberB anyways. After all, each is perfectly representing the same echo chamber to all of the users who bother to browse there.
>This would help build up a more shared “worldview” like mediums such as radio and TV did; you chose the channel, but everybody on the same channel gets the same information.
That would be a nightmare, going back to the bad old days when people's worldviews were entirely decided by whatever flavour of government propaganda their preferred TV station happened to favour.
Oh yea, thank god we left that world behind completely. It would be terrible like, some major news network was completely in the tank for one of our political parties, and a huge percentage of the population kept it on basically 24/7. That would completely poison our discourse. Good thing the internet fixed that one.
I happen to have just looked into this, and it turns out this percentage peaks at 1 (for Sean Hannity, apparently?), but typically is around 0.5%. Less huge than you may be imagining
> One thing that would make social media much better, is forcing providers by law to ensure everybody sees the same content.
This sounds terrible. I don't want to see the same content as everyone else. A good chunk of Youtube right now is rightwing content that I don't have to see.
You won’t. You will still see the videos from the channels you subscribed to.
It’s just that everybody subscribing to that particular channel most get the same information from it; the same videos, the same comments, the same likes/dislikes
On what order would you show things? Upvotes/downvotes?
Could work but "social" media implies we all have different social circles, so my social circle of friends is very different from yours. I can probably see posts from my friends which you won't (since you're not friends with them)
Maybe I follow certain pages that you don't.
How do we still have the same feed then?
I find it pretty telling that the two sides of this argument boil down to:
1. This is a platform owned within China which can easily be used to silently and effectively spread highly targeted propaganda to extremely vulnerable demographics. If it has already been used for this purpose we will never know.
2. They make the most engaging internet junk food and other competitors don’t do nearly as good a job.
> The outcome of the shutdown would be different from that mandated by the law. The law would mandate a ban only on new TikTok downloads on Apple or Google app stores, while existing users could continue using it for some time.
Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for existing users? I.e. why would they choose to do more than the minimum required by the law? It's nice that they want to point people to a way to download their data, but they could also keep showing videos after notifying people of that option. What's the rationale here?
> Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for existing users?
What business would choose to keep operating if it can't gain new customers? Think about it. The law makes it impossible for tiktok to grow or be profitable. What advertiser would be interested in a platform that will lose users every day and won't gain more in the future?
The law was sneakily and intentially written to outright ban tiktok. It would be like congress creating a law saying you specifically cannot buy more gas. You can keep using the gas in the car, but you can't fill up your tank anymore. Would you spend thousands to fix your car? Change the oil or the tire? No. You'd either sell the damn thing or just throw it away.
The obvious play would be to incite those active users to take action by letting their congress critters know their opinions in an effort to have them reverse their vote
They did try that last year though it did generate a lot of calls in absolute terms and it didn't actually work as political pressure for them to vote against the ban.
Getting congress to reverse something seems much harder, in that they also have to get someone to introduce the bill, get it through a committee, get it scheduled for a vote, etc, in both houses.
> Getting congress to reverse something seems much harder,
The GOP is absolutely flip flopping on this issue since Trump has also reversed on the ban idea. That's why the TikTok lawyers' arguments to SCOTUS were to just delay the ban until after Jan 20 so the incoming administration could weigh in on the matter.
> in that they also have to get someone to introduce the bill, get it through a committee, get it scheduled for a vote, etc, in both houses.
I think you are forgetting that the GOP just took control of both houses. It will not be that difficult for them is that's what the orange man says he wants.
If there's an escape hatch, I think it's more likely that Trump directs the DOJ to defer enforcement, first temporarily. Some deal will be made where Trump stipulates some stuff about content moderation, including removing TikTok's ban on political ads. Once TikTok has agreed to act like X, Trump can direct the DOJ to delay enforcement indefinitely, but keeping the law on the books as a sword of damocles to keep leverage.
The Reuters article already states this will happen:
> If it is banned, TikTok plans that users attempting to open the app will see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban, the people said, requesting anonymity as the matter is not public.
The threat of losing something vs actually losing something is not the same though. If TikTok did something with all of the tracking data they did for each user so they could show the contact information for their Rep and Senators to make it easy for everyone with clickable links directly to phone numbers/emails would increase that engagement. It would also just show how creepy AF their tracking is. So maybe just a screen like PH does that refuses access to their content with a screen that says talk to your reps.
Political pressure. There are more Americans on TikTok than voted in the last election. I think the parent company is calculating that they can draw attention to the government taking away something the users love and turn that into political pressure to undo the law. We’ll see what happens, but I’d imagine they are right. Taking away the opiate of the masses has not worked out for governments in the past.
> Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for existing users?
For the same reason Google or Facebook or many other major players might choose to stop operating in a jurisdiction that's trying to impose restrictions on them that they feel are unconscionable, rather than knuckling under?
The "national security" angle that FedGov is attempting to hang this all on is pretty bullshit... defense contractors that do classified work for the DoD can be foreign owned!
I'm tearing my hair out... how is the solution here not just better data privacy laws? Doesn't that solve all the issues, both domestic and international?
It's not about data privacy - it's about social control. I don't know why it's always lost on every commentary that the TikTok ban became a widely bipartisan issue after October 7th.
TikTok was the only large social media platform that did not overtly deplatform Palestinian users and sympathizers.
Because it's not necessarily about the / data privacy/, it's about the ability of a foreign adversary to influence the American populous in subtle ways over time.
By simply suppressing topics, or elevating trends they might find helpful in swaying the populous.
> By simply suppressing topics, or elevating trends they might find helpful in swaying the populous.
Isn't that exactly what US media does as well? Every media has an owner with his own interests, the information they'll provide you will be carefully crafted to not harm those interests.
Best case: I am not propagandized by any state media ||
Second worst case: I am propagandized by my own country's media ||
Worst case: I am propagandized by a foreign adversary's media
The amount of mental gymnastics to justify censorship in this thread is off the charts. A really solid anti utopia material. One can probably make a dystopian museum exhibition with quotes from this thread.
On a similar note, I have never seen so much bigotry and populism on HN as in this and H1B threads.
Link a video. What is the alleged propaganda that is so threatening to national security Americans can't be allowed to see it?
In the article, this discussion, all the media I've read... I've yet to see a single example of this alleged propaganda and manipulation by the CPC. What propaganda? Manipulated into believing what?
Hang on, 'foreign adversary'? Who makes all of America's stuff? Who sent so much of the jobs and manufacturing over there?
> to influence the American populous [sic] in subtle ways over time.
Eg, pointing out Israel's atrocities and how they lead right back to us, or about advantages of socialism compared to oligarchy.
Most other countries allow foreign media to be aired quite freely. Any 'subtle influence' is in a sea of other influences, and quite diluted.
Diverse media with free exchange of ideas leads to a populace with a chance of being informed. Restricting media to the US megacorps is obviously a terrible idea, no?
> That's what propaganda is and it works.
The solution to propaganda is to educate people and teach them critical thinking. However, that would damage the yacht class far too much.
Yeah, at this age,they need to be fed only with US propaganda, just to be sure. Too bad that another country produced a better product to that demography.
> Privately held ByteDance is about 60% owned by institutional investors such as BlackRock and General Atlantic, while its founders and employees own 20% each. It has more than 7,000 employees in the United States
That’s probably a very stupid question, but is how this is a Chinese company when 60% are owned by American funds?
Same way the Singaporean CEO is part of the CCP: He's not, it's not, but there are a lot of vested interests like Facebook lobbying to treat them as the boogeyman.
Presumably, the relevant factor here is not ownership on paper, but who has real control via being able to tell Bytedance employees (including the executives) what to do. Which, in this case, is assumed to be China’s government leaders.
Presumably, yes, but is that actually how it works? I think we need a primer on how Chinese companies are structured. What does it mean to own 60% of a company if that doesn't give you any real control over the company?
Control can be separated from who is owed what share of economic profits. For example, some Alphabet and Meta shares having more voting power than others.
On a more pragmatic level, even in the US "own" means what society will defend for you. However, the US (and other western countries) are presumed to have courts that have a higher probability of defending claims of ownership assuming you have the right paperwork. Whereas in places like China, it is presumed that your paperwork is less likely to entitle you to a defense.
The tiktok ban law forbids chinese ownership of 20% and chinese control of 100%. That is how it is a chinese company, either by 20% ownership or 100% contro.
In the US government's view, as expressed in its brief in the Supreme Court:
"Because of the authoritarian structures and laws of the PRC regime, Chinese companies lack meaningful independence from the PRC’s agenda and objectives. As a result, even putatively ‘private’ companies based in China do not operate with independence from the government. Indeed, “the PRC maintains a powerful Chinese Communist Party committee ‘embedded in ByteDance’ through which it can ‘exert its will on the company.’ ... the committee includes “at least 138 employees,” including ByteDance’s “chief editor”
...
"Even assuming that the law would recognize Zhang as a bona fide domiciliary of Singapore and not the PRC, ByteDance would nevertheless qualify as being “controlled by a foreign adversary” under one or more of the other statutory criteria. For instance, ByteDance is “headquartered in” China, which is sufficient on its own.... ByteDance also is “subject to the direction
or control of ” Chinese persons domiciled in China (in particular, Chinese Communist Party officials), which likewise is sufficient on its own."
The saddest part of this to me was watching congressional representatives try to wrestle with the Singapore thing and fail in hearings. It really made me feel like they thought they had some kind of gotcha when in reality all they did was publicly demonstrate how little they actually grasp the real national security threat at play.
Side-loading APKs are still needed for new Android users, not too much difference right? Exactly like the workarounds you need to find when you want to install "Risky applications" on a Chinese Xiaomi phone.
As a Chinese hated CCP for the internet censorship and decided to be an expat, what's going on these days is changing my world view.
> No it wouldn't be ironic because all of that is allowed.
The irony is that China is usually the one considered "less free" by the US, and in this case Chinese citizen could help US citizen "regain their freedom".
> In fact, existing tiktok users are welcome to keep the existing app on their phone.
My understanding from the article is that ByteDance will redirect US users to a website and prevent them from using the app.
It's really rare for me to be pro-intervention when it comes to the government vs free-industry but TikTok has become undeniably, geopolitically hazardous for the US. The dismal bit of it is that nation state backed, habit-forming propaganda apps are only likely to proliferate.
Surely you can't think propaganda is just spreading lies... Contextual presentation can change how true information is perceived. Seeing a perspective more will align your own with it.
I know of many instances in which Meta suppressed specific opinions, but I don't know any of TikTok doing the same thing. Examples are welcome, if you have any.
Or is this just about Tiktok not being owned by a billionaire who will use censorship to keep the USA government happy?
I continue to be baffled by people who simultaneously believe that TikTok is dangerous because of Chinese propaganda that may happen in the future, but that all the other social media networks are not dangerous despite the mostly Russian misinformation and election interference that has been ongoing since 2016. So far as I can see the important part is not who owns the network, but just how easy it is for misinformation to be published, and basic info like "is this poster a real human?" or "was this person paid to say this?" or "is this a factually incorrect statement?" are not readily visible to users.
> but that all the other social media networks are not dangerous despite the mostly Russian misinformation and election interference that has been ongoing since 2016
You can affirm one thing without affirming similar arguments. This is important for me to say because you're consigning me to an argument that I didn't make.
Yeah good thing they banned facebook as well which provably has a huge fake news / propaganda problem while tiktok... while tiktok has.... um... while tiktok... quick, tell me what propaganda tiktok has been pushing that's so much worse than FB or twitter or IG! You can do it! Can't you?
Zuckerberg and Elon got what they wanted. Regulatory capture. Got the govt to ban a superior product. Elon even gets dips on acquiring it and expanding his megaphone.
I guess US is becoming more like China. Choosing their horses and warding off competition.
Welcome to Oligarchy America. From now on billionaires will get their hands on whatever they can, with a shining approval from the government and the FTC. DOGE will privatize what's left of public services so they can have that too.
And when that's done they'll consolidate into a few monopolies and we'll basically be back in the Gilded Age.
obviously bad policy for many reasons, but as a geriatric millennial I'm selfishly happy. As long as the ban continues, I will never have to sit on the bus and listen to those horrible robot voices blasting nonsense out of someone's phone speakers.
If Vine dying taught us anything its that the content from Tiktok will outlive the platform by being reposted to others. That voice will never die unfortunately.
I don’t understand why, with so much advanced warning that users would need a good replacement for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are still so bad. Why not invest in matching, at least, every TikTok UX feature? And beyond that, how are these two leading AI companies really unable to make a recommendation algorithm that actually shows people things they like?
No really. The Shorts and Reels algorithms are so one dimensional. They both interpreted me disliking smug milquetoast rants about Republicans and Democrats as not wanting politics in my feed at all. I do want the politics, but I don't need it hammered into my head that Republicans are dumb as bricks. I don't need to see the performative Tom Cotton and Jasmine Crockett clips that have already been shown 100 times.
TikTok's algo, OTOH, somehow understands that interests are multi-dimensional and that maybe I just want a different kind of politics or discussions that go deeper than cheap shots. I never in my life thought I'd encounter an anti-Marxist right-libertarian who actually read and is familiar with all three volumes of Capital, but TikTok figured out that I'd find it interesting.
I agree that it is unusual that YouTube and Instagram don't seem to be trying harder to court TikTok users. I assume this is because it would expose how much of an unpopular alternative they are.
The user base is probably more important to the quality of the feed than the interface or the algorithm.
It would be nice if they could also prevent hostile autocratic domestic(ish) powers from leveraging their current cultural power. But they didn't, so naturally those in power are going to build their moat to maintain it.
I have been coming around to the idea that we should ban all* algorithmic content surfacing.
It's taken a while, but the longer we go down this path, the more clear it seems that it is impossible to design a content algorithm that does not have significant negative cultural side effects. This is not to say that content algorithms don't have benefits; they do. It's just that they can't be useful (i.e., designed to optimize for some profitable metric) without causing harm.
I think something like asbestos is a good metaphor: Extremely useful, but the long-term risks outweigh any possible gains.
> It's just that they can't be useful (i.e., designed to optimize for some profitable metric) without causing harm.
That's not the pattern I've seen, as close as you are to it.
I've seen lots of platforms be wildly useful. Digg was good for a while; StumpleUpon, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit and even Facebook all had periods at the start where they added real value to people's lives.
At some point they start to "optimize for some profitable metric" - and quickly become heinous.
The problem isn't the algorithm; it's that it gets twisted toward profit. And that's basically a tautology - once you start trying to suck money out of the equation for yourself, that juice has to come from somewhere.
I can envision a platform that isn't based on profit being far more useful than harmful - if it can only ward off the manipulations of the yacht class.
Reddit is still extremely valuable if you curate it heavily. My entire feed is my narrow interests and passions (though I still use old.reddit, which helps. The minute that's gone, I probably am too)
> if it can only ward off the manipulations of the yacht class.
The inevitable enshittification of goods and services once they reach a certain level of maturity (i.e., profitability) basically guarantees that the yachted-classes will be involved.
Given this de-facto inevitability, the original premise (that algorithmic content is eventually a bad thing) makes more sense
Emails, torrents, Mastodon, VLC, Blender, Linux - They're all either solid, or even getting better over time.
Why? Because the capital class were explicitly denied, by design or by principle.
Like with healthcare, transport, post services, housing, and much else, there's simply areas where the public good is too important to give the profit motive too strong a foothold. I believe social media is one of those areas.
I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.
Don't believe me, we've got lots of data correlating the rise of social media and mental health crisis. As time moves on the evidence linking the two continues to become stronger.
You strained to look past the parent’s point, nowhere did they excuse the private institutions for their part in this; just that a totally unaccountable foreign power having this capability is not ideal.
I guess the counterpoint here is that we have lots of data how external actors (e.g. Russia) is influencing large parts of the political landscape in Europe right now.
> having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us
Dogs kill more Americans than lions, but that doesn't mean that we should be letting people have lions as pets.
I'd personally be happy to see something like Australia's recent restriction of teen use of social media in the US, but bringing that up now is just a whataboutism.
uh... "... worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us"... yet. this is only true because we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation-- up to now, the U.S. has had a monopoloy on social media giants and the like. it is absolutely not guaranteed that this will hold true, and there are many reasons to suspect that it won't be true. given how china views about U.S. sovereignty when it comes to setting up their own (secret) de facto government, police state, etc. on U.S. soil, it would be shocking if they didn't put their thumb on the scale.
and none of that is to say that i agree with the ban-- i think the mere fact of how unamerican, frankly, taking possession of foreign assets for american gain at others' expense is as blatant a signal as possible that we shouldn't be doing it. if we are trying to protect america, western values, etc., if we don't act in accordance with those values, what are we even protecting? the way to protect the american way of life is not through becoming more "unamerican".
in my personal opinion, the so-called "decline of western values", or whatever, has nothing to do with imperialism, nor to do with those values being short-sighted or wrong. it is because of our collective crisis of confidence in these values because of the (many) mistakes we have made along the way. the moral compass still points essentially in the same direction; it's just that for whatever reason we seem to have convinced ourselves that we don't want to go North after all, and instead prefer to just wander around the map aimlessly (all the while shitting on how the compass isn't taking us where we want to go). and so now we have people who unironically defend organizations like Hamas at the expense of the United States as though believing in universal freedom and equality of opportunity is merely a "cultural" value, rather than an absolute one. and, more insanely, that these values are somehow subordinate to the political issue du jour. these values don't give anyone carte blanche to coerce others who don't share them, but the idea that they are somehow subjective or relative-- that they are negotiable-- is the height of insanity.
> I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.
That's pure, shameless whataboutism, and one that desperately tries to hide the fact that totalitarian regimes are using social media service as a tool to control you and your opinions.
You can bring up any bogeyman you'd like, but you are failing to address the fact that these totalitarian regimes clearly are manipulating you to act against your own best interests.
I'm not trying to distract people away from discussing how totalitarian regimes are abusing services like TikTok to manipulate people from Democratic countries to act against their best interests and in line with the totalitarian regime's interests.
Now, can we go back to discuss how the CCP is using the likes of TikTok to manipulate people to do their bidding? Or is the subject being discussed verboten?
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. A foreign enemy keeps us from focusing on our own domestic policies. Turns out, if you look into it, we're the baddies.
In addition to widespread data collection and social manipulation, we also intentionally shove our culture down the throats of other nations in order to maintain cultural supremacy.
> A foreign enemy keeps us from focusing on our own domestic policies.
The nice thing about fiction is that you can make anything sound plausible. Ironically, what people consider the most prosperous time of America happened to be the time when America was opposing a vague foreign adversary. If anything, nihilist platitudes like this that have created a void in civic engagement that megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill in.
> Ironically, what people consider the most prosperous time of America happened to be the time when America was opposing a vague foreign adversary.
It happened to be at a time when the rest of the world's industrial capacity had been almost completely destroyed by a devastating world war which hardly touched US infrastructure.
Outsized returns to the post-war US economy were consequent on being the only intact industrial economy; the regulatory system which ensured those gains be shared with the working class was a response to communism.
The US is a hostile autocratic power with undue cultural power on our own citizens, so even if it's a given that TikTok is mostly a propaganda platform (which I completely, categorically disagree with), wouldn't it be better to at least have a choice? Or be able to compare between them? You are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't capable of making their own decisions which is about as autocratic as it gets.
"You are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't capable of making their own decisions" - the overwhelming majority of HN users would support U.K style ISP blocking of websites and apps deemed hostile to the government.
Endless comments about reciprocity, as if the American citizen doesn't have freedom of expression rights vastly different than Chinese citizens.
Yeah I think you're right. Unfortunately I'm coming to appreciate that many of the users here are heavily pro-censorship / "protect the children" types. Never thought I would see it happen. Feel like I'm waking up from a coma realizing everything's changed. It's so antithetical to the HN I knew and loved.
The type of power China has is very different than Zuck's. You aren't going to get taken to a black site for talking about Tianamen Square on Facebook. (or something like the Tusla Race Massacre may be a better example, since that is embarrassing to the US similarly to Tianamen Square in China)
China didn’t ban U.S. apps. it maintains a policy that sets a high bar for foreign operators, such as requiring domestic servers, domestic partners legally responsible for operations, content access and moderation to meet local standards, etc.
U.S. apps and websites simply choose not to operate there due to these requirements.
The U.S. has been complaining about this for years, advocating for a free internet without censorship in the Chinese market. But now that Chinese apps have access to American data, we’ve begun implementing the same measures.
I can get to the main Xinhua news website -- the Chinese one, not some US-specific page -- easily enough as an American. You definitely can't do the equivalent from within China, you can't get to Voice of America, or the New York Times, or similar sites.
That's the difference. It's not about operating as a business within the country, it's about banning access to even the foreign version of the site or app.
China commonly bans Western websites and apps, even ones that have never operated or attempted to operate as businesses within China. The US doing the same is relatively rare, situations like this TikTok ban are very uncommon.
We can't have people doing things like searching for Tiananman Square or Mao Zedong or talking about how Taiwan and Hong Kong want complete independence from China.
I'm sure a big part of the cost is the additional infrastructure and manpower to implement all of China's censorship, tracking, etc.
Ah, more misinformation from the PRC defense squad, right on time!
> China didn’t ban U.S. apps.
Yes, it did.
It's not just that the websites and apps don't operate as normal businesses within China, but you can't even reach the foreign versions from within China without using a VPN. That's what makes them truly banned.
There are plenty of Chinese websites who do not operate as businesses within the US, but Americans can still freely access the sites if they want to, thus they're not banned.
Could you elaborate on that? I have no clue how the US banning TikTok for granting the CCP the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Americans somehow justifies the decade plus of the GFW, blocking Western social media, rampant censorship, etc.
I think the OP is saying that both nations are banning software because of the risks of the software/data collection posing risks to the political stability of each nation. You can obviously say "our reason is better because X", but the outcomes being the same means that there is justification.
Both sides say it's worth banning "Tiktok/Google for granting the CCP/USA the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Chinese/Americans".
Data sovereignty — the idea that every country should protect and prevent its citizens’ data from foreign entities.
We never discussed this seriously before because we held a monopoly on it. For decades, other countries provided us with a direct feed of their data. Only recently have they begun to grasp the ramifications of that.
China never bought into that narrative. They have consistently upheld their data sovereignty policy, requiring foreign entities to host servers within their borders to operate, and that looks like the direction the rest of the world is heading.
I wish for an open world where data & communication flows freely, but it's unclear who can be trusted to wield that power.
The US government has never provided any direct evidence of their claims of CCP puppet-mastery, the whole thing is generally some combination of "Trust me bro" and "Well obviously China's government is gonna control a Chinese company."
Meanwhile China's reasoning for blocking US companies has been eerily similar arguments the entire time. Hard to prove them wrong when we have the major aristocrats of US tech companies completely prostrating themselves at Mar-a-Lago, offering bribes (er, sorry, the going term is "funding inauguration parties") to the incoming administration in broad daylight, staffing themselves with party officials, etc.
Arguably both are right, and it's a shame because the general working class people of both nations have more in common with each other than they do with their ruling classes. I think the thing that terrifies those in authority the most is the idea that the citizenry might realize this if there's enough communication.
It demonstrates Western weakness. Remember, during the Cold war the "iron curtain" was meant to prevent Soviets from seeing Western culture, political points of views.
The United States does not feel confident in its ability to persuade Americans that it's model, culture and political ideals are superior to global alternatives. Hence a Western Iron Curtain.
Simple exposure to culture, propaganda and points of view is child’s play compared to the modern strategy of inciting discord by amplifying existing differences and mass scale disinformation.
Don’t forget that part of the reason there’s a compartmentalization between Douyin and Tiktok is China’s own concerns about their nationals being exposed to outside influence in a manner far greater than what the US dictates the other way.
I really enjoyed TikTok and will miss it, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t at least provide the potential for the CCP to more directly have an intentionally negative influence on western audiences.
You fundamentally misunderstand the rights American citizens have that are being violated. The government doesn't get to decide where it's citizens get their information from. We're supposed to be free to come to our own conclusions even if presented with propaganda and disinformation.
Once the government decides it has the right to curate what media it's citizens are exposed to you are living in a n authoritarian state.
I made no assertions as to whether or not this was an appropriate trade-off.
The issue at hand, however, is not about any particular media content being censored but about the manipulation of how that media is presented or suppressed by a foreign source. I think people should be given the freedom to choose what to view, but I am also not naive enough to think that we as a whole are not susceptible to influence, often without even being aware of how we are influenced.
To the end that the US has a national security interest here: We have other laws on foreign political influence like FARA and the Logan Act that have similar tradeoffs around free speech and free association, but these elicit much less controversy. There’s a fundamental question: should the ideals of free speech be allowed to undermine the framework that allows that free speech to exist? To some, saying yes to that question is like arguing the US Constitution is a death pact.
> Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
Religion is distributed through churches, synagogues, mosques etc, the medieval equivalent of a digital social platform. A social media platform is kinda like the Vatican but x10000000.
Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider has to bake American policy position into its algorithm, what's going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own algorithm?
From here on out, are only US government collaborating social media apps going to be allowed to scale? If so that is a chilling effect on speech. I want to use my own algorithm. I don't need China nor the USG to tell me what I want to watch. I'm perfectly willing to write my own feed algorithm to do it, I tinker with several on Bluesky right now. Will this be banned?
Is there even a single phone that doesn't have a component that's derived from China? It's never been about security. I agree, the US wants access and they can't make a foreign company comply, even trying exposes the US.
Other countries have rules, make rules, the reality is they don't want to make rules because that might persuade foreign companies from not doing business here. Why make rules when you can get a warrant from a fisa court preventing any and all public scrutiny and getting everything you want?
> Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
There is no evidence for this belief. Really for either religion or for "social networking platforms".
You could maybe make the claim that this is true in terms of reach, but the implication here is that "these mediums can be used deliberately to influence people in a chosen direction", and this is just kind of silly. It's fun to imagine that some nefarious powers (or benificent powers) have some magical insight into how to make people believe things but this just isn't true and I think intuitively we all understand that.
To make the case that this is true you would have to do an examination of all attempts to spread messages, not just look at successful cases where messages catch on. Nobody has the power to do this on demand through some principled approach, or else they would be emperor of the world.
Are you implying that this was a deliberate attempt by an agent to create tourettes-like tics? Are you also asserting that this hypothetical boogieman can do similar attacks on demand because of their understanding of social contagion [1]?
The idea of social networking (or other broadcast or widely disseminated media) being able to influence beliefs or behavior is kind of inarguable. In specific cases there might be causal confusion - whether the media was effective because of existing trends or piggybacked on other phenomena vs. creating the effect directly. But this is a far cry from claiming that it can be deliberately weaponized, or that it is more effective for this purpose than other means of information dissemination.
[1] Social contagion, a phenomenon that long predates the internet
The shallow response here is that use is important. The hammer on your shelf is an effective tool for hammering in nails.
Is the hammer on your shelf an effective tool for influencing public opinion? It can be used for that -- you can smash statues of people you find objectionable and maybe have a greater effect on public opinion than you could by trying to tear down statues with your bare hands (although the nature of the public opinion change is not really that predictable). But it is not a tool for that because it cannot be directed to the general purpose of influencing public opinion. You cannot convince people that assisted suicide should be acceptable or that we shouldn't keep cats as pets or that we should not go to war to defend Taiwan using the hammer.
I'd call your reasoning shallow, but there isn't any. You state a bunch of stuff about a hammer and conclude "therefore TikTok cannot influence public opinion." It is manifestly obvious that many advertisers pay TikTok huge sums of money to literally influence not merely public opinion (of their products) but to incite action (buying those products).
Do you know Shang Yang's Shangjunlun?Any superior will divide and disintegrate the lower class groups，This is the same everywhere, so who is the real enemy?
Given that (as the article mentions) the ban essentially only directs Google/Apple to remove the app from their US stores, what's the rationale on ByteDance's part to immediately revoke existing US users' access? My naive assumption was they'd want to keep it going and support the current dead version of the app for as long as possible to continue squeezing US revenue for at least a few more months until that becomes untenable. Are they instead hoping to rally the user base into mass protests and pressure lawmakers into reversing the ban?
It is endlessly fascinating to me that people ascribe emotions that individuals experience to organizations, companies, nation-states, etc.
As the article says ByteDance is a massive company with thousands of employees in the US alone. It’s ridiculous to think a corporation of that size operates as if it was a singular (and extremely petty) individual, especially to the detriment of its own self interests.
There’s a dozen potential motivations for pursuing this strategy and none of them boil down to being “pissed”.
I'd like to offer an alternative perspective: TikTok's main revenue comes from China. Succumbing to the US gov would challenge the domestic nationalism, thereby causing more losses.
Americans finally discovering their constitution is interpreted all day every day is the funniest thing on the internet. You also don't have free speech, and your rights to bear arm are very restricted.
It makes no sense to me how this is an argument of free speech.
I assume you are saying this is curtailing the creators speech? However the creators can move to any other platform, they are not being restricted in what they can say or produce.
So perhaps the concern is about TikTok's free speech; which, thank god the constitution does not protect a foreign adversaries right to free speech.
Not free speech. INHO its about free assembly. 140M of us assembled there, and now that meeting place is being distroyed, and we are being dispersed, without any actual harm being in evidence. If the government can do that here, it can do it anywhere.
This is completely untrue, there are unlimited examples of speech that exists out there that you have absolutely no inherent right to hear, and in fact many existing laws explicitly support restrictions on your ability to hear the speech. Just a few examples off the top of my head; do I have the right to hear:
* A comedian at a paid event when I haven't paid
* Private conversations between you and your significant other
* DMs between other people on social media
* Podcasts published exclusively on Spotify when I don't have a membership
* Speech in walled gardens (FB, Insta, X, etc) where I don't have an account
The government isn't banning you from most of these, the only ones they are banning you from is private ones, but TikTok has speech that is non-private, so it's completely different.
By your reasoning, I have a right to hear the speech on instagram and X, correct?
Well tough cookies for me, meta and X are bith restricting my freedom of assembly. Will you go to bat for me?
They’ve imposed arbitrary restrictions on my access to speech simply because I refuse to sign up. And The government is okay with them restricting me from these public squares, outrageous!
Will you be angry on my behalf, like you are with the restriction on tik tok?
If these are truly public squares, it’s outrageous that I need to essentially show ID and give away a ton of rights to X and meta just to access the public square. Why are we not mad about that as well?
Again, this feels completely unrelated to the tiktok ban. It's fine for a venue of free speech to have rules, it's different for the government to ban a platform 1/3 of americans use because of intangible threats that are frankly an incredibly thin excuse for censorship.
I agree, though not when broadcast by a foreign adversary (per the 1934 law).
Forcing a sale to a US company also enables that to continue. Additionally, it does not protect the right for users to receive/hear speech from EVERY outlet, this same speech is permissible on any other platform - simply not one mediated by an adversary.
I'm very curious about this case, actually. My top questions
- difference between actually broadcast and potentially broadcast. Can the government suspend someone for potentially doing something?
- More on the right to hear speech -- you're saying that I cannot receive speech from foreign adversaries if I choose to do so myself? IMO this is well within my rights
- Do platform effects (e.g. recommendation) count as speech? For example, I may choose to post on TikTok bc it circulates in 24h to a specific audience - if TT got changed, does this mean that my speech got curtailed? (right to assemble, etc)
Congress does have the power to regulate foreign commerce however. Not that I disagree with you, but rarely can something be distilled to a single concern.
It is a balancing act for sure, but is it 'right' to have all those choices, but only as long as they sufficiently support governing body overall worldview?
There are still a million places online people can organize and assemble so I don't really see how this right is being meaningfully infringed here. It definitely doesn't seem clear to me that this clause means the government needs to maintain every avenue of assembly to the point this is a constitutional issue.
If you listen to the arguments that TikTok made before the Supreme Court, the court is extremely dubious of the free speech argument. And this has been a court that has been very favorable to free speech overall.
Its the fact that 140 million of us chose to assemble in this place ( app ) that IMHO should have weighed much higher as a concern, over speculative spoooky dangers. No actual harm to the country was shown, just supposition, which equates to us trusting the government when it strips out constitutional rights away.
The real answer is that no corporations should have free speech rights in and of themselves - by obtaining a government granted liability shield a corporation (/LLC) is not merely a group of individuals, but rather a highly scaled governmentesque entity running on its own subbureaucracy. That liability shield is an explicit government creation for specific public policy goals, and when the outcome is at odds with the individual freedom the arrangement can and should be modified.
I actually think that they do — tourists to the US have free speech protections. There are many foreign-owned press outlets operating in the US (Forbes, Al Jazeera, RT, CGTN etc.) that are also protected by the first amendment.
I wonder if this will have an effect on iPhone sales vs Android. On android the app can easily be side loaded while on iPhone (in the US) it's incredibly difficult for the average user.
What if any practical effect will this have on American users if 150M of them already have the app downloaded? A pop-up that doesn't block use of the app?
Haven't seen anything about an IP ban/block (ahem, great firewall), nothing's going to block anyone from business as usual on Sunday right?
There's no 'shut down'. And other than a bunch of misinformed users jumping over to RedNote briefly or whatever, the only difference will be an oddly American-free app for the rest of the world?
According to the article, they are voluntarily shutting down in the USA despite that not being required by the law. So yes, there is a potential shut down. Time will tell is they really do it.
The one source of true, lasting happiness in life is the love of others.
All of this stuff - TikTok, Instagram, etc - are entertainment, distraction, and that's fine, but taken to excess is unbalanced, and no matter what, cannot bring true, lasting happiness because they are not the love of another person.
I'm not assigning a cause, but US culture, these days, seems to encourage folks to treat others as "NPCs," and that can have rather bad consequences.
It's always been an issue (sort of human nature), but it seems (to this battered old warhorse), that it's a lot more prevalent, these days, than it was, just twenty years ago.
Just that we consider "others," (with the exception of a close entourage) to be "non-player characters." Basically, shallow simulacrums, with no feelings, standalone, not connected with others, and that can be "disposed of," or "forgotten," with no personal consequences.
We don't have to allow anyone other than ourselves, any agency or consideration.
That makes it very easy to reduce everyone else into one-dimensional caricatures, easy to attack, dismiss or neglect.
Like I said, this has always been a feature of normal human tribalism, but it seems to have gotten a shot of steroids, sometime recently.
I have found, for myself, that closely interacting with as many others as possible; especially ones that challenge me, has helped me to avoid that.
A semi-related term to the "NPC" thing is "main character syndrome." It's usually used derogatorily, but it's the idea that someone thinks they're the "main character" of the world; the people they care about are side characters who matter less, and people they don't care about (or know) don't matter at all. "The self as the center of the universe" is another way to phrase it.
Not sure entirely how that's connected to this thread's topic, but it is relevant in social media in general (and maybe TikTok moreso because of its "great" algorithm?)
Americans have a fixation on freedom of speech. They even defend the right for people to express hate speech that would be prohibited anywhere else in the world. Why aren't people outraged by the censorship of TikTok?
Someone tell me what data TikTok is collecting, that is making it such a national security threat. I guess it knows what videos you like. Awesome, so does every other social media company out there. Its not like the sign up form is asking for upload of SSN and DL.
I guess the US is afraid of manipulation of the video feed by China, that may influence elections. There might be a kernel of truth there, so I d be curious to hear anecdotes of something like that actually happening.
its not about their official data collection. It is a safe assumption that TikTok app is used to spy on targeted users and their surroundings, just google it.
Ok but both Android and iOS have a good permission system where location and other data access can be highly controlled. Isn't it more prudent that the app be restricted by the OS to not have permissions it does not require? Surely the US can enforce something like that.
You don't need to directly tap that information from the phone if you have enough variety of video and an algorithm that will identify and converge on micro-genres of video based on watch time, likes, and shares.
Aside from that, Tik-Tok Shop is also a thing. So elements of the application exist where you volunteer data like location.
I was surprised most by the general publics ignorance regarding possible work arounds. Nobody I spoke to on large Tik Tok lives believed it was even possible to download and install apps from somewhere other than the Play Store. Apple users believed their ability to install apps was identical to Android users
In the future I think the government can force the public to do things simply because the public is unaware of the options they have.
The good news is Rednote seems to be a potential replacement, which is also Chinese owned.
I don't believe the super addictive, antidemocratic backdoor into US citizens lives is actually getting TKO'd. Crisis is their (misquoted) word for new opportunities[1], and the value of the spy tool is too damn high for it to simply go dark.
Here's the lesson: We need our social media platforms to be distributed and out of the hands of any government to promote sharing knowledge and creating peace.
When the mass Tiktok exodus tsent Red Book [1] to the top of the App store, it was the first time in history that American citizens started talking directly to Chinese citizens in mass. I've heard all sorts of stories of both sides learning a lot about each other, including the lies and propaganda each others government places in the media, but mostly more positive things like art, fashion, cooking, food, healthcare and -- probably the most important, each other's different humor.
Video, and an AI algorithm to drive the For You page, is probably the most difficult part. We have some good ideas on privacy[2], and I can imagine some sort of crypto ledger system paired with AI learning, but video expensive to store/stream and at such a high volume of streaming, I don't know what kind of end points would really work to keep quality up.
Then there's the problem of policing such a system, and who the police would be. There's some dark places on the internet that I think everyone but a handful of people think should never be allowed on such a network, but more generally there's questions on politeness, stalking, harassment, "facts", memes, and other culture differences that would need to be ironed out.
Who's building this? We need it by Jan 19th, 2025.
Americans may turn to experience of other countries. E.g. in Russia Istagram has been blocked for years, however it does not really stop everyone from using or running business in it.
This only shows how incompetent Twitter's management was; they not only ruined Twitter but Vine too and gave the opportunity to TikTok to fill the massive vacuum.
At some point SCOTUS will have to revisit the massive deference they give the other branches on natsec issues. We are days away from a new president applying blanket tariffs to everything on the same grounds. What isn't national security in that light? They might as well start with this case and send an early message. Otherwise they'll be fielding all manner of lawsuits over ridiculous overreach for the foreseeable future.
Any guesses on how this will actually work? The apps will be definitely be removed from app stores. Will existing apps work? Will the website still work? Will the death of the app come from "creators" not getting paid? What if users continue to use tikok, but there are no longer professional creators or ads? Would a social network like that be the most radical of all?
Tiktok is popular on a global level. They'll just block access to US users with a link to the details of the ban, and let things stew up the heat until the US budges.
A few months ago I'd have cheered on this news but now that Zuckerberg has made his coming out and basically promised to turn Instagram and Facebook into yet more MAGA echo chambers, I feel... conflicted.
I do still think the world would be better with less social media, but the only words in my mind right now are "not like this".
noahpinion has a great post [1] on this today and he points out the interesting observations we can make: 1. because it's "Beijing" who is tasked with deciding whether or not TikTok can be sold makes it extremely clear Bytedance is not an independent private company the way it would be the case in the US. They are legally required to obey CCP directives [2] 2. Beijing had every opportunity to sell the application off, and in fact they did just that with another app called Grindr some years back [3] without any fanfare. 3. That Beijing would rather close TikTok entirely, rather than sell it, shows how deeply important it is to Beijing that TikTok does not come under the control of another nation, including the US. it's well established that the government censors speech on TikTok including the speech of US citizens [4]
noah bangs on the "the government of China is really trying to weaken or destroy the economic capacity of the US" drum pretty hard and it's hard to disagree with the many books and arguments he cites. The current rush to Rednote has a lot of TikTokers making the argument that "See? Chinese people are great!" which is where they are confusing sentiment about the citizens of China with that of the Chinese government itself. It actually is great if there's a big cultural interplay between young US and Chinese citizens (not sure w/ Rednote though), so that we would be able to counteract a key propaganda point from Beijing which is that the TikTok forced sale is some kind of strike against the Chinese people. It's important that the point be made that this is about the hostility of the Chinese government itself, which is pretty clearly a hostile adversary to the US.
PRC banned exporting Bytedance algo. By that logic, no US companies are independent private companies due to US export controls. And TBH both points are true.
>Grindr
Grindr was foreign company acquired by PRC, and sale was reversed by CFIUS. Selling an acquired foreign company is geo/politically different than having your domestic company nationalized/appropriated by another. Which is quite literally a strike against Chinese people. Even PRC has never forced a US company from divesting US ownership, because that's a retarded tier of "hostility" only US hubris can imagine. And it's particularly retarded tier analysis from Noahpinion who thinks Chinese people won't view divestment requirement a PRC company as hostile against Chinese entrepreners, who are Chinese people.
> PRC banned exporting Bytedance algo. By that logic, no US companies are independent private companies due to US export controls. And TBH both points are true.
Chinese state control over private companies is far more pervasive, and less bound by rule-of-law, than that of the U.S. Export controls are not even the H2O molecule at the tip of the iceberg.
> Even PRC has never forced a US company from divesting US ownership
Bytedance is not being forced to divest; they can leave the market, just like Google and many others had to leave China.
US spectrum export controls have been every bit as pervasive as PRC ones, pretending muh "rule of law" is a distinction without difference at this point. It's functionally the same.
>forced to divest
If US law is forced divestiture, then Bytedance is "force" to leave, because having US nationalize a PRC company is obviously a nonstarter except for the terminally stupid like noahopinion. Unlike Google + western platforms who "chose" (read: not banned) to leave because they "chose" not to comply with PRC laws that applies to all companies, including domestic PRC ones. The difference is US has no equitable law, i.e. some sort of data privacy law, that enables Bytedance to operate in US... while following the same laws that US companies do, as if Bytedance wasn't already bending backwards following additional requirements that US platforms do not have to follow (i.e. functionally Oracle JV).
Like fine, Bytedance needs to follow US laws, except US laws is designed specifically to prevent PRC companies from operating, vs PRC laws is designed to allow everyone to operate, just said operation is onerous - see retarded reciprocal argument that US companies should operate in PRC without abiding by PRC censorship laws that domestic platforms has to abide by. There's a reason FB and Google had internal programs to re-enter PRC market compliant with PRC laws (before being axed by internal dissent), because it's still feasble for US platforms to operate in PRC while being US (or at least JV) owned. So let's not pretend what US is doing is the same thing - PRC is more rule of law, US rule by law in this comparison. But again, functionally that hardly matters.
> US spectrum export controls have been every bit as pervasive as PRC ones, pretending muh "rule of law" is a distinction without difference at this point. It's functionally the same.
As I said, export controls are such a minor part of the problem as to hardly be worth mentioning. The pervasive control I'm speaking of is things like the fact that ByteDance (like all large Chinese companies) would have an internal CCP committee with influence over personnel and strategic decisions.
> having US nationalize a PRC company is obviously a nonstarter except for the terminally stupid like noahopinion
This is wrong on many levels. No one is talking about nationalizing TikTok (which is not a PRC company) and certainly not ByteDance.
>CCP committee with influence over personnel and strategic decisions
Party committees as part of 93 company law basically creates dumb shit like organizing staff picnics for companies with more than 3 CCP members, which is basically any reasonably sized company since 1/8 of country are CCP members. It is much more minor than export controls. The "pervasive control" exists in the sense that there is higher level coordination like META having US intelligence on board, or forming partnerships with said agencies. Fixating on minor shit like internal CCP committee is propaganda trying to pretend somehow US companies are less influenced by geo/politics when they are every bit as much. The big stuff is again, distinction without difference.
> TikTok which is not a PRC company
This is being obtuse like people pretending TikTok being based in Singapore/incorporated in Caymen somehow seperates it from Bytedance's (quartered in Beijing) PRC roots. I'll grant you DE-nationalizing isn't "technically" the same as nationalizing, but geo/politically it's obviously a none starter just like if Beijing told Boeing they would have to divest from US ownership. PRC would never allow US to normalize that kind of behaviour, and vice versa. DE-nationalizing tiktok, i.e. nationalizing by parties other than PRC is another distinction without difference.
Right, the CCP committees are just there to organize picnics. Sure.
Look, I think anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in both places understands that there is a major difference in the way private companies relate to the government in China versus in the U.S. For example, it's far more common for U.S. companies to sue the government over laws or policies they disagree with, whereas in China it's just taken as given that officials have a lot of discretion.
You bring up Meta having US intelligence onboard - I assume you're referring to the Edward Snowden / PRISM revelations. Remember that this was a huge scandal precisely because the idea of American companies working with intelligence agencies to spy (even inadvertently) on Americans is considered so repugnant. Whereas in China it's just taken as given that the government can read your WeChat (or whatever) messages whenever they feel like it, and any encrypted messaging apps that gain a following are quickly removed from app stores.
This is not a distinction without a difference; China is a totalitarian state where you have essentially no right to speech or privacy. The U.S., for all its flaws, is not like that.
> DE-nationalizing... geo/politically it's obviously a none starter just like if Beijing told Boeing they would have to divest...
Can you not see the hypocrisy here, when China functionally bans almost the entire U.S. internet sector?
I mean yes? That's what they do - dumb "political work" activities. It's not the high level strategic coordination, which I said exists (as they do in US), but citing pedestrian CCP committees ain't it. It's Karen from HR buying birthday cakes tier of activities. As someone who spent significant time in both places, sure, PRC companies doesn't fuck with central gov, US companies gets to try to. But push comes to shove, US companies cave, so for the purpose of foreign policy and geopolitics, especially with respect to great powers competition, it's a distinction without difference, because US companies will be subservient to national security interests, with minimal discretion, as they should be. Reminder much chip restrictions were done without industry input / consultation before roll out. Because US system capable of unilaterally laying down the law as well as CCP.
>is not like that.
Yes and NSA totally dismantled domestic spying / FVEY hack to spy on host nationals via third countries (rule of law you know) because Americans found it repugnant, except not. Ex-CIA hires still deciding facebook content policy on "misinfo". US voters thinks lots of things US gov does are repugnant, but functionally cannot change it, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
>functionally bans
Except PRC doesn't. Entire US internet sector is welcome to operate in PRC, provided they follow onerous (expensive) PRC filtering regulations. Which they choose not to. US platforms functionally choses not to operate in PRC, because they don't want to follow the same PRC laws that PRC companies has to follow. Let's not forget these platforms were blocked post 2009 minority riots for actual valid national security reasons, FB/Twitter refused to censor / filter calls for retaliatory violence. Queue PRC platforms implementing onerously expensive human moderation... which later western platforms adopted following NZ shooting, myanmar killings etc. We have TikTok following the same US laws every other US platform follows... and more (again, Oracle basically JV arrangment), i.e. TikTok operating at regulatory disadvantage. Incidentally after getting up their expensive human moderation programs, FB/Google tried but internal dissent killed efforts because they spent the money and can scaling system to PRC. If anything PRC would LOVE if western platforms returned, followed PRC law, and start handing over dissident info per PRC cyber security regulations / get squeezed by PRC influence.
The hypocrisy is thinking they're remotely comparable situations when TikTok chooses to compete in an unfair US regulatory enviroment and western companies choose not to compete in a fair regulatory PRC enviroment. TikTok even offered to basically have US intelligence/oversight on all US activities. The hypocrisy is there is no onerous, concessions TikTok can do to operate in US as a PRC company, even ones that puts it at significant competitive disadvantaged (extra regulatory costs) vs western platforms choosing not to shoulder the same regulatory costs as other PRC companies (100,000s human moderators ain't cheap). Extra hubris when proponents of "CCP ban US platforms" thinks US platforms shouldn't follow PRC laws and somehow are victims. Or that complying to same filtering laws is the same as divestiture. It's difference between house rules being, clean your dishes, versus get a sex change.
Whose buying? For how much. But maybe for the same reason Meta alleges it doesn't sell user data, because there's 7 billion other potential users who wouldn't look fondly at it. Counter productive as long as there's other routes for growth.
A forced sale would essentially gut them of their proprietary algo, which is leagues ahead of anything YT or Insta has. This algo and the associated TikTok assets can still be used a billion different ways around the world and in other apps.
Why would they ever want to help create an international competitor that could compete with them? I don't think any business would want to do that. Obviously the CCP has a level of access if they want it to data hosted in China, that's how it works with every company that has a physical location there.
that is exactly noah's point, that TikTok is an extremely potent application. Except it's not "a business" deciding this it's "a government", and China does not want to pass off this much capability to shape public opinion to the US while losing it themselves.
noahpinion is generally very insightful but I don't think his analysis holds water here. ByteDance is a major Chinese company -- if the EU tried to force the sale of Google you can sure as shit expect "Washington" to have strong feelings about this. The implication that Beijing controls ByteDance is not really supported by this evidence.
Some Japanese tried to buy one the these supposedly perfectly "independent private compan[ies]", and the US president said no, but that's completely different I'm sure.
TikTok has entire RoW (excluding India) market. Assuming US only bans in US... which TBH we don't know. There's no comparison because TikTok is still massively profitable without US, whereas US Steel is still a mess without JP.
> because TikTok is still massively profitable without US
Do we know that? In almost all cases for mobile apps, the US is far and away the largest and most profitable market for any business. I'd also be surprised if the TikTok shop for example is profitable (or available?) outside the US.
I think something like 8/18B revenue (mostly ads) this year is from US. So it's subtantial, but 10B is not chomp change, and theoretically TikTok has growth potential since TikTok algo is competitive with western platforms, which cannot be said for US steel vs other modern metallurgy facilities. Compared to douyin in PRC, TikTok hasn't even began monetizing / ecommerce, which TBH would probably kill its popularity.
>I think something like 8/18B revenue (mostly ads) this year is from US. So it's subtantial, but 10B is not chomp change
A social media site is not like a company that makes widgets. The latter's profits scale linearly with the number of widgets sold. A website's costs do not scale linearly (at least, not in the same way) with the number of users; much of the infrastructure cost is the same whether 500 million or one billion users are on the site.
It's entirely possible that, as nozzlegear said, a TikTok without US users is unprofitable. Especially given that, the last time I checked, US users are a) only 10% of the total TikTok userbase and b) US creators are 21 of the top 50 TikTok users with the most followers. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...>
Without US specific data warehousing requirements (~1.5B Project Texas / Oracle), TikTok can fallback to using Douyin infra... which is already scaled for billion+ users. All that might goto PRC datacentres, i.e. Huawei Cloud which exist in most continents. If anything Douyin can eliminate redundant TikTok infra costs. I've no doubt Americans is a disproportionately more profitable in terms of ARPU, it would be a huge hit, but TikTok unlikely to go in red given those factors if RoW markets still leaves ~10B, especially if PRC wants to prioritize using TikTok as portal for ecommerce with PRC exports, which as I mentioned, TikTok is not nearly aggressive with monetizing as Douyin. I can't say it's impossible, but IMO unlikely.
The majority of ByteDance's users are from China. Without India, USA is around 50% of global revenue, and other markets are alot more fragmented hence smaller ecosystems.
I am talking about Tiktok users, not Douyin. Douyin itself has almost a billion users.
Markets are not countries are not ecosystems. The EU is fragmented by countries but it's a single market, again with more users than the US.
Your stat about revenue is misleading and outdated. Turkey for example generates almost as much revenue as the US, and many markets are currently in the process of being monetized which will take some time, the potential revenue is something Bytedance is going to factor in more than current revenue when it makes a major strategic decision.
> That Beijing would rather close TikTok entirely, rather than sell it, shows how deeply important it is to Beijing that TikTok does not come under the control of another nation, including the US
I don't think it is important because of how 'powerful' a tool it is. I think it is more than being forced to sell it would be losing face and a humiliation (a la 19th century's Inequal Treaties). Also, they don't have to sell it altogether as the issue is only with the US.
So they just shut it down in the US and can say that they don't give in to blackmail while pointing out how hypocritical the US are ("free speech but only if controlled by the US" sort of angle).
The two cases are just very different, why are you even comparing the case of an investment company buying a stake in an existing app with the original creator being banned from owning what they created?
This is an absolutely ridiculous line of reasoning. Tiktok has over a billion users, and about 150 million of those are American. It would be downright stupid to sell all of it just for the US market and it would set an absolutely disastrous precedent.
A social media site is not like a company that makes widgets. The latter's profits scale linearly with the number of widgets sold. A website's costs do not scale linearly (at least, not in the same way) with the number of users; much of the infrastructure cost is the same whether 500 million or one billion users are on the site.
PS - That you seriously believe that tens of millions of iPhone-using Americans will buy, carry around, and constantly switch to an Android phone just to sideload TikTok boggles the mind.
Tiktok is an offshoot of Douyin, I don't think Douyin needs the US to be profitable, and software has a low marginal cost.
> PS - That you seriously believe that tens of millions of iPhone-using Americans will buy, carry around, and constantly switch to an Android phone just to sideload TikTok boggles the mind.
I never said so, I said I wouldn't be surprised if a significant number did. Having grown up in this environment I've seen people literally buy 4 year old iPhones just for iMessage. American teenagers are very weird about social media and this kind of behavior wouldn't be out of character.
Why can't the decentralized social media be made? What are the technical obstacles for this? Why cant it run in your browser, users could store their content on their own devices and share it P2P. Noone knows whats being shared, no problems with censorships, regulations, laws...
Primal.net and yakihonne.com speak nostr protocol and are both pretty slick implementations.
Primal recently launched “build your own algorithm” along with a feed marketplace.
P2P doesn’t work for social, see SecureScuttleButt. Rabble has moved pretty firmly into the Nostr camp. He’s one of the top minds thinking about decentralized social media. Study nostr and don’t dismiss the relay model lightly.
It's just ease of use. I tried to make a mastodon account early into the xitter takeover. I spent probably half an hour trying to make a account before I decided if it was gonna take me this long that there was no way it would ever catch on anyway so I should just give up.
Even if it was technically doable and user-friendly, you'd end up with a toxic cesspool filled to the brim with neonazis and CSAM, which only deranged individuals would want to engage with.
So they want to ban only the mobile app, but the Tiktok website would still work from the mobile browsers? Huh...
I guess they can get less user data from the website than an app, but the content manipulation and the usage data collection could still happen that way if that's the real fear of the US...
This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?
[I made the same comment elsewhere, but I'm putting it here too because I'm really puzzled by this.]
TikTok is ostensibly a commercial product meant to earn revenue that offset costs, and those costs are tremendous.
Meanwhile, the ban will make it impossible for them to (a) enter into trade relationships with the advertisers and other partners that bring in revenu, and (b) share that revenue with monetized users.
Continuing to run it at scale as a website without ads or monetization payouts (and without any legal protections) would pretty well blow the cover of it being a legitimate international business.
That makes sense, but means that banning it from making money through (a) and (b) would be sufficient to kill it quickly (if it's a legitimate business, as you said), without directly taking it away from users and causing so much political uproar.
That amounts to the same thing and ByteDance would present it as the same thing in their PR effort, so nothing material would be different.
Meanwhile, the kind of law that would allow a business to "operate" but disallow it from making money is probably close to unprecedented and would look like even more peculiar targeting. It doesn't really even make sense as operating a business naturally implies participating in commerce.
I'm surprised they're shutting down rather than trying to push the web version. The law does not require ISPs to block the website or forbid anyone from using it; only US-based mobile app stores are affected.
> Users who have downloaded TikTok would theoretically still be able to use the app, except that the law also bars U.S. companies starting Sunday from providing services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of it.
Are you sure that the website and the native mobile app use different CDNs, or a CDN which won't be affected by the ban?
I have some concerns about TikTok, as well as with a shutdown, but if I can imagine a silver lining of a TikTok shutdown, it would be if huge numbers of teens are inspired to learn the tools and awarenesses to not be total b-words of Big Tech.
In this fantasy, initially it would just be to get onto a particular Big Tech (but Chinese) thing that "grownups" don't want them doing. But then they'd start to realize they're also being exploited there, and also by many of the people who are pitching circumventions. And eventually they'd figure out and create genuine empowerment. And rediscover better conventions for society, where everyone isn't either exploiting or being dumb. And it would just be the grownups who are hopelessly b-words of Big Tech, and the teens just have to roll their eyes and be patient with them. Then those teens become grownups and have kids, and raise them to not be airhead b-words. And those kids teach their kids, etc.
Of course, within several generations, the lessons would be diluted and then forgotten, and people would get dumb and shitty again. But society would have improved enough that at least there's room for people to backslide, and fritter away what their great-grandparents achieved. :)
Which makes all the positive comments about rednote hilarious. It's like two proles in 1984 talking one another about how they're gonna defect from Oceania to Eastasia because citizens are treated just so much better there!
Again I note the distinctive lack of self-awareness from the demographic that is moving away from TikTok to a communist country value harboring app like RedNote
The Rednote or "Xiaohongshu" in Chinese is literally referring to the Mao Zedong's propaganda book the modern counterpart being "Xi's Book of Thoughts"
It's frightening how much young Americans hate their own country and the values that have allowed them this much freedom.
Do you think mayyybeeee this hate stems from how young americans are treated and a complete lack of representation? Red note censors stuff about Chinese politics, they are surprisingly accepting of LGBTQ etc, and it's nice to talk with people from other countries you don't normally have interactions with. It's really not that hard to understand.
The China data is just a scapegoat. The risk is very minor. The US is banning TikTok because is a domestic big tech competition, and because lawmakers cant control it.
This is very welcome as a parent in the USA. It is also sound legally, and was a long time coming. Nothing of great value is being lost and in a year users will have moved on to something else.
There are two positive effects here:
1. A company that is meaningfully foreign is losing control of a mass media asset.
2. Children and young adults are losing access to a product that is not good for them.
A country should not allow foreign powers to control platforms with so much reach--full stop. We do not allow foreign entities to own radio stations... Imagine how much deeper these platforms penetrate a person's mind, and how much larger their audiences are. We should all be MUCH more concerned about how these apps are stretching the social fabric (throughout the world) and how every society's ability to function is effected. I challenge anyone voicing discontent at this result to question whose interests they are voicing.
American manipulation of American minds... Yea! That's the point. I'd rather have someone with interests as aligned as possible with mine working for, owning and ultimately making business decisions at these companies. Regulation as appropriate to further align them.
Which leads me into my next point: I think that everyone here would argue that TikTok is in a class of its own with regard to very engaging short form content and rapid feedback feed training. I would argue that these attributes make it necessarily vapid and reactionary, providing little to no net benefit to either the individual or society to begin with.
If you disagree, what is the value of this product to the user and to society? Does it make people's lives better? I think that when the harms are considered, the answer to both is ultimately no. There are very well-documented negative effects on focus, happiness, and anxiety in children, which persist into adulthood from social media[1]. I don't think it can be argued that something that makes you feel good and connected in the moment but disconnects you from your immediate neighbors and friends and is highly correlated with mental illness is good.
Social platforms (TikTok included) are putting our children at a disadvantage mentally compared to previous generations and need to be more regulated. If these platforms (TikTok and other short-form rapid feedback products most of all) are of dubious value to begin with, what is the harm being done here?
Finally, I conjecture that we've only gotten a taste so far of how power can be wielded through these instruments. Even if Elon decides NOT wield his asset overtly during this administration, I believe we'll see more overt demonstrations of the power of social media sites in the next few years if relations with China continue to deteriorate and Russia becomes more desperate, with Meta clearly becoming less scrupulous.
For years people have dogged on North Korea, Iran, China and Russia talking about how the government controls information by banning apps and by creating firewalls blocking access to parts of the internet. Now when the US introduces censorship people like you welcome it with open arms. Something of value is lost, our ability to access information freely
Tiktok is obviously a massive national security risk, and I find it funny people don't see that.
It is extremely well established that propaganda has great value, and so allowing a foreign adversary the capacity to potentially control the information your citizens receive in a clandestine way is insanely dangerous.
Yes, we should also forbid books published by Chinese publishing companies because the CPC might pressure those companies to put propaganda in the books.
We should also forbid Hollywood from selling movies in China, because as we've already seen that means the movies are being adjusted to get approval in China.
We should also forbid Chinese citizens talking to Americans, because they might convince Americans on a topic we don't can't allow American minds to be changed about.
The first two don't apply because they don't share the hyper personalized nature of social media. No two people see the same thing so it's impossible to react to foreign propaganda. Books and movies don't work that way.
Third example is irrelevant because it's impossible to achieve the efficiency (reach) that social media has.
I don't really see your point. Tiktok is a video library. With the exception of private videos, anything hosted on the app can be viewed by anyone. Whether or not the app provides a personalized algorithmic selection of videos does not have any bearing on the more fundamental question of whether American's have the right to access foreign media.
Since when are social media apps considered broadcasters? In fact, section 230 legally protects social media apps from the civil liabilities of broadcasting. You're also just distracting from the actual issue. Being that, as citizens of a democratic republic promoting free speech, press, association, etc., do you think we have a right to view foreign media (including broadcasts for that matter)?
> It is extremely well established that propaganda has great value, and so allowing a foreign adversary the capacity to potentially control the information your citizens receive in a clandestine way is insanely dangerous.
I would say that allowing a ~foreign adversary~ anyone the capacity to potentially control the information your citizens receive in a clandestine way is insanely dangerous. Why do we let domestic ones do it? We're seeing what they're doing to our societies.
It would have been farcically easy to legislate that any large social media company have to expose their algorithm to a regulator, with a capacity for spot checks and immense sanctions if they fail to comply.
If your argument is "we can't allow any foreign owned social media to operate in the US", then how can you possible argue that the rest of the world should allow American applications?
>If your argument is "we can't allow any foreign owned social media to operate in the US", then how can you possible argue that the rest of the world should allow American applications?
Are they not free to ban it if they wish? But they won't because contrary to what some people would like to push, the CCP in fact is alot more sinister than the US Government, and foreigners do recognize that in genuine security analysis.
I disagree. While I think there are definitely biases on Reddit, there is a difference between users, individual moderators, or even established sub policies having a political leaning versus an algorithmically masked propaganda machine like TikTok.
Call me old fashion, but I put more faith in a profit seeking US company (recently public) with light government oversight than a foreign owned black box.
You might be missing the fact that there is a significant amount of bots on Reddit pushing certain agendas giving the impression they're foreign sponsored.
you may be right that there is a, "significant amount of bots on Reddit pushing certain agendas". However, Reddit is fundamentally designed to incentivize authentic engagement and to punish bots. If it wasn't the case before is certainly is now given the fact that they are now extracting value from the authenticity of data on their platform via AI Training data sales. Reddit is fiduciarily encouraged to tamp down bots and spam because they are financially incentivized to have the most genuine data.
All of that aside it is irrelevant because we are talking about third parties (users/bots) pushing propaganda vs the platform owner itself pushing propaganda.
You disagree - try this. Go to the "popular" feed and take a scroll.
I compel you to find one single positive post about capitalism or the west. Count the number of anti-capitalist or blatant pro-ccp content posts.
One such - "Luigis game is about to be multiplayer" (reference to the recent murder of the insurance company ceo) with a video with the label "y'all look how the chinese are living" (compared to usa)
You also say you put faith in a profit seeking US company. Reddit is not a USA owned company.
Can you, someone, anyone in this toxic wasteland of a thread please point out what propaganda you're talking about? Point to an actual thing that justifies banning something 140M Americans use daily and don't just expound upon your vague national security paranoia.
"Where are the examples" is a straw man. Imagine the ways a political enemy might exploit limitless access to the attention of 140M Americans. The calculus seems to be that a false negative will be much more catastrophic than a false positive.
I understand what you're saying but that argument I don't think should apply here. Having some kind of evidence to back up a drastic action like this is not something that should be argued for, it should be a given. I've asked at least 5 different times for people to point to anything material, and no one has come up with anything. I'm not saying there is no threat, I could be wrong and there could be a massive threat, but if there is one shouldn't we be able to point to something more than "it could happen" and being paranoid about it? I'm being asked to have faith in institutions/politicians that have a long, long, long proven track record of not having my best interests at heart and I can't accept that when they have clear conflicting interests / motives.
I think the American government is contorting its public argument to avoid saying this plainly because there are many American companies that control information for most of the world, and they don't want other countries to go "Hmm, hang on a minute..."
What do you mean national security risk? What risk to whom, exactly? Do you mean that the algorithm can portray communism or China in a positive light? Can you provide an example video that constitutes this threat?
小红书 (pronounced Xiaohongshu) is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance (EDIT: I’m wrong, it’s a different company, see below). It’s currently #1 on the USA App Store.
The people on there are super kind and accommodating to all the “American TikTok refugees” today! Lots of little Mandarin 101 classes, UI tutorials, and co-commiserating about government overreach.
I have a negative view of all of social media, but I think banning it is extremely politically unwise. Appreciate the hospitality of these users inviting us into their platform for a bit
This isn't a 'great firewall' solution. It just prevents google/apple from hosting it in their app stores. If tiktok wanted to they could still host it from outside the USA and let people access it via the web (or sideload the apk on android). Having said that tiktok has announced if the ban does occur they will shut down service on Sunday.
Has anyone written up exactly how TikTok is a distinct national security risk?
The best I’ve heard is “they get your data”, which is something they surely can buy from Facebook through an intermediary, “they influence content”, which is a moderation decision that every social media app does, and “there’s a part of the report to congress that’s redacted”, that could be a recipe for tuna casserole for all I know.
Edit: I’m assuming the downvotes are a way of saying “no”? I would assume that “national security threat” would involve some sort of concrete standard of harm or risk that could be communicated beyond “just trust us”. I haven’t even seen concrete examples of what content they influence, just people assuring everyone that it happens and it’s Bad.
I recommend you start reading on Page 33 if you are impatient.
In extremely short. The PRC is an extremely active cyber threat, hacking things all over the US, in large part to gain access do gain access to datasets about U.S. people. Including hacks of the Goverment's Office of Personnel Management, of a credit reporting agency, a health insurance provider.
The PRC has a strategy and laws of using its relationship with Chinese companies, and through them their subsidiaries, to carry out it's intelligence activities.They specifically point to the National Security Law of 2015 and the Cybersecurity law of 2017 which require full co-operation with Chinese authorities and full access to the data.
So one half of their justification is the significant risk of China using TikTok to conduct espionage in the form of gathering a huge dataset on Americans.
---
Another half of the risk is, as everyone else here is already saying, their ability to influence Americans.
This is not an entirely theoretical concern as TikTok would like you to believe, the Government reports that “ByteDance and TikTok Global have taken action
in response to PRC demands to censor content outside of China”.
And all evidence is that it would happen in the US the second the PRC decided to ask for it.
It's not about getting our data. The TikTok algorithm is already being used to sow discord by showing stuff the PRC wants impressionable Americans to see. This ability of an adversarial foreign nation to surgically push individualized propaganda to consumers in another country is pretty unparalleled in human history. TikTok is the ultimate propaganda machine.
Right, I guess I'm agreeing with you that social media is an effective propaganda machine (they're ad companies and what is an ad but propaganda to buy a product) and the US Govt wants one where they set the tone.
I was disagreeing with GP that seemed to act like TikTok was uniquely a propaganda engine
I think the fact that the PRC would rather burn it all down rather than allow it to be sold speaks volumes that it's not about TikTok as a business venture.
They do just buy it. The opinion mentions that. It turns out they want even more data and also do things like hacking to steal it.
> The PRC’s methods for collecting data include using “its
relationships with Chinese companies,” making “strategic
investments in foreign companies,” and “purchasing large data
sets.” For example [...]
In fact it treats the Chinese investment into TikTok as basically a form of "just buying it" with regards to the information gathering justification for banning it.
It's generally not wise to let your geopolitical rival have extensive influence over your populace, which is why CCP doesn't let American companies like Meta operate in China.
Yes, but then we also need to realise that pretty much the whole world outside of China is 'controlled' by American tech companies (both hardware and software/apps)
So if the US think it is not OK to have something like Tiktok owned by a Chinese company the rest of the world might wonder if it is OK for them to have everything owned by American companies...
All of those military bases are there in partnership with and at the invitation of the host country. The US doesn't just slap down a base in Poland and say "deal with it."
Regarding 1990, nonetheless, prolonged U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War became highly controversial though, fueling anti-American sentiment.
Uh yeah the government? I'm not sure if you expect the US to go out and poll everyone in the whole country first or what you're trying to imply, but governments usually coordinate with governments.
> See: 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.
War is war, it sucks but it's been a part of human history for all of human history. That said, those wars are over. If Iraq no longer wanted US bases in their territory, they could ask the US to leave.
I think in 2020, Iraq's parliament did vote to expel foreign troops, yet the U.S. military presence continues albeit in a limited capacity.
You are right, governments usually coordinate with governments, but my point is that the consent of the government doesn't always align with the will of the people, particularly in cases where public opinion is suppressed or ignored.
There's also the signaling and red meat factor for politicians. Easy headline to be "tough on china", requires less explanation than pacific trade deals.
Absent any of these conversations is, in my experience, any notion of what exactly China aims to achieve with TikTok that is so sinister? I'm not even arguing, I wouldn't doubt China has plans or another that involve America, specifically that wouldn't be too great for America, I'm just struggling to connect TikTok to any of them, and any discussion seems to take it as granted that the shifty Chinese government is up to something with it.
So it's several things. Bear with me because finding news reports that I remember is difficult now because search results are flooded with stuff about the ban so I can't find what I'm looking for.
One concern is a general one that the Chinese government is directing the recommendation algorithms to act as propaganda. So subtly shifting user's opinions in favor of things that suit it and away from things that don't.
Another is that it is using TikTok to surveil journalists, emigres, and other persons of interest who are using TikTok. My understanding is there are credible reports of journalists being targeted by the Chinese government, where they used TikTok to find their personal details, location, etc.
There's also been increasing reports of the Chinese government operating detention centers in the US and other countries, where they bring kidnapped Chinese nationals. Basically arresting nationals on foreign soil. In some of these cases at least TikTok has been implicated as the method of locating them etc.
Discussion of this has all been out there over the years, but the way it's been covered has admittedly been weird. Maybe this is yet another sign of a fractured media landscape, but I think some of it has to do with the US not doing a great job of publicizing some things, possibly because it involves intelligence services.
I'm generally very in favor of unfettered freedom of speech, but have mixed feelings about this case. I guess I still side on that, and am skeptical about a ban, but this is getting into different territory and also don't feel strongly about it. I think the effects of foreign (and domestic) propaganda in social networks are very real, and although I generally think censorship is a very bad idea, I'm not sure I can blame a country for wanting an app banned if there's solid information that another country is using it in this way; it seems to be in this gray area of espionage versus free speech which is kind of an unusual territory to be in. Also, I'm fully aware that the US probably does similar things, but two wrongs don't really make a right to me, and if China produced solid evidence of the US doing something similar I wouldn't blame them for banning something either on similar grounds.
