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I have yet to see a convincing argument for banning Tik Tok. It's no worse then any US social media company.
by Miner49er 4y ago
I have yet to see a convincing argument for banning Tik Tok. It's no worse then any US social media company.
- paulcole 4y agoWhy do you think there would be a convincing argument? It’s all politics, grandstanding, and power. If you want to ban something and have the ability to make it happen, why let the lack of a convincing argument stand in your way?
- 13years 4y agoThe premise is China is spying on US citizens. I suppose we don't want competition when it comes to invasion of privacy. Therefore, we ban it so only US companies can spy on US citizens.
- revlolz 4y agoI'm curious what people think about tiktok' plans. They vowed to move data into us soil and have external audits. It came across as actual good faith compromises from my perspective.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 14 4y agoI think they would still send all the data back to China just discreetly. Even with external audits it would be trivial to do so.
- libraryatnight 4y agoThey can feed their users propaganda no matter where the data lives, I don't think the data is the goal, I think the eyeballs are.
- senttoschool 4y ago[flagged]
- libraryatnight 4y agoThat sounds like trying to cure poison with more poison.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoAmericans haven't been drinking enough anti-china information. Barely anyone in this country knows that a 4 year old uighur girl died in an apartment fire and she couldn't escape because the CPC officials had welded the doors shut because of COVID. Meanwhile, we do criticize ourselves in this country, a lot. And that's a good thing. Try protesting about police brutality in China. In the US you might be a hero. In China, nonzero odds you'll disappear.
- senttoschool 4y ago[flagged]
- throwawaymaths 4y agowhat are you smoking? it's not like there werent anti war protests in the US. Jesus Christ, there's even a huge coalition: Iraq veterans against the war. We had a presidential candidate that openly protested a previous war. A whole THREE US national holidays are basically "oops our bad" holidays:. MLK day, Juneteenth, and indigenous people's day.
- senttoschool 4y ago[flagged]
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
- nonethewiser 4y agoIt doesn't matter. The US gains nothing by letting Tiktok operate in the US.
- creato 4y agoThe premise is not that, it’s that the Chinese government can influence the content that the US population is exposed to. For fucks sake, US politicians are campaigning on a platform that the CCP can manipulate.
- Buttons840 4y agoSo if we ban the TikTok app and everyone just moves to the TikTok web page, what are we going to do? Ban the web page too? If we do ban the web page, on what grounds? If we claim that the web page collects too much data and is a national security threat, then doesn't that same argument apply to all of the millions of web pages out there? Or do we just skip all pretense and start strengthening the national firewall?
- creato 4y agoI don’t know. I’m not advocating for a ban, just arguing against all the moronic “but what about US social media” and “it’s because the US government can’t spy on TikTok users” takes.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoThe US government and US companies are different appendages of billionaires: one is a fictional personhood while the other is a collective public administration that has more lobbyists than administrators, but both service the same masters.
- nonethewiser 4y agoEven if true, this is strictly better.
- candiddevmike 4y agoTikTok can influence the US population in ways the US government can't control and can't do in-kind to China.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoThe US government couldn't or wouldn't stop Cambridge Analytica. That is something real. What you are suggesting is a malicious, technocratic conspiracy theory that is racist adjacent.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoRacism-baiting is a known tool of the CPC. This is strictly a CPC matter and has nothing to do with the people of china, or taiwanese people, or Singaporean Chinese, except one Singaporean Chinese person.
- nonethewiser 4y agoNah. Tik-tok operating in the US just isnt in the US's interests. It's as simple as that. They don't need to pass your purity test nor prove anything to you. > What you are suggesting is a malicious, technocratic conspiracy theory that is racist adjacent. This is laughable. How is it 'racist adjacent?'
- ls612 4y agoRealpolitik reciprocity; China bans American social media so turnabout is fair play.
- rtkwe 4y agoTo me part of having any reasonable claim to being "better" as a country involves having a better reason for doing something than "well they did it to us first".
