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The rest of the world should use this precedent to ban Instagram, Twitter and Facebook - they are no less harmful. Possibly YouTube and US based search engines,

by ein0p 3y ago

The rest of the world should use this precedent to ban Instagram, Twitter and Facebook - they are no less harmful. Possibly YouTube and US based search engines, too. All of these services are not only prone to algorithmic manipulation, they actually are being manipulated to advance the preferred narratives, and suppress the "undesirable" ones. What is preferred and what is undesirable is decided in the US, sometimes with the "help" of US government (see e.g. the Twitter Files and other similar leaks).

testrun 3y ago
Well China set the precedent, they did ban Google etc in China. India banned TikTok too. Will have to see how all of this will pan out.
- quyleanh 3y ago
  No, China didn’t ban Google or Facebook… China wants these companies play its rules, and these companies choose to not play. It’s not a ban. Look at many Europe companies and Microsoft.
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    How is that fundamentally different from a ban? You could phrase it thus: "Here are our rules we want you to follow. If you choose not to, you are banned from operating in our country" "We cannot follow your rules because those rules are unacceptable to us / would undermine our business model / would compromise our position in other countries we care about more / insert other reason here" "Then you are banned"
    - quyleanh 3y ago
      A ban means when you operate in a country, you violate their rule, or whatever they call rule, then you are banned. In this case, you haven’t operated in this country, the government of this country tells you that if you want to operate, you have to follow rule a, rule b… Then you choose to not follow these rules, and quit. These are different. Another example is you are operating in a country and not violating any rule from the very beginning. One day when you are strong enough and the government of this country feels you’re threaten. Then they tells you that you have to sell your branch in their country, if not you will be banned. Now you get it?
  - khuey 3y ago
    Right, which is why the US Congress is looking to pass a rule that says "don't be beholden to the Communist Party". Then Chinese companies can either choose to play or leave.
    - quyleanh 3y ago
      No one is beholden to anyone in this war. With this kind of situation, a "threaten" company has no choice but to take the less bad option. And people will not understand the real reason or what actually threatening. The ridiculous is US was always the freedom symbol for everything. I wonder if such kind of freedom only exists when US is the strongest one and others are far behind? But it's understandable that the US election day is coming.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Balkanized social media networks.
  - porphyra 3y ago
    It's a tragedy for sharing human knowledge. Say what you want about China, but there's a huge amount of amazing stuff there that the Western world just doesn't know about. Art, architecture, science, technology, etc. Think about how much human knowledge in Discord servers is hidden from search engines --- in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc.
    - imiric 3y ago
      > in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc. I wouldn't refer to highly censored information, disinformation, and discourse controlled by the CCP as "knowledge". Similarly for western social media. While they're not directly controlled by governments, each platform has its own biases and algorithms that enforce their values and beliefs on the information hosted on their servers. These are not public squares that protect "freedom of speech", regardless of what they may claim. The knowledge found on these sites is of minimal value, and most of it is drowned by the noise produced by the vast majority of their users and bots.
      - porphyra 3y ago
        What??? there's tons of valid information there about all sorts of topics not even remotely related to political stuff that would get censored. There's food, technology, science, whatever. I mean sure there's noise in the form of memes like all social media sites, but calling it "minimal value" is pretty extreme. To take one example, I use Xiaohongshu to read about camera lenses. There's a lot of good information that's not available on Western platforms (optical simulations, anecdotes about rare lenses, etc).
        imiric 3y ago