To me this all just maybe speaks to the need for a shift to open decentralized social network platforms. I realize that's easier said than done, but there's so many examples in the last few years of problems with control of centralized platforms (by private, government, or private-government combinations) leading to huge problems, either in reality or in appearance (which can sometimes be almost as equally concerning).
So literally all the same things the US does, but because China's doing it, now it's wrong. Got it.
I am being glib but I do want it understood that I appreciate the nuance and documentation you put the work into to show. It's just that, literally every one of these I already know about the United States doing so the outrage on it's part feels incredibly, hilariously hypocritical.
If you identify, contemplate, and sometimes activate an attack vector against rivals, how could you possibly be dumb enough to leave yourself exposed to the same attack?
Also, note that China has blocked this attack vector from the US.
So how colossally dumb would it be for the US to not reciprocally block this attack vector from China?
If these things are truly happening -- especially the alleged arrests on US soil -- then that should be really easy to demonstrate to the American people. That the government hasn't bothered to prove the allegations is telling.
Of course, if the allegations were proven, the people would demand more action than merely banning a video app. Action which would have an huge negative impact the economy and would be unpopular among the powerful. So maybe that's why they haven't bothered?
Oh, you could probably make some effective arguments that they're using it to influence American thought in a way that's designed to diminish the US as a world power through internal strife.
Literally every government has people who go on social media or provide press reports. Only when Israel is involved do you start talking about it like it’s a conspiracy. Please reflect on that for a while.
Meanwhile Iran and Russia have literally been caught manipulating Reddit and TikTok. And you’re literally replying to evidence of the pro-Palestinian crowd doing the same in violation of Wikipedia’s terms of use.
Literally every organized group has people who go on social media. Only when Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims do the same thing as Israel do you consider it biased and wrong. Please reflect on why you think that.
Meanwhile, Israel and the US have literally been caught manipulating Reddit and TikTok. And you’re literally replying to evidence of Israeli hasbara and US willingness to ban sites in support of that hasbara.
"No you" is not really a good argument here. Israel does not have an organized campaign to modify wikipedia, like what the pro-Palestine crowd does. And scale matters: there are 15 million Jews globally, 2 billion Muslims, 1.4 billion Chinese, 90 million Iranians. This is not a level playing field; manpower matters in swaying public opinion. And factually - Israel is an American-aligned democracy and has substantially more freedoms than China, Iran, Russia, and the Muslim world, and is not working to destroy all of those places the way that those places are working to destroy the west and all US influence. It's just "Jews control the media" using the cover word of Israel instead. Obviously untrue - if it were, then social media and wikipedia would be dominated by pro-Israel narratives, rather than the other way around, which is what is actually reality.
Banning a propaganda tool used by China, Russia, and Iran, which is also used to collect our data, is not hasbara. It's just wise behavior to stop your enemies from disrupting your population. Anyway, hasbara means "explanation". Use of this as condemnation is basically somewhere between "foreign word bad" and "Jews bad".
Yes it is a good argument here. Yes they do have state level organizations and intelligence agencies being used to push propaganda and silence criticism across all forms of media.
Yes scale matters, the scale of resources used to push Israeli, US, and western propaganda dwarves that of China, Russia, or Iran. It’s laughable you use total population numbers here, as if every Muslim person is a dedicated jihadist working to bring down the west.
Anyway, not going any further down this pointless hole of arguing whether I hate Jews or not cause I don’t support the mass murder of children.
What about the groups linked in the wikipedia article: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices and the United Nations Special Rapporteur ?
Those seem less biased sources than The Jerusalem Post
The source here isn't the JP, it's wikipedia. Wikipedia investigated and banned the editors. JP is just the reporter. You can find other news sites with the same news, or Wikipedia itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_the_Israeli%E2%8...
Those human rights groups, unfortunately, have a long history of bias and foreign influence. The closer they are to the UN, the more political they are. Literally half of the UN's resolutions pertain to Israel - while 99.999% of war deaths, famine, modern slavery, etc, happen without Israel being involved. The UN was led by a literal Nazi in the 70s - Kurt Waldheim - and the last few UN Secretary Generals have said that there is a serious bias against Israel there (obvious from the obsession).
I wonder what you know about Genocide better than experts in Holocaust studies and other genocides themselves.
William Schabas, author of the 741-page textbook, "Genocide in International Law" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
John Quigley, author of the 300-page book, "The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
@martinshawx, author of the books "What is Genocide?" and "War and Genocide" - says it's a genocide.
@dirkmoses, author of the 600-page book, "The Problems of Genocide" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
Raz Segal, author of "Genocide in the Carpathians" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
Amos Goldberg, author of books on Holocaust, says it's a genocide in Gaza
@bartov_omer, author of several books on Holocaust and genocide, says it's a genocide in Gaza.
But why to listen to the experts in law and genocide studies? Why to bother to read the extensive human rights reports?
Listen to @piersmorgan instead; he has a gut feeling.
Yeah, war is how "I was just following orders" German troops justified killing 12m+ in concentration camps. Goebbels said, "The Jews are responsible for the war. The treatment they receive from us is hardly unjust. They have deserved it all." Don't be like Goebbels.
> the 2 billion Muslims that hate Jews
Yeah, well: I know a handful Muslims who married Jews.
> and all you did was bitch on the internet, I'd be ashamed to know you
Unfortunately, popular opinion - at least of the far left - has always been united against Israel. In fact, many of those authors called it a genocide before this war. You can find plenty of such accusations on Twitter from prior to 10/10, when Israel started responding to the attack. You have many groups blaming Israel for all sorts of absurd things - like the fires in California. I wish I was joking. If not for Israel and the Jews, we'd have world peace - at least that's what you'd think if you listened to these groups.
It is an extension of populist antisemitism. I encourage you to think about this on your own: why is Israel condemned for 45k deaths in a war they didn't start, where half of the killed are militants, where Israel is literally providing aid to their enemy, while the Houthis, responsible for 300k dead in the past decade, including many children via starvation, who have brought back slavery in Yemen, are lauded for attacking western shipping and have fanboys of one of their murderous pirates? Where is the criticism for Muslims planning terror attacks against the west, and against individual Jews globally? Why do leftists love the idea of jihad and intifada, but not a nation defending itself?
Meanwhile, most "genocide" decriers seem to have ignored the tens of thousands of rockets, missiles, and drones launched at Israeli civilians from Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. They ignore the videos of Gazans chearing in the streets and spitting on corpses. The open calls for exterminating the Jews from the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ, Iran, and more. There is one side calling for the extermination of the other and taking actions to make it so - the Muslims trying to destroy Israel and calling for and taking actions to kill Jews globally.
> In fact, many of those authors called it a genocide before this war.
That's because Ralph Lemkin, who coined the term "Genocide" in the wake of the Shoah, identified 10 stages, and mass extinction event is the final stage. He posited that once mass extinction commences it almost impossible to stop without incurring a significant cost to whoever wants to stop it (and so, he implored powers-that-be recognize it before the event & not after): https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages
> If not for Israel and the Jews, we'd have world peace - at least that's what you'd think if you listened to these groups.
I know. And it is totally absurd like you say. Racists (antisemites in this case) will never make any sense. Historians specializing in genocide / Holocaust, on the other hand, are experts in their fields.
> Where is the criticism for Muslims planning terror attacks against the west, and against individual Jews globally?
You are joking? ALL Muslims are vilified by many in almost every Western country and in countries where Muslims are a significant minority (like India). Like antisemitism, anti-Muslim racism is every which where.
> the Muslims trying to destroy Israel
Unsure why you blame ALL 2b Muslims. I mean, you're no different than those antisemites who blame the Jewish people for all of world's problems. As a test, replace "Muslims" with "Jews" in your sentences and see if they read antisemitic to you.
Besides, Pakistan, a Muslim country, has 300+ nuclear warheads and Inter-continental ballistic missiles capability; and if ALL Muslims without exception, like you say, are rabidly hell-bent on destroying Israel, what are the Pakistanis waiting for? Please, snap out of this Islamophobic hysteria.
I mean, I'm not on TikTok at all and Israel is committing a genocide. China didn't tell me that, the Israeli's killing Palestinians en masse told me that. Because that's what the word "genocide" means.
It seems to be if the US Government wants not to be associated with a genocide-committing country they should just... do that. TikTok might have the largest share of the pro-Palestine mood as it were, but like... it's on all the platforms. Because again... they're committing a genocide, and filming it.
I would argue that even though you're not on tiktok, you are being influenced by the narrative that China is pushing. There are numerous genocides happening in the world today. Sudan. China (try talking about THAT one on TikTok...). Why aren't those being treated with equal concern? Because China knows that only the Isreal/Gaza one is a wedge in America, so they push that to sow discord.
> Why aren't those being treated with equal concern?
I mean I can't speak to other people's experience, but as an American, I'm uniquely pissed off with the Israeli one because my tax dollars are paying for it, and because the White House could stop it at a time of their choosing, as they've done before.
What makes this a genocide and not every other war where far more people, including more civilians, died? And at higher ratios of the dead? You can find hundreds of videos of Israel targeting militants, Hamas using schools and hospitals as bases, and more.
Nearly a million died in the Iraq war. In a single battle, Mosul, almost as many were killed as in Gaza, including similar ratios of militants and civilians. In Ukraine, far more have been killed, both combatants and civilians - and Russia clearly targets civilians there, and they started the war (while Hamas started the Gaza war). In Syria, half a million died, mostly civilians. Ditto the Lebanese civil war. Ditto the Yemen-Houthi war.
This feels so obvious to explain that I can't help but feel like it's condescending, but a conflict is not a genocide, irrespective of it's death toll. If you looked up the definition:
> the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Which is just 100% what Israel is attempting to do to Palestine, and they're not exactly being coy about it.
Your assertion is obviously not true. This is why they target militants and post the videos and explanations on the internet. You can find hundreds or thousands of such videos. It’s why they send texts hours before bombing. It’s why they do roof knocks. It’s why they provide safe passage and humanitarian zones. It’s why they drop leaflets. It’s why they still provide electricity, water, and food to Gaza. I read a report about how they asked a Palestinian to alert his neighbors via a phone call and waited for him to tell everyone to get out. These are steps no other nation takes, and it is easy to find experts confirming that. It’s why there are only 45k dead instead of 2 million.
If Israel wanted to maximize casualties, there would not be a Palestinian alive today. What would be their incentive to stop? The far left claims it’s a genocide as it is. What would actually killing them all be, then? Double genocide? You have used the worst term you can to describe something very far from the worst Israel could do.
And then of course, is the obvious contradiction that they just agreed to a ceasefire for their hostages. Just like they did in November 2023. And how they agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon despite all the cries of them trying to seize the land. Israel wants to be left alone to live; the Palestinians (and the other neighboring Arab nations) want to kill all the Israelis and destroy Israel. The rest of the world wants these positions to meet in the middle, so there we are in the middle ground: perpetual war. Go look at the Hamas and Hezbollah founding charters, or the Houthi flag, or everything Iran says.
"You can't be mad at them for killing a lot of Palestinians when they've shown incredible restraint in not killing all of them" is a hell of an argument, I'll give you that. Still genocide though. There's no victim-count aspect to this definition, they are attacking Palestinians, living in Palestine, because they are Palestinian, and they want to settle those areas with Israeli's. We don't need to wait for them to kill a certain percentage of the population to then be able to declare it a genocide.
And, like even if I take this:
> I read a report about how they asked a Palestinian to alert his neighbors via a phone call and waited for him to tell everyone to get out.
at 100% face value, that some militants were in some building and the IDF was about to reduce it to ashes... so they called the guy next door, and asked him to evacuate the building? Which is presumably... full of militants? Cuz that's like the whole thing, that's the whole fuckin point?
You talk a lot about how nothing I say makes sense but that's just nonsensical on it's face, like... if these attacks are genuinely needed, why in the world would you warn people beforehand? Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose?
> the Palestinians (and the other neighboring Arab nations) want to kill all the Israelis and destroy Israel.
I mean they can want that as hard as they want, but Israel has the military and political backing of the West. They're untouchable, as has been demonstrated by them being surrounded by enemies essentially since the state was partitioned off from the others during it's founding, and it's still there.
No, this is not why. They are attacking because Gaza invaded Israel on 10/7, killing over 1200, injuring 5000, and kidnapping over 200. Notice how Arab / Palestinian citizens of Israel are not being killed.
> We don't need to wait for them to kill a certain percentage of the population to then be able to declare it a genocide.
I think this is a fundamental flaw of the genocide conventions. With this interpretation, you could call a single murder a genocide, if done with the intent of destroying a people (in which case, isn’t even murder of an Israeli by Hamas or other organizations whose intent is to destroy a genocide?). Obviously, this is absurd, and nobody is on TikTok raging about Hamas’ attempted genocide of Israel.
> You talk a lot about how nothing I say makes sense but that's just nonsensical on it's face, like... if these attacks are genuinely needed, why in the world would you warn people beforehand? Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose?
Yes, it does. It is in fact this attempt to do less harm that prolongs the war and keeps Hamas alive. To actually destroy Hamas, you would have to kill a lot more civilians. So Israel often settles for destroying weapons caches, tunnels, and structures they operate from.
> With this interpretation, you could call a single murder a genocide, if done with the intent of destroying a people
I mean, if you killed someone who for whatever odd reason played a critical role in the maintenance of a culture, with the stated goal being the extinction of that culture, then yes that's an act of genocide. The fact that the event itself is a bit strange doesn't change what it is.
The systematized way that Canada's residential schools literally beat their native tongue out of the native children they were put in charge of was also an act of genocide. It isn't an error in the interpretation, it's what the word is.
> (in which case, isn’t even murder of an Israeli by Hamas or other organizations whose intent is to destroy a genocide?)
Yes, but they're not the ones aggressing. No one is saying Israel's neighbors are innocent, but Israel is currently, actively engaged in an ethnic cleansing. The fact that those they're cleansing wouldn't do the same back to them given the chance both doesn't make that okay and is irrelevant.
> Yes, it does. It is in fact this attempt to do less harm that prolongs the war and keeps Hamas alive. To actually destroy Hamas, you would have to kill a lot more civilians. So Israel often settles for destroying weapons caches, tunnels, and structures they operate from.
Well then they fucked up about 47,000 times by official numbers.
You do know this war started with a massive assault by Hamas, PIJ, PFLP, and other Palestinian groups, right? They attacked Israel, targeting civilians in a brutal assault, starting this war. If you start a war, you are the aggressor, even if you lose.
Social disruption. That's plainly clear given that Douyin is prevented from having the destructive content that proliferates on TikTok. Keep your competition mired in anti-inellectualism for a generation and it accelerates the rot.
It's taken for granted that the shifty [any] government is up to something because they always are, 100% of the time. Why would you expect the evil overlords to not be up to something with the big evil brainwashing program that has access to almost everyone on earth?
Seriously, given all the crazy shit that's been uncovered in the last 20 years — PRISM, Five Eyes, Cambridge Analytica — why would an influence campaign run over one of the world's biggest social networks controlled by the actual, real life authoritarian Big Brother state be the one scenario that crosses the line from plausible to fantasy for you?
I don't necessarily buy the argument that we should play the same game as a communist dictatorship in the name of fairness. If we eat our own dogfood then we ought to conclude that suppression of speech in fact marks a critical weakness of their system. Why not take the free real estate, then, and leave our system's open nature unmolested?
This guy gets it. They don't care about anyone's privacy, save their own. This is yet more coddling of American industry, bought and paid for by generous political donations to keep the scaaaary Chinese apps from stealing honest, hard working red-blooded American's data... so that American apps can steal honest, hard working, red-blooded American's data.
According to the people gunning for it seems to be mostly about controlling what content Americans can see in order to keep public opinions in line with foreign policy goals. (i.e. pro Israel)
>While data security issues are paramount, less often discussed is TikTok’s power to radically distort the world-picture that America’s young people encounter. Israel’s unfolding war with Hamas is a crucial test case. According to one poll, 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe that Hamas’s murder of civilians was justified—a statistic notably different from other age cohorts. Analysts have attributed this disparity to the ubiquity of anti-Israel content on TikTok, where most young internet users get their information about the world
I think there's an important distinction between "keeping public opinions [pro Israel]," as you claim, and discouraging the dissemination of content that radicalizes (for lack of a better word) viewers enough to justify and support the murder of innocent civilians by a terrorist organization, as the Senator claims.
It's far more complex than that. TikTok is a Chinese company with immense reach and influence that can shape American public discourse. A global superpower cannot allow another global superpower to influence its population so significantly through social media (which is also why Facebook is banned in China).
I hope this doesn’t sound overly cynical or conspiratorial. My sense is that there’s panic about unfettered access to what’s happening in Gaza on TikTok, which is shaping Gen Z’s perceptions in a way that isn’t deemed acceptable by the political establishment. US-based companies seem to have processes in place - direct or indirect - to suppress the reach of such content.
Same reason they passed the nonprofit killing bill bipartisanly, for whatever reason this seems to be a huge deal for the people in government right now.
This is overly conspiratorial, because the timeline doesn't line up. Gaza has only been in the news since October 7th 2023.
The government first started talking about banning TikTok in 2018 (under Trump). Ordered them to divest of US interests and prohibited transactions with them in 2020 (under Trump). The latter of which was overturned by the courts.
The current administration took over in 2021, and in 2021 labelled the PRC as a foreign adversary. Discussed the threat to the US through the PRCs control of software applications and teh vasts swaths of information available from their users, directed agencies to find risk mitigation measures, and started a long process of negotiating with TikTok over how exactly it continued to operate.
The act ordering divestment is the inevitable consequence of those talks failing... those talks failed sometime late 2022 or early 2023 (the last proposal under them was in August 2022).
The sudden resurgence of the years-dormant campaign to ban TikTok, and its rapid legislative success this time around, were directly because of Israel and Gaza. From the mouths of senators: "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down (potentially) TikTok...if you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I know that's of real interest..." (https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587)
Jacob Helberg, a member of a congressional research and advisory panel called the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, has been working on building a bipartisan, bicoastal alliance of China hawks, united in part by their desire to ban TikTok. Over the past year, he says, he has met with more than 100 members of Congress, and brought up TikTok with all of them.
[...]
It was slow going until Oct. 7. The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok, Helberg said. People who historically hadn’t taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw as an increase in antisemitic content posted to the app.
Perfect analogy. Keep in mind that most US lawmakers still think the internet is a series of tubes - and we don't want OUR tubes dirties by some pinko commie tubes! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!
It might be pretty simple, if it's just a protest banner and an information website as Reuters said. You can't see TikTok's issue tracker but you can read the Wikimedia Foundation's tasks to implement the Wikipedia campaigns about SOPA and the 2019 EU copyright directive.
Why doesn’t China simply open up for domestic competition? What are they afraid of? It’s a serious question. Are they that much afraid of their consumers switching to Western products? I frankly think it’s overblown. Chinese people will simply stick with homegrown products at this point. It’s way too entrenched for anyone to enter their market and succeed. I think they have made enough progress to open up their markets and they have so much to lose by growing anti-sino sentiments abroad all because they didn’t want US tech monopolies to compete in their home turf. Maybe 10 years ago it made sense but Chinese tech companies can compete on merits at this point. They have the ecosystem to compete without govt protection.
Typical pathetic response from a silly political activist. There are tons of american companies operating in china. I listed few of the biggest. Google used to operate in china. But when china tighten their laws, google chose not to follow them and left. Probably because google, like facebook, are state sponsored propaganda outfits. Unlike tiktok...
> Would you have been more satisfied if the US government forced a backdoor to TikTok? That's why Google pulled out of China.
What a dope. Imagine being dumb enough to believe google pulled out to protect chinese people's privacy.
Google pulled out because the chinese government wanted to monitor it to make sure google wasn't acting as a state actor pushing propaganda to destabilize nations. Turns out the chinese were right and google was indeed a state actor. Their dirty little fingers were all over the color revolutions.
> One country (China) was trying to force foreign companies to spy / psyop.
But that's google's business model. Do you have two brain cells to rub together? Why would the chinese force google to do what it already was doing in china and everywhere in the world? And still does today?
> One country (US) is making sure a foreign adversary doesn't use it to spy / psyop.
That's what china was doing. Dummy. Literally, china created laws to stop google/facebook/etc from running psyops in china and that's why they chose to leave china.
You must be one of the morons that actually swallowed google's motto "Don't be evil" hook line and sinker.
How stupid do you have to be to think google left china because the chinese government forced them to spy on the chinese. When spying is google's bread and butter.
Yes, because it would at least show a modicum of honesty. Instead it's being done indirectly through putting a company in the hands of state-sanctioned owners. What difference does it make other than theater?
You're assuming it's about economics, but it has almost nothing to do with that. Foreign companies like Ford and GM can and do sell in China.
The reason China restricts foreign internet companies specifically, is because the government lacks control over what information is shared on such apps. China is a dictatorship where free speech is considered dangerous.
They did, largely what China did is make any companies that want to do business in China partner with a local company. From there what happened in many cases is the foreign company had their IP stolen and then shut out of the market.
China doesn't want western companies operating in China, they want western IP owned by Chinese companies operating there. That's why so many companies have pulled out of that market.
Definitely not the consumption of foreign products.
The PRC remains a totalitarian government which built itself on an environment where they exert total control over public communication. There are long lists of topics that you simply cannot cover, analyze, talk about or even discuss privately via internet media in China. There's no way to do that if those discussions happen on Snapchat via a data center in Oregon.
Does the CCP need to do that? It's a reasonable question with answers more complicated than I'll be able to offer. But for sure they want (desperately) to do it. Thus, no foreign media in China.
Facebook was allowed until 2009, it was blocked because it was allegedly used by ETIM to organise the 2009 Urumqi riots, and facebook refused to cooperate with the Chinese police.
I dream of the day we give ourselves a decentralized protocol that, while providing an opt-in way of following current events, offers us an extreme breadth of content without being a hypercapitalistic, attention-grabbing nightmare that tries to get us to compulsively consume absolute junk constantly, at the cost of everything else. In the meantime, looks like Sunday is gonna be a fun day.
It doesn't. I'm talking about true decentralization (peer to peer), not federation (the worst of both worlds). It should also be uncensorable and come with some implementation that does away entirely with the idea of "social media" or "microblogging". Just a better version of what the web 1.0 was.
true decentralization means it will be rife with bad actors taking over the network in decentralized methods. it won't work and will be ultimately result for illegal activities.
decentralization != morally beneficial for the masses.
The Trump attempt to force TikTok to sell or get out failed.
Stopped by the courts in 2020 ¹
Then everyone was fine with TikTok more or less.
A few departments, if not all banned it, have given warnings about it.
Then when Gaza blew up, TikTok was not quick enough to ban all
pro Palestine content and that is when congress again decided
that it was time to take on TikTok ²
I downloaded Rednote and was already blown away by just the app quality. So much better than X. I'd never used TikTok but I really hate the idea of our government censoring what I can and cannot see. Rednote has a bunch of great content on it too. Thanks for the Streisand rec US gov!
I've never felt inclined to use TikTok. I've always kept my online presence psuedo-anonymous, all the way back to AOL days. I don't use Meta products at all.
The day TikTok is banned I will create an account and post a video showing my face, in which I will state my name and address.
I'm rooting for a Twitter ban in Europe. Musk has shown willingness to temper with elections in at least two European countries, and the ban would also leave a message for Zuck.
Countries like China, where TikTok is from, already ban US social media.
The other countries you’re presumably thinking of are our allies and typically our propaganda aligns with their (governments’) interests. China’s interests do not.
I don't care about tiktok. But if this is the reality we are stuck in right now. I really hope the EU is banning all the privacy melting Meta apps soon.
Once again, digital drug addicts getting their supply cut off and running to the next hit.
Neither this TikTok "ban" or the new app "Rednote" are going to last in the long term. They will run back to TikTok again.
Would have been better to fine TikTok in the billions just like we already have done for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and all the other social networks.
It's honestly wild how many people in these comments are defending some vague, unsubstantiated, paper thin national security scare vs recognizing this as a clear suppression of free speech and active stoking of xenophobia.
I would genuinely rather drop ship the CCP my SSN/banking info than trust the US government to do something in favor of it's own people when there's lobbying money involved. Why are so many of you pro-government and anti competition only when it comes to tiktok specifically? It's completely the opposite on nearly every other topic from what I've seen.
The most disheartening part of this ban is that it’s just about the only thing the government can agree on. IMO Mitt Romney slipped the truth in saying:
“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
TikTok is the first and just about the only place I’ve seen content about corporate greed, the accelerating disappearance of the middle class and the real downstream effects of US foreign policy that hasn’t been whitewashed.
The ball is in China’s court now, if they can provide a space where this class consciousness can continue to grow they’ll easily get equal/better (though I think magnitudes greater) returns than Russia’s recent social campaigns.
This is like saying that people who are against civilian casualties in the wars in iraq and Afghanistan are all pro 9/11 and love al-qaeda. How does the boot taste?
What's the implication?
That we as a society and/or government have a more just consciousness?
There are certainly are issues in China but are these "popular headline" talking points worse than the suffering we have here? And that's even after assuming they are factual.
We sell prison labor for pennies. We allow individuals to create epidemics and slap them on the wrist. We allow the future of our next generations to be squandered for today's profits. We allow our government to be just as captive to the desires of private parties in a way that's effectually reduced elections to a non-choice.
I don't think anyone with a conscious can say we're any better and that's without taking into account our worst contributions of genocides/wars/instability to the global community.
But in the end w/e, you have your freedom tinted glasses on (it must be nice) and the average american is screwed on our current trajectory.
Let me genuinely ask you something because you seem to be all over this thread with a strong different opinion, and I'm not so arrogant as to believe it's impossible that I'm wrong.
Do you really think, in real world terms, that China could not accomplish the types of infiltrations / surveillance it would deem strategically important without tiktok? Considering that they already compromise government systems on a regular basis (which I can provide links for if you're curious)
Do you genuinely think that corruption / lobbying has nothing to do with this ban? What is your primary concern that makes you in favor of this?
Do you look at things like facebook and instagram and either not see the blatant propaganda on there or not see a problem with it?
I'm just wondering if we are disagreeing on the facts or if we have fundamentally incompatable values, I want to understand.
Nice pivot. Don't want to talk about the Uyghur camps eh?
Respond to the prison labor vs concentration camps point, since you brought up prison labor in attempts to compare convicted criminals to an ethnic group being forced into labor.
I don't have a point, that wasn't me talking about it. The Uyghur camps are horrible, horrible things, and legalized slavery in the US is also horrible. I don't think they are equal at all but tbh I just don't know enough about the Uyghur situation to have an educated opinion on it generally or specifically in regards to the tiktok situation.
Although I do think there's some degree of equivalence specifically in regard to a specific ethnic group being forced into labor since you mentioned it, but I don't want to go on a tangent because that's not what I brought up and not what I was talking about.
if you trust the CCP (which to be clear refers to the government of China, not the actual people who live there, just like any country) to be more respectful and magnanimous to its citizens and human rights overall than the US, you might want to do some research on that (and not on Tiktok)
Oh stop, it has nothing to do with xenophobia, the CCP has a terrible spying and human rights track record (organ harvesting, concentration camps, child labor, etc.).
Nothing to do with the Chinese people as a whole, and everything to do about their overlords.
Before you do some whataboutism, yes the US spies, even on it's own citizens. That is a separate issue we should make sure doesn't happen.
Two things can be bad and is not an excuse for more spying or letting foreign adversaries broadcast psyops.
What psyops are you talking about? Is it a bunch of US citizens talking about how they don't like the US bankrolling a genocide? Why is it more important to protect tiktok users from a threat no one can actually point to versus preserving a place a lot of people feel like is very important to their day to day lives? Why are these lawmakers prioritizing this over actual threats like school shootings? Honestly the general opinion is that this is extremely obviously not about national security for anybody I've talked to about this and I can't possibly disagree.
Do you have an actual counter-argument to this or do you just like pointing out that you don't think Palestinians have a right to live? Just because we disagree doesn't mean that I'm only against human rights violations and war crimes because China said they were bad. Is that how you live your life? Being a good little boy or girl and doing what uncle sam tells you to? If no, why do you assume other people aren't capable of thinking for themselves?
You are arguing that my only reason for being against a genocide is either that I've been brainwashed or paid for. Get better at having basic human empathy. Israel is extremely relevant in this thread as pro-Palestinian sentiment is arguably the reason it's being banned.
You proved my point. You claim to be a free thinker and then try to dismiss what I'm saying by claiming I'm paid for without any substance.
First, folks on this site don't know what real propaganda looks like. Based on growing up in Texas, as far as I can tell you'd have to publish and mandate textbooks to make a meaningful impact on peoples' belief systems. I have seen it happen, and I've had the experience of often leaning that things I had thought were true (or some underlying assumption) was in fact false, and then been able to trace that to my early education. So propaganda feels likely, but it also doesn't seem like some easy magic that can happen at the behest of some autocrat somewhere.
Unfortunately the folks here don't really have much perspective to judge the ways in which their own assumptions about the world are shaped by the rhetoric of the systems that raised them.
Second, many people likely generally haven't had many positive and genuine experiences on social media, or at least not on contemporary short-form video social media. Having been on the net since usenet days, I believe that it's possible to learn how to have those kinds of experiences, just as it's possible to engage with trolls and have a bad day or whatever. I don't consider HN to be fundamentally different than other social media sites, but I also understand that is a marginal view.
However, since folks here have generally never used something like Tiktok in a way that has had a positive impact in their life, the folks using it look like they are addicted doom scrollers instead of people highly engaged in conversations with their community.
I've personally gotten a lot out of Tiktok- the quality of the discussions there is much higher and more diverse than HN. I've also interacted with a lot of folks there in ways that make me fairly certain that I am dealing with actual humans and not, like, a PRC Botnet or something.
It's tough for me to disregard my own experience:
TT doesn't feel any more propaganda-laden than any other media stream, and certainly not in ways that are driven more by the PRC than by the content creators themselves
Further, I feel a little fury at folks who are happy engaging in whatever crappy media they like: mass sports, bad sitcoms, poorly written TV news, etc and feeling like the hour they might spend with that is somehow better than the half hour I might spend listening to some lakota guy talk about some nuance of tribal politics, and then have the gall to tell me that I'm addicted.
However, at the same time those folks apparently have a lot of power- they can happily elect folks who will hake it harder for me to hear some conversations that I found useful. So I suppose it's important to understand that these sociopaths view me as just another addicted, over-propagandized NPC.
I can see what you mean about a lack of positive experiences on social media, I think tiktok is the first one I see genuinely having a positive impact on myself and others. It's so frustrating seeing all these people who have clearly never been on there talk about it like it's the CCP selling us heroin.
I say this as someone who was in high school as the first wave of social media sites (early Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.) came up:
Just get rid of all of them. They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.
Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones. If you have to combine your online interactions with people with the interactions you have with them in real life, you're better off, and that doesn't happen when social networks span the globe.
First, people say things like they can't not use Facebook because it has marketplace, etc. shows there has clearly been an issue of not enforcing any kind of anti-trust laws for the past 20 years since US v Microsoft in the browser wars days.
The FTC over the past four years has taken a turn here and is starting to do that work again, it's slow but it needs to continue.
Second, these companies behave as publishers without any of the responsibilities/liability. This has to stop. If you publish just a chronological feed that's one thing. But when you algorithmically decide what people see when, and now introduce your own AI bots into the mix, you're 100% a publisher and need to be legally responsible for it. That legislation needs to be updated to reflect this.
Third, much of the root issues stem from advertising. These companies are driven to get and keep as much of your attention as possible simply so they can sell that attention to advertisers. If we all paid for it, the design of these services would be different. I'm not sure how to tackle that but it seems a start is privacy legislation to prohibit user tracking and sale or sharing of personal data.
> First, people say things like they can't not use Facebook because it has marketplace, etc. shows there has clearly been an issue of not enforcing any kind of anti-trust laws for the past 20 years since US v Microsoft in the browser wars days.
Or just address the core element of advertising that creates the perverse incentive — the ability for an auction to determine what you see. Paying to be a part of a digital phonebook is fine. Recommending things is fine. But skewing your recommender against the highest bidder maybe not.
I deleted my Facebook in 2016, and when I tried to create a new one they banned me as "inauthentic". I've seen people complain about the site demanding a government ID scan, but I'd have been willing to prove I am who I am if given the chance.
Now I can't delete my Instagram, which I was using FB SSO for. They ocassionally send me marketing emails that I might want to engage with so and so's content.
How, when you nuked my goddamn account for no reason?
Anyways, if I had the money I'd short them -- they seem to be completely unconcerned with the few who'd consider giving them a second chance.
As for Tik Tok, as with Telegram having it's servers in Russia, I think the real issue is the data is in control of the PRC, rather than whinings about "fake news" -- people have consumed supermarket check out drivel like the Weekly World News for years, it's just moved online.
Is this a common issue? I deleted mine around the same time. I recently moved to a small town where many of the restaurants and businesses use Facebook which kind of forced me back on. When I tried creating a new one the same thing happened, and there was no way of reversing this decision.
> Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones.
Herein lies the rub. How do you decide what the threshold is? Who gets to decide what that threshold is, and how do you do it without inviting accusations of regulatory capture?
If you make it blanket all social networks, then things like discord and even public slack orgs will inadvertently become collateral damage. If you make it focussed on only a few large ones, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, then something else will pop up to take it's place. It'll become a game of whack-a-mole. Users are supposedly already migrating in droves to some other TikTok clone.
I'm not really sure what the solution is though. Regulate the shit out of it to the extent where it becomes a government-provided utility or something?
The reality is people want social media because they are addicted to it. Getting rid of social media will be like the war on drugs: completely ineffective. The danger here is that the drug is very easy to create, impossible to control and extremely lucrative.
My passing thought is to prohibit advertising and user data monetization and it might solve itself.
We also have regulations on usage, like truck drivers can only drive X hours a day, force some type of consumption limit the networks are required to enforce. We have similar laws regarding where, when, and how people can consume things like alcohol so could also do something like that. Some amount of it is ok, but as you say we’ve now learned it’s so addictive we need to force people into moderation of their consumption.
Honestly this is probably the most realistic solution. The only reason all the shit ragebait addictive content is so bad is because it drives ad revenue.
I do think there's one exception/problem: youtube. While there's a lot of pregnant spiderman-elsa crap on it, there's also tons of historical, educational, investigative journalism, etc etc etc content there that strikes me as distinctly more valuable than literally anything that's ever existed on facebook, tiktok or even twitter.
And in addition to the backlog, there's an economics problem. Having good, free, easy, available video hosting is a huge good. It's also ridiculously expensive (videos are big, and you have to render multiple qualities of them, and store them forever) and a hard engineering (network and software) problem (what tiny % of video upload constitutes 90% of the actual network traffic? but you also have to brace for videos from nobodies going viral and needing to be served to the entire globe).
So how do you fund something like this? Normally I'd say, well, damn, this sounds like a utility. But given the political climate we're going into for the next 4 years, and the fact that even healthcare is privatized (well, the part of it that can generate a profit... unprofitable customers are of course pushed to the taxpayer)...
I think we'd have to carefully define what a 'social network' is. In my opinion, YT is not a social network. The UGC parts of Amazon.com, like reviews, do not make it a social network either. YT is a broadcast / streaming service with some small layer of UGC (I say small because, honestly, if the entire comment section was eliminated I don't think anyone would miss it, it's meme worthy bad in most cases.)
Or maybe it's just me and don't use it that way and others do? I subscribe to some things, watch a lot of videos mostly has a lurker and almost never even dip into the comments. I have exactly 0 connections with people I know on YT. It's more of a modern television channel than anything in my case.
There is a lot of variation in community and comment quality on YouTube. Similar to Reddit there is a massive long tail of smaller communities and topics which absolutely have vibrant and real, helpful comments. And on the biggest channels and videos there is a lot of bullshit and low quality comments. Both are true at the same time so it would be a shame to stamp out the genuine communities and connections
if the problem is advertising and data monetization, why am I so addicted to /this/ website?
I have had a much harder time quitting Hacker News than I ever did quitting Facebook. I've been off Facebook for ten years yet I keep logging in to leave stupid comments here.
Is that because of advertising and data monetization?
Ads/monetization isn't necessarily the problem, but it enables Facebook to exist at the scale it does. If we're trying to reduce their scale or limit the size of the social network, it seems silly to fracture the entire market by breaking them up. You can simply cut off their revenues.
And no, I don't think HN addiction is anything like FB addiction. This site is heavily moderated in comparison and the content is higher quality. It's a 'news' site with some respectable commentary that is so rare people like us keep coming back. There's a level of decency that's expected and required here. I could go on, lack of photos, videos, etc. The content is community driven via ranking versus an algorithm optimized for financial outcomes.... I also don't actually know any of you people so how is that a social network, it's a community forum at best. The almost absence of political stuff on HN helps a fair amount.
Addiction itself isn't super bad. Addiction to harmful things is what's bad. I don't even know if I'm addicted to HN, sometimes I go weeks without coming here - but have mostly been here daily for many years. I enjoy it, it enriches my life, I feel it's a positive habit. Just because you take your dog for a walk every day, are you addicted to it? You could just let him out in the back yard? You do it because it's a healthy habit, for them and you.
I do not see the correlation either, other than people buying stuff because an ad popped up, but that is not their primary reason for being on Facebook.
> Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.
Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if nothing is flagged? What should be flagged?
It raises the cost of the service therefore the need of user data monetization, I feel like this would backfire. I’d limit the revenue via bans on ads and data monetization.
I was interpreting the poster as saying "you, yourself, the reader will be better off cutting this out of your life" in which case your questions are irrelevant.
Of course, it is possible they meant to come up with a holistic plan for improving society in three short sentences, as your reply assumes.
Which would, I suppose, indirectly make the case that social interactions online tend to be pointless and a little silly.
In the US, at least, a government-run social media site would be impossible to moderate, because of the First Amendment. It becomes a Nazi bar immediately.
FB Marketplace is definitely the best way to buy and sell anything locally. Of course you will have to filter through the usual flakers and what not but that was always the case since craigslist days.
you can easily block those with extensions. that's what I do. I just use if for some local interest groups, marketplace, and messenger for some family/friends.
>FB Marketplace is definitely the best way to buy and sell anything locally
I really wish they had some kind of auction component to deal with multiple interested parties / reduce flakers, but I imagine eBay has some crappy software patent that they wield with an iron fist.
> I really wish they had some kind of auction component to deal with multiple interested parties / reduce flakers, but I imagine eBay has some crappy software patent that they wield with an iron fist.
Facebook Ads has auctions for selling ad slots. They have the technology, they just reserve it for their real customers.
I have sold plenty things on there and none of them were stolen. I buy broken vintage electronics (60s, 70s, 80s) for cheap and resale them after I fix them. It's not a lot of money but it's a way to pass the time on a boring evening.
I remember so fondly coming home from high school and reading over my friends posts, curating the pins on my pin/cork board, messaging friends who would otherwise not be savvy enough to join MSN or IRC or yahoo messenger...
Now I feel physical disgust when I look at the FB logo
The real issue with Facebook is the inability to tune easily. One of the reasons I use Instagram and Threads is because I feel I can easily tune the algorithm with likes. I can keep up with my friends via stories. I dont need to post on my "wall" stupid stuff like the beer im drinking. Instagram + Stories feels like the best medium to see what my friends are upto with short stories and images. The explore feed can be tuned so I get content and threads fills the void on X and its terrible algorithms. I agree, "deleting" facebook or simple just leave it on deprecated mode and never use it besides market place is the best thing you can do. I dont give a crap what person's political view is and dont need to see a news feed based on triggers.
I'm in favor of letting people pay for their own smaller instances, like something Facebook esque, and you can invite all your relatives. They can join your instance. But someone (or maybe its a group effort) has to pay for it. Zero ads, just friends and family.
I've thought about this a lot.
I don't think I'll ever build it (I have another idea in the works consuming all my time), but I'll go a step further and share my other thought on it:
The less they use it, the less they should pay for using it. So if your goal is to keep up with relatives via sharing photos / videos, you can do that, and bug right out. So now there's a financial incentive to use it less, but it serves its purpose, like email.
Smaller instance can become big. Say you set up a small instance and invite your family. Then family members want to invite their family, or friends, or whomever. How do you manage that?
I think the answer is what we see with Mastodon, etc. and that's federated/distributed social networks.
A restaurant can become big. Say you have a food critic showcase your restaurant and hundreds of people show up. How could we possibly deal with this problem without the aid of the smartest, most amazing, totally really smart, awesome at leet code, software engineers?
Yeah that and LiveJournal. And then it just kept going down from there in terms of self-expression, effort, quality, personal, actually-SOCIAL-media, etc.
"Social media" went from blogging and commenting with your friends and others to watching videos of ads interspersed with random memes and shit.
The problem is not the social network in itself, but the fact that companies are manipulating what you see to maximize the bad aspects of the network. Companies should have strict limits on the kind of algorithms they use to generate a feed.
Recently I’ve been imaging a world where social media algorithms were tuned to help people instead of “driving engagement” with ever more outrage bait. Oh you’re watching clips about machining and by your data profile you’re an uneducated adult? Here are some trade school, financial assistance, and self help links to nudge you toward a better life! What a world that would be.
basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s of known people. I thought about this recently… It was really better times.
Even decentralized mastodon is too big and it makes it far too easy to post BS and hateful / unhealthy stuff. Plus there are far too many posts you can’t relate to or just don’t want to read („algorithm“ or not), without even mentioning the bubble effect, much worse there than on X to be honest.
Smaller communities which you can connect to /disconnect from plus a good combo of RSS feeds to get news. That’s probably it.
There's a strong part of me that thinks that a model not unlike BBSes with Fidonet might be the way to go. Everyone gets to have their own little bastion of the 'net that they control, filled with their own content (games, warez, text files, the good ol' shit) and global email/forums/chat provided in a decentralized way. When people are arseholes, you cut them off by blocking them from your server, and we all move on.
I keep toying with building a modern version of that using some of the existing fediverse infrastructure, but I just don't have the time or attention span for it. Partially because my attention span was fried by Instagram.
I did, and it truly was better. Threaded forums are far better at facilitating complex discussions, organizing information, and making the information accessible. Today, most communication is happening inside the walled gardens of Facebook, Discord, etc. That information is effectively being lost rather than being neatly organized and easily searchable.
IRC, simple php forums, no TLS, easy stuff. Nowadays we're full of technology and very poor content. In no way can mastodon (mentioning because it's the defacto decentralized social media) solve that problem. It's really easy to post stuff that shouldn't be posted.
On the other hand, crappy looking forums, slow internet connection, you really had to take the time to think about what to say and mainly why say it in the first place. It was more about the content than about quantity.
You can not because the money invested into this is to large. Same with AI - half of which is used to build a personal cheerleader/ hype-train for everyone using those apps now.
If you want to end that, you need to actively sabotage it, by creating fake users who eat resources for not add-revenue. Feeding crack to children has to become economically unviable for the world to change.
This is the level 0 of reasoning about these topics...
We live in organised societies, nobody is forcing you to do crack but people doing crack will definitely lower the experience of everyone they interact with (and more given the burden on shared goods like healthcare, infrastructures, &c.), that's why we collectively decided that crack shouldn't be sold to 13 years old kids.
Now of course this is very flawed and we'll always have things slipping through the cracks (alcohol, tobacco, junk food, &c.), but unless you want to live in a mad max type of world you have to accept some level of regulation, and that level of regulation, in a working society, should be determined through politics
If tiktok is crack, HN is honey. One becomes problematic much quicker than the other, when you see a kid spending 5 hours a day on HN hit me up
Cool, you can use the argument I was replying to for everything too. I guess we're back to square one then.
If you think skiing and cooking have as much of a negative impact as social media as on entire generation of kids I doubt we'll find common ground to go further, usually it requires a bit of good faith
>This is not an actual argument because you can make it about anything.
>Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.
>Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.
This assumes that fairly standard activities are imposing the societal cost you are attributing to them. For most individuals who perform these activities, they are not producing an outsized societal cost, which is the delineation the parent comment was making. The parent comment used an example of something that from their point of view has a negative societal cost in the base case. Your examples are not similar as they are not referring to the base case of simply performing the activities, but only to the relatively uncommon tail end outcomes.
The impact stated is wildly outsized. I read a microsoft report regarding this that was heavily touted and one of the "prime" examples given was a 1M view Twitter video.
Yeah sure, Socrates was worried about books too... now if you can't see the difference between rock music and kids spending 5+ hours a day doomscrolling I think we'll have a hard time discussing anything. Feel free to share the studies showing the negative effects of books and rock music on kids by the way, because there are plenty of these when it comes to social media, especially the doomscrolling type.
Following your logic everything new has to be desirable, that's a tough position to defend imho. Just because new trends were incorrectly criticised in the past doesn't mean every new trend is good until the heat death of the universe, logic 101
Almost any form of media can be addicting. Kids these days might watch TikTok, but my worst addiction since young age has been reading online news.
Once I got diagnosed with ADHD and tried stimulant medicine, I noticed that the time I spend reading news, social media and playing games dropped dramatically. So, effectively all these activities have been nothing more than drugs for my dysfunctional brain. When my brain isn't deficient in dopamine, I seem to automatically spend most of my time on something more useful. Probably wouldn't be writing this if my meds weren't wearing off at this time of day.
hacker news has a lot of ideological community problems but HN is not "massively centralized", it's just a narrow window into the US tech scene with a relatively small community of people.
I think there's a great argument that says the first amendment is not a suicide pact. The social media environment right now is having an unprecedented destructive effect on US democracy. I think TikTok is right there as a key player in spreading weapons-grade, state-sponsored mush to younger people.
You know, I think lots of us on HN, can at least be the people who can and should go to next levels of this discussion.
So yes - we should definitely agree that all new technology for publishing (publishing? COntent creation?) result in issues of free speech.
I will say that each of these, have had different issues, and that from Radio onwards, we are dealing with several issues (side effects ?) that become more intense with each new media developed.
I'll jump to the end, but Social media is definitely different from the printing press.
We certainly get new and improved benefits, such as the distribution of publishing power to individuals.
At the same time, we are getting issues with an abundance of content, that people need content to be eye catching, in order to gain an audience.
Theres also a tendency for networks to consolidate over time, so at the start of the radio era, or TV era, you have a bunch of cable networks, then over time they start collapsing into larger groups, which are better able to survive.
Fully admit that these are highly generalized, I am just thinking of what others can chime in with.
I'd argue the two are like comparing apples and oranges. Yes, there is a competition of ideas, but accepted scripture is changed so much more slowly than society itself that it cannot exploit the zeitgeist of any one trend. More importantly, it doesn't change differently to each individual to maximize addictive interaction. The slowness is a feature. I'm not saying there aren't some problems with religion being exploitative, but the responsiveness is what makes social media a much more effective manipulator.
Not entirely inaccurate! Martin Luther's 95 Theses propagated from Germany to England in a matter of weeks, thanks to the printing press. I think society got better but it sure did change a lot.
the government of China is a hostile adversary and they dont just spread gobs of misinformation and pro-CCP propaganda on TikTok, they also heavily censor topics the CCP does not like. This is not about free expression so much as where the public square should take place. Having the US public square take place in a tightly controlled, deceptive environment controlled by our worst enemy presents an existential risk to the US.
think of the printing press as invented and controlled by your worst enemy and only printing what it deems to be acceptable.
It's not free expression when someone else chooses what everyone sees.
Threads is notorious for de-boosting posts with external links. This is a deliberate choice which filters facts and external references out of the conversation.
Or you can just delay the feed of posters you don't like. They arrive at every debate a day late, while your favourites go through immediately. And to more people.
And so on.
There's nothing free about any of this. It's covert behaviour and sentiment modification.
With a newspaper you get an editorial angle, so you can choose it if you want it.
Social media pretends to be a neutral conduit. But it's carefully curated and manipulated, and you don't know how or why.
What matters is not the diversity of the overall userbase but the diversity of what gets shown to you. From my (limited) experience TikTok is hyper-targeted and will narrow in on your interests/biases quickly and keep you in that bubble.
HN (and reddit) generally lacks this hyper-targeting. Obviously, just the act of going to HN is selecting for a certain cross-section of opinions, but once you're there what you see is determined by the community and not by your own personal preferences.
1. There's often little or no visibility on how this personalization happens. People with often try to guess and steer the algorithm but the reality is you don't know. This means that unpopular opinions can be quietly suppressed with no detectable censorship. On the poster/creator side this presents as constant paranoia about "shadow banning" and the like.
2. The personalized feeds are effectively endless. This allows for repetition that really amplifies any biases/fears. For example, suppose you're worried that the roads are getting more dangerous and you go on Instagram and start looking at car crash reels. Instagram will happily feed you as much of these as you can stomach and it starts to affect your perception of reality. Never mind that you're looking at incidents captured over a period of years from all over the world, seeing them all back to back will probably give you anxiety the next time you go to cross the street. Now apply this same logic to any political topic...
You're welcome here, and you're welcome to express contrarian views—that's an important part of an intellectually curious community, which is our goal with HN. However, we need you to do it while sticking to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You've unfortunately been breaking them in various places already.
I know how hard it is to be in the minority on a contentious topic without getting provoked (and then becoming provocative oneself), but that's what we need commenters with minority views to do. Otherwise we end up having to moderate the accounts, not because we want to suppress minority views but because we have to enforce HN's rules.
It's in your interest to do this, because then you maximize the persuasive power of your comments. Conversely, if you succumb to the pressure to be indignant and/or snarky and/or flamey and so on, that ends up discrediting your views, which is particularly damaging if they happen to be true: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
(p.s. I'm an admin here in case that wasn't obvious)
sorry being snarky, hard to help it, my bad, again
and there's misunderstanding, I was not provoked, at least in the comment above
it's not a critique to HN, in fact, isn't it obvious that HN inevitably ends to a echo chamber? unpopular opinions greyed out, popular opinions ranked up, wasn't it design to be this?
it's not that bad, most communities are echo chambers
You are 100% correct but HN mods will pretend this is not the case. This site is heavily moderated just like all major subreddits. Dissenting opinion will be silenced either by gang-flagging or dang taking action personally. HN is reddit in a tie.
We don't ban accounts for expressing contrarian views. We do ban accounts for breaking the site guidelines, especially when they do it repeatedly.
But nobody ever says "I was banned for breaking the site guidelines". What they do instead is make new accounts to claim "I was banned for my contrarian views". How noble that sounds!
The tell is that they never supply links (e.g. to their previous account(s) or the place(s) they were banned). If moderation is so bad, why not allow readers to see what actually happened and make up their own minds? And yet these complaints are always linkless...
Hey dang so you just silently shadow-banned that user? That's what it definitely looks like. Not that I care but they seem to be right about you if you did.
Yes, when there's evidence that an account is someone whom we've banned in the past and that they're making new accounts to post abusively, we (sometimes) shadowban those later accounts. You can find past explanations about that here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
In this case you've been using multiple accounts to post in the same thread in ways that are misleading and abusive. That's clearly over the line, so I'm banning this account (and also saying so). If you would please stop creating accounts to break HN's rules with, that would be good.
I can see you flagged all my comments, even unrelated ones within minutes. You also immediately throttled me. You're vindictive and on a power trip. Your moderation style goes directly against the quote from your bio. You're a hypocrite, man.
"Echo chamber" is a tautology by this point. What's bad about a narrower focus? It's good to cross pollinate on occasion but you're not going to ever get to deep discussions when you have the same arguments over and over with people who share little common ground. I don't come to HN to read what flat earthers think about that gorgeous photo of the Earth's curve taken by an astronaut, and I can have productive disagreements with other technologists.
> I can have productive disagreements with other technologists
Only for tech topics
Things went ugly(but fun!) for political/geopolitical topics, 'unpopular' opinions will be grayed out, opinions survived coalesced into the essence of the Anglo-Saxon spirit
but HN is centralized, so you agree if HN exceeds some arbitrary amount of users it should be banned? how ridiculous. tiktok is not any better or worse than facebook, youtube, or the mainstream media.
That can't happen, the 1st amendment protects us from that sort of overreach with lots of precedence coming before it. What can happen is severe penalties for companies and adults who allow minors to get on social media. That is the sort of regulation that can happen if the USA Congress really wants to do something. They can also regulate foreign propaganda sneaking like with TikTok, there is precedence for it. Also severe penalties and jailtime for threats (terrorism, personal) done online, they should be taken seriously and tracked down and prosecuted as if the threat was made against me if I was standing on a street corner.
The literal terminology we use to refer to them directly correlates with their slide. They were "Social Networks" and were all about the network effect of having a connection to people IRL reflected online. That meant you could also go additional links out. They are now "Social Media" and they are largely just one-to-many platforms for media. They have completely crowded out most of the original benefit of being a social network.
For all complains of the toxicity of the platforms. For now, the contents over there are written by your fellow human (maybe AI in a few years). Just focussing on platform closure for me indicates that we resigned from fixing our fellow folks.
But it's not the "folks" that are the factor, generally. The mechanisms of many major social media platforms actively amplify the worst aspects of the worst people, while suppressing the best parts of the best.
Someone put the microphone too close to the speaker. As the feedback rings our ears someone reaches out for the power switch. Do you call out "but the start of the feedback was the music from the band, turning it off won't fix the band"? :)
Assuming that social media is an evolution of traditional media.
The traditional media loves to chase negative news (If it bleeds, it leads) and we let that happen (muh free speech!). So it is logical that social media amplified the negativity of society, coupled with algorithms evolution and instant broadcasting the impact is amplified.
We have. It's A) too expensive, and B) we can't agree on what "fixed" looks like. "Think of the children" type scare-legislation is going to fill this void.
I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed. There was a time when you'd have a couple dozen friends on Facebook, who were people you actually know in real life, and you'd check Facebook, read you feed in chronological order, and then reach the end. Like with email.
The algorithmic feed, in addition to time spent on social media, has also intensified online discourse in a way that I believe to be harmful to society. What people see now is not the most recent things their friends were posting, no matter how banal, but whatever it is that the algorithm judges most engaging. Truth doesn't matter. Now the conspiracy theories and weird new age shit that your one hippy friend posted constantly have an audience. That kind of thing is engaging, so it floats to the top.
I'd be perfectly fine with just banning social media altogether. Never before in history has the value of a barrier to entry to publishing something been more apparent. But as a compromise, I would accept banning the algorithmic feed.
> I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed.
Bringo.
The day Facebook implemented the feed as the main page rather than the original homepage was the day social media went sideways. It's little more than a Skinner box with a bright candy coating and it has just gotten more egregious over time. It's right on the tin, "Feed".
I'd be interested to see how much R&D budget has gone into hiring persons in the field of psychology to tweak the dopamine treadmill over time.
I remember the day they introduced the chronological newsfeed! People were pissed about that. Nobody wanted a list of all their wall posts to be published to everyone who could see them.
Prior to newsfeed, FB was obviously an N-N platform, but the interactions were more 1-1. You used the network to find and connect, but you interacted with individuals (on their wall). The newsfeed tipped the focus toward 1-N interactions, and direct messages solidified that (no more wall posts).
Treat algorithmic feeds as "publications" by machines. Treat these social media companies as publishers and allow them to be sued for libel, with damage amounts based on reach.
If there's no algorithmic feed and the company is truly just a self publishing utility then keep the section 230 protections
CDA 230 was written specifically to overturn a defamation ruling that held online platforms responsible for content; this was specifically a result of Jordan Belfort - the Wolf of Wall Street - suing to censor negative opinions of his fraudulent investment offerings.
Prior to that lawsuit, the existing law regarding defamation was that you could hold a newspaper accountable for what they had printed, but not the newsstand selling the newspaper. The courts in the Jordan Belfort cases decided to categorize online services based on their moderation policy: if you published literally anything sent to you, you were the newsstand[0]; if you decided not to publish certain things then you were a newspaper.
In case it isn't obvious, this is an unacceptable legal precedent for running any sort of online service. The only services that you could legally run would either be the most free-wheeling; or the most censurious, where everything either has to be pre-checked by a team of lawyers for risk and only a small amount of speech ever gets published, or everything gets published, including spam and bullshit.
To make things worse, there is also standing precedent in Mavrix v. LiveJournal regarding DMCA safe harbor[1] that the use of human curation or moderation strips you of your copyright safe harbor. The only thing DMCA 512 protects is machine-generated feeds (algorithmic or chronological).
So let's be clear: removing CDA 230 safe harbor from a feature of social media you don't like doesn't mean that feature goes away. It means that feature gets more and more censored by the whims of whatever private citizens decide to sue that day. The social media companies are not going to get rid of algorithmic feeds unless you explicitly say "no algorithmic feeds", because those feeds make the product more addictive, which is how they make money.
The "slop trough" design of social media is optimal for profit because of a few factors; notably the fact that social media companies have monopolistic control over the client software people use. Even browser extensions intended to hide unwanted content on Facebook have to endure legal threats, because Facebook does not want you using their service as anything other than a slop trough.
So if you want to kill algorithmic feeds, what you want to do is kill Facebook's control over Facebook. That means you want legal protections for third-party API clients, antitrust scrutiny on all social media platforms, and legally mandated interoperability so that when a social media platform decides to turn into a slop trough, anyone so interested can just jump ship to another platform without losing access to their existing friends.
[0] Ignore the fact that this is not how newsstands work. You can't go to any newsstand, put your zine on it, and demand they sell it or face defamation risk.
Algorithmic feeds are wonderful, but unfortunately their goals as implemented today do not align with anyone's best interest except shareholders.
I don't have tiktok, but I used to watch a lot of YouTube suggestions. I finally took the app off my devices and used a suggestion-blocking browser extension. I could only find stuff that I actively searched for. After a few months, I took a peek at suggestions and it was actually great: pretty much only videos I was legitimately interested in, steering me towards useful tiny channels, etc. I still keep it blocked, but check it once daily just in case.
The problem is that algorithmic feeds want you to just keep watching and will absolutely probe all of your "weaknesses" to keep doing so. Instead of trying to support you, it says "how can we break this guy/girl down so s/he keeps watching...".
Until the feeds say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't serve you another video. You should go outside and enjoy the day", then it should be treated more as a weapon aimed at one's brain by a billion or trillion-dollar corporation than a tool.
> I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed.
More than that too, my recollection is that those early social media sites were considered "separate" from the real world. It'd be seen as odd to take it "seriously" in the early days.
The big change I noticed was when my (our?) cohort started graduating college and started sanitizing their Facebooks and embracing "professionalism" on the then nascent LinkedIn. I distinctly remember being shocked at that, and the implicit possibility that employers would "care" about your Facebook posts.
The US occupies a new office downtown. China wants eyes on a specific room, and the choice spot for monitoring it is someone else's apartment. This person happens to own a bakery also in town, and it sort of seems like the apartment is a reach for them as it is.
Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.
6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".
This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.
Wow, this is a whole new level of China otherization and it leads to many bad things, and you don't have to look beyond the past 100 years to find many examples (even Chinese ones).
Maybe consider that it's being banned because it makes it harder to control the political narrative and discourse in society when people have access to information. I think Chomsky put it best: there are many ways of population control, in the old Soviet Union it used to be the boot. In "democracy" it's controlling information and the Overton Window and TikTok breaks that completely. A great example is the Israel's assault on Palestine. Has this been covered anywhere where you watch news in even remotely the most honest way? Don't think so. Is it on TikTok? I think you know the answer.
I'd also say to single out TikTok and the Chinese while ignoring Meta and Google (why not ban them?) is very questionable if you really care about the scenario you described.
While your scenario might make for an interesting Tom Clancy novel there's no evidence any of that is happening and no one involved in this ban with any authority is arguing that this is something they're worried about.
I agree that their example is absurd, but China has definitely used social media accounts to influence opinions on Hong Kong, Xinjiang etc. American social media companies cooperate with investigations and flagging of this propaganda. On the other hand, TikTok is almost certainly being pressured by the CCP to promote it and obfuscate any investigations.
Russia had Bernie Bros and Magatards brawling with each other at pre-planned rallys across the street from one another. And they didn't even have access to the facebook algo.
Devil's advocate: Can this not also happen on literally any other social network? Can this kind of shit not also be initiated by domestic agents, or agents of allied nations, or even just some bored haxor group with a penchant for chaos?
If what you said is the primary reason for banning TikTok (bad actors can do bad things), it's also a valid reason to ban literally every social network, or possibly even all user-generated content on the internet.
On non CCP controlled platforms, they cannot chose what stories to "organically" promote and who to promote them too. Most people have no concept of the 99% of posts to social media that never get traction.
They can still kind of do it, but it requires a lot of work to fool other companies algo's into artificially promoting what you want. Much easier to just call up Bytedance and say "We need everyone in this area seeing this tiktok tomorrow".
If you think domestic social media companies aren't capable of silently promoting certain content at the request of someone with influence... you wouldn't happen to be in the market for a bridge, would you?
Non CCP controlled platforms can definitely choose what stories to promote. Musk does it every day on twitter. Oligarch controlled social media is just as much a blight as government controlled social media.
To your first paragraph, yes, across the board, and yes to more scenarios than you even laid out here.
To the second, you misunderstand the issue the US government has here. It is not that the social network is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority. It is that it is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority that they are enemies with.
Whether you consider them your enemy, whether they consider you theirs, whether you think that China really is or is not an enemy of the US government, and whether you consider the US government your enemy or not is all irrelevant to the point at hand, as interesting as they may be in other contexts; this is about the beliefs of the US government.
China has similar concerns and has already taken numerous similar steps, and it's equally not any sort of hypocrisy or anything because the principle they operate under is not about the existence of control, but who has the control.
All that is great, except for the part where the algorithms that collect your reactions to content and then choose new content for you in a feedback loop—which as you point out, can produce valuable effects as well as harmful ones—are a black box under some approximation of direct control by the CCP.
I keep seeing this stated as a reason for banning tt but I've yet to see any evidence. During the supreme courts oral argument last week they referred to a sealed appendix with more info, when they were passing the legislation they also referred to secret evidence that Americans can't see. I don't want to give in to conspiratorial thinking but if its as bad as they claim then we as the public have a right to see the evidence and decide for ourselves.
Evidence as to CCP control? Or evidence to another thing?
Because something that is very important to understand about China, or any other totalitarian regime, is that the people in charge don't let something like TikTok happen without having a fairly good grip on the people running it. That's just authoritarianism 101.
Should I feel better or worse about it being the CCP instead of a tiny group of billionaires? From where I'm standing the cabal of tech billionaires appear to be a bigger threat to me as a normal american. Do you think this is naive?
I agree. It's the same class of people that helped China become the world's factory that is now saying what it has always been. These are the same people that is still running America.
> Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people. This sort of confirms what I had feared for a few years now: that Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech.
What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?
In May 2019, the U.S. government placed Huawei on the Entity List, which restricted American companies from doing business with it without a special license. This included Google, which meant Huawei lost access to the licensed version of Android and key Google services, including the Google Play Store.
As a result, Huawei could no longer pre-install Google apps like Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and other essential services that many users in Western markets rely on.
Huawei was once a strong competitor in Europe challenging Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers.
It effectively limited Huawei's competitiveness in Western markets and diminished its momentum when it was at the peak of its challenge to Apple and Samsung.
The same will happen with TikTok in the U.S. Under the umbrella of national security, competition is being sidelined.
Hell, even some of the "restrictions" on free speech that are legitimately on the books in the US aren't actually enforced.
Get a ham radio license and use profanity when you transmit. Seriously. Do it. Odds are, the FCC does nothing. The thing they do when they do catch you is send you a letter saying "please don't do that".
> Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people
1. There's plenty of speech you can't say (fraud, libel), so speech is believe it or not regulated.
2. This isn't about free speech per se, it's about the right of a company to exist. the government has broad leeway to regulate which entities do or don't have the right to have limited liability. if TikTok were a unincorporated business entity and the owners were liable for lawsuit the story would be different.
3. the government forcing a sale is individual free speech maximalist position in this situation, because the users of the platform can still have their free speech. if tiktok doesn't take the deal, then the "loss of free speech" is on them, not the government.
4. America, which is supposed to be a bastion of free commerce, forced the sale of Merck away from germany (there is still a german merck with the same name). this is no different.
Are you sure that the "historical knowledge of many concepts" isn't a CCP slanted version of history? Or whatever suits the CCPs current interests? As a trivial example, do you think you are getting an unbiased view on Tiananmen Square or whether the US should back Taiwan in a war?
they aren't banning it. They gave tiktok an out -- sell to an American company or non adversarial country, if ByteDance doesn't bite on that, then that's on them.
That may be the case for you, but that's by definition anecdotal. I personally have seen the content consumed by a number of kids, and the amount of dubious at best information on the platform is absolutely rampant, and younger kids don't yet have a filter to know the bad from the good. Parental oversight can help, of course, but from my own observations, parents aren't for the most part monitoring what their kids are consuming.
Of course, my take is likewise anecdotal, and you may take it for what you will. That said, boiling the entirety of the American sentiment to fear of a "threat to their core" is disingenuous. Criticism of the effects of the app are as valid as its merits, regardless of what conclusions you draw based on your "fears".
No, it's not, nor did I state that it is. It is, though, making it more difficult for something I find detrimental to the development of kids to proliferate.
You, as an adult receiving that video, have the (hopefully) developed sense of what is accurate information or not, as well as the time to gestate on the content of that video and apply critical thinking. You can delete the video and move on with your life.
Tik Tok sends 15 seconds worth of such information, good or bad, and doubles down on detected interest, leaving little to no time to process before moving on to the next clip which is likely tailored towards the first clip's subject. Couple that with the suggestibility and naivete of children, and you end up with reinforcement of thin, poorly informed opinions based on information that may or may not even be remotely accurate.
The idea of banning all dubious information is a strawman.
You can't yell FIRE in crowded rooms with impunity, you can't say untrue things about people that harm their businesses or put their lives in danger with impunity, etc.
The idea that our politicians should not be allowed to ban something being owned by a foreign company (especially when our companies aren't allowed to operate in said country, especially when we don't exactly have friendly relations with said country) - is, IMO, absurd.
To the post indicating shouting fire is legal - I believe the parent’s intent is to indicate there are consequences to it. From the article —
>> The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise. However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as involuntary manslaughter, assuming the other elements of that crime are made out.
Not necessarily that either. You’ll only possibly receive a charge if your conduct was intentionally misleading with purpose to harm. Yelling “fire” in a theater while in a Gen Z crowd (“this is fire”) or while listening to Metallica (“Fight fire with fire”) isn’t going to get a charge either, even if it possibly causes a stampede. The crime therefore could be accomplished with far more alternative words than just “fire.”
The point is: Legal experts unanimously agree this analogy is terrible and should never be used. The Supreme Court also thought so, completely overturning the case it originated from just several years later.
Whoa there bro didn't you see Zuckeberg's latest podcast, he built facebook to bring people together! He paid good money for that corporate beastie boy makeover too-- show some damn respect.
I think around here people will all agree with you, the problem is that in practice this isn't at any level about cleaning up peoples experience of each other. it's economic protectionism injected with yellow-scare nonsense reminiscent of the 20th century. they're gleefully making the large ones worse while closing down anything which doesn't benefit US oligarchs
I understand your point, but I don't think it works like that for teenagers. Teenagers need to connect. They will go where the others go, because that's exactly what matters to them.
It's not that they deliberately want the addiction. The addiction is a consequence of it, but they go to TikTok because their peers are on TikTok.
They can connect in person. Like they did exclusively up until the mid 00s.
I think peers is also a strange word to use. When I joined Facebook in 2007 you were more-or-less sorted by where you went to high school. You connected with people you knew.
I'm sure that still exists on some level, but social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs. An influencer isn't your peer. It's like considering Billy Mays (may he rest in peace) your peer in 2007. No, he's a dude who sold you Oxy-Clean, but he was on TV a lot.
I was bullied in high school because I was so different.
I was also a new kid so it was hard to join an existing clique in a small town.
Online groups saved me. It not only let me stay in contact with my old friends, but also let me meet new people with similar interest so I didn't feel so alone.
I don't think your story is uncommon especially for people who had trouble fitting in, however I would bet that places like facebook or instagram were not where you found your online groups. More likely to have been forums or online games. Very different environments and consequences.
Connect in person as a teen when everything is designed around cars and stuff a lot more expensive. Where cops arrested for you for loitering. Where people see kids going home from school as 'they're up to no good'. A lot of the past locations are gone and no longer accessible for todays youth. Even fast food places want you gone as fast as possible.
> social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs
That's what it is, but that's not how teenagers perceive it, I think.
I see it like this: if all your friends watch the news everyday and spend a lot of time talking about it, you will end up watching the news as well. To connect.
If all your friends watch a lot of sport and meet for that, you may well end up learning to enjoy sport as well.
If all your friends know the trends on TikTok and talk about it...
I went to a school with over 1,200 students and still had no friends. Kids can be extremely cruel to their neurodivergent peers. I wasn’t able to learn social skills until university .
Things would have been a lot different if I had access to the internet.
Xanga allowed kids to connect and be social that otherwise weren’t able to in high school. But do we want to raise a society of Xanga kids, or do we want to solve the root problems why they couldn’t be social in the first place?
(Or am I asking the same exact question two different ways, a distinction without a difference?)
I found myself being the "weird kid", and I'm glad I had the Internet in general, but I'm also glad the Internet wasn't yet advanced enough to seem like a complete replacement for in-person socialization. I knew I was missing something by playing Runescape instead of talking to people, knowing that drove me to forge in-person connections when I did have the opportunity, and the fact that I had to actively engage with the Internet instead of passively scroll through it gave me at least some baseline for doing that.
And we should not underestimate teenagers: if they have something better to do than swiping on TikTok, they do it. Parents must help them have better things to do.
But still, if all their friends know and talk about the TikTok trends, they will feel disconnected if they have no clue. That's how I meant that they "need" it. They need to "connect" as in having the same references as their friends.
