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It's strange how so many in the US have adopted the mindset that it's important, for national security, to deny its citizens access to foreign social networks.

• dannyw 6y ago
  The US is a democratic government with the rule of law, as seen in this very example with a judge blocking the order.
  • avanti 6y ago
    The US is a democratic government with the rule of law, as seen in the case of slavery.
  • edgefield0 6y ago
    I see you're drinking the koolaid...
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    I have seen very democratic arrests going on as well, pity that the person getting arrested can't testify any longer.
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    The US tries to keep up the outward appearance of that, but underneath it is or is quickly becoming a fascist police-state oligarchy.
    • sneak 6y ago
      It seems that the US has the rule of law only in cases where the rule of law is not in conflict with the military dictatorship. In the cases where the military dictatorship wants to jail a journalist (Assange) or has some protesters for a photo op, law no longer rules and instead the military just does what it wants without consequences.
  • chrischen 6y ago
    Seems like the judge is agreeing with your parent poster.
  • viktorcode 6y ago
    Nevertheless, attempts to censor media should be concerning, no?
• unethical_ban 6y ago
  I have not read detailed reports, but just HN commentary and the reddit post that revealed the amount of data collected from phones. Trump's narcissism notwithstanding, the natsec issue with these apps isn't that US citizens are communicating with others, including foreigners. It is that they are installing what may very well be Chinese government spyware on their phones, with detailed tracking and keylogging. FWIW it would be interesting to keep an eye on what kind of permissions and access some of these PC gaming platforms have to peoples' workstations, as well.
  • dilap 6y ago
    Yes, that is another argument made against TikTok, separate from the argument I was responding to. But it's also worth addressing. As near as I can tell, it is unfounded; there is almost no evidence to support it. The one potentially shady thing I know of that TikTok got caught doing was checking the clipboard every second, which it no longer does. TikTok's explanation is that it was an anti-spam feature. I know of no network analysis showing they were sending back the clipboard contents, or that they are sending anything other than normal analytics. (Also, as an aside & for what it's worth, I personally think the data collection of Facebook is far worse than anything alleged against TikTok. They require you to provide your real name, they encourage you to give tons of other personal info, & they use trackers to tie your fb profile to your browsing history on non facebook websites. Then they sell targeted access to this profile to any advertiser that cares to pay, as their primary business model.) (As a second aside, if TikTok is somehow gaining access to more personal info than standard analytics stuff, I would view that, for iOS devices at least, as a security flaw. I'm not that familiar with Android, but I assume the same applies there.) Lastly, if TikTok is doing something nefarious, the proper way to handle it in a country ruled by laws is to have laws against the nefarious activity and prosecute the company for violation of said laws. The president waking up one day and declaring TikTok bad and banning it is ridiculous, authoritarian behavior. IMO :-)
    • gabaix 6y ago
      Tik Tok itself isn’t the issue. The threat is a threat from the CCP. CCP has shown they are willing to use data from Chinese assets to coerce individuals around the world. This is the same reason why Europe should be also wary from both CCP and US administration.
• peacefulhat 6y ago
  I can understand this attitude in the general public but it’s completely bizarre from HN engineers. Expect more more optimism for FBI/NSA backdoors in encryption next.
  • mantap 6y ago
    It's only bizarre if you consider ByteDance as some plucky startup that is being repressed by USA. If you consider it to be under the thumb of the Chinese state then blocking it seems to be the best action to preserve free speech. Will TikTok remove Chinese propaganda on their platform, how would that conversation even go at their offices? Can we trust that TikTok will not in future censor things that China finds uncomfortable such as Taiwan being an independent country? Just a few months ago HN was getting exercised about the rights of Hong Kongers. I'd say it is wholly consistent with the political beliefs of the average HNer to want to see a social network operating from within an autocratic state to be banned from operating, or at least under heavy scrutiny.
    • tmp538394722 6y ago
      And would it be equally “pro free speech” if the US went down the road of preventing we citizens from accessing propaganda websites affiliated with the CCP? And ban “bad” propaganda movies and media from the CCP? And ban direct conversation with known “bad actors” in the CCP? This sounds like a really slippery slope to me.
