6 ms·

What exactly is the problem? AFAICS its just a potential problem - there is a social media platform that is not controlled by an American company. Now you know

What exactly is the problem? AFAICS its just a potential problem - there is a social media platform that is not controlled by an American company. Now you know how the rest of the world feels.

jonathannat 6y ago
it's a problem because TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is essentially owned by the CCP. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3982027 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3982027 And CCP is forcing its own narratives out to the world, such as LGBT is illegal https://instinctmagazine.com/chinese-owned-tiktok-bans-lgbt-content-even-where-homosexuality-is-legal/ https://instinctmagazine.com/chinese-owned-tiktok-bans-lgbt-..., anything against the Chinese leadership is forbidden https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-how-tiktok-censors-videos-that-do-not-please-beijing https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-..., https://www.opindia.com/2020/08/chinese-embasy-threat-nitin-a-gokhale-strat-news-global-xi-jinping-hitler-video/ https://www.opindia.com/2020/08/chinese-embasy-threat-nitin-... etc. Which is why US is pushing hard to ban such a device from a dictatorship so that the free countries have a chance https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-09/tiktok-is-the-superweapon-in-china-s-cultural-warfare https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-09/tiktok...
- jonathannat 6y ago
  lol downmodded for linking to a ton of reference and stating mostly facts. such is the current state of hacker news where many nationalists are hopping over the great firewall to focus attack on countries that ironically have freedom of speech.
  - Bombthecat 6y ago
    Well, trump will be reelected such is life.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kohtatsu 6y ago
  Someone from reddit found some disturbing things through reverse engineering as well: https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/fmuko1m/ https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/fmuko1m/ The app resists reversing, and even slightly modifies its behaviour when reversing is detected, and at least the Android version had blatant RCE capabilities. This is on top of collecting everything it possibly can about the device. I'd presume if you give it the photos permission (which is extremely broad on both mobile platforms unfortunately), it will scrape what it can from there as well, which might include historical location data.
  - disgu 6y ago
    The dude on Reddit is most likely a fraud, though. There's just nothing that indicates that he reverse engineered anything whatsoever. There's just no proof for anything at all. Every single thing he said was known publicly before _and_ he somehow missed the copy&paste api call that was made known with iOS 14? That's weird considering he supposedly did reverse engineering. He also said that there were regular http calls, which is literally impossible on iOS since at least 2016 (Apple guidelines). This dude repeated widely known things in a way that made them sound terrible. His "research" contains zero things we didn't know before. Hell, people have offered him sums of money for proof as well. He's a script kiddie who intercepted some packages on his home network.
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    Gentle reminder that the reddit user in question never actually posted any backing for their claims (they said their laptop broke, and have apparently been unable to replace it or redo their investigation for four months).
- disgu 6y ago
  The LGBTQ+ community on TikTok is actually ridiculously huge. The videos using the LGBT and LGBTQ hash tags have a combined view count of more than 50 billion. Maybe you're talking about the chinese app, because LGBTQ+ is doing great on the regular TikTok.
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    It's interesting to me that the loudest voices about the apparent dangers of TikTok's existence have clearly never interacted with it at all even by proxy.
  - jonathannat 6y ago
    That doesn't mean that there aren't LGBT bans in certain countries, which is what the article was talking about. And also, what prevents authoritarian CCP from ordering TikTok to ban LGBT contents overnight? They've done it with Uighur concentration camp/slave labor mentions, hong kong protests, massive flooding, etc.
    - filleduchaos 6y ago
      I don't recall seeing anything close to this level of concern when e.g. Tumblr was filtering LGBT content from showing up in search and discovery. But I suppose it's oh so different when China does it as opposed to when the US does it.
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  > And CCP is forcing its own narratives out to the world, such as LGBT is illegal There is plenty of LGBT content on TikTok, for your information.
- buran77 6y ago
  You may have been downvoted for suggesting that getting a downvote means someone is trying to take away your freedom of speech. Which is obviously baloney. One problem I see with your actual message is that the narrative being consistently pushed is that this is really just some moral duty the US is carrying out. "Ban such a device from a dictatorship so that the free countries have a chance". Which, if you lived long enough, you must have heard being repeated ad-nauseam every time some country was in need of some "democracy". Hindsight shows us they were all left out worse than they were. But worse than that, even if the problem was unfolding for decades, every time there was such an intervention it just so happened that it was just at the right time when the US needed it. And it just so happened that it benefited the US and US companies the most. Or exclusively. Like leaving the US again holding a monopoly on data gathering in the world, or excluding the main competitor in mobile and 5G from the US and even world markets. So it's easy to wonder and ask the question: if it's a moral duty why wait so long? Was it for a cheaper iPhone? Why invoke reasons that were there for so long exactly when China starts to become a concrete threat on the super-power stage? Look at it from another perspective. In light of the NSA revelations, and knowing the vast quantities of data Facebook or Google are collecting and sharing with the US government (for some morally dubious outcomes for the society) which are highly incompatible with the European values and ideals of rights and freedom, would you support an initiative where all these big-tech companies would have their EU operations be moved entirely under a European company?
