13 ms·

For once I disagree with the EFF. This is a national sovereignty issue masquerading as a freedom issue.

r00fus 3y ago
In principle I agree with you, in practice it seems the only reason TikTok legislation is passing the House is because Israel thinks everyone on TikTok hates them (reality - most people in the US disagree with genocide).
- alephnerd 3y ago
  TikTok's change in ownership has been discussed for years. The current action occured when TikTok pushed users to call Congressional Members through anti-patterns within the app [0] Not everything is about Israel-Palestine smh. [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/tiktok-phone-calls-congress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/tiktok-phone-cal...
  - cj 3y ago
    The TikTok ban issue dates back to at least 2020. I vividly recall because I owned a ton of Fastly stock which cratered when the former administration was trying to ban TikTok, leading ByteDance to move away from Fastly as their CDN. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bytedance-pulls-most-tiktok-traffic-214127487.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bytedance-pulls-most-tiktok-t...
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Yep. There are a lot of low effort commenters on HN now. If you take a look at most of the commenters talking about Israel or Palestine on this thread, their creation date appears to be around 2020-2022.
      - op00to 3y ago
        unfortunately this particular commenter seems to have joined in 2011. not saying you're wrong about low effort commenters.
        alephnerd 3y ago
        Haha yea. Tbh I've grown tired of yelling to the wind. Every single time I mention this change I get downvoted to oblivion, yet it is very clearly happening.
        op00to 3y ago
        It happens everywhere. So many of my homes on the internet have turned to poop. Oh well, maybe I’ll read a book.
- kikokikokiko 3y ago
  To be fair, most of the world (and not only most of Americans) want both sides to lose. Israel is just an invader nation that used power and money to take ownership of land that belonged to another group of people, less than 80 years ago. And now, 3 generations later, the former owners of this land have so much anger and resentment towards the acts of violence and tyranny they suffered on the hands of those invaders, that they themselves became a group of despicable psychopaths. Gen Z simply has new avenues to get informed and to form their own opinion than the legacy media of the 20th century, and now it's hard to impose a narrative that dismisses how much blame does Israel deserves on this subject.
- Longlius 3y ago
  >reality - most people in the US disagree with genocide I'd like to see some sources for a majority of Americans even agreeing that it's a genocide in the first place.
neilv 3y ago
You might be right, but... If TikTok is a national sovereignty issue for the US, should a lot of other countries similarly be banning US tech companies? (Since even GDPR only scratches the surface of the power they're handing over.)
- nostromo 3y ago
  > should a lot of other countries similarly be banning US tech companies China already does for reasons similar to those that are in this bill.
- cj 3y ago
  Yes, if those countries believe US companies are using their platforms as a weapon against them or pose some other national threat.
  - nicce 3y ago
    Western countries are too dependent of the US and it is politically easier to ban China. As a result, the best approach would be set equal restrictions for data collection and privacy, including clear rules how algorithms can behave (or maybe drop them totally), to combat promoting specific content or censoring specific content.
    - cj 3y ago
      Good philosophy in theory, but it seems you would need the equivalent of United Nations to have some sort of globally enforced policies like that. Maybe technology is getting to a point where that needs to happen.
- jachee 3y ago
  The US government generally doesn’t hold a stake in US tech companies, nor direct influence over how they operate abroad.
  - nicce 3y ago
badrequest 3y ago
In what way does TikTok operating challenge U.S. sovereignty? This is 2003 all over again.
- User23 3y ago
  Just try imagining how, if you were the Chinese government, you might use Tik-Tok to influence and undermine American support for militarily defending Taiwan. This isn't hard it's obviously a powerful tool. Just how powerful remains to be seen.
  - Cheer2171 3y ago
    I agree that the US has maybe a short-term self-interest in banning TikTok if the Chinese started to do this. But it violates the first amendment and the rights of US citizens to access speech from the rest of the world. That is very bad in the long run. The US didn't ban Mein Kampf during World War II. In fact, I think the biggest threat to the US is the suspension of the first amendment because of the age old boogeyman of national security. Propaganda has always existed. The way to respond to bad speech is more speech. Banning it makes it forbidden and thus captivating, don't you know about the Streisand Effect? If the transmission of media is a threat to national sovereignty, if the fate of the country can be undermined with memes, then we have already lost. The US should disconnect itself from the global internet.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      The US had a censorship operation in WW2, the Nazis or the Empire of Japan didn't get to operate radio stations in the US during the war, and in the cold war the USSR didn't get TV and radio stations in the US either. In what conflict was giving an adversary a full attack surface for propanda etc. deemed the right approach?
      - Cheer2171 3y ago
        This is like the government telling Radio Shack and RCA that all shortwave radios sold must be programmed to tune out the frequencies of Japanese or USSR stations. Or that it is illegal to tune a shortwave radio to a Japanese station. The US had more a massive propaganda effort of their own during WWII, but yes we literally rounded up every person of Japanese descent and put them in camps, which should never happen again. Yes, there was a lot of really terrible censorship later in the Cold War like McCarthyism, which is the danger I am worried about. The public became so xenophobic that you could kill an actor's career in Hollywood by telling an agent that they had a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Simply having copies of books written by authors from the wrong country automatically made you "unamerican" and a traitor. This is the path I fear we are going down again. The government is saying it knows best about what media we cannot be trusted to consume.
sschueller 3y ago
As a European that has been dealing with what US social media companies have been doing, I am enjoying how the US is loosing their absolute mind when an external company does the same they do to us.
- omginternets 3y ago
  Perhaps the EU might consider defending the sovereignty of its constituent states? That might even put a dent in Euroskepticism. I will never understand your particular brand of whataboutism.
  - sschueller 3y ago
    The people calling out "whataboutism" are the same people that constantly complain about other people's shit stinking when their own shit stinks just as bad.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Feel free to start your own platform. VK has been the primary platform in the CIS for over a decade now at this point. And even Signal was started in the US.
- sakras 3y ago
  The difference is that if a European social media company wanted to operate in the US, it's welcome to. With China it's a different story - they can operate in our market but we can't operate in theirs.
  - drekk 3y ago
    You absolutely can operate in the Chinese market. There are Chinese regulations, and companies like Meta are unwilling to abide by them because the data they're harvesting is the only product.
- xtracto 3y ago
  As a Mexican, I find this actions from the US to try to maintain the "Pax Americana" Imperialism quite interesting. People in US centric forums like HN, Reddit, Slashdot, etc just cannot understand or see it, and it's OK; it is their country and their ideals. They are allowed to unequivocally take their country side. But for uninterested 3rd parties, it's quite entertaining the bitchslap games that China and the US play with these sort of policies (Google ban, tiktok ban, etc).
archagon 3y ago
Neither you nor the government have any right to tell me what media to consume, and through which medium.

