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Lawmakers ask US intelligence chief to investigate TikTok

74 points by zachguo 7y ago

Thorentis 7y ago
Forget the national security concerns (though they could well be valid, would not be surprised if so) ... what about the potential for child exploitation? The softporn/borderline actual porn that children are allowed to post of themselves to be viewed by anybody? It amazes me that very little has been said about this in the mainstream press. Just do a YouTube search for "hottest tiktok videos" and convince yourself that child predators aren't using this platform. Some YouTuber did a big "expose" of this a while back and had his video deleted (and then reinstated?), typical YouTube drama etc. but it was quite eye opening. I would never allow my children anywhere near such a platform.
- viraptor 7y ago
  Is there a reason this gives different impression than "hottest vine videos"? Was vine curated differently?
  - Thorentis 7y ago
    I think a huge part of it is that music videos in general are highly sexualised. Vine isn't about just music videos, you can post whatever. TikTok is specifically for music videos, so kids will see popular music videos where celebs are scantily dressed or whatever, and then emulate it. And then other kids come along and see what their friends are posting and want to do it too, and the cycle just continues. Add to that the fact it isn't US based (and so probably isn't moderated as heavily) and you get what we have now. edit: confused by the down votes. Not sure what is being disagreed with? Miley cyrus wearing so little you can see her bum cheeks is what I'd consider sexualised. Maybe you don't? Do you think it's okay for 12 year olds to be posting that on TikTok? Am I just a prude?
    - mistermann 7y ago
      I saw nothing remarkable at all for your search term.
      - Thorentis 7y ago
        Well, it isn't something I search regularly so perhaps not accurate. Or perhaps YouTube has started removing some videos? I remember seeing a lot of fuss made about this in the YouTube community about a year ago. At work now and not really keen to add that search to my history, but might see if anything has changed later.
    - viraptor 7y ago
      I'm confused by people today in general. On one hand side, yes... tiktok videos seem to be full of highly sexualised teens, which they may regret later. On the other, is it that much worse than what you find by searching for "kids ballet" on YouTube (approved and posted by their parents and teachers)? Tiktok seems like an enabler, but it doesn't look like the reason videos like that exist. I wish this wasn't really want the prude part, but about: should those videos be globally available forever without teens understanding the issue with that.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  There's also the problem of TikTok's home-grown toxic culture. There was an article last year in one of the Hong Kong publications (HKFP, maybe) about how children will post TikTok videos of themselves doing things like jumping in front of buses, and threatening to kill themselves if they don't get x number of likes.
- FakeComments 7y ago
  Children posting nudes online has been a problem for two decades. I’m not trying to minimize it, but we also don’t need to upend the world to fix it.
simplecomplex 7y ago
We wouldn’t want Chinese spies leaking all those Congressmens’ dick pics...
unityByFreedom 7y ago
> the lawmakers asked the acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire if the app maker could be compelled to turn Americans’ data over to the Chinese authorities. > Both Schumer and Cotton warn that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is “still required to adhere” to Chinese law. I'm surprised if there are many TikTok users in the US. What is the draw of that app? The description on Wikipedia says is it is for "markets outside China" but all the content I see upvoted on reddit appears to be from China. Do they just take the popular videos from China's version (that the West has never seen) and inject them into TikTok, making TikTok appear to be popular/high quality?
- paggle 7y ago
  The stridency with which you make factually incorrect claims that can be invalidated with a single Google Search is some witches' brew of impressive and disturbing.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- kumarm 7y ago
  >>I'm surprised if there are many TikTok users in the US. Tiktok is #1 in social category in US on Google Play. #1 in Entertainment in US on Apple App Store. Does that surprise you?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - unityByFreedom 7y ago
    I'm not surprised, and I don't think many people look to those rankings as good proxies for innovative software. They just show what's popular, not what's hip. Being part of the borg is not enviable.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  If you haven’t noticed (because you don’t use it or whatever), they are burning money aggressively advertising on Snapchat. Add to that the fact that it filled the void left by Vine.
Aperocky 7y ago
> But the lawmakers say because TikTok is owned by a Beijing-based company, it could be compelled by the Chinese government to turn over user data — such as location data, cookies, metadata and more — even if it’s stored on servers it owns in the United States. An analogy: To protect data from potential acquirement by the US government, EU should shut out Google from Europe? This doesn't make sense and is completely political. Watching politicians trying to gain brownie points and _sound like they care_ while not actually doing anything useful hurts my eyes.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  It makes perfect sense with the way business works in 2019. Regulatory capture means big players in a given country want lawmakers to attack foreign (and local) competition, and the lawmakers are happy to do it because it pays off. The fact that Chinese competition is Politically Threatening just makes it easier to convince lawmakers to act. Foreign countries will exercise their control over local companies and subsidiaries (for population control, for tax revenues, and for corrupt personal gains to politicians) just like we do, and will tap into any data they can for political advantage. All the big countries want control over data, which means they want services to be operated by local subsidiaries or want the foreign companies to be subject to local laws. Their uses for the data may vary and the other demands they make may vary but in the end all of these big capitalist societies (even the ones pretending to be communist or whatever) function the same way: The people with money control the system in order to make more money. Even before TikTok was being attacked as an arm of a foreign surveillance state, Huawei was being targeted the same way (rightly or not - probably correct). This framing is a success with the general public as well, and is currently being deployed against international gaming companies like Blizzard, Epic and Riot based on their Chinese (Tencent) ownership stakes, even if they're based in the US.
