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Do they think TikTok's user base will disappear overnight? There are a thousand competitors out there, and one of them will fill the gap. There may be a tempora

by paxys 3y ago

Do they think TikTok's user base will disappear overnight? There are a thousand competitors out there, and one of them will fill the gap. There may be a temporary disruption, sure, but that is still better than having a key chunk of the American economy (and young American eyeballs) directly controlled by the CCP.

jtriangle 3y ago
They certainly won't disappear overnight. In fact, they will be very, very upset with those that took their platform away. Millions of upset people, and, if you're worried about the CCP, well, they'll have plenty of time to tell those millions of very upset people anything they'd like. So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people who are upset and vulnerable potentially being shown how to escape their negative emotions by your enemy. I'd say the latter really. That and the bill is far too broad, being that any company can be forced to sell or get banned, provided they have sufficient link to a country that has been determined to be 'adversarial', which, reads to me as "literally any app the USGOV doesn't like". Either way, I look forward to TikTok forcing the DOJ to prove that China, our biggest trade partner, signer of more than a few treaties, regional political partner, is adversarial. It's gonna be super fun, and probably thrown out immediately. And, well, if it isn't, we can look forward to literally any publicly traded platform cow-towing to washington's whims, which will also be very fun being that power tends to flip flop constantly. One second you can only be pro-abortion on facebook, oops, democrats lost an election, now you can only be anti-abortion. Sounds great doesn't it? But hey, at least we stuck it to those commies data mining our cat dance videos.
- FredPret 3y ago
  Every US publicly traded company of course has to kowtow [0] to the US national agenda. How else could it work? The cold war with China is here to stay. Trump started it, Biden continued it, and now it's on the agenda for good. China is openly striving to supplant the US as the premier power. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-of-world-dominance-by-2049-sends-chill-through-markets https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-...
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    There's a difference between playing along with what the US government wants and having to have a parallel chain of command with CCP "party cells" in your company. And there's more than enough US companies actively opposing what the US government want, most notably Google who went and encrypted all their internal traffic so that it couldn't be tapped any more.
    - FredPret 3y ago
      > There's a difference between playing along with what the US government wants and having to have a parallel chain of command with CCP "party cells" in your company. That's exactly what I'm saying. TikTok needs to play ball (be sold in the US) or get banned. It's one thing to fight against various regulations like Google did in your example, but when you're actively seeking to undermine the nation, that's a whole different ballgame.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > Trump started it It was the OPM breach [0] and the brutal eradication of the CIA network within China [1] that tipped the scales Mutual US-China espionage has been common for decades, but these two actions were a step too far. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme... [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932012_killing_of_CIA_sources_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932012_killing_of...
    - FredPret 3y ago
      I did not know about [0]. All I heard from up here in Canada was when Trump starting saying "China" a lot.
      - Modified3019 3y ago
        And it wasn’t just the CIA roundup, it was in multiple political/economic/military domains around 2012 that China started making clear their decision to suddenly reverse what had been decades of putting in a ton of effort and money into embracing the west. This caught many by surprise because the behavior seems bizarre from a western point of view. Instead China became increasingly aggressive to it’s neighbors and started using the west as adversaries to try to fan the flames of its version of nationalism, in order to distract from their many home issues. There was a reluctantly growing recognition of this, but Trump finally forced the public recognition of the issue in his characteristic camera grabbing way. Whether his efforts and characterization of the issue where ultimately helpful or harmful… is quite debated. Likewise our current attempts at a response continues to be occasionally questionable. If you are curious beyond more than this extremely barebones summary, there are a mile of books and days of videos on the topic, though I don’t have any personal recommendations offhand since that isn’t really my wheelhouse, just something I watched build up over the years and start effecting my industry (agriculture). It’s similar to how Europe had increasingly considered Russia to be moving into their big umbrella despite the occasional murder here and there. Hence the oil pipelines and deals. It took until the second time that Putin made his move on Ukraine before the illusion that Russia was ever a geopolitical friend was finally shattered.