  - jonathannat 6y ago
    > downvote means someone is trying to take away your freedom of speech Nope, that's not what I said > Hindsight shows us they were all left out worse than they were. Taiwan, South Korea, and a few eastern european countries would vehemontly disagree with you > US government which is highly incompatible with the European values and ideals of rights and freedom I don't know where you're getting this. US shares the same democratic ideals as most of the countries in Europe. Which is why there's now a ton of pushbacks against China in Europe. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-07/from-france-to-sweden-china-is-losing-europe https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-07/from-f... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/business/european-union-china-deals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/business/european-union-c... Germany (sans Merkel): https://www.politico.eu/article/why-post-merkel-germany-will-change-its-tune-on-china/ https://www.politico.eu/article/why-post-merkel-germany-will... France: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Huawei-crackdown/France-places-de-facto-5G-ban-on-Huawei-gear-by-2028 https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Huawei-crackdown/France-pl... UK: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/world/europe/mike-pompeo-boris-johnson-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/world/europe/mike-pompeo-... Czech: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-czech/czech-prime-minister-says-chinas-ambassador-should-be-replaced-idUSKBN20W1EH https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-czech/czech-prime-m... Sweden: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Sweden-China-ties-grow-ever-icier-over-Hong-Kong-and-coronavirus https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Swe...
- rvz 6y ago
  There you go. There's no amount of spin that makes this platform any better than the other social networks; if not worse. At least anyone can freely criticize the US president or administration on any social network without getting banned. Try this at home: Criticize the CCP or just post some content that they don't like on TikTok.* If you're in Hong Kong, you'd wish that it didn't go viral. *If you dare: [0][1] [0] https://time.com/5863350/tiktok-black-creators/ https://time.com/5863350/tiktok-black-creators/ [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/tiktok-says-it-doesnt-censor-but-a-user-who-criticized-china-was-locked-out.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/tiktok-says-it-doesnt-censor...
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    Some people's biggest concern is getting banned from a website, others' biggest concern is getting barred from entering the US (see: the current requirement to provide all your social media accounts when applying for a visa to the US). Yet others are concerned about how compliance with US laws and norms is imposed on the rest of the globe (see: Github's bans of developers' accounts, and the ripple effects on the people they work with). But of course they're expected to just suck it up.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Well fine but then: 1. Congress should pass a law 2. Companies from China should not be singled out by name, but rather selected by fixed criteria. 3. The law should be conditioned on specific conditions in China such that if those conditions change, the door is automatically reopened. 4. Perhaps, have a way Chinese companies to own foreign subsidiaries that keep the data outside of China, and provide some way to audit all the feed prioritization. Maybe that means banning foreign-trained proprietary neural networks, if they are hopeless mess that makes everything plausibly deniable. Oh and slap on a huge confiscatory tariff so this option isn't too rosy. Seriously, everyone is acting under a false choice of "neoliberal turn the other cheek" and "stoop to China's level". Those are both shit choices. We should: 1. Find a way to use TikTok to give Facebook some long overdue competition, while keeping American data safe, while giving China some actual incentives to change their behavior. 2. Channel this new fear into understanding that the US fucking you over due to surveillance and censorship is only slightly better than China fucking you over for those reasons.
filleduchaos 6y ago
> Now you know how the rest of the world feels. A lot of Americans have a tendency to think of their country as naturally owning the internet. I personally find it quite alarming.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Depends on what you mean by owning it. I personally accept it as depending on locality and trying to legislate outside your borders just makes you look like inssne, an unironic King Canute telling the tides to go back. I do acknowledge that the US throws its weight around diplomatically and tries to impose its laws as an international standard.
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    Hmmm. It is difficult to put what I've observed into words but as an example: look at the way people are reacting to TikTok hypothetically enforcing Chinese norms and laws on the rest of the globe. Then look at the way people pretty much just shrug and make excuses when it comes to US companies actually enforcing US norms and laws on everybody else (e.g. Github banning people that are from countries the US doesn't like without pretty much no warning, or that time that Tumblr was blocking LGBT content from showing up in search because of the SESTA/FOSTA thing). On a pervasive level, it's in the way a lot of Americans on social media tend to assume that all content is necessarily intended for or addressed to them somehow. For instance many people I know have had an American hate train jump on their tweets that were talking about one issue or the other from a local lens - as though we should be constantly filtering ourselves and our language to cater to America's sensibilities. I've never seen quite that level of arrogance from anyone else.
boublepop 6y ago
I feel like no one is looking at this for what it really is. Trump is anti BLM. I don’t care if you believe he’s a racist or not (despite the many literal cases of racist treatment he has lost) but we all have to agree that he’s anti BLM. BLM protests and evidence of police brutality sprees like wildfire on TikTok, for some reason that sort of content didn’t really grab on as significantly on twitter or Facebook. If you ask me this has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with Trumps re-election campaign.