  - jchw 7y ago
    >and is currently being deployed against international gaming companies like Blizzard, Epic and Riot based on their Chinese (Tencent) ownership stakes, even if they're based in the US. Blizzard didn't exactly get called into question out of the blue. The criticism against them was explicitly the result of their actions.
tudorconstantin 7y ago
I find it very intriguing and fascinating the market penetration speed tiktok had: - developed in 200 days - launched in September 2016 in China - launched in September 2017 internationally - in November 2017 it's parent company spends up to $1 billion to acquire musical.ly. - it presently has over 500 million MAU users (I think it has them for over a year now, but I'm on mobile and can't find a source for this claim) How do you think it's possible for an app appearing seemingly out of the blue to move so fast in such a crowded and mature market like social media? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok
- dvt 7y ago
  > How do you think it's possible for an app appearing seemingly out of the blue to move so fast in such a crowded and mature market like social media? I'm not sure if you're on Snapchat or Instagram, but they aggressively advertise (I see dozens of TikTok ads a day). Basically, they're burning money. It's definitely not sustainable.
  - tudorconstantin 7y ago
    I am thinking rather in the context of google plus for example: they had the money to promote it and the channels to do it and still they had to close it. Throwing money at a problem doesn't always solve it. Not wanting to sound conspirational, but there's got to be more than huge piles of money behind tiktok.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - mensetmanusman 7y ago
    The average time spent in front of artwork at a museum is 8 seconds. Maybe this is the attention span of people in leisure?
- nudiustertian 7y ago
  it took up the vacuum left by vine and inherited the musical.ly users
rshnotsecure 7y ago
There are some interesting results if you check the Google Analytics ID of TikTok. They seem to also manage a somewhat sizable portfolio of gambling sites, sites selling knockoff Sports Jerseys, and adult videotube sites. I am counting about 45 sites right now for UA-75850242. Many Chinese sites seem to operate like this. I believe Huawei has about 500 completely unrelated sites. A sort of SFW “soft core” example of this would be yoma202.com [1] which is also used to manage huaweimarine.com. Please note that Huawei and Huawei Marine separated about 6 months ago technically. [1] http://yoma202.com http://yoma202.com
- greggman2 7y ago
  Is it possible they're just sharing source and not changing the id?
- ars 7y ago
  That doesn't actually mean anything. Every large site will have it's UA number copied by random spammers, often in Russia. I've never figured out the motivation, but I've seen it a number of times.
  - rshnotsecure 7y ago
    I think you make a valid point that also is the most plausible argument I’ve heard. Except though if I do this exercise for USA sites, I don’t see the same thing. My guess though is that the USA sites are maybe just more aggressive about filing abuse claims to the registrar?
    - codezero 7y ago
      late to this discussion, but in terms of using Google Analytics, you can whitelist specific domains if someone is copying your UA code and sending your instance data. Most implementations are set up this way from the start so you don't even need to notice someone is attempting to poison your data. One of the reasons this is done is to generate referrer spam, which is a really niche way to get the analysts who are looking at the data in GA to see their ads. I'm sure there are other reasons folks do this, perhaps there's a UA- code factor into PageRank/Google rankings that spammers picked up on, I can think of a lot of other creative reasons. That said, it's pretty curious that there are a lot of sites using it, you might do well to see if you can intercept some mobile app data to see if any other apps are also using the UA tag of TikTok. There are other things you could look at in terms of how they implement the actual tracking in GA, if the tracking calls look pretty similar but aren't just a carbon copy, it could be more intentional.
nightnight 7y ago
OT: The other day in one of Europe's biggest consumer electronics retail chain (MediaMarkt): Why does Huawei has 3x more showroom space than all other smartphones manufacturers together, right in front of the entrance and this in every MediaMarkt? No other brand has such a setup. The US is the only country trying to interfere and seeing potential and bigger threats.
- probably_wrong 7y ago
  > Why does Huawei has 3x more showroom space than all other smartphones manufacturers together, right in front of the entrance and this in every MediaMarkt? Where have you seen this? I bought a phone at MediaMarkt yesterday in NRW and I haven't seen anything close to what you describe. I would put them head-to-head with Samsung, which sounds reasonable for a brand this big. But "3x more showroom that all other manufacturers together" feels a bit too much.
- dingo_bat 7y ago
  Because they are the number 2 smartphone manufacturer in the world. You would expect the number 2 to be trying the hardest.
- vadym909 7y ago
  The US no free market- no good. China porduct only good. Go TikTok! dominate to facebook and youtube
- Deukhoofd 7y ago
  Is your argument that because Huawei spends more money on marketing at Mediamarkt than other companies it must be evil? I've seen the exact same for Apple products at Mediamarkt, where it in one case even had its own floor.
- ClikeX 7y ago
  MediaMarkt in the Netherlands has a its own Samsung and Apple sections complete with personel. The Huawei section isn't really that big in the stores I've been in. Unless it massively changed in the past 2 months.
- 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