        Perhaps "minimal value" is wrongly phrased. After all, if you find great value in these sites, I can't contradict your experience. My point is that most content posted on these platforms is heavily modified to game and appease the algorithms that drive engagement. So you never really know if something is factual and honest. Add to that the fact that these platforms promote content that is actively harmful to its users, and to society as a whole, and I doubt whether whatever valuable information is on them is really worth searching for and consuming. Chances are that you would be able to find the same information elsewhere, without risking your sanity. That said, I do have an extremely negative view of all social media, and actively avoid it, so I concede that I may be missing out. :)
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  How easy is the Indian TikTok ban to circumvent?
  - execat 3y ago
    Instagram reels have completely replaced Tiktok. No one around me misses Tiktok.
  - contravariant 3y ago
    For an app that relies on network effect I'd imagine 'just hard enough'.
  - addicted 3y ago
    TikTok doesn’t exist in India essentially. And no one misses it. It’s as pointless and substitutable as any other social network today.
  - fakedang 3y ago
    Replaced by Reels basically.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > China set the precedent, they did ban Google etc in China. India banned TikTok too And to clarify, those were bans. This is not. TikTok just needs to be sold to a non-foreign adversary country.
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    >And to clarify, those were bans. This is not. TikTok just needs to be sold to a non-foreign adversary country. If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place This bill makes that explicit. TikTok doesn't have to be sold to an American. It could be sold to any of the above, and it would comply with the proposed law.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - snehk 3y ago
    To clarify, those were not bans. They were decisions by companies not to follow the laws that every other company in that country has to follow as well.
  - foverzar 3y ago
    Wait, didn't that already happen during Trumps presidency.
- ein0p 3y ago
  I’m not referring to China, that case was settled long time ago. I’m talking about Europe and the rest of Asia, South America, Canada. If you think about it, allowing a foreign state unfettered influence over public opinion (as well as near total internet surveillance) is an utterly insane thing to do.
- probably_satan 3y ago
  MTG is bananas but she's right, why start at tiktok when there are battalions of military aged Chinese males crossing the border through Mexico, scores of Chinese tech companies operating in the US legally, and companies/politicians (like Microsoft and the Clintons) who sold America out to China decades ago. Tiktok ban is almost superficial
melling 3y ago
But none of that has to do with the reason it’s being banned, at least according to the article
kcb 3y ago
Yea, China should ban US social media in retaliation...
- yumraj 3y ago
  What’s remaining? I think it’s all already banned..
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Is HN banned in China yet? I used to spend a lot of time on HN on the taxi home from work when I was living in Beijing. I’m guessing now even Reddit is blocked, HN is possibly blocked, there wouldn’t be much to kill time on without a VPN.
    - number_man 3y ago
      There are plenty of sites to test this, and yes HN is blocked.
hakdbha 3y ago
[dead]
khuey 3y ago
This is why the US government pushing a national security angle to this is idiotic. They should have made a simple trade reciprocity argument: essentially every non-Chinese social network or communication app is blocked in China, and until that changes TikTok wouldn't be allowed to operate in the US. Simple, impossible to argue with, and doesn't blow back on any US companies.
- addicted 3y ago
  When the concern is national security why would they push a trade reciprocity argument? You do know that Biden cannot just lie and get away with it right? Unlike in authoritarian countries, nearly all American records will be unsealed within a single generation. Further, the press usually gets the wind of stuff being hidden. That doesn’t stop the government from trying to hide stuff and they often succeed, but why would they take a chance on something like this which gives them an extremely tiny benefit at best.
  - ein0p 3y ago