So if theoretically you ban addictive social media platforms and prevent the formation of any platform with more than a million users, then yes, teenagers will go where their peers go, but that will not necessarily be where teenagers on the other side of the country go. It will also not necessarily be a destructive algorithm-oriented social network designed to maximize time spent viewing ads.
My friend group had a phpBB forum back in the day. I spent hours on there because I liked hanging out with that group of friends, not because it was profitable for some megacorp.
I didn't want to imply that those things are the pinnacle of connection.
I rather wanted to say that it's easier said than done. You can't just tell teenagers "stop using social media, it's bad for you". Because if their peers use social media, then they need to use social media as well.
This is a trite (and arguably silly) comment bordering on neo-Luddism. The genie is out of the bottle. There's really no going back.
Worse, it's treating symptoms as the problem. We, as a society, deify hyper-individualism. This is to such an extreme that people actually in completely and utterly selfish ways are glorified and celebrated because "freedom".
Social media happened after we destroyed community and any sense of collectivism. Unhealthy social media habits are a consequence of that. They didn't cause it.
Where once you needed just one job to live, you now need 5. Every aspect of our lives is financialized. We spend 30 years working to the bone to pay for a house that cost 1/10th what it did 30 years ago. The high costs of housing have destroyed all the so-called "third places".
Federating services does nothing to the core problem here. I find HN's obsession with federation, which literally solves zero problems for users and creates a bunch of problems, bizarre and out-of-touch.
This is how you end up with the UK's Online Safety Act. And personally, I'd prefer to have international networks where you can get exposed to different opinions; my life would be in an objectively worse place if I had only had the opinions of the people of my country to go off of.
There's a lot of issues with social media - I don't think anyone denies that. But not everyone thinks like the HN crew. What about the millions of users who actually enjoy FB and use it to connect with friends and family? To pretend that use case doesn't exist seems naive and biased. There's a reason these companies are so big - some people actually like them. Maybe they're the naive ones and we need to save them from themselves, but I don't think it's that black and white.
I want to respect the user here, but also they need to be saved.
The companies are big because they’re advertising machines with intense targeting abilities, which makes for a great place for advertisers to spend money.
Plenty of people enjoy Facebook, and plenty of people enjoy drugs and gambling and all sorts of destructive behaviors that many nations regulate. I think we can recognize that it can be fun and have utility, while still being dangerous or problematic.
If you had to convince people to pay for Facebook as a subscription, would people use it the same way? Would they still find utility there? Would they prefer a competitor?
I have a facebook account from my college days, but I don’t use it and neither does most of my network. My parents, despite being deeply suspicious and tech-savvy have started using it more and more to “connect” with family. In reality, I’ve seen their usage and it’s mostly generic groups and memes and similar stuff. I suspect that most people experience the same reality, and respectfully, I think society can survive without that.
To postulate, I think there are a million “better” ways to connect with friends and family, but I also think that there’s no one App that can do everything for everyone. My extended family bought a dozen smart picture frames, and everyone adds photos to a joint account we all share, and that has replaced a social feed for pics of kids/grandkids. I think people would be better served finding what works for them and letting it be bespoke to their family/friends.
Please stop advocating for censorship and authoritarianism.
This is the USA, we don’t do that here. (Except when we do, as in this terrible case, but it’s not what we are about.)
If you don’t like them, don’t use them. Don’t force other people to share your views and opinions. We like social media and choose every day to continue to use it.
App bans are simply state censorship, nothing more. It’s a real shame we don’t have methods of sideloading to bypass such idiocy on the part of the USG and the chokepoints at Apple and Google.
What content is being censored? Creators are free to post their videos on other platforms.
Also note that the law doesn’t force TikTok to shut down, it requires divestment. The fact that they choose not to divest says a lot about how they view the platform.
The comment they are replying to suggests taking down all the major social media networks by government force ("Just get rid of all of them").
Arguably, even if you are not prohibiting the content itself, if you take away the means for your content to spread far & wide, that's the same as censorship.
> They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.
At least as far as kids are concerned, current evidence does not readily support this common believe.
Sabine Hossenfelder writes: "The idea that social media causes children mental health distress is plausible, but unfortunately it isn’t true. Trouble is, if you read what the press has written about it, you wouldn’t know. Scientists have described it as a “moral panic” that isn’t backed by data, which has been promoted most prominently by one man: Jonathan Haidt."
And correlation is not causation. If you disagree with her interpretation (it's mostly just presentation, really) of the data, feel free to be specific. Attacking the person is, as always, bad form and lame.
Right, but correlation does not equal causation. Kids are also increasingly aware that they live in a neoliberal hellworld, and their chances of maintaining the lifestyles their parents and grandparents had are slim to none.
I’m losing family members to conspiracy theory YouTube channels.
The crackpots had a greater barrier to transmit back in the day. They had to get an FCC license or know someone with a radio station. Even then reach was limited unless you could reach a deal to transmit nationwide.
I personally believe our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff. It’s very hard to overcome.
I agree completely, social media is essentially a dopamine addiction. Steve Jobs had an apt quote regarding what you said "our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff."
> When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a
conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But
when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks
are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far
more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot
the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really
in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.
“Sociologist” is more of an anti-qualification. In any case let’s not rely on appeals to authority. I think we are intelligent enough to judge the evidence ourselves.
No, but she doesn't have to be in this context. She's a very capable critical thinker who knows how to do very thorough research, which is all someone has to be to determine that there is, in fact, no data to support the claims.
They might not be causing literally mental health issues, but they're certainly radicalizing a lot of young folks into some really toxic behaviors and beliefs.
I don't really want to watch a video, but do you have a write up somewhere?
The last rebuttal I've read (I think from the books that kill podcast) basically dismissed Haidts claims by saying that the increase in anxiety related disorders was due to increased self reporting. And the podcast seems to have ignored the graph on the next page in Haidts book, which showed a correlated increase in emergency room admissions due to anxiety related disorders.
In 1990 there were zero identified exoplants. Now there are 4000+. It isn't that there is the creation of lots of new planets, but that we started looking for them in earnest, and had the means to identify them.
Being diagnosed is the likely reason there is an explosion in mental health disorders. We go to lengths to apply a diagnostic label on every child. The massive variation in humans means that a huge portion are going to fall to the sides of the curve on all sorts of gradients. Older HNers will remember having a wide variety of kids among their cohorts, with "nerds", depressives, the hyperactive, the super driven and focused, and the manic depressives, etc, but likely zero were actually diagnosed in any way. Now you could apply a diagnoses on literally all of them.
This isn't judgmental, and it's good to know what people are dealing with, and to offer treatment or medication where possible.
According to the CDC, teen suicide rate is up over 33% from 1999.
(Obviously, social media doesn't have to be the only cause. But something is producing a material difference and it's hard to say social media isn't a leading one.)
Are children actually experiencing mental health disorders at a higher rate, or are we just classifying pre-existing variations in personality as behavior as mental health disorders at a higher rate?
The DSM used to break mental health disorders down into what it called the multi-axial system. Axis 1 being the least impacting diseases, and axis 5 the most severe. At some point we had so many disorders that more than 50% of the population was seen to have Axis 1 or higher mental health disorders. This meant that more of the population was regarded as mentally ill than were considered "healthy."
Rather than accept that >50% of the population being classified as mentally ill might be a sign we were thinking about things in a backwards way they just got rid of the multi-axial system in DSM 5.
I agree with your skepticism on this, but youth suicide rates have been steadily climbing. Unless we were misclassifying suicide, it seems like there is a rising mental health crisis.
Teen suicide rates have been falling in Europe and most of the world. North America has edged back up to 1990 levels, and it's largely alone in that trend.
Europe and the rest of the world has social media as well. And of course 1990 didn't have social media.
There are a lot of reasons teens can feel hopeless, and I think the hyper-partisan political atmosphere / circus, coupled with the existential crisis and very real career crisis caused by AI, at least in the common understanding, the rapid heating of the Earth, etc. I would attribute all of those as dramatically more likely to lead a child to seek an out more than social media, even if the latter is much easier to blame.
What skepticism did I express? There are two possible explanations for the value of a metric changing: either the thing being measured has changed, or the methodology of conducting the measurement has changed. I honestly do not know which is the case here.
I tried it for about a 1/2 hr and it was nothing like TikTok in terms of content, UX, or the algorithm. More of a fail than Reels or Shorts, or any other wannabe clones.
My prediction, based off raising kids and working with teenagers? The teens are going to give a big ol' Yankee Doodle Middle Finger to Uncle Sam. They'll flock to any social media site not hosted by a US megacorp.
If you don't understand why that would be then I posit you haven't spent much time around teens.
That seems unlikely. The play store lists it at 10m+ downloads and it's still a very Chinese app. I checked it out myself. This is people trying to troll the US government
what seems unlikely? it's simply a fact that many are going to the other app. as you said yourself, 10m+ downloads on play store, #1 on ios app store, etc.
RedNote don't have english user interface, and it have worse censorship compare to tiktok or facebook.
Unless you want to learn Chinese and/or spend time to navigate around the content modulation system (not very hard, it just different), the experience ain't great.
I think they do have an English user interface since yesterday, which may still be unpolished. TikTok is available in many countries under their own languages though.
Rednote is a popular meme at the moment for obvious reasons. But TikTok has around 170 Million users in the USA. What you see at the moment is a loud minority checking out the app and creating content. This is something happening all the time with Social Media and especially TikTok, loud minorities doing something, and people hard overrating the numbers. There is simply no way that with Rednotes state at the moment, we will see a significant number of users switching from TikTok to it. Maybe at the end we will see some millions switching.
That depends on the definition of "many". Some use it relative, some absolute. On its own, Millions can be a big number for a service, but in relation to the absolute amount of TikTok-Users in the USA and Globally, it's just a few, a handful, more than 3, less than a majority.
They are simply different translations, period. The book you mentioned is usually referred to as "红宝书" (Red Precious Book). Don't know where the translation on Wikipedia comes from.
There are reports that they want to sell the US branch to Musk as a contingency if their appeal to the Supreme Court doesn't work. So this whole thing might wind up making things even worse.
I don't think TikTok shutting down is great for its users (of which I am one). There are genuine areas of concern but I have concerns about US based social platforms as well.
It's hard to unpick these thoughts and it's harder to decide what a good outcome would look like.
Looking at a lot of user's feeds, its algo doesn't feel as "rage-baity" as the ones from YT or Insta. Even normal platforms, like FB and Twitter push rage bait to the top. TikTok seems to avoid those pitfalls in a lot of cases.
In general the algorithm seems flexible to me; on TikTok I find it easy to scroll away or flag unwanted content as "do not show again"; and in my experience the algorithm adjusts well to that.
I feel like as an individual user, I'd rather have my social media data siphoned off by a foreign government than my own. On a societal level, having everyone's data siphoned off by a foreign government and being subjected to political influence is undesirable.
TikTok practically saved my life by exposing me to alternate worldviews and the spiritual nature of existence, so the US government singling it out feels like a personal attack to me. To think of all of the people earning independent side incomes on TikTok - one of the few places outside of eBay/Craigslist/Uber/etc where that's even still possible - who will lose that lifeline, well, words like travesty barely convey the loss.
I also don't buy the national security argument. Considering how much of our personal data is leaked through all of the other social media apps, as well as international ad markets, that argument is nonsense. This is about the US government and corporations going to any length to control the narrative as the US falls to authoritarian dystopia and fascism.
I'm disappointed in the Democratic Party for not standing up for free speech and the rights of its constituency. It's forgotten where it came from, and what its goals are. This move means that there effectively is no Democratic Party - we just have two Republican Parties, both beholden to their corporate overlords (Meta and X/Twitter), as well as the billionaires behind them (Zuckerberg and Musk).
It's also tragic beyond words that Donald Trump may be viewed as TikTok's savior if he lifts the ban after he takes office. After he has undermined so many aspects of American tradition and our institutions. It reeks.
And most of all, I'm at least as mad at all of you as I am at myself for not organizing to stop this ban. 170 million TikTok users and we can't come together in solidarity to have real leverage on our elected officials? As in, withholding our participation in keeping the web running? Talk about ineffectual.
The more time goes by, the more I'm giving up on the tech scene. We've lost our values on such a fundamental level that we are now the clear and present danger threatening the American democratic experiment. Shame on all of us.
If we keep losing the way we are, and with the rise of AI and unprecedented wealth inequality, we have maybe 5-10 years left before revolution. We've entered a Cold Civil War, divided along ideological lines. I dearly hope I'm wrong and it doesn't come to violence, but after watching America's decline as a beacon of freedom post-9/11, the safest bet is continued cynicism.
> TikTok practically saved my life by exposing me to alternate worldviews and the spiritual nature of existence
If what you say is true then perhaps the credit is due to something that’s Above being subject to the whims of society & you never needed the clock app & “the beacon of freedom” was acqui-hired sometime around the age you think we’re headed back toward & the cynics are the sages.
"Chinese leaders simply think that TikTok, unlike other apps, is so important that they would rather destroy it than see it escape their control." -Noah Smith
"I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead than go back to using Instagram Reels"
I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and telling everyone to go to LinkedIn.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.
As someone who's been on TikTok for years now, it's extremely fake, the algorithm is a total ruse, as most of what trends is based on seeing news stories repeated hundreds of times, and most other content has the same repetitive music behind it... Far too much repetition and subtle seminaries in trending content, down to the way videos are color graded to be honestly real & organic... I've had a few videos go viral, but most things that do go viral are memes, the minute you want to push out anything remotely serious or related to business, they want money to let it pass the visibility gate.
I won't miss it if it does get banned. It's stressed so many people out for no good reason, and sucked up millions of hours of free labor from unrecognized & unpaid creators that deserve better.
That doesn't mean that any Meta product is good for content creators mind you.
what types of videos have made that have gone viral?
The algorithm is genuinely very good. That's why I deleted it.
It's very addictive and not always just shoveling slop.
I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian. Neo-china...
It's a proper Skinner box. Very well made. And in millions of people's pockets too.
Someone who remembers good old Skinner. Cool!
the tiktok algo is genuinely impressive. What's cool is that the engineers published some works explaining how it functions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07663
It's an interesting read if you're into recommender systems or AI in general. What amazes me is that despite this published work google and meta still can't produce a decent social media algorithm, so it's either incompetence or malice.
Google can't even produce a decent search engine. I've switched to yandex.
same here. I found myself loosing an hour of just scrolling through short videos, most of them really good and ones that I liked. I had to delete the app because it was working too good.
Same reason I never touched prismatic after its first load.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prismatic_(app)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Prismatic served the news. You can only get so addicted to Reuters!?
Back in the day when I was using Windows Mobile (2002-2008) there was an app (RSS basic) that was pulling the news from various websites (I had added BBC, CNN, some with IT news, etc.). Before I would leave home I'd sync it, and it would give me 'many' news articles, just the text ofc.
At some point I got addicted into reading news, so out it went. So yes, anything that gives you dopamine hits (cat videos, semi-naked men/women, news of the world), must go!
Prismatic was even worse (better?), IIRC it scanned your twitter feed and then gave you a set research articles, academic websites, etc. To say I have a breadth of interests is an understatement. My twitter feed looks like arxiv and and a british tabloid had a baby.
What prismatic gave me was pages and pages of Art, Design, Philosophy, Mathematics, Literature and all of it hours to days old. Every single article it back I wanted to read and there was pages of it, never ending. There was no way I could even filter out what read and even what to be aware of, there was simply too much.
I closed it and never went back. I also realized that even knowing of knowing is itself a Faustian bargain, we are all on a temporary atoll in a giant sea.
Fox manages to do ok.
https://youtube.com/shorts/3FISFq_sCH8
Can't watch YT shorts because their algorithm is too good also ...
I disable them with a browser addon (and Revanced on mobile) because I seriously never want to watch a 30 second video on Youtube. Having to scroll past useless snippets when I'm looking for something had borderline-ruined Youtube for me.
there's some astoundingly good shit on there. some japanese cabinet maker who does phenomenal stuff and conveys it all in 30 secs. so much more. but so much more, in fact, that i can't risk my life/time by stepping into the stream.
first time i did that, i finally realized that this is probably the tiktok experience that so many other people are talking about. utterly terrifying.
Your perception of TikTok likely depends on your TikTok for you page. If you spend time cultivating it, the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.
This seems to be less true on YouTube and Reels unfortunately.
The algorithm will spoonfeed you content that you perceive a certain way, whether that's true or not is a different story. Unfortunately for most people, all those hilarious situations that are not-so-obviously staged just fly over their heads as genuine. My wife is smart and well educated, but I even had to keep correcting her when she showed me videos that she believed were genuine.
I think a lot of people fall for the feels authentic and confuse it with authentic. Also a lot of people cant tell the difference.
A lot of people are simply pessimists and will dismiss real authenticity because they don't have the tools to recognize it.
> A lot of people are simply pessimists and will dismiss real authenticity because they don't have the tools to recognize it.
Do you think you have those tools? And if you do, do you actually have them?
You are purposely being shoveled content that's expected to be engaging. Your feedback is used to tune your own personal model to maximize the volume of content you swallow.
If I ever get to know you, remind me not to recommend you books I think you’ll like.
The mistake you're making is presuming that these recommendations are pushed to you with your best interests in mind. Read up on propaganda attacks such as the infamous alt-right pipeline.
If we believe people can't be trusted with free access to ideas because they might become 'radicalized' or potential ’useful idiots’, we're advocating for more social control, not less. The ability to think critically isn't threatened by exposure to ideas - it's threatened by a broken social contract that deprives people of the conditions for self-actualization and genuine autonomy. Banning platforms or content just scapegoats symptoms while ignoring this deeper crisis.
Because the internet is filled by slop shit by people trying to make a buck from it.
It's like saying I don't know how to recognize non-spam when I end up blocking 99.99% of all mail showing up at the server.
I do recognize non-spam, it's just that I know most of it is crap.
I don’t know that it’s people trying to make a buck - and that seems a bit silly of a thing to say to begin with. I presume you try to make your buck doing whatever it is you do.
What I will say is that it’s definitely a different form of expression from what we’ve had beyond recent history and - at the same time - artists, photographers, painters, jesters, philosophers, and playwrights have been trying to live off their form of expression for a while now too.
Is there truly a difference? It's not our reality that shapes our perception, but our perception that shapes our reality.
Excuse me, have you never "perceived" a lie before?
I have believed vastly more than I have perceived. Of the lies I have perceived, my reality has altered in response to the perception.
My TikTok For You Page is almost entirely made up of Veritasium videos, sci-fi authors, some standup, lock picking lawyer and "how is it made" style videos. I don't get any of that brain-rot slop. If I did, I wouldn't use it. Which would be a slight improvement to my life. Although I'm not negatively impacted by the current level of my TikTok use, I can definitely see it takes an extra level of willpower to stop (i.e. close the app, put down the phone) than almost any other of my extra curriculars. From enjoyable hobbies to other fun time wasting activities such as gaming. Barring Factorio which is the biggest time warp I've ever encountered, with an almost perfect dopamine extracting game loop.
The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
I'd argue that shorts, even the educational ones, are still the same brain-rot slop.
These videos are often not that short. They're often broken into several parts and can be 30 minutes or longer.
The true danger of TikTok is the "wonder what will be next?" which is an infinitely rewarding question.
>The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
So, based on your description, the algorithm gives you almost exactly what you like, in terms of authenticity and legitimate interest on your part, instead of force feeding you crap that tries to change your perception of X or Y, and this is... bad? How exactly is it dangerous for doing what you want it to instead of pouring slop onto your brain?
An endless supply of content you like is infinitely more problematic than just shovelling irrelevant slop at you. With the latter you’re going to put it down.
The funny thing is I think you're misunderstanding the scale. You wife likes videos that are not-so-obviously staged. Somone else would get purely staged videos. Someone else would get actual real videos. If you like real pilots landing planes on runways where the wheels make sudden noises, it will give you that.
There are tens of billions of pieces of content there. TikTok is the furthest thing from a monolith possible.
It has to start somewhere, so it recommends the things that the most people like, but it's not the only content there, that's just common sense and good business (recommend The Beatles/Taylor Swift before you recommend Arch Echo/Aesop Rock)
the TikTok reocmmendation engine seemed to work better with a sparse history and better understood user feedback about content that one wants to see or avoid
Instagram tbh just feels icky but at least you can explicitly like or dislike stuff not that it would fix the feed though
YT shorts is also good but I hate you can't say show me this or do not show me that and it is all based on duration. idk what the powers that be at YT were thinking but I'm sure they did user studies and stuff
so much for free market economics though stuck with two imperfect options because Zuck couldn't fix the feed :(
> the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.
Jesus, this is like a line out of a William Gibson novel. I hope you wrote that aware of the irony inherent in it.
I'm also reminded of this George Burns quote: "The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made."
Connecting people to other people, to life changing art, places and things that they end up loving and wouldn’t know about otherwise? That has to be one of the best uses for technology. I’d like to see more of it.
I think you and others here are focusing on the stereotypical “influencer” faking authenticity for views but there are literally millions of human beings posting on TikTok about all kinds of things. A lot of them are pretty cool. Just click “not interested” on influencers and click like on the stuff you want to see instead.
I think it's fair to say after a decade or so social media does not "connect people to other people", what you are describing are parasocial relationships. People are lonelier than ever, not just in America but worldwide.
Besides, for any hobby, recommendations are only really relevant for newcomers without solidified preferences and knowledge, after that the space of available content quickly dwindles as one seeks increasingly ambitious and avant-garde works to their preferences. Amateur stuff can be quite generic after all, what not with the lack of resources and experience. If you're still relying on an algorithm, I'd see it more as a vapid surface-level engagement with a hobby/medium than a genuine interest to dive further.
Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
> Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
You’re just getting older. You’ve seen it before in another place, another medium, a different author, actor, photographer, director, philosopher, painter. You just haven’t realized that the internet isn’t just for you, and that reel you saw that just rehashed something well-known to you, was new info to someone else, somewhere. I can assure you, in 2010, there were plenty oh people bitching about bloggers retelling the same old things they learned decades prior.
“Everything old is new again” is a centuries-old expression. Every generation tells their tales, and shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right now, people express themselves in short-form video. I’m curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won’t like it.
Everything invented up to your 20s is just the innate environment.
Everything invented from your 20s-40s is cool, you accept it and will probably make a living with it.
Everything invented after your 40s is a perversion of the natural order and must be destroyed.
On the other hand, kids don't seem to have great mental health, attention spans, or academic attainment right now, and this type of social media is one of the likely factors behind this change.
I almost forgot the accompaniment to the third item:
When you reach your 40s, something starts corrupting the youth.
Hm. I didn't know me getting older could affect so much time series data. I must be really powerful ;)
would you like to serve up some comparative evidence showing just how much these things have degraded in kids these days vs. some particular point in the past?
This reminds me of people harping about the pervasiveness of misinformation in social media today, while completely forgetting how narrowly propagandized and baited toward yellow journalism the much more restricted media sources of the past often were, helping create all kinds of absurdly ignorant belief systems from which escape into alternative viewpoints was much harder.
Here is a blog that rolls up lots and lots of time series graphs from different research.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...
Time series data is always confounded in many ways; lots of stuff changes, and as a society we change what we're paying attention to and that itself changes things like emergency room visits or perceptions of being anxious. At the same time, a whole lot of different measures moved in a negative direction suddenly (after slowly moving that way for many years). Of course, to be fair: these time series seem to show more the effect of social media in general and smartphones than short form video content on social media/smartphones.
There is no shortage of comparative evidence, though.
There's also evidence that short form video use is correlated with shorter attention span and that it is addictive. Of course, correlation ain't causation: maybe it's just the most naturally attention-challenged that consume a lot of it. I personally suspect it's a little of both.
We also have research that shows that if you show people lots of short form video and then test their attention span later, it's worse. But this, of course, isn't the same as the effect of voluntarily watching short form video. This is all trivial to find, but if you want links to specific things, let me knwo.
Kids complain that the other kids who are on tiktok all the time will do something like ask a peer a question, and then drift off to something else during the answer if it's longer than a single short sentence.
I've been doing youth programs for quite awhile now, and there's been a definite qualitative shift in the past several years, and various kinds of quantitative shifts in my own data aligned with this trend, too.
There will never be perfect evidence, unfortunately. We have to act on the information we have, and when we're studying humans it's going to include time series data and artificial studies of the phenomenon in lab conditions.
One person's short attention span is another person's intolerance for bullshit. One person's poor mental health is another person's emotions appropriate to the actual state of the world. The kids these days are doing great in all the ways that matter.
Put a short straight-to-the-point instructional video on youtube, gets praised for being the best of humanity, "You win the internet today sir". Put the same video on TikTok, suddenly it's brain rot.
> One person's short attention span is another person's intolerance for bullshit.
If a student asks a friend a question, and then drifts off into space before the two sentence answer has been delivered, that's not great.
> One person's poor mental health is another person's emotions appropriate to the actual state of the world.
Perhaps being prone to anxiety attacks, panic, and self-harm are what we need to meet today's challenges head-on.
> The kids these days are doing great in all the ways that matter.
Hey, not everything is negative-- we live in a world with more interpersonal kindness and tolerance than a few decades ago, and that's great. But the kids aren't alright.
Especially teen girls. It's impossible to escape curated content encouraging social comparison to edited, perfectly curated standards of perfection.
>“Everything old is new again” is a centuries-old expression. Every generation tells their tales, and shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right now, people express themselves in short-form video. I’m curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won’t like it.
You know it's interesting to frame these arguments because it's exemplar of the clash of worldviews here, between the classic view of an cyclical history, and the modern linear view of historical continuity. The latter was birthed in reaction against the former, yet as the inheritors of Rennaisance conquered the world, it eventually became the norm, the "old" of which the "present" would be compared against.
So if the present now cycles the past, is this an abberation or the norm here? The past is the "future", and the present is "stagnation". It is both revolutionary and regressionary. The TikTok Bill, the need to retake the Narrative by the Establishment thus represents itself the Past reasserting Continuity, and thus the Future, while Present pushes back to the very denial of the Future itself, to establish it's totalizing dominance of an endless now. So for the question of whether I would like the future, well that depends on which of the two sides win.
> You’re just getting older. You’ve seen it before in another place .. You just haven’t realized that the internet isn’t just for you.. same old things decades prior..
This reads as both extremely condescending and extremely naive at the same time.
An earlier version of the internet had blogs and meme lords sure, and a generation consumed that stuff and found that it was good. And after that consumption, it turns out kids still wanted to grow up to be doctors, astronauts, or whatever.
Another generation consumed another kind of content which was mostly leaning towards short-format, after many years spent researching/weaponizing dopamine and misinformation. Almost all of that content was mediated by corporations really, with as little involvement from people as the corporations could manage. That generation wanted to be influencers and "content creators" when they grew up.
The basic incentive structures are radically different now, for companies, creators, and consumers, and we're sort of past doing things for the lulz. There's a difference here that actually makes a difference, and writing it off as "yawn, more of the same if only your perspective was as wide as mine!" seems more ignorant than enlightened.
> Connecting people to other people, to life changing art, places and things that they end up loving and wouldn’t know about otherwise?
Does your opinion change if you understand that none of that is remotely real or actually exists?
You have an app that is designed to feed you Potemkin villages, and here you are praising their real estate value.
> That has to be one of the best uses for technology. I’d like to see more of it.
That's like praising psychosis for being one of the best mental illnesses, and concluding that you'd like to see more of it.
> Jesus, this is like a line out of a William Gibson novel. I hope you wrote that aware of the irony inherent in it.
There's a spectrum between Vaudeville and sharing family recipes. YouTube's MrBeast is on one end of that spectrum.
This is the kind of stuff that happens on TikTok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdXhx-yECOc
This is what was meant.
It all looks the same to me. Something made to be amusing/viral for the clicks.
> This is the kind of stuff that happens on TikTok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdXhx-yECOc
still confused. Is this supposed to be an example of “bad” or “good” content?
Because I can’t (perhaps due to lack of empathy.. idk) imagine why anyone would want to waste their time watching stuff like that.
It's pretty creative and funny stuff, imo. If you consider that to be "good" or "bad" that's up to you I guess.
The way people choose to spend their lives is largely up to them, I'm not sure it's good to be labeling things as a "waste of time" when they're deriving something from it that you simply do not understand. Particularly when they do it in a way that is pretty harmless.
I don't know if you have pets, but if you spend time observing them you'll see most of what they do is simply letting time pass and for them, that's enough. Believe it or not, for many people the same is the case. Finding meaning in the acts we do is a personal endeavour so I think rather than telling people they're wasting their time instead try to understand what they're seeing in such things that you don't see.
I think a lot of people find creative acts very rewarding, there's an element of surprise that comes from it. The unexpected can be enjoyable. I think one of the reasons why the TikTok algorithm is so powerful is that it really succeeds in giving people the feeling of constant surprise.
Personally, I've found really inspiring art on Tiktok, as well as new music and also a lot of simple but engaging content in german (which I'm trying to learn).
> This is what was meant.
I think you inadvertently made an entirely different point: it's all fake, but you just swallow some content acritically believing it's something personal that speaks to you.
In the end, you're just complaining that some sirens are fake but others really do love you.
Is this supposed to be good?
'authenticity' in the sense of content made by normal people without any strong goals other than 'some other people might like that' (and for some, maybe eventually getting some income from monetization) rather than highly produced content with the goal of reaching the largest possible audience and extracting the largest possible amount of money from that, which is what reels feels like. if you want to see that type of 'more authentic' content, tiktok's approach to populating your feed will be much more responsive to that than instagram's. there also seem to be a lot more people creating content on tiktok aimed at that level.
I had cultivated a FYP that felt authentic to me, especially relative to everything else on the internet, but after a while it looked just as phony to my eyes, without any real change in the content itself. Just a different brand of phony.
This is exactly it - its filled with phony garbage but its a new and exciting kind of phony garbage that people lap up.
Also people are getting really good at making content seem real.
Just did a test, opened up TikTok
1) a guy telling me in my native language (not english) how to spot phishing scams 2) another guy doing a short video about how much you need to invest to retire in my native language 3) Donald's AG not answering simple questions directly 4) video about 2CV ice racing where people leisurely drive old Citroens 5) A skit by an Australian dude who has a wall full of Milwaukee tools
Instagram Reels
1) A couple doing a very much scripted skit 2) A stolen clip from an old 90s sitcom 3) one-liner joke 4) A dude farting 5) A homophobic "joke" video
Youtube Shorts
1) pro skier made up to look old doing tricks on the slope 2) A couple I don't know showing what they looked like in 1988 3) A skit by a couple 4) One of those weird youtube-only dating channels reposting a clip of their stuff 5) Americans not knowing how to drive on icy roads in 2022
The quality difference is so clear that it's not even funny. In my experience all of the good content in Reels is just reposted/stolen TikTok content. Shorts has the same or snippets of bigger YT videos.
FB Reels is so bad I don't even want to give them the engagement metrics.
Tiktok is serving you better things because
1) more people post there 2) you've used it much more and given them huge amounts of data on who you are and what your like to watch, when.
I can assure you those tiktok things are not the top of everyone's feed, sounds personalized. But your list for reels, and the other one sounds like the basic things they show to new people to try to figure out what they like, possibly somewhat curated by some past swipes.
Each of these are just algorithms. They get better the more you use them because your use = your data and personality and you've just used tiktok enough that they know _exactly_ what you like and who you are. Give it time, the others will come along if people use them
It's not the algorithm, it's the accounts and people in there.
I actually tried reels for a good while, but the content is just tits&ass (a major part of instagram), "funny" videos reposted so many times they're grainy from all the recompression and crap like that. Very very few people I would like to follow do actual original content on Instagram Reels.
Have you considered that Reels is so bad precisely because you don’t use it?
Mine:
A bit from the SF Chronicle on the LA fires. A comedy/info bit by Alex Falcone. An Ad. A wrestling technique (I’m into judo and BJJ). A card trick. Cooking techniques. An ad.
It’s ad-heavy and frankly I don’t try to spend a lot of time on it. But as somebody who uses it at least some, I get absolutely zero of the kind of garbage you suggest.
My wife hates it when I don't enjoy the TikTok videos she sends me, because it's very easy for me to tell how staged and fake they are. She, on the other hand, neither notices nor cares.
This would be concerning, if I didn't know that this way of thinking was incredibly common these days—instead, it's mildly terrifying.
I enjoy movies, even though they are staged.
Everybody knows movies are staged, even the ones that are "based on a true story". From what I can tell, people seem to think those short videos are genuine.
Everyone knows movies are staged, and they expect this. No one in their right mind wants to go to a theater and pay $20 for some crap that someone shot on their phone with no script.
With the short videos, people expect them to be genuine, and not highly staged productions meant to entertain.
No, I watch these kind of videos expecting them to be fake. Why would I expect otherwise when I have every reason to expect them to be non-genuine? If people's expectations are not right, that is on them.
I think better comparison would be documentaries and reality tv.
Do you friends think they are real and get mad when you point out that they aren’t?
If every time I watched a movie with my SO they said "you do know this is completely fake, why do you even like movies?", I would probably get a bit annoyed
Would you get angry because you thought it was real though? Because that’s what happens with these people.
They show you something and say something incredulous like, “I can’t believe something like this is legal. How is this allowed?”
Your choices are to point out it’s fake or play along in a stupid fantasy. The latter is disingenuous just to avoid conflict.
It's where the young kids who don't know any better overshare. Instagram is where the perfectly manicured young adults put out a phony facade to make their money.
Hm. I’m a grown man and I post reels to all the platforms. I like the tech and enjoy trying to emulate a professional process with prosumer equipment and practices (filming, editing, color grading, sound design, etc.).
After about 30 or so reels this year, I’ve got about 70 followers - half of which are definitely bots, a third are family/friends, and the rest seem to be real people.
My feed has a lot of people like me, and people whose content I think is at the quality I’d like to be at (mostly photographers, videographers, small but full-time YouTubers).
Maybe you’re just finding what you’re looking for.
My TikTok feed is full of very much adults and who own small businesses. I’ve seen some people in college, but there’s no kids in my feeds.
All the major social networking things are fake, no matter how they feel to one particular user.
However, the US seems to ban only the options where it's not US companies making money off their users...
It's commensurate with how China treats foreign companies. Nobody can do serious business in China without the CCP's blessing, often involving a "partnership" with a local company.
Maybe, but the point is the US government is not concerned with privacy or addictive effects of 'engagement'.
You're both right! There was a good article/discussion on on this yesterday, but tldr: They are authentically fake! As in, the creators are not putting up a show with a 'real' person behind the persona, the algorithms have remade whatever person there use to be such that their 'authentic' self has become the persona.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42696691
Interpellation [0]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation_(philosophy)
Go outside, everyone's real .. at least for the time being!
They are boring though
Only seems that way until you come down off the hyperstimulation.
I don't know if I would characterize TikTok as 'authentic' first and foremost, but it's a platform where real people go to perform. When I scrolled TikTok, I would often get poorly-shot videos from average folks trying to put their spin on the day's joke format, or reacting to that day's outrage. It was junk food, but at least somewhat 'real'.
My Reels feed, on the other hand, is 100% bot drivel. It's all stolen viral videos by artificially-boosted accounts, and the comments appear to be fake comments that were 'paid for'. I assume there must be some sort of financial incentive to gaming the system this way.
The end result is that TikTok feels like scrolling through (attention-grabbing, reactionary) stuff by real people, and Reels feels like scrolling through some sort of bot wasteland.
I guess I should add that, due to its size, TikTok almost certainly also has a bot problem, but if it does it's not as clearly evident in a way that is detrimental to the platform.
I genuinely have no idea what Zuckerberg is responsible for at Facebook other than hijacking credentials (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433) and stealing/copying ideas
Anyone with half a brain ought to have come up with a better system than Reels is
I would use the word 'fresh' for TikTok; like old school YouTube, there's quirkiness and variety.
Exactly. In other threads on hacker news people have bemoaned the loss of the old weird web. I don't think anyone believed me that the same spirit exists in some sides of TikTok.
I remember seeing threads here about how TikTok reminded people of the old web. It's wild seeing attitudes shift so completely.
The lady with the rug story, the tik tok recipes... All felt very real, down to earth to me. Versus IG's obsession with glamor, travel stories, other hucksters.
Strange. Until about a month ago, my IG feed was almost all independent and amateur musicians, interesting tech makers (NOT reviewers or “influencers”, and some alt comedy. Suddenly, in the past 4 weeks, my feed is all political propaganda from the far right, ads, and more ads.
I deleted Instagram because of the change. I’m done. Never used TikTok, it seemed totally fake to me.
You have to break it in, strangely enough. When I first used it it was like being logged out and watching Reels. But overtime it really understood what might interest me, even topics I didn't think I'd be interested in but was
Exactly. Despite using TikTok since mid 2019, I recognized very few of the top 20 accounts.
Got any room over in your universe? I'm feeling pretty tired of this one.
I think Im in your universe…how do we get out?
TikTok has a lot of true believers.
Fake compared to what? Alt-right Zuck with a fresh perm?
Seriously. US social media is taking a massive turn to the right while its owners are swearing allegiance to Trump. To most of the world that is a much more real danger than the Chinese communists.
Yeah… TikTok is absolutely chock full of garbage for me, whether or not I’m logged out.
YouTube Shorts are not bad now for this kind of thing. I’m guessing it’s based on my subscriptions so it’s already off to a good start for me.
If you spent 10 minutes on each platform, you'd immediately realize how tone-deaf and naive your comment is.
The US gov's intention was not at all to shut down TikTok. It was to force ByteDance to sell it.
The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt, and their unwillingness to sell under the circumstances kinda proves their whole First Amendment claims are made in bad faith. Something deeper is going on, and it's not about your social security number.
This isn't rocket science. What's going on is having the keys to the kingdom with regards to serving videos to influence the mind of a user with extremely precise targeting.
China doesn't want USA doing that, and banned their social media. USA doesn't want China doing it because they've been doing it all over the world to everybody since Radio Free Europe, and likely before.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Radio-Free-Europe
The timing of this with the Israeli crimes in Gaza is clear.
https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-g...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok-...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/tiktok...
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2024/3/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/business/tiktok-israel-ha...
Israel's practices are historically so insidious. The more I learn about that state the more disturbing it is.
People have said it before but the clear internet is increasingly under Israel's influence. X's have silenced so many Palestinian accounts.
Western social media have platforms that allow states to censor content, and they have to comply. Under the guise of misinformation ofcourse.
Lots of countries have made it illegal to listen things like Radio Free Europe. I'm guessing you can't in North Korea. On the other hand, a US citizen that wants to get the Chinese perspective on anything has lots of ways to legally find that and repeat it. I am not saying a lot of people in the US are interested in a foreign point of view, or that the US doesn't have tons of propaganda. But I don't think you can convince anyone that the two countries treat speech the same way.
> On the other hand, a US citizen that wants to get the Chinese perspective on anything has lots of ways to legally find that and repeat it.
What do you mean by "Chinese perspective"? Do you mean people's genuine opinion or the official government talking points?
Is that distinction material to the point the GP is making?
Radio Free Europe is nothing like TikTok. Not only is broadcast media not able to be pinpoint targeted in real time to individuals, but the connection of who was behind RFE and other similar propaganda is pretty obvious, unlike tiktok.
Feels a little bit like the Chinpokomon episode of South Park - innocent kids being brainwashed and whatnot. (I know the target in that ep is Japan, but still)
I think that China is working to control left-wing activism in the U.S and TikTok is the perfect trojan horse to split the Democratic party and elevate their bribed proxies. I'd rather not go into how they're doing it, but certainly massive focus on the Gaza war in TikTok did do a number on the unity of the Democratic party.
Speaking of China influence I keep getting these stories on my social media feeds: Isn't this overpass, road, or this building, or this city in with lots of LED lights in China just great? China is the future, and so on!
...except that the "extremely precise targeting" is a new thing.
microtargeting specific to individual psychological metrics is indeed a new thing.
If you feel that the national security angle is a farce, do you similarly feel that the DoD banning TikTok on government systems was just for show? https://defensescoop.com/2023/06/02/pentagon-proposes-rule-t...
The DoD banning an app on their network is a lot different than banning it competely in the US. I would think DoD should ban most apps connecting to their networks that aren't work related. I feel this whole effort is either in bad faith or isn't being transparently communicated to the public.
They famously failed to ban strava and some military assets were unintentionally disclosed on the strava heatmap by soldiers logging their cardio jogs through facility hallways.
Except there was never a discussion of banning TikTok the app. Which is why a sale of the app was always an option.
NatSec should not even be needed. A simpler reason could be that China bans foreign social media apps from operating in China, so Chinese apps should be treated as such.
Reciprocity is not a good idea. Why would we want to copy every bad foreign law?
> Reciprocity is not a good idea.
Sometimes it is. Especially, if an adversary is bad to you, you should not be good to him. You should be equally bad, or sometimes worse.
That's how wars are won. Those who are nice to enemies because of "values" get crushed by the ruthless opponents.
There’s no adversary here. There’s no ongoing war. In fact, up until the US started imposing restrictions on China, the US was one of China’s largest trade PARTNER.
US social media is banned in China because it doesn’t comply with local censorship laws, nor because it is American. They impose the same censorship on local individuals and organisations too.
But China banning foreign apps also plays into their stranglehold on their domestic media and economy, so it's not a purely adversarial move against the US.
Or to put it another way, should the US also ban/censor Chinese art and cinema within it's borders?
If it's going to help US in any way, why not? TikTok is eating the lunch of US social media apps so fair to play the protectionism game.
> Sometimes it is. Especially, if an adversary is bad to you, you should not be good to him. You should be equally bad, or sometimes worse.
Every little thing the West does is already played up in China and spun as an intentional attack aimed directly at China because the West wants to destroy China. Usually this is conveyed in news broadcasts set to a backdrop of video of various US military exercises.
A lot of the support the Chinese government enjoys comes from people in China generally seeing the country as much better off than it was a few decades ago, and a sense of nationalism and conflating the government, country, and people as one. An attack on China is an attack on all of us is an attack on me.
Whatever you do in retaliation is just building the public and political will, or even public demand, within China for them to take harsher measures or escalate things further.
Despite the government's efforts, the populace is not exactly entirely isolated from the outside world. There are many people who, while maybe not fully distrusting of the government, definitely smell something fishy. They're curious, and they want to and are able to learn more.
Heading into the 2030s, China itself is already forecasting China's going to enter a period of negative population growth. Combined with a variety of cultural forces, this could be even more impactful than in some other countries. And it will only get worse with time. "Better off than we were a few decades ago" may soon become clearly untrue to a lot of people. The government knows this is coming and is trying to prepare by strengthening their grip.
I think a smarter long term move here would be to just... not. Let them yell at the clouds. Make whatever information we can freely available to the curious in any way we can. Welcome those that want to embrace Western values with open arms. Model the world that we think is best.
Rather than giving China the government the tools and ammunition needed to unify the people and rally them behind China the government... let's just wait. When the people feel the government is failing them, instead of leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable... let them see they have somewhere else to turn.
Or, y'know, escalate this towards an economically and politically unstable nation of 1.5 billion people who think the West is the cause of all of their woes and see how it all shakes out. That'd definitely show everyone we have the biggest dick.
That's not how you win wars, that's how you start them. Diplomacy is a thing.
It only works when one party isn't interested in starting a war in the first place.
and why on earth would China want to start a war with us? We are a huge trading partner and yes there's a lot of posturing and conflicting geo-political interests, cultural views etc but that doesn't mean that war is their goal.
Diplomacy only works when both sides are playing fair. If China is going to ban US apps unilaterally, US should reciprocate in kind.
Reciprocity is a great idea. It takes the emotion out of the decision: we don’t allow X from Y because Y doesn’t allow X from us. It makes sense for trade at least.
Then there is no need to find another excuse that might be offensive.
It also lets somebody else make your decision for you, though, which is probably not a good strategy.
If you can’t make a decision always, it works out. Besides, this is a simple reciprocal trade sanction, which are rarely so straightforward. No one in China is seriously going to admonish the USA for banning TikTok when even China blocks it (since it allows content banned in China), while most Americans who would care probably don’t vote.
It seems like an approach that begs to be gamed, though. Country A bans something, Country B reciprocally bans the something. Years later, Country B realizes it's at a severe disadvantage because County A has hoarded all the something and now there's a something shortage in Country B that was planned and executed by a Country A.
Obviously not probably an issue with social networks, but mindlessly banning something just because somebody else banned something seems like a recipe to be tricked.
It took us 5 years to go from “let’s ban TikTok” to actually banning TikTok. I don’t think it’s going to be very exploitable, and it’s not like China where Facebook works one day and then just doesn’t (China doesn’t publicize what it bans and for what reasons, even a list of banned sites is orobably considered a state secret).
If you made a literal mindless robot to reciprocally ban anything another country banned, yes, that would probably be exploitable. Normalising reciprocal bans and applying even a little bit of human oversight seems fine though.
The difference is, of course, that only one of those countries CONSTANTLY bangs on about being the "free" world, about "free" markets, about how not saying the n-word is censorship etc.
In short, it's only hypocritical for one of those countries.
In both cases though, for normal citizens your own country and it's companies are far more dangerous than some random country halfway across the globe.
China is a foreign sovereign country.
"USA is a free country" does not refer to China. "The free world" does not refer to China.
It was not for show. It acknowledged its success and was to limit its success. Then limit it as a "potential" vector for intrusion. Kaspersky was removed from the US on the same basis.
Don't mobile apps have severely limited permissions compared to Kaspersky?
Tiktok has access to photos and videos on the device, and user data on interactions. This was seen as a vector for compromising the individual's integrity via embarrassment and blackmail.
I just installed tiktok for the first time on my Android device and it asked for no permissions and even let me use it without creating an account. How is it getting photos and videos on my device?
Normal practice is a prompt-on-first-attempt: when you click on various things, it'll ask; I've never given it access to anything, and so I get a prompt asking for permission to see my contacts about once a week.
most bases still block twitter, facebook, flickr, etc too
https://www.wired.com/2009/06/despite-army-order-some-bases-...
well, probably yes
i think there are obvious reasons why bytedance would not want to spawn a US-based competitor and why a US only social media network would be ineffective.
this is exactly the same as what China does with their gfw, they allow american apps to divest and be owned by a chinese company.
Wrong
1. China asked American SNS companys to 'obey Chinese laws', which mostly refer to content control and data ownership, these companys refused, China didn'tforced them to sell 2. Are you sure to play the 'same as what China does'? hey, we are a totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial regime, are we same? think twice
2. The game can be slightly different. "hey, we are open by default. but if an authoritarian regimes wants to exploit our openness by marketing their apps while at the same time banning our apps from their market, then we will strike back".
paradox of intolerance and all that..
If we played the same as China does, we'd be hacking Baidu through a vulnerability in a Microsoft web browser until they withdrew completely from the American market.
> If we played the same as China does, we'd be hacking Baidu through a vulnerability in a Microsoft web browser
We don't?
With the goal of driving them out of the US?
I just typed https://www.baidu.com into my browser bar, hit enter, and their page loaded.
Why throw out something hackable? Apparently they couldn't hack TikTok so they thrown them out.
They probably could, but it's become such a pain in the ass, it's no longer worth it.
You can still go to the mobile web version; but that doesn't give the same level of access to devices and data that an app does.
Have you heard of the NSA
I'm not saying we don't hack them.
I'm saying we don't hack them with the goal of driving them out of the American market, which is what happened to Google's PRC operations.
We hacked Huawei and drove them out, but those were separate incidents. I'm not convinced it puts the US in a morally superior position, though.
1. Yes, China forced the sale of Uber China to Didi - this is well documented.
2. Did I say that? No. I am opposed to the tiktok ban
China forced the sale of Uber China to Didi - this is well documented
really? > https://www.bbc.com/news/36938812 > https://www.heritage.org/international-economies/commentary/...
Let me tell you a cruel fact - Uber is completely unable to compete with Didi. You have no idea how fierce the competition in this industry in China is.
Uber died before it grew up in China
Uber got 33%+ market share.
From your article:
> If Uber had become a commercial success in China, Chinese authorities ultimately would have clamped down to protect their domestic competitors.
> firms that do occasionally find success often face headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access to the domestic market.
> Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-wealth fund.
> "Uber China" sought local investors. The hope was that, with local investors, the Chinese operation would be spared some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed on foreign businesses.
China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism. Not sure where the profit is in denying that, given your own sources seem to clearly state it and even name a number of channels through which the state puts their thumb on the scale, not just regulatory but also through financing.
You can ignore my following comments if this will make you feel better...
> *If* Uber had become a commercial success in China, Chinese authorities ultimately *would* have clamped down to protect their domestic competitors.
classic demonizing and loser's execuse
> firms that do occasionally find success often face headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access to the domestic market.
every other demestic companys face headwinds from Chinese regulators, just like I mentioned above, and Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, they all in same situation, some of them couldn't handle this so they leaved, some stays
Also, DiDi once were banned more than 2 years by authorities, it survived
> Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-wealth fund
The 'STATE-BACKED' is a typical word used by certain people, it's just some kind of gov investment funds, there're dozens and invested thousands private companys, it's a Socialism country, it's called socialism, what do you expect? Didi is not even a state-owned enterprise. And is this equals to "force to sell"?
> some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed on foreign businesses.
Bruh
> China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism.
That's true, and? many Chinese people also have intense domestic favoritism
BTW, Apple is losing market share in China. However, take it easy, I don't think Apple will be sold to Huawei. Moreover, Apple is produced by Chinese and Indian, why bothered?
Heck, China forced Apple to divest iCloud to the government of Guizhou.
it's about data ownership, part of data compliance, citizen data can not be pass to abroad, of course, it's also about content censorship
Microsoft and Tesla accepted the same rule
You can understand it as the US gov requiring TikTok's data must be hosted by Microsoft in the US
Social media is the front line of an ongoing cyber war. It is a matter of propaganda and social engineering.
Imagine if Japan owned all the newspapers in the run-up to WWII.
That's not to say China is the only one with propaganda.
It's unfortunate that this comment is buried so deep and that generally this topic is under discussed.
Media has always been a force for controlling popular opinion, but in the age of social media it's going to new extremes. There are forces that try to control how you see the world on all social media platforms and do so to attempt to shape your opinions of the world and modify your actions.
You can visibly see Reddit has been completely taken over by bot, shills, and other controlled accounts. There is no sincere, real human opinion posted on the front page.
Even HN is not immune. "Bad news" has long been forbidden here, and there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.
> there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.
Such as? Disappear as in getting flagged?
Large portions of the things posted to the Oakland subreddit get flagged and removed. Almost anything mentioning the city in a negative light gets flagged. Crime reports / trends, anything.
Sarcastically chuckling about the state of the city as a long time resident gets the ban hammer.
It is really quite something.
Luigi
Massively controversial on HN, leading to lots of flagged posts (due to a mix of legitimate flame bait and emotional kneejerk).
Everyone knows HN is censored. Let's test your theory though. Here is a litmus test:
Is it true that women unknowingly engage in Eugenics when choosing to procreate only with tall men in large numbers?
Or another test:
What happened to Epstein's video tapes stored in his NY mansion and why were the people in them not prosecuted?
Think about it...
The US owned all the newspapers in the run-up to Iraq war II…
Imagine if one company owned all the local news papers and replaced all the content with wire stories and the lowest quality local content or a fox news like company bough local news to run a propaganda operation. Oh wait that's real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gannett
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
"Imagine if a handful of ultra-billionaires controlled almost all social media in the US." doesn't feel less threatening. The fact that Congress doesn't consider this a problem feels like the bigger problem.
It reminds me of Google's decision to pull out of China instead of censor their results.
>The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt
Um, what? There is zero chance that ByteDance could get a fair price for TikTok. VC calculations can be disregarded, TikTok as a platform is more valuable than Facebook. How much money would it take for Zuckerberg to sell FB to a Chinese company?
I mean, the Chinese government was never going to let the US just take their company at bargain basement prices.
Didn't something similar happen with Grindr? It was Chinese owned and sold without nearly as much excitement. Given the inevitable bidding war from multiple interested parties I would be surprised if they couldn't get a fair price for TikTok
China didn’t need to fight to keep Grindr because all the value from the acquisition was realized as soon as they ran a database query to compile a list of closeted Republican senators. No need to hold on once you got the spy treasure.
What about future senators?
Senators have to be at minimum 30, more commonly 50+.
Anyone that's going to be a senator in the next 12 years (at minimum) is already on Grindr if they were ever going to be.
Do you think that ByteDance is primarily concerned with the economic considerations for TikTok, or do you think that it is something else?
Do you think that there is a price at which they would be willing to sell it?
It wouldn't have been at a bargain basement price if they started trying to sell it when the law passed. It could have been the highest market price they could get from the US's largest buyers.
Obviously they don't have the same leverage when they're otherwise going to be shut off in a few days.
I think this is untrue. The government wanted to shut down TikTok, but it can't just outright ban it because that's a clear violation of the first amendment, so it came up with a way to ban it indirectly. That was their intention all along.
I don't see how people don't see what is their most likely rationale - the ban will be temporary. Trump's already come out against it and is going to work to reverse it once in office. If it can't be done directly, it'll be done like usual - as an addon to some must-pass bill.
I think they would probably refuse to sell in a situation where they had reason to expect the ban to persist (for different reasons), but in this case they probably didn't even consider selling when there's a high probability they'll be back legally operating in the US within a year.
Acts of congress can only be blocked by the supreme court's power of judicial review. The supreme court held a 2.5 hour hearing this past week and the only two justices who voiced skepticism of the law were Gorsuch and Thomas.
Or another act of Congress! But given that the Supreme Court is waiting to the last second to issue their ruling, I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them. The nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not apply to a company legally operating within the country, because of its nationality, has extremely broad implications as a precedent - well beyond corporations alone, even for a judge who might be more than okay with the ban in and of itself.
Beyond this, there's the matter of enforcement and implementation. The former is discretionary and the latter is not specified by the bill. An effective ban would effectively require the creation of a Great Firewall of China type mechanism to effectively implement (which is what I thought this law was always a sort of 'trojan horse' for). Otherwise the "ban" will be trivially sidestepped by using a web app, downloading an APK from their site/mirrors instead of the marketplace, etc. Let alone things like VPNs! As Chinese companies are increasingly banned from the US, we're likely to see more adversarial setups where these companies will make no effort to prevent US customers no matter how much the US government madly gesticulates, though again with the current administration said gesticulation will not even happen in the first place.
>The nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not apply to a company legally operating within the country, because of its nationality, has extremely broad implications as a precedent
The law (PAFACA) doesn't directly apply to TikTok, but only to TikTok's ownership by ByteDance, due to ByteDance being a corporation located in a foreign adversary nation. Foreign corporations are not protected by the first amendment as domestic corporations are. Case law clarifying separate first amendment protections for domestic vs foreign entities such as Citizens United v FEC (2010) and Bluman v FEC (2011), already established the precedent for this.
>I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them
Did you watch the hearing or read the transcript? The opinions of the majority of the justices on both sides, including the chief justice, were not ambiguous. As referenced in the hearing by the justices, the first amendment only applies to communication on the platform, not the ownership of the platform. Given that TikTok's parent company is ByteDance, and as the first amendment does not apply to foreign corporations as it does to domestic corporations, which multiple justices pointed out, the law is not in conflict with the first amendment. The law is referred to as the "TikTok ban law", but it doesn't ban the platform explicitly, it only bans its ownership by a foreign adversary located corporation, which are not protected by the first amendment, which is how the law avoids a conflict with the first amendment while potentially still effectively banning the platform.
The case you cited is not really appropriate here because it's about elections which are one of the few domains where citizenship plays a critical and very well established role. In this case, you're talking about broadly restricting the constitutional rights of an entity legally within the US based on its ties to a nationality, given that ByteDance is legally not even a Chinese company, as it's incorporated in the Cayman Isles. The implications of this seem huge.
Don't trust regular media to give you fair assessments of this case. ScotusBlog generally has excellent and impartial analysis of cases from experienced lawyers, and this is no exception. [1] They described the overall court as skeptical of the claims. Skeptical does not mean fully in bed with one side or the other, but simply that - skeptical. It's also important to bear in mind is that hearings are, by their very nature, off the cuff. And the implications (or factualness) of what the justices believe may change as they consider the implications of a decision, and factualness of their assumptions.
Again the thing I would say is that if this was an obvious case, the justices would not be waiting to the last second. My guess is that we'll probably see an announced delay+injunction on Friday.
[1] - https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/01/supreme-court-skeptical-o...
Did you read that blog post? Despite the post being titled as it is, the post contains more examples of justices voicing skepticism to the TikTok lawyers' arguments than it does examples of justices who were voicing skepticism to the law:
"Some justices, however, were unconvinced that the law necessarily raises a First Amendment issue. Justice Clarence Thomas asked Francisco how a restriction on ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok created any limitations on TikTok’s speech.
Justice Elena Kagan echoed Thomas’s skepticism. If the law only targets ByteDance, which does not have any First Amendment rights because it is a foreign corporation, she asked Francisco, how does that implicate TikTok’s First Amendment rights? TikTok can still use whatever algorithm it wants, Kagan observed.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett also appeared to agree at times. The law, she simply requires ByteDance to divest TikTok. A shut-down by TikTok, she suggested, would be the consequence of ByteDance’s choice not to do so.
Other justices appeared persuaded by the government’s invocation of national security concerns. Chief Justice John Roberts observed that, although Francisco contended that TikTok is a U.S. company, Congress had concluded that the “ultimate company that controls” TikTok is subject to Chinese laws, including an obligation to assist the Chinese government with intelligence work. “Are we,” Roberts queried, “supposed to ignore that?”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted the government’s contention that China is using TikTok to access information about millions of U.S. citizens, and in particular young people, and could in the future use that information to try to recruit spies or manipulate future U.S. officials. That “seems like a huge concern for the future of” the United States, Kavanaugh observed."
In a Supreme Court case the burden of proof is on the petitioner, and it's the duty of the Court to critically question that evidence and proof. See, for instance, comparable coverage on the Roe vs Wade case, where you will see similar grilling. [1] Something quite important is how the judges responded to the claims and the follow ups. For instance in the transcript [2] follow the dialogue from the quotes you gave versus the grilling of Prelogar, representing the government.
She was, at times, being overtly mocked with quotes from judges like, "That's your best argument is that the average American won't be able to figure out that the cat feed he's getting on TikTok could be manipulated, even though there's a disclosure saying it could be manipulated?" Prelogar in general found herself struggling to defend the claim that the attempted ban was based on data access and not content (which would be unconstitutional), why there were no alternatives if the claims were based solely on data access, and the implications for any other foreign company that has access to user data (which is basically all of them). TikTok was met with some tough questioning but generally responded competently.
[1] - https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/12/majority-of-court-appears...
[2] - https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-us-supreme-court-ora...
I read the transcript also, and from what I read, I don't disagree that Francisco answered competently, but he may have been given an impossible task. The law was upheld, as I suggested the justices were leaning towards. I didn't see the decision being unanimous, but that's the way it came down.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-17/tiktok-ba...
Yip, gotta say I'm extremely surprised - not that it passed per se, but by 9-0?! I wish more of the justices wrote opinions. Gorsuch's opinion was pretty enlightening, but simultaneously even more confusing. Apparently the judges deemed the law of a "compelling interest" and "content neutral" which enabled it to sidestep a "strict scrutiny" of Constitutional appropriateness.
Yet his opinion was almost entirely critical of the arguments that justified such. And it also seemed to include misinformation (unless it happens that I'm misinformed) suggesting that the TikTok app could access "any data" - a term which he himself put in quotes and also italicized - about anybody in a user's contact list. He said it included, but was not limited to photos and personal information. And this leaking of data of non-consenting users was apparently a significant part of the case. I'd be beyond surprised if the Android/Apple APIs bleed any substantial amount of information through contact access alone.
Interesting times we live in, as always!
What, they should just shut up and sell? They're getting extorted.
Yeah it’s about that algorithms could radicalize the population or turn them against each other
> I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead
Somewhat paradoxically, I am actually more comfortable giving out private data to foreign countries than my own. I mean, what is Xi Jinping going to do with a US social security number? If I am in the US, it will be hard for bad people in China to reach me, because there is a border between the two countries, in every sense of the word. There is no such protection if me and my data are both in the same country.
Xi Jinping can have my social security number, in fact, he can have my whole life, it is not like he is going to do anything to an random guy who lives in a foreign country. I will definitely won't give these data to a neighbor I barely know because my neighbor can do something I don't want him to do with it and may find some motivation to do so.
Are you aware that almost all of the scam calls, phishing emails, and other attempts to separate you from the currency in your bank account arise from outside of the US?
Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users. You can imagine how well they are up to that task.
it's still much harder for overseas scams to succeed against someone who's tech savvy vs domestic identity fraud. There's simply a lot more barriers to moving money outside of the country
> Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users
Historically speaking this is actually the opposite. Many critics of globalization have pointed out that you can directly track trade deals to massive spikes in border funding, much stronger enforcement of intellectual property laws, etc. Research actually shows a huge decrease in the dissemination of ideas, language, etc across borders where trade deals have been enacted. Paradoxically, globalization has made us more siloed off from each other
This is a rather poor take. Individually it's "probably" not much, but when you start putting the data together in bulk you have a social network graph of huge parts of an entire country. That and everything they like and probably work on. If you can get things like location data, then you can figure out what entire companies are doing. You can get insight into secret projects. You can figure out what small companies/contractors to install moles in.
It is literally the biggest spy data gold mine on earth.
It's infinitely worse for someone abroad to have your SS because it is worth it for them to try for several days to scam you for just a few dozen dollars. There's an entire industry of scam farms run in Cambodia by CH gangs.
Exactly. There are people deleting menstrual tracker apps in the US because the information might be used against them by law enforcement. But what's the risk to them of the Chinese government having that? Other than turning it over to the US authorities, of course.
Funnily enough, the lawyer who quit Meta has resorted to doomposting on .. Linkedin. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/meta-lawyer-lemley-quit...
My tiktok feed was night and day better compared to IG reels. IG reels is simply attrocious memes. Like the same recycled crap over and over again. Where my tiktok feed always felt fresh. Makes me embarrassed that Zuck and co can't make the feed better. I thought this was America!
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
Yknow creators get paid _by tiktok_ to do natural ad placement in their videos?
It’s just as fake as everything else, if not more so.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect
They're very different, and I understand what you're getting at comparing it to the hyper-manufactured perfectly glossy Instagram culture, but I wouldn't call TikTok 'authentic'.
Of course, Tiktok is large and there's many different subcultures there, but overall I think TikTok is heavily drenched in Irony. It's a stark difference to the very fake Instagram, but that doesn't make it authentic.
Are tiktok dances 'authentic'? They might have started as just innocent kids doing a fun little dance, but the moment anything turns into a trend I think it loses authenticity. The whole NPC live streaming trend[1] from a few years ago was anything but authentic. TikTok 'suffers' from the exact same paid 'influencers' promoting whatever garbage of the day, and even has its own version of affiliate marking spam with 'TikTok shop' junk.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/people-are-pretending-to-be-npcs...
You said a lot of words that are a litmus test proving you almost never use TikTok nowadays. First of all this is not 2020 anymore, you're 5 years late if you think TikTok is still filled with "dances". "Paid influencers" mean nothing in TikTok since everyone has an equal voice and equal shot at virality, see you're still seeing it from the lens of Instagram here.
The NPC live streaming is weird yeah but you cherry picked a trend and then make it about all TikTok. Literally hundreds of trends spawn up in TikTok every month and some of them are damn more authentic than whatever happens in IG reels. Some of the successful original trends even pick up in Instagram or YouTube.
I use tiktok every day. Maybe I don't know what 'authentic' means, but I don't think most content on tiktok is authentic. I think it is a particular type of fitting to an ideal or trend.
> Equal shot at virality
What makes you think that? The process is not open and fully controlled by the company running the show
yes but those types stick to live and tiktok lets you completely remove live from your feed. In fact if i don't want to see joe rogan, peterson, or other such horsemen of the misinformation apocalypse outside of live, I can make that decision on tiktok in a meaningful way. I can actually remove that content from my feed. Good luck getting that to work on youtube or instagram. You'll get that content if you like it or not. Good luck blocking all the random alphanumeric account names posting the deluge of that kind of content, reels / youtube shorts will force feed it to you anyway, no matter what you do.
> I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
Exhibit A for banning tiktok right here
Just break the addiction to both apps. It's not good for you anyway
Link in bio is literally killing instagram, it’s so anti user for the sake of $$ so people don’t link out easily
The best account on TikTok is that old man who champions his cause of stopping circumcision. One must ask oneself why it's not considered on the same plane as genital mutilation in our so called modern civilized society.
A glaring example of the fakeness of insta reels I saw yesterday was comments regarding the LA fires. On multiple reels, I saw the exact same back and forth exchanges between a handful of accounts. I thought maybe it was some kind of caching issue but there were different accounts commenting on in the fake threads across reels. Good way to boost engagement for the bot accounts.
The fact people are using either is mind numbing. Such a waste of life.
TikTok has simply beaten FB and YouTube, its algorithm is much better. That's why it has to be killed now in the US, big tech needs to be protected.
>TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
Probably the most bizarre thing I've read on here in the last few days. You actually believe that what you're seeing on TikTok is real? It's literally the antithesis of base reality. It's a living, breathing delusion.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
I'm shocked how easily manipulated people are by social media. The vast majority of TikTok content is very intentionally produced, largely to attempt to generate revenue or, at the very least, to feed ones ego.
The "real" people you see on there are all, to different degrees of success, actors. Nearly all of the spontaneous/I can't believe this happened!/caught on camera style content is entirely staged.
Likewise all of the "freedom of speech must be protected" posts are laughable. Everything on TikTok is ultimately created for and prompoted to ultimately drive profit.
This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Virtually all media you see is very heavily filtered and manipulated to ensure you're getting the right message.
> This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Provide literally one source for this. literally any source.
They completely revamped the UX from being essentially an instagram clone focusing on pictures and written content, to increasingly a tiktok clone focusing on browseable short form video?
Are you going to need similar evidence if I claim that YouTube has been working on being a TikTok replacement as well? It's pretty clear that YouTube created the "shorts" feature as an attempt to allow TikTok creators to trivially repost content.
Considering the TikTok UI is a clone of 抖音's UI, it's more likely that 小红书 copied 抖音 rather than TikTok. 小红书's primary market has always been China and overseas Chinese, foreigners were an afterthought up until this past week.
It's the same kind of mentality that thinks "reality TV" is about real people and not intentionally produced performances.
No 小红书 is literally not a TikTok replacement. The app is only very partially short form video, while most of the posts are more like pinterest. If you are talking about the recent UI changes that made it look like TikTok, I'm sorry to break it to you but I think that's just a coincident.
The comment and quote is telling of the zeitgeist. I would be more aghast by it, but then I remember that my SSN has been a subject to multiple data breach notices in past year.. so.. what is one more bad actor at this point?
Exactly. They keep fear mongering about China stealing our data but when these companies leak every single piece of sensitive data about hundreds of millions of americans they get a slap on the wrist. Tells you exactly where their priorities are.
What I don't understand is what's with all the China apologists around here, it's absolutely insane to me to see how even here, but also on reddit, for example, there is this wave of praising everything that a dictatorship does, do people really believe that what China does is ok and something to follow, or is it just propaganda? And no, I'm not ignoring all the bad stuff in the west, but I'm a bit afraid of the Chinese model appreciation.
Honestly I don't see a lot of people praising China who are against the tiktok ban. It's not just that our opinion of China is high, it's that our opinion of the US government is very low and they are our government, so why be worried about a foreign power when you feel like your own government is actively setting you up to fail, lying to your face and doing horrible shit.
I'll definitely admit that China is doing some horrible shit. I'm not the most educated on all of their issues but from what I've seen it's not great. But I'm also not convinced that TikTok is as much of a critical intelligence/espionage tool as much as the government claims it is, and I've seen a very real positive influence on people's connection with each other, and a frankly insane amount of mutual aid content on tiktok.
I am seeing a lot of people talking about how they have discovered that Chinese people are very welcoming and polite when you talk to them online. IDK, maybe I'm just missing the pro-chinese government stuff you are.
YouTube Shorts doesn't even get a mention?
It's more like telling people that they're gonna have to visit a mobile site instead of use a mobile app.
Strange, I found Instagram Reels' algorithm to be much better suited to my interests than TikTok's, and I've tried both multiple times, deleting them multiple times and seeing if it would improve, but TikTok's never did.
Very interesting. To me TikTok is nothing but memes and useless stuff. Whereas Instagram has been an amazing community for many of my passions. And now Threads is gaining in popularity as well (it really feels like hope scrolling in comparison to X's doom scrolling). I wish it wasn't owned by Meta, but if TikTok actually gets banned I would say good riddance. Something about Instagram/Threads is just perfect to me.
"“I would rather stare at a language I can't understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday."
https://www.wired.com/story/red-note-tiktok-xiaohongshu/
Is it actually Instagram Reels that is inauthentic, or is it the content that people post there? The Instagram Reels service is just that - a service people can use to post videos, same as TikTok. It's the people who choose to use the service that cause it to seem inauthentic, not the service itself. If everyone migrated from TikTok to Reels overnight, then wouldn't Reels become more "authentic"?
The content doesn't matter. There's more than a lifetime supply of I'll relevant kinds of content on both platforms. The algorithm for curating your feed matters.
"The algorithm" doesn't matter as much as you think it does. If all the videos have metadata, it's quite simple to suggest another video to someone if they just watched a similar video. I watch how my wife uses TikTok, and "the algorithm" is hit or miss. Most of the time it's a hit, but that's because the metadata from the preceding videos (and how long she watched them, or didn't) makes it easy to figure out what she'll most likely want to watch next. Without metadata, there is no "algorithm", and with metadata, it's trivially easy for anyone to produce "an algorithm" that does the same thing, maybe even better than TikTok does it now. I mean, if you do a search about how to put on makeup, then the next 10 videos you see are going to be about how to put on makeup - that isn't exactly an irreplaceable algorithm.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect
I feel like this is what so many people (including myself) are missing about TikTok.I'll be honest I saw TikTok largely as an "extension" of Reels and vice-versa where folks with a following on one will post to the other because they are so similar and that would increase their reach.