- nozzlegear 3y ago
  Is your argument that we shouldn’t ban TikTok because the CCP can manipulate upset users? Isn’t that one of the reasons we’re banning it in the first place?
  - caseyy 3y ago
    There is such a thing as "too late". For example, consider Brexit from the perspective or a remainer. It's quite reasonable to believe that the leave referendum would have failed if it wasn't done at a time when (sometimes a bit vague) frustration at the EU has escalated to the point that it had. It's not always "better late than never". For a less political example, health interventions can be too late and not better late than never. Some cancer care that is long overdue is better to forego. The patient would suffer less and overall have a better quality of their remaining life with palliative care. Business also follows this rule sometimes. If the right decision isn't made in time, it can later become throwing good money after bad and it's better to weather the consequences of the decision that wasn't made in time. This is also explored in broken power laws. What is a good idea up to a certain point can turn into a bad idea very suddenly afterwards.
  - jtriangle 3y ago
    No, not making an argument, just a comment that, if you're worried about the CCP data mining US users, banning tiktok is a bad way to fix that problem. Realistically, this falls under the "solving a human problem with tech", which is to say, it's not going to work. What you need to do is to educate the users. The problem is, the USGOV is data mining US users, and, if they were to educate users on how to avoid CCP data mining, they'd also defacto be educating them on how to avoid domestic data mining as well. Of course, that would be a net-positive for society as a whole, it'll just never happen. They could also pass comprehensive user privacy protections, which, they won't do for similar reasons. What you're really seeing play out here, is USGOV/CCP incentives matching, and the USGOV having a hard time navigating this legally because we do have at least some protection against massive unilateral government actions, whereas China has nothing of the sort. You're free to think about data mining, narrative shaping, etc, any way you'd like. I know many think that it's nbd, many think that only the CCP doing it is bad because the USGOV is a force for good, many think that the CCP doing it is ok but the USGOV doing it is bad. I really do think that if you think the CCP is bad, and tiktok is used by them somehow, directly going after tiktok is a very bad idea that'll likely result in a lost court case and tiktok being a permanent fixture, along with any other app in a similar situation, because calling China a foreign adversary is, well, extremely hard to prove in court, no matter how true it is. Doing nothing would be better, and, if something must be done, teaching people what they're dealing with is the best option, even at the expense of a loss of domestic capabilities.
volf_ 3y ago
TikTok has one of the lowest bars to monetization out of all the major social media networks. There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They all have short form video, but TikTok has a lot of features that just don't exist on other platforms.
- rdlecler1 3y ago
  I’m sorry but the livelihood of a healthy democracy is more important than the livelihood of a bunch of influencers.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Do you know for a fact that TikTok is not more beneficial to democracy than detrimental? Could it be possible that your opinion is based upon the various stories you have read on the matter, and could it be possible that those stories are misleading? Ironically, TikTok is a good platform for learning about why people think the things they do, though it is also a very powerful tool for exacerbating the problem. Power of most any kind can be used for good or ill, and TikTok is certainly powerful. If I was in the controlling beliefs of the masses business, canceling TikTok is the first thing I would do also...and to make sure it gets done I would bundle it in with funding for Ukraine and Israel.
- caeril 3y ago
  Awful lot of people on "Hacker" News incredibly worried about the livelihoods of people who look pretty and dance for 15 seconds for a living. Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind. The entire business is social engineering of our brains, en masse, and you should care as much of the livelihoods of these people as you would about an Enron executive, or Madoff or SBF associate. That said, it doesn't matter who controls the platform. If it gets banned or purchased, the show still goes on, and the world is still worse off for it.

