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- "Everybody loses. This outcome is worse than anyone could have conceived." The outcome is exactly as anyone with a modicum of sense expected. "Those who w

- "Everybody loses. This outcome is worse than anyone could have conceived." The outcome is *exactly* as anyone with a modicum of sense expected. "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"—often paraphrased (sensibly!) as "deserve neither and *will lose both*." As you say: we've lost both—who could have predicted that? Yeah; well. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin There's nothing really novel about the instant situation. It's a classic, on repeat.

selimthegrim 2y ago
That quote has to do with taxation.
- FFFXXX 2y ago
  https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
- Xelbair 2y ago
  and is relevant for more than original intent. censorship, and similar constraints on free speech, just hide the problems of society so you are unable to act on possible threats as a policymaker.
bcrosby95 2y ago
The liberty in that example being raising enough taxes to properly fund our government so people can just go about their lives.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  You can no more riase taxes to properly fund government than you can fill a bucket with no bottom. One only need to look at the Harris campaign to see that the political class in the us is fundamentally innumerate as well as incapable of making a cost benefit analysis.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    One only needs look at any administration after 1980. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306#toc-budget-deficit-by-year-since-1929 https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306#t... The only presidential administration that produced a non-deficit budget was Bill Clinton's second term (~97-00). Probably because Ross Perot mostly self-funded a third party campaign centered around the national debt and had received 8% of the vote (and 19% in the previous election).
  - microtonal 2y ago
    You are missing the point. Benjamin Franklin's quote is about taxation (well at least some people argue): https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... People quote it in the wrong context.
nightski 2y ago
I just took the liberty to delete TikTok and remove it from my life regardless if it comes back.
- dv_dt 2y ago
  Thats funny, I took a look at publicly available harms from various social media apps and deleted Meta apps.
  - DougMerritt 2y ago
    ¿Por Qué No Los Dos?
    - galangalalgol 2y ago
      Why stop at two? X seems to just be crazy person x says crazy thing y, so no problem adding that to my dns blacklist, fb and insta are as you say, just as obvious as tiktok. SEO results are dominated by AI vomit blogs, nothing to see there so searech engines are useless. LLMs seem to be mostly ok for finding things right now, I'm sure they will figure out how to mess that up soon enough though. YouTube is really useful for figuring out how to fix my <insert thing broken in my house>. But other than that is just the prototype the other stuff was based on. For news I look at news sources that cost money, wsj, economist etc. because then there is at least a chance that I myself am not the product. For finding music I ask local musicians who they like and follow those referrals a few deep. For seeing funny pet antics I look at my pets. To learn more about tech I come here and follow links.
      - SCPlayz7000 2y ago
        Unlike TikTok, X is an American social media platform. By default, It is protected under free speech rights. TikTok is Chinese and doesn't get to play that card. End of story.
        galangalalgol 2y ago
moritzwarhier 2y ago
I think that potential EU legislation can and should take this as a cautionary tale.
- ninalanyon 2y ago
  How so?
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    Banning foreign tech can be massively unpopular and give a huge tailwind to populists who promise to unban it.
  - moritzwarhier 2y ago
    I was thinking: 1. Banning media based on alleged (or real) foreign interference is a very thin line 2. Banning and "unbanning" media based on vague accusations can be exploited for self-serving economical or political interests, which long-term hurts any kind of credibility of media as a whole. And, like it or not: we depend on media. We're not living in self-sufficient communes, at least most of us don't. 3. What made TikTok an issue in the first place: foreign interference (see 1) and problematic content, the policy causes for this probably include insufficient moderation and lack of court accountability. Then there's the question of algorithmic bias: I think this is not a simple question, e.g. is Instagram Reels technically the same or if not, what are the most important differences between their recommendation algorithms?
- LinXitoW 2y ago
  The EU has the advantage that their politicians don't all own gigantic shares in any social media companies (because the EU doesn't have any), so they are afforded the rare luxury of actually voting for the good of the people. That's why the EU has decent data privacy laws. The TikTok ban would've been far less problematic if they had created legislation for all companies that curtailed data trading and increased user privacy. But that was never the goal.
arcticbull 2y ago
Not free speech. Amplification of speech and to an extent freedom of association. Speech is not being criminalized -- you can say the exact same things on a different forum. And the entity being constrained is a foreign actor [edit] with likely state security apparatus ties.
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  > And the entity being constrained is a foreign actor Genuine question from a non-American: does the 1st amendment only apply to US citizens?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - arcticbull 2y ago
