29 ms·

Lawmakers shift gears on TikTok ban

82 points by c420 3y ago

mistermann 3y ago
A big problem here is that when the government makes a classic public relations play like they did the first time around, they get utterly demolished by American TikTokers posting their propaganda on TikTok and brutally mocking it, and unlike all other platforms TikTok doesn't support easy censorship of such responses. I think if they were smart they'd be more low key and focus on censoring posts (which are now stored in the US I believe?), trying to take TikTok down seems like it will continue to blow up in their face.
- logicchains 3y ago
  TikTok already aggressively censors anything critical of the US establishment; it's much easier to find right-wing content on Facebook and X now than on TikTok.
mindslight 3y ago
Any bets on how many different "attempts" will try to single out TikTok as some exceptional problem, instead of addressing any of the longstanding general issues of data privacy, unaccountable editorialization algorithms, anticompetitive bundling of software+services+hosting, etc? The obvious approach is to create universal rules that hold all tech companies accountable, yet these politicians want to stick their fingers in their ears and continue pretending unaccountable centralization is fine as long as it's only nominally US-based companies amassing such power.
Eumenes 3y ago
At first, I was all for banning Tiktok, but I'm come around - no social media giant has the users or general public in mind, whether their HQ is in the US or China. Big tech in the US is just upset they didn't come up with Tiktok first and in turn, the intelligence agencies are upset they can't snoop as much as they'd like. This turns off politicians because they're 1) tight with big tech 2) support the federal intelligence apparatus like ravenous dogs 3) its easy to join the anti China bandwagon ... if anything, popular internet connected services being ran from other countries actually acts as a nice buffer from domestic foolery.
- cptcobalt 3y ago
  Strong agree here. I wish there were significant & substantive items in the reporting that motivated the desire behind the ban (in a manner that differs significantly from what US social giants definitely already do), but it's too abstract and the motivations easily reduce to exactly what you say.
- throwaway63323 3y ago
  >Big tech in the US is just upset they didn't come up with Tiktok first They did come up with it first, it was called Vine. I would even go as far as calling TikTok a Vine clone.
  - cma 3y ago
    It was more focused on lip syncing, from their purchase of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly
  - macintosh-hd 3y ago
    Tik tok is only a vine clone if Reddit is a Twitter clone. They operate completely differently and had very different starting points.
    - Golden_Wind123 3y ago
      Comparing Reddit to Twitter is bad. But saying TikTok is a vine Clone like Reddit is a Digg clone is a pretty good analogy though.
      - macintosh-hd 3y ago
        Tik tok and vine have and had nothing of substance alike.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    Vine was pretty limited and never really evolved much beyond its earliest implementation. TikTok has powerful editing, remixing, and a very good recommendation engine that Vine never had.
coldpie 3y ago
> "There are real national security risks associated with TikTok, but it’s also an app 150 million Americans use," said Peter Harrell, who served on Biden’s National Security Council until last fall. It would be nice if anyone explained what those risks are, and why they don't apply to Facebook et al. Banning it on government devices makes sense, but I don't understand why they're trying to ban individuals from using it. Edit to clarify: I don't have strong feelings one way or the other on the ban. I'd like to understand it better because it feels weird to me to specifically single this one app out, without a clear explanation for why the bad behavior can't be prevented in a more general way.
- chankstein38 3y ago
  The implications, as far as I've understood, is that the Chinese government has access and, theoretically, could be slurping the information that TikTok collects which is seemingly more than some others collect. I'm not purporting to know this is happening but I believe this is the reason for the assertion.
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    Looking at the content there... i don't think they are getting anything good...
    - jayveeone 3y ago
      What content are you looking at? I see amazing artists on there every time I open the app.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      TikTok is the worst "brain junk food" platform I've seen. Sometimes people forward me videos from TikTok that have some horizontal video at the top (the one you are supposed to watch, apparently?), and then completely unrelated video game footage as the vertical "background". I don't know if it is intended to hook into some sort of attention hack where they abuse the fact that humans are stimulated by movement and color, so a video with a game background is more appealing/attractive than one without, but it's too much stimulus for me to enjoy it. I try to avoid brain junk food most of the time.
boh 3y ago
The WSJ had an interesting feature on the efforts by US investors (particularly Jeff Yass) on lobbying to keep Tik Tok in the US: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/jeff-yass-tiktok-bytedance-ban-congress-15a41ec4 https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/jeff-yass-tiktok-bytedan...
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
