Judge temporarily blocks U.S. ban on TikTok downloads from U.S. app stores
reuters.com
reuters.com
This position is covered much more eloquently than I put it above in Ben Thompson's "The TikTok War" [1].
Also US government hasn't made a specific claim of any imminent security threat posed by TikTok.
From a data security point of view the expert opinion seems to be that there isn't a clear cut case for singling out and banning tiktok.
The ban is therefore undoubtedly a political move, and that is problematic. Things should not be banned on political whims by using executive or administrative measures.
Even legislative has limits, even if Congress passes a legislation banning TikTok, that legislation is likely to be struck down by the court is my guess.
Ultimately banning TikTok is not a tenable democratic solution to whatever real or perceived problems it is causing.
Some of the commenters here seems to want the democratic US government to suddenly grow authoritarian powers.
Congress and Executive branch can easily ban foreign companies from operating in the US and there is a long history of them doing so.
Also it has been allowed to operate for years till now, What sudden change of circumstance has occurred that banning it is imperative now? The government has not made any explanation.
Ideal solution in this case would be to define a data security and privacy legislation through Congress applicable to all social networking apps/services and clarify the terms under which they can operate. Then if TikTok is complying with them they can operate and if they are in violation they face necessary consequences.
Instead what is happening is arbitrary misuse of executive/administrative powers to promulgate a ban without due process, and based merely on fear and speculation.
Cuban cigars haven't broken any laws. Iranian ceramics haven't broken any laws.
The power to sanction / embargo is a very well established power of the government, and it doesn't require a trial. China has long been in violation of the Trafficking in Persons report[1] and, more recently, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act[2]. Violation of the TIP report especially gives a very strong precedent for trade sanctions.
TikTok has been described as a national security threat multiple times by multiple political leaders. You may disagree with that designation, but the resulting ban itself is strongly supported by law and precedent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficking_in_Persons_Report
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_Human_Rights_Policy_Act
[a] And before the “ByteDance isn’t American, so the Constitution doesn’t apply” argument, they actually do employ US citizens in a US office. There’s also the fact that the Constitution doesn’t differentiate between citizens and non-citizens, but that seems to be ignored nowadays.
Another possibility is that objective physical reality contains some information (some of which is Top Secret) that does not exist in your internal mental model of reality. An exact, always up to date copy would require something akin to omniscience.
It's extremely ironic that the Trump administration (& their supporters) justify their control over US people and companies, preventing them engaging in normal everyday activities with Chinese partners, by saying "[X] is controllable by the CCP". Even whilst there is no evidence of the latter actually happening.
This is not even "pot meet kettle", this is the pot calling a fridge a kettle.
https://www.asiatimesfinancial.com/ccp-announces-plan-to-tak...
Further the CCP has already done the same to Western companies across the board. Let's not forget not only the atrocities committed against Uigher people, but the censorship of those atrocities.
Are you uncomfortable adopting that belief with literally no concrete evidence that anything of the sort is actually occurring?
I don't know how you reconcile rule of law with such drastic interventions in the rights of companies without evidence of wrongdoing. If anything you can come up with in your most paranoid fantasies can be the basis of shutting down a company, pretty much anything can be done to anyone on the basis of anything, no?
It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.
Going by “national security” reasons most countries should ban Facebook and google, not to mention amazon, Microsoft, oracle, Cisco etc. since the us government has already shown willingness and ability to spy on anything they can get their hands on, including foreign heads of state. Allowing US controlled social media and other tech companies is a huge risk.
Of course power doesn’t balance that way so they don’t.
It is highly duplicitous to be sabre rattling over perceived ideological differences, when America's own ideology is couched in immensely contradicting - nay, hypocritical - failures to conduct state affairs according to International law.
>It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.
This is also true of American companies, especially those with a trillion dollar profit motive in the military-industrial endless-war market.
Be very, very careful about what doors you open with statements such as this:
>If you want some sort of smoking gun evidence you're not going to find it, unless you somehow have a security clearance in China good enough to gain knowledge about their operations
We know all too well how tightly wrapped up in its deep state secrets America's own heinous crimes against humanity are .. and if you are so sure of your own states innocence that you feel warranted in calling for other states' downfall for similar reasons, you must surely be willing to discuss America's own human rights abuses in a similar light.
No? Then the moral authority you claim does not exist.
The political regime of the countries you deal with is not a national security issue in itself, that's not what national security means. Certainly, 'dictatorship' is not a national security issue. Some of the US's "best friends" were, and are, dictatorships.
Neither Bytedance nor TikTok are Chinese companies.