What exactly is the problem? AFAICS its just a potential problem - there is a social media platform that is not controlled by an American company. Now you know how the rest of the world feels.

jonathannat 6y ago

it's a problem because TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is essentially owned by the CCP. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3982027 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3982027 And CCP is forcing its own narratives out to the world, such as LGBT is illegal https://instinctmagazine.com/chinese-owned-tiktok-bans-lgbt-content-even-where-homosexuality-is-legal/ https://instinctmagazine.com/chinese-owned-tiktok-bans-lgbt-..., anything against the Chinese leadership is forbidden https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-how-tiktok-censors-videos-that-do-not-please-beijing https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-..., https://www.opindia.com/2020/08/chinese-embasy-threat-nitin-a-gokhale-strat-news-global-xi-jinping-hitler-video/ https://www.opindia.com/2020/08/chinese-embasy-threat-nitin-... etc. Which is why US is pushing hard to ban such a device from a dictatorship so that the free countries have a chance https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-09/tiktok-is-the-superweapon-in-china-s-cultural-warfare https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-09/tiktok...

jonathannat 6y ago
lol downmodded for linking to a ton of reference and stating mostly facts. such is the current state of hacker news where many nationalists are hopping over the great firewall to focus attack on countries that ironically have freedom of speech.
- Bombthecat 6y ago
  Well, trump will be reelected such is life.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kohtatsu 6y ago
Someone from reddit found some disturbing things through reverse engineering as well: https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/fmuko1m/ https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/fmuko1m/ The app resists reversing, and even slightly modifies its behaviour when reversing is detected, and at least the Android version had blatant RCE capabilities. This is on top of collecting everything it possibly can about the device. I'd presume if you give it the photos permission (which is extremely broad on both mobile platforms unfortunately), it will scrape what it can from there as well, which might include historical location data.
- disgu 6y ago
  The dude on Reddit is most likely a fraud, though. There's just nothing that indicates that he reverse engineered anything whatsoever. There's just no proof for anything at all. Every single thing he said was known publicly before _and_ he somehow missed the copy&paste api call that was made known with iOS 14? That's weird considering he supposedly did reverse engineering. He also said that there were regular http calls, which is literally impossible on iOS since at least 2016 (Apple guidelines). This dude repeated widely known things in a way that made them sound terrible. His "research" contains zero things we didn't know before. Hell, people have offered him sums of money for proof as well. He's a script kiddie who intercepted some packages on his home network.
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  Gentle reminder that the reddit user in question never actually posted any backing for their claims (they said their laptop broke, and have apparently been unable to replace it or redo their investigation for four months).
disgu 6y ago
The LGBTQ+ community on TikTok is actually ridiculously huge. The videos using the LGBT and LGBTQ hash tags have a combined view count of more than 50 billion. Maybe you're talking about the chinese app, because LGBTQ+ is doing great on the regular TikTok.
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  It's interesting to me that the loudest voices about the apparent dangers of TikTok's existence have clearly never interacted with it at all even by proxy.
- jonathannat 6y ago
  That doesn't mean that there aren't LGBT bans in certain countries, which is what the article was talking about. And also, what prevents authoritarian CCP from ordering TikTok to ban LGBT contents overnight? They've done it with Uighur concentration camp/slave labor mentions, hong kong protests, massive flooding, etc.
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    I don't recall seeing anything close to this level of concern when e.g. Tumblr was filtering LGBT content from showing up in search and discovery. But I suppose it's oh so different when China does it as opposed to when the US does it.
filleduchaos 6y ago
> And CCP is forcing its own narratives out to the world, such as LGBT is illegal There is plenty of LGBT content on TikTok, for your information.
buran77 6y ago