The way I see it is this: If war were to break out between the US and China right now, what could they do with tiktok? I think they could censor victories and raise losses or fabricated stories, sow doubt at a minimum. Make dead american soldiers trend. Whether we like it or not, most teens get news from tiktok. At a maximum they could brick 150 million phones, use them to ddos, use them to hack/disrupt, etc. steal bank information that is also on your phone. In a war these things would not be off limits. If I were in their shoes that's what I'd do.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  They could data-mine for the kids of generals and colonels, see when daddy (or mommy) wasn't home until 2am, and infer that something big's happening. They could see on some nobody's kid that lives one town over from the base that traffic has been heavier or lighter at a certain date, just from watching the kid dance down the sidewalk. Tiktok's like having a spy camera that floats around randomly, taking pictures. 99% of the time those pictures are worthless... in the wrong place, at the wrong time, etc. But once in awhile they have gold. I still freak out about the Japanese pop star whose stalker managed to see the reflection in her high-res eye photo that had a street sign, found her home address from it. In a war situation, would China ever allow anyone in the US to see a photo of anything inside their country? Would they even allow those to be taken for viewing by other Chinese (for fear it'd somehow leak out to us)?
  - croes 3y ago
    And all of a sudden privacy and data protection are important. Maybe the USA and China should sign a data protection agreement and call it Safe Harbor or so.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      The US government wanting privacy but only from foreign nations is a perfectly logical and consistent policy from a government that thinks it has a right to it's citizen's data but also understands that privacy is valuable. It's no different from a US court having a right to sign a warrant for your data while China has no right to obtain a US citizen's data through a chinese equivalent of a warrant.
lukev 3y ago
I haven't heard a good explanation yet for whether this is even legal. It seems like a textbook example of an unconstitutional bill of attainder. You'd have to ban TikTok based on something it does, and any such law would impact a lot of other companies too. Or I guess you could ban all Chinese software using trade laws, but that has even bigger ramifications.
- ejlxsh 3y ago
  Can’t you ban an app based on purpose, “they’re using the app to spy on us”, and then case law applies it on an app by app basis?
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    Surely this would mostly apply to non-chinese companies, no? This would wipe the market out.
    - ac54321 3y ago
      OK. How about “they’re using the app to spy on us for a Foreign Hostile Government”
      - colordrops 3y ago
        Is "Foreign Hostile Government" an official legal distinction? I thought the US was still on good terms with China as a trade partner.
        cjbgkagh 3y ago
        It’s a weird duality with import taxes acting as a middle ground. It seems the belief that a conflict with China is inevitable is becoming more pervasive. So much of the US economy relies on reselling Chinese goods that to stop trading completely would be calamitous. I think the idea is to keep trading right up until the war starts. I’ve already stocked up on goods and materials that are only available from China as I include myself as one of those who believe a great power conflict is coming.
bloomingeek 3y ago
All the comments so far are great, and for me, understandable. What gets me is why China would poke the US government for all these months? What is it that our government isn't telling us? Is it an advantage for China to alienate one of the largest economies on Earth? Does China realize that to wake up the average American "bear" is a really bad idea, especially in these crazy political times?!?
henriquez 3y ago
Civil liberties group hated the RESTRICT Act because it basically gives the executive branch unilateral authority to censor web sites, which is why it stalled despite “support from senior leaders in both parties.” The RESTRICT Act sounds like, and actually is censorship. That’s why the Biden admin is hard at work repackaging it as the HAPPY Act.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Many on HN seem to have "TikTok Derangement Syndrome". If this was any other app, I think many people here would be up in arms about government restrictions on what apps they can install.
pbjtime 3y ago
Both parties agree because neither party can control the message of the platform.
RyEgswuCsn 3y ago
I don't think it is just about TikTok being capable of spying on foreign users; my opinion is that it is more about TikTok's propaganda potential, i.e. how it can be used to manipulate narratives in the most subtle way against U.S.'s national interest. Imagine the case where the U.S. government would like the (western) world to form certain sentiments on the current regional conflicts that are aligned with its own interests, and then imagine how TikTok's recommendations could be deliberately designed to compromise such alignment...
- newsclues 3y ago
  Like how Twitter was used?
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    Why past tense?
    - rchaud 3y ago
      Twitter isn't as universal as it used to be. Even people who didn't have a Twitter account would see Twitter embeds on every news page for the past decade. That's gone down a lot over the past year.