I wonder what would happen if we shut down all the socials.
HN excluded of course.
that would be an extremely interesting experiment. Young people would probably feel completely lost, unsure of where to get "news" from. Actually having to go websites and search for stuff :)
Reddit is absolutely terrible, it has an extreme far left bias and banned anyone with a different opinion.
Imagine outing yourself as someone who uses these mind numbing apps.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity
Oh wait, you're serious? Let me laugh even louder!
How do I downvote this.
>TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness...
LMAO
"At this point, we have to accept that younger generations—precisely the people who have been raised on quantified audience feedback for their every creative gesture—have an unrecognizable conception of authenticity."[0]
[0]https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-mrbea...
Thanks for that link! Really interesting.
You're welcome--this was on the HN front page earlier this week, so my taste here is crowdsourced.
The migration app of choice appears to be .. xiaohongshu, or "little red book". I'm guessing this won't last since it wasn't intended to have lots of Westerners using it and neither government is going to be happy with that scale of unfiltered contact between ordinary Chinese citizens and US citizens.
In the meantime, it's the place for Luigi Mangione memes.
Related ongoing thread (though not much there yet):
‘TikTok refugees’ flock to China's RedNote - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709236
for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book despite the association, obviously they could have been better about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in either language:
The social media app Xiaohongshu (小红书) does literally translate to "little red book" in English. However, this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was informally known as "Hongbaoshu" (红宝书) meaning "red treasured book" and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (毛主席语录).
The apparent connection in English comes from translators using "Little Red Book" for both terms (maybe due to training or an agenda? who knows, choosing word-by-word translation for one and popular translation for another), even though they're distinct and unrelated in the original Chinese, and of course in the official desired English "RedNote" too.
On Wikipedia, it says he chose red because:
> The Chinese name was inspired by two pivotal institutions in its co-founder Charlwin Mao's career journey that both feature red as their primary color: Bain & Company, where he worked as a consultant, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA.
I would guess that the association to Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for plausible deniability.
As a native Chinese I can assure you 小红书 and 红宝书 are as close semantically to each other as the words constipation and constitution. Few would relate those two.
Even the most leftist Chinese entrepreneurs avoid having their brand names associated to politics; it's just common sense.
The guy went to university in the US and his name is literally Mao.
He knows Americans call Mao's book the Little Red Book. He back-translated it to Chinese word by word. Anyone who would have an obviously perfect product name like that and not use it would be dumb.
There's zero chance a dude named Mao had an idea for a little red book app and thought "Yeah, I'll call it this because I went to Stanford and they're red." It'd be like Google saying they named themselves after googly eyes and not spelling the number googol differently.
> his name is literally Mao
The guy didn't pick the name. "Mao" is the family name he inherited from his father. In the case of Mao Zedong and Mao Wenchao, they have the same family name, but that's about it. The two people aren't even from the same province.
Please, at least learn your lessons first. It's like suspecting everyone with the family name "Manson" to be a serial killer aspirant.
And in case someone wants to hear a linguistic opinion outside of English and Chinese: As a Japanese, I can confirm that those two words indeed have about as much to do with each other as constipation and constitution.
Then he picked a truly terrible name.
But for a lot of people, the character 红 / red is already enough to trigger the association with communism and Mao.
Red is the "good," lucky color in Chinese culture. It's the color of the new year, of weddings, and of other auspicious events
Maoism-Bainism with Stanford characteristics
> I would guess that the association to Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for plausible deniability.
Yeah, I mean "Every Chinese citizen has a Little Red Book in their pocket!" is pretty compelling for a social media app.
It's not necessarily political beyond that, but the connection is obviously there.
Reality is stranger than fiction. That’s the reason I would expect to be reported by The Onion aha
Chinese in general love the color red, and the number 8. Luck, wealth, love connotations.
However, for any Chinese people who also know English, the association is obvious.
I asked an actual Chinese person about 小红书 and they assumed I was talking about Mao's book until I clarified.
> an actual Chinese person
None of the "actual" Chinese people I know were confused about the terminology. The average Chinese does not care one lick about anything related to communism or the history of communism in this country. Mao's book is largely a relic of their great (or even great) grand parents age.
However most of my Chinese friends were confused about why something that most Chinese find to be a relatively uninteresting app in mainland China is suddenly so popular in the US.
It's also worth pointing out that this isn't some serendipitous accident, 小红书 has been working to become a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
I don't know which Chinese person you are talking about. I've never associated 小红书 with whatever Mao did back in the day. Hell, I don't think anyone I know made that connection. I only get that idea after watching a video made by a youtuber, who's not Chinese.
The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia, trying to tie anything Chinese to scary, nefarious communists. I doubt that they were thinking of Mao at all when making the app, Xiaohongshu is an app tailored for young, wealthy, cosmopolitan Chinese as an alternative to Douyin which is more for the masses, I wouldn't call that very Maoist.
Antiestablishment-types supporting an ideology like Maoism is at least something I can understand. Antiestablishment-types expressing their loyalty to the establishment of a foreign adversary is significantly more concerning.
When your own government is more of an adversary than a foreign government, the equation solves itself.
This nihilistic outlook may make you feel better, but at the end of the day only creates a void in government that megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill in.
In case if you weren't merely being facetious, your home country at least has some incentive to work towards your interest, no matter how evil they are because they have to pay the consequences of these actions. Even in autocratic China, for example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.
On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...
The people who want to unite Americans might find more success meeting the outliers where they're at rather than framing it as needing them to conform. That approach is what made the outliers cynics in the first place. What would it look like to make real change to address the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?
> What would it look like to make real change to address the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?
Real change will come when those who actually put work into it. Nobody will do it for you. Not China, not Trump, not the DNC. When the NAACP noticed that even the Senators who supported Civil Rights were too apathetic to put together a coalition to pass the Civil Rights Act, they created that coalition themselves. This is level political organizing that actually gets things done, and likely how Meta and Alphabet got this TikTok ban through as well.
Sorry, but I fought and lost. If I have to be under someone's boot, at least I get to choose the boot.
If that's your attitude, you can't be surprised when your side continues to lose. Meta "fought and lost" their first attempt to ban TikTok.
Thanks for blaming me. I give up :)
What a truly insane take. Do you honestly think the Chinese government looks out more for your interests as an American citizen? The fact that you couldn't make the reverse claim in China without being censored speaks volumes.
When you've exhausted legitimate means for change, you begin searching for illegitimate means. Sorry, but at the end of the day, leverage is leverage and if a person in power says "this really hurts," congratulations they've told you their weakness.
the chinese government doesn't care about you one way or another; the US one is actively hostile towards you.
Not true
it probably isnt, and is just a random name, but it feels like the name is a joke about the red scare
> The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia.
Is it paranoia if Mao Zedong is still revered? If the government is the communist party? I realize the CCP is not perfectly communist in many ways but they are unapologetic about communism and their roots.
It is a coincidence that the original work did not mean little red book. But thats how it was translated, and the translation of the app is correct. So obviously now when you have the same name coming from a country that doesn't denounce communism I think it's fair to be concerned about communist influence.
he'll be revered forever the same way geroge washington is. theyre both warlords who founded a country, casting away the prior government and foreign invaders
washington is still liked even though he was a notable slave owner
Mao Zedong should not be revered even if George Washington is worse than Hitler.
What you're doing is called "whataboutism."
..did you only learn chinese academically or something? anyone in china would think of Mao if you said 小红书 (well, at least before the app)
So they're moving to a video site named "Red" plus a four-letter word?
TikTok, you've changed! But maybe not that much.
I can't believe TikTok is not just getting around this by using the philosophy many people use when they are forced to change passwords. Just add an "!". TikTok: "We arn't TikTok, we are now TikTok!"
In English, it seems to be called rednote. But I doubt that it will be a real successor. At the moment it's a funny meme, and for some people satisfied cultural curiosity. But we already see the problems appearing, from the poorly localized interface, to people getting banned for reasons outside their understanding.
My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.
My kids in HS and their friends all downloaded “Red Note” this week. I said “what about Reels?” — “That’s for you and mom”.
Well technically I am in high school and Neither have you used ever instagram (okay maybe for that one time , I wanted to propose to my crush , (turns out she didn't have insta , so I had to talk to her friend asking her on my behalf where they said no [aww man])
and I live in India , so tiktok's banned. There are many indian alternatives to tiktok's that I have seen , But rednote being chinese just makes me wonder if its gonna survive.
Y'know things are just different yet so the same. The same fomo happened during the facebook time is now happening with red note.
“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” as Mark Twain is often reputed to have said. (I’ve found no compelling evidence that he ever uttered that nifty aphorism. No matter — the line is too good to resist.) (source https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/)
Wait, you proposed to your crush? Proposed as in marriage proposal and crush as in romantic feelings for someone seemingly unattainable? You also asked her friend to ask for you via Instagram?
I know we come from very different cultures and I have no intention of judging you, but can you perhaps give me a clue as to how this would work? I'm intrigued, to say the least.
I'm from India too (but at-least a generation older than this kid) and to clarify:
proposed = asking for a date or if he's too forward / self-centered then asking her to "be my girlfriend"
crush = a girl I like but haven't told that to her or shown it in public
And yes for kids in school it's quite common to initiate conversations through mutual friends because otherwise gossip spreads too quick and can sometimes be damaging (both emotionally and socially).
Uh okay, I totally misunderstood then, sorry to all :) Also thank you for the explanation!
I’m guessing proposed to go on a date
How do the youths feel about Snapchat's TikTok knock-off? Is Snapchat available in India?
Proposal via instagram is certainly a move.
I guess propose means „asking out“, or he proposed to her over her friends afterwards and they said no…
That's surprising to me. I'm 23 and Reels is, as far as I was aware, a big complimentary app to TikTok in my generation. To frame it as a Reel I saw;
"TikTok is vape and Reels are cigarettes".
TikTok's algorithm is _super_ curated and targeted, like a Mr. Beast video. Instagram's is pretty good but if you can get your algorithm to the brainrot cluster with everyone else then you'll get a lot of out-of-left-field, grungier content you might not find on TikTok.
I think once RedNote gets banned or the meme fades people will mainly flock to IG. There's still a void of creator based features that IG can't fill, so maybe a competitor will pop up if IG can't replicate the environment well enough.
Counterpoint here, I'm 32 and would have to disagree on the complimentary piece.
In my group of friends, the reels/shorts crowd have eased off on keeping up with the latest fads/memes. Its similar to the old meme cycle of them starting on 4chan and some filtering down to Digg/Reddit, you end up with them being watered down or receive them extremely late in the fad cycle.
Reels have a few problems, the biggest one is randomly getting served gore/death videos. This has never happened to me on tiktok. I feel like (cant substantiate this) reels pushes sex/thirst content more than tiktok does. The final one is the actual social aspect of tiktok vs reels, the comments and interactions on reels are very abusive and spammy compared to tiktok.
I do agree with you about RedNote being a fad, its artificially inflated but its possible the astroturfing of "interaction" will lead to a sustainable level of organic/real interaction with the app. IG is not great for communities.
You're 32 i.e. too old to really matter for this market. The companies are battling for 14-23 year olds.
He's likely to have more disposable incomr and go through a crisis of some sort that many people fill with buying, whilst also deluding themselves they're still in their 20s. I think mid 30s is a pretty hot market for advertisers.
I mean we’ll buy anything with a Harry Potter logo on it, so yeah.
I really hope people will unflock from most social media, at last for now that it is really at its worst. Perhaps in time, after building some open source social media platforms that does not have these big corporations in charge, things will change for the better.
I disagree I could never get past the dopamine bait posts on Reels to genuine conversations like I could on TikTok
I use none of these things and that still hurts more than it should.
Pretty much Insta/X is for genx and millennials, Facebook is for the boomer gen. Tiktok was for zoomers, when i was a teen till like 23 i hated being on the same cringe ass social media platform as my mom. Another teen trait is rebellion.
> In English, it seems to be called rednote.
I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
> My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.
If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.
> and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it
"Little Red Book" is the literal translation of the original name but that's not the only way companies approach global markets, especially with longer to say names. It looks like they sometimes use "REDNote" (as it appears in App Stores), "RedNote", and sometimes just "RED" depending on the context (e.g. their advertisement/promotional email address is red.ad@xiaohongshu.com).
As to how they got there with it? "Little Red Book" is just an awkward mouthful to refer to compared to the alternative forms they used.
You're being facetious. The name Xiaohongshu is clearly a reference to Mao's book. And it's incorrectly translated as "Red Note" specifically to avoid the reference, not because it's a "mouthful".
If there was a German app called "My Strawberry" and you found out that the original German name translates to "My Struggle" you'd be very curious as to why the English name is so different and what they're trying to hide.
Re: Xiaohongshu - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42714339
Can you explain the connection between "kampf" and strawberries? I don't speak enough German to get it or Google it.
Its a reference to Hitler's book Mein Kampf
I'm not sure where the humor or joke was supposed to be nor where I claimed the original name lacked said association. Similarly, I don't particularly see "RedNote" as a well aimed choice for a rebrand set about for the purpose of distancing the app from communist associations.
TikTok doesn't use their literal translation either. Not because the name had a certain association but because it'd've also been a terrible way to market the app globally. I could give some credit to the idea there may have been more than a singular reason for changing the name but I can't buy the reason other apps also do is not at least a major factor, if not the largest.
Also, not coincidentally, explicitly Communist-coded which isn't helpful for not getting banned in the US.
What law is that exactly?
"Protecting Americans’ Data From Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024"
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520...
https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7520/BILLS-118hr7520eh....
One could argue, and I think with a strong case that if this law applies to TikTok, it would also apply to Twitter (Saudi investment) and Snapchat (also Saudi investment).
Saudi Arabia is not on the list. It's Russia, Iran, North Korea, China.
> (4) FOREIGN ADVERSARY COUNTRY.—The term "foreign adversary country" means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.
As written there are several problems with your theory: A) The bill is about transfer of user information, not investment in a company. B) Saudi Arabia owns a small, non controlling interest in Twitter/x C) Saudi Arabia is not on the list of foreign adversary countries
So you’d have a hard time making that ‘strong’ argument.
Unstated, I implied that Saudi Arabia should be on the list. That maybe the list should be behavioral instead of statutory.
SA has lead directly and indirectly to the loss of more American lives than any of those countries.
9/11 was perpetrated by mostly Saudis. Sum the knock on deaths as you will.
The killing of Jamal Khashoggi https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45812399
We are trying to get away from Saudi influence and control so much that we look the other way while we pump poison into our water. So much so that the Simpson's even have an episode devoted to it where Marge exclaims, "the water is on fire!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ29JFoVqCE
Maybe the list should be behavior based?
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has provisions explicitly excluding protections for Communist organizations.
> > In English, it seems to be called rednote.
> I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
I'll tell you a funny one like that in another language:
Instagram reels are well... short-form videos usually with music/audio and effects.
It's pronounced something like "real" but longer.
Anyway, in French that word "reel" is printed the same but since most people don't practice spoken English it's read and pronounced "réel". Something like ray-hell (notice the é). And it annoys me to no eeeend :D.
So, among French-speaking community management crews and social network teams you hear "réel"/ray-hell all the time instead of "reel".
And how do you translate "réel" into English ? You guessed it: it's "real".
It's called REDnote—小红书国际版 in the Google Play store. That's the exact way it is currently listed.
> and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
It's actually just what it's called in the US app stores: "REDnote—小红书国际版"
Little red book means something different in 1970s China. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...
People are trying to do away with that association, but it still boggles my mind why the app is called LRB in the first place.
Yeah but "little red book" (xiaohongshu) in mandarin is not actually how the original Mao Little Red Book is called in Mandarin, either formally or informally. Informally in mandarin it's called hongbaoshu (literally "red cover book" and formally, as you can imagine, is like Quotes from Chairman Mao).
So this is a case of translators with an agenda translating two phrases with different original mandarin renditions (hongbaoshu and xiaohongshu), and picking and choosing the style of translation (base on usage vs based on character) to get the English translation to merge both of them as "Little Red Book".
Not really. Mao's book has been known as the "Little Red Book" in English for decades, well before the app existed.
And the characters for "小红书" directly and literally translate to "little", "red", and "book". It's the most literal and obvious translation of the name, no agenda needed. Go ask any Chinese person.
The app didn't even have an English name until recently. It was just "小红书" which any Chinese person would render in English as "Little Red Book". "RedNote" is a recent branding exercise.
> If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.
We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds. Unless they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.
> We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds. Unless they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.
The way the law is written, any adversary-controlled social network with more than 1 million MAU could be affected.
I think they'd ban it if it started gaining traction outside of Chinese immigrant communities. And it'd make sense to do it early, now that they have the legal power to do so, since it'd avoid controversy. No one would have cared about the TikTok ban if they did it when it was at 1-2 million MAU.
Because the posts are called notes and the book is a notebook, capiche?
It's branded on google play as “REDnote”
Tiktok is buggy, lacks undo in obvious places, and has seemingly random transient UI changes. Nobody cares.
Rednote could be a fad that fades, but technical problems won't be decisive.
As a casual observer, I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious successor? The UI is better than TikTok ever was and a lot of the most popular creators are already mirroring their content there?
Shorts has a way worse algorithm, I don’t use TikTok because it’s too addictive but I get bored of YouTube shorts after like 5-10mins most times, which actually for me is a Feature but for YouTube itself is a drawback.
Not disagreeing with you as TikTok obviously works for a lot of people, but its recommendation algorithm never came anywhere near working for me after several attempts at it over fairly long periods of time.
I can't say I like YouTube shorts a lot, but there's often some I find interesting in a long enough window of time — the problem there is more the signal to noise ratio than the volume of the signal. TikTok just feels like my personal signal is just nonexistent.
Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on under the hood. There's such a huge difference between how much people like TikTok and how I feel about the content, and I don't understand why TikTok would have such a hard time with me in particular.
In general I'm kind of souring on algorithmic-driven social media, or at least short format (video or text). I don't have anything against it in principle, I just find I enjoy longer format posts and articles more in experience.
Tiktoks algorithm takes a while to get used to but it is pretty tameable. Quick way that works for me:
- avoid attempts based on "unliking" things, I'm pretty sure it treats it as engagement. Instead swipe bad content away.
- avoid "accidentally engaging", like replying to a comment you feel is wrong or watching something you don't like because you were trying to see where the speech was going. Disengage ASAP with unwanted.
- positive feedback for whatever video starts getting close to what you want.
- positive implies staying the whole clip, liking, viewing comments, commenting, liking comments and the strongest of all, sharing the video (you can send it to a telegram conversation with yourself or whatever, not sure if the link you shared ever being opened is accounted for but I think nope). Do this on purpose, like if a video is cool just open the comment section and like all comments without looking.
-try to "navigate". If you want to see tech and it's currently showing you music, maybe engage with music production or Spotify tricks when they appear. It might not be the tech you're looking for, but it's closer to tech than a teenage girl dancing. You'll eventually be shown things more relevant to you, at which point you grab that current.
Also do not try to rush the process. I think updating your interests is not instant, and session time might be a metric as well.
This is fascinating, I'm curious -- do you find yourself generally thinking in this way when using TikTok? Do you find that your peers that use TikTok do something similar?
This is just completely foreign to how I consume media. The idea that I need to try and "trick" an algorithm into showing me what I want is just completely unappealing. I'd much rather go somewhere else and actively seek out the content that I want, rather than trying to fight a system that seems like it would prefer me to be a passive consumer.
"Passive" not in the sense that I shouldn't be engaged, clearly, as the algorithm rewards engagement. But passive in the sense that I should not be seeking out what I want to see, I should just be reactive based on what I am shown, and then the platform will decide from that what I really want.
Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why would I want to bother with that?
>do you find yourself generally thinking in this way when using TikTok? Do you find that your peers that use TikTok do something similar?
Yup. It was new to me, as I learned from younger friends. To them it's obvious it's ride or be taken for a ride - not doing this active navigation, they'd compare it with surfing reddit using just the default frontpage unlogged.
In fact people even troll each other, for example by sending someone a mormon speech or an untranslated meme from India to screw with their feeds.
I have to say that in a way it's way better than YouTube or Instagram, where you can't really tame the thing and it will suddenly decide for a month that you like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro because you watched a video about bodybuilding.
>Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why would I want to bother with that?
Because a huge amount of interesting content is there. I also prefer the old style, but I'd rather begrudgingly adapt than be left behind in progressively decaying platforms - it is what it is.
You don't have to do any of this. He's just explaining more about how the algorithm works.
To a first approximation, TikTok simply shows you more of what you watch. If you swipe away a lot of stuff in the first second or two, it stops showing you that kind of stuff. If you watch complete videos, it shows you more like that.
I'm aware that this is how the algorithm works, but the parent comment is not just explaining how it works, they gave suggestions based on things that "work for me".
So I am specifically trying to sus out how common it is among tiktok users to have this sort of strategic thinking around the algorithm, since it's not something I've heard much of before.
This is very common and I would even say a necessary part of using algorithmic social media now, basically awareness of the algorithm and interacting with content in a way that keeps your algorithm tuned to what you want. For example I avoid clicking anything political on YouTube because as soon as I do, my suggestions become full of political ragebait.
My cynical take is that a lot of the people for whom the tiktok algorithm "didn't work" simply weren't pleased by what the algorithm (correctly) thought of them. It's like the 40 year old truck driver that complains it's just hot girls dancing. No, my dude, you just ALWAYS stay to watch the girls dance, you just don't want to admit it.
In general, it "just works" after a short period of maybe searching for specific terms just to "seed" the algorithm.
I don't think that's cynical, necessarily.
But if you're used to your media telling you who to be instead of having media be responsive to who you are, it might feel very disconcerting.
Or maybe it's precisely because one will just watch hot girls dance if given the opportunity, that one would not want a social media feed that caters to your most base desires.
I'm in your boat. I tried out TikTok out a few times, including making a new account, but it never showed me good content. I had maybe one or two longer sessions, but never felt the need to go back, like I (unfortunately) do with Reddit or Youtube. I could never understand why it was so popular, but maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.
I think that's part of why it's always been a little bit of a head scratcher for me — I didn't really go into it curmudgeonly, I was genuinely interested in it, people seemed to like it, and I was interested in something new. It just never worked out at all for me.
I even had people telling me in all seriousness "I must secretly like the content", as in the algorithm knows better than I do what I like. Which is kind of a weird and maybe even disturbing idea to buy into if you think about it.
I was told to keep at it, which I did. I'd put aside for a long time, go back to it, repeat the process over and over again. Eventually I just gave up. I always felt like it was targeting some specific demographic by default and never got out of that algorithmic optimization spot for me.
Anecdotally TikTok has the best content for me as well. I can’t even place my finger on why I like it more than IG. I don’t know if it’s the slight differences in the content if surfaces. Even if I am just looking through music on both apps (I play guitar) something about TikTok is more pleasant and I really am not sure what.
Same with Instagram Reels. Occasionally I'd be scrolling going "man my Tiktok feed is bad today", and then I realise it's IG.
At least between Subway Surfer Reddit narrations and other garbage, TikTok shows me stuff I know I want to see. Instagram reels will start with something I'm interested in and very quickly pivot to people seemingly in the midst of psychosis, or literal porn. No matter how much I manually report as not interested.
it seems to me like tiktok has a you model, where youtube and instagram have an everyone model
It's strange to me everyone acting as like TikTok's algorithm is completely unassailable and will always be better than the competition for years and decades to come. Tech moves fast and Meta/YT aren't just standing around.
If their only differentiating feature is the algorithm, Insta would eat them for lunch eventually the same they did for Snapchat after knocking off that app's big/only claim to fame (stories).
The discussion seems to be TikTok's algorithm is so good no one could ever possibly compete. I really don't think that's the case and TikTok really has no moat whatsoever.
> It's strange to me everyone acting as like TikTok's algorithm is completely unassailable and will always be better than the competition for years and decades to come.
I'm not seeing this sentiment. More that none of its competitors are so obviously ahead of the pack that we can easily predict TikTok's natural successor.
5-10mins seems like a perfect algorithm to me.
If you have more time, then you can watch normal youtube videos or TV shows...
there are so many low quality shorts, really makes it feel like a waste of time. never had that feeling on tiktok
I feel a lot of people have compare TikTok that they have used for countless of hours and where the algorithm has zero'd in in their preferences to a more vanilla YT Shorts. I used shorts for a few months heavily, and pretty much every video was in some way relevant to my interests (which is also why I don't consume short form video anymore, it's waaaay to addictive).
It doesn't need to be better than TikTok though, just better than xiaohongshu
Maybe people developed a fetish for Chinese.
"Fetish" is the wrong way to look at it, but it does seem connected. The explanation I've seen is basically a unified "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me, so instead I'm going to give my data to China even harder". It's a generation of kids who grew up (mostly correctly) assuming all of their data was already all controlled by corporations in league with the government. Worrying about data privacy is too quaint to even consider.
There's of course a chance of algorithmic meddling, nudging people to a different Chinese app, but I think spite is a far simpler answer.
> I've seen is basically a unified "fuck you ..."
My wife is exploring RedNote for this very reason. "You're telling me I have an easy way to make the US government upset and the more I use RedNote, the more upset they are?" was her line of thinking. She explained that it makes her feel like she has a morsel of control over a group that previously didn't give a damn.
Her father would also be upset if she starts learning Chinese because of his political tendencies. It's basically a two-for-one deal of learning about another culture and learning a foreign language.
I live in the US. I mean, if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me? Oh wait no, that's if I give my data to Google or Meta.
> if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me?
Flip the question around to your familiar villain. You’re a U.S. intelligence chief, and have a trove of embarrassing—possibly worse—information about ordinary Chinese citizens. How can you use this to make them useful to you?
This is a very first level consideration of things like this. In general it would not be particularly useful because exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement which would not only curtail these efforts (or even completely backfire in the case of double agent stuff), but could also blow up into a giant international controversy.
And for what? What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"? The risk:reward ratios are simply horribly broken in this sort of case. By contrast when your own government is doing this to you, you have nobody to turn to, and they can completely destroy your life in ways far worse than the threat of somehow revealing your taste in videos.
> exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement
Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
> could also blow up into a giant international controversy
Like if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM? Or India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil? What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)" [1]?
> What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"?
Everything needs grunt work. Taking pictures. Accepting and transferring funds as part of a laundering operation. Driving an operative around.
The ladies who killed Kim Jong-un's uncle thought they were "making prank videos at the airport and she was required to 'dress nicely, pass by another person and pour a cup of liquid on his/her head'" [2]. Being able to arrange that from afar, with limited outreach, is something Cold War-era spooks could only dream of.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-operating-illega...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam#...
> Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
It does, quite often. Which is why blackmail is done mainly by those who law enforcement would think twice about going after, and/or those who have nothing to lose.
> if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM?
Plausible deniability, and who is there to rally around?
> India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil?
I don't know what incident you're talking about, but the fact you say specifically "American citizen" suggests to me you're talking about someone who had strong connections to India and would be generally perceived as Indian.
> What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)"
That sounds like a propaganda framing. In what sense was this a "police station", much less an illegal one? All they apparently did was "help locate a Chinese dissident living in the US". So the ground facts are more like "the MPS had a private eye working in New York". Which, well, sure; so what?
The options available to that intelligence chief in your scenario are probably bad for China, but are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
I kinda get why the US is banning tiktok, I don't get why you'd expect most of tiktok's users to care about those reasons.
You only need to look at the news for how many Russian citizens are tricked by Ukrainian telephone con-men into giving away all their money and then setting fire to banks/trains/various military installations in the hope of getting it back. I'm already expecting to see that in the US and elsewhere when the inevitable happens. Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens, how easier would all of this be?
You can't make extraordinary claims like that without providing a source. Especially considering Wikipedia has this to say:
> In August 2023, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued official warnings about a new form of phone fraud in which Russians are forced to set fire to military enlistment offices through pressure or deception. The authorities claim that scammers call from the territory of Ukraine and choose elderly Russians as their victims. The Russian government has not yet offered any evidence of their claims. Russian business newspaper Kommersant claims that fraudsters support the Armed Forces of Ukraine and organize "terrorist attacks".
Emphasis mine.
> Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens
You don't really have to imagine this.
Kommersant is a way better source than the Russian government anyway.
Your comment just reiterates the same point which I was already questioning. My response to JumpCrisscross already applies perfectly to your comment.
From China’s perspective, the things the US intelligence official could to China’s citizens is worse than what China could do to those same citizens.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for some citizens to feel the same
As a US citizen living in the US, I think it's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the US government. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to even consider, and seems just as ridiculous that a Chinese citizen could feel the same.
Even leaving aside the state's monopoly on violence, agents at any of multiple three-letter agencies could easily ruin my life. An IRS agent could randomly decide to audit my last decade of tax returns. A law enforcement agent (local, state, or federal) could deliberately incorrectly mark my vehicle as stolen. They could SWAT me on a trumped up basis. They could just black bag me, and throw me in some dark pit.
China could probably hack me, and fuck up my digital presence, including my finances. But the US government could easily skip a few steps and just declare those finances illegitimate in a variety of ways much more difficult to undo.
> it's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the US government
Sure, individually. If you think about more than yourself, you should recognise a collective threat that requires a modicum of sacrifice to protect against.
id consider that the sacrifice is the opposite - the local government is a collective threat, and we sacrifice locally built products to mitigate that threat
The local government is made up of the collective. I have a lot more control on what they do than what China does.
> are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
Yes. It's riskier for the FBI to fuck around with an American than it is for the CIA to fuck around with someone in Russia or China. Particularly when we're dealing with extorting someone using embarassing, but not necessarily criminal, information.
Or just, you know, sowing chaos. Again, if the CIA had a list of Chinese citizens who may be mentally unstable and are obsessing over e.g. the Uyghurs, could that not be put to use in a way that's harmful to China and that person?
Your risk of being fucked with by either Beijing or D.C. is incredibly low. ("Fucked with" meaning being harassed for legal behaviour.) Given the existence of such a database, however, the chances of fuckery at the population level is almost 100%. What President wouldn't want a call they could make that would tumble a foreign adversary into chaos for a few days?
Would make a change from fetish for Japan.
You must be 40. Japanese fetish is only for weirdos, whereas 15% of young girls will say their favorite band is a South Korean one.
I don't think that's true anymore. In NYC, at least, the people who are into Japanese culture tend to be black/Hispanic teenage girls, not the classic "basement-dwelling white guy" stereotype. Visit a big Japanese store like Kinokuniya or Bookoff sometime if you have one in your area - I think you'll be surprised!
Or South Korea. :D
A large part of it is obviously negative polarization: you tell people they can't use a Chinese app, they're going to use a different Chinese app. Hence the pictures of Luigi.
It's worth asking why Reels/Shorts didn't take off and those companies had to ask for their competition to be banned instead. Everyone agrees that "the algorithm is better", but this is very hard to quantify. Perhaps something about surfacing smaller creators? Quantity/quality of invasive advertising? Extent to which people feel particular kinds of rage content is being forced on them?
Main reason besides the algorithm is in my opinion that TikTok has wide but hard boundaries when it comes to content. This leads to diverse but relatively safe content.
It is not 4chan where you think twice before clicking a link to avoid emotional damage. It is also not Reddit or Youtube where you do not bother to go because you permanently encounter stuff that is inconsequentially blocked and you are still not safe from trauma. I think most platforms other than TikTok try to be too strict, fail to enforce their unrealistic rules in any comprehensible form and therefore suck for most intellectually curious users.
This has been my experience and it is what people are reporting from red note.
In comparison to instagram I have found it far easier to explore, for instance, black women making leftist political critiques of Harris engaged in long conversations with black women who were actively supporting Harris.
Similarly, it has been much easier to find discussions about Palestine, labor rights, indigenous US culture, and numerous other topics.
I think those conversations are probably find-able on Ig or Yt, but I have had much more difficult time with those platforms. It's been hard for me to find much engaging content that is close enough to my (admittedly anarchistic) political and cultural views that the conversation changes what I think in useful ways, so I avoid that work on things like FB. These platforms do suck for doing anything other than keeping up with pictures of my nieces.
My feeling is that in general the TT algo doesn't really care about US politics so it just shows me engaging content, whatever that might be for me.
People here can call that "addictive", but in doing so it quickly discards any agency for people who have any actual political disagreements with the radically centrist US political mainstream.
I am used to that flippant dismissal- Allen Dulles would have rather believed in mind control than believe that US military personal who encountered Koreans were swayed by genuine empathy for a legitimate political-economic position.
By contrast, my feeling is that various other governments don't really care what folks in other countries think about the world so as long as it's not objectively porn or gore they just let conversations happen.
That is, of course, quite dangerous if your power relies on maintaining narrative consistency for the population you rule- that's why China and other authoritarian folks do things like limit what can happen on social media in their countries...
The whole concept that one's views can be changed by what they were compelled to watch is what leads to the circus of absurdity in modern times. The fact that the media, corporations, and political establishment will all aggressively repeat a statement only to be rebuffed by the public at large seems to have no affect on their insistence on believing in this nonsense.
If it were true than the countless nations which turned to extreme censorship and propaganda to try to maintain themselves would be still standing. Instead, they invariably lose the faith of their people who simply stop believing anything (or supporting their own government) and at that point their collapse is already imminent - even if it might only happen decades later. See: Soviet Union.
Or for some predictive power - once China's economy reaches its twilight years where you have to juke the books and redefine exactly how things are measured just to keep eeking out that 1 or 2% growth per year, their entire political system will collapse. People would be happy being ruled by a group of authoritarian mutated frogs who demanded you ribbit in loyalty 6 times a day, so long as their economy and society was booming from the average person's perspective. It's only when things slow down that people start looking more critically at the systems they live under.
A large part of the effectiveness of the media is normal people think they don't know this.
Media has absolutely wised up to the fact that contrarian attitudes are common amongst Americans. These companies know that if they repeat something nonstop and make it as obnoxious as possible, a large number of people will quickly adopt the opposite viewpoint. That's the desired result.
Reverse psychology is something elementary school kids learn about and use to torment others or do their bidding. It doesn't end in elementary school.
This is nonsense. The media constantly runs overt level 0 propaganda that directly furthers the interests of the US political establishment. It's certainly not some secret 5d chess ploy to turn everybody into jaded anti-establishment types.
Even more so because once you do realize how silly things are (on both sides of the aisle) your favorite media outlet quickly becomes NOTA.
It's not even 5D chess.
They focus on the most ridiculous "controversies" about some politicians that they know people will think are ridiculous, while completely ignoring their actual problems. They say "oh no, definitely don't vote for this person, or that means you're against us!!!" Lots of people then think "I hate this group, so I'm going to do the opposite just to own them." Then you see that these companies are donating millions to those candidates that they're giving fake criticism of.
It's very transparent.
A decade ago, people on the internet said big corps will never advertise on places like reddit because people say bad words there and they don't want their brand associated with it. Turns out companies just stopped posting banners and paid people to do stealth marketing and it's much more effective.
Advertising and propaganda works best when there's plausible deniability. And half the country very strongly believes they can't be advertised to and will never believe any propaganda--they're free thinkers who do the opposite of what the media tells them.
If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
> If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
It's not that they give up, it's that they keep posting level 0 things because that's what their manager wants and can understand.
Do you think the Tokyo Rose broadcasts were some 5D chess ploy to make sure Japan lost the war faster? No, they were people who had a job doing their job. Large organisations are barely capable of getting their members to pull in the same direction. You occasionally see a level 1 reverse psychology ad campaign, but they're inevitably done by a small agency working for a small department and get pulled as soon as they collide with someone higher up who doesn't get it.
Media an entire lifetime ago and media today aren't even worthy of being compared. The methods employed aren't a fraction as complex. WW2 propaganda being ineffective would mean Russia would make zero effort to influence western thinking today. Yet western governments are absolutely panicking because Russian operations are targeting westerners, and they're working.
You could also take the reverse point of view and claim Russians aren't targeting westerners at all, and any propaganda they do make isn't working. Which is possible. But that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
An honest proposition: if these media companies are dumb and completely ineffectual, then you have a multi-hundred-billion dollar opportunity. They're missing out on hundreds of millions of people in America alone. It'd be silly to not take advantage of that by simply starting a network saying what everyone else is "really" thinking, because people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it. [1] Surely media companies aren't documented to be doing this intentionally and some commenters online have realized they're merely dumb and not really trying to just get people outraged so they take the opposite point of view. They certainly wouldn't do that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outrage_porn
You're not considering one simple alternative - and that's the best "propaganda", by an overwhelming margin, is the truth. US propaganda worked during the Cold War era because it was mostly just pointing out true things, like having store shelves stocked full of really cheap and diverse goods. Soviet propaganda, by contrast, failed because the truth was not on their side.
And now we've basically swapped roles. So a lot of Russian propaganda is effective because it is the truth - Ukraine isn't winning, the sanctions are improving Russia's economy (and uniting the Global South) while wrecking Europe's, they didn't blow up their own oil pipeline, and so on endlessly. And vice versa, US propaganda isn't really working, because it's often left trying to make claims that are simply false - the opposite of all of the above would be an example.
As for governments freaking out - it's because of self interest. As everything comes crashing down, people are holding them accountable and anti-establishment candidates/parties are surging (and in many cases taking high office) pretty much everywhere. We're simultaneously living through a geopolitical inflection point with the decline of one great empire and the rise of [something else] (which hopefully isn't just another great empire), and the likely end of globalism. It's a shift that will likely geopolitically define the next century.
> So a lot of Russian propaganda is effective because it is the truth /.../ the sanctions are improving Russia's economy
This is not the truth, very far from it. Western observers are fooled by the official statistics because they've literally never experienced a government blatantly lying and posting completely fabricated numbers. They recognize when governments tweak definitions and try other manipulations, but they are utterly unequipped to recognize completely made up numbers.
For Russian economists, this is nothing new. They are openly sarcastic when they reference figures like the official inflation rate (9.5%), because they estimate the true number to be far worse, 20-25%. They used to base their opinions on independent market research companies like ROMIR that tracked consumer spending habits, but Russian government shut them all down in late 2024.
Russia is getting hit with a similar inflation wave like the world saw during and after Covid, but unlike the rest, Russia cannot climb out of the hole, because they are unwilling to stop the war against Ukraine. War spending is the main cause of the inflation. Russian government is flooding the economy with insane payouts to mercenaries for their utterly unproductive "work" on the battlefield while the production of goods is stalling and the availability of foreign goods is much lower as well due to sanctions. Growing amount of money in the system + less goods available = money loses value relative to goods (inflation).
Vladimir Milov, the former Deputy Minister of Energy, gave an excellent interview where he broke it all down: https://frontelligence.substack.com/p/war-deficits-and-the-r...
It's not like Russia is a closed country, nor is inflation difficult to measure. Third parties don't simply take Russian figures at face value, which is why the numbers from e.g. the World Bank will vary slightly from those of the IMF and then vary once again from the official figures, and so on.
When the Russian economy was briefly under substantial strain when the huge sanctions attack first landed and the ruble fell rapidly, not only did their official numbers reflect this, but they had a more negative expectation than third parties!
For that matter there are a zillion videos you can watch on YouTube of people doing walking tours through various supermarkets and places looking at the availability/prices of stuff. Here's one from some lady a month ago that clearly leans ideologically Western, but nonetheless affirms prices to be somewhat lower than would be expected from the official rates, while complaining about it - https://youtube.com/watch?v=m01-iYSPDt0
Made even sillier if you're aware of Russia's economic history since the end of the 90s. Their economy has for decades been seeing substantial inflation (5-10%) yet even more substantial wage growth. So complaining about prices without even mentioning the change in wages is the sort of behaviour one should expect from people of this sort of bias.
> that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
I don't think anyone believes that they're being successfully targeted by Russian propaganda. A lot of people believe, or claim to believe, that their political opponents have been successfully targeted by Russian propaganda, or that ideas that they don't like are Russian propaganda. But that's not really because they've been convinced of something that strongly goes against their interests/predispositions; it only requires them to believe that their opponents are stupid and they are smart, which they were already predisposed to believe. (And I suspect most of them know on some level that this is something they're professing rather than something they think is literally true)
> people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it
Oh no, people enjoy righteous indignation and so media serves it to them. But the media establishment is not organised enough to direct that, certainly not through some 5D chess logic. Yes you do occasionally see false/slanted stories spread as outrage bait by people on the other side, but when those happen they're done by, like, literally 3 guys, and one of them spills the beans shortly after.
If you want a contemporary example, look at the UK media suppressing coverage of muslim child rape gangs for the past 10 years or so that's now kind of bubbling over into the mainstream discourse. Yes, it's creating a backlash effect, but if that was the deliberate intention then a propaganda payload that takes 10+ years to deliver results is not going to be useful for day-to-day politics (is Russia still going to be at war in 10 years, and if so, with who? Will e.g. Belarus be an ally or an enemy at that point?). And even at level 0 it was never really effective in changing minds - maybe it gave the people who wanted to pretend it wasn't happening an excuse to pretend it wasn't happening, but the people who cared about it managed to find out.
Theories of propaganda masterminds are comforting in the same way that conspiracy theories are - the idea that there's actually some competent entity that's got it all worked out. But in fact any entity large enough to spread propaganda is ipso facto too unwieldy to push anything but the simplest messages.
The reason they lie to the point of absurdity is because media giving up any notion of impartiality and going full ideological has led to a polarization in society (or perhaps it was vice versa - in any case, it is what has happened) and this has gradually led to people believing in caricatures of the "other side" which exist in only extreme cases. E.g. - conservatives believing liberals want to have children reading gay literature and defund the police. Or liberals believing that conservatives want to completely ban immigration and turn the US into some sort of white Christian ethnostate.
Each "side" does share clips of the other sides absurdities to galvanize themselves and their rightness, while simultaneously unquestioningly believing the absurdities their side posts. It's not reverse psychology.
I have no idea how you can believe that media does not affect a person's beliefs.
The evidence is all around you.
You miss the direction of causality. People, especially in modern times, are attracted to media that 'identifies' with their worldview. So you end up with a viewership that matches the ideology of the medium. But it's not because the medium 'converted' anybody.
Or consider things like the USSR where the government strictly controlled all media, there was no media, and even entry/exit from the country was strictly (and generally ideologically) controlled. If media affected people, you'd have had a country of mindless drones of the system. But it was anything but. One of my favorite jokes from the time is, "Why do we have two newspapers, "The Truth" and "The News"? Well that's because there's no truth in The News, and no news in The Truth!" And indeed once they started allowing some degree of expression, it was basically all anti-establishment, leading to some notably great Soviet music from the 80s-90s that parallels the 60s-70s in the US.
I do think media can have an influence on things people know nothing about, but even that comes with an asterisk. War propaganda is the obvious example. Each time we go invade somewhere, or enjoin a conflict, there's a propaganda blitzkrieg about it being the most just action ever against the most evil guy ever. And it does usually work, at first, because people know nothing whatsoever about the conflict. But then over time people begin to learn more and formulate their own views and learn more about the conflicts and opinion starts to shift, even if the media continues the propaganda party 24/7.
And in cases where people already have preformed opinions, this is completely futile from day 0. The obvious example in recent times would be the media effort to try to paint Israel's actions as positively as possible. People simply didn't buy it, because they already had their opinions and so the media propaganda was mostly completely ineffective.
I don't miss the causality at all. I think you greatly overestimate people's willingness to critically examine ideas that are surfaced within their affinity group.
Causality works both ways. People are drawn to their affirming media, but they are also assimilated into it. And it's not like they are unformed lumps of clay before they "choose" what media to consume -- often this is a product of their developmental environment to begin with.
Where they might not have preexisting biases, a framework for thought is provided to them by the group. These groups are sometimes tightly, and sometimes loosely, defined. There is always a fringe. But independent thought is far far from the strongest influence in 99% of people.
This is such a blindingly obvious truth of the world (to me) that I can't formulate a serious counterargument. Can you?
Again there are obvious and mostly endless counter-examples to this. A couple of examples from both sides of the aisle - when Fox News fired Tucker Carslon, their ratings plummeted and he ended up getting [far] more viewers on X than FoxNews gets during prime time broadcasts! When the NYTimes published an editorial from Senator Tom Cotton suggesting that the George Floyd riots and violence should be brought to an end by deploying of the military, their readers freaked out to the point that the director of editorials was "retired", and they publicly announced they would be rethinking about what they publish.
People pick their worldview and biases, and media (in current times) sees it as their role to deliver on those biases. When they don't - the audience leaves and moves on to somebody who will.
The only real superpower media has is to overtly lie to people. And on issues that people know nothing about it is generally effective. But as they learn more about the topic, the views shift more towards what people again choose to individually think about an issue. And as a longer term side effect of this, this superpower is completely self defeating because people begin to completely distrust the media. I could show polls on that but I'm sure you already know trust in media is basically nonexistent. The funnier one is this. [1] The perceived ethics of journalists lies literally right between lawyers and advertisers.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/467804/nurses-retain-top-ethics...
I think you're proving my point though.
While it's true that people follow their affirming media (e.g. Tucker Carlson), they also accept a lot of what he says, without critical thought.
The "facts" he presents are the basis for their beliefs, and since he is very selective and slanted about the information he presents, they believe it to be further affirmation of their preexisting beliefs or biases.
This is the essence of propaganda and manipulation. Fill in the gaps of people's knowledge/belief with something that's plausible and favorable to you, even if it's only part of the story.
Content generation is Propaganda 101. Editorial control of a trusted entity is a higher level. Algorithm manipulation of a (perceived) neutral/noninvolved source is a higher level yet. And personalized algorithm manipulation is basically spear phishing. Which works extremely well!
Well, again I'd look at the examples where a media (or in this case) a media source falls outside what is expected. With Tucker this is easy - he's a very religious person and quite regularly makes his religion a significant part of his arguments, yet few people who follow him support or advocate those claims. In fact he has some order of magnitudes greater viewers than his entire religious group has followers! People follow him mostly for the multipolar and anti-hegemony stuff, but accept (while not embracing) embracing his own distinct takes outside of that because they don't generally run too hard against these worldviews.
Contrast this against the NYTimes. People follow it for the woke, pro-hegemony, pro-establishment stuff. But as per the example with Senator Tom Cotton, if they veer to far from this ideology, far from just accepting it - they rant and rave, and if NYTimes didn't promise to get back on track - they would also have left.
I don't think anyone doesn't believe media impacts how people think.
I do think that you have toan incredibly reductive view of belief formation to think that simply showing someone a series of short videos is enough to change how they think about the world.
There's a whole dialect in our existence within language, but most folks I know think that they are the sole authors of their beliefs while other folks are entirely a product of whatever happens to be in front of them. It's very reminiscent of the Fundamental Attribution fallacy...
Well-executed propaganda does not need to attempt direct change in thought.
It sows ideas that are net-beneficial to the propagandist. Leans into the ones that get traction. Manipulates the conversation. Provides simplistic (but advantageous) refutations of more complex (but more true) criticisms.
This is Psych 101 material here. Not at all complicated. You just need to think on a wider horizon and a longer time frame. Stereotypically, this is a cultural weakness of US Americans. Certainly of its leaders. Other cultures have contrasting reputations, some of which appears to be earned.
reels cannot seem to give me anything other than America’s funniest home videos style content and thirst traps, while on tiktok I get critical analysis of todays events, planet money-esque content, discussion of analytic philosophers i’m interested in, etc. it’s truly no contest.
Reels just wants to basically treat me as a generic male with some bias towards what my social graph likes. I also hate that my likes are public on reels.
e: not sure why this is downvoted, just trying to provide color to an earnest question
This is exactly my problem. Instagram thinks they can just apply your demographics to an algorithm and find what you like. Tiktok figures out your demographic based on what you like. Tiktok listens, ineffectually tries to sell you things, and gives you what you enjoy; Instagram tries to fit you to a mold, and then sell things to that mold, then give you slop popular within that mold.
Planet, money, style economic analysis, is that the vibes woman?
But I would be curious how to make sure I get that kind of content I would love philosophy and current events.
Somehow I’ve trained my algorithm is only show me superhero clips, I think because I was watching all the Marvel movies during the pandemic and then didn’t really use it again since then
I don't understand your first question at all, but tiktok lets you reset your algorithm and try again.
Be diligent about not spending too much time watching something if it's not what you want your algo to be, sometimes I can get in loops where I watch something because I'm confused by it and then just get a lot of confusing content.
Scanlan, her name escaped me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9NdaQPjJlo
mostly morningbrew and actual planet money, but i think her face looks vaguely familiar
I've never saw Luigi or Aaron Bushnell suggested to me by YouTube, unless I search them
I think that's why, just saying
Rednote and TikTok has 'novelty' content type that originally cultivated in mainland China. The memes, reactions pic, etc don't really exist on reels/shorts.
My god, in this thread you can tell who actually used TikTok and who only read about it
it’s painfully obvious
I don't use TikTok, but my understanding is that they are just a lot better than anyone else with the algorithm. Somehow where Meta built a social graph, TikTok built a graph of videos (no need to know who you are, they can just suggest videos based on other videos you watch). And it's apparently difficult to catch up (presumably because they have more users so more data to make better predictions).
That would, IMO, explain why people use TikTok and not something else.
As to where they go after TikTok is banned... I feel like there is also a factor of "Oh you want to ban chinese apps? Let me show you". Not sure whether it will last, though.
I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.
Of course an app you have used for thousands of hours is going to know you better than the one you tried for half an hour
Then be prepared to be surprised? I don't know why its better but it actually is night and day different. The best uneducated way I can describe it is YouTube sticks you into a model that only classifies people in large groups. Oh you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-right talking heads. TikTok has a model that is tailored just for you. Oh you like video game streamers that play Tarkov? Here are some videos of other games similar to Tarkov.
> you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-right talking heads
This is something that infuriates me about youtube, to the extent that I wonder if it's deliberate. Those guys feel like the propaganda the platform wants to sell me, whereas on the Chinese platforms there isn't the sense of HERE IS THE TWO MINUTE HATE PROPAGANDA VIDEO CITIZEN you sometimes get on other platforms.
I wonder if its simply just a pattern over the last N years with Google where they maximize everything for ad revenue. I honestly don't know how TikToks ad revenue looks like but from a consumer point of view it appears for whatever reason they have mostly corporate ads where YouTube has the lowest value garbage (perhaps highest paying) ads on MLM and getting rich through real estate.
Edit: As a weak comparison I think about Prime Streaming vs YouTube or Hulu. Ignoring that ads suck. Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it. YouTube throws whatever highest paying garbage at you as much as possible. I tried Hulu once with ads, painful, every like 7mins you are getting an ad and often the same ad over and over.
It's also worth noting that TikTok has the "TikTok Shop" that allows people to sell directly through the app. Perhaps this allows them to rely less heavily on advertising. I certainly see virtually zero ads on the app. Ideally this is because they've identified that I'm a terrible person to sell ads to, but perhaps they're just less aggressive about pushing them.
> Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it.
Sure, I just stopped using prime when they introduced ads. It's also the number one complaint about the service and it regularly shows up any time the service is mentioned. I also can't remember a single ad played that was actually relevant to me.
Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.
> Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.
I feel like Hulu established early enough that they were partially (or fully) ad-supported. I watched a show for free on Hulu with ads many years before I ever would have considered paying for a streaming service at all. Prime, on the other hand, is something people already pay for (usually for reasons other than just streaming, but that also reinforces that they're paying), so the ads probably come off as worse because of that, even though it's kind of backwards in some ways.
Yea, I commented[1] on this exact observation yesterday, right down to the two topics. It's absurd what gets highlighted as "suggestions."
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42699541
Reminder that YT used to be pretty decent about (music) recommendations until, I’d say, 2015-ish, that’s how I discovered lots and lots of very cool and interesting (music) stuff that I listen to this day.
Not sure how they managed to screw that up, but screw it they did, and nowadays the sidebar, or even the plain search, has become unusable.
Try it. I've been using Youtube for a decade and its recommendations are a total crapshoot these days. TikTok figured out my preferences within 15 minutes just based on which videos I liked and watched, and it can change course extremely quickly if you get bored of a certain topic.
The total number of hours I spent Youtube must outnumber the total number of hours I spent on TikTok by at least 100:1.
For me the normal video recommendations are awesome on Youtube, I regularly find very obscure super interesting stuff in my recommendations.
For shorts it is abysmal, I only get horrible recommendations there - no idea why it is so different.
That's interesting. YouTube's gotten me fairly pinned algorithm-wise over the past few years (I used to never use recommendations at all before that). But my Shorts recommendations seem to just be the regular recommendations, but Shorts versions of them. Sometimes as far as the same channels, or the same people in clips even if it's on a different channel.
I think youtube is deliberately not showing good recommendations to boost ad revenue
When I tried TikTok for the first time in 2020, it had my preferences dialed in within about 15 minutes.
I tried reels when it first released, and gave up after an hour of constantly being shown videos of scantily clad women.
Any video platform is engaged in a constant war against being the OnlyFans sales funnel. Mind you, this also has a false positives ban problem.
it absolutely is, i routinely do a vanilla algo run on reels vs tiktok to compare and it’s crazy how much better it is.
reels is really, really bad - it is surprisingly hard to get it to stop showing you some combination of “funny prank videos” and onlyfans funnel content.
> I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.
I've watched probably 1000s of hours of youtube and it's still pushing crap at me that I would never watch in a million years (edit: eg "How to create Smart Contracts using ChatGPT" or "Abusive tough guy picks fight w the WRONG GUY!"). Maybe it's better if you like a specific genre of video essays or whatever but in terms of a replacement for tiktok it's completely irrelevant.
Reels is at least in the conversation, but the UX is ass and the culture there is a dumpster fire. Granted, I haven't had a meta account for about a decade (the ad obsession just destroys the experience) so this is all hearsay.
Reels is just as bad as you remember, both in content and in presentation (the app is a dumpster fire).
> not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes
Well, and what about the actual content? If all you have is a bunch of garbage it doesn't matter how good your algorithm is if all it can do is find the best garbage to push at the user.
As others said, you should try it. I did, and I was impressed how quickly it gets me to lose a lot of time.
I've put Tik Tok on my phone three different times now and used it each time over a few days and it seemed like I was scrolling endlessly and finding nothing.
YouTube's recommendations are terrible, but I usually open YouTube when I'm looking for something specific and it's amazing in that regard.
Instagram is somewhere in the middle. I mostly follow people I actually know so the videos are interesting because of that.
Are you "liking" videos? That's how I steered it in the right direction because it wasn't doing much for me when I first started using it. It only took a few minutes for it to latch onto my interest and then the watch time took over.
I only ever find something interesting on tiktok by searching for it. I can only watch the people i follow, the "FYP" has totally irrelevant stuff. I too have been trying to like and follow to get it to perform this magic people talk about but the "FYP" doesn't show me stuff I'd like to see like what I intentionally like and follow from searches.
I tried TikTok and it was awful. I didn’t find a single interesting video. I haven’t tried it since. I’m curious what people actually watch on there?
It seems to have just about everything. I use it mostly for bodybuilding, foreign language lessons, and music. FWIW it's known for the short-form stuff, but it also has plenty of long-form content as well.
I suspect that the algorithm is taking in inputs that maybe we don’t consider. Not just swipes or likes, but maybe even how still the phone is while you watch it or if you blink less, signs you’re more focused on the video. Maybe they don’t have access to that telemetry but I think that’s kind of the vein of how they measure attention more than just touchscreen actions
Also, Tiktok don't even require you to be a user to use, exactly because it's kinda irrelevant for them. They will build the algo based on which videos you liked, for how many seconds, replays, etc etc.
I use both and YouTube Short produces mostly just garbage for me. AI voice videos that will get your attention, but has little content. TikTok's algorithm on the other hand is much better and provides quality, half-long-form content.
Shorts is garbage.
There are so many UI elements on top of video that end up blocking what you're trying to see. There is no way to hide them.
YouTube also destroyed its search.
As someone that uses both, YouTube shorts it's _not_ superior. Two very simple reasons:
1. the algorithm sucks 2. it will consistently fail to load content quickly enough when scrolling unwanted content
I spend a lot of time on YT, and less time on Instagram... and 0 time on TikTok, where I never created an account.
YT Shorts exist exclusively for YT creators who want to publish bite-sized pieces of content for their audience with a much lower expectation of polish than their normal longer form content. Perhaps the algorithm also presents "random" YouTubers', too, but the vast majority of what I see is put out by the publishers I'm already following (or other very similar publishers in the same ecosystem).
I would suggest that TikTok's successor is Insta Reels. Reels are almost exclusively entertainment and because they tie into Instagram's broader user/connections network the UX is much better than TikTok. Nobody goes to Instagram to figure out how to replace their garbage disposal -- this is squarely YT domain. If YT Shorts can make inroads in the entertainment market [without feeling like a commercial break between pieces of actual content, which is the impression I have and the way I use it].
It's not as addictive. TikTok mastered the hyper-addictive algorithm.
IMHO good riddance. Anything bad for the mindless addictive chum industry is good for humanity. Now do Instagram, Facebook, Xhitter, etc.
> The UI is better than TikTok ever was
I cannot disagree more. I just scroll on tiktok and tiktok populates the scrolling with videos I want to see, and it takes about ten minutes to signal to tiktok what content you like and don't like. Youtube, meanwhile, is an exercise in a far too-busy UI with thumbnails and comments and text and buttons—it's inherently a desktop app shoved into a web browser. Nice if you want to search for a specific topic and watch a four-hour video on it, but terrible for entertainment or killing time.
The only use I have for youtube are in solving these two problems: 1) where can I find a music video and 2) how do I do x
...but the focus on the interface obscures why youtube shorts won't ever take off: youtube is extremely bad at pushing content I want to watch. I've heard this over and over and over again and I know it's true for me, too.
Let's see if the ActivityPub Loops in time (made by the creator of Pixelfed): https://loops.video/
If I'm not mistaken the 'killer feature' of Tiktok is not the player, but the editor (Capcut?)
Yes, although Capcut is a separate piece of software. You can in theory make content with it for any app. In practice, Tiktok is so dominant that a lot of popular Reels content has Tiktok watermarks on it.
Every time in the last year that anyone has shared me a link to a short video on Facebook or Instagram, it has a TikTok watermark on it. This leads me to assume that most of the content on FB or Insta that I would actually want to see originally comes from TikTok.
No 2x speed playback doesn't help
> I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious successor
It might be eventually.
(GenZ) People are migrating to RedNote now to lift a middle finger. It's more of a meme.
Because Youtube shorts is awful, at least me, as a user.
Most of the content there, it's, well, "shorts", cuts from full videos of podcasts, etc. It lacks real users. It's basically the current youtube creators doing content for Youtube Shorts.
Let alone how the algo it's worse, and you can't download videos :)
Shorts is absolute trash. It does not have critical mass and will repeat the same videos to you over and over.
EDIT: I want to overemphasize just how bad it is. It feels like a project someone whipped up in coding bootcamp over a week. It feels like it has zero ability to pick the next video correctly and it genuinely repeats videos between sessions.
I think in part because of YouTube demonization, which is how TikTok could poach the creators in the first place.
I suspect if they're mirroring content to YouTube, it's more to try to attract audience to TikTok than monetize through YouTube.
Part of it is intentional spite from the users switching; a big part of the push for banning TikTok was based on the fact that it's based on China, so purposely seeking out a Chinese alternative is making a statement. Whether or not you think the ban is justified, I think it's hard not to see the obvious inconsistency in banning only a single app on those grounds that this migration points out.
I've never personally used TikTok, so it's possible my perception is flawed, but to me it almost seems like a dare to the government to prove how serious their rationale is. If the government truly thinks that having data collected by Chinese apps is so dangerous, are they willing to flat out ban _all_ Chinese apps? If so, is that more extreme step still something the courts consider constitutional? If not, was TikTok just a convenient political target rather than something actually dangerous?
Sometimes I visit forums where people share video snippets, I've never seen sexy stuff snagged from Shorts, but a lot from TikTok.
I think both Alphabet and Meta suck at seductive material.
Because for 5-20 dollars you can drive hundreds of thousands of people if not millions of people to your video, product, meme, whatever... Youtube, not so much.
I loathe YouTube Shorts entirely.
TikTok has a great e-commerce integration, no one else is offering this at the moment.
the community on TikTok is friendlier and more uplifting compared to YouTube shorts
both shorts and reels give me so much more brain dead content than tiktok and it’s really hard to get out of that rut
Shorts is almost there. IMHO all it needed to do was be a separate app and not try to get you to sign up for YouTube Premium every 2 seconds.
Reels needs to be more disconnected from Facebook for it do anything similar.
Why do you say the Shorts UI is better? It seems exactly the same to me.
If it feels the same, you're not familiar enough with either app to make that judgement.
Is it not scrolling in either case?
Well it's more... Xiaohongshu is for cosmo PRC cool kids (read: lean wealthy), and also a large ecommerce portal that targets that demographic. Not sure if the userbase is interested in... western and RoW "riff raff" shitting up the content for too long. I say this more as an insult to Xiaohongshu, I like TikTok (or Douyin) because I like seeing entrepenurs sell neon signs and industrial glycerine between my swipes.
"Hey Homie, it's Tony,"
I've never been so interested in advertisements for commercial equipment before that guy.
His accent is fascinating. It's like he learned English as a second language in Rural Georgia.
And that's only one of his accents. The man is a chameleon.
Rest of World had an informative article about Xiaohongshu few months ago, it seems indeed to be a combination of Instagram and Tripadvisor. Chinese people that are able to travel are using it to find the "authentic" places.
https://restofworld.org/2024/xiaohongshu-southeast-asia-tour...
It's also TIGHTLY controlled, with people complaining on Twitter and elsewhere that their posts are under 48 hour review before posting. The rules are also quite strict around LGBT issues etc, and not in favor.
Most of all though it's just a very silly protest, given that the "tiktok ban bill" is really a "hostile foreign-power controlled platform divestment bill" so Xiaohongshu will just be next on the block in the unlikely event that it becomes popular.
> cosmo PRC cool kids (read: lean wealthy)
What does this mean?
XHS is for cool GenZ, bias female, urban, has money / disposable income, think coastal elite. I guess more lifestyle/gram, pushes beauty, fashion, wellness, food, luxury goods etc. Douyin (TikTok) is for masses... "less cultured" audience, more working class / hillbilly, pushes some of the above occasionally but also everything else from cheap widgets to industrial equipment.
Or the Chinese version of instagram, by short
Not really. Little Redbook is like if everyone on Reddit was upper middle class instead of Reddit's low middle class. Plus Instagram daily life and friend photos. Plus TikTok algorithm videos. Plus Tumblr microblogging. We don't have a 1:1 equivalent.
Reddit, except upper middle class, is how HN feels to me a lot of the time.
For more down to earth contents I heard that Kuaishou (They made KLING AI video maker) is more suitable.
well-traveled kids from well-connected families
> it's the place for Luigi Mangione memes
I read a lot about TikTok the last few months from users all over the web. Trust me, that's not what TikTok is actually full of, its just what algorithm you got sucked into, for whatever reason. I assume there's some specific bubble for "current viral thing" that you're locked into. Make an alt and like completely different content, you'll see that your feed will be night and day.
Additionally, what's worse is, I've seen posts of people unable to get out of the algorithm bubble on TikTok no matter how many videos they dislike. I think some people even try blocking the accounts. It's the weirdest algorithm. I assume it works for MOST users (when its not a "MEME" Bubble, its likely content you actually like), but if you shove someone into a niche meme bubble, it can get weird.
tiktok easily lets you reset your algo, not sure if reels does the same
The "it's" to which that sentence is referring is the previously mentioned "xiaohongshu, or "little red book"".
Teens are rebellious & want to be far away from parents.
It disqualifies mainstream apps like Twitter, Reddit, BlueSky, Reels & now Snapchat as well. This leaves Tiktok and now international apps like Xiaohongshu as the obvious alternatives.
The more the US govt. forces youths to use American mega-corps, the less they want to use it.
I don't think rebellion has anything to do with why kids use Tiktok. Nor do I think the US has any interest in forcing kids to use social media...
It’s not why they use TikTok but it’s why they don’t use other social media apps. Once an app becomes too popular with older people the quality and vibes decrease, plus everyone feels awkward about posting.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about outside of generational gaps, new social media apps are fun because you add all the people you’re comfortable with. After some years you now have a ton of connections from past stages of life, and start feeling restricted again in your personal expression.
Plus there’s the dual use issue – IG is too commonly shared now so I have current and former coworkers there plus everyone I’ve ever been interested in as friends or more at a party. So it’s not the place I’d want to feel free and creative.
IG tries to solve some of this with Close Friends and other lists but people don’t really want to spend their time constantly organizing a list of friends.
> IG tries to solve some of this with Close Friends and other lists but people don’t really want to spend their time constantly organizing a list of friends.
Agreed. IG's UI for this is horrible.
I really liked Google+'s "Circles" feature back in the day that let you drag and drop people into different groups really easily and 'assign' posts/content to those circles.
Exactly, Instagram started as a way for me to interact with my social circle. Show people I personally know what is going on in my life and see what is going on in their life. Instagram later on has slowly tried evolving into something else, but mentally I still view it as a place to share with people in my life. On the other hand, Tiktok is a both a global community and a small niche of people who share the same interests as you where you can make memes, enjoy the same content together, converse and witness trends and ideas in real time
> It’s not why they use TikTok but it’s why they don’t use other social media apps. Once an app becomes too popular with older people the quality and vibes decrease, plus everyone feels awkward about posting.
What is the point about the "best algo in town" if the universally popular app can not curate each person's feed differently?
Maybe it is because old people can comment on young people's posts and vice versa?
> So it’s not the place I’d want to feel free and creative.
Alternative account, "Private Friends" list?
No, but rebellion definitely has to do with why there is a shift towards Xiaohongshu, which is obviously even more Chinese than TikTok ever was.
Hilarious categorizing TikTok as non-mainstream. I get what you mean, but the most popular thing is pretty much mainstream by default
Also, Bluesky is in no way mainstream. It's a niche platform used by a handful of terminally online people who really hate Elon. Most Twitter users who aren't hung up on ideology are still there.
parents aren't on Discord
Discord is more of a small-group or individual communication platform. I don't think it's suited as well for the one-to-many or feed-based appeals of social media such as TikTok. (Large, public Discord servers absolutely exist, but they're often themed around something specific; and even if they weren't, you can't just have an algorithm determine which messages in a channel you do or don't see.)
No one is one discord because its UI is impenetrable. Amazing VOIP though.
Even Top 1 in the german app store where TikTok isn't banned. People identify on Red as TikTok refugees
I have a friends group where everybody is hopping to this in the group chat. They are so eager to run from one addiction to another - and I told them so. They are so eager to give China all their data and to focus their own lives around an addictive app. It's baffling. Go live your life, enjoy not being indoctrinated by bullshit and having your time wasted by manipulative algorithms.
It's pretty wild in there...I remember seeing the comment 'IN THE CLERB, WE ALL LEARN MANDARIN'...I went in there and started commenting about Tienenman...curious if I'll get banned. It's very wild to see so many CCP memes and Chinese military people making content. Very odd experience so far.
It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information, is to give your data to another Chinese app instead. Not that I'd feel any less safe with Chinese companies having all my cat picks & ranting than I feel with American companies having the same (particularly under the upcoming regime).
Not that it makes a lot of difference to me, facebook is the only social-media-y thing I use and that is just under sufferance (only way to easily keep tabs on what is happening with some people, mainly family) and because I sometimes like to “breakfast with Lord Percy”. I might try bluesky at some pint as many contacts are moving from fb to there (though that seems rather twitter-like and that has never appealed to me even before I even knew Musk existed).
> It is amusing
Well, the US government has just successfully antagonized a bunch of their citizens...
It's amusing on the "interesting times" sense, no doubt. But it's not something unexpected. They have been antagonizing their citizens for a while by now.
At some point, something breaks and you get either an autocracy or real change. Some people claim they are already there but this is really still not clear.
> It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information
my guess is that nigh 100% of tiktok users think the app is getting banned because the government is some combination of capricious, bought, and incompetent. their stated reasons for banning it barely register.
I think that the law "banning" TikTok applies to any Chinese app with over 1 million US users, so Xiaohongshu/Rednote or anywhere else the TikTok refugees flee will be a target - except YouTube shorts and Facebook/Instagram reels of course.
No, the law doesn't give a users threshold: it names ByteDance and TikTok specifically, and provides a mechanism for the President to add new companies controlled by a "foreign adversary country" to the list. So anything at all by ByteDance is banned, but RedNote is owned by a different company that would have to be targeted separately under this law.
https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7521/BILLS-118hr7521rfs...
> No, the law doesn't give a users threshold
It does have a threshold:
> (ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on which a relevant determination of the President is made pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);
So if it stays unpopular, it's protected from this law.
> but RedNote is owned by a different company that would have to be targeted separately under this law.
I think that's a foregone conclusion if it actually gets popular with Americans.
Ah, you're right—it's not a threshold that automatically kicks in at a certain number of users, but the president can't add one to the list until they reach that threshold. Thanks for clarifying.
I would be amazed if the company who runs that application wasn't working around the clock to make it a better tiktok replacement and to retain this swath of new users.
It definitely won't last because even the medium is different. TikTok is all about short videos, but most of the content on Xiaohongshu are static images, and some even an image of text.
Looks like that app may have a backdoor https://x.com/d0tslash/status/1878959715033694492
The backdoor named "backdoor", the l33t h4ck3rs strike again.
If it's for spying on Chinese people inside Chinese territory, there wouldn't be any need to hide it.
Nah, I don't buy it. Chinese as plenty of programmers who can read code as well as you. This dude is literally dumping symbols. There's no proof that it's actually a backdoor.
And those Chinese programmers can't talk to anybody about what they find.
It has been under heavy scrutiny by the security community for years, it would have already been found had it existed.
Running strings for “backdoor” isn’t quite top-notch technical analysis.
Quite plausible. To what extent can a backdoor escape Android/iOS sandboxing?
> To what extent can a backdoor escape Android/iOS sandboxing?
Chances of that happening are close to 0.
It wouldn't be that hard to keep users separated by location.
Is there a problem with Youtube Shorts? Or Facebook videos?