    • peacefulhat 6y ago
      Is this a hypothetical? I don't believe you've tried TikTok if you think scrolls are filled with Chinese propaganda.
      • mantap 6y ago
        Plenty of western companies have been forced to apologize for listing Taiwan as a country. China recently passed a law in Hong Kong that makes criticism of the regime a crime world wide. There's also the whole overwatch debacle. China does not care about free speech, nor does it pretend to. Allowing a popular forum for speech to operate out of China is dangerous.
• nostromo 6y ago
  It'd be better if Chinese companies could freely operate in the American market and American companies could freely operate in the Chinese market. But China blocks American companies from their market, or extracts unfair concessions from them. So the US should do the same until they change their practices. It's similar to how countries that want peace still need militaries -- that isn't a contradiction because militaries can help achieve peace. Similarly here, if you want free and open markets, you need to punish bad actors, like China, through things like sanctions.
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    > But China blocks American companies from their market, or extracts unfair concessions from them. So the US should do the same until they change their practices. Maybe that is true. I'm not sure. But if this is the real reason and national security is a fig leaf, then it is contrary to the rule of law and the constitution.
  • DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    > But China blocks American companies from their market, or extracts unfair concessions from them. This is largely untrue. First, American companies have a far larger market presence in China than vice versa. Second, American companies have made massive returns on investment in China. They're in China because it's profitable for them. There's a view that developing countries should immediately open their markets to complete, 100% unfettered access by all foreign companies. That might be great for foreign companies, but it would be terrible development policy. The host country would risk destroying any domestic industry it has. Developing countries benefit from some level of protectionism. There's nothing unfair about that - advanced companies from developed countries have enough of an advantage that they can still compete. Asking for 100% market opening on day 1 is like asking to eliminate weight classes in boxing in the name of fairness. That would be great for the heavyweights, but not so much for the featherweights.
  • chrischen 6y ago
    The US does in fact do the same. It limits the high-level IP transfers so that China cannot develop and compete higher up in the technology chain. You think the fact that they manufacture the world's plastic crap and assemble iPhones is an enviable position? The reason why we're stepping it up is because China has shown that they can domestically grow successful tech and social media companies that can penetrate the US market. It's not so much national security that's the issue more than it is insecurity in our fundamental beliefs that our system is inherently superior because they're now crossed the barrier higher up in the value chain. We gave them manufacturing just like we gave domestic immigrants the "dirty" jobs that no one wanted.
• bo1024 6y ago
  Note there is a difference between saying one thinks TikTok is a national security threat to the USA, and saying one thinks the U.S. government should ban it (or so on). It's tempting to base your opinion of whether TikTok is a threat on how much you (dis)like authoritarian responses, but that's a logical fallacy.
  • dilap 6y ago
    That's fair. Imagine, for example, an extremely convincing book is authored that convinces anyone that reads it that the United States government should disolve itself and its citizens should pledge fealty to China. Quite credibly, the book could be described a national security threat to the US. However, I would still argue that the book should not be banned, and that any country that wants to honestly describe itself as "free" could not ban the book. Being a free country means giving citizens the right to engage with ideas that might not be aligned w/ the interests of its government.
    • pleasedontbanme 6y ago
      It's magical thinking to believe that there could be a book that convinces people of something despite being wrong.
      • fuzxi 6y ago
        Yes, that's why he said "imagine".
      • luckylion 6y ago
        People cannot be convinced of things by reading a book if that book is factually incorrect? That sounds like magical thinking.
    • djsumdog 6y ago
      I think the it's a bit different to compare the medium of a book. It's a one directional medium with ideas. In America, we treasure speech and don't fear ideas. But in a two directional medium, that allows an entity to soak up information .. well that's already a problem in the US. Europe saw it as so much of an issue they implemented GDPR (for better or worse) and California has similar legislation. Information is way different, and we've already seen cases where TikTok has been caught reading clipboards (could just be to scan for tiktok links, but it could have also been harvesting additional data). The US does not allow certain things to be imported/exported to other nations. We've seen that for decades with Cuba and various other embargo. If you get a book from an embargoed country, it's not illegal to have to distribute it (granted it doesn't contain illegal/obscene content). The Federal government can legislate foreign commerce.