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        I was initially happy with Musk’s acquisition, both because watching a dumpster fire is entertaining and because he actually made it work a lot better for logged-out use, very soon after the purchase. Changes in the last few weeks have flipped that around and made it terrible if you’re logged out. Friends (with accounts) have started sharing screenshots rather than links, because the links strip all context for a post if you visit them while logged out. Logged out search no longer works. Account pages have seemingly insane post ordering putting posts from months or years ago at the top, and newer posts often no-where. Whole site’s now entirely useless without an account.
- 3y ago
calibas 3y ago
The problem with the RESTRICT act isn't that it punishes China or bans TikTok, the problem is the harsh penalties (up to $1 million USD and 20 years in prison) for US citizens who try to bypass government censorship. Even calling it the "TikTok ban" is rather misleading.
- paganel 3y ago
  > (up to $1 million USD and 20 years in prison) Is that really on the table? If yes, then it's bat-s*it insane, it's maybe rude to call it that but there's no better word to describe it. To put it in perspective, throughout the '80s people were not getting sent to 20 years in prison for listening to Radio Free Europe here in Eastern Europe. There were still some political prisoners left, put in prison under different pretexts, but they had not gotten in there only for listening to Radio Free Europe.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >Is that really on the table? If yes, then it's bat-s*it insane, it's maybe rude to call it that but there's no better word to describe it. Not really. That might be the maximum sentence but the chance that a kid who's downloaded tiktok using a vpn of getting anywhere near that is near zero. See: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-eleventy-million-years/ https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
    - paganel 3y ago
      I know that because of Aaron's tragic destiny, but I find that even a plea-induced 6-months sentence (let's say) is too much a punishment for having TikTok installed on your phone.
      - dimmke 3y ago
        Uh yeah, I'd say even 1 day in jail or prison is too much of a punishment for having TikTok installed on your phone. This is fucking bonkers.
soylentcola 3y ago
Wisdom of any legislation aside, I'm curious how you can effectively "ban" a program or a website. It seems futile to ban the distribution of software, and while you can get ISPs to block access to an IP/range, there are easy ways around this. See also: torrents of unlicensed-everything and the use of mirrors, proxies, etc. to access the sites that index them. Not saying it wouldn't put a dent in use, but if all I had to do was get a copy of the installer I'd hardly consider that "banned". All sorts of software is technically illegal to distribute or acquire but it doesn't exactly seem to stop people who want it. In this case there wouldn't even be DRM to crack (like on a game or Photoshop or whatever).
- dylan604 3y ago
  Naturally, this is where Apple's walled garden comes to play. Ban the app from the walled garden, and the lack of ability of side loading apps becomes the greatest defense of national security. do your part America!!!
- gruez 3y ago
  Even a minor roadblock like a DNS ban would be enough to cripple the app, in terms of market share. Think about it, the target audience of the app is someone who wants to mindless scroll through short video clips. Do you think they're going to download tor browser, find the darknet site where you can get an unofficial copy, and jump through a dozen hoops to sideload that on their phone? No, they're just going to switch to instagram reels or youtube shorts.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  > how you can effectively "ban" a program or a website Two words: App. Store.
civilitty 3y ago
This is the text of the RESTRICT Act in case anyone was curious: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
petre 3y ago
They can start banning pre installed social media apps, including TikTok. My mom bought a new Samsung phone and the onboarding process automatically installed facebook and tiktok spyware plus candy crush as "recommended apps". What's next, pre installed gambling apps?
dopa42365 3y ago
Russia banned tiktok and instagram etc. in early 2022. Curious to hear about just how that improved everyone's lives. Maybe the "real national security risks" of funny dance or cat clips and pictures of your last meal were slightly exaggerated after all?
- aftbit 3y ago
  The national security risks are three-fold: 1. Anyone who puts an app on your phone can track your behavior, especially your coarse location, but additionally (for TikTok) the trends that you follow. This is actually a huge security risk (affecting basically all devices with any 3rd party apps) that is generally ignored. 2. TikTok allows a foreign government to choose which topics trend which allows them to influence the political and social discourse of other countries. 3. TikTok could be used as a botnet or for network surveillance with a presence on many different LANs. These problems are mostly not specific to TikTok, but are indeed true for all apps. TikTok just happens to be the most popular app that is developed and managed outside of the USA, making the US more paranoid about it.
unsere595 3y ago
[flagged]
kornhole 3y ago
Simply threatening to ban or impose other punishments on a platform can be enough to make it comply with demands of the state: That's a nice social media platform you got there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. As evidence that Tiktok has caved to censorship demands, Mondoweis.com was banned today from Tiktok with no reason given.

