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Exactly. And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, infl

Exactly. And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat. Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
It would have been great for ByteDance to IPO TikTok in the USA, it has had plenty of time to do so, it would have made lots of people boatloads of money, Chinese and Americans alike. Even Snapchat, which had similar levels of pervasive arrogance, IPO'd.
- cm2012 2y ago
  Yes. The Chinese government probably lost its citizens around $100b by not allowing TikTok to sell.
  - encoderer 2y ago
    When you think of it as enough money to give a $100 bill to ~everybody in china, wow. That’s quite a bit of money.
  - callc 2y ago
    Any amount of $$$ earned by CCP will not be easily passed down to citizens. I’d be interested if there’s any objective measure of how much a countries money is passed down back to its citizens or hoarded by people in power. Is there any such measure?
    - dmix 2y ago
      Even if the money from the IPO itself doesnt go to directly to random citizens it still pumps a ton of money into their economy providing capital for other investments in new markets creating jobs, spending on goods/services by the company, hiring internally (IPOs always allow companies to expand), etc etc. That money doesn't just sit in a giant pile being unused, like Scrooge McDuck's gold pile. Not to mention the training and development it would give a whole new class of people in China to operate global businesses.
  - isoprophlex 2y ago
    So, you could say that that sweet large scale mind control is apparently worth more than $100b to them...
    - airstrike 2y ago
      Sadly the expected value of it was less than $100B and the realized value in the end is zero.
  - hintymad 2y ago
    In the late 80s and early 90s, the foreign-exchange reserves of China was less than a billion dollars. The US government could spend $50M to negotiate a lot of things from China, like having a war with Vietnam even though it was Soviet who was behind Vietnamese government. Nowadays, Chinese government could easily say fuck this $100B. Papa can afford it to call your bluff. It's great that an entire nation can gain wealth through hard work and good strategic decisions, at least in some way. But it hurts me that the US lost its way in the process by losing so much manufacturing capabilities, to the point that we can't even adequately produce saline solutions, nor could we make shells or screws for our war planes cheaply.
  - russli1993 2y ago
    Or the Chinese government can do its citizens a favor for forcing Apple, Tesla, Walmart, Starbucks, Johnson-Johnson, and all USA companies to sell itself to the Chinese people. So your suggest for how to deal with a pirate and terrorist is to bow down and pay the ransom. Got it, let's do that to you then. Could it be the inventor of Tiktok, who are Chinese citizens don't want their assets to be stolen by USA? In fact, all countries in the world, USA just showed it is perfectly fine to steal a foreign companies' asset. Let's do that to all USA companies, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Qualcomn, Intel, all of them. U know how rich you will be if you just got a piece of them? U know you could end homelessness, poverty, balance trade, stabilize your currency, elevate tax revenues, get free education and health care for your citizens, provide great jobs if you just got a piece of USA companies? Now you can! All of them can be Indian, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Kenyan, Egyptian companies. Everyone gets a piece, everyone gets them equally, everyone will benefit and be happy!
    - cm2012 2y ago
      It's not stealing, obviously.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  You don't put your treasure for sale, at least not when you have extracted its value first.
- Arkhadia 2y ago
  So why didn’t they? Cmon. Is that not enough evidence to show you that something else is at play here? Of course going public would have been the honest and rational move. Communist governments would never
corimaith 2y ago
If you look at the people defending TikTok, if you ask similar questions they won't try to defend it either, it's an immediate switch to whataboutism with regards to native US tech companies or arguing that the US Gov is more dangerous than the CCP. But all that only just confirms the priors of the people who are pro-Ban. And unfortunately it's about justifying why we shouldn't ban TikTok, not why we should ban TikTok. They can't provide a good justification for that, the best they can is just poison the well and try to attack those same institutions. But turns out effectively saying "fuck you" to Congress isn't going to work when Congress has all the power here.
- gnkyfrg 2y ago
  [dead]
sweeter 2y ago
This is just hypocrisy baiting, this isn't a real analysis at any level. They didn't bring ANY evidence for them to argue against, it was purely an opinion by the state that there could exist a threat, which again is not supported by evidence, true or not. America has a lot to gain by controlling tiktok and one American billionaire will become a lot richer, that's all there is to it. I mean both candidates used tiktok to campaign while wanting to ban it. It's just a ridiculous notion and even they know that. "Oh you love hamburgers? Then why did you eat chicken last night? Hmmm, curious... You are obviously guilty"
- firesteelrain 2y ago
  There was evidence and it was discussed in the ruling by the Supreme Court. Please read it. For example, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf Gorsuch pg 3
  - gunian 2y ago
    Can you link it here would be super grateful It's super interesting to see the custom code in TikTok not in Reels that can enable this not into politics but the algo would be cool to look at
    - firesteelrain 2y ago
      https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12271 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12271 https://kvombatkere.github.io/assets/TikTok_Paper_WebConf24.pdf https://kvombatkere.github.io/assets/TikTok_Paper_WebConf24.... https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04086 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04086 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-76520-0_15 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-76520-0_... https://redfame.com/journal/index.php/ijsss/article/view/5664 https://redfame.com/journal/index.php/ijsss/article/view/566... https://github.com/SyntaxSparkk/TikTok https://github.com/SyntaxSparkk/TikTok https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-122/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-122/?utm_source=...
glenstein 2y ago
>And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat. I think in a national security paradigm, you model threats and threat capabilities rather than reacting to threats only after they are realized. This of course can and has been abused to rationalize foreign policy misadventures and there's a real issue of our institutions failing to arrest momentum in that direction. But I don't think the upshot of those problems is that we stop attempting to model and respond to national security threats altogether, which appears to be the implication of some arguments that dispute the reality of national security concerns. > Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A. I think this is a great point, but perhaps their hands were tied, because it's a policy decision by congress in the aforementioned national security paradigm and not the kind of thing where it's incumbent on our govt to prove a specific injury in order to have authority to make policy judgments on national security.
henryfjordan 2y ago
The evidence and reasoning by Congress was all "non-justiciable" by the courts. Congress looked at some evidence and made a decision. That is their purview and our checks-and-balances do not allow the courts to second-guess Congress like that. They can look at the "how" of the law, but not the "why". Specifically the court looked at "what is congress' goal and is there any other way to achieve that goal that doesn't stop as much speech" and there isn't, but they can't question the validity of Congress' goals. So there's no point in Bytedance arguing any of it, at least not in court.
tomjen3 2y ago
As a European I have to ask is this really the way you want to go? Because we could make nearly the same argument for banning Facebook.
- matwood 2y ago
  If the EU and US became adversaries, I would fully expect the EU to do exactly this. The EU already has the GDPR with data residency protections that Meta was fined ~1B for violating.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