    He literally lies nearly every time he speaks and doesn’t care if something will be “uncovered”, like any other US president before him. Bush lied about Afghanistan and Iraq. Zero consequences. Obama lied about Syria and Libya - zero consequences.
- ein0p 3y ago
  It’s absolutely not idiotic. What’s idiotic is that so few other countries do not see national security threats from US based social media companies
sebzim4500 3y ago
A nation state doesn't need precedent to ban Instagram, they could just do it. Problem is they would lose the next election because people will think it's stupid.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  They do need precedent. Any other country if they did just ban US social media like that would probably find itself in a trade war. Not even China or Russia just went ahead and banned US tech companies, at most they asked for equal oversight to domestic companies.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Any other country if they did just ban US social media like that would probably find itself in a trade war Probably not. There is enough frustration with the tech giants across the political spectrum that consolidating votes for a retaliation wouldn't happen. > Not even China or Russia just went ahead and banned US tech companies China banned Google and Facebook years ago. And Russia? "In March 2022, Russia criminalized spreading 'misinformation' against its war with Ukraine. TikTok then banned any new uploads and only allowed old videos that were uploaded within Russia" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      Technically, the executive can retaliate, including through the WTO. No need for Congress, that would be only necessary once it escalates, and then it wouldn't be a big tech only issue anywhere. Beyond that, there would probably be retaliation next Congress anyways. China did not ban Google and Facebook. They both had the opportunity to comply with extremely restrictive local laws and both decided not to bother (especially Facebook for which it would likely have been too expensive).It offered both to obey the same laws and controls as local companies, and they refused. Famously, Google had Project Dragonfly to make their own TikTok/Douyin split, until political and employee pressure stopped that. This is very much precedented (and is done by many more countries for many more industries), in a way that banning TikTok just isn't.
gamepsys 3y ago
Biden isn't setting an international precedent here. He isn't even setting a US precedent. * The US shut down Napster, and a large number of other web services over time. * The new Utah age verification laws has essentially forced many websites to stop severing traffic to them. * China has banned twitter, facebook, google, etc. * India has banned tiktok * Iran has banned Twitter and Facebook. * North Korea operates on a whitelist of websites, and western social media isn't on the list.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
I guess you haven’t been to China before.
zer0zzz 3y ago
Why stop there? Why don’t you suggest banning Google, WhatsApp, all news sites generally, and more? afaict the reasoning for banning TikTok kinda makes sense for getting it off of the devices of government employees. The rest seems pretty overblown and silly to me.
- ein0p 3y ago
  Precisely what’s going to happen eventually. I mention that towards the end of my post.
api 3y ago
I call social media “tobacco companies of the mind.” All of it is toxic. All of it is manipulative. It’s all designed to addict you (“maximizing engagement” is code for addiction) to feed you ads and propaganda. It destroys relationships, ruins people’s attention spans, and eats people’s time. It’d also the main driver of political hyper-polarization because that’s what maximizes engagement. In the end it leaves nothing to show for itself. Books, movies, even radio and TV leave behind a cultural legacy. Social media leaves nothing because there is nothing worth saving. It’s barely even worthy of being called media. I’ve watched it evolve since MySpace and over time it has only become less intelligent, more polarizing, less actually social, and more addicting. Burn it all down. Edit: TikTok seems like it’s currently the pinnacle of hyper-addictive trash. I predict the next iteration beyond TikTok will drop the pretense of social entirely and just use AI to generate personalized streams of addictive filler. It’ll be the mental equivalent of the tub or “Flaturin” the idiots eat on Idiocracy. Just addictive vapor to act as a medium for ad delivery. YouTube is kinda already heading this way.
SamvitJ 3y ago
Why do you think banning search engines would be a net positive for society?