82 points by c420 3y ago

A big problem here is that when the government makes a classic public relations play like they did the first time around, they get utterly demolished by American TikTokers posting their propaganda on TikTok and brutally mocking it, and unlike all other platforms TikTok doesn't support easy censorship of such responses. I think if they were smart they'd be more low key and focus on censoring posts (which are now stored in the US I believe?), trying to take TikTok down seems like it will continue to blow up in their face.

logicchains 3y ago
TikTok already aggressively censors anything critical of the US establishment; it's much easier to find right-wing content on Facebook and X now than on TikTok.

mindslight 3y ago

Any bets on how many different "attempts" will try to single out TikTok as some exceptional problem, instead of addressing any of the longstanding general issues of data privacy, unaccountable editorialization algorithms, anticompetitive bundling of software+services+hosting, etc? The obvious approach is to create universal rules that hold all tech companies accountable, yet these politicians want to stick their fingers in their ears and continue pretending unaccountable centralization is fine as long as it's only nominally US-based companies amassing such power.

Eumenes 3y ago

At first, I was all for banning Tiktok, but I'm come around - no social media giant has the users or general public in mind, whether their HQ is in the US or China. Big tech in the US is just upset they didn't come up with Tiktok first and in turn, the intelligence agencies are upset they can't snoop as much as they'd like. This turns off politicians because they're 1) tight with big tech 2) support the federal intelligence apparatus like ravenous dogs 3) its easy to join the anti China bandwagon ... if anything, popular internet connected services being ran from other countries actually acts as a nice buffer from domestic foolery.

cptcobalt 3y ago
Strong agree here. I wish there were significant & substantive items in the reporting that motivated the desire behind the ban (in a manner that differs significantly from what US social giants definitely already do), but it's too abstract and the motivations easily reduce to exactly what you say.
throwaway63323 3y ago
>Big tech in the US is just upset they didn't come up with Tiktok first They did come up with it first, it was called Vine. I would even go as far as calling TikTok a Vine clone.
- cma 3y ago
  It was more focused on lip syncing, from their purchase of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly
- macintosh-hd 3y ago
  Tik tok is only a vine clone if Reddit is a Twitter clone. They operate completely differently and had very different starting points.
  - Golden_Wind123 3y ago
    Comparing Reddit to Twitter is bad. But saying TikTok is a vine Clone like Reddit is a Digg clone is a pretty good analogy though.
    - macintosh-hd 3y ago
      Tik tok and vine have and had nothing of substance alike.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Vine was pretty limited and never really evolved much beyond its earliest implementation. TikTok has powerful editing, remixing, and a very good recommendation engine that Vine never had.

coldpie 3y ago

> "There are real national security risks associated with TikTok, but it’s also an app 150 million Americans use," said Peter Harrell, who served on Biden’s National Security Council until last fall. It would be nice if anyone explained what those risks are, and why they don't apply to Facebook et al. Banning it on government devices makes sense, but I don't understand why they're trying to ban individuals from using it. Edit to clarify: I don't have strong feelings one way or the other on the ban. I'd like to understand it better because it feels weird to me to specifically single this one app out, without a clear explanation for why the bad behavior can't be prevented in a more general way.

chankstein38 3y ago
The implications, as far as I've understood, is that the Chinese government has access and, theoretically, could be slurping the information that TikTok collects which is seemingly more than some others collect. I'm not purporting to know this is happening but I believe this is the reason for the assertion.
- lawlessone 3y ago
  Looking at the content there... i don't think they are getting anything good...
  - jayveeone 3y ago
    What content are you looking at? I see amazing artists on there every time I open the app.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    TikTok is the worst "brain junk food" platform I've seen. Sometimes people forward me videos from TikTok that have some horizontal video at the top (the one you are supposed to watch, apparently?), and then completely unrelated video game footage as the vertical "background". I don't know if it is intended to hook into some sort of attention hack where they abuse the fact that humans are stimulated by movement and color, so a video with a game background is more appealing/attractive than one without, but it's too much stimulus for me to enjoy it. I try to avoid brain junk food most of the time.

boh 3y ago

The WSJ had an interesting feature on the efforts by US investors (particularly Jeff Yass) on lobbying to keep Tik Tok in the US: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/jeff-yass-tiktok-bytedance-ban-congress-15a41ec4 https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/jeff-yass-tiktok-bytedan...