It would have been great for ByteDance to IPO TikTok in the USA, it has had plenty of time to do so, it would have made lots of people boatloads of money, Chinese and Americans alike. Even Snapchat, which had similar levels of pervasive arrogance, IPO'd.

cm2012 2y ago
Yes. The Chinese government probably lost its citizens around $100b by not allowing TikTok to sell.
- encoderer 2y ago
  When you think of it as enough money to give a $100 bill to ~everybody in china, wow. That’s quite a bit of money.
- callc 2y ago
  Any amount of $$$ earned by CCP will not be easily passed down to citizens. I’d be interested if there’s any objective measure of how much a countries money is passed down back to its citizens or hoarded by people in power. Is there any such measure?
  - dmix 2y ago
    Even if the money from the IPO itself doesnt go to directly to random citizens it still pumps a ton of money into their economy providing capital for other investments in new markets creating jobs, spending on goods/services by the company, hiring internally (IPOs always allow companies to expand), etc etc. That money doesn't just sit in a giant pile being unused, like Scrooge McDuck's gold pile. Not to mention the training and development it would give a whole new class of people in China to operate global businesses.
- isoprophlex 2y ago
  So, you could say that that sweet large scale mind control is apparently worth more than $100b to them...
  - airstrike 2y ago
    Sadly the expected value of it was less than $100B and the realized value in the end is zero.
- hintymad 2y ago
  In the late 80s and early 90s, the foreign-exchange reserves of China was less than a billion dollars. The US government could spend $50M to negotiate a lot of things from China, like having a war with Vietnam even though it was Soviet who was behind Vietnamese government. Nowadays, Chinese government could easily say fuck this $100B. Papa can afford it to call your bluff. It's great that an entire nation can gain wealth through hard work and good strategic decisions, at least in some way. But it hurts me that the US lost its way in the process by losing so much manufacturing capabilities, to the point that we can't even adequately produce saline solutions, nor could we make shells or screws for our war planes cheaply.
- russli1993 2y ago
  Or the Chinese government can do its citizens a favor for forcing Apple, Tesla, Walmart, Starbucks, Johnson-Johnson, and all USA companies to sell itself to the Chinese people. So your suggest for how to deal with a pirate and terrorist is to bow down and pay the ransom. Got it, let's do that to you then. Could it be the inventor of Tiktok, who are Chinese citizens don't want their assets to be stolen by USA? In fact, all countries in the world, USA just showed it is perfectly fine to steal a foreign companies' asset. Let's do that to all USA companies, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Qualcomn, Intel, all of them. U know how rich you will be if you just got a piece of them? U know you could end homelessness, poverty, balance trade, stabilize your currency, elevate tax revenues, get free education and health care for your citizens, provide great jobs if you just got a piece of USA companies? Now you can! All of them can be Indian, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Kenyan, Egyptian companies. Everyone gets a piece, everyone gets them equally, everyone will benefit and be happy!
  - cm2012 2y ago
    It's not stealing, obviously.
markus_zhang 2y ago
You don't put your treasure for sale, at least not when you have extracted its value first.
Arkhadia 2y ago
So why didn’t they? Cmon. Is that not enough evidence to show you that something else is at play here? Of course going public would have been the honest and rational move. Communist governments would never