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoAgreed. The US seems to be trying very hard to win the race to the bottom these days though.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- labster 4y agoWithout reciprocity, TikTok is a weapon against which America has no equivalent, and we like to stay even in arms races. Russia has very effectively used the internet to sow dissent in its geopolitical rivals, funding far-left, far-right, and separatist causes in Europe and North America. The Overton window has opened so wide that we don’t even agree on reality in the middle now. TikTok is a way to collect personality profiles, and a way to push adversarial content to take advantage of these profiles. It can be used as a radicalization machine with very little way of detecting it with counterintelligence. Now, whether China ever intends to use it this way is another question, as are the appropriate limits of freedom of speech for foreign actors. But the main reason they want to ban it is: it’s a weapon.
- rtkwe 4y agoI don't think I've seen anything other than yellow scare adjacent innuendo that TikTok actually has any nefarious meddling in their algorithm to push different types of content to American vs Chinese users. Youtube and Facebook have both shown that basic heuristics like showing the user things more likely to keep them on the site and interacting is more than enough to form "radicalization pipelines". As for the current consensus reality split in the US and other parts of the world I think that issue has been present and rotting at the center of mass media long before TikTok came around. There's also a big observational bias in our current issues where everything is easily documented and distributed we're able to know about all our neighbor's crazy beliefs and the same for people around the world, so maybe our consensus has always been a lot looser than we imagined we just see the crazies more these days (and the crazies see more of each other of course letting them build a wonderful little alt-reality bubble). I will agree it's definitely much easier for kooks and grifters willing to indulge them to make a buck to find each other these days which has hypercharged the issue.
- bsder 4y agoChina doesn't allow the US equivalent of TikTok in China, itself. I think that's a pretty solid argument ...
- AirMax98 4y agoRight, but the US is supposedly much more of a country of liberty.
- cscurmudgeon 4y agoThat's the paradox of tolerance. Should the US tolerate an app that has a high and known risk of reducing liberty?
- djkoolaide 4y agocan you please explain how a phone app will reduce liberty
- cscurmudgeon 4y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2023/03/23/tiktok-ceo-says-it-wasnt-spying-when-bytedance-employees-surveilled-journalists/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/23/tiktok-ceo-says-it-wasnt-s... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/byte-dance-tik-tok-internal-investigation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/byte-dance-tik... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/android-app-from-china-executed-0-day-exploit-on-millions-of-devices/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/andro...
- cscurmudgeon 4y agoAnd downvoted when presented with obvious evidence lol.
- nonethewiser 4y agoIt is indeed a country of far more liberty than China. The simple fact that the uniparty government can rewrite the Chinese constitution at will says everything you need to know.
- YeBanKo 4y agoIt’s not anti-TikTok, its anti privacy. If they explicitly banned TikTok, at least it would have been honest. This is about banning your rights to secure communication.
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoFor any US-friendly country TikTok is actually better because China is less likely to both have extradition agreements with US-friendly countries and to reach out do extra-judicial "things" to people it doesn't like, than the US (so long as you're not a Chinese ex-pat, China does seemingly like tapping it's non-resident citizens on the shoulder as a reminder). The "proper" (ie. snowball's chance in hell) way to fight the problem would be to introduce laws around the tracking, gathering, storing, analysing, packaging, selling, and buying of individual / user profile data. Tell you what though, if the Fed wants employment figures to go down, such a law would certainly have that effect, lots of companies (that I wouldn't shed a tear over) would be hitting the skids real fast. The US economy is too dependent upon it though. Gross.
- _8j50 4y ago[flagged]
- lmm 4y ago> Have you been so brainwashed that you think the US government is more of an enemy than China? The US government has detained or killed many more people like me than China has. I don't think that's brainwashing, that's just the reality. > Why did China hack OPM (every personal data on every fed employee),equifax (credit on all americans) and every major company being hit by their hackers? Probably the same reason the NSA grabs all that data.