by ein0p 3y ago

testrun 3y ago

Well China set the precedent, they did ban Google etc in China. India banned TikTok too. Will have to see how all of this will pan out.

quyleanh 3y ago
No, China didn’t ban Google or Facebook… China wants these companies play its rules, and these companies choose to not play. It’s not a ban. Look at many Europe companies and Microsoft.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  How is that fundamentally different from a ban? You could phrase it thus: "Here are our rules we want you to follow. If you choose not to, you are banned from operating in our country" "We cannot follow your rules because those rules are unacceptable to us / would undermine our business model / would compromise our position in other countries we care about more / insert other reason here" "Then you are banned"
  - quyleanh 3y ago
    A ban means when you operate in a country, you violate their rule, or whatever they call rule, then you are banned. In this case, you haven’t operated in this country, the government of this country tells you that if you want to operate, you have to follow rule a, rule b… Then you choose to not follow these rules, and quit. These are different. Another example is you are operating in a country and not violating any rule from the very beginning. One day when you are strong enough and the government of this country feels you’re threaten. Then they tells you that you have to sell your branch in their country, if not you will be banned. Now you get it?
- khuey 3y ago
  Right, which is why the US Congress is looking to pass a rule that says "don't be beholden to the Communist Party". Then Chinese companies can either choose to play or leave.
  - quyleanh 3y ago
    No one is beholden to anyone in this war. With this kind of situation, a "threaten" company has no choice but to take the less bad option. And people will not understand the real reason or what actually threatening. The ridiculous is US was always the freedom symbol for everything. I wonder if such kind of freedom only exists when US is the strongest one and others are far behind? But it's understandable that the US election day is coming.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
Balkanized social media networks.
- porphyra 3y ago
  It's a tragedy for sharing human knowledge. Say what you want about China, but there's a huge amount of amazing stuff there that the Western world just doesn't know about. Art, architecture, science, technology, etc. Think about how much human knowledge in Discord servers is hidden from search engines --- in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc.
  - imiric 3y ago
    > in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc. I wouldn't refer to highly censored information, disinformation, and discourse controlled by the CCP as "knowledge". Similarly for western social media. While they're not directly controlled by governments, each platform has its own biases and algorithms that enforce their values and beliefs on the information hosted on their servers. These are not public squares that protect "freedom of speech", regardless of what they may claim. The knowledge found on these sites is of minimal value, and most of it is drowned by the noise produced by the vast majority of their users and bots.
    - porphyra 3y ago
      What??? there's tons of valid information there about all sorts of topics not even remotely related to political stuff that would get censored. There's food, technology, science, whatever. I mean sure there's noise in the form of memes like all social media sites, but calling it "minimal value" is pretty extreme. To take one example, I use Xiaohongshu to read about camera lenses. There's a lot of good information that's not available on Western platforms (optical simulations, anecdotes about rare lenses, etc).
      - imiric 3y ago
        Perhaps "minimal value" is wrongly phrased. After all, if you find great value in these sites, I can't contradict your experience. My point is that most content posted on these platforms is heavily modified to game and appease the algorithms that drive engagement. So you never really know if something is factual and honest. Add to that the fact that these platforms promote content that is actively harmful to its users, and to society as a whole, and I doubt whether whatever valuable information is on them is really worth searching for and consuming. Chances are that you would be able to find the same information elsewhere, without risking your sanity. That said, I do have an extremely negative view of all social media, and actively avoid it, so I concede that I may be missing out. :)
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
How easy is the Indian TikTok ban to circumvent?
- execat 3y ago
  Instagram reels have completely replaced Tiktok. No one around me misses Tiktok.
- contravariant 3y ago
  For an app that relies on network effect I'd imagine 'just hard enough'.
- addicted 3y ago
  TikTok doesn’t exist in India essentially. And no one misses it. It’s as pointless and substitutable as any other social network today.
- fakedang 3y ago
  Replaced by Reels basically.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> China set the precedent, they did ban Google etc in China. India banned TikTok too And to clarify, those were bans. This is not. TikTok just needs to be sold to a non-foreign adversary country.
- TMWNN 3y ago
  >And to clarify, those were bans. This is not. TikTok just needs to be sold to a non-foreign adversary country. If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place This bill makes that explicit. TikTok doesn't have to be sold to an American. It could be sold to any of the above, and it would comply with the proposed law.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- snehk 3y ago
  To clarify, those were not bans. They were decisions by companies not to follow the laws that every other company in that country has to follow as well.
- foverzar 3y ago
  Wait, didn't that already happen during Trumps presidency.
ein0p 3y ago
I’m not referring to China, that case was settled long time ago. I’m talking about Europe and the rest of Asia, South America, Canada. If you think about it, allowing a foreign state unfettered influence over public opinion (as well as near total internet surveillance) is an utterly insane thing to do.
probably_satan 3y ago
MTG is bananas but she's right, why start at tiktok when there are battalions of military aged Chinese males crossing the border through Mexico, scores of Chinese tech companies operating in the US legally, and companies/politicians (like Microsoft and the Clintons) who sold America out to China decades ago. Tiktok ban is almost superficial

melling 3y ago

But none of that has to do with the reason it’s being banned, at least according to the article

kcb 3y ago

Yea, China should ban US social media in retaliation...

yumraj 3y ago
What’s remaining? I think it’s all already banned..
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Is HN banned in China yet? I used to spend a lot of time on HN on the taxi home from work when I was living in Beijing. I’m guessing now even Reddit is blocked, HN is possibly blocked, there wouldn’t be much to kill time on without a VPN.
  - number_man 3y ago
    There are plenty of sites to test this, and yes HN is blocked.

hakdbha 3y ago

[dead]

khuey 3y ago

This is why the US government pushing a national security angle to this is idiotic. They should have made a simple trade reciprocity argument: essentially every non-Chinese social network or communication app is blocked in China, and until that changes TikTok wouldn't be allowed to operate in the US. Simple, impossible to argue with, and doesn't blow back on any US companies.