    The First Amendment enjoins only the US government.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    By its wording, no, because it applies to "Congress". Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. A later amendment is held to have "incorporated" this prohibition against the state governments as well, though that amendment doesn't actually specify anything in particular. ("No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.") It is frequently argued that some act of the government violates the free speech rights of foreigners living abroad, which is to say that whatever it was the government did fell into the class of behaviors prohibited by the first amendment. People tend to find that argument weird; I don't know what its batting average is. Summing up, nothing extends rights to foreigners, but since the first amendment is a prohibition on the government rather than a grant of rights to certain protected people, foreigners arguably enjoy equal protection.
watwut 2y ago
That quote was about making the state stronger and able to demand more from citizends.
metabagel 2y ago
Different outcome if Harris wins the election though. Is it possible that TikTok solved their problem by purchasing $6 billion worth of Trump’s meme coin?
- hbarka 2y ago
  B I N G O
- DeepYogurt 2y ago
  > Is it possible that TikTok solved their problem by purchasing $6 billion worth of Trump’s meme coin? Yep
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  He's making tens of millions of Americans (especially including those who may not have otherwise been political) quite fond of him, bringing back a platform that has definitely been a net positive for him overall, undoing one of his predecessors 'achievements', and so on. He came out against a ban on TikTok long ago (after initially being in support) and made it clear he'd work to reverse it the second the ban bill started gaining momentum.
  - bink 2y ago
    So he can make a call and cancel a border security bill, but can't make the same call to cancel the TikTok portion of the spending bill before it passed?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - cmorgan31 2y ago
    Did he not start this entire process during his own presidency? It’s spectacle for the masses and real tv scripts being played out in the White House.
  - metabagel 2y ago
jfengel 2y ago
I've never understood that quote. Is it ok to give up essential liberty to gain a large, permanent safety? If so, how large and how permanent does it have to be to qualify? I'm also a little unclear on which liberties are essential, versus those that are merely nice to have. We all give up the liberty of driving on the wrong side of the road, and nobody seems to mind.
- csoups14 2y ago
  I also find it comical that banning TikTok is the red line for folks when the NSA and other government agencies have been acting with impunity when it comes to harvesting data for decades now.
  - LPisGood 2y ago
    The issue isn’t data harvesting, and it’s unclear to me why people getting this wrong. The issue is a foreign government having access to that data, to installed software on millions of phones, and foreign control of the primary information source for tens of millions of Americans.
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    People don't care about most things because there are a practically infinite number of things one could care about. But when you ban something 9 figures of people happily use, with some small chunk of that even being people making a living off of it, people will care about that because it directly and visibly affects them.
    - citizenpaul 2y ago
      Bread and circus.
      - kaoD 2y ago
        If I were an US citizen this would be the most worrying aspect to me. Are the congressmen so incompetent that they didn't see this coming? This backfired horribly for them in multiple ways... unless this was somehow part of a master plan my simple mind can't comprehend? Did it somehow not backfire and I'm just being led to believe so?
LPisGood 2y ago
The free speech argument is ridiculous to me. The content wasn’t at issue; the ownership of the platform was. You can legally the same content anywhere else, and Tik Tok would not be under fire if it were not owned by one of a handful of countries.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >The content wasn’t at issue You sure about that one? (https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senator-romney-antony-blinken-tiktok-ban-israel-palestinian-content https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...) Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content, and implicitly the fact that if a Chinese company owns it, the US has no control over it. Opinion making in the US is always implicitly enforced, not explicitly. There's a great bit of an old interview with Noam Chomsky talking to an American reporter in which the reporter asks Chomsky: "You think I'm lying to you, pushing a US agenda?" and he responds: "No I think you're perfectly honest, but if you held any other beliefs than you do you wouldn't be sitting in that chair talking to me" this is the platform version of that concept.
  - LPisGood 2y ago
    Frankly, I’m not taking seriously an Axios article. The content wasn’t not outlawed; the platform was not outlawed. Some aspect of the platform’s ownership has been outlawedd. That’s pretty different.
    - School-Cotton 2y ago
      You didn't respond to the point at all and just repeated your original point.
      - LPisGood 2y ago
        I responded directly to this > Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content Perhaps I should have quoted it so that it was clear.
tunesmith 2y ago
There's a metaculus prediction of whether TikTok will be lawfully banned on 1/20, and they were 99.9% confident it would be in effect. (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/31247/tiktok-ban-in-effect-in-us-on-january-20-2025/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/31247/tiktok-ban-in-effe...) I personally picked 40% because I couldn't image a change of this sort being consistent with today's political reality. That said, the fine print of that prediction can be interpreted that the ban is "in effect" even if it not enforced and has no legal liability. I doubt all the predictors were hanging their hat on that fine print when they predicted, though.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
Except that no one voted to give up this liberty nor purchase this "safety". The oligarchs determined that they wanted to purchase power and "elected" to take our liberty.