- _8j50 4y ago[flagged]
- dang 4y agoYou've been breaking the site guidelines badly and frequently lately. This is the kind of thing we ban accounts for. I don't want to ban you, so we need you to please stop doing that. Please especially don't cross into personal attack, and don't use HN primarily for political/ideological/national battle. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _8j50 4y ago[flagged]
- sedivy94 4y agoYou are not alone in your sentiments. Anyone that has a pulse on the USG’s security posture knows exactly what’s going on here. At any moment, the CCP can press their finger on the scale of public opinion, manipulating 150 million Americans at once. We already saw how Facebook, Google, and Twitter royally fvcked the last election cycle, incited violence across the country, and divided us during COVID... that was a coordinated effort between domestic tech companies and government agencies (fact, not opinion). Imagine what's possible when a foreign country enters the chat, especially when public trust in institutions is at an all-time low. Roughly 50% of the American population is using TikTok. Folks ought to chew on that thought for a moment.
- WillPostForFood 4y agovirtually everything on your phone and every device in your LAN it scans and collecte data If this was true you'd be right, but it is mostly fear mongering and incorrect. It is just a typical app, running in a sandbox, collecting the data you give it permission to collect.
- _8j50 4y ago[flagged]
- cscurmudgeon 4y ago1. It is not about privacy. 2. It is not about data collection. 3. It is about an enemy govt. having access to US population's data. #3 is a valid thing and the US govt should act on it. This is the same kind of logic that people spout to justify Chinese police stations in the US (The US has police stations in the US why can't China have Chinese police stations in the US? The answer to Chinese police on US soil is not a blanket restriction on all police.)
- throwawaymaths 4y agoTechnically china is not considered to be an enemy state. It would be really hard to justify that, unless you had some evidence (which must exist somewhere) of Chinese military officials labeling the US as an enemy state and enacting a reciprocity law (which afaict does not exist currently).
- libraryatnight 4y agoI don't like tiktok, but I don't like banning things either so I'm not sure what to do there, but my personal tin-foil hat concerns with it are less about the user data, and more about the ability to drip content amenable to their views as needed to a fairly addicted base. We know troll factories interfere online to keep people angry and support them in believing their worst ideas, why wouldn't the CCP leverage Tik Tok for the same? Anyway, I'm sad that the Tik Tok issue is being discussed like the only danger is the CCP having access to our stupid videos or the same data the other social media giants have (But what about Google and Facebook!? Well they suck too, let's discuss them after we sort this, or legislate to fix the lot all at once)
- deepserket 4y agoTikTok is a threat to established socials so they lobbied to ban it. The fact that is Chinese is a huge help thanks to the anti China sentiment being fueled for the past few years.
- granzymes 4y agoThe concerning part is a foreign government with whom we have a quasi-antagonistic relationship being able to access detailed information on US citizens. Imagine you work at Goldman Sachs, along with 50,000 other people. Like a lot of your colleagues, you use TikTok. You often open the app at work. Maybe you have something embarrassing in your search history. China uses location data, wifi matching, or even a list of names to figure out that you work at Goldman and they know you might be susceptible to blackmail. And then they get you to check in some malicious code that damages the financial sector. That's why the US is going to ban TikTok. It's also why the US forced the sale of Grindr.
- nonethewiser 4y ago> The concerning part is a foreign government with whom we have a quasi-antagonistic relationship being able to access detailed information on US citizens. And before we argue about whether or not Tik-tok can access this data, consider that we can be certain that they can't access it if they're banned. There is no obligation to prove that China is exploiting the US in order to justify a ban of Tik-tok.
- granzymes 4y agoThere is no question on whether China can access TikTok data. China has total control as long as TikTok is owned by ByteDance and the executives of ByteDance are physically located in China. No laws necessary. Give us the data or you disappear for a year.
- nonethewiser 4y agoIt's as simple as you say. By virtue of Chinese law we must assume they have access. but it's not even necessary to prove. Simply not being in the US's interests is good enough reason.
- worrycue 4y agoPersonally I’m more worried that TikTok can be used to manipulate public option the way FaceBook was used by Cambridge Analytics.
- nonethewiser 4y agoBut are you a reasonable person? And does your opinion even matter to anyone but yourself? That you're not convinced seems of no consequence to anyone here. Tik-tok is not in the US's interests. I agree that social media is toxic in general. I would argue Tik-tok is even more so (by means of their algorithm and short attention span videos). But that's besides the point. It offer's China a potential strategic advantage. There doesn't really need to be any more reason that that.