Yes, they're shoved in user's faces and cannot get rid of them, disable them, etc.
It depends on how they respond over the next 1-2 weeks.
Given how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers and how similar the functionality of TikTok and YouTube Shorts, I feel like the only explanations are:
1. The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a domestic one
Or more likely, given that there are so many other industries that didn't get a ban:
2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
The big issue isn't data security; it's propaganda. Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't) there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans. Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
And even if you disagree with the national security reasons for disallowing China to control a major U.S. social network, there is still the issue of trade reciprocity - nearly all of the U.S. Web companies are banned in China.
Looking forward to Europe banning Meta and X considering how their CEOs are meeting weekly with their government overlord, quite clear those social networks are in the pocket of the new US government.
No, no, you can't do that. Than they'll come after you and claim how you're not free, you don't support free market and whatnot. Banning is tool for them, but not for you.
Any country is free to do this.
TikTok is literally banned in China (along with YouTube, Facebook, Insta, etc, etc).
Is it banned or is it just not available due to the owners already having an app that does the same thing (douyin)?
Yes, it's region banned (not just by IP so VPNs don't even really work well). You'll get a 404, if you try connecting, and your packet rate won't support video through a VPN. Note that it's also banned in HK and India and parts of Europe so it's not really anything new to ban it when you're talking about almost half the world's population.
Couldn't people just say "but Instagram" is just TikTok? Is it really the "same thing" just, because the same people have control, if the algos, servers, content, moderation/censorship, and promotion are different? Like BlueSky, Twitter, and TruthCentral are all the same thing? Or if we want the "same company" company Allo and Hangouts? I mean everyone loved Allo, right, you can have that one.
The US didn’t “ban” anything. If the EU required Meta to divest I imagine they would do that rather than shut down and lose billions.
You think US Meta would relinquish tech to EU Meta? You think they're better then TikTok?
Yeah, we're not buying that story anymore.
US tech companies sell themselves to European tech companies all the time, Meta would definitely sell.
TikTok's main user base is the USA. If TikTok sells their US app, they can't support themselves on the rest of the world. TikTok isn't even the leader in China.
US Meta can definitely support itself at it's current size without EU Meta.
Are there any numbers for that? I highly doubt tiktok is doomed to fail just because is banning it.
It's still way more popular than any Meta or US app for that matter, is right now.
The company scaled to support the world’s largest economy.
Remove that. Recognize they can’t compete in #2 (China).
Then how can you justify their current scale?
What do you mean by more popular than any meta or us app? WhatsApp has 2b monthly active users, where as TikTok has little more than 1b.
More important than user count is user economic purchasing power.
This ban only applies to foreign adversaries (e.g. China, Iran, and Russia).
Which the United States clearly is trying to become with Mexico, Canada and Denmark, UK and Germany. so far.
Hum... Brazil already demanded explanations about the new Meta moderation rules. I remember reading the same about the UK, but I'm not sure.
1. CEOs meeting the President is not evidence of govt. control.
2. Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella .
>Europe is an ally
Was? Isn't a threat of invasion of Nato territory something that ended that situation.
Sure "it's Trump being an insane dickhead", but y'all elected him, then suspended rule of law for him.
Europe is sitting waiting to be shafted if we don't assume Trump will continue to do the absolute worst, most hostile things. We should be taking the threats of invasion seriously despite them appearing to be a way to, for example, invade Panama and not look as insane as was expected.
> Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella
That's an absolute illusion. And definitely absolutely wrong to call it ally. Most govs don't want to have anything to do with trump, musk and all this bullshit.
Most European countries will basically make no deals or anything for 4 years just like we did last time.
There is a literal war thread open of trump claiming to invade parts of Europe. We are pissed. Not allies
You know this was happening before elon bought Twitter, right? Secretly?
Members of congress were texting and emailing with execs from Twitter and Facebook to request post suppression. During an election.
Musk making threats against the UK government has gone down badly: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/uk-counter-ext...
Musk, is a representative of Trump's government, right?
A senior member of Trump's government is trying to mess with our political system - how is this not catastrophic for diplomatic relations, coming on top of the threats to our NATO allies?
The US is not an enemy to the EU, while China is a clear enemy to the US.
The difference is quite easy to easy to spot.
I mean under Trump the US becomes less and less of an ally, and more an opportunistic bully.
> Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't)
Posting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook will get your account terminated for "supporting terrorism". The pro-western censorship regime on FB is extremely strong. US lawmakers specifically cited the amount of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok as why they were banning the app.
Sources:
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
The HRW report’s list of complaints starts with censorship of praising Hamas (a designated terrorist org) and “from the river to the sea” (a call for the elimination of Israel, which lies between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea).
Right, what i take issue with is that you hear similarly dehumanizing things said about palenstinians on mainstream news outlets in the US every single day (my friends in group chats share thme). I don't think any dehumanizing language like that is a good thing but really hard to act like there isn't asymmetric policies applied here
Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider has to bake American policy position into its algorithm, what's going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own algorithm?
Can nation states ban email or bittorrent? Entities can be targeted, protocols less so. Where the algorithm is matters.
Nation states definitely can by using port targeting, traffic heuristics, and DPI. The US historically has not done this but several other states have. Even if protocols are preserved, I wouldn't want to be in a situation where I have to run a client on my local machine that consumes from the protocol. I want to be able to use a hosted client.
A user should be able to use another person's hosted Mastodon instance or Bluesky AppView/Relay.
obfs4proxy, Shadowsocks, Snowflake, Xray?
Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.
Attempting to reconcile that with HRW's article: on the one hand I think HRW might be unrealistic about what FB should be expected to tolerate (for instance, they criticize FB for taking down posts praising designated terrorist organizations); on the other, Meta's approach to content moderation - which combines automated systems with overworked and underpaid humans exposed non-stop to awful content - is notoriously fickle and subject to abuse (including, perhaps, by state actors).
Beyond Israel/Palestine, I regularly encounter content on Facebook that the Powers That Be would censor if "the pro-Western censorship regime on FB [were] extremely strong". I think I subscribe to only one political (left-leaning) group (along with a bunch of local and meme pages), but nevertheless my feed is full of tankies demanding we bring back the guillotine and install full communism.
>Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.
Naturally there is no overt censorship on FB/Meta, but in the wake of October 7th there was a clear difference in what kinds of content was being lifted by the algorithms on both platforms. I think, save for Bella Hadid, you would rarely see "organic" pro-palestine content with millions of views on Instagram, while it was less censored on TikTok.
Human Rights Watch even did a study on it: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
Not just trade reciprocity, but ideological reciprocity. The argument that the US should allow TikTok because “free speech”—while China bans American platforms because of censorship and also dictates content on TikTok because of censorship—seems obviously broken. Seems like the rule should at least be something like “Europe is welcome to blast propaganda at our teenagers for as long as we get to blast propaganda at their teenagers.”
we should probably start banning books from China too, for the same reason
That isn't even a remotely realistic propaganda threat, while tick tock arguably is.
I mean, Chinese people should be allowed to post videos for Americans, the issue is editorialization.
Like how newspapers and other media can use editorial discretion to create the impression that “all reasonable people” hold some opinion X by only publishing the voices of reasonable people who believe X (manufactured consent), social media platforms can do the same thing, but x1000 thanks to automation and personalization (“the algorithm”)
So editorialization, including the algorithmic editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of speech separate from the speech of the authors on these platforms. If the editors are independent, and part of the same public discourse as their readers and authors, then you wind up with a diverse media ecosystem where the liberal machinery of people working out complex issues through public discourse can hopefully still more or less proceed.
If one part of the ecosystem isn’t letting outside voices in, the feedback mechanisms are broken and you don’t have a healthy public discourse anymore. And growing and maintaining a diverse media ecosystem in a society that does still have a healthy public discourse is slow and fragile (as the posts below comparing the risk of books to TikTok observe).
> So editorialization, including the algorithmic editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of speech separate from the speech of the authors on these platforms.
I certainly agree that editorial discretion is speech. I'm an adult and I think it is my prerogative to participate in as many broken ecosystems I want. Nor do I trust you or 300 million of my peers to accurately assess what is a broken ecosystem.
Not at all the same thing.
Comparing books to TikTok algo is like comparing rifles to ICBMs.
This is what people seem to be ignoring: the algorithms are damned near mind reading, and these algos put members of society into separate realities. We would be better off if they were all banned, but at least it should be agreeable that a hostile foreign government should not be allowed to deploy this on Americans without oversight.
> hostile foreign government
I don't take this as a given and I believe the US government has caused more harm to its own people than China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly enforces laws against people, create laws that benefit 1% of its citizens to the detriment of the rest, forces its people to go wars they doesn't support, create rules that target certain genders and races, and so on.
Importantly, the US government is able to enact more harm on its citizens than China when it feels like.
> the US government has caused more harm to its own people than China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly enforces laws against people,
Maybe, maybe not. But when the PRC decides the time is right to take Taiwan, it will have prepared the ground by making sure lots of Americans saw TikToks (made by other Americans) saying basically this.
>Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
Yes, there are millions of US citizens that would rather have a Russian TV station in their neighborhood than one run by Democrats. I don't understand it, but that seems to be the way it's going lately. And considering who's POTUS now, a Russia-run TV network in the US isn't that far-fetched. I mean, Fox News practically already is.
i absolutely reject this great firewall style of thinking. I’m an American, an adult, and I can read and watch whatever I want.
Cherish it while you still can.
But is there actually any evidence that the US's foreign adversaries can more effectively deliver propaganda on Tiktok compared to other platforms?
I understand the concern over foreign propaganda, but this feels like it's not going to remotely impact the ability for foreign governments to deliver propaganda to Americans. It's perfectly possible to deliver propaganda on US-based social networks.
The best outcome of this is just that Americans find the other social networks so boring that they spend less time on social networks altogether, thus reducing their propaganda intake (at least, from social networks).
Literally same arguments used by Iran.
It’s fascinating honestly. Soon we’re going to have “we need government to be able to DPI and block propaganda!”
> Literally same arguments used by Iran.
All governments/nations have some level of self-interest. That doesn't mean they are all equal in their motivations or approaches.
China is literally controlling the narrative through TikTok. Why shouldn't the US respond to that?
> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans
Is the argument itself correct or not? Or do we evaluate it based on motivation, i.e. it's ok when we do it because we have good reasons for it? Sounds like the ends justify the means to me.
The correct approach would be to increase the critical thinking skills of the population, increase transparency, require corporations to make algorithms fair and equitable. Require all feeds to be chronological or some other uniform, fair rule for showing posts. No boosting certain viewpoints, or paid promotions. But these things would bother corporations and politicians in the west as well as the external forces with "bad motivations", so just ban the external social networks.
The EU I think has a better approach, of course made possible because we don't have any powerful social networks of our own, and so nobody lobbies against these rules. I'm sure the DSA and DMA would be different (if they existed at all) if at least one of FAANG was European. Nevertheless, the concept is better.
The US literally controls most of the modern internet.
The argument is probably more correct for Iran banning YouTube than it is for the US banning TikTok.
The chinese government couldn’t care less about tiktok, your brain has been poisoned by usa propaganda against china
> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans.
I don't think this is a useful distinction in a world where a handful of ultra-billionaires control most of the remaining media channels. People like Rupert Murdoch, Musk, and the others have very different interests than the average American, and at least several of them openly push their own (divisive) viewpoints through their media. Why is Rupert Murdoch less of an adversary to the average person than the CCP?
The Western media are already doing everything that TikTok has been accused of being hypothetically able to do: sowing social division, brainrot, encouraging lawbreaking, undermining confidence in the government, promoting dangerous or fake products, etc.
The real difference is that TikTok threatens to boost an alternative to the consensus message of the political elite. A US with TikTok would see actual pushback against something like the early 2000s media shennanigans that got the Iraq War and Patriot Act smoothly approved with little public debate. That is the real reason Congress banned it and why the homegrown brainrot isn't seen as a threat.
So many people keep missing this. It's not about data harvesting. It is about influencing huge portions of the population and controlling that narrative. Of course any social media app can do this, but ostensibly it is worse coming from a foreign adversary who don't play by the same rules.
> propaganda
It's so amusing seeing the society that lionizes itself as the paragon of open society and can't stop boasting about the effectiveness of free-speech soft-power compared to sclerotic communist propaganda now having panics over short video apps.
Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton could never think that.
Well, maybe we will be on yeltsin-on-supermarket stage soon?
The propaganda on TikTok comes disguised as Americans sharing points of view that just happen to serve CCP interests. Often the creators are expressing a genuine (but rare) viewpoint that China just needs to amplify. This isn't about keeping Americans from reading Pravda.
It's not hard to imagine the messages China will be pushing to weaken support for assisting Taiwan in a conflict. "Don't waste money propping up the corrupt Taiwanese government, spend it on health care /tax cuts at home!"
Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.
Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually. Hospitals running out of medical supplies will hit WAY sooner than your existing 4090 needs to be replaced by a new Taiwanese product.
This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline. Surely you can at least admit this. It's just a battle of propaganda, except China unfortunately has common sense on its side in many of these arenas:
USA should not be spending hundreds of billions maintaining a WW2 power projection strategy, 80 years later.
I disagree (I don't know what "military power projection over China's coastline" even means - do you think the U.S. has military bases in Taiwan?), but the point is that these issues need to be debated by Americans without the other side surreptitiously trying to sway public opinion.
> I don't know what "military power projection over China's coastline" even means
That's the problem. There's massive lack of historical education on this topic. The Taiwan issue greatly predates TSMC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_chain_strategy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis
> these issues need to be debated by Americans
Yo can we drop the whole “our government executes on the will of the people charade”. If you think your average American has any say in their governments foreign policy I have a bridge to sell you.
>> Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.
> Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually.
Yes, but let's not use that as a justification for letting it get worse.
> This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline.
The whole f*ing modern economy runs on semiconductors, and the most advanced ones are fabbed in Taiwan. You might have a point if Intel wasn't falling on its face, but it is, so you don't
The way we stop making this worse, i.e. reducing our trade deficit with China and in general, is by doing virtually the opposite of what Washington is currently doing.
Rebuild the republic instead of wasting everything on hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion.
> Rebuild the republic instead of wasting everything on hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion.
Reducing risk from Chinese influence is "rebuild[ing] the republic" and is not " hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion."
Also, letting China encroach and control more vital supplies is a good way to make "rebuild[ing] the republic" a lot harder.
I can't admit this and have no idea what you're talking about. You're right that Taiwan isn't more important to the US than China or any other major trading partner; the key difference is that China is not threatening to invade and conquer any of the other trading partners. Demanding that belligerent countries should not invade their neighbors is not a "WW2 power projection strategy", as China understood perfectly well when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
We haven't allowed a foreign adversary to own a media company since 1934.
This is just updating the standard. TikTok is clearly a massive threat, how is that not obvious?
https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli....
>We haven't allowed a foreign adversary to own a media company since 1934.
False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_America
What? Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton would never have allowed a hostile foreign government to own a major communications platform.
Bush and Bill would still laugh about nailing jelly to the wall
Meanwhile the rest of the modern world is not banning apps because of propaganda. China and USA is.
I just want to remind everyone that China/Russia is doing everything you dislike the West doing right now. Please talk when China/Russia opens up. Right now they spew propaganda into our societies with no way for us to retaliate. I don't like censorships but these one-way attacks are a weakness to democracies, not strengths.
Open internet only works as long as everyone is friendly. The world is increasingly becoming not friendly.
Yes, but at least in the USA, I constantly have to hear shouting about how "free" everything is whenever I ask for sane regulations (guns), or something like universal healthcare.
If USA was actually so free, that would at least be consistent. But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to run around with bullet proof vests? I get all the bad, none of the good.
Every voting citizen should remember that this TikTok ban was bipartisan. That means they all cared more about this than ANY other sensible legislation. Banning child marriage? Nah! Protecting the childrens physical bodies in school was not as important as a hypothetical "mind attack" from TikTok.
They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red kid"
This is real though- the only other bipartisan bill they passed was the "Crucial Communism Bill" ie. a mandate to teach anticommunist propaganda in schools
> But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to run around with bullet proof vests?
WTF? In no way do kids have to wear bullet proof vests. That is a very odd statement.
> They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red kid"
They have not literally said that.
They have passed a law to force every schoolkid to:
(B) understand the dangers of communism and similar political ideologies; and
(C) understand that 1,500,000,000 people still suffer under communism.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5349...
And yet nothing is being done for school shootings. Make of that what you will
Where's the evidence that TikTok is being used by China to spew propaganda?
Conversely there's a mountain of evidence which strongly suggests that US officials are going after TikTok specifically because they're not in control of the truthful narratives that paint the US in a bad light.
> Please talk when China/Russia opens up.
Careful with this sort of rhetoric. China's constitution enshrines freedom of speech as a constitutional right, just like the US, but they're both taking this freedom away by invoking "national security".
Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.
TikTok has repeatedly shown to nuke political topics on TikTok that China doesn’t like.
Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet all get black holed by the algorithm.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
> Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.
Why would we wait for TikTok to continue to have greater and greater social influence before we cut off their propaganda tool? Do we have to wait until Taiwan has been leveled by China? And TikTok is being used to push the narrative that the US must not come to the aid of a peaceful nation being brutally conquered? By then it’s too late.
> Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet all get black holed by the algorithm.
None of those threaten US national security - that's what the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake. US social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't like, that's not news.
How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition of the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US citizens express those views if every popular non-US owned/aligned platform is banned on the grounds of national security?
> None of those threaten US national security - that's what the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake. US social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't like, that's not news.
Read the last paragraph of my comment again and you’ll find your answer.
> How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition of the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US citizens express those views if every popular non-US owned/aligned platform is banned on the grounds of national security?
This isn’t a reality that exists. Did you spend any time at all on Twitter in the last year? You literally could not go a day without hearing about it. It was front page news on US news sites constantly. Protests against both Biden and Harris were constantly in the news and all over social media. The student protests were all over the news and social media. I don’t know what world you’re living in where you think Americans can’t talk about Gaza because it’s all I’ve been hearing about for a year. And here you are, talking about it on an American social media website.
> This isn’t a reality that exists.
I'll just go ahead and quote my sources. The suppression and narrative shaping are very real, but doesn't mean that nobody on the internet has said anything about it.
Isn't this exactly what you're worried about with TikTok - that an adversary is going to shape the conversation by purposefully biasing the conversation? I'd appreciate it if you applied the same standard to both sides.
> Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel. The documented cases include content originating from over 60 countries around the world, primarily in English, all of peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways. This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship. Hundreds of people continued to report censorship after Human Rights Watch completed its analysis for this report, meaning that the total number of cases Human Rights Watch received greatly exceeded 1,050.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
> The CNN staff member described how the policy works in practice. “‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words,” the person said. “Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/04/cnn-israel-gaza-idf-repo...
And where is the United States government directing any of this? Nowhere.
Even your own source says
“Despite the censorship documented in this report, Meta allows a significant amount of pro-Palestinian expression and denunciations of Israeli government policies.”
Just because you dislike the way CNN is covering a conflict doesn’t somehow mean the shadowy US government is pulling the strings behind the scenes.
The Intercept is also an American news organization that is clearly not being censored on this topic, so I’m not sure you’re really making your point here.
You know the whole idea of “oh, all of our problems are actually because X, Y, Z boogeyman!” thing? Yeah that. Watching from outside, it feels like political landscape of the US knows that they have lost the global competition and scrambling to get back on its feet. Everyone just keeps yelling “no, no, don’t look what’s happening inside, because everything is so much worse in other countries, they’re about to completely fall down! Those europoors with no ACs, China is about to collapse for the 50th time in the last 10 years, Japan is basically dead etc etc.”.
Elon Musk seemed to leverage Twitter to try to manipulate the US election along with a myriad of other underhanded actions.
Should Twitter be banned as a propaganda / risk to US democracy?
Yes.
> Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
They don't have to, Fox News does it for free /zing. But for real I wouldn't see a problem with it. Less now that the world is more globalized than ever, I can get news from every corner of the globe both from our allies and enemies.
Could they be subtly pushing a narrative of communism or something, sure but this kind of "news is biased towards its owners" is beyond commonplace at this point. Jon Stewart just did a whole bit about why he couldn't criticize Apple or China.
To be clear, Russia pays those right wing trolls a fat chunk of change
Citation needed.
Right-wing influencers were duped to work for covert Russian operation: https://apnews.com/article/russian-interference-presidential...
In the words of Noam Chomsky [1]:
> [Manufacturing Consent] argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
The problem with Tiktok, as far as the government is concerned, is the lack of control on narrative when Meta, Twitter and Google are an extension of the US State Department (eg [2]).
The Tiktok ban came together in a matter of days as a bipartisan effort weeks after the ADL said (in leaked audio) that they have a "TikTok problem" [3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[2]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
[3]: https://x.com/TaylorNoakes/status/1766612105426596297
> 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
If the last four years are indicative of anything, it's that the US government has fairly limited control over the narrative on American social platforms.
I lost count of how many times I saw people typing in "FJB" and "MAGA".
"FJB" and "MAGA" are within the bounds of allowed political discourse and were encouraged.
"Throw the bums out" without any additional coherent political project is precisely what the elites allow and what allows them to maintain power.
I mean, if you want to ignore the fact that the JB was Joe Biden and he was quite literally President of the United States when that was a trend, sure.
Same with MAGA after January 6th.
Why would you have to "ignore" those facts?
It was a concerted effort to channel quiescently conservative voters into national electoral politics.
Neither of those challenged the super-structure.
Or, maybe, those things they don't see as a problem.
These shifty foreigners, however... Xenophobia isn't just some old timey things we use to do
Facebook is extremely censored re: the genocide in Gaza
TikTok is not
Is it censored, or do most people just not talk about it on Facebook?
It's interesting how incredibly supportive of human rights that a platform in bed with the CCP became, no? Do you think that China's human rights bugaboos are often discussed on their internal social networks?
It's amplified.
It is censored.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...
No, I do not think China's bugaboos are allowed on TikTok for the exact same reason the US's are not allowed on Facebook
I mean, I've seen plenty of dissenting material against the powers-that-be on Meta platforms over the years, but okay.
Police brutality (both viewpoints), COVID conspiracies, election conspiracies, etc. are not particularly hard to find on there.
Is posting about CEOs allowed there?
Yes? I've seen plenty of Facebook posts about how CEOs are greedy, criminal, ripping us all off, etc. I'm really not sure how you could have gotten the impression that it's not allowed to talk about CEOs on Facebook.
Wait, but I like the issue being amplified. Do you not?
there's a billion people on facebook, i am sure people talk about it
It's possible, but ultimately it's hard to tell, especially in regard to the American users.
The results of the election would point to the idea that most American voters aren't so perturbed by what's happening in Gaza as to want an administration that would be at least as effective in reeling in the Israelis as the Biden administration was. Whether that's right or wrong, well, that's another discussion.
It's a chicken-or-the-egg problem. Do people not talk about Gaza on Facebook because it's censored, or do people not talk about Gaza on Facebook because no one was talking about it to begin with?
Which party should I vote for to help the people of Gaza?
lol, doesn't matter at this point.
Given the history I'd say that the incoming administration will be less sympathetic to the Gazans than the outgoing, but, again, it doesn't matter at this point.
Green party
The Biden administration was obviously not effective at reeling in Israel at all.
Give it a few months.
>that most American voters aren't so perturbed by what's happening in Gaza as to want an administration that would be at least as effective in reeling in the Israelis as the Biden administration was.
It's not hard to be at least as capable as somebody who's completly incapable. Think what you will of Trump, but in one meeting he had a solid deadline for implementing the ceasefire agreement the Biden admin has had floating since May. There weren't even any changes to it, so what the heck has Biden been doing?
If that cease-fire holds, I'll be very surprised.
More likely than Biden's incompetence is that Bibi now has a variable solved for in the geopolitical calculus: the American election now has a winner. He finds a kindred spirit in Trump and thinks he is now working with an American administration that will let him do whatever he wants without even the appearance of trying to rein him in. There is no Rashida Tlaib in Trump's party.
But that's on a different subject than the greater thread discussion.
People in Gaza are celebrating the proposed ceasefire and Zionists are angry about it. I’m no Trump fan but it does indeed look like he’ll be better than Biden (who was the worst).
The people in Gaza are probably desperate enough to accept anything at this point and everyone involved has a long history of going back on their word.
Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and supports West Bank settlements. To suddenly give an Iran-backed militia a win goes against literally everything in the grand scheme of things.
Are they desperate enough to overthrow Hamas?
They weren't desperate enough to vote Hamas out over the last decade or so.
Dog. When was the last election? The answer is 2006.
I'm with you that Biden has been doing worse than nothing, and has been stringing us along with this ceasefire that will never come, while at the same time using UN to block any sort of resolution.
But don't kid yourself that Trump is better. He supports the settlement of the West Bank and has recognized Jerusalem as exclusively Israeli.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/11/trump-cabinet-is...
The Republicans are just as on board with the genocide as the Democrats are, if not more.
The question is whether it's a ruinous empathy thing. It's much too early for me to be confident that the current ceasefire is actually going to work better than the last one. But if it does, it's a pretty strong data point for the idea that credibly taking either side is better for the Palestinian people than flailing around trying to support both.
Is this in favor of a one state solution, with Israel being the one state?
genuinely confused - Biden has not been remotely empathic towards Palestine.
Biden has been as empathetic towards Palestine as it's possible to be without opposing Israel. That's how we ended up with things like the crazy floating aid pier. Trump's position is much less empathetic, complete with overt threats of "all hell to pay" if they don't release the hostages soon, and if the current ceasefire holds then it's hard to avoid concluding it's better for the Palestinian people overall.
tiktok is extremely censored re: genocide in xinjiang. facebook is not.
Great, so we have TikTok where we can access information that's being censored by the West, and Facebook to access information that's being censored by the East. What's the problem? Information wants to be free.
Not disagreeing, that's exactly my point, the govt wants to be able control the narrative
There are places in the west where you risk losing your job just by mentioning the ongoing genocide that is happening now in Gaza. I'm not defending the CCP in any way, it's just that power corrupts and abuse of power happens pretty much everywhere.
i feel that we overuse the word genocide nowadays, in a way that almost amounts to holocaust trivialization
if this is referring to Gaza, many Holocaust experts are willing to call what's happening there a genocide
i think i’m pretty clearly referring to Xinjiang.
if the Rohingya genocide is a genocide, then I can see the case for Gaza (the UN definition of genocide is quite broad) - but still feel that there should be a word distinguishing the stuff that happened in the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide from less systemic killings occurring in the background of conflict. A lot of the power of the word “genocide” comes from the implicit comparison to the Holocaust, but none of the events we are discussing really come all that close barring Rwanda.
Yeah when the Palestinians say they want to murder all the Jews that's what genocide is. When there are no Jewish people in Palestine because they killed them all, that's what genocide is. If people didn't hate Jews and support terrorism, Palestinians wouldn't be dying. When Arabs are allowed to vote, participate in government, and join the military, that's the opposite of what genocide is.
Yep. The Chinese state is guilty of a number of things in Xinjiang, but genocide is not one of them.
fair. they are guilty of arresting specific ethnicity for the crime of gathering in groups, and targetting men and forbidding men to have children, and forcing women to take han husbands to dilute their ethnicity. but not genocide.
Trump won, the Russian misinformation campaign is over now. You can stop making stuff up about Jews now.
Totally. I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize China for their protectionism, but as soon as something out-competes US companies, it gets banned: Huawei, DJI, TikTok.
Of course it cannot be said like this, because "free speech" and "democracy", so the official reason is "national security".
This claim is incompatible with the reality that the U.S. runs an enormous bilateral trade deficit with China.
Also Japanese cars
well china does it too with google,fb etc back then, and other nation do it too
albeit not outright banned it all together but sometimes they prefer homegrown company/technology
> albeit not outright banned it all together
No they absolutely do just ban them.
It's not just that Google or FB can't operate Chinese-specific sites as a business within China, from within China you can't even get to the foreign/international versions of those sites, because they're blocked by China's firewall. Wikipedia has a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
Sure. I just noted the irony that the US discourse has sounded a lot like "we are better than China, we are more free" for decades.
But we are, there is no irony. China has the great wall and massive corporate espionage games to steal state and corporate secrets. The US and its various federal intelligence agencies have certainly done nefarious things but never quite as documented at the level as China's. They actively monitor all of their Social Media, block most foreign social media. I can easily go to any Chinese social media/website from the US.
In some ways, this is still true, even surrounding this decision.
Do you think there were many people standing outside of government buildings in Beijing protesting the potential ban of Facebook and Google while politicians of different political parties were debating the ban in the country's primary legislative body? Do you think you could launch a campaign for office on repealing said ban in China?
I think they could, and fundamentally won't because they can be accessed via VPN, but ultimately aren't necessary because those companies are not exactly interesting for any purpose but talking to Americans or studying Americans.
That wasn't the case in the late 00s when those hacks happened.
> "we are better than China, we are more free"
Anyone who disagrees with this is either not being honest or is not aware of what extent China restricts it's citizens.
But wouldn't you say that there is some irony there, still?
I see multiple comments saying "shut up, we're not China!", but that's not what I meant :-). I just meant that there is some irony here.
And that next time we criticize China's protectionism, we may take a step back and think that we do it too, sometimes.
It'd be ironic if someone said "we're better than China because we never censor anything."
I said, and I quote:
> I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize China for their protectionism
The irony I see is that we criticize their protectionism, but we also do some kind of protectionism. More largely, we criticize the fact that they ban US companies, and then we do the same. How in the world is that not ironic?
It would be perfectly fine to admit it and acknowledge that actually, sometimes protectionism makes sense. But if you look at the answers in this thread, it seems like nobody wants to do that. "We are never wrong, it is not ironic, it is obviously national security".
So let's talk about national security. TikTok is a userspace social media app, just like Instagram or Snapchat. If collecting that kind of data is an obvious national security risk, then every single country in the world should ban them. What would the US say if all the western countries banned their social media? Would you say "we understand, it's a national security issue"? My guess is that you would say "but for us it's different: we are the good guys".
What about Huawei? Fair enough, infrastructures like antennas are very sensitive, don't let a Chinese company own them on your soil. But the smartphones? Really? Any government can buy stuff like NSO's Pegasus and get access to any mobile phone (iPhones included). Let's not pretend that someone buying a Huawei phone makes that worse, shall we? And it's still obviously fine to ask sensitive personalities (like politicians) to use a non-Chinese smartphone, but that's very different from banning the brand entirely.
DJI then? The drones don't have an Internet connection: you have to connect them to your WiFi (be it at home or a mobile hotspot from your phone). That means that if you fly above government facilities, the drone is not streaming the video to China. That also means that if it wanted to, it would have to go through your mobile hotspot, through your ISP. Doesn't seem that hard to ask government drone operators to connect through a firewall, does it? Every big company in the world asks all of their employees to do that.
And when did it start being seen as a security issue? Precisely when western companies started lobbying against them because they could not compete. Nobody complained about DJI for years, especially not when the view in western startups was "we are better, we will make a better drone". It took us to realise that DJI was actually a lot better than us to start looking for other ways. Look at who's been lobbying a lot for the ban: western drone companies that have no reason to know about security, but that are struggling because - let's be honest - DJI drones are a lot cheaper and a lot better than anything else.
And now we have US billionaires and owners of the biggest tech companies in the world publicly interfering with politics in allied countries. How the hell is that not ironic?
The criticism is that China has a ton of protectionism. We know the US does it a little.
Btw, Huawei in particular stole a ton of technology over the past couple of decades, from Cisco and others. Not sure if the smartphone ban had the same cause, but at this point I don't really care, the company deserves it.
> at this point I don't really care, the company deserves it.
Right. Obvious national security reason.
Exactly. One doesn't become their own enemy overnight. It's death by a thousand cuts; attrition.
I mean, let's be clear: Facebook and Google are very much banned in Mainland China.
Mercantalism begets Mercantalism. If their mercantalist policies become successfull then unfortunately we'll need to also assume similar policies to protect ourselves, aka Beggar Thy Neighbour, and everyone loses in an arms race of tariffs and subsidies.
That's exactly why free trade proponets oppose those policies, but the CCP didn't want to reform so we'll go the opposite way.
It's important to say that the US had TikTok with Vine, but is so corrupt that it let Facebook buy it to shut it down.
Huawei has been caught stealing more than enough trade secrets to justify a ban. I'd be happy if they banned a lot more Chinese firms for that, or just in response to China's own bans. But TikTok seems to be uniquely about censorship.
> But TikTok seems to be uniquely about censorship.
Censorship, or protectionism because TikTok is eating the lunch of the big US social media?
I cannot argue on the TikTok as strongly but I can see strong arguments on why Huawei and DJI are national security risks. Some of this is more educated guesses so not defensible with numbers. We know most major companies in the Chinese market have extremely close ties to the CCP. No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms but I believe the CCP takes it to a next level. We know for a fact that the CCP and chinese entities play extremely hardball when it comes to corporate espionage. Some of the stories we have seen almost read like a spy novel. Certainly Huawei and DJI make some incredible products but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure, I do believe it warrants major concern for national security.
I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy compared to the easier explanation, China is a fairly crafty bad actor in a lot of cases. 99% of the imported products from China are not getting blocked, just the ones that have very significant national security risks.
> 99% of the imported products from China are not getting blocked
because it's impossible.
the US offloaded low-added-value manufacturing to China, exchanging paper dollars for cheap industrial goods. When China tries to upgrade to high-added-value industries, like chips, guess what? National security risks!
just enjoy cheap goods and nature resources from 3rd world...
I am not sure I follow your point. There have been both National Security risks as well as protectionist economic policy enforced against china that benefits domestic players. In a lot of those protectionist cases, there is either a case of China flooding the market or there are cases where the government makes a choice that its beneficial to keep domestic manufacturers alive.
In the above provided examples its quite clear that there are possible national security risks involved with China being involved in US infrastructure and technology. If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
If you have better example beyond hyperbole I am all ears.
> If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
1. of course there'll be no 'national security risks' because EU is an ally, and the US is spying on it
2. even though, troubles come to US's allies sometimes, like what Alstom and ASML met
3. EU products are mostly less compatible, overall, it cannot challenge the position where the US holds in the global value chain, so pose less of threat
You still have not given any evidence how DJI is not a national security risk?
Doesn't it work the other way round? You'd have to prove that they are a national security risk? Because it's hard to prove a negative.
Like the way your irony works? I listed my arguments as why you can make a case that they are national security threats. You are more than welcome to call it a fake pretense but the fact remains that the majority of Chinese imports are not restricted and that includes tech/high-tech related items. If you have nothing more than America is ironic I can see where your endless questions stem from.
The burden of proof lies on the accuser. If you are not able to provide a proof of national security threat from tiktok or dji, then don't treat it like it's a fact. All the "ifs" don't constitute as a proof.
You obviously have a bias here so its going to be impossible to have any real discussion. There are very simple facts that I will restate for you. The CCP has seats at every major mainland corporation. Chinese corporations have in recent years been caught in some very spy like espionage, this is happening globally. China is an adversary to the US and Europe. There is no further burden of proof needed when talking about sensitive industries. You don't need to catch DJI in the act, similar to TikTok, if you cannot sever data/ties with the mainland there are real risks. Geopolitics suck but its a real risk that has to be snipped before it becomes a problem.
Do the five eyes and other countries have national intelligence that are collecting data, absolutely. I cannot recall any recent published articles about overt Western corporate espionage and especially any that were supported by a parent country.
> I cannot recall any recent published articles about overt Western corporate espionage and especially any that were supported by a parent country.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24992485
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57302806
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Parliamentary_Committee...
And this is just one known case of the US spying on allies.
Are any of those corporate espionage? Those seems to fall under government spying which I acknowledged exists for all companies and especially so with the five eyes.
So you justify the ban of TikTok, Huawei and DJI for strong national security reasons, but when we talk about the US spying on the government of allies, you say "spying on a government is okay, the problem is corporate espionage"?
Can you tell me - in your logic - why the hell there is a need to ban DJI if it's okay for the CCP to spy on the US government? Or will you now say "It's not okay because it's not the US"? Or maybe "It's okay to spy on allies, but not on adversaries, except if you are the US because then it's okay to do both"?
I was going to type out my rationale again but came to the thought that it wouldn't matter on you. You are emotional and slightly biased either in an angle that supports China or negatively towards the US. I am honestly not sure where your quotes/thought process is going other than its confusing. Enjoy your weekend bud.
Actually, that's probably the one thing that I would find interesting.
I didn't expect so many people to attack me when I said it was ironic. I find it ironic, period. It doesn't mean that I support China or that I hate the US. It only means precisely what I said: I find it ironic to criticise China's ban on US companies and end up banning Chinese companies for what seems to be protectionism.
Now you've been repeating that it is obviously a strong national security threat, but whenever I asked you to elaborate on that, you avoided it. Would that mean that it's maybe not that obvious?
> If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
If DJI was from the EU, the US would manage to buy it.
Read some of the many stories out there about the NSA, please. They have backdoors into internet infrastructure. If any country is a threat to information security, it’s the USA.
Did you read my comment? I explicitly called out backdoors, you should read comments closer. It most definitely happens within the US but the ties between the US government and corporate entities are no where as perversely intertwined as they are in China.
So you would say for sure that the NSA has definitely never been used to give advantages to US companies? I could totally imagine Boeing receiving information in order to win a contract against Airbus.
After all, we know for a fact that the US have been spying on European politicians.
You are making up stories now. We have proven news article of flagrant corporate espionage happening from Chinese actors. We know that CCP upper leadership holds seats at the major mainland corporations. Will I say never has US intelligence participated in corporate espionage? There are documented cases of the US meddling but as far as we have evidence, not at the level of Chinese interference. So nope, I won't say for sure but I am also not fabricating stories.
Sorry I don't follow. What did I make up? That I don't believe that the US are "always fair" either? That I don't need to believe it, because it has been documented many times?
> We know that CCP upper leadership holds seats at the major mainland corporations.
And who holds seats/has major influence in the US government?
Sorry I am not sure what 1) your point is or 2) what you are arguing. This thread is simply DJI poses a real national security threat as there has been demonstrable issues in recent history.
Depends on where you start the thread. Before your comment, this thread was simply "this is US protectionism and not really national security".
After your first comment, this thread was "the USA are an information security risk".
My point is that of course, from the US point of view, China abusing its power is worse than the US abusing their power. But if you take a step back... why should a European citizen consider that what China is doing is worse than what the US are doing?
It has been proven that the US have been targeting European politicians with spying. It has been proven that the NSA was collecting private information about just everything they could (including US citizen BTW). The richest people on Earth control the biggest tech companies on Earth and are getting closer to the US president every day. Some of those people are actively trying to influence politics in Europe (e.g. promoting neo-nazis in Germany, I don't know if you understand what it means there). The US president is talking about invading Greenland, Panama etc. And you talk about links between the Chinese government and Chinese companies?
If TikTok is a strong national security risk for the US, then Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple are all strong security risks for Europe. But what would the US say if Europe banned those companies? Probably more "it's a free market, it's democracy, it's capitalism, you can't do that!" than "fair enough, we do it too, and China does it too", right?
That's where I find it ironic. The US promote free market when it's about having their companies in other countries. But when the roles are inverted, then the US behave a lot more like China than like Europe (by banning companies), don't they?
Lots of ideas but you are missing the simple point. The CCP is partnered with their companies and actively support corporate espionage. Its a fact that the five eyes spy on lots of people including their own citizens. Some of this is certainly based off recent history but the way I frame it is China adulterates almost every piece of data they release. They limit their incoming internet. They aggressively monitor their citizens and will cull information on social media proactively. They participate in corporate espionage that sounds like its from a fiction story. Corporations in China are in some form or another tightly partnered with the government once they reach a massive scale. To find irony is to ignore everything China is doing. Again, absolutely everyone is running foreign intelligence. The difference is I don't believe anyone is as worried of drones made outside of China but its an obvious threat vector that drones made in China have the opportunity to phone home data and with the increased use of drones in industrial settings there are real risks to be thought about.
Feels like your view is "whatever we do is okay, as long as we can point to someone else doing worse". Is that what you are saying?
> its an obvious threat vector that drones made in China have the opportunity to phone home data and with the increased use of drones in industrial settings there are real risks to be thought about.
Okay, let's take drones. Can you articulate concretely one of those "obvious threat vectors"? For instance, a DJI drone does not come with an Internet connection magically embedded into it. So you can be completely offline while you fly your mission.
Are you scared that the drone may save a 4K video in a hidden storage, and then upload GBs of it when you connect it to the Internet without you having a chance to see it? Why not instructing government operators to only connect through a router that filters the network? And that would be on top of the DJI Local Data mode that you don't have to trust.
Or are you scared that the drone may store few bytes of critical information? What would that be, a location? Why wouldn't the CCP just hack the smartphone of the employee, e.g. using something like NSO Pegasus (which is western technology, but I won't call any irony there)?
If it is obvious, please explain the national security threat caused by DJI drones that couldn't be solved with a simple external firewall.
I think you’re biased if you don’t believe the USA is also doing domestic corporate espionage. Cisco probably has multiple NSA sleeper agents silently inserting backdoors into their routers.
> On July 3, 2014, the former Technical Director of the NSA, William Binney, who had become a whistleblower after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, testified to the committee. He said that the NSA has a totalitarian approach that has previously only been known from dictatorships and that there is no longer such a thing as privacy.
But no, there is absolutely no reason to think that the US may be doing corporate espionage /s.
You don't seem to understand the definition of corporate espionage.
And you don't seem to understand what Binney meant when he said "the NSA can basically access anything anywhere, and they don't have to justify it to anyone other than the US President in person".
> I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy
I am not proposing a conspiracy, I am merely noting some irony in the fact that the US are doing protectionism here.
> No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms
Well, most of the Western Internet goes through the US, and we know for a fact that the US try to extract as much as they can from whatever they can (remember Snowden?). Also the US are very fine with US companies owning all the data of a big part of the world, and they would be really pissed if some country started banning them "for national security reasons".
> but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure
You don't need to connect the drone to the Internet. Technical solutions would most definitely exist, I am convinced of that. The reason DJI is being banned is because DJI is 7 years ahead of anyone else, and the gap is getting bigger every year. It really, really sounds like the US drone companies have been lobbying a ton because they just can't compete.
Yup. China has been kicking Silicon Valley's butt for some time now, and I don't see any signs of that changing any time soon.
This drives the point home:
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38242135-ai-superpowers
It was with the 2020 version of the algorithm till they changed things see https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
I'm not referring exclusively to TikTok but tech in general. China makes SV look entitled and lazy.
> how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers
A law passed at the same time as the tiktok ban attempts to address this:
> a) Prohibition It shall be unlawful for a data broker to sell, license, rent, trade, transfer, release, disclose, provide access to, or otherwise make available personally identifiable sensitive data of a United States individual to— (1) any foreign adversary country; or (2) any entity that is controlled by a foreign adversary.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/9901
To echo what other comments have said about it being propaganda related, we can already see this occurring today:
https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/A-Tik-Tok-ing-...
it's not the same data or data quality. the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of the american public (psyops). What russia is doing through their trollfarms, china is doing through tiktok.
> the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of the american public (psyops).
I don't buy it. If that were actually the concern, we would be talking about banning Facebook and X for manipulating Americans to vote against their own interests and hand over more power & money to the platforms' owners. Facebook has done way, way, way, way more harm to America and Americans than Tiktok ever did. The Tiktok ban is an illegitimate handout to America's oligarchs to protect them from having to compete. It's nothing to do with protecting Americans from manipulation.
Well FB is American. Even though I and many people agree FB is also a problem, I think it’s pretty clear why those in Washington are more okay with an American company that they have some power over and also should ostensibly care for America versus a company that is ostensibly beholden to an adversary. (To be clear, I don’t think FB cares about America.)
I don’t really see why it’s hard to see the reasoning behind the ban even if one disagrees with it.
Take it to an extreme, imagine there were zero American social media companies in our modern world where most people get there news from social media. That obviously would be a huge security risk, having one’s population’s news being controlled exclusively by foreign states.
American social media is banned in China and if used against americans by its leadership, it would be a domestic threat not a foreign threat. Twitter was bought by Elon and used to influence an election successfully. if we're honest in this discussion, we shouldn't pretend the threat isn't real. Foreign companies get banned from owning american companies all the time. Biden just banned US steel's takeover by a japanese company.
You know what scares me? how the actual majority on HN is critical of the tiktok ban despite all what I have just said being obvious things a critical thinker can deduce. I'm concerned the influence of tiktok (foreign actors) is already too pervasive and damaging. You all should know the US by any historical metrics is at the precipice of a civil war as it is.
American corporations have free speech rights. Chinese corporations do not.
American corporations have free propaganda rights. Chinese corporations shall not.
You have essentially repeated the argument you are replying to while removing the very substance of that argument.
I'm not sure that's true, and even if it was, the law as passed requires American companies to not serve the app from their app stores, which is a restriction of American company speech.
> we would be talking about banning Facebook and X for manipulating Americans vote
in fact, there is alot of talk about this. wasn't that the main reason Musk bought Twitter?
> wasn't that the main reason Musk bought Twitter?
Yes.
> there is alot of talk about this
There's a lot of talk by politicians about banning Facebook & X in the US? Really?
Mitt Romney basically came out and admitted that the reason for the TikTok ban was that young people were getting unfiltered access to information about the genocide in Gaza.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
In support of (2): https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
I personally see this as the beginning of a slippery slope - a move that follows in the footsteps of China.
Wrong - it's practically impossible to buy video and audio data at the PII level like Tiktok is getting.
The video and audio data that users publicly post?
it's been said many times, it's a national security risk, and it is very obviously one. Tiktok has already gone against the wishes of the US, there's evidence Chinese engineers accessed Tiktok data hosted in the US (related: project Texas). It's so easy to sway public opinion when you own the largest megaphone to the people... That's literally what's happening right now on tiktok.
Only legit reason would've been trade. China won't "import" our products, so we do the same. But that seems like not the reason.
but your 2. implies China has control rather than the US.
Isn’t that what the government has been saying?
> The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a domestic one
China certainly engages in security theater for their own economic advantage as well. It's no coincidence that any American internet company that tries to operate in China gets throttled or "accidentally" blocked by the great Chinese firewall. And no, economic retaliation against China isn't "stooping down" to censorship of China. That would be like framing the EU's retaliatory tariffs against Trump as a punishment to European bourbon lovers.
> The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
Yes, but people do not appreciate what that really means. Countries need to eat the consequences of influencing domestic media, so you at least need to maintain a weak form of checks and balances. For example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.
On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...
> 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
This was the case for the first attempt, but then TikTok gave the US government access to everything. So the effort completely stalled, and the only people still banging the drum about it were R's who had run on anti-China rhetoric.
Then Oct. 7th happened, and the followup genocide that the US decided to go out of its way to participate in. The most, and most influential, anti-genocide activity was on TikTok, simply because TikTok has a hold on the young audience and young content producers, and being young they aren't cynical and hollowed out inside, and can't justify being silent in order to protect their own incomes and families (which they don't have yet.) The Lobby quickly picked up the dropped ball and carried it over the line, and Biden continued his unbroken record of being completely humiliated by Bibi, a regular criminal before he was a war criminal.
Now the ban is a zombie, because opposition to (and support for) the genocide is now set in stone, and it already looks like Trump has ended it even though he isn't in office yet through the technique of placing the slightest amount of pressure on Bibi.
All we'll have left is a horrible soon-to-come Supreme Court decision that enshrines the idea that bills of attainder explicitly intended to limit free speech are ok now because China. Which is also because Russia and also because Hamas, and because Maduro, and because hate, and because sowing discord, and because, because, because...
-----
edit: and if the Trump peace fails, and all the kids migrate to some other platform, that platform will be attacked. They lucked out that TikTok was owned by China, and Americans are such racists that they could use that racism to get them to agree to silence Americans speaking to Americans. But before, they were attacking every social network for allowing speech from Trump supporters, people criticizing covid policy, always Palestinians, women who don't accept transwomen (to get the libs onboard), etc...
Absolutely
3. The government is concerned that having a company that's beholden to a foreign government control the algorithm that feeds the rising generation much of their worldview may not be a good long term plan.
This has a passing resemblance to (2), but the key difference is that the government doesn't believe they have control over the narrative on Facebook, they just know that a foreign government doesn't. It's strictly better from the perspective of the US government to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism (after all, that's how all of the older generations' world views were shaped) than to risk the possibility that an adversary is tipping the scales.
What I don't understand is why the politicians insist on talking about spying as the concern. The people who are pro-TikTok are pretty clearly skeptical either way, and "think of the children" is usually the most effective political tool they have.
Funny you mention Raw Capitalism:
It shows a point I like to bring up often that Capitalism and The Free Market are directly opposed. What capital (a fancy word for shareholders) want is an infinite money machine and that is easiest with a monopoly. Hence, banning a competitor that's doing too well in the free market.
To the other part, I consider your 3 and my 2 the same, the US doesn't want us getting Chinese info and has their own perfered sources instead.
They're strictly not equivalent—yours believes the US has a substantial amount of control over Facebook, mine does not. I can't change your belief, but I can draw a distinction between our beliefs.
I think it's better to say it the other way round: Facebook and to a much greater extent X has a substantial amount of influence over the US government.
In the free market the monopoly buys out the competitors. No need for banning. Shareholders, the embodiment of greed, will just follow the money.
In a free market, there are monopolies, by definition.
If you're saying that capitalists will inevitably contort a free market to an unfree one, via whatever means (often mergers) then we agree.
IMO. a common misconception is that allowing all mergers is a "free market" policy when it is not
are no monopolies*
> to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism
.. by the guy sitting next to the President? It's not yet clear what this "DOGE" thing that Musk has been given by Trump actually is, but it sounds like part of the government to me and has "government" in the name?
I'm fine with this, based on the simple principle of Turnabout Is Fair Play.
China already bans practically all the popular US social media apps and similar apps/websites. I'm for free trade, but it ought to be fair trade too, as in, roughly similar/equal policies. If another country bans X imports from your own, it's hardly unfair to respond in kind.
This is exactly it. If China allowed fully uncensored American social media to operate in China I’d had zero issue letting them do the same in the US.
But the CCP wants to have their cake and eat it too. Fully repressive social media lock downs and censorship for their citizens but exploiting the west’s values of free speech and debate.
To be clear, it's not just that China won't let Western websites operate uncensored as businesses within China targeting the Chinese market.
It's also that people within China can't access the foreign websites and apps (without using a VPN), because China's Internet firewall blocks that access! That's what makes it an incontrovertible ban!
Even if a company has no interest in operating as a business within China in the first place, China may still block the websites and apps. That's a ban no matter how you slice it.
On the other hand, the reason these bans are in place have very specific origins. Facebook for example refused to provide Chinese authorities with information on domestic terrorists in 2009. Facebook has never pulled that off in a western country.
Meanwhile TikTok has worked very hard to work with authorities in the US for pretty much any of their demands.
I don't support any of these bans but I don't think its fair to equate these.
> On the other hand, the reason these bans are in place have very specific origins.
No, they don't.
You think all these sites refused to provide Chinese authorities with legit information? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
What exactly do you think Wikipedia did that was so wrong? Or Voice of America -- that's an American propaganda outlet sure, but I can get to Xinhua (Chinese state media) as an American easily enough, so why not the other way?
In any case, refusing to provide info on domestic terrorists could be a legit case for bannning a company from operating within your country...but what does that have to do with banning everyone residing in your country from being able to access the foreign versions of those websites on foreign servers?
The simple reality is that China is extremely ban-happy when it comes to foreign websites and apps, even for companies that have never tried to operate their business from within China.
You've either fallen victim to or are knowingly spreading CCCP propaganda.
China doesn't allow uncensored Chinese social media to operate in China either, so it doesn't really make much sense to say that they should have to allow uncensored American social media in order for Chinese social media companies to operate in the US.
That would be like saying that an Israeli publisher should not be allowed to publish in the US because US publishers cannot publish holocaust denial books in Israel. Or saying that a UAE restaurant should not be allowed to operate in the US because the UAE doesn't Wendy's there to serve the Baconator.
The sensible rule is that X should allow companies from Y to operate in X subject to the same rules that domestic X companies must follow if Y allows X companies to operate in Y if they follow the same rules as domestic Y companies.
Ah, so because China severely represses their own people, that means outright banning foreign web platforms even when they're hosted on foreign soil isn't really a ban for some reason.
The logic of PRC defenders never ceases to amaze.
Couldn't you argue the opposite? That is, if we are so opposed to China then shouldn't we do the opposite of them? I don't think it seems very American to change our policy to be more like the "enemy"
This is like saying, "well sure they invaded us with their military, but we don't want to be like them, so let's not take any military action in response."
Fundamentally, aggressive action as a response is not equivalent to being the initiator of aggression. Hence: turnabout is fair play. If someone punches you economically, it's entirely fair and reasonable to punch them back. It does not make you "just like them" to defend yourself.
That's a poor analogy. It's more like they censor their citizens so we should censor ours!
No, it's a perfect analogy, you just don't like it. If you actually had a valid point, you'd bother to explain the issue, but you didn't. Telling.
The US isn't censoring it based on content anyway -- in fact, the US government's ability to censor much of anything based on content is severely constrained by the First Amendment -- the US doesn't like the fact that it's controlled by the PRC. But blocking businesses from a rival nation is a trade issue, not a speech issue.
China is a rival and opponent of the US on the geopolitical stage. It's entirely reasonable to respond to trade restrictions with trade restrictions.
Sure but that is the ruling class's perspective.
What about the people who want TT? You can not hold them hostage to Chinese people not having TT or other apps. That's what the current Red Note revolt is all about.
> What about the people who want TT?
Well, unlike Chinese nationals, Americans live in a democracy, so they could write to representatives or vote.
But realistically, few care enough for this to sway who they're voting for.
> You can not hold them hostage to Chinese people not having TT or other apps.
You actually can! As long as one nation is being shitty on trade and that starts a trade war, yeah that will hurt some regular people, but the alternative would be to become a total doormat and just let other countries get away with doing whatever they want.
TikTok is banned in China.
> China already bans practically all the popular US social media apps and similar apps/websites
Sorry but not ALL of them. Myspace is not banned lmao
Well I did say "popular".
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Maybe this soundbite applies in an information vacuum like North Korea or ironically, and to a lesser extent, China. But in an environment where there is too much information for people to process, and truth is drowned out by lies and nonsense on social media feeds, it works against society.
It's bad enough that US based social media corporations are allowed to wash their hands of responsibility for the content on their platform and add to the executive bonus pool in the process. But having a hostile government control a platform is just insane.
There is a middle ground between being bundled into the back of a police car if someone speaks against their government, and freely allowing enemies to manipulate your population.
The problem is that it's the government who decides who the enemies are when silencing "the words of enemies"
> hostile government
I don't recall us being at war or anything with China. For example, most of our crap is made there and shipped here with barely a look. If China were truly hostile and combative like everyone claims, they could literally import bombs and spies via those means.
Is this just the Red Scare 2.0? I've had way more issue with American oligarchs and politicians fucking over America's values and our way of life than China in the past few years/decades, that is for sure.
If buying a plastic toilet bowl cleaner, I don't care where it comes from. If buying a 5G network equipment, we do care. Most of the stuff we buy from China is plastic junk.
> Most of the stuff we buy from China is plastic junk.
You're making an error by discounting China's manufacturing prowess these days. There are plenty of companies there making products that you would be amazed about, and the plastic crap is simply because of momentum at this point. Japan used to make a lot of crap in the post-war era, until they started making the best electronics and blew the US companies away.
There's nothing free-flow about TikTok, though. Like Twitter/X, Instagram, etc it's actually a carefully curated experience that can be tuned opaquely by whoever runs it to control the flow of information. The US took umbrage to this being in the direct hands of a foreign adversary.
TikTok is a restricted information environment controlled and manipulated by literal tyrants. Subjects that are disfavored by the CCP are heavily penalized by their algorithm [1]
if you are looking to safeguard against tyranny step 1 is to not have the CCP be in full control of your country's public square
[1] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...
Google the phase "flood the zone with shit". Your strategy only works if most of the people speaking/writing are genuinely trying to make the world a better place. If state actors are trying to flood the zone with anything and everything, then it becomes impossible for John Everyman to distinguish signal from noise.
The "War on Drugs" ensured that when an American dies from a drug overdose it is an American company, like Purdue Pharma, that made money killing them.
And when an American is brainwashed into believing a lie, it better damn well be an American company that sold them that lie.
That is the dream this country was built on.
Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban access to a popular website? I imagine this ban will go down exactly the same. Never underestimate a bored teenager's ability to bypass tech restrictions. Heck maybe this is what is needed to finally get a new generation out of the comforts of their tech walled garden and get their hands dirty.
Don't underestimate the human ability to "settle for less" if said less requires less effort from them. There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality ; Netflix is just easier. They will settle for the "easy" solution, which will be any one of the TikTok clones already existing (YT shorts, reels, whatever).
> There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality; Netflix is just easier
I'm slightly annoyed how this comment completely ignores the moral and ethical reasons someone might want to avoid making an illegal copy of something while denying it's creators any compensation. I need more coffee.
Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results. Some random pirating streaming site is unknown and probably not even easily discoverable on google (you have to use yandex for that).
I stick to pirating with adblockers because it is more convenient, there is a much bigger library of content and I don't have to share any personal info or pay for anything.
If you know the words “yandex” and “adblocker” you are already 90th percentile ability to pirate content
Netflix is absolutely easier to use than any form of pirating for the vast majority of their userbase.
Everyone in this thread talking about how people will “just get a VPN” to use TikTok have zero concept of the technical abilities of TikTok’s user base
What's amazing about this comment chain is that it's totally wrong. Netflix is missing tons of content, like older movies, and tries to replace them with store-brand "originals" that everyone knows are garbage or only have a couple seasons before being cut. It lost its most popular product, The Office. Netflix literally cannot serve the product its users want the most, so the "easiness" of using netflix to get that product is 0.
The particular shows don't matter to most of Netflix's customers. Piracy to them is someone in a dark room wearing a balaclava with a laughing ASCII skull on their laptop. The ones that care about "The Office" will either throw up their hands and watch whatever suggestion Netflix has for them, or they'll subscribe to Peacock.
Netflix has succeeded in diluting what product its users want from "The Office" to "something funny". Why hunt for one specific show when it will throw a million options at you?
Or piracy is a somewhat tech-savvy person searching "The Office 123movies 321 123" on Google, then trying on Bing cause Google hid some DCMA takedowns, giving up on 9 results that only pretend to work, then finally getting a working one. Except episode 2 is weirdly quieter than the others, episode 11 is missing, and the whole website disappears a month later.
This person may have also had uBlock Origin, or maybe they got duped into the fake uBlock that still shows ads, or Chrome disabled uBO.
Netflix's death has been greatly exaggerated on HN. It's not popular with us, and for good reasons, but it's ever more popular both in terms of subscribers and viewer hours. It's not the easiest to always get the exact and best content you want but it's the best to get okay content any time. The latter tends to drive the average user.
Their stock had a scare in 2022, but it's recovered: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NFLX:NASDAQ?sa=X&ved=2a...
Even then that was a scare of what people's perception of the future of the company was was, not actual negative performance metrics. Netflix continued to gain subscribers despite the concerns of the time (covid ending, changes in competition, changes in content) hence the quick stock recovery as the doubts evaporated.
So whoever wants The Office so much, and hasn't seen it already, pays for Peacock.
Even just having a PC hooked up to your TV in the first place is rare. People have locked-down smart TVs or STBs.
I used to pirate, went to Netflix because it was easy, and recently went back to pirating. Not because pirating became easier... but because Netflix became shit enough for pirating to be worth the bother.
I wouldn't mind paying if it wasn't setup in a way like "oh want to watch that movie? subscribe to this service" at one point I was paying for maybe 5 different providers eg. Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax, etc...
> Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results.
Did you just confirm the parent poster point while also denying it.
Convenience wins every time. Digital photos are lower quality but easy. MP3 is worse than CD quality but easy. Etc.
Popular creators will leave, if they can't monetize their content anymore. Then, everyone else will follow the creators to whatever platform they will end up on.
The only reason social media is popular is Americans are too lazy to find stuff on the open web. They'd prefer the lazier option of the single web site deciding for them what to see and think about.
There's zero chance most will put in effort to access TikTok.
Exactly. There was a blog post a couple years ago called “The Tyranny of the marginal user” that states this principle succinctly. If it’s anymore effort than a thumb swipe, you’re losing users in a hurry.
This ban does nothing about the mobile tick tok website. You don’t need to be a techie to use the browser on your cellphone. Yet it is a point of friction compared to an app with native notifications. And given the expectations of the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade into safe app store apps instead of the scary web, people are legitimately concerned.
This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?
In any case, yeah, I'm not sure that "the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade" knows what a web browser is. I've observed some user behavior among family members that indicates a pretty bizarre mental model of how the Internet, web, and mobile applications work.
how would this actually work? iOS is so dominant among US teens it's crazy, and the ability to sideload on that platform is nonexistent even to very technically savvy users.
If the holding power of TikTok is strong enough (which it just might be) then you might actually see teens start to switch to Android.
I wonder how many Android users would actually sideload it. Same happened with Fortnite for a few years, and idk how many people did that.
Fortnite never had even a hundredth of the smartphone screentime as Tiktok. I honestly think a lot (at least 5 million) Android users will sideload it once it comes to that.
Yeah but what % of them. Cause if it's only 1%, and 99% are going to some other app...
Or DJI. Side loading is so easy, we usually just call it "installing an app" there is no hacking or magic around that, works just like a .exe with some extra protections.
you won’t
I don't think it would be as unlikely as you'd think. It's not impossible for a significant amount of people to get a cheap Android for these apps, after all iPhones are a result of iMessage.
“Large portions of US teens will get second phones for one specific social media app” is an absolutely wild thing to predict seriously
Most US teens probably already have a second smartphone-like device, and large portions of them have purchased them purely for one specific social media app.
I'm not saying it's more likely that not, but I am saying I wouldn't be surprised. If you replace "one specific social media app" with "iMessage", it has already happened.
Not only this - my observation is that having a secret backup phone is not an unusual practice for kids who might get their primary phone taken away at times by parents, school officials, etc. Or if their primary phone is subject to technical parental controls.
Yes, anecdotally many of my friends (and I) had a backup phone. Second hand Android phones are so cheap that why not? By the time the app has to be reinstalled it may make sense, if sideloading on Android takes off.
Many of your high school aged friends had a secondary backup phone with a separate cellphone plan they pay for? That’s wild!
I don’t think the average American high school student has two smart phones one of which is a secret from their major source of income (their parents).
No, why would they pay a cellphone plan for it? For most of them it was their or their siblings' previous phone, or their first phone they paid for themselves when they got a job, for others it's a cheap 60$ used phone they bought when their parents took theirs away at some point. That's like money for going out for lunch three times.
There's no use for a cellphone plan, we would just use wifi or hotspot from their main phone.
I think it's more likely that people would simply use the browser
I got popcorn ready to see how the masses of iOS users will react to the TikTok ban
That is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that if I have a tiktok channel, and the only way for people to see it is through a hack, then obviously my channel won't do that well.
The bored teenager will learn ways to get tiktok. But the bored tiktokker won't learn ways to get the audience on tiktok
All they're really banning is the app on the App or Play store basically. Anyone who still has tiktok on their phone can continue on and even make a new account. Anyone who cares enough can probably get a cracked APK too
TikTok will probably die slowly not suddenly
The duopoly of app store and play store makes this kind of ban much more effective. India banned TikTok and nobody uses it over here now. It's simply too hard to download the app. Google won't let me download it even when I'm traveling abroad.
Banning websites has been very hard, but today's closed marketplace ecosystems make banning apps much easier and people are not motivated to find loopholes.
When Ukraine banned russian social networks in 2015, all the teens had free FSB-sponsored VPNs running on their phones in no time. Like, almost 100% of them. In mere days. Now leaking not just the social network data to russia, but rather the entirety of their traffic.
Let's see if US teenagers are as savvy and motivated.
If it works on 75% of the population, that’s good enough. The other 25% will give up and move on as well, because people flock to social media where the others are.
> Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban access to a popular website?
Uhhh there are many websites that are banned in the USA. Otherwise working URLs that wont work in the USA. Mostly hostile state actor stuff.Iran, NK, etc. The fact that you don't know about it just says how effective it is.
Sure, VPN. But (serious question, not rhetorical) is that going to get the app on your phone? And are you going to go to the trouble when the algorithm thinks you're eastern european? When the user base is smalelr?
AFAIK most teenagers use iPhones in US. What are they going to do? I'm Apple fanboy but this is the exact type of power they shouldn't have.
Maybe you agree with the ban, I'm curious how would many people be feeling around year of 2028 after a few years of oligarchs consolidating their power and designing an obedient society through full control of the communications. Maybe you have ideas against H1B or maybe you use birth control, whatever your current opinions oh these are there's non-zero chance that you will be enforced into the correct opinions.
US citizens do not want this.
Every news article descending into tangents on any other point than that is part of why we can't have nice things.
The whole country has turned into some sort of lower primate improv troupe where whatever stupid thing comes up gets a "Yes and let's" diversion instead of an adult in the room standing up and cutting the crap.
We certainly _do_ want this. I think the fact that we let a foreign company own a social media platform in the first place is preposterous. As others have said, we would never let the CCP own a TV broadcast, why should we let china own a major social media platform? That's just absurd.
“We” do not want surveillance propaganda targeted towards children. The US government does not want Chinese surveillance propaganda targeted toward children. They’re perfectly happy when it’s done on US soil under US jurisdiction.
For most of the world, your platforms are already foreign-owned.
If we don't want this then we simply won't make an account on those platforms...
YOU want this ban and you don't like that OTHER PEOPLE like TikTok. Clearly you don't have a TikTok account and that's not enough. You want to make sure no one else is allowed to have a TikTok account either
Instead of spreading the message about possible harms you'd rather ban other people's abilities
You do realize that in vast majority of all countries, all major social media platforms are owned by foreign companies?
There seems to be a real risk of propaganda on Tiktok, but foreign ownership alone isn't a sound reason for a ban.
> foreign ownership alone isn't a sound reason for a ban
You're right -- but foreign ownership by a repressive regime with undemocratic ideals certainly is. For example, I don't think anyone would be too concerned if a European country was the one that founded & owned TikTok.
But if it would be a US company people in Europe would have the same kind of distrust like they have right now with china.
The US is even working on their great Firewall. It's red apples Vs blue apples at this point.
Or should it be reason enough. The EU should ban Meta as well, no question. This foreign propaganda, risking mental health in teenagers and all that stuff is US propaganda shoved down our eyes.
There are foreign-controlled TV networks in the US. Not over-the-air, but that's probably due to them being niche more than anything.
Part of it is almost certainly due to the FCC controlling licenses for what is broadcast over the air.
I watch like 25 hours of TikTok a week. I absolutely love it.
I certainly _do_not_ want this.
There's a Kremlin radio station in Missouri.
> US citizens do not want this
Ha ha, I guess you are discovering, many many people do want this.
No one who actually uses it or understands it wants this. This is like vegans banning steak.
It's like the non-addicts banning heroin. You don't have to be a Tik Tok user to understand that it's bad for it to be PRC-controlled!
I'd rather be able to choose to consume propaganda than for than the government to be able to decide what I should and should not consume.
Yeah, the heroin addicts say the same thing about heroin though.
And yet the systems where addicts get actual heroin instead of even worse alternatives usually work better. See Switzerland
That is a fine take, but the assumption that all other forms of media masses of people are exposed to aren’t also propaganda is a foolish one to make. We have an entire advertising industry in this country. Something like $300 billion in ad spend a year in the US. Ad spend is literally propaganda lest we forget.
> aren’t also propaganda
It's not that other propaganda doesn't exist, it's that a likely intended effect of Chinese propaganda is destabilization and/or delegitimization of hostile governments. Ad spend is more about destabilizing consumers' savings.
I don't think that people are arguing that. What kind of propaganda one is exposed to matters.
Why is it bad when China (supposedly) creates propaganda on tiktok but it’s good when the US creates propaganda on facebook?
You’re not a government, you’re a person. Either way you’re being manipulated, and the US government definitely doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
Because we live in a world of Sovereign States, where the point of discrimination very much is between Citizen and Non-Citizen? You free to renounce your citizenship and live without the Protections of the Government, there are many who would be quite happy with that to take your wealth freely then :)
The only people thinking in such a arrogantly privileged manner ironically are Westerners, try saying this crap in China or India and people will laugh at you all day. Or I doubt this poster has the best interests of Americans in mind either.
Do I have to adopt the government line of the country I was born in if I want to maintain citizenship? Am I not allowed to think for myself?
How exactly is that different from a dictatorship?
Is this a serious question? China has its best interests in mind, the US government has its best interests in mind. Which one of those two adversaries are more likely to align with your interests?
Why do we have to choose one? I'm not going to trust US-owned media on the topic of Israel and Palestine, I'm not going to trust Russian media on Ukraine, or Chinese media on Taiwan.
By stifling freedom of expression under the guise of "national security" you're creating blind spots that allow atrocities to go unchallenged. I thought we learned from history but maybe I was wrong.
Considering that my country has a history of CIA sponsored coups and election meddling by the US, China definitely has been better to me
I honestly believe the answer is China—by living in the US, its interests and my own are more likely to come into conflict, whereas China’s interests are more likely irrelevant to me.
Huh. What are your interests? I'm curious why you think they would come in conflict with those of the US.
I'm confused why you think China's interests are irrelevant to you, unless you truly believe geopolitics is a zero-sum game. We compete in markets, militarily in the indo-pacific, and technologically in ways that are not mutually beneficial.
The US government generally works to maintain harmful institutions like health insurance, gun manufacturing, prisons and policing, etc., and will oppose me through violence if I work to weaken these. They can restrict my access to things online and control what online services I can run via laws like SESTA/FOSTA and this TikTok ban. China can't do any of that to me. I'm less concerned about geopolitics given our massive military and the position of the dollar, not to mention our cultural influence via the Internet (which bans like this directly weaken).