- "Everybody loses. This outcome is worse than anyone could have conceived." The outcome is *exactly* as anyone with a modicum of sense expected. "Those who w

selimthegrim 2y ago

That quote has to do with taxation.

FFFXXX 2y ago
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
Xelbair 2y ago
and is relevant for more than original intent. censorship, and similar constraints on free speech, just hide the problems of society so you are unable to act on possible threats as a policymaker.

bcrosby95 2y ago

The liberty in that example being raising enough taxes to properly fund our government so people can just go about their lives.

llm_trw 2y ago
You can no more riase taxes to properly fund government than you can fill a bucket with no bottom. One only need to look at the Harris campaign to see that the political class in the us is fundamentally innumerate as well as incapable of making a cost benefit analysis.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  One only needs look at any administration after 1980. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306#toc-budget-deficit-by-year-since-1929 https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306#t... The only presidential administration that produced a non-deficit budget was Bill Clinton's second term (~97-00). Probably because Ross Perot mostly self-funded a third party campaign centered around the national debt and had received 8% of the vote (and 19% in the previous election).
- microtonal 2y ago
  You are missing the point. Benjamin Franklin's quote is about taxation (well at least some people argue): https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... People quote it in the wrong context.

nightski 2y ago

I just took the liberty to delete TikTok and remove it from my life regardless if it comes back.

dv_dt 2y ago
Thats funny, I took a look at publicly available harms from various social media apps and deleted Meta apps.
- DougMerritt 2y ago
  ¿Por Qué No Los Dos?
  - galangalalgol 2y ago
    Why stop at two? X seems to just be crazy person x says crazy thing y, so no problem adding that to my dns blacklist, fb and insta are as you say, just as obvious as tiktok. SEO results are dominated by AI vomit blogs, nothing to see there so searech engines are useless. LLMs seem to be mostly ok for finding things right now, I'm sure they will figure out how to mess that up soon enough though. YouTube is really useful for figuring out how to fix my <insert thing broken in my house>. But other than that is just the prototype the other stuff was based on. For news I look at news sources that cost money, wsj, economist etc. because then there is at least a chance that I myself am not the product. For finding music I ask local musicians who they like and follow those referrals a few deep. For seeing funny pet antics I look at my pets. To learn more about tech I come here and follow links.
    - SCPlayz7000 2y ago
      Unlike TikTok, X is an American social media platform. By default, It is protected under free speech rights. TikTok is Chinese and doesn't get to play that card. End of story.
      - galangalalgol 2y ago

moritzwarhier 2y ago

I think that potential EU legislation can and should take this as a cautionary tale.

ninalanyon 2y ago
How so?
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  Banning foreign tech can be massively unpopular and give a huge tailwind to populists who promise to unban it.
- moritzwarhier 2y ago
  I was thinking: 1. Banning media based on alleged (or real) foreign interference is a very thin line 2. Banning and "unbanning" media based on vague accusations can be exploited for self-serving economical or political interests, which long-term hurts any kind of credibility of media as a whole. And, like it or not: we depend on media. We're not living in self-sufficient communes, at least most of us don't. 3. What made TikTok an issue in the first place: foreign interference (see 1) and problematic content, the policy causes for this probably include insufficient moderation and lack of court accountability. Then there's the question of algorithmic bias: I think this is not a simple question, e.g. is Instagram Reels technically the same or if not, what are the most important differences between their recommendation algorithms?
LinXitoW 2y ago
The EU has the advantage that their politicians don't all own gigantic shares in any social media companies (because the EU doesn't have any), so they are afforded the rare luxury of actually voting for the good of the people. That's why the EU has decent data privacy laws. The TikTok ban would've been far less problematic if they had created legislation for all companies that curtailed data trading and increased user privacy. But that was never the goal.

arcticbull 2y ago

Not free speech. Amplification of speech and to an extent freedom of association. Speech is not being criminalized -- you can say the exact same things on a different forum. And the entity being constrained is a foreign actor [edit] with likely state security apparatus ties.