You may have been downvoted for suggesting that getting a downvote means someone is trying to take away your freedom of speech. Which is obviously baloney. One problem I see with your actual message is that the narrative being consistently pushed is that this is really just some moral duty the US is carrying out. "Ban such a device from a dictatorship so that the free countries have a chance". Which, if you lived long enough, you must have heard being repeated ad-nauseam every time some country was in need of some "democracy". Hindsight shows us they were all left out worse than they were. But worse than that, even if the problem was unfolding for decades, every time there was such an intervention it just so happened that it was just at the right time when the US needed it. And it just so happened that it benefited the US and US companies the most. Or exclusively. Like leaving the US again holding a monopoly on data gathering in the world, or excluding the main competitor in mobile and 5G from the US and even world markets. So it's easy to wonder and ask the question: if it's a moral duty why wait so long? Was it for a cheaper iPhone? Why invoke reasons that were there for so long exactly when China starts to become a concrete threat on the super-power stage? Look at it from another perspective. In light of the NSA revelations, and knowing the vast quantities of data Facebook or Google are collecting and sharing with the US government (for some morally dubious outcomes for the society) which are highly incompatible with the European values and ideals of rights and freedom, would you support an initiative where all these big-tech companies would have their EU operations be moved entirely under a European company?
- jonathannat 6y ago
  > downvote means someone is trying to take away your freedom of speech Nope, that's not what I said > Hindsight shows us they were all left out worse than they were. Taiwan, South Korea, and a few eastern european countries would vehemontly disagree with you > US government which is highly incompatible with the European values and ideals of rights and freedom I don't know where you're getting this. US shares the same democratic ideals as most of the countries in Europe. Which is why there's now a ton of pushbacks against China in Europe. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-07/from-france-to-sweden-china-is-losing-europe https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-07/from-f... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/business/european-union-china-deals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/business/european-union-c... Germany (sans Merkel): https://www.politico.eu/article/why-post-merkel-germany-will-change-its-tune-on-china/ https://www.politico.eu/article/why-post-merkel-germany-will... France: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Huawei-crackdown/France-places-de-facto-5G-ban-on-Huawei-gear-by-2028 https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Huawei-crackdown/France-pl... UK: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/world/europe/mike-pompeo-boris-johnson-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/world/europe/mike-pompeo-... Czech: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-czech/czech-prime-minister-says-chinas-ambassador-should-be-replaced-idUSKBN20W1EH https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-czech/czech-prime-m... Sweden: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Sweden-China-ties-grow-ever-icier-over-Hong-Kong-and-coronavirus https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Swe...
rvz 6y ago
There you go. There's no amount of spin that makes this platform any better than the other social networks; if not worse. At least anyone can freely criticize the US president or administration on any social network without getting banned. Try this at home: Criticize the CCP or just post some content that they don't like on TikTok.* If you're in Hong Kong, you'd wish that it didn't go viral. *If you dare: [0][1] [0] https://time.com/5863350/tiktok-black-creators/ https://time.com/5863350/tiktok-black-creators/ [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/tiktok-says-it-doesnt-censor-but-a-user-who-criticized-china-was-locked-out.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/tiktok-says-it-doesnt-censor...
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  Some people's biggest concern is getting banned from a website, others' biggest concern is getting barred from entering the US (see: the current requirement to provide all your social media accounts when applying for a visa to the US). Yet others are concerned about how compliance with US laws and norms is imposed on the rest of the globe (see: Github's bans of developers' accounts, and the ripple effects on the people they work with). But of course they're expected to just suck it up.
Ericson2314 6y ago
Well fine but then: 1. Congress should pass a law 2. Companies from China should not be singled out by name, but rather selected by fixed criteria. 3. The law should be conditioned on specific conditions in China such that if those conditions change, the door is automatically reopened. 4. Perhaps, have a way Chinese companies to own foreign subsidiaries that keep the data outside of China, and provide some way to audit all the feed prioritization. Maybe that means banning foreign-trained proprietary neural networks, if they are hopeless mess that makes everything plausibly deniable. Oh and slap on a huge confiscatory tariff so this option isn't too rosy. Seriously, everyone is acting under a false choice of "neoliberal turn the other cheek" and "stoop to China's level". Those are both shit choices. We should: 1. Find a way to use TikTok to give Facebook some long overdue competition, while keeping American data safe, while giving China some actual incentives to change their behavior. 2. Channel this new fear into understanding that the US fucking you over due to surveillance and censorship is only slightly better than China fucking you over for those reasons.