74 points by zachguo 7y ago

Forget the national security concerns (though they could well be valid, would not be surprised if so) ... what about the potential for child exploitation? The softporn/borderline actual porn that children are allowed to post of themselves to be viewed by anybody? It amazes me that very little has been said about this in the mainstream press. Just do a YouTube search for "hottest tiktok videos" and convince yourself that child predators aren't using this platform. Some YouTuber did a big "expose" of this a while back and had his video deleted (and then reinstated?), typical YouTube drama etc. but it was quite eye opening. I would never allow my children anywhere near such a platform.

viraptor 7y ago
Is there a reason this gives different impression than "hottest vine videos"? Was vine curated differently?
- Thorentis 7y ago
  I think a huge part of it is that music videos in general are highly sexualised. Vine isn't about just music videos, you can post whatever. TikTok is specifically for music videos, so kids will see popular music videos where celebs are scantily dressed or whatever, and then emulate it. And then other kids come along and see what their friends are posting and want to do it too, and the cycle just continues. Add to that the fact it isn't US based (and so probably isn't moderated as heavily) and you get what we have now. edit: confused by the down votes. Not sure what is being disagreed with? Miley cyrus wearing so little you can see her bum cheeks is what I'd consider sexualised. Maybe you don't? Do you think it's okay for 12 year olds to be posting that on TikTok? Am I just a prude?
  - mistermann 7y ago
    I saw nothing remarkable at all for your search term.
    - Thorentis 7y ago
      Well, it isn't something I search regularly so perhaps not accurate. Or perhaps YouTube has started removing some videos? I remember seeing a lot of fuss made about this in the YouTube community about a year ago. At work now and not really keen to add that search to my history, but might see if anything has changed later.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    I'm confused by people today in general. On one hand side, yes... tiktok videos seem to be full of highly sexualised teens, which they may regret later. On the other, is it that much worse than what you find by searching for "kids ballet" on YouTube (approved and posted by their parents and teachers)? Tiktok seems like an enabler, but it doesn't look like the reason videos like that exist. I wish this wasn't really want the prude part, but about: should those videos be globally available forever without teens understanding the issue with that.
reaperducer 7y ago
There's also the problem of TikTok's home-grown toxic culture. There was an article last year in one of the Hong Kong publications (HKFP, maybe) about how children will post TikTok videos of themselves doing things like jumping in front of buses, and threatening to kill themselves if they don't get x number of likes.
FakeComments 7y ago
Children posting nudes online has been a problem for two decades. I’m not trying to minimize it, but we also don’t need to upend the world to fix it.