> Why is it bad when China (supposedly) creates propaganda on tiktok but it’s good when the US creates propaganda on facebook?
Because this imaginary world where the US somehow equally controls Facebook on the level that China directly influences TikTok isn’t one that exists?
This low resolution view of the world is grating. “Facebook is a US based social media company so it’s exactly the same as China and TikTok” is completely devoid of the context of reality.
Not only does Facebook actually have 1st amendment speech rights with a judicial system empowered to enforce them. But even the slightest appearance that the US government was attempting to influence speech on Facebook would be a career ending scandal.
Compared to TikTok where the CCP literally has a seat on ByteDance’s board by law and has for its entire existence had its algorithm nuke political topics that China does not want discussed.
It’s not the same thing.
Honestly, I don’t believe China has as much control over TikTok as you claim, and I believe the US government has much higher control over FB than you.
So from where I’m standing it’s the same thing.
And to give you some perspective, there’s plenty of content critical of China on TikTok even though that stuff gets banned on DouYin.
yeah because they wont censor gaza information
You're getting it. It is like vegans banning steak!
> "lower primate improv troupe"
> "No one who actually uses it or understands it wants this."
"Everyone's generalizations are stupid, except mine."
The users for sure don't want this. Among non-users, I'd say there's a sizable difference (let's say 50/50)...
Many things aren't that democratic when you look at it like that!
US citizens elected representatives to make laws for them. Even more so, this is a bipartisan law.
Tiktok US users of voting age are already accounted for in that process, they don't get extra sway just because they use the app.
> US citizens elected representatives to make laws for them. Even more so, this is a bipartisan law.
A majority of American citizens want affordable healthcare, housing, and education, net neutrality, an arms embargo vs Israel, an end to illegal forever wars, stronger environmental protections, cleaner water, less fossil fuel use and an end to fracking, etc - and there's still bipartisan resistance in our politics and media against all of those.
Congress doesn't actually represent us, it represents capital. Been like that for a long time. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
I don't understand this. In my view most people don't want this otherwise they would have implemented a government where the majority is heard, but they didn't. And don't even seem to try.
Either it's a dictatorship or it's listening to the majority. There is nothing democratic about acting against the majority. Never was
> In my view most people don't want this
The polls on all the above are pretty clear. There's no need to rely on your own viewpoint.
> otherwise they would have implemented a government where the majority is heard, but they didn't.
May I suggest reading some Chomsky, or at least watching Manufacturing Consent.
> Either it's a dictatorship or it's listening to the majority.
It's a plutocracy, and this has never been more obvious.
> There is nothing democratic about acting against the majority.
Well, there you go. Do check out those polls.
Nevertheless, the voters made their choice and actively voted for these representatives.
If everyone is so outraged and there's so many TikTok users, they can rally and vote out the people who voted for this.
I for one support this ban fwiw. You'll find out a lot of people do too. So in this instance and quite a few others, my representative has voted in my favor.
Voting between 1 of 2 respectives every few years to represent all issues doesnt seem to represent how citizens feel about individual issues.
What would your system be?
Democratic
So mob rule? Doesn't work.
That’s not how voting works in practice. The people I vote for do not match my views on every single topic. Just enough (weighted) that they are the better choice.
It is possible that every single candidate on the ballot is in agreement on a topic that every single non-candidate voter has the opposite view on. That doesn’t mean nobody gets elected.
Of course the users don’t want it. Asking a fanbase if the thing they are a fan of should be banned and ignoring all other groups doesn’t make much sense. Nothing would be banned.
Pew has it at 32–28 in support of the ban[0]. I think that's pretty low for a bipartisan effort where the opposition hasn't really had a chance to air it's case.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/05/support-f...
I'm for the ban chiefly on the grounds of economic fairness in access to markets. China doesn't allow access to any US social media products. We should only open our doors to Chinese companies conditioned on reciprocation.
I am a US Citizen and I 100% want this. I think this is far too small a step; I think all social media should be banned.
But this isn't about banning social media, it's about banning dissent.
Would you feel the same way if the US government banned all mainstream media organizations except the ones you ideologically oppose?
> it's about banning dissent
On the contrary, I think it is about banning a propaganda and social engineering vector that is under the thumb of an adversarial foreign government. That, for me, is enough of a reason to ban it and justify it under our constitution.
The fact that I am in favor of banning all social media should tell you that it is not ideological, but rather that I think social media is extremely addictive, and has huge negative externalities.
> I think it is about banning a propaganda
The problem of allowing government banning propaganda is it allows government to ban anything they label as propaganda. There is no law defining what's propaganda, so you just end up with the government being able to ban any information they don't like.
Imagine the government drums up for another illegal war like Iraq using fake evidence, and we ban all counter evidence as "foreign propaganda". Do you not see how dangerous that gets?
>That, for me, is enough of a reason to ban it and justify it under our constitution
The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled in the past foreign propaganda is protected speech under First Amendment.
You cannot strip American citizens' rights to receive foreign propaganda if they choose to do so.
You left a few words off in my first quote. I did not say anything about banning propaganda! I am talking about the system of dissemination, not its content.
> The fact that I am in favor of banning all social media should tell you that it is not ideological,
I'm not accusing you of being ideologically motivated, I just think that your (otherwise understandable) support for banning social media is inadvertently helping a bad actor in stifling freedom of speech.
Could China be using TikTok to spread propaganda in the US? Sure, but I haven't seen any evidence supporting this and if there was concrete proof I'd support the ban. Meanwhile the US government is labeling truthful discussions about Israel's genocide "antisemitic propaganda" and using them as motivation for the TikTok ban.
On one side we have vague communist boogeymen, on the other there's expressed desire to take control of unpleasant narratives. That tells me that they're really just trying to take away people's ability to discuss their dissenting ideas.
What criteria define social media that's ban-worthy for you? Does it require the combination of user-generated content and a personalized algorithmic feed which characterizes modern corporate social media, or do you extend it to a broader range of ways people can interact over the internet?
I'm not a lawyer, and therefore I am not qualified to make that kind of definition.
I'm not asking for a legal definition. This is Hacker News; in looking for a definition that would enable hackers to correctly classify things most of the time.
I think there is probably some combination of the following aspects:
-Content is user-generated -Content is curated by the company (i.e., users don't have the ability to fully turn off what is shown to them) -Content is not universal (i.e., users don't see the same thing)
I’m a us citizen and I do want this. Speak for yourself. China bans us social media. Us should ban Chinese social media.
Where is that whataboutism coming from. What has the one to do with the other? Do you want a great Firewall for America? Is that what this is about?
The Senator you voted for this probably voted for this so yes, America does want this.
Those in leadership being against a meaningful percentage (about 30%) of those under their care is common.
Well let's not talk in abstract phrases, who did YOU vote for, and did you not find it probable that they would support such actions?
I voted for a Democrat; and I also was a loud fighter against previous attempts at a TikTok ban. That
Does not negate that my "representative" is not representing me.I think part of the problem is everyone thinks they are the "adult in the room" and everyone else is the "primates". I agree policy discussions are a bit of a farce though (in a sorta funny twist places like TikTok are responsible for that since the engagement metrics have a tendency to promote nonsense and lies)
Hey, the ADL president is a US citizen, and he said "we really have a TikTok problem."
America has an Israel problem.
US citizens most definitely want this.
Some, sure, highly unlikely a majority does if you look at how many Americans use TikTok
How many of those people voted? The young people who don't vote don't want this and the old people who do vote do want this. The outcome is predictable.
I don't think it matters who voted for what and who got elected, TikTok's ban would probably still occur.
About 1/3 of Americans use TikTok.
When it comes to *restricting* rights (not growing them), it's very concerning that such a large percentage of people can _not_ want something and still have it forced upon them.
The ones that use the app don't want this. The ones that don't use it ... don't care.
Naturally either you don't want it. or you don't care.
My opinion on this has not changed since Trump tried to ban TikTok in his first term [0]: if the USA wants to ban TikTok for XYZ reason, they need to pass a general purpose law in Congress that applies equally to all foreign-owned companies.
Singling out TikTok without a universal principle or law leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, and the US gov. will just be playing whack-a-mole with whatever the TikTok successor is.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/944039053/u-s-judge-halts-tru...
Shockingly, given how often congress shirks its duty these days, they did write such a law:
https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7520/BILLS-118hr7520eh....
We all live in a bubble that consists of the people and things we interact with. People in your bubble not wanting this doesn't mean other people outside of your bubble don't.
Banning individual apps in this manner is wrong, IMO. In a country where concepts like freedom of speech and restrictions on government censorship are not insignificant considerations (in theory, at a minimum) a decision like this is unfortunate. China bans apps... tons of apps... in order to maintain strict control over the content and identity of users. This strategy is not something the US should be mimicking.
The claim that it's a "national security" risk and the ban is needed to mitigate that is silly. If it is really that then ban it from government facilities and devices. The actual risk from TikTok is no greater than the risk from Facebook, Instagram or any of a myriad of apps.
The correct thing to do would be to strengthen laws that address the core concerns so that we are protected from ANY app that represents a threat to privacy or security. Just banning a single app (and then another, and another...) is ridiculous and goes against a number of things this country is supposed to stand for.
So what if a conflict breaks out and the CCP essentially use TikTok as a pathway directly into the brains of millions of Americans. Let's say they tweak the algorithm with a button press to create confusion and public discord when we should be united to protect taiwan.
That's a possible tool of disinformation.
WHAT IF aliens invade and take over TikTok and then use it to convince hard-working Americans to dive into the mouths of the aliens?
It's a possible tool for aliens to make lunch.
One of those scenarios is much more likely than the other.
You (the US) should definitely make same laws banning aliens from owning social media before it's to late! Think about the children!!1!
hm, create a law which gives government emergency powers to delete apps / ban ip networks in case of a war
---
now that I think about it more banning foreign websites is the perfect way to brain wash
1. ban all foreign websites, because clearly it's a foreign influence on your people. "What if the war breaks" and so on
2. now you only have your local websites. Their owners are here and can be forced to mangle / edit content and bend it to your will. Where the foreign actor can ignore your requests local one can not
We already have it in Russia. People use the ugly and banned Facebook because they know that at least it's less censored in regards to Russian topics than locally owned VK or dzen. And Facebook is less likely to provide your messages to the russian police
Counterbalance to misinformation is, just, information. Strengthen the institutions that provide valuable and quality information and use them as counter. Why aren't PBS and such institutions funded to produce shorts that inform users and put those on Tiktok et all?
This is so fucking sad. As a russian american who lived through russian transition from relatively free country to an authoritarian one I'm getting dejavu vibes here(Putin started with taking over of all independent news sources like newspapers/tv and radio channels etc). This is not up to the government or some other people to decide what I read, what I watch where I get my information/news from. America has a beautiful concept of free speech, stick to it. I personally think that TikTok is a brain rot, but I still don't want any government involvement into this. Don't like it? - Don't use it.
Totally agree with this.
If they would ban what they think tiktok does wrong. Mr Zuckerberg would be very sad I guess.
But so much this, just banning TikTok will change nothing but more distrust in American politics
I broadly agree with this, but there was a path for the Tiktok app to not be banned, which is basically the China playbook of handing over control to a domestically controlled entity. Which in the case of a social media company with the reach of Tiktok i don't think is unreasonable.
Strengthened laws would be welcome, but all the social media companies would resist this as hard as they can. I don't see any real regulation happening until there is a crisis of some sort that will push it through against all the lobbyists and bought politicians.
Lots of American social media are banned here by the Russian government (all for the same reason of protecting citizens from foreign avdersaries), and we just use VPN. We're used to it, and if a service is popular (like Instagram), it's practically impossible to ban it. Monetization provided by the service is replaced by embedding sponsors' videos directly in the video (and getting money directly from the sponsor without third parties), or by selling merchendize to fans.
I wonder how many Americans will just use VPN? Is it common to use VPN in the US? Here, almost everyone uses it now. A few weeks ago they suddenly banned Viber for some reason and I barely noticed it.
As someone in Australia which I assume is fairly similar, we really don't use VPN's, at the very least the average person doesn't and their use isn't common knowledge. However I have friends in China like you, where VPN's are used by the majority.
We are used to having access to pretty much everything we want access to.
The most popular apps and services used around the world are largely readily available in the US and do not need VPN's to use.
A Tiktok ban is in my memory probably the first time that a major platform used by the masses has been banned for use in the US. Because of the lack of VPN usage by every day people, I'd say everyone will flock to Instagram rather than continuing to try accessing Tiktok. If nobody else you know is using Tiktok, then why use it would be the question.
Almost nobody uses a VPN here, just the geeks and people who need it for their corporate job. We're not used to this at all.
People in here literally argue that they should build a great Firewall because China has one too.
Do these people listen themself when they write things like this?
I think it's absolutely worrisome if this mentality gets an actual thing, if it isn't already.
I’m puzzled too. By the rationale I read here, Europe should ban all non-European social networks (which would be great since we don’t really have any). Whilst TikTok based propaganda is clearly being used to wage war on European elections, US propaganda targeting Europeans is equally being peddled by US tech giants as well. Social media is truly the worst widely accepted invention of the internet.
If X ne Twitter knew what they were doing, now would have been the obvious moment to relaunch Vine.
I've been wondering for the past couple of years, why did Vine fail but TikTok succeed? Based on my increasingly fuzzy memories of Vine and my rough understanding of TikTok as a non-user, they appear to be pretty much the same app.
TikTok’s algorithm for the feed and their data science and recommenders are pretty amazing. You can tune it to show you what you like really quickly and it’s effective. Mine is tuned to old house preservation and restoration, a couple guys doing skits as blue collar workers that are some of the funniest parts of my day, motocross videos, and some dog/animal content. I’ve never liked a video or commented on a video, it’s just so effective using dwell time and they have so much data that they can give you exactly what you want and little that you don’t. There is no politics on my feed. I challenge you to get that with twitter, reels, threads, Facebook, vine… any of them
Lack of variety in videos. 6s videos limited the amount of content that could be included to the point where all videos were essentially short comedy skits. TikTok keeps you engaged by showing you a variety of different genres of video. This includes comedy, but also educational videos, sports highlights, video game clips, etc.
Add to this TikTok's algorithm for deciding what content to show you based on how engaged you were in the previous videos and you end up with a "For you" feed that drastically varies from person-to-person. This keeps it fresh and enjoyable at all times.
Youtube tries to do a similar thing by presenting you videos that are similar to your interests, but in my experience it usually trends towards what is likely "more profitable". Meaning longer videos from well-established creators to juice as much ad revenue as possible from the user.
TikTok feels night-and-day in comparison. On TikTok, I can watch a 3 minute educational video on how elevators work, and then scroll once and see 3 second video of a grown man pretending to be a duck
I think we remember Vine through rose colored glasses. There was nothing on vine that was addicting, other than some very famous videos, that are still treated as relics. And everyone knew about those videos, because of how the feed was organized. TikTok is way more tailored-to-the-user.
> There was nothing on vine that was addicting
Well that sounds like a selling point to me.
It's "selling" if you're not going to spend hours on it. Kinda the opposite.
> There was nothing on vine that was addicting
Did we use the same app??
RIP Vine
IIRC people didn’t spend multiple hours a day on Vine. That was one of the reasons why it shut down — they couldn’t grab attention span of the aging users like Instagram and Snapchat did at that period (2012-2016). They also couldn’t get the fomo feeling that younger people nowadays get without TikTok et al.
vine could only do 7 second videos which hurts long-term
Until 2020, most TikTok videos were 15 seconds or so. They only switched to 30 seconds and later 1min+ after gaining huge traction. I guess 7 seconds is pretty short, but it the algorithm that was pretty simple.
7 seconds was great for certain types of videos especially quick comedic ones and brevity being the soul of wit means you have to be intentional with the little time you have
doubling the max duration length added greater versatility for creators while minimizing bloat.
making longer videos beyond a certain length can add to rambling and bloat which is why they've since added speed controls.
The precursor to TikTik (Musical.ly) "failed" as well. I think it's because while apps of that era were able to achieve the viral moment, they failed to convert that into advertising and sponsorship $$$. TikTok, Instagram etc. have perfected that pipeline.
Right idea, wrong time. The number of people with phones and data plans capable of recording, uploading, and viewing good quality video is near 100% now.
Vines were limited to six seconds, so the medium was a little different. That seems easy enough to change however.
Seems to me like they just gave up?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/28/extreme...
I doubt they have the engineering experience to launch anything at this point. They try to do a weird tiktok like thing where watching a video on mobile will randomly scroll to another video, but I think this probably has more to do with juicing "unregretted user seconds" than anything.
I am not saying that it's good or bad, and the geopolitical situation has changed a lot, but I miss the relative innocence, openness, and sense of unity that characterised the 2000-2010s internet.
We are slowly going in the direction of European internet, American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
The 1990s-2010s Internet was a golden age in the sense that even though the Internet was a child of the US military-industrial-research complex, political powers didn't yet perceive it as a potential threat vector or even comprehend it at all ("the internet is a series of tunes"). Many of its users also came from academic or technical backgrounds, which helped to maintain shared cultural values (although this was constantly eroding over time - see "Eternal September").
Social media and "Web 2.0" were probably the death knell for this era - while they were wonderful for democratization of the Internet's benefits, the merger of Internet culture and non-Internet culture meant that all the ills of the latter were inflicted on the former.
> The 1990s-2010s Internet was a golden age
It was the golden age because from the 1990 to 2010, the internet was majority american. For the entire 90s, the internet population was something ridiculous like 95% american. Fun times.
> in the sense that even though the Internet was a child of the US military-industrial-research complex, political powers didn't yet perceive it as a potential threat vector or even comprehend it at all ("the internet is a series of tunes").
Comprehend it at all? Are you joking. Maybe the dumb politicians didn't know it but certainly the real people in charge certainly knew it's potential.
> Social media and "Web 2.0" were probably the death knell for this era
The death nell of the era was the smartphone which allowed millions of computer illiterate peoples around the world to join the internet. The demographics of the internet was definitely changing in the 2000s, but the arrival of the smartphone toward the end of the decade accelerated the demographic shift. Now americans make up a small portion of the internet population.
>For the entire 90s, the internet population was something ridiculous like 95% american.
Do you have a source for this claim? It doesn't sound realistic to me.
> European internet, American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
Not sure about the European one. Unlike Russia or China, we don't seem capable to produce our own services, or to not use the US ones. Maybe it'll change with the increased hostility of US government and tech CEOs?
> seem capable to produce our own services, or to not use the US ones.
Like the China/US situation, as soon as there's friction against using the US ones people will switch to local competitors. There was a UK competitor to Facebook around the time of its launch called "Friends Reunited". Technologically these things are not as hard as recruiting users, overcoming the natural monopoly effects, and handling moderation.
A confrontation has long been brewing over the Microsoft Ireland "safe harbor" case.
> We are slowly going in the direction of European internet, American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
That has always existed, you just may not be aware of it if you are from an English speaking country, because those other parts are not easily accessible without knowledge of the respective languages.
Not only,
European computer, American computer, Chinese computer, Russian computer...
European OS, American OS, Chinese OS, Russian OS...
European programming language, American programming language, Chinese programming language, Russian programming language...
Just like in the good old days of computing during cold war.
I 100% agree, I think social media has been a complete mistake, facebook's creation is my version of eternal november since I joined the web in 1999
The big reason I think it changed is that the internet went from being a place for nerds and geeks, when there was a technical barrier to getting online, to a place where there is essentially no barrier. As a result the web now reflects the innocence, openness, and intellectual curiosity of the average person, since the internet has become a daily part of everyone's life not just a subsection of the world that appeals to us.
Eternal September?
I miss that too. I was in China before 2005 and the Internet was pretty much free. I used to speak to the quake editing group on IRC about mapping until deep into the night.
I think it's going to get more segmented. And not only that, the hardware, the OS, everything.
That said, I believe HN is a good platform. I don't think it's banned in China and people here can keep politics out of technical discussions, at least for now.
Bound to happen when the internet becomes weaponized, unfortunately. It's kind of crazy to begin with that we put all of our public infrastructure on a network Russia and China have wired access to from their home countries and it's lasted this long when you think about it.
I understand why they do it, and it makes sense. Still, it's amazing how quickly that open world has closed down.
"I miss being 9 years old"
It wasn't possible to share videos with the world in 2000 unless you owned a television broadcasting network. In 2000 you could not freely socialize with Chinese people on the Internet.
You still mostly can't freely converse with Chinese people because of the language barrier.
That shrinks by the minute, thanks to AI-assisted translators.
I had a long-distance relationship with someone when I was in my very early 20s who does not speak English nor my first language. I do not think language barrier is a difficult obstacle to overcome today if it was not much of an issue 10 years ago.
As someone watching Quicktime and Real Player videos in 2000, it was surely possible.
One thing that would make social media much better, is forcing providers by law to ensure everybody sees the same content.
Example: I can be on Reddit in subreddit A. You can be on Reddit in subreddit B.
We would obviously still see different content.
But ALL members of subreddit A MUST see the exact same topics in the exact same order with the exact same comments and likes/dislikes.
This would help build up a more shared “worldview” like mediums such as radio and TV did; you chose the channel, but everybody on the same channel gets the same information.
This would then allow the service provider and potentially government agencies, as well as users themselves, to moderate harmful content or false information more reliably.
Originally (and I don't know if this is still the case) the case for randomizing the content view on Reddit a bit (fuzzy numbering) was as a layer which helped prevent vote manipulation and brigading/bandwagoning. There may be similar reason for other platforms where not being exactly the same is unrelated to tuning the types of information presented to people. I.e. I don't know how much it matters that "all member absolutely must see the same exact order" as much as "the ordering defaults are not gamed for individual engagement"
Even then, I'd settle for "must have the option to use chronological/absolute vote based/similar type by default" type option. I'm not as convinced I know what others need to do to save themselves as much as I'm I think it'd be nice if it to be easy for us to be able to choose how we engage with content feeds (regardless what the platform is).
And then there is a matter of content groups when it comes to exposure rather than the addictive nature. Does it really make a difference if people end up seeing only /r/MyEchoChamberA and /r/MyEchoChamberB anyways. After all, each is perfectly representing the same echo chamber to all of the users who bother to browse there.
>This would help build up a more shared “worldview” like mediums such as radio and TV did; you chose the channel, but everybody on the same channel gets the same information.
That would be a nightmare, going back to the bad old days when people's worldviews were entirely decided by whatever flavour of government propaganda their preferred TV station happened to favour.
Oh yea, thank god we left that world behind completely. It would be terrible like, some major news network was completely in the tank for one of our political parties, and a huge percentage of the population kept it on basically 24/7. That would completely poison our discourse. Good thing the internet fixed that one.
>huge percentage of the population
I happen to have just looked into this, and it turns out this percentage peaks at 1 (for Sean Hannity, apparently?), but typically is around 0.5%. Less huge than you may be imagining
> One thing that would make social media much better, is forcing providers by law to ensure everybody sees the same content.
This sounds terrible. I don't want to see the same content as everyone else. A good chunk of Youtube right now is rightwing content that I don't have to see.
You won’t. You will still see the videos from the channels you subscribed to.
It’s just that everybody subscribing to that particular channel most get the same information from it; the same videos, the same comments, the same likes/dislikes
I'm going to blow your mind, but at one point you weren't subscribed to the channel. You found that channel likely through the algo.
> ensure everybody sees the same content.
Terrible idea.
On what order would you show things? Upvotes/downvotes? Could work but "social" media implies we all have different social circles, so my social circle of friends is very different from yours. I can probably see posts from my friends which you won't (since you're not friends with them) Maybe I follow certain pages that you don't. How do we still have the same feed then?
I find it pretty telling that the two sides of this argument boil down to:
1. This is a platform owned within China which can easily be used to silently and effectively spread highly targeted propaganda to extremely vulnerable demographics. If it has already been used for this purpose we will never know.
2. They make the most engaging internet junk food and other competitors don’t do nearly as good a job.
Does that about cover it?
> The outcome of the shutdown would be different from that mandated by the law. The law would mandate a ban only on new TikTok downloads on Apple or Google app stores, while existing users could continue using it for some time.
Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for existing users? I.e. why would they choose to do more than the minimum required by the law? It's nice that they want to point people to a way to download their data, but they could also keep showing videos after notifying people of that option. What's the rationale here?
> Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for existing users?
What business would choose to keep operating if it can't gain new customers? Think about it. The law makes it impossible for tiktok to grow or be profitable. What advertiser would be interested in a platform that will lose users every day and won't gain more in the future?
The law was sneakily and intentially written to outright ban tiktok. It would be like congress creating a law saying you specifically cannot buy more gas. You can keep using the gas in the car, but you can't fill up your tank anymore. Would you spend thousands to fix your car? Change the oil or the tire? No. You'd either sell the damn thing or just throw it away.
Would you throw away a $100B asset? If TikTok was just a business and not an arm of the CCP then they would not be shutting down.
It's not being thrown away, it will work as normal in every other country except the United States.
I wonder how many countries you need to have to match the united states' revenue
Waiting for Trump to take office to cut a deal.
The obvious play would be to incite those active users to take action by letting their congress critters know their opinions in an effort to have them reverse their vote
They did try that last year though it did generate a lot of calls in absolute terms and it didn't actually work as political pressure for them to vote against the ban.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/07/tiktok-us...
Getting congress to reverse something seems much harder, in that they also have to get someone to introduce the bill, get it through a committee, get it scheduled for a vote, etc, in both houses.
> Getting congress to reverse something seems much harder,
The GOP is absolutely flip flopping on this issue since Trump has also reversed on the ban idea. That's why the TikTok lawyers' arguments to SCOTUS were to just delay the ban until after Jan 20 so the incoming administration could weigh in on the matter.
> in that they also have to get someone to introduce the bill, get it through a committee, get it scheduled for a vote, etc, in both houses.
I think you are forgetting that the GOP just took control of both houses. It will not be that difficult for them is that's what the orange man says he wants.
If there's an escape hatch, I think it's more likely that Trump directs the DOJ to defer enforcement, first temporarily. Some deal will be made where Trump stipulates some stuff about content moderation, including removing TikTok's ban on political ads. Once TikTok has agreed to act like X, Trump can direct the DOJ to delay enforcement indefinitely, but keeping the law on the books as a sword of damocles to keep leverage.
The Reuters article already states this will happen:
> If it is banned, TikTok plans that users attempting to open the app will see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban, the people said, requesting anonymity as the matter is not public.
those plays can easily backfire - like when tiktok first did it
although there are success cases, like prop 22 in california and uber
The threat of losing something vs actually losing something is not the same though. If TikTok did something with all of the tracking data they did for each user so they could show the contact information for their Rep and Senators to make it easy for everyone with clickable links directly to phone numbers/emails would increase that engagement. It would also just show how creepy AF their tracking is. So maybe just a screen like PH does that refuses access to their content with a screen that says talk to your reps.
no, i think the negative reaction in political places would be exactly the same if they did this again
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/krishnamoorthi-gallagher-ti...
again, I think you are not considering the loyalty to the incoming president and that his party now controls both houses of Congress.
> again
you didn’t mention anything about either of those two points in your previous comments, but sure
Sure I did, just not to you directly. Read the full thread and the time stamps
not sure how you expect me to take into account things you are saying in different threads after i made my original comment
Political pressure. There are more Americans on TikTok than voted in the last election. I think the parent company is calculating that they can draw attention to the government taking away something the users love and turn that into political pressure to undo the law. We’ll see what happens, but I’d imagine they are right. Taking away the opiate of the masses has not worked out for governments in the past.
Many of those users are not eligible to vote.
People in the US have the right to petition the Government, regardless of their eligibility to vote.
Drawing attention to the stupidity and agenda-driven approach of the USG by causing pain to millions of users, is my guess.
The downloading your data thing is actually part of what is required by law.
> Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for existing users?
For the same reason Google or Facebook or many other major players might choose to stop operating in a jurisdiction that's trying to impose restrictions on them that they feel are unconscionable, rather than knuckling under?
The "national security" angle that FedGov is attempting to hang this all on is pretty bullshit... defense contractors that do classified work for the DoD can be foreign owned!
I'm tearing my hair out... how is the solution here not just better data privacy laws? Doesn't that solve all the issues, both domestic and international?
It's not about data privacy - it's about social control. I don't know why it's always lost on every commentary that the TikTok ban became a widely bipartisan issue after October 7th.
TikTok was the only large social media platform that did not overtly deplatform Palestinian users and sympathizers.
Because the point is to funnel people to US apps where the US Govt has control of the narrative
Data privacy is not the concern, or else they'd have done what you suggest
Because it's not necessarily about the / data privacy/, it's about the ability of a foreign adversary to influence the American populous in subtle ways over time.
By simply suppressing topics, or elevating trends they might find helpful in swaying the populous.
That's what propaganda is and it works.
> By simply suppressing topics, or elevating trends they might find helpful in swaying the populous.
Isn't that exactly what US media does as well? Every media has an owner with his own interests, the information they'll provide you will be carefully crafted to not harm those interests.
Best case: I am not propagandized by any state media || Second worst case: I am propagandized by my own country's media || Worst case: I am propagandized by a foreign adversary's media
So just blind nationalism? Who guarantees that your own country's propaganda is more beneficial to you?
The amount of mental gymnastics to justify censorship in this thread is off the charts. A really solid anti utopia material. One can probably make a dystopian museum exhibition with quotes from this thread.
On a similar note, I have never seen so much bigotry and populism on HN as in this and H1B threads.
Link a video. What is the alleged propaganda that is so threatening to national security Americans can't be allowed to see it?
In the article, this discussion, all the media I've read... I've yet to see a single example of this alleged propaganda and manipulation by the CPC. What propaganda? Manipulated into believing what?
> it's about the ability of a foreign adversary
Hang on, 'foreign adversary'? Who makes all of America's stuff? Who sent so much of the jobs and manufacturing over there?
> to influence the American populous [sic] in subtle ways over time.
Eg, pointing out Israel's atrocities and how they lead right back to us, or about advantages of socialism compared to oligarchy.
Most other countries allow foreign media to be aired quite freely. Any 'subtle influence' is in a sea of other influences, and quite diluted.
Diverse media with free exchange of ideas leads to a populace with a chance of being informed. Restricting media to the US megacorps is obviously a terrible idea, no?
> That's what propaganda is and it works.
The solution to propaganda is to educate people and teach them critical thinking. However, that would damage the yacht class far too much.
Because better data privacy laws would be bad for American companies for collecting the same data.
Ding ding ding
I believe there was a bill that addressed this, but if failed shortly before the TikTok stuff.
Privacy is irrelevant in this case. It’s a free line of propaganda for almost all our youth at their most vulnerable age.
Yeah, at this age,they need to be fed only with US propaganda, just to be sure. Too bad that another country produced a better product to that demography.
> Privately held ByteDance is about 60% owned by institutional investors such as BlackRock and General Atlantic, while its founders and employees own 20% each. It has more than 7,000 employees in the United States
That’s probably a very stupid question, but is how this is a Chinese company when 60% are owned by American funds?
Same way the Singaporean CEO is part of the CCP: He's not, it's not, but there are a lot of vested interests like Facebook lobbying to treat them as the boogeyman.
That Tom Cotton interview was wild.
Presumably, the relevant factor here is not ownership on paper, but who has real control via being able to tell Bytedance employees (including the executives) what to do. Which, in this case, is assumed to be China’s government leaders.
Presumably, yes, but is that actually how it works? I think we need a primer on how Chinese companies are structured. What does it mean to own 60% of a company if that doesn't give you any real control over the company?
Control can be separated from who is owed what share of economic profits. For example, some Alphabet and Meta shares having more voting power than others.
On a more pragmatic level, even in the US "own" means what society will defend for you. However, the US (and other western countries) are presumed to have courts that have a higher probability of defending claims of ownership assuming you have the right paperwork. Whereas in places like China, it is presumed that your paperwork is less likely to entitle you to a defense.
The tiktok ban law forbids chinese ownership of 20% and chinese control of 100%. That is how it is a chinese company, either by 20% ownership or 100% contro.
In the US government's view, as expressed in its brief in the Supreme Court:
"Because of the authoritarian structures and laws of the PRC regime, Chinese companies lack meaningful independence from the PRC’s agenda and objectives. As a result, even putatively ‘private’ companies based in China do not operate with independence from the government. Indeed, “the PRC maintains a powerful Chinese Communist Party committee ‘embedded in ByteDance’ through which it can ‘exert its will on the company.’ ... the committee includes “at least 138 employees,” including ByteDance’s “chief editor”
...
"Even assuming that the law would recognize Zhang as a bona fide domiciliary of Singapore and not the PRC, ByteDance would nevertheless qualify as being “controlled by a foreign adversary” under one or more of the other statutory criteria. For instance, ByteDance is “headquartered in” China, which is sufficient on its own.... ByteDance also is “subject to the direction or control of ” Chinese persons domiciled in China (in particular, Chinese Communist Party officials), which likewise is sufficient on its own."
http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-656/336144/20241...
The saddest part of this to me was watching congressional representatives try to wrestle with the Singapore thing and fail in hearings. It really made me feel like they thought they had some kind of gotcha when in reality all they did was publicly demonstrate how little they actually grasp the real national security threat at play.
Maybe the Chinese people will be able to teach the US people how to side-load APKs (on Android) and use a VPN.
That would be ironic.
No it wouldn't be ironic because all of that is allowed.
In fact, existing tiktok users are welcome to keep the existing app on their phone.
What's being banned is the commerce.
Side-loading APKs are still needed for new Android users, not too much difference right? Exactly like the workarounds you need to find when you want to install "Risky applications" on a Chinese Xiaomi phone.
As a Chinese hated CCP for the internet censorship and decided to be an expat, what's going on these days is changing my world view.
In the article it's stated that TikTok will display a message to US users and the app will not work:
> Under TikTok's plan, people attempting to open the app will see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban
> No it wouldn't be ironic because all of that is allowed.
The irony is that China is usually the one considered "less free" by the US, and in this case Chinese citizen could help US citizen "regain their freedom".
> In fact, existing tiktok users are welcome to keep the existing app on their phone.
My understanding from the article is that ByteDance will redirect US users to a website and prevent them from using the app.
The only real irony is your continued use the word.
It's really rare for me to be pro-intervention when it comes to the government vs free-industry but TikTok has become undeniably, geopolitically hazardous for the US. The dismal bit of it is that nation state backed, habit-forming propaganda apps are only likely to proliferate.
Can you provide examples of China controlled propaganda happening on Tiktok?
Things that are factually true don't count, obviously.
Surely you can't think propaganda is just spreading lies... Contextual presentation can change how true information is perceived. Seeing a perspective more will align your own with it.
I know of many instances in which Meta suppressed specific opinions, but I don't know any of TikTok doing the same thing. Examples are welcome, if you have any.
Or is this just about Tiktok not being owned by a billionaire who will use censorship to keep the USA government happy?
There are many different ways to read your comment. Both of which are actually pretty funny. Well done.
There's only one way if you're being intellectually honest.
I'm still waiting for examples of Chinese propaganda pushing for misinformation, by the way.
It seems not a single person on this post is capable of providing one, even though there are dozens of users scaremongering over Chinese propaganda.
I continue to be baffled by people who simultaneously believe that TikTok is dangerous because of Chinese propaganda that may happen in the future, but that all the other social media networks are not dangerous despite the mostly Russian misinformation and election interference that has been ongoing since 2016. So far as I can see the important part is not who owns the network, but just how easy it is for misinformation to be published, and basic info like "is this poster a real human?" or "was this person paid to say this?" or "is this a factually incorrect statement?" are not readily visible to users.
Ban all social media.
> but that all the other social media networks are not dangerous despite the mostly Russian misinformation and election interference that has been ongoing since 2016
You can affirm one thing without affirming similar arguments. This is important for me to say because you're consigning me to an argument that I didn't make.
Yeah good thing they banned facebook as well which provably has a huge fake news / propaganda problem while tiktok... while tiktok has.... um... while tiktok... quick, tell me what propaganda tiktok has been pushing that's so much worse than FB or twitter or IG! You can do it! Can't you?
Zuckerberg and Elon got what they wanted. Regulatory capture. Got the govt to ban a superior product. Elon even gets dips on acquiring it and expanding his megaphone.
I guess US is becoming more like China. Choosing their horses and warding off competition.
So much for free markets.
Welcome to Oligarchy America. From now on billionaires will get their hands on whatever they can, with a shining approval from the government and the FTC. DOGE will privatize what's left of public services so they can have that too.
And when that's done they'll consolidate into a few monopolies and we'll basically be back in the Gilded Age.
I created a quick tutorial on how to backup and download all of your TikToks.
https://x.com/adocomplete/status/1879568249261621572
Doesn't "yt-dlp https://www.tiktok.com/@YOURPROFILE" also work?
oh wow, didn't think that would work, but it does. even better!
You are linking the wrong script in the initial tweet. You meant to link to this one: https://gist.github.com/kukicado/e92b31601117060f6895ecefc98...
obviously bad policy for many reasons, but as a geriatric millennial I'm selfishly happy. As long as the ban continues, I will never have to sit on the bus and listen to those horrible robot voices blasting nonsense out of someone's phone speakers.
There’s nothing worse than listening to the audio of someone else scrolling TikTok
Hearing the same 10 second clip of a song 20 times
If Vine dying taught us anything its that the content from Tiktok will outlive the platform by being reposted to others. That voice will never die unfortunately.
I’m sure they will move to some other platform.
Are you sure you're actually thinking of people using youtube shorts or facebook?
You probably might not know whether that's coming from Tiktok, or instagram, facebook, youtube reels and shorts.
Tiktoks isn't the only provider of that type of content.
I don’t understand why, with so much advanced warning that users would need a good replacement for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are still so bad. Why not invest in matching, at least, every TikTok UX feature? And beyond that, how are these two leading AI companies really unable to make a recommendation algorithm that actually shows people things they like?
No really. The Shorts and Reels algorithms are so one dimensional. They both interpreted me disliking smug milquetoast rants about Republicans and Democrats as not wanting politics in my feed at all. I do want the politics, but I don't need it hammered into my head that Republicans are dumb as bricks. I don't need to see the performative Tom Cotton and Jasmine Crockett clips that have already been shown 100 times.
TikTok's algo, OTOH, somehow understands that interests are multi-dimensional and that maybe I just want a different kind of politics or discussions that go deeper than cheap shots. I never in my life thought I'd encounter an anti-Marxist right-libertarian who actually read and is familiar with all three volumes of Capital, but TikTok figured out that I'd find it interesting.
I agree that it is unusual that YouTube and Instagram don't seem to be trying harder to court TikTok users. I assume this is because it would expose how much of an unpopular alternative they are.
The user base is probably more important to the quality of the feed than the interface or the algorithm.
We'd be better off without a clone, whether its owned by a Western company or not.
Perfect time to ditch TikTok, Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts and restore your attention span.
Let’s be clear about one thing: it’s never about protecting the privacy of private citizens—that’s just the justification.
Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
The U.S. has held a monopoly on this power, leveraging it to gather data on citizens worldwide and projecting our value systems onto others.
Banning TikTok is simply an effort by us to maintain that monopoly, and making sure a foreign adversary do not wield such power.
That's mostly true and it's a good thing for the US to prevent hostile, autocratic, foreign powers from gaining undue cultural power.
It would be nice if they could also prevent hostile autocratic domestic(ish) powers from leveraging their current cultural power. But they didn't, so naturally those in power are going to build their moat to maintain it.
I have been coming around to the idea that we should ban all* algorithmic content surfacing.
It's taken a while, but the longer we go down this path, the more clear it seems that it is impossible to design a content algorithm that does not have significant negative cultural side effects. This is not to say that content algorithms don't have benefits; they do. It's just that they can't be useful (i.e., designed to optimize for some profitable metric) without causing harm.
I think something like asbestos is a good metaphor: Extremely useful, but the long-term risks outweigh any possible gains.
> It's just that they can't be useful (i.e., designed to optimize for some profitable metric) without causing harm.
That's not the pattern I've seen, as close as you are to it.
I've seen lots of platforms be wildly useful. Digg was good for a while; StumpleUpon, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit and even Facebook all had periods at the start where they added real value to people's lives.
At some point they start to "optimize for some profitable metric" - and quickly become heinous.
The problem isn't the algorithm; it's that it gets twisted toward profit. And that's basically a tautology - once you start trying to suck money out of the equation for yourself, that juice has to come from somewhere.
I can envision a platform that isn't based on profit being far more useful than harmful - if it can only ward off the manipulations of the yacht class.
Reddit is still extremely valuable if you curate it heavily. My entire feed is my narrow interests and passions (though I still use old.reddit, which helps. The minute that's gone, I probably am too)
> if it can only ward off the manipulations of the yacht class.
The inevitable enshittification of goods and services once they reach a certain level of maturity (i.e., profitability) basically guarantees that the yachted-classes will be involved.
Given this de-facto inevitability, the original premise (that algorithmic content is eventually a bad thing) makes more sense
It's not inevitable though.
Emails, torrents, Mastodon, VLC, Blender, Linux - They're all either solid, or even getting better over time.
Why? Because the capital class were explicitly denied, by design or by principle.
Like with healthcare, transport, post services, housing, and much else, there's simply areas where the public good is too important to give the profit motive too strong a foothold. I believe social media is one of those areas.
I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.
Don't believe me, we've got lots of data correlating the rise of social media and mental health crisis. As time moves on the evidence linking the two continues to become stronger.
You strained to look past the parent’s point, nowhere did they excuse the private institutions for their part in this; just that a totally unaccountable foreign power having this capability is not ideal.
I guess the counterpoint here is that we have lots of data how external actors (e.g. Russia) is influencing large parts of the political landscape in Europe right now.
> having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us
Dogs kill more Americans than lions, but that doesn't mean that we should be letting people have lions as pets.
I'd personally be happy to see something like Australia's recent restriction of teen use of social media in the US, but bringing that up now is just a whataboutism.
uh... "... worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us"... yet. this is only true because we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation-- up to now, the U.S. has had a monopoloy on social media giants and the like. it is absolutely not guaranteed that this will hold true, and there are many reasons to suspect that it won't be true. given how china views about U.S. sovereignty when it comes to setting up their own (secret) de facto government, police state, etc. on U.S. soil, it would be shocking if they didn't put their thumb on the scale.
and none of that is to say that i agree with the ban-- i think the mere fact of how unamerican, frankly, taking possession of foreign assets for american gain at others' expense is as blatant a signal as possible that we shouldn't be doing it. if we are trying to protect america, western values, etc., if we don't act in accordance with those values, what are we even protecting? the way to protect the american way of life is not through becoming more "unamerican".
in my personal opinion, the so-called "decline of western values", or whatever, has nothing to do with imperialism, nor to do with those values being short-sighted or wrong. it is because of our collective crisis of confidence in these values because of the (many) mistakes we have made along the way. the moral compass still points essentially in the same direction; it's just that for whatever reason we seem to have convinced ourselves that we don't want to go North after all, and instead prefer to just wander around the map aimlessly (all the while shitting on how the compass isn't taking us where we want to go). and so now we have people who unironically defend organizations like Hamas at the expense of the United States as though believing in universal freedom and equality of opportunity is merely a "cultural" value, rather than an absolute one. and, more insanely, that these values are somehow subordinate to the political issue du jour. these values don't give anyone carte blanche to coerce others who don't share them, but the idea that they are somehow subjective or relative-- that they are negotiable-- is the height of insanity.
how did you manage to shoehorn israel in here? seems entirely irrelevant.
> I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.
That's pure, shameless whataboutism, and one that desperately tries to hide the fact that totalitarian regimes are using social media service as a tool to control you and your opinions.
You can bring up any bogeyman you'd like, but you are failing to address the fact that these totalitarian regimes clearly are manipulating you to act against your own best interests.
How are you not doing the exact same thing?
> How are you not doing the exact same thing?
I'm not trying to distract people away from discussing how totalitarian regimes are abusing services like TikTok to manipulate people from Democratic countries to act against their best interests and in line with the totalitarian regime's interests.
Now, can we go back to discuss how the CCP is using the likes of TikTok to manipulate people to do their bidding? Or is the subject being discussed verboten?
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. A foreign enemy keeps us from focusing on our own domestic policies. Turns out, if you look into it, we're the baddies.
In addition to widespread data collection and social manipulation, we also intentionally shove our culture down the throats of other nations in order to maintain cultural supremacy.
> A foreign enemy keeps us from focusing on our own domestic policies.
The nice thing about fiction is that you can make anything sound plausible. Ironically, what people consider the most prosperous time of America happened to be the time when America was opposing a vague foreign adversary. If anything, nihilist platitudes like this that have created a void in civic engagement that megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill in.
> Ironically, what people consider the most prosperous time of America happened to be the time when America was opposing a vague foreign adversary.
It happened to be at a time when the rest of the world's industrial capacity had been almost completely destroyed by a devastating world war which hardly touched US infrastructure.
¿Porque no los dos?
Outsized returns to the post-war US economy were consequent on being the only intact industrial economy; the regulatory system which ensured those gains be shared with the working class was a response to communism.
The US is a hostile autocratic power with undue cultural power on our own citizens, so even if it's a given that TikTok is mostly a propaganda platform (which I completely, categorically disagree with), wouldn't it be better to at least have a choice? Or be able to compare between them? You are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't capable of making their own decisions which is about as autocratic as it gets.
"You are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't capable of making their own decisions" - the overwhelming majority of HN users would support U.K style ISP blocking of websites and apps deemed hostile to the government.
Endless comments about reciprocity, as if the American citizen doesn't have freedom of expression rights vastly different than Chinese citizens.
Yeah I think you're right. Unfortunately I'm coming to appreciate that many of the users here are heavily pro-censorship / "protect the children" types. Never thought I would see it happen. Feel like I'm waking up from a coma realizing everything's changed. It's so antithetical to the HN I knew and loved.
i would argue, if it’s that powerful, it should be illegal for anyone to have that sort of power. from china to musk to zuckerberg to religions.
we really should ask ourselves why we’re continuing to allow some to continue these abuses…. there should be laws in place to stop all of them.
Agreed; let's ban social media.
The type of power China has is very different than Zuck's. You aren't going to get taken to a black site for talking about Tianamen Square on Facebook. (or something like the Tusla Race Massacre may be a better example, since that is embarrassing to the US similarly to Tianamen Square in China)
It's a good thing for anyone. Which is why the EU should find the way to restrain, or completely ban if necessary, American social media.
We should return the favor then and shut down the psyops divisions like this (and these are just the public ones):
https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/specialty-careers/sp...
tencent should divest from reddit?
The US censorship of Chinese social media apps on these grounds sure makes it look like China was completely justified in doing it first.
???
Isn't it the reverse? China has censored/banned many US apps and websites for a long time, surely turnabout is fair play?
Hell, TikTok itself is already banned in China, irony of ironies.
China didn’t ban U.S. apps. it maintains a policy that sets a high bar for foreign operators, such as requiring domestic servers, domestic partners legally responsible for operations, content access and moderation to meet local standards, etc.
U.S. apps and websites simply choose not to operate there due to these requirements.
The U.S. has been complaining about this for years, advocating for a free internet without censorship in the Chinese market. But now that Chinese apps have access to American data, we’ve begun implementing the same measures.
I can get to the main Xinhua news website -- the Chinese one, not some US-specific page -- easily enough as an American. You definitely can't do the equivalent from within China, you can't get to Voice of America, or the New York Times, or similar sites.
That's the difference. It's not about operating as a business within the country, it's about banning access to even the foreign version of the site or app.
China commonly bans Western websites and apps, even ones that have never operated or attempted to operate as businesses within China. The US doing the same is relatively rare, situations like this TikTok ban are very uncommon.
> content access and moderation to meet local standards
what a nice way to say forcing a backdoor to identify, spy on, and oppress citizens.
but yeah I guess oppression of people is a "high bar" for foreign operators to meet.
backdoors are wrong here and are wrong there.
We can't have people doing things like searching for Tiananman Square or Mao Zedong or talking about how Taiwan and Hong Kong want complete independence from China.
I'm sure a big part of the cost is the additional infrastructure and manpower to implement all of China's censorship, tracking, etc.
Ah, more misinformation from the PRC defense squad, right on time!
> China didn’t ban U.S. apps.
Yes, it did.
It's not just that the websites and apps don't operate as normal businesses within China, but you can't even reach the foreign versions from within China without using a VPN. That's what makes them truly banned.
There are plenty of Chinese websites who do not operate as businesses within the US, but Americans can still freely access the sites if they want to, thus they're not banned.
Please, read this and educate yourself about China's firewall: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...
Could you elaborate on that? I have no clue how the US banning TikTok for granting the CCP the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Americans somehow justifies the decade plus of the GFW, blocking Western social media, rampant censorship, etc.
I think the OP is saying that both nations are banning software because of the risks of the software/data collection posing risks to the political stability of each nation. You can obviously say "our reason is better because X", but the outcomes being the same means that there is justification.
Both sides say it's worth banning "Tiktok/Google for granting the CCP/USA the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Chinese/Americans".
Data sovereignty — the idea that every country should protect and prevent its citizens’ data from foreign entities.
We never discussed this seriously before because we held a monopoly on it. For decades, other countries provided us with a direct feed of their data. Only recently have they begun to grasp the ramifications of that.
China never bought into that narrative. They have consistently upheld their data sovereignty policy, requiring foreign entities to host servers within their borders to operate, and that looks like the direction the rest of the world is heading.
I wish for an open world where data & communication flows freely, but it's unclear who can be trusted to wield that power.
The US government has never provided any direct evidence of their claims of CCP puppet-mastery, the whole thing is generally some combination of "Trust me bro" and "Well obviously China's government is gonna control a Chinese company."
Meanwhile China's reasoning for blocking US companies has been eerily similar arguments the entire time. Hard to prove them wrong when we have the major aristocrats of US tech companies completely prostrating themselves at Mar-a-Lago, offering bribes (er, sorry, the going term is "funding inauguration parties") to the incoming administration in broad daylight, staffing themselves with party officials, etc.
Arguably both are right, and it's a shame because the general working class people of both nations have more in common with each other than they do with their ruling classes. I think the thing that terrifies those in authority the most is the idea that the citizenry might realize this if there's enough communication.
The difference being American citizens used to have the final say while the Chinese never did.
Congratulations, you turned the U.S into an authoritarian clone of China.
It demonstrates Western weakness. Remember, during the Cold war the "iron curtain" was meant to prevent Soviets from seeing Western culture, political points of views.
The United States does not feel confident in its ability to persuade Americans that it's model, culture and political ideals are superior to global alternatives. Hence a Western Iron Curtain.
Simple exposure to culture, propaganda and points of view is child’s play compared to the modern strategy of inciting discord by amplifying existing differences and mass scale disinformation.
Don’t forget that part of the reason there’s a compartmentalization between Douyin and Tiktok is China’s own concerns about their nationals being exposed to outside influence in a manner far greater than what the US dictates the other way.
I really enjoyed TikTok and will miss it, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t at least provide the potential for the CCP to more directly have an intentionally negative influence on western audiences.
You fundamentally misunderstand the rights American citizens have that are being violated. The government doesn't get to decide where it's citizens get their information from. We're supposed to be free to come to our own conclusions even if presented with propaganda and disinformation.
Once the government decides it has the right to curate what media it's citizens are exposed to you are living in a n authoritarian state.
These actions make me more hostile to my country.
I made no assertions as to whether or not this was an appropriate trade-off.
The issue at hand, however, is not about any particular media content being censored but about the manipulation of how that media is presented or suppressed by a foreign source. I think people should be given the freedom to choose what to view, but I am also not naive enough to think that we as a whole are not susceptible to influence, often without even being aware of how we are influenced.
To the end that the US has a national security interest here: We have other laws on foreign political influence like FARA and the Logan Act that have similar tradeoffs around free speech and free association, but these elicit much less controversy. There’s a fundamental question: should the ideals of free speech be allowed to undermine the framework that allows that free speech to exist? To some, saying yes to that question is like arguing the US Constitution is a death pact.
> Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
Religion is distributed through churches, synagogues, mosques etc, the medieval equivalent of a digital social platform. A social media platform is kinda like the Vatican but x10000000.
Repeating my other comment:
Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider has to bake American policy position into its algorithm, what's going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own algorithm?
From here on out, are only US government collaborating social media apps going to be allowed to scale? If so that is a chilling effect on speech. I want to use my own algorithm. I don't need China nor the USG to tell me what I want to watch. I'm perfectly willing to write my own feed algorithm to do it, I tinker with several on Bluesky right now. Will this be banned?
Is there even a single phone that doesn't have a component that's derived from China? It's never been about security. I agree, the US wants access and they can't make a foreign company comply, even trying exposes the US.
Other countries have rules, make rules, the reality is they don't want to make rules because that might persuade foreign companies from not doing business here. Why make rules when you can get a warrant from a fisa court preventing any and all public scrutiny and getting everything you want?
Gives you some idea of the massive amount of data available to US authorities derived from the US domination of privacy invading services.
They know it's a threat because they wrote the book on it. That's also why we'll never get decent privacy legislation.
> it’s never about protecting the privacy of private citizens—that’s just the justification
...but it wasn't. It was clearly and explicitly about national security.
Ok. What if I think nobody should have that power?
> Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
Fox News and talk radio demonstrate that isn't true in the US.
> Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
There is no evidence for this belief. Really for either religion or for "social networking platforms".
You could maybe make the claim that this is true in terms of reach, but the implication here is that "these mediums can be used deliberately to influence people in a chosen direction", and this is just kind of silly. It's fun to imagine that some nefarious powers (or benificent powers) have some magical insight into how to make people believe things but this just isn't true and I think intuitively we all understand that.
To make the case that this is true you would have to do an examination of all attempts to spread messages, not just look at successful cases where messages catch on. Nobody has the power to do this on demand through some principled approach, or else they would be emperor of the world.
I don't recall legacy media spreading tourettes-like tics...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9553600/
Are you implying that this was a deliberate attempt by an agent to create tourettes-like tics? Are you also asserting that this hypothetical boogieman can do similar attacks on demand because of their understanding of social contagion [1]?
The idea of social networking (or other broadcast or widely disseminated media) being able to influence beliefs or behavior is kind of inarguable. In specific cases there might be causal confusion - whether the media was effective because of existing trends or piggybacked on other phenomena vs. creating the effect directly. But this is a far cry from claiming that it can be deliberately weaponized, or that it is more effective for this purpose than other means of information dissemination.
[1] Social contagion, a phenomenon that long predates the internet
I am simply providing evidence for the claim
>Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence
To be a tool it has to be able to be directed towards an end.
Hurricanes are effective for coastal property destruction, but they can't be used as a tool
I have a hammer on my shelf that I have not used yet; is it therefore not a tool?
The shallow response here is that use is important. The hammer on your shelf is an effective tool for hammering in nails.
Is the hammer on your shelf an effective tool for influencing public opinion? It can be used for that -- you can smash statues of people you find objectionable and maybe have a greater effect on public opinion than you could by trying to tear down statues with your bare hands (although the nature of the public opinion change is not really that predictable). But it is not a tool for that because it cannot be directed to the general purpose of influencing public opinion. You cannot convince people that assisted suicide should be acceptable or that we shouldn't keep cats as pets or that we should not go to war to defend Taiwan using the hammer.
Similarly, TikTok.
I'd call your reasoning shallow, but there isn't any. You state a bunch of stuff about a hammer and conclude "therefore TikTok cannot influence public opinion." It is manifestly obvious that many advertisers pay TikTok huge sums of money to literally influence not merely public opinion (of their products) but to incite action (buying those products).
Tiktok has incited action on its own behalf:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/tiktok-phone-cal...
https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/press-releas...
Your claims are ridiculous and your arguments are nonexistent.
And nothing of value was lost.
Do you know Shang Yang's Shangjunlun?Any superior will divide and disintegrate the lower class groups，This is the same everywhere, so who is the real enemy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Lord_Shang
Given that (as the article mentions) the ban essentially only directs Google/Apple to remove the app from their US stores, what's the rationale on ByteDance's part to immediately revoke existing US users' access? My naive assumption was they'd want to keep it going and support the current dead version of the app for as long as possible to continue squeezing US revenue for at least a few more months until that becomes untenable. Are they instead hoping to rally the user base into mass protests and pressure lawmakers into reversing the ban?
As far as I know there's no real calculation, it would just be for revenge.
ByteDance is very pissed about how they are being treated and so they would rather burn it all down than hand it over to some American.
It is endlessly fascinating to me that people ascribe emotions that individuals experience to organizations, companies, nation-states, etc.
As the article says ByteDance is a massive company with thousands of employees in the US alone. It’s ridiculous to think a corporation of that size operates as if it was a singular (and extremely petty) individual, especially to the detriment of its own self interests.
There’s a dozen potential motivations for pursuing this strategy and none of them boil down to being “pissed”.
I'd like to offer an alternative perspective: TikTok's main revenue comes from China. Succumbing to the US gov would challenge the domestic nationalism, thereby causing more losses.
I was surprised by that too. I assumed we would see a sudden interest in android and iphone jailbreaking.
Congress shall make no law respecting ... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble ...
unless they mumble 'national security', and then screw the constitution ...
Americans finally discovering their constitution is interpreted all day every day is the funniest thing on the internet. You also don't have free speech, and your rights to bear arm are very restricted.
It makes no sense to me how this is an argument of free speech.
I assume you are saying this is curtailing the creators speech? However the creators can move to any other platform, they are not being restricted in what they can say or produce.
So perhaps the concern is about TikTok's free speech; which, thank god the constitution does not protect a foreign adversaries right to free speech.
Not free speech. INHO its about free assembly. 140M of us assembled there, and now that meeting place is being distroyed, and we are being dispersed, without any actual harm being in evidence. If the government can do that here, it can do it anywhere.
Go try to assemble on the White House lawn without an invitation; I'm sure it will work very well for you.
That's how women earned the right to vote in this country...
Free speech includes the right to receive/hear speech. TikTok contains lots of speech that US citizens have the right to hear.
This is completely untrue, there are unlimited examples of speech that exists out there that you have absolutely no inherent right to hear, and in fact many existing laws explicitly support restrictions on your ability to hear the speech. Just a few examples off the top of my head; do I have the right to hear:
* A comedian at a paid event when I haven't paid
* Private conversations between you and your significant other
* DMs between other people on social media
* Podcasts published exclusively on Spotify when I don't have a membership
* Speech in walled gardens (FB, Insta, X, etc) where I don't have an account
The government isn't banning you from most of these, the only ones they are banning you from is private ones, but TikTok has speech that is non-private, so it's completely different.
What does this have to do with anything? How do any of these examples relate to the tiktok ban in the slightest?
By your reasoning, I have a right to hear the speech on instagram and X, correct?
Well tough cookies for me, meta and X are bith restricting my freedom of assembly. Will you go to bat for me?
They’ve imposed arbitrary restrictions on my access to speech simply because I refuse to sign up. And The government is okay with them restricting me from these public squares, outrageous!
Will you be angry on my behalf, like you are with the restriction on tik tok?
If these are truly public squares, it’s outrageous that I need to essentially show ID and give away a ton of rights to X and meta just to access the public square. Why are we not mad about that as well?
Again, this feels completely unrelated to the tiktok ban. It's fine for a venue of free speech to have rules, it's different for the government to ban a platform 1/3 of americans use because of intangible threats that are frankly an incredibly thin excuse for censorship.
I agree, though not when broadcast by a foreign adversary (per the 1934 law).
Forcing a sale to a US company also enables that to continue. Additionally, it does not protect the right for users to receive/hear speech from EVERY outlet, this same speech is permissible on any other platform - simply not one mediated by an adversary.
I'm very curious about this case, actually. My top questions
- difference between actually broadcast and potentially broadcast. Can the government suspend someone for potentially doing something?
- More on the right to hear speech -- you're saying that I cannot receive speech from foreign adversaries if I choose to do so myself? IMO this is well within my rights
- Do platform effects (e.g. recommendation) count as speech? For example, I may choose to post on TikTok bc it circulates in 24h to a specific audience - if TT got changed, does this mean that my speech got curtailed? (right to assemble, etc)
So just go hear it from somewhere else. There is no content on tiktok that can't be recorded and posted on instagram reels.
Congress does have the power to regulate foreign commerce however. Not that I disagree with you, but rarely can something be distilled to a single concern.
It is a balancing act for sure, but is it 'right' to have all those choices, but only as long as they sufficiently support governing body overall worldview?
There are still a million places online people can organize and assemble so I don't really see how this right is being meaningfully infringed here. It definitely doesn't seem clear to me that this clause means the government needs to maintain every avenue of assembly to the point this is a constitutional issue.
THIS!
If you listen to the arguments that TikTok made before the Supreme Court, the court is extremely dubious of the free speech argument. And this has been a court that has been very favorable to free speech overall.
Its the fact that 140 million of us chose to assemble in this place ( app ) that IMHO should have weighed much higher as a concern, over speculative spoooky dangers. No actual harm to the country was shown, just supposition, which equates to us trusting the government when it strips out constitutional rights away.
Foreign corporations do not have free speech rights.
The real answer is that no corporations should have free speech rights in and of themselves - by obtaining a government granted liability shield a corporation (/LLC) is not merely a group of individuals, but rather a highly scaled governmentesque entity running on its own subbureaucracy. That liability shield is an explicit government creation for specific public policy goals, and when the outcome is at odds with the individual freedom the arrangement can and should be modified.
Doesn't matter, US citizens have the right to receive the speech on TikTok
I actually think that they do — tourists to the US have free speech protections. There are many foreign-owned press outlets operating in the US (Forbes, Al Jazeera, RT, CGTN etc.) that are also protected by the first amendment.
Remember, money is speech (Citizens United v. FEC)!
I wonder if this will have an effect on iPhone sales vs Android. On android the app can easily be side loaded while on iPhone (in the US) it's incredibly difficult for the average user.
What if any practical effect will this have on American users if 150M of them already have the app downloaded? A pop-up that doesn't block use of the app?
Haven't seen anything about an IP ban/block (ahem, great firewall), nothing's going to block anyone from business as usual on Sunday right?
There's no 'shut down'. And other than a bunch of misinformed users jumping over to RedNote briefly or whatever, the only difference will be an oddly American-free app for the rest of the world?
According to the article, they are voluntarily shutting down in the USA despite that not being required by the law. So yes, there is a potential shut down. Time will tell is they really do it.
Yes, you can do an IP block and you can also detect VPN clients and block those.
If the companies is barred from doing business with US users then they will be required to take reasonable steps to block those users.
> If the companies is barred from doing business with US users then they will be required to take reasonable steps to block those users.
Or what? I don't think a US-brought lawsuit would succeed in China.
This will be such a fascinating moment to track statistically. Like how Covid in 2020 shows up every graph. Tiktok day might too.
The one source of true, lasting happiness in life is the love of others.
All of this stuff - TikTok, Instagram, etc - are entertainment, distraction, and that's fine, but taken to excess is unbalanced, and no matter what, cannot bring true, lasting happiness because they are not the love of another person.
I'm not assigning a cause, but US culture, these days, seems to encourage folks to treat others as "NPCs," and that can have rather bad consequences.
It's always been an issue (sort of human nature), but it seems (to this battered old warhorse), that it's a lot more prevalent, these days, than it was, just twenty years ago.
Can you elaborate on this phenomena?
Just that we consider "others," (with the exception of a close entourage) to be "non-player characters." Basically, shallow simulacrums, with no feelings, standalone, not connected with others, and that can be "disposed of," or "forgotten," with no personal consequences.
We don't have to allow anyone other than ourselves, any agency or consideration.
That makes it very easy to reduce everyone else into one-dimensional caricatures, easy to attack, dismiss or neglect.
Like I said, this has always been a feature of normal human tribalism, but it seems to have gotten a shot of steroids, sometime recently.
I have found, for myself, that closely interacting with as many others as possible; especially ones that challenge me, has helped me to avoid that.
A semi-related term to the "NPC" thing is "main character syndrome." It's usually used derogatorily, but it's the idea that someone thinks they're the "main character" of the world; the people they care about are side characters who matter less, and people they don't care about (or know) don't matter at all. "The self as the center of the universe" is another way to phrase it.
Not sure entirely how that's connected to this thread's topic, but it is relevant in social media in general (and maybe TikTok moreso because of its "great" algorithm?)
Americans have a fixation on freedom of speech. They even defend the right for people to express hate speech that would be prohibited anywhere else in the world. Why aren't people outraged by the censorship of TikTok?
This move shouts “you win China, your products are superior than ours”. We hate losing at our own game don’t we?
As China bans TikTok too, this move shouts “We don’t want this app either.”
Because neither government wants a well-educated, knowledgeable population. Carlin was trying to teach us that for decades and it still rings true.
Someone tell me what data TikTok is collecting, that is making it such a national security threat. I guess it knows what videos you like. Awesome, so does every other social media company out there. Its not like the sign up form is asking for upload of SSN and DL.
I guess the US is afraid of manipulation of the video feed by China, that may influence elections. There might be a kernel of truth there, so I d be curious to hear anecdotes of something like that actually happening.
its not about their official data collection. It is a safe assumption that TikTok app is used to spy on targeted users and their surroundings, just google it.
Ok but both Android and iOS have a good permission system where location and other data access can be highly controlled. Isn't it more prudent that the app be restricted by the OS to not have permissions it does not require? Surely the US can enforce something like that.
You don't need to directly tap that information from the phone if you have enough variety of video and an algorithm that will identify and converge on micro-genres of video based on watch time, likes, and shares.
Aside from that, Tik-Tok Shop is also a thing. So elements of the application exist where you volunteer data like location.
I was surprised most by the general publics ignorance regarding possible work arounds. Nobody I spoke to on large Tik Tok lives believed it was even possible to download and install apps from somewhere other than the Play Store. Apple users believed their ability to install apps was identical to Android users
In the future I think the government can force the public to do things simply because the public is unaware of the options they have.
The good news is Rednote seems to be a potential replacement, which is also Chinese owned.
I don't believe the super addictive, antidemocratic backdoor into US citizens lives is actually getting TKO'd. Crisis is their (misquoted) word for new opportunities[1], and the value of the spy tool is too damn high for it to simply go dark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis
Here's the lesson: We need our social media platforms to be distributed and out of the hands of any government to promote sharing knowledge and creating peace.
When the mass Tiktok exodus tsent Red Book [1] to the top of the App store, it was the first time in history that American citizens started talking directly to Chinese citizens in mass. I've heard all sorts of stories of both sides learning a lot about each other, including the lies and propaganda each others government places in the media, but mostly more positive things like art, fashion, cooking, food, healthcare and -- probably the most important, each other's different humor.
Video, and an AI algorithm to drive the For You page, is probably the most difficult part. We have some good ideas on privacy[2], and I can imagine some sort of crypto ledger system paired with AI learning, but video expensive to store/stream and at such a high volume of streaming, I don't know what kind of end points would really work to keep quality up.
Then there's the problem of policing such a system, and who the police would be. There's some dark places on the internet that I think everyone but a handful of people think should never be allowed on such a network, but more generally there's questions on politeness, stalking, harassment, "facts", memes, and other culture differences that would need to be ironed out.
Who's building this? We need it by Jan 19th, 2025.
[1] Not to be confused with SF's Redbook: https://www.wired.com/2015/02/redbook/
[2] Tim has been making the rounds about his Solid project: https://www.inrupt.com/
Americans may turn to experience of other countries. E.g. in Russia Istagram has been blocked for years, however it does not really stop everyone from using or running business in it.
This only shows how incompetent Twitter's management was; they not only ruined Twitter but Vine too and gave the opportunity to TikTok to fill the massive vacuum.
At some point SCOTUS will have to revisit the massive deference they give the other branches on natsec issues. We are days away from a new president applying blanket tariffs to everything on the same grounds. What isn't national security in that light? They might as well start with this case and send an early message. Otherwise they'll be fielding all manner of lawsuits over ridiculous overreach for the foreseeable future.
Any guesses on how this will actually work? The apps will be definitely be removed from app stores. Will existing apps work? Will the website still work? Will the death of the app come from "creators" not getting paid? What if users continue to use tikok, but there are no longer professional creators or ads? Would a social network like that be the most radical of all?
Tiktok is popular on a global level. They'll just block access to US users with a link to the details of the ban, and let things stew up the heat until the US budges.
A few months ago I'd have cheered on this news but now that Zuckerberg has made his coming out and basically promised to turn Instagram and Facebook into yet more MAGA echo chambers, I feel... conflicted.
I do still think the world would be better with less social media, but the only words in my mind right now are "not like this".
noahpinion has a great post [1] on this today and he points out the interesting observations we can make: 1. because it's "Beijing" who is tasked with deciding whether or not TikTok can be sold makes it extremely clear Bytedance is not an independent private company the way it would be the case in the US. They are legally required to obey CCP directives [2] 2. Beijing had every opportunity to sell the application off, and in fact they did just that with another app called Grindr some years back [3] without any fanfare. 3. That Beijing would rather close TikTok entirely, rather than sell it, shows how deeply important it is to Beijing that TikTok does not come under the control of another nation, including the US. it's well established that the government censors speech on TikTok including the speech of US citizens [4]
noah bangs on the "the government of China is really trying to weaken or destroy the economic capacity of the US" drum pretty hard and it's hard to disagree with the many books and arguments he cites. The current rush to Rednote has a lot of TikTokers making the argument that "See? Chinese people are great!" which is where they are confusing sentiment about the citizens of China with that of the Chinese government itself. It actually is great if there's a big cultural interplay between young US and Chinese citizens (not sure w/ Rednote though), so that we would be able to counteract a key propaganda point from Beijing which is that the TikTok forced sale is some kind of strike against the Chinese people. It's important that the point be made that this is about the hostility of the Chinese government itself, which is pretty clearly a hostile adversary to the US.
[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tiktok-is-just-the-beginning
[2] https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/experts-agree-byte-da...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168079/grindr-sold-chine...
[4] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...
>Bytedance is not an independent private company
PRC banned exporting Bytedance algo. By that logic, no US companies are independent private companies due to US export controls. And TBH both points are true.