filleduchaos 6y ago

> Now you know how the rest of the world feels. A lot of Americans have a tendency to think of their country as naturally owning the internet. I personally find it quite alarming.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Depends on what you mean by owning it. I personally accept it as depending on locality and trying to legislate outside your borders just makes you look like inssne, an unironic King Canute telling the tides to go back. I do acknowledge that the US throws its weight around diplomatically and tries to impose its laws as an international standard.
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  Hmmm. It is difficult to put what I've observed into words but as an example: look at the way people are reacting to TikTok hypothetically enforcing Chinese norms and laws on the rest of the globe. Then look at the way people pretty much just shrug and make excuses when it comes to US companies actually enforcing US norms and laws on everybody else (e.g. Github banning people that are from countries the US doesn't like without pretty much no warning, or that time that Tumblr was blocking LGBT content from showing up in search because of the SESTA/FOSTA thing). On a pervasive level, it's in the way a lot of Americans on social media tend to assume that all content is necessarily intended for or addressed to them somehow. For instance many people I know have had an American hate train jump on their tweets that were talking about one issue or the other from a local lens - as though we should be constantly filtering ourselves and our language to cater to America's sensibilities. I've never seen quite that level of arrogance from anyone else.

boublepop 6y ago

I feel like no one is looking at this for what it really is. Trump is anti BLM. I don’t care if you believe he’s a racist or not (despite the many literal cases of racist treatment he has lost) but we all have to agree that he’s anti BLM. BLM protests and evidence of police brutality sprees like wildfire on TikTok, for some reason that sort of content didn’t really grab on as significantly on twitter or Facebook. If you ask me this has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with Trumps re-election campaign.