simplecomplex 7y ago

We wouldn’t want Chinese spies leaking all those Congressmens’ dick pics...

unityByFreedom 7y ago

> the lawmakers asked the acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire if the app maker could be compelled to turn Americans’ data over to the Chinese authorities. > Both Schumer and Cotton warn that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is “still required to adhere” to Chinese law. I'm surprised if there are many TikTok users in the US. What is the draw of that app? The description on Wikipedia says is it is for "markets outside China" but all the content I see upvoted on reddit appears to be from China. Do they just take the popular videos from China's version (that the West has never seen) and inject them into TikTok, making TikTok appear to be popular/high quality?

paggle 7y ago
The stridency with which you make factually incorrect claims that can be invalidated with a single Google Search is some witches' brew of impressive and disturbing.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kumarm 7y ago
>>I'm surprised if there are many TikTok users in the US. Tiktok is #1 in social category in US on Google Play. #1 in Entertainment in US on Apple App Store. Does that surprise you?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  I'm not surprised, and I don't think many people look to those rankings as good proxies for innovative software. They just show what's popular, not what's hip. Being part of the borg is not enviable.
colejohnson66 7y ago
If you haven’t noticed (because you don’t use it or whatever), they are burning money aggressively advertising on Snapchat. Add to that the fact that it filled the void left by Vine.

Aperocky 7y ago

> But the lawmakers say because TikTok is owned by a Beijing-based company, it could be compelled by the Chinese government to turn over user data — such as location data, cookies, metadata and more — even if it’s stored on servers it owns in the United States. An analogy: To protect data from potential acquirement by the US government, EU should shut out Google from Europe? This doesn't make sense and is completely political. Watching politicians trying to gain brownie points and _sound like they care_ while not actually doing anything useful hurts my eyes.

kevingadd 7y ago
It makes perfect sense with the way business works in 2019. Regulatory capture means big players in a given country want lawmakers to attack foreign (and local) competition, and the lawmakers are happy to do it because it pays off. The fact that Chinese competition is Politically Threatening just makes it easier to convince lawmakers to act. Foreign countries will exercise their control over local companies and subsidiaries (for population control, for tax revenues, and for corrupt personal gains to politicians) just like we do, and will tap into any data they can for political advantage. All the big countries want control over data, which means they want services to be operated by local subsidiaries or want the foreign companies to be subject to local laws. Their uses for the data may vary and the other demands they make may vary but in the end all of these big capitalist societies (even the ones pretending to be communist or whatever) function the same way: The people with money control the system in order to make more money. Even before TikTok was being attacked as an arm of a foreign surveillance state, Huawei was being targeted the same way (rightly or not - probably correct). This framing is a success with the general public as well, and is currently being deployed against international gaming companies like Blizzard, Epic and Riot based on their Chinese (Tencent) ownership stakes, even if they're based in the US.
- jchw 7y ago
  >and is currently being deployed against international gaming companies like Blizzard, Epic and Riot based on their Chinese (Tencent) ownership stakes, even if they're based in the US. Blizzard didn't exactly get called into question out of the blue. The criticism against them was explicitly the result of their actions.