In principle I agree with you, in practice it seems the only reason TikTok legislation is passing the House is because Israel thinks everyone on TikTok hates them (reality - most people in the US disagree with genocide).

alephnerd 3y ago
TikTok's change in ownership has been discussed for years. The current action occured when TikTok pushed users to call Congressional Members through anti-patterns within the app [0] Not everything is about Israel-Palestine smh. [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/tiktok-phone-calls-congress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/tiktok-phone-cal...
- cj 3y ago
  The TikTok ban issue dates back to at least 2020. I vividly recall because I owned a ton of Fastly stock which cratered when the former administration was trying to ban TikTok, leading ByteDance to move away from Fastly as their CDN. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bytedance-pulls-most-tiktok-traffic-214127487.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bytedance-pulls-most-tiktok-t...
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Yep. There are a lot of low effort commenters on HN now. If you take a look at most of the commenters talking about Israel or Palestine on this thread, their creation date appears to be around 2020-2022.
    - op00to 3y ago
      unfortunately this particular commenter seems to have joined in 2011. not saying you're wrong about low effort commenters.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        Haha yea. Tbh I've grown tired of yelling to the wind. Every single time I mention this change I get downvoted to oblivion, yet it is very clearly happening.
        op00to 3y ago
        It happens everywhere. So many of my homes on the internet have turned to poop. Oh well, maybe I’ll read a book.
kikokikokiko 3y ago
To be fair, most of the world (and not only most of Americans) want both sides to lose. Israel is just an invader nation that used power and money to take ownership of land that belonged to another group of people, less than 80 years ago. And now, 3 generations later, the former owners of this land have so much anger and resentment towards the acts of violence and tyranny they suffered on the hands of those invaders, that they themselves became a group of despicable psychopaths. Gen Z simply has new avenues to get informed and to form their own opinion than the legacy media of the 20th century, and now it's hard to impose a narrative that dismisses how much blame does Israel deserves on this subject.
Longlius 3y ago
>reality - most people in the US disagree with genocide I'd like to see some sources for a majority of Americans even agreeing that it's a genocide in the first place.