addicted 3y ago
When the concern is national security why would they push a trade reciprocity argument? You do know that Biden cannot just lie and get away with it right? Unlike in authoritarian countries, nearly all American records will be unsealed within a single generation. Further, the press usually gets the wind of stuff being hidden. That doesn’t stop the government from trying to hide stuff and they often succeed, but why would they take a chance on something like this which gives them an extremely tiny benefit at best.
- ein0p 3y ago
  He literally lies nearly every time he speaks and doesn’t care if something will be “uncovered”, like any other US president before him. Bush lied about Afghanistan and Iraq. Zero consequences. Obama lied about Syria and Libya - zero consequences.
ein0p 3y ago
It’s absolutely not idiotic. What’s idiotic is that so few other countries do not see national security threats from US based social media companies

sebzim4500 3y ago

A nation state doesn't need precedent to ban Instagram, they could just do it. Problem is they would lose the next election because people will think it's stupid.

sudosysgen 3y ago
They do need precedent. Any other country if they did just ban US social media like that would probably find itself in a trade war. Not even China or Russia just went ahead and banned US tech companies, at most they asked for equal oversight to domestic companies.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Any other country if they did just ban US social media like that would probably find itself in a trade war Probably not. There is enough frustration with the tech giants across the political spectrum that consolidating votes for a retaliation wouldn't happen. > Not even China or Russia just went ahead and banned US tech companies China banned Google and Facebook years ago. And Russia? "In March 2022, Russia criminalized spreading 'misinformation' against its war with Ukraine. TikTok then banned any new uploads and only allowed old videos that were uploaded within Russia" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    Technically, the executive can retaliate, including through the WTO. No need for Congress, that would be only necessary once it escalates, and then it wouldn't be a big tech only issue anywhere. Beyond that, there would probably be retaliation next Congress anyways. China did not ban Google and Facebook. They both had the opportunity to comply with extremely restrictive local laws and both decided not to bother (especially Facebook for which it would likely have been too expensive).It offered both to obey the same laws and controls as local companies, and they refused. Famously, Google had Project Dragonfly to make their own TikTok/Douyin split, until political and employee pressure stopped that. This is very much precedented (and is done by many more countries for many more industries), in a way that banning TikTok just isn't.

gamepsys 3y ago

Biden isn't setting an international precedent here. He isn't even setting a US precedent. * The US shut down Napster, and a large number of other web services over time. * The new Utah age verification laws has essentially forced many websites to stop severing traffic to them. * China has banned twitter, facebook, google, etc. * India has banned tiktok * Iran has banned Twitter and Facebook. * North Korea operates on a whitelist of websites, and western social media isn't on the list.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

I guess you haven’t been to China before.

zer0zzz 3y ago

Why stop there? Why don’t you suggest banning Google, WhatsApp, all news sites generally, and more? afaict the reasoning for banning TikTok kinda makes sense for getting it off of the devices of government employees. The rest seems pretty overblown and silly to me.

ein0p 3y ago
Precisely what’s going to happen eventually. I mention that towards the end of my post.

api 3y ago

I call social media “tobacco companies of the mind.” All of it is toxic. All of it is manipulative. It’s all designed to addict you (“maximizing engagement” is code for addiction) to feed you ads and propaganda. It destroys relationships, ruins people’s attention spans, and eats people’s time. It’d also the main driver of political hyper-polarization because that’s what maximizes engagement. In the end it leaves nothing to show for itself. Books, movies, even radio and TV leave behind a cultural legacy. Social media leaves nothing because there is nothing worth saving. It’s barely even worthy of being called media. I’ve watched it evolve since MySpace and over time it has only become less intelligent, more polarizing, less actually social, and more addicting. Burn it all down. Edit: TikTok seems like it’s currently the pinnacle of hyper-addictive trash. I predict the next iteration beyond TikTok will drop the pretense of social entirely and just use AI to generate personalized streams of addictive filler. It’ll be the mental equivalent of the tub or “Flaturin” the idiots eat on Idiocracy. Just addictive vapor to act as a medium for ad delivery. YouTube is kinda already heading this way.

SamvitJ 3y ago

Why do you think banning search engines would be a net positive for society?