tudorconstantin 7y ago

I find it very intriguing and fascinating the market penetration speed tiktok had: - developed in 200 days - launched in September 2016 in China - launched in September 2017 internationally - in November 2017 it's parent company spends up to $1 billion to acquire musical.ly. - it presently has over 500 million MAU users (I think it has them for over a year now, but I'm on mobile and can't find a source for this claim) How do you think it's possible for an app appearing seemingly out of the blue to move so fast in such a crowded and mature market like social media? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok

dvt 7y ago
> How do you think it's possible for an app appearing seemingly out of the blue to move so fast in such a crowded and mature market like social media? I'm not sure if you're on Snapchat or Instagram, but they aggressively advertise (I see dozens of TikTok ads a day). Basically, they're burning money. It's definitely not sustainable.
- tudorconstantin 7y ago
  I am thinking rather in the context of google plus for example: they had the money to promote it and the channels to do it and still they had to close it. Throwing money at a problem doesn't always solve it. Not wanting to sound conspirational, but there's got to be more than huge piles of money behind tiktok.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  The average time spent in front of artwork at a museum is 8 seconds. Maybe this is the attention span of people in leisure?
nudiustertian 7y ago
it took up the vacuum left by vine and inherited the musical.ly users

rshnotsecure 7y ago

There are some interesting results if you check the Google Analytics ID of TikTok. They seem to also manage a somewhat sizable portfolio of gambling sites, sites selling knockoff Sports Jerseys, and adult videotube sites. I am counting about 45 sites right now for UA-75850242. Many Chinese sites seem to operate like this. I believe Huawei has about 500 completely unrelated sites. A sort of SFW “soft core” example of this would be yoma202.com [1] which is also used to manage huaweimarine.com. Please note that Huawei and Huawei Marine separated about 6 months ago technically. [1] http://yoma202.com http://yoma202.com

greggman2 7y ago
Is it possible they're just sharing source and not changing the id?
ars 7y ago
That doesn't actually mean anything. Every large site will have it's UA number copied by random spammers, often in Russia. I've never figured out the motivation, but I've seen it a number of times.
- rshnotsecure 7y ago
  I think you make a valid point that also is the most plausible argument I’ve heard. Except though if I do this exercise for USA sites, I don’t see the same thing. My guess though is that the USA sites are maybe just more aggressive about filing abuse claims to the registrar?
  - codezero 7y ago
    late to this discussion, but in terms of using Google Analytics, you can whitelist specific domains if someone is copying your UA code and sending your instance data. Most implementations are set up this way from the start so you don't even need to notice someone is attempting to poison your data. One of the reasons this is done is to generate referrer spam, which is a really niche way to get the analysts who are looking at the data in GA to see their ads. I'm sure there are other reasons folks do this, perhaps there's a UA- code factor into PageRank/Google rankings that spammers picked up on, I can think of a lot of other creative reasons. That said, it's pretty curious that there are a lot of sites using it, you might do well to see if you can intercept some mobile app data to see if any other apps are also using the UA tag of TikTok. There are other things you could look at in terms of how they implement the actual tracking in GA, if the tracking calls look pretty similar but aren't just a carbon copy, it could be more intentional.

nightnight 7y ago

OT: The other day in one of Europe's biggest consumer electronics retail chain (MediaMarkt): Why does Huawei has 3x more showroom space than all other smartphones manufacturers together, right in front of the entrance and this in every MediaMarkt? No other brand has such a setup. The US is the only country trying to interfere and seeing potential and bigger threats.

probably_wrong 7y ago
> Why does Huawei has 3x more showroom space than all other smartphones manufacturers together, right in front of the entrance and this in every MediaMarkt? Where have you seen this? I bought a phone at MediaMarkt yesterday in NRW and I haven't seen anything close to what you describe. I would put them head-to-head with Samsung, which sounds reasonable for a brand this big. But "3x more showroom that all other manufacturers together" feels a bit too much.
dingo_bat 7y ago
Because they are the number 2 smartphone manufacturer in the world. You would expect the number 2 to be trying the hardest.
vadym909 7y ago
The US no free market- no good. China porduct only good. Go TikTok! dominate to facebook and youtube
Deukhoofd 7y ago
Is your argument that because Huawei spends more money on marketing at Mediamarkt than other companies it must be evil? I've seen the exact same for Apple products at Mediamarkt, where it in one case even had its own floor.
ClikeX 7y ago
MediaMarkt in the Netherlands has a its own Samsung and Apple sections complete with personel. The Huawei section isn't really that big in the stores I've been in. Unless it massively changed in the past 2 months.
7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]