corimaith 2y ago

If you look at the people defending TikTok, if you ask similar questions they won't try to defend it either, it's an immediate switch to whataboutism with regards to native US tech companies or arguing that the US Gov is more dangerous than the CCP. But all that only just confirms the priors of the people who are pro-Ban. And unfortunately it's about justifying why we shouldn't ban TikTok, not why we should ban TikTok. They can't provide a good justification for that, the best they can is just poison the well and try to attack those same institutions. But turns out effectively saying "fuck you" to Congress isn't going to work when Congress has all the power here.

gnkyfrg 2y ago
[dead]

sweeter 2y ago

This is just hypocrisy baiting, this isn't a real analysis at any level. They didn't bring ANY evidence for them to argue against, it was purely an opinion by the state that there could exist a threat, which again is not supported by evidence, true or not. America has a lot to gain by controlling tiktok and one American billionaire will become a lot richer, that's all there is to it. I mean both candidates used tiktok to campaign while wanting to ban it. It's just a ridiculous notion and even they know that. "Oh you love hamburgers? Then why did you eat chicken last night? Hmmm, curious... You are obviously guilty"

firesteelrain 2y ago
There was evidence and it was discussed in the ruling by the Supreme Court. Please read it. For example, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf Gorsuch pg 3
- gunian 2y ago
  Can you link it here would be super grateful It's super interesting to see the custom code in TikTok not in Reels that can enable this not into politics but the algo would be cool to look at
  - firesteelrain 2y ago
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12271 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12271 https://kvombatkere.github.io/assets/TikTok_Paper_WebConf24.pdf https://kvombatkere.github.io/assets/TikTok_Paper_WebConf24.... https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04086 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04086 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-76520-0_15 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-76520-0_... https://redfame.com/journal/index.php/ijsss/article/view/5664 https://redfame.com/journal/index.php/ijsss/article/view/566... https://github.com/SyntaxSparkk/TikTok https://github.com/SyntaxSparkk/TikTok https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-122/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-122/?utm_source=...

glenstein 2y ago

>And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat. I think in a national security paradigm, you model threats and threat capabilities rather than reacting to threats only after they are realized. This of course can and has been abused to rationalize foreign policy misadventures and there's a real issue of our institutions failing to arrest momentum in that direction. But I don't think the upshot of those problems is that we stop attempting to model and respond to national security threats altogether, which appears to be the implication of some arguments that dispute the reality of national security concerns. > Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A. I think this is a great point, but perhaps their hands were tied, because it's a policy decision by congress in the aforementioned national security paradigm and not the kind of thing where it's incumbent on our govt to prove a specific injury in order to have authority to make policy judgments on national security.

henryfjordan 2y ago

The evidence and reasoning by Congress was all "non-justiciable" by the courts. Congress looked at some evidence and made a decision. That is their purview and our checks-and-balances do not allow the courts to second-guess Congress like that. They can look at the "how" of the law, but not the "why". Specifically the court looked at "what is congress' goal and is there any other way to achieve that goal that doesn't stop as much speech" and there isn't, but they can't question the validity of Congress' goals. So there's no point in Bytedance arguing any of it, at least not in court.

tomjen3 2y ago

As a European I have to ask is this really the way you want to go? Because we could make nearly the same argument for banning Facebook.

matwood 2y ago
If the EU and US became adversaries, I would fully expect the EU to do exactly this. The EU already has the GDPR with data residency protections that Meta was fined ~1B for violating.