>Grindr
Grindr was foreign company acquired by PRC, and sale was reversed by CFIUS. Selling an acquired foreign company is geo/politically different than having your domestic company nationalized/appropriated by another. Which is quite literally a strike against Chinese people. Even PRC has never forced a US company from divesting US ownership, because that's a retarded tier of "hostility" only US hubris can imagine. And it's particularly retarded tier analysis from Noahpinion who thinks Chinese people won't view divestment requirement a PRC company as hostile against Chinese entrepreners, who are Chinese people.
> PRC banned exporting Bytedance algo. By that logic, no US companies are independent private companies due to US export controls. And TBH both points are true.
Chinese state control over private companies is far more pervasive, and less bound by rule-of-law, than that of the U.S. Export controls are not even the H2O molecule at the tip of the iceberg.
> Even PRC has never forced a US company from divesting US ownership
Bytedance is not being forced to divest; they can leave the market, just like Google and many others had to leave China.
>more pervasive
US spectrum export controls have been every bit as pervasive as PRC ones, pretending muh "rule of law" is a distinction without difference at this point. It's functionally the same.
>forced to divest
If US law is forced divestiture, then Bytedance is "force" to leave, because having US nationalize a PRC company is obviously a nonstarter except for the terminally stupid like noahopinion. Unlike Google + western platforms who "chose" (read: not banned) to leave because they "chose" not to comply with PRC laws that applies to all companies, including domestic PRC ones. The difference is US has no equitable law, i.e. some sort of data privacy law, that enables Bytedance to operate in US... while following the same laws that US companies do, as if Bytedance wasn't already bending backwards following additional requirements that US platforms do not have to follow (i.e. functionally Oracle JV).
Like fine, Bytedance needs to follow US laws, except US laws is designed specifically to prevent PRC companies from operating, vs PRC laws is designed to allow everyone to operate, just said operation is onerous - see retarded reciprocal argument that US companies should operate in PRC without abiding by PRC censorship laws that domestic platforms has to abide by. There's a reason FB and Google had internal programs to re-enter PRC market compliant with PRC laws (before being axed by internal dissent), because it's still feasble for US platforms to operate in PRC while being US (or at least JV) owned. So let's not pretend what US is doing is the same thing - PRC is more rule of law, US rule by law in this comparison. But again, functionally that hardly matters.
> US spectrum export controls have been every bit as pervasive as PRC ones, pretending muh "rule of law" is a distinction without difference at this point. It's functionally the same.
As I said, export controls are such a minor part of the problem as to hardly be worth mentioning. The pervasive control I'm speaking of is things like the fact that ByteDance (like all large Chinese companies) would have an internal CCP committee with influence over personnel and strategic decisions.
> having US nationalize a PRC company is obviously a nonstarter except for the terminally stupid like noahopinion
This is wrong on many levels. No one is talking about nationalizing TikTok (which is not a PRC company) and certainly not ByteDance.
>CCP committee with influence over personnel and strategic decisions
Party committees as part of 93 company law basically creates dumb shit like organizing staff picnics for companies with more than 3 CCP members, which is basically any reasonably sized company since 1/8 of country are CCP members. It is much more minor than export controls. The "pervasive control" exists in the sense that there is higher level coordination like META having US intelligence on board, or forming partnerships with said agencies. Fixating on minor shit like internal CCP committee is propaganda trying to pretend somehow US companies are less influenced by geo/politics when they are every bit as much. The big stuff is again, distinction without difference.
> TikTok which is not a PRC company
This is being obtuse like people pretending TikTok being based in Singapore/incorporated in Caymen somehow seperates it from Bytedance's (quartered in Beijing) PRC roots. I'll grant you DE-nationalizing isn't "technically" the same as nationalizing, but geo/politically it's obviously a none starter just like if Beijing told Boeing they would have to divest from US ownership. PRC would never allow US to normalize that kind of behaviour, and vice versa. DE-nationalizing tiktok, i.e. nationalizing by parties other than PRC is another distinction without difference.
Right, the CCP committees are just there to organize picnics. Sure.
Look, I think anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in both places understands that there is a major difference in the way private companies relate to the government in China versus in the U.S. For example, it's far more common for U.S. companies to sue the government over laws or policies they disagree with, whereas in China it's just taken as given that officials have a lot of discretion.
You bring up Meta having US intelligence onboard - I assume you're referring to the Edward Snowden / PRISM revelations. Remember that this was a huge scandal precisely because the idea of American companies working with intelligence agencies to spy (even inadvertently) on Americans is considered so repugnant. Whereas in China it's just taken as given that the government can read your WeChat (or whatever) messages whenever they feel like it, and any encrypted messaging apps that gain a following are quickly removed from app stores.
This is not a distinction without a difference; China is a totalitarian state where you have essentially no right to speech or privacy. The U.S., for all its flaws, is not like that.
> DE-nationalizing... geo/politically it's obviously a none starter just like if Beijing told Boeing they would have to divest...
Can you not see the hypocrisy here, when China functionally bans almost the entire U.S. internet sector?
> Sure.
I mean yes? That's what they do - dumb "political work" activities. It's not the high level strategic coordination, which I said exists (as they do in US), but citing pedestrian CCP committees ain't it. It's Karen from HR buying birthday cakes tier of activities. As someone who spent significant time in both places, sure, PRC companies doesn't fuck with central gov, US companies gets to try to. But push comes to shove, US companies cave, so for the purpose of foreign policy and geopolitics, especially with respect to great powers competition, it's a distinction without difference, because US companies will be subservient to national security interests, with minimal discretion, as they should be. Reminder much chip restrictions were done without industry input / consultation before roll out. Because US system capable of unilaterally laying down the law as well as CCP.
>is not like that.
Yes and NSA totally dismantled domestic spying / FVEY hack to spy on host nationals via third countries (rule of law you know) because Americans found it repugnant, except not. Ex-CIA hires still deciding facebook content policy on "misinfo". US voters thinks lots of things US gov does are repugnant, but functionally cannot change it, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
>functionally bans
Except PRC doesn't. Entire US internet sector is welcome to operate in PRC, provided they follow onerous (expensive) PRC filtering regulations. Which they choose not to. US platforms functionally choses not to operate in PRC, because they don't want to follow the same PRC laws that PRC companies has to follow. Let's not forget these platforms were blocked post 2009 minority riots for actual valid national security reasons, FB/Twitter refused to censor / filter calls for retaliatory violence. Queue PRC platforms implementing onerously expensive human moderation... which later western platforms adopted following NZ shooting, myanmar killings etc. We have TikTok following the same US laws every other US platform follows... and more (again, Oracle basically JV arrangment), i.e. TikTok operating at regulatory disadvantage. Incidentally after getting up their expensive human moderation programs, FB/Google tried but internal dissent killed efforts because they spent the money and can scaling system to PRC. If anything PRC would LOVE if western platforms returned, followed PRC law, and start handing over dissident info per PRC cyber security regulations / get squeezed by PRC influence.
The hypocrisy is thinking they're remotely comparable situations when TikTok chooses to compete in an unfair US regulatory enviroment and western companies choose not to compete in a fair regulatory PRC enviroment. TikTok even offered to basically have US intelligence/oversight on all US activities. The hypocrisy is there is no onerous, concessions TikTok can do to operate in US as a PRC company, even ones that puts it at significant competitive disadvantaged (extra regulatory costs) vs western platforms choosing not to shoulder the same regulatory costs as other PRC companies (100,000s human moderators ain't cheap). Extra hubris when proponents of "CCP ban US platforms" thinks US platforms shouldn't follow PRC laws and somehow are victims. Or that complying to same filtering laws is the same as divestiture. It's difference between house rules being, clean your dishes, versus get a sex change.
Surely the value of the TikTok user base is >$0 even without the algorithm. Why not sell that part of it?
Whose buying? For how much. But maybe for the same reason Meta alleges it doesn't sell user data, because there's 7 billion other potential users who wouldn't look fondly at it. Counter productive as long as there's other routes for growth.
A forced sale would essentially gut them of their proprietary algo, which is leagues ahead of anything YT or Insta has. This algo and the associated TikTok assets can still be used a billion different ways around the world and in other apps.
Why would they ever want to help create an international competitor that could compete with them? I don't think any business would want to do that. Obviously the CCP has a level of access if they want it to data hosted in China, that's how it works with every company that has a physical location there.
that is exactly noah's point, that TikTok is an extremely potent application. Except it's not "a business" deciding this it's "a government", and China does not want to pass off this much capability to shape public opinion to the US while losing it themselves.
noahpinion is generally very insightful but I don't think his analysis holds water here. ByteDance is a major Chinese company -- if the EU tried to force the sale of Google you can sure as shit expect "Washington" to have strong feelings about this. The implication that Beijing controls ByteDance is not really supported by this evidence.
Some Japanese tried to buy one the these supposedly perfectly "independent private compan[ies]", and the US president said no, but that's completely different I'm sure.
right instead Biden ordered US Steel to close and cease all operations, just like Beijing is doing to TikTok. /sarcasm
there is no comparison between these events
TikTok has entire RoW (excluding India) market. Assuming US only bans in US... which TBH we don't know. There's no comparison because TikTok is still massively profitable without US, whereas US Steel is still a mess without JP.
> because TikTok is still massively profitable without US
Do we know that? In almost all cases for mobile apps, the US is far and away the largest and most profitable market for any business. I'd also be surprised if the TikTok shop for example is profitable (or available?) outside the US.
I think something like 8/18B revenue (mostly ads) this year is from US. So it's subtantial, but 10B is not chomp change, and theoretically TikTok has growth potential since TikTok algo is competitive with western platforms, which cannot be said for US steel vs other modern metallurgy facilities. Compared to douyin in PRC, TikTok hasn't even began monetizing / ecommerce, which TBH would probably kill its popularity.
>I think something like 8/18B revenue (mostly ads) this year is from US. So it's subtantial, but 10B is not chomp change
A social media site is not like a company that makes widgets. The latter's profits scale linearly with the number of widgets sold. A website's costs do not scale linearly (at least, not in the same way) with the number of users; much of the infrastructure cost is the same whether 500 million or one billion users are on the site.
It's entirely possible that, as nozzlegear said, a TikTok without US users is unprofitable. Especially given that, the last time I checked, US users are a) only 10% of the total TikTok userbase and b) US creators are 21 of the top 50 TikTok users with the most followers. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...>
Without US specific data warehousing requirements (~1.5B Project Texas / Oracle), TikTok can fallback to using Douyin infra... which is already scaled for billion+ users. All that might goto PRC datacentres, i.e. Huawei Cloud which exist in most continents. If anything Douyin can eliminate redundant TikTok infra costs. I've no doubt Americans is a disproportionately more profitable in terms of ARPU, it would be a huge hit, but TikTok unlikely to go in red given those factors if RoW markets still leaves ~10B, especially if PRC wants to prioritize using TikTok as portal for ecommerce with PRC exports, which as I mentioned, TikTok is not nearly aggressive with monetizing as Douyin. I can't say it's impossible, but IMO unlikely.
This is silly, the US is only 15% of Tiktok users.
The majority of ByteDance's users are from China. Without India, USA is around 50% of global revenue, and other markets are alot more fragmented hence smaller ecosystems.
I am talking about Tiktok users, not Douyin. Douyin itself has almost a billion users.
Markets are not countries are not ecosystems. The EU is fragmented by countries but it's a single market, again with more users than the US.
Your stat about revenue is misleading and outdated. Turkey for example generates almost as much revenue as the US, and many markets are currently in the process of being monetized which will take some time, the potential revenue is something Bytedance is going to factor in more than current revenue when it makes a major strategic decision.
> That Beijing would rather close TikTok entirely, rather than sell it, shows how deeply important it is to Beijing that TikTok does not come under the control of another nation, including the US
I don't think it is important because of how 'powerful' a tool it is. I think it is more than being forced to sell it would be losing face and a humiliation (a la 19th century's Inequal Treaties). Also, they don't have to sell it altogether as the issue is only with the US.
So they just shut it down in the US and can say that they don't give in to blackmail while pointing out how hypocritical the US are ("free speech but only if controlled by the US" sort of angle).
why did they sell Grindr when presented with an identical set of constraints / demands ?
The two cases are just very different, why are you even comparing the case of an investment company buying a stake in an existing app with the original creator being banned from owning what they created?
This is an absolutely ridiculous line of reasoning. Tiktok has over a billion users, and about 150 million of those are American. It would be downright stupid to sell all of it just for the US market and it would set an absolutely disastrous precedent.
A social media site is not like a company that makes widgets. The latter's profits scale linearly with the number of widgets sold. A website's costs do not scale linearly (at least, not in the same way) with the number of users; much of the infrastructure cost is the same whether 500 million or one billion users are on the site.
It's entirely possible that a TikTok without US users is unprofitable. Especially given that US creators are 21 of the top 50 TikTok users with the most followers. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...>
PS - That you seriously believe that tens of millions of iPhone-using Americans will buy, carry around, and constantly switch to an Android phone just to sideload TikTok boggles the mind.
Tiktok is an offshoot of Douyin, I don't think Douyin needs the US to be profitable, and software has a low marginal cost.
> PS - That you seriously believe that tens of millions of iPhone-using Americans will buy, carry around, and constantly switch to an Android phone just to sideload TikTok boggles the mind.
I never said so, I said I wouldn't be surprised if a significant number did. Having grown up in this environment I've seen people literally buy 4 year old iPhones just for iMessage. American teenagers are very weird about social media and this kind of behavior wouldn't be out of character.
American eyeballs are worth more than other countries' eyeballs.
Tiktok in other countries monetizes mostly using the shop, not ads. Turkey brings only slightly less revenue than the US.
Source?
Why can't the decentralized social media be made? What are the technical obstacles for this? Why cant it run in your browser, users could store their content on their own devices and share it P2P. Noone knows whats being shared, no problems with censorships, regulations, laws...
Primal.net and yakihonne.com speak nostr protocol and are both pretty slick implementations.
Primal recently launched “build your own algorithm” along with a feed marketplace.
P2P doesn’t work for social, see SecureScuttleButt. Rabble has moved pretty firmly into the Nostr camp. He’s one of the top minds thinking about decentralized social media. Study nostr and don’t dismiss the relay model lightly.
It's just ease of use. I tried to make a mastodon account early into the xitter takeover. I spent probably half an hour trying to make a account before I decided if it was gonna take me this long that there was no way it would ever catch on anyway so I should just give up.
Even if it was technically doable and user-friendly, you'd end up with a toxic cesspool filled to the brim with neonazis and CSAM, which only deranged individuals would want to engage with.
What kind of content do you think's going to end up filling a platform like that?
You can do that, except nobody would use it.
It can. https://loops.video/
If it becomes too popular, though, Congress will probably pass a law to force you to use some oligarch-approved alternative.
So they want to ban only the mobile app, but the Tiktok website would still work from the mobile browsers? Huh... I guess they can get less user data from the website than an app, but the content manipulation and the usage data collection could still happen that way if that's the real fear of the US...
This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?
[I made the same comment elsewhere, but I'm putting it here too because I'm really puzzled by this.]
TikTok is ostensibly a commercial product meant to earn revenue that offset costs, and those costs are tremendous.
Meanwhile, the ban will make it impossible for them to (a) enter into trade relationships with the advertisers and other partners that bring in revenu, and (b) share that revenue with monetized users.
Continuing to run it at scale as a website without ads or monetization payouts (and without any legal protections) would pretty well blow the cover of it being a legitimate international business.
That makes sense, but means that banning it from making money through (a) and (b) would be sufficient to kill it quickly (if it's a legitimate business, as you said), without directly taking it away from users and causing so much political uproar.
That amounts to the same thing and ByteDance would present it as the same thing in their PR effort, so nothing material would be different.
Meanwhile, the kind of law that would allow a business to "operate" but disallow it from making money is probably close to unprecedented and would look like even more peculiar targeting. It doesn't really even make sense as operating a business naturally implies participating in commerce.
I'm surprised they're shutting down rather than trying to push the web version. The law does not require ISPs to block the website or forbid anyone from using it; only US-based mobile app stores are affected.
The Reuters article says
> Users who have downloaded TikTok would theoretically still be able to use the app, except that the law also bars U.S. companies starting Sunday from providing services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of it.
Are you sure that the website and the native mobile app use different CDNs, or a CDN which won't be affected by the ban?
I'm sure it's possible to serve the website entirely from outside the US. I suppose there's a chance it wouldn't be cost effective.
Still they'd need networking in the USA. For example they have 11 peerings (100G or 200G) with Equinix. https://www.peeringdb.com/net/19428
Let's remember this when the discussion again centers around the US' immense commercial success.
It is easy when you have been placed at an advantageous place and use all the tricks in the book against competition.
I have some concerns about TikTok, as well as with a shutdown, but if I can imagine a silver lining of a TikTok shutdown, it would be if huge numbers of teens are inspired to learn the tools and awarenesses to not be total b-words of Big Tech.
In this fantasy, initially it would just be to get onto a particular Big Tech (but Chinese) thing that "grownups" don't want them doing. But then they'd start to realize they're also being exploited there, and also by many of the people who are pitching circumventions. And eventually they'd figure out and create genuine empowerment. And rediscover better conventions for society, where everyone isn't either exploiting or being dumb. And it would just be the grownups who are hopelessly b-words of Big Tech, and the teens just have to roll their eyes and be patient with them. Then those teens become grownups and have kids, and raise them to not be airhead b-words. And those kids teach their kids, etc.
Of course, within several generations, the lessons would be diluted and then forgotten, and people would get dumb and shitty again. But society would have improved enough that at least there's room for people to backslide, and fritter away what their great-grandparents achieved. :)
That would be amazing, honestly. Big Tech needs to get the fuck out of our lives...
This is about censorship
Which makes all the positive comments about rednote hilarious. It's like two proles in 1984 talking one another about how they're gonna defect from Oceania to Eastasia because citizens are treated just so much better there!
Again I note the distinctive lack of self-awareness from the demographic that is moving away from TikTok to a communist country value harboring app like RedNote
The Rednote or "Xiaohongshu" in Chinese is literally referring to the Mao Zedong's propaganda book the modern counterpart being "Xi's Book of Thoughts"
It's frightening how much young Americans hate their own country and the values that have allowed them this much freedom.
Do you think mayyybeeee this hate stems from how young americans are treated and a complete lack of representation? Red note censors stuff about Chinese politics, they are surprisingly accepting of LGBTQ etc, and it's nice to talk with people from other countries you don't normally have interactions with. It's really not that hard to understand.
There are only two gender options when you create an account on RedNotes: male or female
Well yeah, that's because there are only two sexes.
"communist country"
I didn't realize China had eliminated class and that companies were worker owned.
This thread is a cesspool of hypocrisy, in its most accurate form.
You claim you want a free and open Internet for everyone but, do you really?
The two reasons behind the TikTok ban:
1. Domestic big tech lobby
2. Domestic Israeli Lobby [1]
The China data is just a scapegoat. The risk is very minor. The US is banning TikTok because is a domestic big tech competition, and because lawmakers cant control it.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
This is very welcome as a parent in the USA. It is also sound legally, and was a long time coming. Nothing of great value is being lost and in a year users will have moved on to something else.
There are two positive effects here: 1. A company that is meaningfully foreign is losing control of a mass media asset. 2. Children and young adults are losing access to a product that is not good for them.
A country should not allow foreign powers to control platforms with so much reach--full stop. We do not allow foreign entities to own radio stations... Imagine how much deeper these platforms penetrate a person's mind, and how much larger their audiences are. We should all be MUCH more concerned about how these apps are stretching the social fabric (throughout the world) and how every society's ability to function is effected. I challenge anyone voicing discontent at this result to question whose interests they are voicing.
American manipulation of American minds... Yea! That's the point. I'd rather have someone with interests as aligned as possible with mine working for, owning and ultimately making business decisions at these companies. Regulation as appropriate to further align them.
Which leads me into my next point: I think that everyone here would argue that TikTok is in a class of its own with regard to very engaging short form content and rapid feedback feed training. I would argue that these attributes make it necessarily vapid and reactionary, providing little to no net benefit to either the individual or society to begin with.
If you disagree, what is the value of this product to the user and to society? Does it make people's lives better? I think that when the harms are considered, the answer to both is ultimately no. There are very well-documented negative effects on focus, happiness, and anxiety in children, which persist into adulthood from social media[1]. I don't think it can be argued that something that makes you feel good and connected in the moment but disconnects you from your immediate neighbors and friends and is highly correlated with mental illness is good.
Social platforms (TikTok included) are putting our children at a disadvantage mentally compared to previous generations and need to be more regulated. If these platforms (TikTok and other short-form rapid feedback products most of all) are of dubious value to begin with, what is the harm being done here?
Finally, I conjecture that we've only gotten a taste so far of how power can be wielded through these instruments. Even if Elon decides NOT wield his asset overtly during this administration, I believe we'll see more overt demonstrations of the power of social media sites in the next few years if relations with China continue to deteriorate and Russia becomes more desperate, with Meta clearly becoming less scrupulous.
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1. https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/the-evidence
For years people have dogged on North Korea, Iran, China and Russia talking about how the government controls information by banning apps and by creating firewalls blocking access to parts of the internet. Now when the US introduces censorship people like you welcome it with open arms. Something of value is lost, our ability to access information freely
Think of it like Oreos:
- Text-based blogging platforms: regular Oreos
- Image-based blogging platforms: Double Stuff Oreos
- Short-form video blogging platforms: Mega Stuff Oreos
There are still plenty of high-quality and addictive ways to share information without Tik-tok.
Everyone will be better off without Mega Stuff Oreos, they were an abomination to begin with
Tiktok is obviously a massive national security risk, and I find it funny people don't see that.
It is extremely well established that propaganda has great value, and so allowing a foreign adversary the capacity to potentially control the information your citizens receive in a clandestine way is insanely dangerous.
Yes, we should also forbid books published by Chinese publishing companies because the CPC might pressure those companies to put propaganda in the books.
We should also forbid Hollywood from selling movies in China, because as we've already seen that means the movies are being adjusted to get approval in China.
We should also forbid Chinese citizens talking to Americans, because they might convince Americans on a topic we don't can't allow American minds to be changed about.
The first two don't apply because they don't share the hyper personalized nature of social media. No two people see the same thing so it's impossible to react to foreign propaganda. Books and movies don't work that way.
Third example is irrelevant because it's impossible to achieve the efficiency (reach) that social media has.
I don't really see your point. Tiktok is a video library. With the exception of private videos, anything hosted on the app can be viewed by anyone. Whether or not the app provides a personalized algorithmic selection of videos does not have any bearing on the more fundamental question of whether American's have the right to access foreign media.
Of course it's relevant. TikTok should be considered a broadcaster. We have not allowed foreign ownership of a broadcaster since 1934.
A book does not broadcast in the same way.
Since when are social media apps considered broadcasters? In fact, section 230 legally protects social media apps from the civil liabilities of broadcasting. You're also just distracting from the actual issue. Being that, as citizens of a democratic republic promoting free speech, press, association, etc., do you think we have a right to view foreign media (including broadcasts for that matter)?
> TikTok should be considered a broadcaster.
> Since when are social media apps considered broadcasters?
Not OP but they said should be, not is
We live in a democracy. If you get enough people to vote for this platform, then sure let's do it.
You can't compare a popular bipartisan law to a hypothetical thing you just made up.
Peoples' votes matter
The popular vote for president would like a word. And, yes, I know Trump won that too, but the point still stands that it doesn't matter.
> It is extremely well established that propaganda has great value, and so allowing a foreign adversary the capacity to potentially control the information your citizens receive in a clandestine way is insanely dangerous.
I would say that allowing a ~foreign adversary~ anyone the capacity to potentially control the information your citizens receive in a clandestine way is insanely dangerous. Why do we let domestic ones do it? We're seeing what they're doing to our societies.
It would have been farcically easy to legislate that any large social media company have to expose their algorithm to a regulator, with a capacity for spot checks and immense sanctions if they fail to comply.
If your argument is "we can't allow any foreign owned social media to operate in the US", then how can you possible argue that the rest of the world should allow American applications?
>If your argument is "we can't allow any foreign owned social media to operate in the US", then how can you possible argue that the rest of the world should allow American applications?
Are they not free to ban it if they wish? But they won't because contrary to what some people would like to push, the CCP in fact is alot more sinister than the US Government, and foreigners do recognize that in genuine security analysis.
Reddit is the exact same - just a propaganda machine
I disagree. While I think there are definitely biases on Reddit, there is a difference between users, individual moderators, or even established sub policies having a political leaning versus an algorithmically masked propaganda machine like TikTok.
Call me old fashion, but I put more faith in a profit seeking US company (recently public) with light government oversight than a foreign owned black box.
You might be missing the fact that there is a significant amount of bots on Reddit pushing certain agendas giving the impression they're foreign sponsored.
you may be right that there is a, "significant amount of bots on Reddit pushing certain agendas". However, Reddit is fundamentally designed to incentivize authentic engagement and to punish bots. If it wasn't the case before is certainly is now given the fact that they are now extracting value from the authenticity of data on their platform via AI Training data sales. Reddit is fiduciarily encouraged to tamp down bots and spam because they are financially incentivized to have the most genuine data.
All of that aside it is irrelevant because we are talking about third parties (users/bots) pushing propaganda vs the platform owner itself pushing propaganda.
I'd vouch for fake-ness of political Reddit as well
it's easier to see phrasing and logical inconsistencies when you don't share the opinion that gets forced, sadly
You disagree - try this. Go to the "popular" feed and take a scroll.
I compel you to find one single positive post about capitalism or the west. Count the number of anti-capitalist or blatant pro-ccp content posts.
One such - "Luigis game is about to be multiplayer" (reference to the recent murder of the insurance company ceo) with a video with the label "y'all look how the chinese are living" (compared to usa)
You also say you put faith in a profit seeking US company. Reddit is not a USA owned company.
Can you provide examples of China controlled propaganda happening on Tiktok?
Things that are factually true don't count, obviously.
Can you, someone, anyone in this toxic wasteland of a thread please point out what propaganda you're talking about? Point to an actual thing that justifies banning something 140M Americans use daily and don't just expound upon your vague national security paranoia.
Why does the ban need to be reactive for you to understand it?
"Where are the examples" is a straw man. Imagine the ways a political enemy might exploit limitless access to the attention of 140M Americans. The calculus seems to be that a false negative will be much more catastrophic than a false positive.
I understand what you're saying but that argument I don't think should apply here. Having some kind of evidence to back up a drastic action like this is not something that should be argued for, it should be a given. I've asked at least 5 different times for people to point to anything material, and no one has come up with anything. I'm not saying there is no threat, I could be wrong and there could be a massive threat, but if there is one shouldn't we be able to point to something more than "it could happen" and being paranoid about it? I'm being asked to have faith in institutions/politicians that have a long, long, long proven track record of not having my best interests at heart and I can't accept that when they have clear conflicting interests / motives.
I think the American government is contorting its public argument to avoid saying this plainly because there are many American companies that control information for most of the world, and they don't want other countries to go "Hmm, hang on a minute..."
National security risk to which nation? The kids on TikTok seem to understand pretty well why it all the sudden was wrongthink.
"The internet is obviously a massive national security risk, and I find it funny people don't see that"
"Libraries are obviously a massive national security risk, and I find it funny people don't see that."
They do see it, they just support that very foreign adversary (or may even be such adversaries).
the problem is that similar efforts in other countries have been criticized as "internet censorship"
either Russia and Indonesia are in the right - or US is in the wrong
What do you mean national security risk? What risk to whom, exactly? Do you mean that the algorithm can portray communism or China in a positive light? Can you provide an example video that constitutes this threat?
Allowing the government to control the information its citizens receive is dangerous.
小红书 (pronounced Xiaohongshu) is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance (EDIT: I’m wrong, it’s a different company, see below). It’s currently #1 on the USA App Store.
The people on there are super kind and accommodating to all the “American TikTok refugees” today! Lots of little Mandarin 101 classes, UI tutorials, and co-commiserating about government overreach.
I have a negative view of all of social media, but I think banning it is extremely politically unwise. Appreciate the hospitality of these users inviting us into their platform for a bit
No that is a completely different app. The Chinese TikTok (Douyin) isn't on US app stores.
> 小红书 (pronounced Xiaohongshu) is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance. It’s currently #1 on the USA App Store.
抖音 Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance...
Oops. TIL
From an engineering point of view it is VPN companies that need to be bracing for 1000x spikes.
This isn't a 'great firewall' solution. It just prevents google/apple from hosting it in their app stores. If tiktok wanted to they could still host it from outside the USA and let people access it via the web (or sideload the apk on android). Having said that tiktok has announced if the ban does occur they will shut down service on Sunday.
I strongly expect they will shut down service to USA IPs; why on earth would they block anyone else?
Has anyone written up exactly how TikTok is a distinct national security risk?
The best I’ve heard is “they get your data”, which is something they surely can buy from Facebook through an intermediary, “they influence content”, which is a moderation decision that every social media app does, and “there’s a part of the report to congress that’s redacted”, that could be a recipe for tuna casserole for all I know.
Edit: I’m assuming the downvotes are a way of saying “no”? I would assume that “national security threat” would involve some sort of concrete standard of harm or risk that could be communicated beyond “just trust us”. I haven’t even seen concrete examples of what content they influence, just people assuring everyone that it happens and it’s Bad.
Can anyone enlighten me as to what this TikTok ban is supposed to be about? It feels a bit satanic panic from a distance.
Yes! In fact the US court system does a great job of things like that.
https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2024/12/24-111...
I recommend you start reading on Page 33 if you are impatient.
In extremely short. The PRC is an extremely active cyber threat, hacking things all over the US, in large part to gain access do gain access to datasets about U.S. people. Including hacks of the Goverment's Office of Personnel Management, of a credit reporting agency, a health insurance provider.
The PRC has a strategy and laws of using its relationship with Chinese companies, and through them their subsidiaries, to carry out it's intelligence activities.They specifically point to the National Security Law of 2015 and the Cybersecurity law of 2017 which require full co-operation with Chinese authorities and full access to the data.
So one half of their justification is the significant risk of China using TikTok to conduct espionage in the form of gathering a huge dataset on Americans.
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Another half of the risk is, as everyone else here is already saying, their ability to influence Americans.
This is not an entirely theoretical concern as TikTok would like you to believe, the Government reports that “ByteDance and TikTok Global have taken action in response to PRC demands to censor content outside of China”.
And all evidence is that it would happen in the US the second the PRC decided to ask for it.
If they wanted our datasets they could just buy it lol,
Remember Cambridge Analytica?
It's not about getting our data. The TikTok algorithm is already being used to sow discord by showing stuff the PRC wants impressionable Americans to see. This ability of an adversarial foreign nation to surgically push individualized propaganda to consumers in another country is pretty unparalleled in human history. TikTok is the ultimate propaganda machine.
At this point, I trust Xi approximately as much as I do Zuck and Musk with my economic future.
‘There are three fires’ is not an argument against putting out any one of them.
Can you link to some evidence of any of those claims? US politicians' statements do not count as evidence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/13/tiktok-...
It sounds like they were complying with a Russian law?
TikTok is basically the same as Facebook/Instagram/Y.T.Shorts but with a different owner
Well... yes... it's the owner the government is concerned about.
The law requires that ownership of TikTok be changed before it continues operating in the US, not that TikTok stop operating.
Right, I guess I'm agreeing with you that social media is an effective propaganda machine (they're ad companies and what is an ad but propaganda to buy a product) and the US Govt wants one where they set the tone.
I was disagreeing with GP that seemed to act like TikTok was uniquely a propaganda engine
I think the fact that the PRC would rather burn it all down rather than allow it to be sold speaks volumes that it's not about TikTok as a business venture.
It's also possible that the US market just isn't as valuable or profitable to TikTok/ByteDance as we assume.
They do just buy it. The opinion mentions that. It turns out they want even more data and also do things like hacking to steal it.
> The PRC’s methods for collecting data include using “its relationships with Chinese companies,” making “strategic investments in foreign companies,” and “purchasing large data sets.” For example [...]
In fact it treats the Chinese investment into TikTok as basically a form of "just buying it" with regards to the information gathering justification for banning it.
Excellent summary, thank you.
It's generally not wise to let your geopolitical rival have extensive influence over your populace, which is why CCP doesn't let American companies like Meta operate in China.
Turnabout is fair play.
Yes, but then we also need to realise that pretty much the whole world outside of China is 'controlled' by American tech companies (both hardware and software/apps)
So if the US think it is not OK to have something like Tiktok owned by a Chinese company the rest of the world might wonder if it is OK for them to have everything owned by American companies...
The usual story, it is OK for the Americans to have military bases all around the world, much less so when it comes to any other countries.
All of those military bases are there in partnership with and at the invitation of the host country. The US doesn't just slap down a base in Poland and say "deal with it."
You mean the Government of the host country, not the people.
See: 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.
1990 Gulf War is actually an example of the Saudi Arabians asking for coalition troops to defend them.
2003? I'll give you that one.
Regarding 1990, nonetheless, prolonged U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War became highly controversial though, fueling anti-American sentiment.
And the US left.
Also, if there's one thing that the House of Saud has made apparent, it's that they don't much care about what their subjects consider controversial.
Uh yeah the government? I'm not sure if you expect the US to go out and poll everyone in the whole country first or what you're trying to imply, but governments usually coordinate with governments.
> See: 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.
War is war, it sucks but it's been a part of human history for all of human history. That said, those wars are over. If Iraq no longer wanted US bases in their territory, they could ask the US to leave.
I think in 2020, Iraq's parliament did vote to expel foreign troops, yet the U.S. military presence continues albeit in a limited capacity.
You are right, governments usually coordinate with governments, but my point is that the consent of the government doesn't always align with the will of the people, particularly in cases where public opinion is suppressed or ignored.
Well the alternative, in realpolitik terms, is having everything owned by Chinese companies.
I suppose they're free to pick.
There's also the signaling and red meat factor for politicians. Easy headline to be "tough on china", requires less explanation than pacific trade deals.
Absent any of these conversations is, in my experience, any notion of what exactly China aims to achieve with TikTok that is so sinister? I'm not even arguing, I wouldn't doubt China has plans or another that involve America, specifically that wouldn't be too great for America, I'm just struggling to connect TikTok to any of them, and any discussion seems to take it as granted that the shifty Chinese government is up to something with it.
So it's several things. Bear with me because finding news reports that I remember is difficult now because search results are flooded with stuff about the ban so I can't find what I'm looking for.
One concern is a general one that the Chinese government is directing the recommendation algorithms to act as propaganda. So subtly shifting user's opinions in favor of things that suit it and away from things that don't.
https://archive.is/tCVmR
Another is that it is using TikTok to surveil journalists, emigres, and other persons of interest who are using TikTok. My understanding is there are credible reports of journalists being targeted by the Chinese government, where they used TikTok to find their personal details, location, etc.
There's also been increasing reports of the Chinese government operating detention centers in the US and other countries, where they bring kidnapped Chinese nationals. Basically arresting nationals on foreign soil. In some of these cases at least TikTok has been implicated as the method of locating them etc.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/764194/intelligence-officials...
Discussion of this has all been out there over the years, but the way it's been covered has admittedly been weird. Maybe this is yet another sign of a fractured media landscape, but I think some of it has to do with the US not doing a great job of publicizing some things, possibly because it involves intelligence services.
I'm generally very in favor of unfettered freedom of speech, but have mixed feelings about this case. I guess I still side on that, and am skeptical about a ban, but this is getting into different territory and also don't feel strongly about it. I think the effects of foreign (and domestic) propaganda in social networks are very real, and although I generally think censorship is a very bad idea, I'm not sure I can blame a country for wanting an app banned if there's solid information that another country is using it in this way; it seems to be in this gray area of espionage versus free speech which is kind of an unusual territory to be in. Also, I'm fully aware that the US probably does similar things, but two wrongs don't really make a right to me, and if China produced solid evidence of the US doing something similar I wouldn't blame them for banning something either on similar grounds.
To me this all just maybe speaks to the need for a shift to open decentralized social network platforms. I realize that's easier said than done, but there's so many examples in the last few years of problems with control of centralized platforms (by private, government, or private-government combinations) leading to huge problems, either in reality or in appearance (which can sometimes be almost as equally concerning).
So literally all the same things the US does, but because China's doing it, now it's wrong. Got it.
I am being glib but I do want it understood that I appreciate the nuance and documentation you put the work into to show. It's just that, literally every one of these I already know about the United States doing so the outrage on it's part feels incredibly, hilariously hypocritical.
How can this be surprising?
If you identify, contemplate, and sometimes activate an attack vector against rivals, how could you possibly be dumb enough to leave yourself exposed to the same attack?
Also, note that China has blocked this attack vector from the US.
So how colossally dumb would it be for the US to not reciprocally block this attack vector from China?
Hypocrisy is irrelevant. Attack vectors are real.
If these things are truly happening -- especially the alleged arrests on US soil -- then that should be really easy to demonstrate to the American people. That the government hasn't bothered to prove the allegations is telling.
Of course, if the allegations were proven, the people would demand more action than merely banning a video app. Action which would have an huge negative impact the economy and would be unpopular among the powerful. So maybe that's why they haven't bothered?
Oh, you could probably make some effective arguments that they're using it to influence American thought in a way that's designed to diminish the US as a world power through internal strife.
Israel/Hamas would probably be an example.
Its clear to anyone that's looking that what's happening in Gaza is a genocide
For example, here's the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
Wikipedia is the subject of a very large pro-Palestinian propaganda campaign:
https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...
And they have banned several of those involved, though obviously each of the thousands who participated should be banned:
https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-833180
Israel has whole government and military orgs dedicated to hasbara and advancing Israeli and Zionist interests.
The editors were banned for organizing people around a vote. You going to pretend Israel doesn’t coordinate about the same things?
I laughed when I read about this pro-palestine propaganda group. There's no organized state sponsorship of online astroturfing like Israel.
Norman Finkelstein puts it nicely: https://youtube.com/shorts/M0ZnnjQ3tAQ
Literally every government has people who go on social media or provide press reports. Only when Israel is involved do you start talking about it like it’s a conspiracy. Please reflect on that for a while.
Meanwhile Iran and Russia have literally been caught manipulating Reddit and TikTok. And you’re literally replying to evidence of the pro-Palestinian crowd doing the same in violation of Wikipedia’s terms of use.
Literally every organized group has people who go on social media. Only when Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims do the same thing as Israel do you consider it biased and wrong. Please reflect on why you think that.
Meanwhile, Israel and the US have literally been caught manipulating Reddit and TikTok. And you’re literally replying to evidence of Israeli hasbara and US willingness to ban sites in support of that hasbara.
"No you" is not really a good argument here. Israel does not have an organized campaign to modify wikipedia, like what the pro-Palestine crowd does. And scale matters: there are 15 million Jews globally, 2 billion Muslims, 1.4 billion Chinese, 90 million Iranians. This is not a level playing field; manpower matters in swaying public opinion. And factually - Israel is an American-aligned democracy and has substantially more freedoms than China, Iran, Russia, and the Muslim world, and is not working to destroy all of those places the way that those places are working to destroy the west and all US influence. It's just "Jews control the media" using the cover word of Israel instead. Obviously untrue - if it were, then social media and wikipedia would be dominated by pro-Israel narratives, rather than the other way around, which is what is actually reality.
Banning a propaganda tool used by China, Russia, and Iran, which is also used to collect our data, is not hasbara. It's just wise behavior to stop your enemies from disrupting your population. Anyway, hasbara means "explanation". Use of this as condemnation is basically somewhere between "foreign word bad" and "Jews bad".
Yes it is a good argument here. Yes they do have state level organizations and intelligence agencies being used to push propaganda and silence criticism across all forms of media.
Yes scale matters, the scale of resources used to push Israeli, US, and western propaganda dwarves that of China, Russia, or Iran. It’s laughable you use total population numbers here, as if every Muslim person is a dedicated jihadist working to bring down the west.
Anyway, not going any further down this pointless hole of arguing whether I hate Jews or not cause I don’t support the mass murder of children.
What about the groups linked in the wikipedia article: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices and the United Nations Special Rapporteur ?
Those seem less biased sources than The Jerusalem Post
The source here isn't the JP, it's wikipedia. Wikipedia investigated and banned the editors. JP is just the reporter. You can find other news sites with the same news, or Wikipedia itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_the_Israeli%E2%8...
Those human rights groups, unfortunately, have a long history of bias and foreign influence. The closer they are to the UN, the more political they are. Literally half of the UN's resolutions pertain to Israel - while 99.999% of war deaths, famine, modern slavery, etc, happen without Israel being involved. The UN was led by a literal Nazi in the 70s - Kurt Waldheim - and the last few UN Secretary Generals have said that there is a serious bias against Israel there (obvious from the obsession).
[flagged]
Religious flamewar isn't allowed on HN, and your comment crosses that line. Please don't post like this here.
(yes, this is the case regardless of which religion(s) are being flamed)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> No, it really isn't.
I wonder what you know about Genocide better than experts in Holocaust studies and other genocides themselves.
https://x.com/NimerSultany/status/1870761846497583323> This is war, this is how it goes.
Yeah, war is how "I was just following orders" German troops justified killing 12m+ in concentration camps. Goebbels said, "The Jews are responsible for the war. The treatment they receive from us is hardly unjust. They have deserved it all." Don't be like Goebbels.
> the 2 billion Muslims that hate Jews
Yeah, well: I know a handful Muslims who married Jews.
> and all you did was bitch on the internet, I'd be ashamed to know you
Same.
Unfortunately, popular opinion - at least of the far left - has always been united against Israel. In fact, many of those authors called it a genocide before this war. You can find plenty of such accusations on Twitter from prior to 10/10, when Israel started responding to the attack. You have many groups blaming Israel for all sorts of absurd things - like the fires in California. I wish I was joking. If not for Israel and the Jews, we'd have world peace - at least that's what you'd think if you listened to these groups.
It is an extension of populist antisemitism. I encourage you to think about this on your own: why is Israel condemned for 45k deaths in a war they didn't start, where half of the killed are militants, where Israel is literally providing aid to their enemy, while the Houthis, responsible for 300k dead in the past decade, including many children via starvation, who have brought back slavery in Yemen, are lauded for attacking western shipping and have fanboys of one of their murderous pirates? Where is the criticism for Muslims planning terror attacks against the west, and against individual Jews globally? Why do leftists love the idea of jihad and intifada, but not a nation defending itself?
Meanwhile, most "genocide" decriers seem to have ignored the tens of thousands of rockets, missiles, and drones launched at Israeli civilians from Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. They ignore the videos of Gazans chearing in the streets and spitting on corpses. The open calls for exterminating the Jews from the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ, Iran, and more. There is one side calling for the extermination of the other and taking actions to make it so - the Muslims trying to destroy Israel and calling for and taking actions to kill Jews globally.
> In fact, many of those authors called it a genocide before this war.
That's because Ralph Lemkin, who coined the term "Genocide" in the wake of the Shoah, identified 10 stages, and mass extinction event is the final stage. He posited that once mass extinction commences it almost impossible to stop without incurring a significant cost to whoever wants to stop it (and so, he implored powers-that-be recognize it before the event & not after): https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages
> If not for Israel and the Jews, we'd have world peace - at least that's what you'd think if you listened to these groups.
I know. And it is totally absurd like you say. Racists (antisemites in this case) will never make any sense. Historians specializing in genocide / Holocaust, on the other hand, are experts in their fields.
> Where is the criticism for Muslims planning terror attacks against the west, and against individual Jews globally?
You are joking? ALL Muslims are vilified by many in almost every Western country and in countries where Muslims are a significant minority (like India). Like antisemitism, anti-Muslim racism is every which where.
> the Muslims trying to destroy Israel
Unsure why you blame ALL 2b Muslims. I mean, you're no different than those antisemites who blame the Jewish people for all of world's problems. As a test, replace "Muslims" with "Jews" in your sentences and see if they read antisemitic to you.
Besides, Pakistan, a Muslim country, has 300+ nuclear warheads and Inter-continental ballistic missiles capability; and if ALL Muslims without exception, like you say, are rabidly hell-bent on destroying Israel, what are the Pakistanis waiting for? Please, snap out of this Islamophobic hysteria.
I mean, I'm not on TikTok at all and Israel is committing a genocide. China didn't tell me that, the Israeli's killing Palestinians en masse told me that. Because that's what the word "genocide" means.
It seems to be if the US Government wants not to be associated with a genocide-committing country they should just... do that. TikTok might have the largest share of the pro-Palestine mood as it were, but like... it's on all the platforms. Because again... they're committing a genocide, and filming it.
I would argue that even though you're not on tiktok, you are being influenced by the narrative that China is pushing. There are numerous genocides happening in the world today. Sudan. China (try talking about THAT one on TikTok...). Why aren't those being treated with equal concern? Because China knows that only the Isreal/Gaza one is a wedge in America, so they push that to sow discord.
Which one is the US funding, and using UN vetos to continue?
We're an active participant in, its not a surprise its the one we (USA ppl) care about.
> Why aren't those being treated with equal concern?
I mean I can't speak to other people's experience, but as an American, I'm uniquely pissed off with the Israeli one because my tax dollars are paying for it, and because the White House could stop it at a time of their choosing, as they've done before.
What makes this a genocide and not every other war where far more people, including more civilians, died? And at higher ratios of the dead? You can find hundreds of videos of Israel targeting militants, Hamas using schools and hospitals as bases, and more.
Nearly a million died in the Iraq war. In a single battle, Mosul, almost as many were killed as in Gaza, including similar ratios of militants and civilians. In Ukraine, far more have been killed, both combatants and civilians - and Russia clearly targets civilians there, and they started the war (while Hamas started the Gaza war). In Syria, half a million died, mostly civilians. Ditto the Lebanese civil war. Ditto the Yemen-Houthi war.
This feels so obvious to explain that I can't help but feel like it's condescending, but a conflict is not a genocide, irrespective of it's death toll. If you looked up the definition:
> the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Which is just 100% what Israel is attempting to do to Palestine, and they're not exactly being coy about it.
Your assertion is obviously not true. This is why they target militants and post the videos and explanations on the internet. You can find hundreds or thousands of such videos. It’s why they send texts hours before bombing. It’s why they do roof knocks. It’s why they provide safe passage and humanitarian zones. It’s why they drop leaflets. It’s why they still provide electricity, water, and food to Gaza. I read a report about how they asked a Palestinian to alert his neighbors via a phone call and waited for him to tell everyone to get out. These are steps no other nation takes, and it is easy to find experts confirming that. It’s why there are only 45k dead instead of 2 million.
If Israel wanted to maximize casualties, there would not be a Palestinian alive today. What would be their incentive to stop? The far left claims it’s a genocide as it is. What would actually killing them all be, then? Double genocide? You have used the worst term you can to describe something very far from the worst Israel could do.
And then of course, is the obvious contradiction that they just agreed to a ceasefire for their hostages. Just like they did in November 2023. And how they agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon despite all the cries of them trying to seize the land. Israel wants to be left alone to live; the Palestinians (and the other neighboring Arab nations) want to kill all the Israelis and destroy Israel. The rest of the world wants these positions to meet in the middle, so there we are in the middle ground: perpetual war. Go look at the Hamas and Hezbollah founding charters, or the Houthi flag, or everything Iran says.
"You can't be mad at them for killing a lot of Palestinians when they've shown incredible restraint in not killing all of them" is a hell of an argument, I'll give you that. Still genocide though. There's no victim-count aspect to this definition, they are attacking Palestinians, living in Palestine, because they are Palestinian, and they want to settle those areas with Israeli's. We don't need to wait for them to kill a certain percentage of the population to then be able to declare it a genocide.
And, like even if I take this:
> I read a report about how they asked a Palestinian to alert his neighbors via a phone call and waited for him to tell everyone to get out.
at 100% face value, that some militants were in some building and the IDF was about to reduce it to ashes... so they called the guy next door, and asked him to evacuate the building? Which is presumably... full of militants? Cuz that's like the whole thing, that's the whole fuckin point?
You talk a lot about how nothing I say makes sense but that's just nonsensical on it's face, like... if these attacks are genuinely needed, why in the world would you warn people beforehand? Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose?
> the Palestinians (and the other neighboring Arab nations) want to kill all the Israelis and destroy Israel.
I mean they can want that as hard as they want, but Israel has the military and political backing of the West. They're untouchable, as has been demonstrated by them being surrounded by enemies essentially since the state was partitioned off from the others during it's founding, and it's still there.
> because they are Palestinian
No, this is not why. They are attacking because Gaza invaded Israel on 10/7, killing over 1200, injuring 5000, and kidnapping over 200. Notice how Arab / Palestinian citizens of Israel are not being killed.
> We don't need to wait for them to kill a certain percentage of the population to then be able to declare it a genocide.
I think this is a fundamental flaw of the genocide conventions. With this interpretation, you could call a single murder a genocide, if done with the intent of destroying a people (in which case, isn’t even murder of an Israeli by Hamas or other organizations whose intent is to destroy a genocide?). Obviously, this is absurd, and nobody is on TikTok raging about Hamas’ attempted genocide of Israel.
> You talk a lot about how nothing I say makes sense but that's just nonsensical on it's face, like... if these attacks are genuinely needed, why in the world would you warn people beforehand? Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose?
Yes, it does. It is in fact this attempt to do less harm that prolongs the war and keeps Hamas alive. To actually destroy Hamas, you would have to kill a lot more civilians. So Israel often settles for destroying weapons caches, tunnels, and structures they operate from.
> With this interpretation, you could call a single murder a genocide, if done with the intent of destroying a people
I mean, if you killed someone who for whatever odd reason played a critical role in the maintenance of a culture, with the stated goal being the extinction of that culture, then yes that's an act of genocide. The fact that the event itself is a bit strange doesn't change what it is.
The systematized way that Canada's residential schools literally beat their native tongue out of the native children they were put in charge of was also an act of genocide. It isn't an error in the interpretation, it's what the word is.
> (in which case, isn’t even murder of an Israeli by Hamas or other organizations whose intent is to destroy a genocide?)
Yes, but they're not the ones aggressing. No one is saying Israel's neighbors are innocent, but Israel is currently, actively engaged in an ethnic cleansing. The fact that those they're cleansing wouldn't do the same back to them given the chance both doesn't make that okay and is irrelevant.
> Yes, it does. It is in fact this attempt to do less harm that prolongs the war and keeps Hamas alive. To actually destroy Hamas, you would have to kill a lot more civilians. So Israel often settles for destroying weapons caches, tunnels, and structures they operate from.
Well then they fucked up about 47,000 times by official numbers.
> Yes, but they're not the ones aggressing
You do know this war started with a massive assault by Hamas, PIJ, PFLP, and other Palestinian groups, right? They attacked Israel, targeting civilians in a brutal assault, starting this war. If you start a war, you are the aggressor, even if you lose.
Social disruption. That's plainly clear given that Douyin is prevented from having the destructive content that proliferates on TikTok. Keep your competition mired in anti-inellectualism for a generation and it accelerates the rot.
It's taken for granted that the shifty [any] government is up to something because they always are, 100% of the time. Why would you expect the evil overlords to not be up to something with the big evil brainwashing program that has access to almost everyone on earth?
This but unironically.
Seriously, given all the crazy shit that's been uncovered in the last 20 years — PRISM, Five Eyes, Cambridge Analytica — why would an influence campaign run over one of the world's biggest social networks controlled by the actual, real life authoritarian Big Brother state be the one scenario that crosses the line from plausible to fantasy for you?
I don't necessarily buy the argument that we should play the same game as a communist dictatorship in the name of fairness. If we eat our own dogfood then we ought to conclude that suppression of speech in fact marks a critical weakness of their system. Why not take the free real estate, then, and leave our system's open nature unmolested?
Politicians realized just how powerful the corporate surveillance and propaganda system is, and they don't want to share it with China.
This guy gets it. They don't care about anyone's privacy, save their own. This is yet more coddling of American industry, bought and paid for by generous political donations to keep the scaaaary Chinese apps from stealing honest, hard working red-blooded American's data... so that American apps can steal honest, hard working, red-blooded American's data.
It's not a coincidence that this comes along with similar cybersecurity/anticompetitive pushes against Chinese routers, drones, and EVs.
Except people may be migrating to Rednote (which you have heard, is Chinese).
Government intervention at its finest.
According to the people gunning for it seems to be mostly about controlling what content Americans can see in order to keep public opinions in line with foreign policy goals. (i.e. pro Israel)
>While data security issues are paramount, less often discussed is TikTok’s power to radically distort the world-picture that America’s young people encounter. Israel’s unfolding war with Hamas is a crucial test case. According to one poll, 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe that Hamas’s murder of civilians was justified—a statistic notably different from other age cohorts. Analysts have attributed this disparity to the ubiquity of anti-Israel content on TikTok, where most young internet users get their information about the world
from:
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/Ha...
I think there's an important distinction between "keeping public opinions [pro Israel]," as you claim, and discouraging the dissemination of content that radicalizes (for lack of a better word) viewers enough to justify and support the murder of innocent civilians by a terrorist organization, as the Senator claims.
It's far more complex than that. TikTok is a Chinese company with immense reach and influence that can shape American public discourse. A global superpower cannot allow another global superpower to influence its population so significantly through social media (which is also why Facebook is banned in China).
Red panic, racism, and corporate welfare. The usual motivating factors in US policy.
I hope this doesn’t sound overly cynical or conspiratorial. My sense is that there’s panic about unfettered access to what’s happening in Gaza on TikTok, which is shaping Gen Z’s perceptions in a way that isn’t deemed acceptable by the political establishment. US-based companies seem to have processes in place - direct or indirect - to suppress the reach of such content.
^^^^^^
Same reason they passed the nonprofit killing bill bipartisanly, for whatever reason this seems to be a huge deal for the people in government right now.
This is overly conspiratorial, because the timeline doesn't line up. Gaza has only been in the news since October 7th 2023.
The government first started talking about banning TikTok in 2018 (under Trump). Ordered them to divest of US interests and prohibited transactions with them in 2020 (under Trump). The latter of which was overturned by the courts.
The current administration took over in 2021, and in 2021 labelled the PRC as a foreign adversary. Discussed the threat to the US through the PRCs control of software applications and teh vasts swaths of information available from their users, directed agencies to find risk mitigation measures, and started a long process of negotiating with TikTok over how exactly it continued to operate.
The act ordering divestment is the inevitable consequence of those talks failing... those talks failed sometime late 2022 or early 2023 (the last proposal under them was in August 2022).
The sudden resurgence of the years-dormant campaign to ban TikTok, and its rapid legislative success this time around, were directly because of Israel and Gaza. From the mouths of senators: "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down (potentially) TikTok...if you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I know that's of real interest..." (https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587)
"How TikTok Was Blindsided by U.S. Bill That Could Ban It" (https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-tiktok-was-blindsided-by-a-u-s-...)The push for the TikTok ban only went bipartisan after October 7. It was stalled out before that.
Perfect analogy. Keep in mind that most US lawmakers still think the internet is a series of tubes - and we don't want OUR tubes dirties by some pinko commie tubes! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!
What a weird Jira ticket it must be to get "implement complete turn-off".
It might be pretty simple, if it's just a protest banner and an information website as Reuters said. You can't see TikTok's issue tracker but you can read the Wikimedia Foundation's tasks to implement the Wikipedia campaigns about SOPA and the 2019 EU copyright directive.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T203095
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_...
Why doesn’t China simply open up for domestic competition? What are they afraid of? It’s a serious question. Are they that much afraid of their consumers switching to Western products? I frankly think it’s overblown. Chinese people will simply stick with homegrown products at this point. It’s way too entrenched for anyone to enter their market and succeed. I think they have made enough progress to open up their markets and they have so much to lose by growing anti-sino sentiments abroad all because they didn’t want US tech monopolies to compete in their home turf. Maybe 10 years ago it made sense but Chinese tech companies can compete on merits at this point. They have the ecosystem to compete without govt protection.
> Why doesn’t China simply open up for domestic competition?
China does allow competition. It's just that google, facebook, etc chose not to follow chinese laws.
> they have so much to lose by growing anti-sino sentiments abroad all because they didn’t want US tech monopolies to compete in their home turf
Funny how microsoft, apple, tesla, etc are competing in china?
You are just parroting stale propaganda.
> China does allow competition. It's just that google, facebook, etc chose not to follow chinese laws.
HAHA, thanks for giving me a good laugh
Typical pathetic response from a silly political activist. There are tons of american companies operating in china. I listed few of the biggest. Google used to operate in china. But when china tighten their laws, google chose not to follow them and left. Probably because google, like facebook, are state sponsored propaganda outfits. Unlike tiktok...
Really skipped over expanding on the CCP laws that Google chose not follow, didn't ya?
What's the relevance? Would you have been more satisfied if Google were forced to sell to Jack Ma instead?
Would you have been more satisfied if the US government forced a backdoor to TikTok? That's why Google pulled out of China.
The US is doing the opposite, it's removing TikTok because they probably spy / psyop for the CCP.
One country (China) was trying to force foreign companies to spy / psyop.
One country (US) is making sure a foreign adversary doesn't use it to spy / psyop.
> Would you have been more satisfied if the US government forced a backdoor to TikTok? That's why Google pulled out of China.
What a dope. Imagine being dumb enough to believe google pulled out to protect chinese people's privacy.
Google pulled out because the chinese government wanted to monitor it to make sure google wasn't acting as a state actor pushing propaganda to destabilize nations. Turns out the chinese were right and google was indeed a state actor. Their dirty little fingers were all over the color revolutions.
> One country (China) was trying to force foreign companies to spy / psyop.
But that's google's business model. Do you have two brain cells to rub together? Why would the chinese force google to do what it already was doing in china and everywhere in the world? And still does today?
> One country (US) is making sure a foreign adversary doesn't use it to spy / psyop.
That's what china was doing. Dummy. Literally, china created laws to stop google/facebook/etc from running psyops in china and that's why they chose to leave china.
You must be one of the morons that actually swallowed google's motto "Don't be evil" hook line and sinker.
How stupid do you have to be to think google left china because the chinese government forced them to spy on the chinese. When spying is google's bread and butter.
Yes, because it would at least show a modicum of honesty. Instead it's being done indirectly through putting a company in the hands of state-sanctioned owners. What difference does it make other than theater?
if they did that the US government would then be spying on US citizens by monitoring TikTok data.
how in the world would that show a modicum of honesty?
You're assuming it's about economics, but it has almost nothing to do with that. Foreign companies like Ford and GM can and do sell in China.
The reason China restricts foreign internet companies specifically, is because the government lacks control over what information is shared on such apps. China is a dictatorship where free speech is considered dangerous.
And that’s my point really. US tech companies have all kowtowed to CCP for the past two decades trying to gain access to the second largest economy.
They did, largely what China did is make any companies that want to do business in China partner with a local company. From there what happened in many cases is the foreign company had their IP stolen and then shut out of the market.
China doesn't want western companies operating in China, they want western IP owned by Chinese companies operating there. That's why so many companies have pulled out of that market.
> What are they afraid of?
Definitely not the consumption of foreign products.
The PRC remains a totalitarian government which built itself on an environment where they exert total control over public communication. There are long lists of topics that you simply cannot cover, analyze, talk about or even discuss privately via internet media in China. There's no way to do that if those discussions happen on Snapchat via a data center in Oregon.
Does the CCP need to do that? It's a reasonable question with answers more complicated than I'll be able to offer. But for sure they want (desperately) to do it. Thus, no foreign media in China.
Pretty sure Google was allowed but decided to pull out (maybe due to censorship demands from China) not sure about facebook.
Facebook was allowed until 2009, it was blocked because it was allegedly used by ETIM to organise the 2009 Urumqi riots, and facebook refused to cooperate with the Chinese police.
Let's just be clear on what this is. Supporting a TikTok ban has several valuable benefits to politicians.
1. You look tough on China
2. You look like you're being tough on "misinformation"
3. You get to look like you are in favor of privacy
4. You get to implicitly support the American competitors of this product
5. You get to look like you're helping kids by getting rid of something that they like but older voters are skeptical about
6. None of this affects the supply chain so won't impose consumer costs
None of these things are real (except the competitors and supply chain ones)
Considering how many of our sites they ban, this seems pretty reasonable.
I dream of the day we give ourselves a decentralized protocol that, while providing an opt-in way of following current events, offers us an extreme breadth of content without being a hypercapitalistic, attention-grabbing nightmare that tries to get us to compulsively consume absolute junk constantly, at the cost of everything else. In the meantime, looks like Sunday is gonna be a fun day.
ActivityPub is exactly that. Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, etc.
What you're asking for exists.
It doesn't. I'm talking about true decentralization (peer to peer), not federation (the worst of both worlds). It should also be uncensorable and come with some implementation that does away entirely with the idea of "social media" or "microblogging". Just a better version of what the web 1.0 was.
true decentralization means it will be rife with bad actors taking over the network in decentralized methods. it won't work and will be ultimately result for illegal activities.
decentralization != morally beneficial for the masses.
So do the masses have the wisdom to rule themselves or do they need a paternalistic gatekeeper? Pick one.
Was your father a gatekeeper?
What about Nostr?
The Trump attempt to force TikTok to sell or get out failed. Stopped by the courts in 2020 ¹
Then everyone was fine with TikTok more or less. A few departments, if not all banned it, have given warnings about it.
Then when Gaza blew up, TikTok was not quick enough to ban all pro Palestine content and that is when congress again decided that it was time to take on TikTok ²
¹ https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-courts-a526c144fad9f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_co...
² https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest... https://forward.com/culture/688840/tiktok-ban-gaza-palestine... https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/tiktok-faces-renew... https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/tiktok-ban-israel-... https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmaker...
I downloaded Rednote and was already blown away by just the app quality. So much better than X. I'd never used TikTok but I really hate the idea of our government censoring what I can and cannot see. Rednote has a bunch of great content on it too. Thanks for the Streisand rec US gov!
?? X/Twitter is not the main competitor to TikTok/RedNote. Meta's Instagram/Instagram Reels is.
I was commenting more on the code quality and app performance. It’s very well written.
The content is good too though. It’s nice to see so much amazing Chinese cooking.
And YouTube Shorts?
How many users does Genshin Impact need to have before it gets banned?
I've never felt inclined to use TikTok. I've always kept my online presence psuedo-anonymous, all the way back to AOL days. I don't use Meta products at all.
The day TikTok is banned I will create an account and post a video showing my face, in which I will state my name and address.
Perhaps other countries will also regulate or ban social media companies.
I'm rooting for a Twitter ban in Europe. Musk has shown willingness to temper with elections in at least two European countries, and the ban would also leave a message for Zuck.
You'd rather bad actors like Soros used their $billions to manipulate elections in the shadows? At least Musk is upfront.
Like many celebrities he's chosen to endorse a political candidate and make donations. Like many celebrities he has large influence.
But the difference with Musk is he's supporting a political side that you don't like.
Foreign interference is foreign interference. If you don't tolerate it at home, don't promote it abroad.
https://www.newsweek.com/australia-social-media-ban-teens-wh...
Countries like China, where TikTok is from, already ban US social media.
The other countries you’re presumably thinking of are our allies and typically our propaganda aligns with their (governments’) interests. China’s interests do not.
IMO they should be for children under 15.
Good.
And I want this to set a precedent that we CAN reign in the social media companies.
Looks like we’re about to witness a digital apocalypse...
Won’t the website still work? Or do kids these days only open apps?
America deserves more for supporting authoritarian gov
> TikTok... estimates one-third of the 170 million Americans using its app would stop accessing the platform if the ban lasts a month.
If customers care that little about the product, maybe it's a good sign that it isn't providing significant value to their lives.
You can also read this as despite being banned TikTok expects 2/3 users to find ways to circumvent the ban
I don't care about tiktok. But if this is the reality we are stuck in right now. I really hope the EU is banning all the privacy melting Meta apps soon.
Once again, digital drug addicts getting their supply cut off and running to the next hit.
Neither this TikTok "ban" or the new app "Rednote" are going to last in the long term. They will run back to TikTok again.
Would have been better to fine TikTok in the billions just like we already have done for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and all the other social networks.
But this is all temporary.
surely this will be the big break for bluesky
Haha there's no shot. Apples and oranges - completely different platforms and features.
I know, it was sarcasm
Good riddance. Hopefully whatever fills its place is stricter on sexual content, insane what kids have been inspired to do on there.
So basically, tiktok will be unavailable in the US for 24 hours until Trump takes office and then he'll probably extend the deadline
When the President literally owns a competitor called "Truth Social" do you think he will not take the America First pledge??
It's honestly wild how many people in these comments are defending some vague, unsubstantiated, paper thin national security scare vs recognizing this as a clear suppression of free speech and active stoking of xenophobia.
I would genuinely rather drop ship the CCP my SSN/banking info than trust the US government to do something in favor of it's own people when there's lobbying money involved. Why are so many of you pro-government and anti competition only when it comes to tiktok specifically? It's completely the opposite on nearly every other topic from what I've seen.
The most disheartening part of this ban is that it’s just about the only thing the government can agree on. IMO Mitt Romney slipped the truth in saying: “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
TikTok is the first and just about the only place I’ve seen content about corporate greed, the accelerating disappearance of the middle class and the real downstream effects of US foreign policy that hasn’t been whitewashed.
The ball is in China’s court now, if they can provide a space where this class consciousness can continue to grow they’ll easily get equal/better (though I think magnitudes greater) returns than Russia’s recent social campaigns.
> The ball is in China’s court now, if they can provide a space where this class consciousness can continue to grow they’ll easily get equal/better
We can hope the CCP's consciousness grows and they shutdown their concentration camps, stop organ harvesting, and start having elections.
The ball is in their court.
We can talk TikTok being allowed after that.
Maybe every other country should ban American imports until we stop bankrolling Israel if that's your position.
Sure. Plenty of people to trade with who don't support terrorists like Hamas.
This is like saying that people who are against civilian casualties in the wars in iraq and Afghanistan are all pro 9/11 and love al-qaeda. How does the boot taste?
What's the implication? That we as a society and/or government have a more just consciousness?
There are certainly are issues in China but are these "popular headline" talking points worse than the suffering we have here? And that's even after assuming they are factual.
We sell prison labor for pennies. We allow individuals to create epidemics and slap them on the wrist. We allow the future of our next generations to be squandered for today's profits. We allow our government to be just as captive to the desires of private parties in a way that's effectually reduced elections to a non-choice.
I don't think anyone with a conscious can say we're any better and that's without taking into account our worst contributions of genocides/wars/instability to the global community.
But in the end w/e, you have your freedom tinted glasses on (it must be nice) and the average american is screwed on our current trajectory.
The difference between prison labor and Uyghur forced labor camps:
In the US those people lost their rights by committing criminal acts and were convicted by a jury of their peers.
In China, the Uyghurs were forced into camps because of their ethnicity.
No different than Nazi Germany. And yes those camps are real.
Btw the prison labor camp talking point is a common 50 cent army tactic. Not sure if you're doing it for free or...
Let me genuinely ask you something because you seem to be all over this thread with a strong different opinion, and I'm not so arrogant as to believe it's impossible that I'm wrong.
Do you really think, in real world terms, that China could not accomplish the types of infiltrations / surveillance it would deem strategically important without tiktok? Considering that they already compromise government systems on a regular basis (which I can provide links for if you're curious)
Do you genuinely think that corruption / lobbying has nothing to do with this ban? What is your primary concern that makes you in favor of this?
Do you look at things like facebook and instagram and either not see the blatant propaganda on there or not see a problem with it?
I'm just wondering if we are disagreeing on the facts or if we have fundamentally incompatable values, I want to understand.
Nice pivot. Don't want to talk about the Uyghur camps eh?
Respond to the prison labor vs concentration camps point, since you brought up prison labor in attempts to compare convicted criminals to an ethnic group being forced into labor.
I don't have a point, that wasn't me talking about it. The Uyghur camps are horrible, horrible things, and legalized slavery in the US is also horrible. I don't think they are equal at all but tbh I just don't know enough about the Uyghur situation to have an educated opinion on it generally or specifically in regards to the tiktok situation.
Although I do think there's some degree of equivalence specifically in regard to a specific ethnic group being forced into labor since you mentioned it, but I don't want to go on a tangent because that's not what I brought up and not what I was talking about.
if you trust the CCP (which to be clear refers to the government of China, not the actual people who live there, just like any country) to be more respectful and magnanimous to its citizens and human rights overall than the US, you might want to do some research on that (and not on Tiktok)
This isn't how the about how the CCP treats it's own citizens, it's about how the US is currently treating it's citizens.
Oh stop, it has nothing to do with xenophobia, the CCP has a terrible spying and human rights track record (organ harvesting, concentration camps, child labor, etc.).
Nothing to do with the Chinese people as a whole, and everything to do about their overlords.
Before you do some whataboutism, yes the US spies, even on it's own citizens. That is a separate issue we should make sure doesn't happen.
Two things can be bad and is not an excuse for more spying or letting foreign adversaries broadcast psyops.
What psyops are you talking about? Is it a bunch of US citizens talking about how they don't like the US bankrolling a genocide? Why is it more important to protect tiktok users from a threat no one can actually point to versus preserving a place a lot of people feel like is very important to their day to day lives? Why are these lawmakers prioritizing this over actual threats like school shootings? Honestly the general opinion is that this is extremely obviously not about national security for anybody I've talked to about this and I can't possibly disagree.
Yeah that's a good example.
Framing Gaza as the victims in this whole ordeal.
That's like the 3rd time you dropped Israel in this China topic.
Really trying to shoehorn that in eh?
Do you have an actual counter-argument to this or do you just like pointing out that you don't think Palestinians have a right to live? Just because we disagree doesn't mean that I'm only against human rights violations and war crimes because China said they were bad. Is that how you live your life? Being a good little boy or girl and doing what uncle sam tells you to? If no, why do you assume other people aren't capable of thinking for themselves?
You're terrible at this. Noone is defending the US, your whataboutism is just irrelevant.
I can be against Chinese spying and bad things the US does.
Israel is irrelevant in this thread...
Hopefully they aren't paying you the full 50c for these posts, get better.
You are arguing that my only reason for being against a genocide is either that I've been brainwashed or paid for. Get better at having basic human empathy. Israel is extremely relevant in this thread as pro-Palestinian sentiment is arguably the reason it's being banned.