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

The way I see it is this: If war were to break out between the US and China right now, what could they do with tiktok? I think they could censor victories and raise losses or fabricated stories, sow doubt at a minimum. Make dead american soldiers trend. Whether we like it or not, most teens get news from tiktok. At a maximum they could brick 150 million phones, use them to ddos, use them to hack/disrupt, etc. steal bank information that is also on your phone. In a war these things would not be off limits. If I were in their shoes that's what I'd do.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
They could data-mine for the kids of generals and colonels, see when daddy (or mommy) wasn't home until 2am, and infer that something big's happening. They could see on some nobody's kid that lives one town over from the base that traffic has been heavier or lighter at a certain date, just from watching the kid dance down the sidewalk. Tiktok's like having a spy camera that floats around randomly, taking pictures. 99% of the time those pictures are worthless... in the wrong place, at the wrong time, etc. But once in awhile they have gold. I still freak out about the Japanese pop star whose stalker managed to see the reflection in her high-res eye photo that had a street sign, found her home address from it. In a war situation, would China ever allow anyone in the US to see a photo of anything inside their country? Would they even allow those to be taken for viewing by other Chinese (for fear it'd somehow leak out to us)?
- croes 3y ago
  And all of a sudden privacy and data protection are important. Maybe the USA and China should sign a data protection agreement and call it Safe Harbor or so.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    The US government wanting privacy but only from foreign nations is a perfectly logical and consistent policy from a government that thinks it has a right to it's citizen's data but also understands that privacy is valuable. It's no different from a US court having a right to sign a warrant for your data while China has no right to obtain a US citizen's data through a chinese equivalent of a warrant.

lukev 3y ago

I haven't heard a good explanation yet for whether this is even legal. It seems like a textbook example of an unconstitutional bill of attainder. You'd have to ban TikTok based on something it does, and any such law would impact a lot of other companies too. Or I guess you could ban all Chinese software using trade laws, but that has even bigger ramifications.

ejlxsh 3y ago
Can’t you ban an app based on purpose, “they’re using the app to spy on us”, and then case law applies it on an app by app basis?
- diogenes4 3y ago
  Surely this would mostly apply to non-chinese companies, no? This would wipe the market out.
  - ac54321 3y ago
    OK. How about “they’re using the app to spy on us for a Foreign Hostile Government”
    - colordrops 3y ago
      Is "Foreign Hostile Government" an official legal distinction? I thought the US was still on good terms with China as a trade partner.
      - cjbgkagh 3y ago
        It’s a weird duality with import taxes acting as a middle ground. It seems the belief that a conflict with China is inevitable is becoming more pervasive. So much of the US economy relies on reselling Chinese goods that to stop trading completely would be calamitous. I think the idea is to keep trading right up until the war starts. I’ve already stocked up on goods and materials that are only available from China as I include myself as one of those who believe a great power conflict is coming.

bloomingeek 3y ago

All the comments so far are great, and for me, understandable. What gets me is why China would poke the US government for all these months? What is it that our government isn't telling us? Is it an advantage for China to alienate one of the largest economies on Earth? Does China realize that to wake up the average American "bear" is a really bad idea, especially in these crazy political times?!?

henriquez 3y ago

Civil liberties group hated the RESTRICT Act because it basically gives the executive branch unilateral authority to censor web sites, which is why it stalled despite “support from senior leaders in both parties.” The RESTRICT Act sounds like, and actually is censorship. That’s why the Biden admin is hard at work repackaging it as the HAPPY Act.

AlexandrB 3y ago
Many on HN seem to have "TikTok Derangement Syndrome". If this was any other app, I think many people here would be up in arms about government restrictions on what apps they can install.

pbjtime 3y ago

Both parties agree because neither party can control the message of the platform.

RyEgswuCsn 3y ago

I don't think it is just about TikTok being capable of spying on foreign users; my opinion is that it is more about TikTok's propaganda potential, i.e. how it can be used to manipulate narratives in the most subtle way against U.S.'s national interest. Imagine the case where the U.S. government would like the (western) world to form certain sentiments on the current regional conflicts that are aligned with its own interests, and then imagine how TikTok's recommendations could be deliberately designed to compromise such alignment...

