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Unreal. Land of Freedom bans Social Media app that runs on US servers, on its own terms, with censorship teams staffed by dozens of ex-US State officials[1]. A
by jchook 2y ago
Unreal. Land of Freedom bans Social Media app that runs on US servers, on its own terms, with censorship teams staffed by dozens of ex-US State officials[1].
Amazing that Congress will see bipartisan action on this issue before any of the other much more important issues.
It absolutely destroys criticisms of China banning Facebook, etc.
1. https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-ru...
- sidcool 2y agoWasn't the concern of data being siphoned off to China? Even India has banned it. Where does freedom come into picture here?
- jchook 2y agoWas it? What was the real concern? And can you prove it?
- Technetium 2y agoYes, it has been a security threat for years. It's a shame it took this long. In case you missed some of the myriad stories, here's just a few. Sure seems like the onus is on TikTok to prove they aren't being evil at this point, because all the evidence so far isn't implying anything good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31920756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31920756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28199588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28199588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33280176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33280176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21076459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21076459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33302591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33302591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098132
- surfaceofthesun 2y agoThank you for collecting these.
- sillysaurusx 2y agoI wouldn’t mind my data being siphoned off to China. It’s not even clear that if China had all of our data then it would meaningfully change world events. Freedom means freedom from censorship. I can’t think of an equivalent event that’s happened in my lifetime in the US. "India did it too" isn’t exactly a strong rallying cry. That said, we’ll live. Hopefully our blind trust that there were security concerns ends up being worth something.
- jchook 2y agoArguably China has won the day with the massive migration to RedNote.
- ffsm8 2y ago> massive migration You're in a bubble if you think there is a massive migration happening to an unlocalized app .
- sillysaurusx 2y agoNot at all. There are hundreds of thousands of US users. Most of the content I see is localized and tailored for English. There’s even an auto translate feature. They’re very welcoming and nice, and encourage us to post. Most of them are just showing their houses and what it’s like to live in China. It was a pleasant surprise. That said, I’m not too interested in endless house tours, so I’m going to see what kind of content there is when things settle down. That’s still a migration though, at least for me.
- rayval 2y agoWhat is impressive to me as a software developer is that the RedNote engineering team added a Translate item to the system, at scale, within a matter of days. It works flawlessly.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y agoIt's meant as a joke of sorts, not a migration. From the NYT: "Sure, there are the people calling themselves “TikTok refugees” and joining Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app, as a half-joking protest of the U.S. government’s decision to ban TikTok on national security grounds. (The joke part is: OK, Congress, you want to stop us from using a sketchy Chinese social media app? We’ll download an even sketchier Chinese social media app and use that instead.)" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/technology/what-if-no-one-misses-tiktok.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/technology/what-if-no-one... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/arts/tiktok-red-note-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/arts/tiktok-red-note-chin...
- ascorbic 2y agoWhat do you mean "even India" has banned it? India is notorious for its censorship and is rated near the bottom of the World Press Freedom Index. Being in that company is absolutely not something the US should aspire to.
- sidcool 2y agoThat's not the point. It's in the interest of a country to not let it's data be sucked by a foreign government. And India took the bold but right decision early on.
- matsemann 2y agoI feel the same concerns for which US bans tiktok are valid for EU and fb/meta/x/twitter/google. How do we know they're not siphoning our EU data to the US, or controlling what the algorithm shows us to influence politics?
- surfaceofthesun 2y agoI think the better framing is that ByteDance refused to comply with US regulations and spin off TikTok. If the EU decided WhatsApp should be spun off from Meta (for any number of legitimate reasons) to continue operating there, we wouldn’t claim that the EU banned the app.
- _bin_ 2y agoit's a trade war response to china's long history of walling non-chinese apps off from their billion-odd-user market while happily collecting users, data, and ad revenue from their own apps in other countries. if china removes all limitations on US tech platforms and ceases exploiting our open-by-default policy, we can talk lifting restrictions. until then, all chinese tech services should be banned. basically china's entire tech industry was built on the back of creating an artificially constrained market where foreign competitors with superior products were not allowed to compete. that is, everything that wasn't built off outright theft of American tech. that could have been hundreds of billions of dollars of increased market cap and returns to the investing public, hundreds of billions that china effectively stole.
- MIA_Alive 2y agojust banning isn't a good idea. Chinese companies should be forced to give technology transfers.
- 9dev 2y agoNow that was the entire point of this, remember? The offer was to sell to an American entity, or be banned. They didn’t want to sell, so here we are.
- dehrmann 2y agoSomewhere I heard that there would have been much less drama around the TikTok ban if the US had framed it as tit-for-tat punishment for not allowing US social media platforms in China.
- imgabe 2y agoChina also bans TikTok. That should tell you everything you need to know about whether they believe it is a positive influence.
- sschueller 2y agoChina also has a firewall, are we going to do that too? I guess that is one day to become communist, just copy them tit for tat...
- imgabe 2y agoLet’s say you and I are adversaries. Or maybe just competitors. I invite you for a meal. But I won’t eat the meal myself. I only want you to eat it. Do you think that’s going to be good for you?
- sschueller 2y agoBasically how I feel as a European with the US sitting on the other side of the table.
- wildrhythms 2y agoWhy is the only solution to continue the competition rather than engage in mutual cooperation?
- timeon 2y ago> It absolutely destroys criticisms of China banning Facebook, etc. What is that criticisms about? US and EU should ban that too.
- bsza 2y ago> It absolutely destroys criticisms of China banning Facebook, etc. You mean around 10-20% of the open internet? [1][2] That is what you graciously summarize as "Facebook, etc."? No, it does not destroy criticisms of that. China is #172 out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index [3]. It was #179 two years ago. Just because the US "bans" [sic!] one app (that, by the way, is also blocked in China [4]), that does not make them equal. To give you an idea of how bad it is: I went through the Pudong Airport two years ago. I had to scan my passport and my face to connect to the WiFi. After I did, I couldn't call my mother, because literally every communication channel I could think of was blocked. I couldn't even connect to a VPN. I might as well have been on a mountain in the middle of nothing. [1] https://en.greatfire.org/analyzer https://en.greatfire.org/analyzer [2] https://cyber.harvard.edu/filtering/china/ https://cyber.harvard.edu/filtering/china/ [3] https://rsf.org/en/index https://rsf.org/en/index [4] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/tiktok-douyin-bytedance-china-intl-hnk/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/24/tech/tiktok-douyin-byteda...
- jedimastert 2y agoA quick note: the US is falling down the WPFI fairly quickly lately...