RobotToaster 2y ago
> And the entity being constrained is a foreign actor Genuine question from a non-American: does the 1st amendment only apply to US citizens?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- arcticbull 2y ago
  The First Amendment enjoins only the US government.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  By its wording, no, because it applies to "Congress". Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. A later amendment is held to have "incorporated" this prohibition against the state governments as well, though that amendment doesn't actually specify anything in particular. ("No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.") It is frequently argued that some act of the government violates the free speech rights of foreigners living abroad, which is to say that whatever it was the government did fell into the class of behaviors prohibited by the first amendment. People tend to find that argument weird; I don't know what its batting average is. Summing up, nothing extends rights to foreigners, but since the first amendment is a prohibition on the government rather than a grant of rights to certain protected people, foreigners arguably enjoy equal protection.

watwut 2y ago

That quote was about making the state stronger and able to demand more from citizends.

metabagel 2y ago

Different outcome if Harris wins the election though. Is it possible that TikTok solved their problem by purchasing $6 billion worth of Trump’s meme coin?

hbarka 2y ago
B I N G O
DeepYogurt 2y ago
> Is it possible that TikTok solved their problem by purchasing $6 billion worth of Trump’s meme coin? Yep
ANewFormation 2y ago
He's making tens of millions of Americans (especially including those who may not have otherwise been political) quite fond of him, bringing back a platform that has definitely been a net positive for him overall, undoing one of his predecessors 'achievements', and so on. He came out against a ban on TikTok long ago (after initially being in support) and made it clear he'd work to reverse it the second the ban bill started gaining momentum.
- bink 2y ago
  So he can make a call and cancel a border security bill, but can't make the same call to cancel the TikTok portion of the spending bill before it passed?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- cmorgan31 2y ago
  Did he not start this entire process during his own presidency? It’s spectacle for the masses and real tv scripts being played out in the White House.
- metabagel 2y ago

jfengel 2y ago

I've never understood that quote. Is it ok to give up essential liberty to gain a large, permanent safety? If so, how large and how permanent does it have to be to qualify? I'm also a little unclear on which liberties are essential, versus those that are merely nice to have. We all give up the liberty of driving on the wrong side of the road, and nobody seems to mind.

csoups14 2y ago
I also find it comical that banning TikTok is the red line for folks when the NSA and other government agencies have been acting with impunity when it comes to harvesting data for decades now.
- LPisGood 2y ago
  The issue isn’t data harvesting, and it’s unclear to me why people getting this wrong. The issue is a foreign government having access to that data, to installed software on millions of phones, and foreign control of the primary information source for tens of millions of Americans.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  People don't care about most things because there are a practically infinite number of things one could care about. But when you ban something 9 figures of people happily use, with some small chunk of that even being people making a living off of it, people will care about that because it directly and visibly affects them.
  - citizenpaul 2y ago
    Bread and circus.
    - kaoD 2y ago
      If I were an US citizen this would be the most worrying aspect to me. Are the congressmen so incompetent that they didn't see this coming? This backfired horribly for them in multiple ways... unless this was somehow part of a master plan my simple mind can't comprehend? Did it somehow not backfire and I'm just being led to believe so?

LPisGood 2y ago

The free speech argument is ridiculous to me. The content wasn’t at issue; the ownership of the platform was. You can legally the same content anywhere else, and Tik Tok would not be under fire if it were not owned by one of a handful of countries.

Barrin92 2y ago
>The content wasn’t at issue You sure about that one? (https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senator-romney-antony-blinken-tiktok-ban-israel-palestinian-content https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...) Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content, and implicitly the fact that if a Chinese company owns it, the US has no control over it. Opinion making in the US is always implicitly enforced, not explicitly. There's a great bit of an old interview with Noam Chomsky talking to an American reporter in which the reporter asks Chomsky: "You think I'm lying to you, pushing a US agenda?" and he responds: "No I think you're perfectly honest, but if you held any other beliefs than you do you wouldn't be sitting in that chair talking to me" this is the platform version of that concept.
- LPisGood 2y ago
  Frankly, I’m not taking seriously an Axios article. The content wasn’t not outlawed; the platform was not outlawed. Some aspect of the platform’s ownership has been outlawedd. That’s pretty different.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    You didn't respond to the point at all and just repeated your original point.
    - LPisGood 2y ago
      I responded directly to this > Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content Perhaps I should have quoted it so that it was clear.

tunesmith 2y ago

There's a metaculus prediction of whether TikTok will be lawfully banned on 1/20, and they were 99.9% confident it would be in effect. (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/31247/tiktok-ban-in-effect-in-us-on-january-20-2025/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/31247/tiktok-ban-in-effe...) I personally picked 40% because I couldn't image a change of this sort being consistent with today's political reality. That said, the fine print of that prediction can be interpreted that the ban is "in effect" even if it not enforced and has no legal liability. I doubt all the predictors were hanging their hat on that fine print when they predicted, though.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

Except that no one voted to give up this liberty nor purchase this "safety". The oligarchs determined that they wanted to purchase power and "elected" to take our liberty.