newsclues 3y ago
Like how Twitter was used?
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Why past tense?
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Twitter isn't as universal as it used to be. Even people who didn't have a Twitter account would see Twitter embeds on every news page for the past decade. That's gone down a lot over the past year.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      I was initially happy with Musk’s acquisition, both because watching a dumpster fire is entertaining and because he actually made it work a lot better for logged-out use, very soon after the purchase. Changes in the last few weeks have flipped that around and made it terrible if you’re logged out. Friends (with accounts) have started sharing screenshots rather than links, because the links strip all context for a post if you visit them while logged out. Logged out search no longer works. Account pages have seemingly insane post ordering putting posts from months or years ago at the top, and newer posts often no-where. Whole site’s now entirely useless without an account.
3y ago

calibas 3y ago

The problem with the RESTRICT act isn't that it punishes China or bans TikTok, the problem is the harsh penalties (up to $1 million USD and 20 years in prison) for US citizens who try to bypass government censorship. Even calling it the "TikTok ban" is rather misleading.

paganel 3y ago
> (up to $1 million USD and 20 years in prison) Is that really on the table? If yes, then it's bat-s*it insane, it's maybe rude to call it that but there's no better word to describe it. To put it in perspective, throughout the '80s people were not getting sent to 20 years in prison for listening to Radio Free Europe here in Eastern Europe. There were still some political prisoners left, put in prison under different pretexts, but they had not gotten in there only for listening to Radio Free Europe.
- gruez 3y ago
  >Is that really on the table? If yes, then it's bat-s*it insane, it's maybe rude to call it that but there's no better word to describe it. Not really. That might be the maximum sentence but the chance that a kid who's downloaded tiktok using a vpn of getting anywhere near that is near zero. See: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-eleventy-million-years/ https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
  - paganel 3y ago
    I know that because of Aaron's tragic destiny, but I find that even a plea-induced 6-months sentence (let's say) is too much a punishment for having TikTok installed on your phone.
    - dimmke 3y ago
      Uh yeah, I'd say even 1 day in jail or prison is too much of a punishment for having TikTok installed on your phone. This is fucking bonkers.

soylentcola 3y ago

Wisdom of any legislation aside, I'm curious how you can effectively "ban" a program or a website. It seems futile to ban the distribution of software, and while you can get ISPs to block access to an IP/range, there are easy ways around this. See also: torrents of unlicensed-everything and the use of mirrors, proxies, etc. to access the sites that index them. Not saying it wouldn't put a dent in use, but if all I had to do was get a copy of the installer I'd hardly consider that "banned". All sorts of software is technically illegal to distribute or acquire but it doesn't exactly seem to stop people who want it. In this case there wouldn't even be DRM to crack (like on a game or Photoshop or whatever).

dylan604 3y ago
Naturally, this is where Apple's walled garden comes to play. Ban the app from the walled garden, and the lack of ability of side loading apps becomes the greatest defense of national security. do your part America!!!
gruez 3y ago
Even a minor roadblock like a DNS ban would be enough to cripple the app, in terms of market share. Think about it, the target audience of the app is someone who wants to mindless scroll through short video clips. Do you think they're going to download tor browser, find the darknet site where you can get an unofficial copy, and jump through a dozen hoops to sideload that on their phone? No, they're just going to switch to instagram reels or youtube shorts.
paulddraper 3y ago
> how you can effectively "ban" a program or a website Two words: App. Store.

civilitty 3y ago

This is the text of the RESTRICT Act in case anyone was curious: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...

petre 3y ago

They can start banning pre installed social media apps, including TikTok. My mom bought a new Samsung phone and the onboarding process automatically installed facebook and tiktok spyware plus candy crush as "recommended apps". What's next, pre installed gambling apps?

dopa42365 3y ago

Russia banned tiktok and instagram etc. in early 2022. Curious to hear about just how that improved everyone's lives. Maybe the "real national security risks" of funny dance or cat clips and pictures of your last meal were slightly exaggerated after all?

aftbit 3y ago
The national security risks are three-fold: 1. Anyone who puts an app on your phone can track your behavior, especially your coarse location, but additionally (for TikTok) the trends that you follow. This is actually a huge security risk (affecting basically all devices with any 3rd party apps) that is generally ignored. 2. TikTok allows a foreign government to choose which topics trend which allows them to influence the political and social discourse of other countries. 3. TikTok could be used as a botnet or for network surveillance with a presence on many different LANs. These problems are mostly not specific to TikTok, but are indeed true for all apps. TikTok just happens to be the most popular app that is developed and managed outside of the USA, making the US more paranoid about it.

unsere595 3y ago

[flagged]

kornhole 3y ago

Simply threatening to ban or impose other punishments on a platform can be enough to make it comply with demands of the state: That's a nice social media platform you got there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. As evidence that Tiktok has caved to censorship demands, Mondoweis.com was banned today from Tiktok with no reason given.