by paxys 3y ago

jtriangle 3y ago

They certainly won't disappear overnight. In fact, they will be very, very upset with those that took their platform away. Millions of upset people, and, if you're worried about the CCP, well, they'll have plenty of time to tell those millions of very upset people anything they'd like. So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people who are upset and vulnerable potentially being shown how to escape their negative emotions by your enemy. I'd say the latter really. That and the bill is far too broad, being that any company can be forced to sell or get banned, provided they have sufficient link to a country that has been determined to be 'adversarial', which, reads to me as "literally any app the USGOV doesn't like". Either way, I look forward to TikTok forcing the DOJ to prove that China, our biggest trade partner, signer of more than a few treaties, regional political partner, is adversarial. It's gonna be super fun, and probably thrown out immediately. And, well, if it isn't, we can look forward to literally any publicly traded platform cow-towing to washington's whims, which will also be very fun being that power tends to flip flop constantly. One second you can only be pro-abortion on facebook, oops, democrats lost an election, now you can only be anti-abortion. Sounds great doesn't it? But hey, at least we stuck it to those commies data mining our cat dance videos.

FredPret 3y ago
Every US publicly traded company of course has to kowtow [0] to the US national agenda. How else could it work? The cold war with China is here to stay. Trump started it, Biden continued it, and now it's on the agenda for good. China is openly striving to supplant the US as the premier power. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-of-world-dominance-by-2049-sends-chill-through-markets https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-...
- mschuster91 3y ago
  There's a difference between playing along with what the US government wants and having to have a parallel chain of command with CCP "party cells" in your company. And there's more than enough US companies actively opposing what the US government want, most notably Google who went and encrypted all their internal traffic so that it couldn't be tapped any more.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    > There's a difference between playing along with what the US government wants and having to have a parallel chain of command with CCP "party cells" in your company. That's exactly what I'm saying. TikTok needs to play ball (be sold in the US) or get banned. It's one thing to fight against various regulations like Google did in your example, but when you're actively seeking to undermine the nation, that's a whole different ballgame.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > Trump started it It was the OPM breach [0] and the brutal eradication of the CIA network within China [1] that tipped the scales Mutual US-China espionage has been common for decades, but these two actions were a step too far. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme... [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932012_killing_of_CIA_sources_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932012_killing_of...
  - FredPret 3y ago
    I did not know about [0]. All I heard from up here in Canada was when Trump starting saying "China" a lot.
    - Modified3019 3y ago
      And it wasn’t just the CIA roundup, it was in multiple political/economic/military domains around 2012 that China started making clear their decision to suddenly reverse what had been decades of putting in a ton of effort and money into embracing the west. This caught many by surprise because the behavior seems bizarre from a western point of view. Instead China became increasingly aggressive to it’s neighbors and started using the west as adversaries to try to fan the flames of its version of nationalism, in order to distract from their many home issues. There was a reluctantly growing recognition of this, but Trump finally forced the public recognition of the issue in his characteristic camera grabbing way. Whether his efforts and characterization of the issue where ultimately helpful or harmful… is quite debated. Likewise our current attempts at a response continues to be occasionally questionable. If you are curious beyond more than this extremely barebones summary, there are a mile of books and days of videos on the topic, though I don’t have any personal recommendations offhand since that isn’t really my wheelhouse, just something I watched build up over the years and start effecting my industry (agriculture). It’s similar to how Europe had increasingly considered Russia to be moving into their big umbrella despite the occasional murder here and there. Hence the oil pipelines and deals. It took until the second time that Putin made his move on Ukraine before the illusion that Russia was ever a geopolitical friend was finally shattered.
nozzlegear 3y ago
Is your argument that we shouldn’t ban TikTok because the CCP can manipulate upset users? Isn’t that one of the reasons we’re banning it in the first place?
- caseyy 3y ago
  There is such a thing as "too late". For example, consider Brexit from the perspective or a remainer. It's quite reasonable to believe that the leave referendum would have failed if it wasn't done at a time when (sometimes a bit vague) frustration at the EU has escalated to the point that it had. It's not always "better late than never". For a less political example, health interventions can be too late and not better late than never. Some cancer care that is long overdue is better to forego. The patient would suffer less and overall have a better quality of their remaining life with palliative care. Business also follows this rule sometimes. If the right decision isn't made in time, it can later become throwing good money after bad and it's better to weather the consequences of the decision that wasn't made in time. This is also explored in broken power laws. What is a good idea up to a certain point can turn into a bad idea very suddenly afterwards.
- jtriangle 3y ago
  No, not making an argument, just a comment that, if you're worried about the CCP data mining US users, banning tiktok is a bad way to fix that problem. Realistically, this falls under the "solving a human problem with tech", which is to say, it's not going to work. What you need to do is to educate the users. The problem is, the USGOV is data mining US users, and, if they were to educate users on how to avoid CCP data mining, they'd also defacto be educating them on how to avoid domestic data mining as well. Of course, that would be a net-positive for society as a whole, it'll just never happen. They could also pass comprehensive user privacy protections, which, they won't do for similar reasons. What you're really seeing play out here, is USGOV/CCP incentives matching, and the USGOV having a hard time navigating this legally because we do have at least some protection against massive unilateral government actions, whereas China has nothing of the sort. You're free to think about data mining, narrative shaping, etc, any way you'd like. I know many think that it's nbd, many think that only the CCP doing it is bad because the USGOV is a force for good, many think that the CCP doing it is ok but the USGOV doing it is bad. I really do think that if you think the CCP is bad, and tiktok is used by them somehow, directly going after tiktok is a very bad idea that'll likely result in a lost court case and tiktok being a permanent fixture, along with any other app in a similar situation, because calling China a foreign adversary is, well, extremely hard to prove in court, no matter how true it is. Doing nothing would be better, and, if something must be done, teaching people what they're dealing with is the best option, even at the expense of a loss of domestic capabilities.

volf_ 3y ago

TikTok has one of the lowest bars to monetization out of all the major social media networks. There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They all have short form video, but TikTok has a lot of features that just don't exist on other platforms.

rdlecler1 3y ago
I’m sorry but the livelihood of a healthy democracy is more important than the livelihood of a bunch of influencers.
- mistermann 3y ago
  Do you know for a fact that TikTok is not more beneficial to democracy than detrimental? Could it be possible that your opinion is based upon the various stories you have read on the matter, and could it be possible that those stories are misleading? Ironically, TikTok is a good platform for learning about why people think the things they do, though it is also a very powerful tool for exacerbating the problem. Power of most any kind can be used for good or ill, and TikTok is certainly powerful. If I was in the controlling beliefs of the masses business, canceling TikTok is the first thing I would do also...and to make sure it gets done I would bundle it in with funding for Ukraine and Israel.
caeril 3y ago
Awful lot of people on "Hacker" News incredibly worried about the livelihoods of people who look pretty and dance for 15 seconds for a living. Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind. The entire business is social engineering of our brains, en masse, and you should care as much of the livelihoods of these people as you would about an Enron executive, or Madoff or SBF associate. That said, it doesn't matter who controls the platform. If it gets banned or purchased, the show still goes on, and the world is still worse off for it.