neilv 3y ago

You might be right, but... If TikTok is a national sovereignty issue for the US, should a lot of other countries similarly be banning US tech companies? (Since even GDPR only scratches the surface of the power they're handing over.)

nostromo 3y ago
> should a lot of other countries similarly be banning US tech companies China already does for reasons similar to those that are in this bill.
cj 3y ago
Yes, if those countries believe US companies are using their platforms as a weapon against them or pose some other national threat.
- nicce 3y ago
  Western countries are too dependent of the US and it is politically easier to ban China. As a result, the best approach would be set equal restrictions for data collection and privacy, including clear rules how algorithms can behave (or maybe drop them totally), to combat promoting specific content or censoring specific content.
  - cj 3y ago
    Good philosophy in theory, but it seems you would need the equivalent of United Nations to have some sort of globally enforced policies like that. Maybe technology is getting to a point where that needs to happen.
jachee 3y ago
The US government generally doesn’t hold a stake in US tech companies, nor direct influence over how they operate abroad.
- nicce 3y ago

badrequest 3y ago

In what way does TikTok operating challenge U.S. sovereignty? This is 2003 all over again.

User23 3y ago
Just try imagining how, if you were the Chinese government, you might use Tik-Tok to influence and undermine American support for militarily defending Taiwan. This isn't hard it's obviously a powerful tool. Just how powerful remains to be seen.
- Cheer2171 3y ago
  I agree that the US has maybe a short-term self-interest in banning TikTok if the Chinese started to do this. But it violates the first amendment and the rights of US citizens to access speech from the rest of the world. That is very bad in the long run. The US didn't ban Mein Kampf during World War II. In fact, I think the biggest threat to the US is the suspension of the first amendment because of the age old boogeyman of national security. Propaganda has always existed. The way to respond to bad speech is more speech. Banning it makes it forbidden and thus captivating, don't you know about the Streisand Effect? If the transmission of media is a threat to national sovereignty, if the fate of the country can be undermined with memes, then we have already lost. The US should disconnect itself from the global internet.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    The US had a censorship operation in WW2, the Nazis or the Empire of Japan didn't get to operate radio stations in the US during the war, and in the cold war the USSR didn't get TV and radio stations in the US either. In what conflict was giving an adversary a full attack surface for propanda etc. deemed the right approach?
    - Cheer2171 3y ago
      This is like the government telling Radio Shack and RCA that all shortwave radios sold must be programmed to tune out the frequencies of Japanese or USSR stations. Or that it is illegal to tune a shortwave radio to a Japanese station. The US had more a massive propaganda effort of their own during WWII, but yes we literally rounded up every person of Japanese descent and put them in camps, which should never happen again. Yes, there was a lot of really terrible censorship later in the Cold War like McCarthyism, which is the danger I am worried about. The public became so xenophobic that you could kill an actor's career in Hollywood by telling an agent that they had a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Simply having copies of books written by authors from the wrong country automatically made you "unamerican" and a traitor. This is the path I fear we are going down again. The government is saying it knows best about what media we cannot be trusted to consume.

sschueller 3y ago

As a European that has been dealing with what US social media companies have been doing, I am enjoying how the US is loosing their absolute mind when an external company does the same they do to us.

omginternets 3y ago
Perhaps the EU might consider defending the sovereignty of its constituent states? That might even put a dent in Euroskepticism. I will never understand your particular brand of whataboutism.
- sschueller 3y ago
  The people calling out "whataboutism" are the same people that constantly complain about other people's shit stinking when their own shit stinks just as bad.
alephnerd 3y ago
Feel free to start your own platform. VK has been the primary platform in the CIS for over a decade now at this point. And even Signal was started in the US.
sakras 3y ago
The difference is that if a European social media company wanted to operate in the US, it's welcome to. With China it's a different story - they can operate in our market but we can't operate in theirs.
- drekk 3y ago
  You absolutely can operate in the Chinese market. There are Chinese regulations, and companies like Meta are unwilling to abide by them because the data they're harvesting is the only product.
xtracto 3y ago
As a Mexican, I find this actions from the US to try to maintain the "Pax Americana" Imperialism quite interesting. People in US centric forums like HN, Reddit, Slashdot, etc just cannot understand or see it, and it's OK; it is their country and their ideals. They are allowed to unequivocally take their country side. But for uninterested 3rd parties, it's quite entertaining the bitchslap games that China and the US play with these sort of policies (Google ban, tiktok ban, etc).

archagon 3y ago

Neither you nor the government have any right to tell me what media to consume, and through which medium.