You proved my point. You claim to be a free thinker and then try to dismiss what I'm saying by claiming I'm paid for without any substance.
I feel the same.
I think there are two things in play.
First, folks on this site don't know what real propaganda looks like. Based on growing up in Texas, as far as I can tell you'd have to publish and mandate textbooks to make a meaningful impact on peoples' belief systems. I have seen it happen, and I've had the experience of often leaning that things I had thought were true (or some underlying assumption) was in fact false, and then been able to trace that to my early education. So propaganda feels likely, but it also doesn't seem like some easy magic that can happen at the behest of some autocrat somewhere.
Unfortunately the folks here don't really have much perspective to judge the ways in which their own assumptions about the world are shaped by the rhetoric of the systems that raised them.
Second, many people likely generally haven't had many positive and genuine experiences on social media, or at least not on contemporary short-form video social media. Having been on the net since usenet days, I believe that it's possible to learn how to have those kinds of experiences, just as it's possible to engage with trolls and have a bad day or whatever. I don't consider HN to be fundamentally different than other social media sites, but I also understand that is a marginal view.
However, since folks here have generally never used something like Tiktok in a way that has had a positive impact in their life, the folks using it look like they are addicted doom scrollers instead of people highly engaged in conversations with their community.
I've personally gotten a lot out of Tiktok- the quality of the discussions there is much higher and more diverse than HN. I've also interacted with a lot of folks there in ways that make me fairly certain that I am dealing with actual humans and not, like, a PRC Botnet or something.
It's tough for me to disregard my own experience:
TT doesn't feel any more propaganda-laden than any other media stream, and certainly not in ways that are driven more by the PRC than by the content creators themselves
Further, I feel a little fury at folks who are happy engaging in whatever crappy media they like: mass sports, bad sitcoms, poorly written TV news, etc and feeling like the hour they might spend with that is somehow better than the half hour I might spend listening to some lakota guy talk about some nuance of tribal politics, and then have the gall to tell me that I'm addicted.
However, at the same time those folks apparently have a lot of power- they can happily elect folks who will hake it harder for me to hear some conversations that I found useful. So I suppose it's important to understand that these sociopaths view me as just another addicted, over-propagandized NPC.
I can see what you mean about a lack of positive experiences on social media, I think tiktok is the first one I see genuinely having a positive impact on myself and others. It's so frustrating seeing all these people who have clearly never been on there talk about it like it's the CCP selling us heroin.
I say this as someone who was in high school as the first wave of social media sites (early Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.) came up:
Just get rid of all of them. They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.
Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones. If you have to combine your online interactions with people with the interactions you have with them in real life, you're better off, and that doesn't happen when social networks span the globe.
First, people say things like they can't not use Facebook because it has marketplace, etc. shows there has clearly been an issue of not enforcing any kind of anti-trust laws for the past 20 years since US v Microsoft in the browser wars days.
The FTC over the past four years has taken a turn here and is starting to do that work again, it's slow but it needs to continue.
Second, these companies behave as publishers without any of the responsibilities/liability. This has to stop. If you publish just a chronological feed that's one thing. But when you algorithmically decide what people see when, and now introduce your own AI bots into the mix, you're 100% a publisher and need to be legally responsible for it. That legislation needs to be updated to reflect this.
Third, much of the root issues stem from advertising. These companies are driven to get and keep as much of your attention as possible simply so they can sell that attention to advertisers. If we all paid for it, the design of these services would be different. I'm not sure how to tackle that but it seems a start is privacy legislation to prohibit user tracking and sale or sharing of personal data.
> First, people say things like they can't not use Facebook because it has marketplace, etc. shows there has clearly been an issue of not enforcing any kind of anti-trust laws for the past 20 years since US v Microsoft in the browser wars days.
Europe is in some capacity doing that. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/facebook-marketplace-t...
Or just address the core element of advertising that creates the perverse incentive — the ability for an auction to determine what you see. Paying to be a part of a digital phonebook is fine. Recommending things is fine. But skewing your recommender against the highest bidder maybe not.
I deleted my Facebook in 2016, and when I tried to create a new one they banned me as "inauthentic". I've seen people complain about the site demanding a government ID scan, but I'd have been willing to prove I am who I am if given the chance.
Now I can't delete my Instagram, which I was using FB SSO for. They ocassionally send me marketing emails that I might want to engage with so and so's content.
How, when you nuked my goddamn account for no reason?
Anyways, if I had the money I'd short them -- they seem to be completely unconcerned with the few who'd consider giving them a second chance.
As for Tik Tok, as with Telegram having it's servers in Russia, I think the real issue is the data is in control of the PRC, rather than whinings about "fake news" -- people have consumed supermarket check out drivel like the Weekly World News for years, it's just moved online.
Is this a common issue? I deleted mine around the same time. I recently moved to a small town where many of the restaurants and businesses use Facebook which kind of forced me back on. When I tried creating a new one the same thing happened, and there was no way of reversing this decision.
Same with me, who "needed" to join FB because that is the main communication platform for a leisure activity. Apparently I am a fake person.
Did you try signing up with a different email address,
If you deleted an account, how are they sending you emails? Are you in the EU?
I am not in the EU. There's two accounts - FB and Insta. The same email was given to both.
Solid point!
> Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones.
Herein lies the rub. How do you decide what the threshold is? Who gets to decide what that threshold is, and how do you do it without inviting accusations of regulatory capture?
If you make it blanket all social networks, then things like discord and even public slack orgs will inadvertently become collateral damage. If you make it focussed on only a few large ones, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, then something else will pop up to take it's place. It'll become a game of whack-a-mole. Users are supposedly already migrating in droves to some other TikTok clone.
I'm not really sure what the solution is though. Regulate the shit out of it to the extent where it becomes a government-provided utility or something?
The reality is people want social media because they are addicted to it. Getting rid of social media will be like the war on drugs: completely ineffective. The danger here is that the drug is very easy to create, impossible to control and extremely lucrative.
My passing thought is to prohibit advertising and user data monetization and it might solve itself.
We also have regulations on usage, like truck drivers can only drive X hours a day, force some type of consumption limit the networks are required to enforce. We have similar laws regarding where, when, and how people can consume things like alcohol so could also do something like that. Some amount of it is ok, but as you say we’ve now learned it’s so addictive we need to force people into moderation of their consumption.
Honestly this is probably the most realistic solution. The only reason all the shit ragebait addictive content is so bad is because it drives ad revenue.
I do think there's one exception/problem: youtube. While there's a lot of pregnant spiderman-elsa crap on it, there's also tons of historical, educational, investigative journalism, etc etc etc content there that strikes me as distinctly more valuable than literally anything that's ever existed on facebook, tiktok or even twitter.
And in addition to the backlog, there's an economics problem. Having good, free, easy, available video hosting is a huge good. It's also ridiculously expensive (videos are big, and you have to render multiple qualities of them, and store them forever) and a hard engineering (network and software) problem (what tiny % of video upload constitutes 90% of the actual network traffic? but you also have to brace for videos from nobodies going viral and needing to be served to the entire globe).
So how do you fund something like this? Normally I'd say, well, damn, this sounds like a utility. But given the political climate we're going into for the next 4 years, and the fact that even healthcare is privatized (well, the part of it that can generate a profit... unprofitable customers are of course pushed to the taxpayer)...
I think we'd have to carefully define what a 'social network' is. In my opinion, YT is not a social network. The UGC parts of Amazon.com, like reviews, do not make it a social network either. YT is a broadcast / streaming service with some small layer of UGC (I say small because, honestly, if the entire comment section was eliminated I don't think anyone would miss it, it's meme worthy bad in most cases.)
Or maybe it's just me and don't use it that way and others do? I subscribe to some things, watch a lot of videos mostly has a lurker and almost never even dip into the comments. I have exactly 0 connections with people I know on YT. It's more of a modern television channel than anything in my case.
There is a lot of variation in community and comment quality on YouTube. Similar to Reddit there is a massive long tail of smaller communities and topics which absolutely have vibrant and real, helpful comments. And on the biggest channels and videos there is a lot of bullshit and low quality comments. Both are true at the same time so it would be a shame to stamp out the genuine communities and connections
Is there any reasonable definition of "social network" that includes TikTok, but doesn't include YouTube Shorts?
Maybe YT needs to ditch Shorts under this hypothetical, I don't think it's the enriching part of the service the comment above was referencing
Youtube ain’t a social network and you can watch all of it without an account.
if the problem is advertising and data monetization, why am I so addicted to /this/ website?
I have had a much harder time quitting Hacker News than I ever did quitting Facebook. I've been off Facebook for ten years yet I keep logging in to leave stupid comments here.
Is that because of advertising and data monetization?
Ads/monetization isn't necessarily the problem, but it enables Facebook to exist at the scale it does. If we're trying to reduce their scale or limit the size of the social network, it seems silly to fracture the entire market by breaking them up. You can simply cut off their revenues.
And no, I don't think HN addiction is anything like FB addiction. This site is heavily moderated in comparison and the content is higher quality. It's a 'news' site with some respectable commentary that is so rare people like us keep coming back. There's a level of decency that's expected and required here. I could go on, lack of photos, videos, etc. The content is community driven via ranking versus an algorithm optimized for financial outcomes.... I also don't actually know any of you people so how is that a social network, it's a community forum at best. The almost absence of political stuff on HN helps a fair amount.
Addiction itself isn't super bad. Addiction to harmful things is what's bad. I don't even know if I'm addicted to HN, sometimes I go weeks without coming here - but have mostly been here daily for many years. I enjoy it, it enriches my life, I feel it's a positive habit. Just because you take your dog for a walk every day, are you addicted to it? You could just let him out in the back yard? You do it because it's a healthy habit, for them and you.
I do not see the correlation either, other than people buying stuff because an ad popped up, but that is not their primary reason for being on Facebook.
I don't think "addictiveness" is really the problem. I've been "addicted" to Wikipedia for 20+ years too.
The voting system (everything it entails in terms of visual design) is addictive.
Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.
> Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.
Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if nothing is flagged? What should be flagged?
> Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator.
Because those are two orthogonal things. You aren’t sending a letter to be displayed by everyone and their dog on this planet to see.
You can also print flyers, pamphlets, books, posters, and all such things without submitting them to a human censor (c.f. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/p... for this usage).
Yes. To one address at a time. If you do a mass send, you'll get regulated at some point, too.
It raises the cost of the service therefore the need of user data monetization, I feel like this would backfire. I’d limit the revenue via bans on ads and data monetization.
great way to burn out people and scar them for life, look at all the stories of facebook moderators etc.
Nah, they would use AI, and as such, would not really limit scale.
I was interpreting the poster as saying "you, yourself, the reader will be better off cutting this out of your life" in which case your questions are irrelevant.
Of course, it is possible they meant to come up with a holistic plan for improving society in three short sentences, as your reply assumes.
Which would, I suppose, indirectly make the case that social interactions online tend to be pointless and a little silly.
My social network is WhatsApp and Telegram: 1-to-1 messages and some groups where I usually know everybody in them. That's the threshold.
Get rid of behavioral advertising. You'll find that most or all of the negative things people have in mind when they say "ban social media" go away.
In the US, at least, a government-run social media site would be impossible to moderate, because of the First Amendment. It becomes a Nazi bar immediately.
> early Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.
This was really a fun time and it was a whole new vista for interaction. It was really something to enter a new age.
That feeling didn't last long, but I still got value from Facebook until the early 2010s.
FB Marketplace is definitely the best way to buy and sell anything locally. Of course you will have to filter through the usual flakers and what not but that was always the case since craigslist days.
But for actual social media? Burn it all down lol
Facebook groups is also a decent way to build communities.
Honestly, Facebook without the push for reels / videos isn't that bad. (now you can crucify me)
you can easily block those with extensions. that's what I do. I just use if for some local interest groups, marketplace, and messenger for some family/friends.
People say that, but I've long since abandoned my FB account and sinkhole facebook domains. I miss CragisList for that. Used it a lot a decade ago.
>FB Marketplace is definitely the best way to buy and sell anything locally
I really wish they had some kind of auction component to deal with multiple interested parties / reduce flakers, but I imagine eBay has some crappy software patent that they wield with an iron fist.
> I really wish they had some kind of auction component to deal with multiple interested parties / reduce flakers, but I imagine eBay has some crappy software patent that they wield with an iron fist.
Facebook Ads has auctions for selling ad slots. They have the technology, they just reserve it for their real customers.
FB Marketplace is the best way to buy stolen goods cheaply - not sure about authentic goods.
I have sold plenty things on there and none of them were stolen. I buy broken vintage electronics (60s, 70s, 80s) for cheap and resale them after I fix them. It's not a lot of money but it's a way to pass the time on a boring evening.
I remember so fondly coming home from high school and reading over my friends posts, curating the pins on my pin/cork board, messaging friends who would otherwise not be savvy enough to join MSN or IRC or yahoo messenger...
Now I feel physical disgust when I look at the FB logo
The real issue with Facebook is the inability to tune easily. One of the reasons I use Instagram and Threads is because I feel I can easily tune the algorithm with likes. I can keep up with my friends via stories. I dont need to post on my "wall" stupid stuff like the beer im drinking. Instagram + Stories feels like the best medium to see what my friends are upto with short stories and images. The explore feed can be tuned so I get content and threads fills the void on X and its terrible algorithms. I agree, "deleting" facebook or simple just leave it on deprecated mode and never use it besides market place is the best thing you can do. I dont give a crap what person's political view is and dont need to see a news feed based on triggers.
The real issue with Facebook is that they help precipitate the TikTok ban [1].
Not that TikTok should have stayed, but the fact that Meta was pushing for this and now stands to benefit massively should be concerning.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
I love that I can have multiple profiles in IG and Threads, each tuned like you talked about for a specific interest of mine with no cross-pollination
I'm in favor of letting people pay for their own smaller instances, like something Facebook esque, and you can invite all your relatives. They can join your instance. But someone (or maybe its a group effort) has to pay for it. Zero ads, just friends and family.
I've thought about this a lot.
I don't think I'll ever build it (I have another idea in the works consuming all my time), but I'll go a step further and share my other thought on it:
The less they use it, the less they should pay for using it. So if your goal is to keep up with relatives via sharing photos / videos, you can do that, and bug right out. So now there's a financial incentive to use it less, but it serves its purpose, like email.
Smaller instance can become big. Say you set up a small instance and invite your family. Then family members want to invite their family, or friends, or whomever. How do you manage that?
I think the answer is what we see with Mastodon, etc. and that's federated/distributed social networks.
A restaurant can become big. Say you have a food critic showcase your restaurant and hundreds of people show up. How could we possibly deal with this problem without the aid of the smartest, most amazing, totally really smart, awesome at leet code, software engineers?
This won't help with the dopamine craving. Most peoples' actual friends can't produce enough content.
The sooner we treat it as an addiction the faster we'll think of treatments.
Idk Xanga was peak non toxic social media. Pretty much just blogging. I miss it.
Yeah that and LiveJournal. And then it just kept going down from there in terms of self-expression, effort, quality, personal, actually-SOCIAL-media, etc.
"Social media" went from blogging and commenting with your friends and others to watching videos of ads interspersed with random memes and shit.
Quite a slide.
The problem is not the social network in itself, but the fact that companies are manipulating what you see to maximize the bad aspects of the network. Companies should have strict limits on the kind of algorithms they use to generate a feed.
Recently I’ve been imaging a world where social media algorithms were tuned to help people instead of “driving engagement” with ever more outrage bait. Oh you’re watching clips about machining and by your data profile you’re an uneducated adult? Here are some trade school, financial assistance, and self help links to nudge you toward a better life! What a world that would be.
Doesn't China's national TikTok equivalent do that?
I'm fine with going back to 100% chronological feeds. Show events as they happen and don't put a hand on the scale.
That's how social networks usually build their base then they switch to an algorithmic feed to satisfy advertisers once their user base is big enough.
“We will teach you to be free”
basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s of known people. I thought about this recently… It was really better times.
Even decentralized mastodon is too big and it makes it far too easy to post BS and hateful / unhealthy stuff. Plus there are far too many posts you can’t relate to or just don’t want to read („algorithm“ or not), without even mentioning the bubble effect, much worse there than on X to be honest.
Smaller communities which you can connect to /disconnect from plus a good combo of RSS feeds to get news. That’s probably it.
There's a strong part of me that thinks that a model not unlike BBSes with Fidonet might be the way to go. Everyone gets to have their own little bastion of the 'net that they control, filled with their own content (games, warez, text files, the good ol' shit) and global email/forums/chat provided in a decentralized way. When people are arseholes, you cut them off by blocking them from your server, and we all move on.
I keep toying with building a modern version of that using some of the existing fediverse infrastructure, but I just don't have the time or attention span for it. Partially because my attention span was fried by Instagram.
> basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s of known people. I thought about this recently… It was really better times.
I'm going to take a wild guess and assume this is how you grew up?
It's simply a better model to connected online. I use present tense because the "better times" didn't really go away: it becomes Discord servers.
The bad part, of course, is that Discord is owned by one single entity and not indexed like the open web is.
I did, and it truly was better. Threaded forums are far better at facilitating complex discussions, organizing information, and making the information accessible. Today, most communication is happening inside the walled gardens of Facebook, Discord, etc. That information is effectively being lost rather than being neatly organized and easily searchable.
Kind of, yeah.
IRC, simple php forums, no TLS, easy stuff. Nowadays we're full of technology and very poor content. In no way can mastodon (mentioning because it's the defacto decentralized social media) solve that problem. It's really easy to post stuff that shouldn't be posted.
On the other hand, crappy looking forums, slow internet connection, you really had to take the time to think about what to say and mainly why say it in the first place. It was more about the content than about quantity.
Just put a propagation delay on the information, like the physical world. Human socialization is evolved to handle the physical world.
> go back to old SMF/php forums
Some of us are old enough to remember when those were already the enshitification stage, and would prefer to go back to usenet
"Eternal September" was a more serious problem than we knew.
Ahahah I believe you! Some forums were really bad. :)
The more you ban, the more "centralized" and "massive" the platforms you don't ban get. Unless you literally ban everything.
One has to be extremely naive to think Google (youtube) lobbyists didn't play a role in this Tiktok ban.
Big things aren't necessarily centralized, and you can replace big things with lots of small ones.
Meta certainly lobbied for a TikTok ban:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
Ah so that's why he's sucking up to trump now.
You can not because the money invested into this is to large. Same with AI - half of which is used to build a personal cheerleader/ hype-train for everyone using those apps now.
If you want to end that, you need to actively sabotage it, by creating fake users who eat resources for not add-revenue. Feeding crack to children has to become economically unviable for the world to change.
why? you don't have to use them. should HN be banned?
This is the level 0 of reasoning about these topics...
We live in organised societies, nobody is forcing you to do crack but people doing crack will definitely lower the experience of everyone they interact with (and more given the burden on shared goods like healthcare, infrastructures, &c.), that's why we collectively decided that crack shouldn't be sold to 13 years old kids.
Now of course this is very flawed and we'll always have things slipping through the cracks (alcohol, tobacco, junk food, &c.), but unless you want to live in a mad max type of world you have to accept some level of regulation, and that level of regulation, in a working society, should be determined through politics
If tiktok is crack, HN is honey. One becomes problematic much quicker than the other, when you see a kid spending 5 hours a day on HN hit me up
This is not an actual argument because you can make it about anything.
Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.
Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.
If you can use an argument for anything it’s not a very convincing argument.
Cool, you can use the argument I was replying to for everything too. I guess we're back to square one then.
If you think skiing and cooking have as much of a negative impact as social media as on entire generation of kids I doubt we'll find common ground to go further, usually it requires a bit of good faith
>This is not an actual argument because you can make it about anything.
>Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.
>Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.
This assumes that fairly standard activities are imposing the societal cost you are attributing to them. For most individuals who perform these activities, they are not producing an outsized societal cost, which is the delineation the parent comment was making. The parent comment used an example of something that from their point of view has a negative societal cost in the base case. Your examples are not similar as they are not referring to the base case of simply performing the activities, but only to the relatively uncommon tail end outcomes.
yeah, that makes sense. Everything has a cost, TANSTAFL.
This is the second philopsiphical point of economics. Everything is a choice between costs.
Im curious how else you would put it?
Won't someone think of the Children!!!?
Social media is just the demon of the day. In the 80s it was that damn rock music ruining our kids and in the 90s it was violent video games and rap.
Every generation has their "this thing is corrupting the youth" moment.
I don't recall violent video games and rap music influencing elections.
I wish it had - I’d vote for the person fighting for my right to party
The impact stated is wildly outsized. I read a microsoft report regarding this that was heavily touted and one of the "prime" examples given was a 1M view Twitter video.
Yeah sure, Socrates was worried about books too... now if you can't see the difference between rock music and kids spending 5+ hours a day doomscrolling I think we'll have a hard time discussing anything. Feel free to share the studies showing the negative effects of books and rock music on kids by the way, because there are plenty of these when it comes to social media, especially the doomscrolling type.
Following your logic everything new has to be desirable, that's a tough position to defend imho. Just because new trends were incorrectly criticised in the past doesn't mean every new trend is good until the heat death of the universe, logic 101
> and kids spending 5+ hours a day doomscrolling
Let's stop pretending adults do not do it too.
Oh yeah absolutely, but the comment specifically says: "Won't someone think of the Children!!!?"
Children are in a crucial period of their lives when it comes to forging habits, learning skills, developing addictions, &c.
Teens don't get addicted to Hacker News
Almost any form of media can be addicting. Kids these days might watch TikTok, but my worst addiction since young age has been reading online news.
Once I got diagnosed with ADHD and tried stimulant medicine, I noticed that the time I spend reading news, social media and playing games dropped dramatically. So, effectively all these activities have been nothing more than drugs for my dysfunctional brain. When my brain isn't deficient in dopamine, I seem to automatically spend most of my time on something more useful. Probably wouldn't be writing this if my meds weren't wearing off at this time of day.
HN is too slow for that, if you spend the time kids spend on tiktok every day here you'll get bored to death.
yep tiktak has far more serotonin spikes per "next item" per unit time than hackernews.
Meanwhile I’m reading this while I should be coding
Speak for yourself. I've been using hacker news since high school, 10+ years ago and haven't been able to stop.
HN is the most addictive social media I've ever used.
Not a teen since recently, but got to know it earlier, so ... untrue.
It has a built in timer to prevent folks from using it too often.
speak for yourself
hacker news has a lot of ideological community problems but HN is not "massively centralized", it's just a narrow window into the US tech scene with a relatively small community of people.
I think there's a great argument that says the first amendment is not a suicide pact. The social media environment right now is having an unprecedented destructive effect on US democracy. I think TikTok is right there as a key player in spreading weapons-grade, state-sponsored mush to younger people.
I recall similar arguments about the printing press.
“But the masses will be able to access the scripture without guidance! Society will crumble!”
You know, I think lots of us on HN, can at least be the people who can and should go to next levels of this discussion.
So yes - we should definitely agree that all new technology for publishing (publishing? COntent creation?) result in issues of free speech.
I will say that each of these, have had different issues, and that from Radio onwards, we are dealing with several issues (side effects ?) that become more intense with each new media developed.
I'll jump to the end, but Social media is definitely different from the printing press.
We certainly get new and improved benefits, such as the distribution of publishing power to individuals.
At the same time, we are getting issues with an abundance of content, that people need content to be eye catching, in order to gain an audience.
Theres also a tendency for networks to consolidate over time, so at the start of the radio era, or TV era, you have a bunch of cable networks, then over time they start collapsing into larger groups, which are better able to survive.
Fully admit that these are highly generalized, I am just thinking of what others can chime in with.
To be fair, scripture doesn't actively change to increase obsessive engagement at the expense of all else.
But the argument was that your average peasant would not be able to understand the scripture and be deceived.
Not that different from arguing that your average American can’t see through propaganda on TikTok - I think they can.
And if the argument is that it’s addictive, I mean ok? Lots of things are addictive that aren’t severely harmful. We tolerate those as well.
The argument about teens is an entirely different one, I’m talking about adults.
it does, just more slowly - modern religions are absolutely the result of natural selection for virality and fervor in the field of ideas
I'd argue the two are like comparing apples and oranges. Yes, there is a competition of ideas, but accepted scripture is changed so much more slowly than society itself that it cannot exploit the zeitgeist of any one trend. More importantly, it doesn't change differently to each individual to maximize addictive interaction. The slowness is a feature. I'm not saying there aren't some problems with religion being exploitative, but the responsiveness is what makes social media a much more effective manipulator.
Not entirely inaccurate! Martin Luther's 95 Theses propagated from Germany to England in a matter of weeks, thanks to the printing press. I think society got better but it sure did change a lot.
the government of China is a hostile adversary and they dont just spread gobs of misinformation and pro-CCP propaganda on TikTok, they also heavily censor topics the CCP does not like. This is not about free expression so much as where the public square should take place. Having the US public square take place in a tightly controlled, deceptive environment controlled by our worst enemy presents an existential risk to the US.
think of the printing press as invented and controlled by your worst enemy and only printing what it deems to be acceptable.
every generation thinks they’re the first to argue that there are negative effects of free expression.
It's not free expression when someone else chooses what everyone sees.
Threads is notorious for de-boosting posts with external links. This is a deliberate choice which filters facts and external references out of the conversation.
Or you can just delay the feed of posters you don't like. They arrive at every debate a day late, while your favourites go through immediately. And to more people.
And so on.
There's nothing free about any of this. It's covert behaviour and sentiment modification.
With a newspaper you get an editorial angle, so you can choose it if you want it.
Social media pretends to be a neutral conduit. But it's carefully curated and manipulated, and you don't know how or why.
Editorial discretion is absolutely part of free expression
TBO, TikTok and Twitter are far more diverse than HN, which is merely an echo chamber, only slightly better than a subreddit.
Although I like HN more than TikTok, it's so funny
What matters is not the diversity of the overall userbase but the diversity of what gets shown to you. From my (limited) experience TikTok is hyper-targeted and will narrow in on your interests/biases quickly and keep you in that bubble.
HN (and reddit) generally lacks this hyper-targeting. Obviously, just the act of going to HN is selecting for a certain cross-section of opinions, but once you're there what you see is determined by the community and not by your own personal preferences.
It sounds like you’re saying that personalized feeds are the key problem?
Absolutely. In two specific ways:
1. There's often little or no visibility on how this personalization happens. People with often try to guess and steer the algorithm but the reality is you don't know. This means that unpopular opinions can be quietly suppressed with no detectable censorship. On the poster/creator side this presents as constant paranoia about "shadow banning" and the like.
2. The personalized feeds are effectively endless. This allows for repetition that really amplifies any biases/fears. For example, suppose you're worried that the roads are getting more dangerous and you go on Instagram and start looking at car crash reels. Instagram will happily feed you as much of these as you can stomach and it starts to affect your perception of reality. Never mind that you're looking at incidents captured over a period of years from all over the world, seeing them all back to back will probably give you anxiety the next time you go to cross the street. Now apply this same logic to any political topic...
Tiktok(or other algorithm-suggesting platforms) provides echo chambers for each user
HN/subreddit provides a single echo chamber for everyone
that's why I like HN more, I don't want to be in my echo chamber, I perfer visiting your chamber
You're welcome here, and you're welcome to express contrarian views—that's an important part of an intellectually curious community, which is our goal with HN. However, we need you to do it while sticking to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You've unfortunately been breaking them in various places already.
I know how hard it is to be in the minority on a contentious topic without getting provoked (and then becoming provocative oneself), but that's what we need commenters with minority views to do. Otherwise we end up having to moderate the accounts, not because we want to suppress minority views but because we have to enforce HN's rules.
I've written about this extensively because it's such a consistent phenomenon. Here's one post if you (or anyone) wants a fuller explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722. There are plenty more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's in your interest to do this, because then you maximize the persuasive power of your comments. Conversely, if you succumb to the pressure to be indignant and/or snarky and/or flamey and so on, that ends up discrediting your views, which is particularly damaging if they happen to be true: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
(p.s. I'm an admin here in case that wasn't obvious)
sorry being snarky, hard to help it, my bad, again
and there's misunderstanding, I was not provoked, at least in the comment above
it's not a critique to HN, in fact, isn't it obvious that HN inevitably ends to a echo chamber? unpopular opinions greyed out, popular opinions ranked up, wasn't it design to be this?
it's not that bad, most communities are echo chambers
You are 100% correct but HN mods will pretend this is not the case. This site is heavily moderated just like all major subreddits. Dissenting opinion will be silenced either by gang-flagging or dang taking action personally. HN is reddit in a tie.
> you're welcome to express contrarian views—that's an important part of an intellectually curious community, which is our goal with HN
Well, that's a straight out lie! :)
We don't ban accounts for expressing contrarian views. We do ban accounts for breaking the site guidelines, especially when they do it repeatedly.
But nobody ever says "I was banned for breaking the site guidelines". What they do instead is make new accounts to claim "I was banned for my contrarian views". How noble that sounds!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The tell is that they never supply links (e.g. to their previous account(s) or the place(s) they were banned). If moderation is so bad, why not allow readers to see what actually happened and make up their own minds? And yet these complaints are always linkless...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Hey dang so you just silently shadow-banned that user? That's what it definitely looks like. Not that I care but they seem to be right about you if you did.
Yes, when there's evidence that an account is someone whom we've banned in the past and that they're making new accounts to post abusively, we (sometimes) shadowban those later accounts. You can find past explanations about that here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
In this case you've been using multiple accounts to post in the same thread in ways that are misleading and abusive. That's clearly over the line, so I'm banning this account (and also saying so). If you would please stop creating accounts to break HN's rules with, that would be good.
I can see you flagged all my comments, even unrelated ones within minutes. You also immediately throttled me. You're vindictive and on a power trip. Your moderation style goes directly against the quote from your bio. You're a hypocrite, man.
I mean, you're not wrong. I come to HN to see how awful the tech ghouls are being today.
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Echo chamber" is a tautology by this point. What's bad about a narrower focus? It's good to cross pollinate on occasion but you're not going to ever get to deep discussions when you have the same arguments over and over with people who share little common ground. I don't come to HN to read what flat earthers think about that gorgeous photo of the Earth's curve taken by an astronaut, and I can have productive disagreements with other technologists.
> I can have productive disagreements with other technologists
Only for tech topics
Things went ugly(but fun!) for political/geopolitical topics, 'unpopular' opinions will be grayed out, opinions survived coalesced into the essence of the Anglo-Saxon spirit
but HN is centralized, so you agree if HN exceeds some arbitrary amount of users it should be banned? how ridiculous. tiktok is not any better or worse than facebook, youtube, or the mainstream media.
Hell, I'd make that arbitrary amount 300.
That's about the number of social connections the human brain is really meant to handle.
Its worse for the US Govt in that they cannot secretly ask them to control what gets seen
That can't happen, the 1st amendment protects us from that sort of overreach with lots of precedence coming before it. What can happen is severe penalties for companies and adults who allow minors to get on social media. That is the sort of regulation that can happen if the USA Congress really wants to do something. They can also regulate foreign propaganda sneaking like with TikTok, there is precedence for it. Also severe penalties and jailtime for threats (terrorism, personal) done online, they should be taken seriously and tracked down and prosecuted as if the threat was made against me if I was standing on a street corner.
The literal terminology we use to refer to them directly correlates with their slide. They were "Social Networks" and were all about the network effect of having a connection to people IRL reflected online. That meant you could also go additional links out. They are now "Social Media" and they are largely just one-to-many platforms for media. They have completely crowded out most of the original benefit of being a social network.
The early waves of most communities is 'better'. Strangely this is really consistent, even if you've been on sites quite a bit.
One of the rules of moderation I believe in, is that the workload depends on the nature of the people in your community.
Oh, so communities follow the rules of subculture founding and decline ???
So there should be a point where things that were not cool, become cool again?
For all complains of the toxicity of the platforms. For now, the contents over there are written by your fellow human (maybe AI in a few years). Just focussing on platform closure for me indicates that we resigned from fixing our fellow folks.
But it's not the "folks" that are the factor, generally. The mechanisms of many major social media platforms actively amplify the worst aspects of the worst people, while suppressing the best parts of the best.
Someone put the microphone too close to the speaker. As the feedback rings our ears someone reaches out for the power switch. Do you call out "but the start of the feedback was the music from the band, turning it off won't fix the band"? :)
Assuming that social media is an evolution of traditional media.
The traditional media loves to chase negative news (If it bleeds, it leads) and we let that happen (muh free speech!). So it is logical that social media amplified the negativity of society, coupled with algorithms evolution and instant broadcasting the impact is amplified.
Fck around and find out I guess.
Yep, I'm very careful what kind of content I feed my subconscious these days.
Watching news is like begging for nightmares, and most of it's made up anyways.
> we resigned from fixing our fellow folks
We have. It's A) too expensive, and B) we can't agree on what "fixed" looks like. "Think of the children" type scare-legislation is going to fill this void.
I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed. There was a time when you'd have a couple dozen friends on Facebook, who were people you actually know in real life, and you'd check Facebook, read you feed in chronological order, and then reach the end. Like with email.
The algorithmic feed, in addition to time spent on social media, has also intensified online discourse in a way that I believe to be harmful to society. What people see now is not the most recent things their friends were posting, no matter how banal, but whatever it is that the algorithm judges most engaging. Truth doesn't matter. Now the conspiracy theories and weird new age shit that your one hippy friend posted constantly have an audience. That kind of thing is engaging, so it floats to the top.
I'd be perfectly fine with just banning social media altogether. Never before in history has the value of a barrier to entry to publishing something been more apparent. But as a compromise, I would accept banning the algorithmic feed.
> I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed.
Bringo.
The day Facebook implemented the feed as the main page rather than the original homepage was the day social media went sideways. It's little more than a Skinner box with a bright candy coating and it has just gotten more egregious over time. It's right on the tin, "Feed".
I'd be interested to see how much R&D budget has gone into hiring persons in the field of psychology to tweak the dopamine treadmill over time.
I distinctly remember when the chronological timeline was done away with, people were extremely pissed.
I remember the day they introduced the chronological newsfeed! People were pissed about that. Nobody wanted a list of all their wall posts to be published to everyone who could see them.
Prior to newsfeed, FB was obviously an N-N platform, but the interactions were more 1-1. You used the network to find and connect, but you interacted with individuals (on their wall). The newsfeed tipped the focus toward 1-N interactions, and direct messages solidified that (no more wall posts).
I believe GP is comparing pre-feed and post-feed days, not chrono feed vs algo feed.
For its first few years, Facebook had no feed at all.
You are correct, but the introduction of the algorithm is indeed just as if not as significant as the introduction of the feed
> It's right on the tin, "Feed"
+5 Insightful
You just say "bingo"
That's the wrong movieshow, ya dangus.
For your health
Treat algorithmic feeds as "publications" by machines. Treat these social media companies as publishers and allow them to be sued for libel, with damage amounts based on reach.
If there's no algorithmic feed and the company is truly just a self publishing utility then keep the section 230 protections
Yup, I absolutely don't understand how they're able to get away with choosing material to promote and then not call themselves publishers.
They're acting as editors for a publication. Hold them accountable like the publication companies they are.
Want to continue getting safe-harbor exemptions for user submitted content? No fucking algorithmically chosen feeds.
CDA 230 was written specifically to overturn a defamation ruling that held online platforms responsible for content; this was specifically a result of Jordan Belfort - the Wolf of Wall Street - suing to censor negative opinions of his fraudulent investment offerings.
Prior to that lawsuit, the existing law regarding defamation was that you could hold a newspaper accountable for what they had printed, but not the newsstand selling the newspaper. The courts in the Jordan Belfort cases decided to categorize online services based on their moderation policy: if you published literally anything sent to you, you were the newsstand[0]; if you decided not to publish certain things then you were a newspaper.
In case it isn't obvious, this is an unacceptable legal precedent for running any sort of online service. The only services that you could legally run would either be the most free-wheeling; or the most censurious, where everything either has to be pre-checked by a team of lawyers for risk and only a small amount of speech ever gets published, or everything gets published, including spam and bullshit.
To make things worse, there is also standing precedent in Mavrix v. LiveJournal regarding DMCA safe harbor[1] that the use of human curation or moderation strips you of your copyright safe harbor. The only thing DMCA 512 protects is machine-generated feeds (algorithmic or chronological).
So let's be clear: removing CDA 230 safe harbor from a feature of social media you don't like doesn't mean that feature goes away. It means that feature gets more and more censored by the whims of whatever private citizens decide to sue that day. The social media companies are not going to get rid of algorithmic feeds unless you explicitly say "no algorithmic feeds", because those feeds make the product more addictive, which is how they make money.
The "slop trough" design of social media is optimal for profit because of a few factors; notably the fact that social media companies have monopolistic control over the client software people use. Even browser extensions intended to hide unwanted content on Facebook have to endure legal threats, because Facebook does not want you using their service as anything other than a slop trough.
So if you want to kill algorithmic feeds, what you want to do is kill Facebook's control over Facebook. That means you want legal protections for third-party API clients, antitrust scrutiny on all social media platforms, and legally mandated interoperability so that when a social media platform decides to turn into a slop trough, anyone so interested can just jump ship to another platform without losing access to their existing friends.
[0] Ignore the fact that this is not how newsstands work. You can't go to any newsstand, put your zine on it, and demand they sell it or face defamation risk.
Algorithmic feeds are wonderful, but unfortunately their goals as implemented today do not align with anyone's best interest except shareholders.
I don't have tiktok, but I used to watch a lot of YouTube suggestions. I finally took the app off my devices and used a suggestion-blocking browser extension. I could only find stuff that I actively searched for. After a few months, I took a peek at suggestions and it was actually great: pretty much only videos I was legitimately interested in, steering me towards useful tiny channels, etc. I still keep it blocked, but check it once daily just in case.
The problem is that algorithmic feeds want you to just keep watching and will absolutely probe all of your "weaknesses" to keep doing so. Instead of trying to support you, it says "how can we break this guy/girl down so s/he keeps watching...".
Until the feeds say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't serve you another video. You should go outside and enjoy the day", then it should be treated more as a weapon aimed at one's brain by a billion or trillion-dollar corporation than a tool.
> I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed.
More than that too, my recollection is that those early social media sites were considered "separate" from the real world. It'd be seen as odd to take it "seriously" in the early days.
The big change I noticed was when my (our?) cohort started graduating college and started sanitizing their Facebooks and embracing "professionalism" on the then nascent LinkedIn. I distinctly remember being shocked at that, and the implicit possibility that employers would "care" about your Facebook posts.
How far we've fallen.
They 100% are - I fantasize about world in which they dont exist.
[flagged]
Let me lay out how this works:
The US occupies a new office downtown. China wants eyes on a specific room, and the choice spot for monitoring it is someone else's apartment. This person happens to own a bakery also in town, and it sort of seems like the apartment is a reach for them as it is.
Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.
6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".
This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.
Wow, this is a whole new level of China otherization and it leads to many bad things, and you don't have to look beyond the past 100 years to find many examples (even Chinese ones).
Maybe consider that it's being banned because it makes it harder to control the political narrative and discourse in society when people have access to information. I think Chomsky put it best: there are many ways of population control, in the old Soviet Union it used to be the boot. In "democracy" it's controlling information and the Overton Window and TikTok breaks that completely. A great example is the Israel's assault on Palestine. Has this been covered anywhere where you watch news in even remotely the most honest way? Don't think so. Is it on TikTok? I think you know the answer.
I'd also say to single out TikTok and the Chinese while ignoring Meta and Google (why not ban them?) is very questionable if you really care about the scenario you described.
Might as well ban electricity in case the Chinese manage to use it to do bad things, same (insane) logic applies.
While your scenario might make for an interesting Tom Clancy novel there's no evidence any of that is happening and no one involved in this ban with any authority is arguing that this is something they're worried about.
I agree that their example is absurd, but China has definitely used social media accounts to influence opinions on Hong Kong, Xinjiang etc. American social media companies cooperate with investigations and flagging of this propaganda. On the other hand, TikTok is almost certainly being pressured by the CCP to promote it and obfuscate any investigations.
You might want to get your paranoia checked out. I'm not even going to bother asking for the many sources that support your overwhelming reason.
Russia had Bernie Bros and Magatards brawling with each other at pre-planned rallys across the street from one another. And they didn't even have access to the facebook algo.
Citation needed.
Devil's advocate: Can this not also happen on literally any other social network? Can this kind of shit not also be initiated by domestic agents, or agents of allied nations, or even just some bored haxor group with a penchant for chaos?
If what you said is the primary reason for banning TikTok (bad actors can do bad things), it's also a valid reason to ban literally every social network, or possibly even all user-generated content on the internet.
On non CCP controlled platforms, they cannot chose what stories to "organically" promote and who to promote them too. Most people have no concept of the 99% of posts to social media that never get traction.
They can still kind of do it, but it requires a lot of work to fool other companies algo's into artificially promoting what you want. Much easier to just call up Bytedance and say "We need everyone in this area seeing this tiktok tomorrow".
If you think domestic social media companies aren't capable of silently promoting certain content at the request of someone with influence... you wouldn't happen to be in the market for a bridge, would you?
Non CCP controlled platforms can definitely choose what stories to promote. Musk does it every day on twitter. Oligarch controlled social media is just as much a blight as government controlled social media.
Of course they do, but they aren't interested in toppling the west.
Guess we will find out. They sure do seem to prefer Russian style oligarchy and control over Western values.
To your first paragraph, yes, across the board, and yes to more scenarios than you even laid out here.
To the second, you misunderstand the issue the US government has here. It is not that the social network is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority. It is that it is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority that they are enemies with.
Whether you consider them your enemy, whether they consider you theirs, whether you think that China really is or is not an enemy of the US government, and whether you consider the US government your enemy or not is all irrelevant to the point at hand, as interesting as they may be in other contexts; this is about the beliefs of the US government.
China has similar concerns and has already taken numerous similar steps, and it's equally not any sort of hypocrisy or anything because the principle they operate under is not about the existence of control, but who has the control.
All that is great, except for the part where the algorithms that collect your reactions to content and then choose new content for you in a feedback loop—which as you point out, can produce valuable effects as well as harmful ones—are a black box under some approximation of direct control by the CCP.
And it would be better if "the algorithm" were under control of some unelected managers in a billion dollar company owned by finance capital?
I keep seeing this stated as a reason for banning tt but I've yet to see any evidence. During the supreme courts oral argument last week they referred to a sealed appendix with more info, when they were passing the legislation they also referred to secret evidence that Americans can't see. I don't want to give in to conspiratorial thinking but if its as bad as they claim then we as the public have a right to see the evidence and decide for ourselves.
Evidence as to CCP control? Or evidence to another thing?
Because something that is very important to understand about China, or any other totalitarian regime, is that the people in charge don't let something like TikTok happen without having a fairly good grip on the people running it. That's just authoritarianism 101.
You've just described the reason for this TikTok ban.
Evidence that they are using the app to influence US users in a direction that would benefit the ccp and hurt the USA.
If you catch someone planting bombs under all your bridges, you don’t need evidence that they’ve detonated any to take them down.
I laid out in another comment how this works, but the gist of it is that the CCP can use the populace as dumb actors to achieve their goals.
China has secret agents they need to move through an area. Why not have an asian hate awareness rally in that area at the same time?
Nobody attending that rally would have any idea they are acting as decoy agents. None would report seeing CCP propaganda on tiktok.
Maybe you're the dumb actor posting on behalf of American tech moguls?
Here's a study showing TikTok tilts toward positive views on CCP and away from negative ones, unlike trends on other socials.
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Peer-Reviewed...
Think of it this way:
"TikTok would rather shut itself off from the U.S. market than divest its ownership from the CCP.
That is not the action of a rational corporation and really tells you who calls the shots at TikTok."
Should I feel better or worse about it being the CCP instead of a tiny group of billionaires? From where I'm standing the cabal of tech billionaires appear to be a bigger threat to me as a normal american. Do you think this is naive?
I agree. It's the same class of people that helped China become the world's factory that is now saying what it has always been. These are the same people that is still running America.
> Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people. This sort of confirms what I had feared for a few years now: that Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech.
What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?
> What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?
Let me expand this: what in the law prevents someone from going to TikTok.com and seeing the same content?
The ban is on (a) apps in the app stores and (b) hosting by American companies. It’s not sanctioning TikTok à la Huawei.
In May 2019, the U.S. government placed Huawei on the Entity List, which restricted American companies from doing business with it without a special license. This included Google, which meant Huawei lost access to the licensed version of Android and key Google services, including the Google Play Store. As a result, Huawei could no longer pre-install Google apps like Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and other essential services that many users in Western markets rely on. Huawei was once a strong competitor in Europe challenging Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers. It effectively limited Huawei's competitiveness in Western markets and diminished its momentum when it was at the peak of its challenge to Apple and Samsung. The same will happen with TikTok in the U.S. Under the umbrella of national security, competition is being sidelined.
Until two police officers come and frogmarch you to the back of a car when you are saying something the government doesn't like there is free speech.
Most people are just annoyed their social media addiction is being interrupted when they moan about account bans, or app bans in this case.
Hell, even some of the "restrictions" on free speech that are legitimately on the books in the US aren't actually enforced.
Get a ham radio license and use profanity when you transmit. Seriously. Do it. Odds are, the FCC does nothing. The thing they do when they do catch you is send you a letter saying "please don't do that".
> Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people
1. There's plenty of speech you can't say (fraud, libel), so speech is believe it or not regulated.
2. This isn't about free speech per se, it's about the right of a company to exist. the government has broad leeway to regulate which entities do or don't have the right to have limited liability. if TikTok were a unincorporated business entity and the owners were liable for lawsuit the story would be different.
3. the government forcing a sale is individual free speech maximalist position in this situation, because the users of the platform can still have their free speech. if tiktok doesn't take the deal, then the "loss of free speech" is on them, not the government.
4. America, which is supposed to be a bastion of free commerce, forced the sale of Merck away from germany (there is still a german merck with the same name). this is no different.
Are you sure that the "historical knowledge of many concepts" isn't a CCP slanted version of history? Or whatever suits the CCPs current interests? As a trivial example, do you think you are getting an unbiased view on Tiananmen Square or whether the US should back Taiwan in a war?
they aren't banning it. They gave tiktok an out -- sell to an American company or non adversarial country, if ByteDance doesn't bite on that, then that's on them.
That may be the case for you, but that's by definition anecdotal. I personally have seen the content consumed by a number of kids, and the amount of dubious at best information on the platform is absolutely rampant, and younger kids don't yet have a filter to know the bad from the good. Parental oversight can help, of course, but from my own observations, parents aren't for the most part monitoring what their kids are consuming.
Of course, my take is likewise anecdotal, and you may take it for what you will. That said, boiling the entirety of the American sentiment to fear of a "threat to their core" is disingenuous. Criticism of the effects of the app are as valid as its merits, regardless of what conclusions you draw based on your "fears".
This isn't banning dubious information. I only have to look at what my mom sends me videos about from Facebook.
No, it's not, nor did I state that it is. It is, though, making it more difficult for something I find detrimental to the development of kids to proliferate.
You, as an adult receiving that video, have the (hopefully) developed sense of what is accurate information or not, as well as the time to gestate on the content of that video and apply critical thinking. You can delete the video and move on with your life.
Tik Tok sends 15 seconds worth of such information, good or bad, and doubles down on detected interest, leaving little to no time to process before moving on to the next clip which is likely tailored towards the first clip's subject. Couple that with the suggestibility and naivete of children, and you end up with reinforcement of thin, poorly informed opinions based on information that may or may not even be remotely accurate.
The idea of banning all dubious information is a strawman.
>Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech.
Americans love free speech. American oligarchs hate it.
Free Speech != freedom to do literally anything.
We don't even have free speech, btw.
You can't yell FIRE in crowded rooms with impunity, you can't say untrue things about people that harm their businesses or put their lives in danger with impunity, etc.
The idea that our politicians should not be allowed to ban something being owned by a foreign company (especially when our companies aren't allowed to operate in said country, especially when we don't exactly have friendly relations with said country) - is, IMO, absurd.
To the post indicating shouting fire is legal - I believe the parent’s intent is to indicate there are consequences to it. From the article —
>> The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise. However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as involuntary manslaughter, assuming the other elements of that crime are made out.
It is actually legal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...
https://www.whalenlawoffice.com/blog/legal-mythbusting-serie...
It is SOMETIMES legal, which means that it is in the other times illegal.
Not necessarily that either. You’ll only possibly receive a charge if your conduct was intentionally misleading with purpose to harm. Yelling “fire” in a theater while in a Gen Z crowd (“this is fire”) or while listening to Metallica (“Fight fire with fire”) isn’t going to get a charge either, even if it possibly causes a stampede. The crime therefore could be accomplished with far more alternative words than just “fire.”
The point is: Legal experts unanimously agree this analogy is terrible and should never be used. The Supreme Court also thought so, completely overturning the case it originated from just several years later.
I think 90% of the negative social impacts would go away if they just did reverse chronological, opt-in news feed.
The black box algorithms are the problem.
First wave? You must have missed yahoo groups.
And of course someone will reply to this and mention usenet.
What are you actually saying? The government should make these websites illegal?
I like tiktok. I scroll for a bit in the morning and watch some funny videos. Who are you to say that's immoral and shouldn't happen?
The government’s banned owning media with too much reach before, placing limits on audience size per owner.
We no longer know how to actually govern the country, but it used to be entirely possible.
Bring back IRC
It never left. I've been consistently on IRC since the 90s.
Whoa there bro didn't you see Zuckeberg's latest podcast, he built facebook to bring people together! He paid good money for that corporate beastie boy makeover too-- show some damn respect.
I think around here people will all agree with you, the problem is that in practice this isn't at any level about cleaning up peoples experience of each other. it's economic protectionism injected with yellow-scare nonsense reminiscent of the 20th century. they're gleefully making the large ones worse while closing down anything which doesn't benefit US oligarchs
I understand your point, but I don't think it works like that for teenagers. Teenagers need to connect. They will go where the others go, because that's exactly what matters to them.
It's not that they deliberately want the addiction. The addiction is a consequence of it, but they go to TikTok because their peers are on TikTok.
They can connect in person. Like they did exclusively up until the mid 00s.
I think peers is also a strange word to use. When I joined Facebook in 2007 you were more-or-less sorted by where you went to high school. You connected with people you knew.
I'm sure that still exists on some level, but social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs. An influencer isn't your peer. It's like considering Billy Mays (may he rest in peace) your peer in 2007. No, he's a dude who sold you Oxy-Clean, but he was on TV a lot.
I was bullied in high school because I was so different.
I was also a new kid so it was hard to join an existing clique in a small town.
Online groups saved me. It not only let me stay in contact with my old friends, but also let me meet new people with similar interest so I didn't feel so alone.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. have mostly killed off the places where online groups formed when I was a kid.
Exactly. Subject specific forums and blogs are just ghost towns these days.
Reddit seems just like every forum, but with a mostly default skin
I don't think your story is uncommon especially for people who had trouble fitting in, however I would bet that places like facebook or instagram were not where you found your online groups. More likely to have been forums or online games. Very different environments and consequences.
Facebook is not "online groups", and it is known to statistically lead teenagers into higher rates of suicide.
Connect in person as a teen when everything is designed around cars and stuff a lot more expensive. Where cops arrested for you for loitering. Where people see kids going home from school as 'they're up to no good'. A lot of the past locations are gone and no longer accessible for todays youth. Even fast food places want you gone as fast as possible.
> social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs
That's what it is, but that's not how teenagers perceive it, I think.
I see it like this: if all your friends watch the news everyday and spend a lot of time talking about it, you will end up watching the news as well. To connect.
If all your friends watch a lot of sport and meet for that, you may well end up learning to enjoy sport as well.
If all your friends know the trends on TikTok and talk about it...
>Teenagers need to connect.
But not in a tiktok-way. They have more than enough social contacts when they go to school. No one need tiktok.
I went to a school with over 1,200 students and still had no friends. Kids can be extremely cruel to their neurodivergent peers. I wasn’t able to learn social skills until university .
Things would have been a lot different if I had access to the internet.
I’m sorry to hear that happened to you.
Unfortunately, the data about mental health outcomes of teens who consume social media is not positive, so I’m not sure things would have been better.
Xanga allowed kids to connect and be social that otherwise weren’t able to in high school. But do we want to raise a society of Xanga kids, or do we want to solve the root problems why they couldn’t be social in the first place?
(Or am I asking the same exact question two different ways, a distinction without a difference?)
> They have more than enough social contacts when they go to school.
If you ever found yourself being the "weird kid" in a small town high school, you might see it different.
I found myself being the "weird kid", and I'm glad I had the Internet in general, but I'm also glad the Internet wasn't yet advanced enough to seem like a complete replacement for in-person socialization. I knew I was missing something by playing Runescape instead of talking to people, knowing that drove me to forge in-person connections when I did have the opportunity, and the fact that I had to actively engage with the Internet instead of passively scroll through it gave me at least some baseline for doing that.
Yes, I generally agree. As a parent of teens I think this as well.
But social media isn't the cause of alienation. It's a symptom.
> No one need tiktok.
And we should not underestimate teenagers: if they have something better to do than swiping on TikTok, they do it. Parents must help them have better things to do.
But still, if all their friends know and talk about the TikTok trends, they will feel disconnected if they have no clue. That's how I meant that they "need" it. They need to "connect" as in having the same references as their friends.
That’s kind of like telling parents that they should tell their kids to eat their vegetables when sitting next to McDonalds.
Nah, it is more like parents telling their children to eat healthy, while they themself go to McDonalds.
Most parents are addicted to smartphone and don't go with their children outside. I would start the investigation into root causes right there.
So... in the end it's like telling the parents to eat healthy to show their kid that they should also eat healthy...
I didn't expect what I wrote to be that confusing.
Yes, and? Parenting is an active job. It can be done. Take a lesson from Steve Jobs and say "no" a lot.
And Mark Zuckerburg.
So if theoretically you ban addictive social media platforms and prevent the formation of any platform with more than a million users, then yes, teenagers will go where their peers go, but that will not necessarily be where teenagers on the other side of the country go. It will also not necessarily be a destructive algorithm-oriented social network designed to maximize time spent viewing ads.
My friend group had a phpBB forum back in the day. I spent hours on there because I liked hanging out with that group of friends, not because it was profitable for some megacorp.
yea I don't think people are grasping how different places like Myspace or forums or online games are compared to modern social media.
How do you explain the children/teenager loneliness spike since ~2008-2010 if these things are the pinnacle of connection ?
I didn't want to imply that those things are the pinnacle of connection.
I rather wanted to say that it's easier said than done. You can't just tell teenagers "stop using social media, it's bad for you". Because if their peers use social media, then they need to use social media as well.
I'm all for removing social media altogether.
Social media is not connection.
This is a trite (and arguably silly) comment bordering on neo-Luddism. The genie is out of the bottle. There's really no going back.
Worse, it's treating symptoms as the problem. We, as a society, deify hyper-individualism. This is to such an extreme that people actually in completely and utterly selfish ways are glorified and celebrated because "freedom".
Social media happened after we destroyed community and any sense of collectivism. Unhealthy social media habits are a consequence of that. They didn't cause it.
Where once you needed just one job to live, you now need 5. Every aspect of our lives is financialized. We spend 30 years working to the bone to pay for a house that cost 1/10th what it did 30 years ago. The high costs of housing have destroyed all the so-called "third places".
Federating services does nothing to the core problem here. I find HN's obsession with federation, which literally solves zero problems for users and creates a bunch of problems, bizarre and out-of-touch.
The problem is capitalism.
What practical alternative do you propose to capitalism?
This is how you end up with the UK's Online Safety Act. And personally, I'd prefer to have international networks where you can get exposed to different opinions; my life would be in an objectively worse place if I had only had the opinions of the people of my country to go off of.
There's a lot of issues with social media - I don't think anyone denies that. But not everyone thinks like the HN crew. What about the millions of users who actually enjoy FB and use it to connect with friends and family? To pretend that use case doesn't exist seems naive and biased. There's a reason these companies are so big - some people actually like them. Maybe they're the naive ones and we need to save them from themselves, but I don't think it's that black and white.
I want to respect the user here, but also they need to be saved.
The companies are big because they’re advertising machines with intense targeting abilities, which makes for a great place for advertisers to spend money.
Plenty of people enjoy Facebook, and plenty of people enjoy drugs and gambling and all sorts of destructive behaviors that many nations regulate. I think we can recognize that it can be fun and have utility, while still being dangerous or problematic.
If you had to convince people to pay for Facebook as a subscription, would people use it the same way? Would they still find utility there? Would they prefer a competitor?
I have a facebook account from my college days, but I don’t use it and neither does most of my network. My parents, despite being deeply suspicious and tech-savvy have started using it more and more to “connect” with family. In reality, I’ve seen their usage and it’s mostly generic groups and memes and similar stuff. I suspect that most people experience the same reality, and respectfully, I think society can survive without that.
To postulate, I think there are a million “better” ways to connect with friends and family, but I also think that there’s no one App that can do everything for everyone. My extended family bought a dozen smart picture frames, and everyone adds photos to a joint account we all share, and that has replaced a social feed for pics of kids/grandkids. I think people would be better served finding what works for them and letting it be bespoke to their family/friends.
Please stop advocating for censorship and authoritarianism.
This is the USA, we don’t do that here. (Except when we do, as in this terrible case, but it’s not what we are about.)
If you don’t like them, don’t use them. Don’t force other people to share your views and opinions. We like social media and choose every day to continue to use it.
App bans are simply state censorship, nothing more. It’s a real shame we don’t have methods of sideloading to bypass such idiocy on the part of the USG and the chokepoints at Apple and Google.
At least tiktok.com will still work.
What content is being censored? Creators are free to post their videos on other platforms.
Also note that the law doesn’t force TikTok to shut down, it requires divestment. The fact that they choose not to divest says a lot about how they view the platform.
The comment they are replying to suggests taking down all the major social media networks by government force ("Just get rid of all of them").
Arguably, even if you are not prohibiting the content itself, if you take away the means for your content to spread far & wide, that's the same as censorship.
I find this quite disturbing.
I read it as a personal recommendation to delete the apps, not as an appeal to ban them for everybody
> They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.
At least as far as kids are concerned, current evidence does not readily support this common believe.
Sabine Hossenfelder writes: "The idea that social media causes children mental health distress is plausible, but unfortunately it isn’t true. Trouble is, if you read what the press has written about it, you wouldn’t know. Scientists have described it as a “moral panic” that isn’t backed by data, which has been promoted most prominently by one man: Jonathan Haidt."
Video for more insight, if you are interested: https://youtu.be/V95Vg2pVlo0
Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist, she's not an expert on mental health. She might be right, she might be wrong, but she isn't a source of truth.
The chart with the number of suicides for children going up is not a moral panic, but a grim reality.
> she's not an expert on mental health. She might be right, she might be wrong, but she isn't a source of truth.
It's FB but for the purpose of studying effects of social media on mental health it should suffice:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/facebook-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-internal-report-sho...
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/how-social-medias-toxic-conten...
Suicides were higher in the 1980s than now. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have any apps back then.
The cause might be different, 1980s were 45 years ago. Half a century ago.
The causes for suicide might've changed in the last 50 years.
Also, the number of children suicides was in a downtrend before it went up again:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-...
The moral panic is social media being the reason for the suicides going up, not the fact that suicides are going up in itself.
And correlation is not causation. If you disagree with her interpretation (it's mostly just presentation, really) of the data, feel free to be specific. Attacking the person is, as always, bad form and lame.
I haven't attacked Sabine, it was OP who used her as some some sort of authority in children mental health.
Right, but correlation does not equal causation. Kids are also increasingly aware that they live in a neoliberal hellworld, and their chances of maintaining the lifestyles their parents and grandparents had are slim to none.
I’m losing family members to conspiracy theory YouTube channels.
The crackpots had a greater barrier to transmit back in the day. They had to get an FCC license or know someone with a radio station. Even then reach was limited unless you could reach a deal to transmit nationwide.
I personally believe our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff. It’s very hard to overcome.
I agree completely, social media is essentially a dopamine addiction. Steve Jobs had an apt quote regarding what you said "our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff."
> When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.
So Hossenfelder is now a psychiatrist and a sociologist?
bah, I really dislike "scientist influencers". She isn't versed in the subject, she's no better than Haidt.
From that point of view, the press and journalism should not exist.
“Sociologist” is more of an anti-qualification. In any case let’s not rely on appeals to authority. I think we are intelligent enough to judge the evidence ourselves.
No, but she doesn't have to be in this context. She's a very capable critical thinker who knows how to do very thorough research, which is all someone has to be to determine that there is, in fact, no data to support the claims.
She’s not a capable critical thinker, quite the opposite, in fact. Completely unimpressive.
They might not be causing literally mental health issues, but they're certainly radicalizing a lot of young folks into some really toxic behaviors and beliefs.
I don't really want to watch a video, but do you have a write up somewhere? The last rebuttal I've read (I think from the books that kill podcast) basically dismissed Haidts claims by saying that the increase in anxiety related disorders was due to increased self reporting. And the podcast seems to have ignored the graph on the next page in Haidts book, which showed a correlated increase in emergency room admissions due to anxiety related disorders.
> Sabine Hossenfelder
Why would a physicist's opinion on mental health carry any weight?
What is causing the record level of mental health disorders in children?
In 1990 there were zero identified exoplants. Now there are 4000+. It isn't that there is the creation of lots of new planets, but that we started looking for them in earnest, and had the means to identify them.
Being diagnosed is the likely reason there is an explosion in mental health disorders. We go to lengths to apply a diagnostic label on every child. The massive variation in humans means that a huge portion are going to fall to the sides of the curve on all sorts of gradients. Older HNers will remember having a wide variety of kids among their cohorts, with "nerds", depressives, the hyperactive, the super driven and focused, and the manic depressives, etc, but likely zero were actually diagnosed in any way. Now you could apply a diagnoses on literally all of them.
This isn't judgmental, and it's good to know what people are dealing with, and to offer treatment or medication where possible.
Actually getting kids tested for them.
You can argue for more increased self-reporting, but suicide rates are going up too.
To support this: https://www.charliehealth.com/research/the-us-teen-suicide-r...
According to the CDC, teen suicide rate is up over 33% from 1999.
(Obviously, social media doesn't have to be the only cause. But something is producing a material difference and it's hard to say social media isn't a leading one.)
Do you have evidence to back up that claim?
Are children actually experiencing mental health disorders at a higher rate, or are we just classifying pre-existing variations in personality as behavior as mental health disorders at a higher rate?
The DSM used to break mental health disorders down into what it called the multi-axial system. Axis 1 being the least impacting diseases, and axis 5 the most severe. At some point we had so many disorders that more than 50% of the population was seen to have Axis 1 or higher mental health disorders. This meant that more of the population was regarded as mentally ill than were considered "healthy."
Rather than accept that >50% of the population being classified as mentally ill might be a sign we were thinking about things in a backwards way they just got rid of the multi-axial system in DSM 5.
Problem solved.
I agree with your skepticism on this, but youth suicide rates have been steadily climbing. Unless we were misclassifying suicide, it seems like there is a rising mental health crisis.
Teen suicide rates have been falling in Europe and most of the world. North America has edged back up to 1990 levels, and it's largely alone in that trend.
Europe and the rest of the world has social media as well. And of course 1990 didn't have social media.
There are a lot of reasons teens can feel hopeless, and I think the hyper-partisan political atmosphere / circus, coupled with the existential crisis and very real career crisis caused by AI, at least in the common understanding, the rapid heating of the Earth, etc. I would attribute all of those as dramatically more likely to lead a child to seek an out more than social media, even if the latter is much easier to blame.
What skepticism did I express? There are two possible explanations for the value of a metric changing: either the thing being measured has changed, or the methodology of conducting the measurement has changed. I honestly do not know which is the case here.
Suicide rates were higher in the 80s
And it got lower before going back up.
You could use the exact same argument with the Earth temperature: it was higher 50 millions year ago.
Other children.
The parents.
Lemon8 is taking over?
I tried it for about a 1/2 hr and it was nothing like TikTok in terms of content, UX, or the algorithm. More of a fail than Reels or Shorts, or any other wannabe clones.
It's currently down (503 Service Temporarily Unavailable), so no, it's not taking over
RedNote is
My prediction, based off raising kids and working with teenagers? The teens are going to give a big ol' Yankee Doodle Middle Finger to Uncle Sam. They'll flock to any social media site not hosted by a US megacorp.
If you don't understand why that would be then I posit you haven't spent much time around teens.
The concern is China specifically. If TikTok were owned by a German company there wouldn’t have been any concerns.
Sounds to me like the United States just handed South Korea a gift.
Honestly I'm fine with this. I look forward to a break from the nonsense until whatever comes next to replace it.
Hope they do that worldwide soon too!
Do yourself a favor and delete social media and go outside and touch grass. Life was so much better before social media.
Meanwhile many are going to another chinese app, RedNote.
That seems unlikely. The play store lists it at 10m+ downloads and it's still a very Chinese app. I checked it out myself. This is people trying to troll the US government
what seems unlikely? it's simply a fact that many are going to the other app. as you said yourself, 10m+ downloads on play store, #1 on ios app store, etc.
RedNote don't have english user interface, and it have worse censorship compare to tiktok or facebook.
Unless you want to learn Chinese and/or spend time to navigate around the content modulation system (not very hard, it just different), the experience ain't great.
I think they do have an English user interface since yesterday, which may still be unpolished. TikTok is available in many countries under their own languages though.
I'm not talking about the quality, I'm saying that red note has been getting a wave of downloads as tiktok gets closer to its imminent ban
Rednote is a popular meme at the moment for obvious reasons. But TikTok has around 170 Million users in the USA. What you see at the moment is a loud minority checking out the app and creating content. This is something happening all the time with Social Media and especially TikTok, loud minorities doing something, and people hard overrating the numbers. There is simply no way that with Rednotes state at the moment, we will see a significant number of users switching from TikTok to it. Maybe at the end we will see some millions switching.
sure, but it's a fact that millions have downloaded rednote in the past week. I think millions is "many"
That depends on the definition of "many". Some use it relative, some absolute. On its own, Millions can be a big number for a service, but in relation to the absolute amount of TikTok-Users in the USA and Globally, it's just a few, a handful, more than 3, less than a majority.
I think its name is actually Xiaohongshu - "Little Red Book" (you know, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T... )
They are simply different translations, period. The book you mentioned is usually referred to as "红宝书" (Red Precious Book). Don't know where the translation on Wikipedia comes from.
Search "小红书 毛語錄" in Google. You can see it is referenced in both way.
The name 红宝书 is popular in mainland China. Chinese from Taiwan or other se asian community just call it 小红书 or 毛語錄
Hahaha
Guess what
1. As you mentioned, Xiaohongshu, is the same name of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
2. The CEO of Xiaohongshu has the surname Mao
3. The headquarters of Xiaohongshu is located near the site of the First National Congress of CPC
obviously, this is part of CPC's conspiracy
You mean it isn’t a Harvey Penick tribute?
...Good?
There are reports that they want to sell the US branch to Musk as a contingency if their appeal to the Supreme Court doesn't work. So this whole thing might wind up making things even worse.
Nah, bad.
I don't think TikTok shutting down is great for its users (of which I am one). There are genuine areas of concern but I have concerns about US based social platforms as well.
It's hard to unpick these thoughts and it's harder to decide what a good outcome would look like.
Looking at a lot of user's feeds, its algo doesn't feel as "rage-baity" as the ones from YT or Insta. Even normal platforms, like FB and Twitter push rage bait to the top. TikTok seems to avoid those pitfalls in a lot of cases.
Anecdotally, I can confirm.
In general the algorithm seems flexible to me; on TikTok I find it easy to scroll away or flag unwanted content as "do not show again"; and in my experience the algorithm adjusts well to that.
I feel like as an individual user, I'd rather have my social media data siphoned off by a foreign government than my own. On a societal level, having everyone's data siphoned off by a foreign government and being subjected to political influence is undesirable.
TikTok practically saved my life by exposing me to alternate worldviews and the spiritual nature of existence, so the US government singling it out feels like a personal attack to me. To think of all of the people earning independent side incomes on TikTok - one of the few places outside of eBay/Craigslist/Uber/etc where that's even still possible - who will lose that lifeline, well, words like travesty barely convey the loss.
I also don't buy the national security argument. Considering how much of our personal data is leaked through all of the other social media apps, as well as international ad markets, that argument is nonsense. This is about the US government and corporations going to any length to control the narrative as the US falls to authoritarian dystopia and fascism.
I'm disappointed in the Democratic Party for not standing up for free speech and the rights of its constituency. It's forgotten where it came from, and what its goals are. This move means that there effectively is no Democratic Party - we just have two Republican Parties, both beholden to their corporate overlords (Meta and X/Twitter), as well as the billionaires behind them (Zuckerberg and Musk).
It's also tragic beyond words that Donald Trump may be viewed as TikTok's savior if he lifts the ban after he takes office. After he has undermined so many aspects of American tradition and our institutions. It reeks.
And most of all, I'm at least as mad at all of you as I am at myself for not organizing to stop this ban. 170 million TikTok users and we can't come together in solidarity to have real leverage on our elected officials? As in, withholding our participation in keeping the web running? Talk about ineffectual.
The more time goes by, the more I'm giving up on the tech scene. We've lost our values on such a fundamental level that we are now the clear and present danger threatening the American democratic experiment. Shame on all of us.
If we keep losing the way we are, and with the rise of AI and unprecedented wealth inequality, we have maybe 5-10 years left before revolution. We've entered a Cold Civil War, divided along ideological lines. I dearly hope I'm wrong and it doesn't come to violence, but after watching America's decline as a beacon of freedom post-9/11, the safest bet is continued cynicism.
> TikTok practically saved my life by exposing me to alternate worldviews and the spiritual nature of existence
If what you say is true then perhaps the credit is due to something that’s Above being subject to the whims of society & you never needed the clock app & “the beacon of freedom” was acqui-hired sometime around the age you think we’re headed back toward & the cynics are the sages.
"Chinese leaders simply think that TikTok, unlike other apps, is so important that they would rather destroy it than see it escape their control." -Noah Smith