• MetalGuru 6y ago
  The CCP is waging ideological warfare on Western liberalism. And they’re the aggressor. Blocking a medium for them to wage it isn’t hypocrisy.
• wbillingsley 6y ago
  It's not very surprising. It is a reasonable assumption that the CCP, which has expressed ideological opposition to the spread of democracy, will not be using information it gathers on US or European citizens in order to defend or promote democratic rights and freedoms globally. It's a reasonable assumption that western governments, who do have an ideological intention of spreading democracy and western-style freedoms, probably would want to promote individual rights and freedoms (and that is why China was wary of them). How you see a stick depends on whether you think the person holding it will brandish it for or against you.
  • grawprog 6y ago
    >will not be using information it gathers on US or European citizens in order to defend or promote democratic rights and freedoms globally. And when was America doing this? I seem to recall the last 15 years as being full of America attacking and occupying foreign nations to claim resources.
    • wbillingsley 6y ago
      I really don't think it had much to do with whether they had access to Facebook... This seems to be getting caught up in general "pro-US"/"anti-US" or "pro-China"/"anti-China" sentiments on the forum. To be honest, I'm not interested in that or getting into general political discussions, though the question of how the tech environment will evolve around the world is very interesting to most of us that read this forum. Someone claimed it was "surprising" that Americans would support their companies operating overseas but oppose alleged data gathering by allegedly foreign-government-linked corporations. I expressed that I'm not surprised by that at all. That matches up pretty well with how I imagine the American public reacting. Likewise I do think the nature of this allegation is different to national security allegations in the past. So far as I recall, this is the first time a national security risk allegation has been about mass data collection on civilians from the regular operation of an app. Cambridge Analytica is perhaps the closest equivalent, and that got shut down pretty quickly even though it was a company run in another western country.
  • conception 6y ago
• otterley 6y ago
  China censors the Internet to prevent public information from getting in. The US Government is attempting to restrict the activities of certain Chinese companies to prevent private information from getting out.
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    Indeed and Europe should do the same against US ones. In fact we should start a movement to migrate away from any US based OS or programming languages, cleaning our IT stack from foreign interference.
  • undersuit 6y ago
    >The US Government is attempting to restrict the activities of certain Chinese companies to prevent private information from getting out. OK so one country... mildly contained. Now finish the job and do the other 193 countries.
  • slim 6y ago
    what you said just does not make any sense. china does censor information getting out for the same reason us is doing it. us is censoring information getting to "protect the minds of the children from influence" just like china. it's just the way the technology works and the intentions of both parties seem to be the same xenophobic warmongering shit
• throwaway4good 6y ago
  What is even more concerning is that the ban seems to be widely supported even though it is used for something obviously corrupt: The forced fire sale to Oracle with its personal connections to mr. Trump and the setting up of the 5B "education fund". Really third world country stuff where extreme nationalism is used hide crony capitalism.
• sbmthakur 6y ago
  > Now that the US is itself considering doing the same, many in the west have suddenly adopted the attitude that China had it right all along. PRC blocks applications which are critical of the regime and are not openly sharing data with the CCP[1]. The US is blocking applications due to legitimate concerns[2]. I don't know how both can be the same. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma... 2. https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/ https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/
• jariel 6y ago
  China banning US apps and US banning China apps are for mostly separate reasons. At very least consider China bans foreign apps because they won't help the CCP oppress their own citizens, which is obviously not the case in the US.
• mechnesium 6y ago
  It’s possible that the United States will resemble China once its population reaches a comparable size. China may simply the next evolution of what the US will become, and if it happens slowly enough, no one will do anything about it. Conway’s Game of Life on the scale of a nation state, where the US is currently in late-stage capitalism. Late-stage capitalism, per Wikipedia: > Since 2016, the term has been used in the United States and Canada to refer to perceived absurdities, contradictions, crises, injustices, and inequality created by modern business development. Sounds just like this TikTok fiasco.
• mantap 6y ago
  The situations are not equivalent at all. China blocks outside social networks so that it can control its citizens' access to information either internal or external.