It's true that Bytedance has buildings in Beijing, and a Chinese app (Taotiao) that is a Chinese subsidiary, but Bytedance is a Cayman's Islands company and TikTok doesn't even have servers inside China.
For purposes of the Chinese National Intelligence Law compelling the company to share user information with the CCP, Apple shares way more user data than TikTok does.
Can you prove to me that any company, domestic or otherwise, operating in the US has its national security in mind over shareholder value?
How far reaching does the rule of law go? Like the US is governed by rule of law, but when you bring in international elements, can all parties operate under rule of law ?
It seems almost in this case that the argument made by the US is actually that TikTok is not governed under an agreed upon rule of laws. Such as it needing to share information with the CCP or having to comply to any other of their wishes.
Also, rule of laws just means the laws define the regulations which apply equally to everyone (which means everyone that bought into the society which honors those laws). So the question here is, do the laws give the president the ability to block a foreign company in such situation? If not, then this should be blocked, though laws could be made to block the company as well, just not exclusively enacted by the president.
Yes, Congress has given the President the power to “regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” [1], “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat” [2]. This is the power that Trump is purporting to exercise.
In my opinion, absolutely. Stop it now before it gets too powerful to ban. WeChat already has 19 million US users.
The status quo is that you only need some minor skill at language games to talk about forbidden topics without using any keywords that trigger censorship. With a ban in place, at least one of the participants additionally has to circumvent their country's firewall to reach the other side. Censoring censored media even more is not a good way to fight censorship.
I'm also not sure why you think "How much time would you really spend discussing Tiananmen or criticizing the CCP?" is talking about TikTok, since you can absolutely do that there https://www.tiktok.com/tag/tiananmen
Other countries historically accompanying the US in the top GDP pair included the soviet union and japan, so no surprise that today china would get the two minutes hate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_largest_h...
(right now I'd say india is too underdeveloped and too important a part of Oceania, but assuming the US remains in a position to believe it embodies power two or three decades from now, we'll see if india gets the hate, too.)
Maybe not in the mass media, but the new cold war preceded Trump as an issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_foreign_policy_of_t...
It's not a company. It's a division of a foreign government. That was the point being made. If it was an independent company, none of this would be happening.
Can you elaborate on this? As far as I can tell this is just not the case, and none of the people saying it are clarifying what they mean.
ByteDance Ltd. (Cayman) -> TikTok Ltd. (Cayman) -> TikTok LLC. (US)
Legally it is indeed a company and not controlled by the CCP, but exactly how much of its US operations are conducted and directed by non-US citizens on non-US soil is unknown.
US OpSec is terrible and it's still obvious.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/05/huawei-would-have-to-give-da...
"Huawei would be forced to hand over 5G data to the Chinese government if it was asked for it, because of national security laws, experts told CNBC."
...is really no different from the US, is it?
And while China has lots of problems, citing a lack of "rule of law" in this context is rather brave. Also: if you believe everything called "communist party" is "communist", you definitely have to pay the beer at the next "RePUBlican Party" meeting.
Every country on Earth gives its executive some discretion when dealing with foreign powers. The idea that TikTok should have the same due process rights as American corporations is naive (putting it mildly).
"Rule of law" means you need to have a specific rule to govern government's action. The use of the catch-all "national security" justification here is in itself proof that nothing better exists in US law, or they would cite that.
Among the free countries, I'm most familiar with the EU's laws: there are some provisions limiting, for example, acquisitions of land, mergers, and military technology to countries like China. But there's no "we don't like them" power. Those powers belong to a king, not a president.
EU companies have explicit guarantees against discrimination in other EU countries, and most every trade agreement contains similar provision. I believe even WTO rules, which both China and the US are theoretically bound by, would exclude arbitrary bans.
What I'm saying is it's largely hypocritical -- telling China they need to open up their markets to foreign businesses from America just the way Americans do for foreign entities, and then once a Chinese company becomes successful enough to garner the slightest bit of attention forcing a sale to an American company. It's exactly the thing America has been accusing China of doing for mandatory joint ventures.
They can do it, by all means, however it further erodes the brand value of America on the world stage as "open for business."
there's got to be some limitation on where you draw the line on the government exercising this absolute and arbitrary power, i'm curious where exactly it is. could they shut down twitter for national security reasons? what about shopify - they're canadian, and the government is already levying tariffs against canadian imports for national security reasons, so the national security threat is already justified. should they be able to ban shopify with no concrete justification beyond claiming it's a vague threat to national security?
This isn’t playing the “devil’s advocate” (which-the devil here does not need any advocacy) this is a request to prove a potential negative.
Can we please retire the tactic of giving the devil representation in such a blatant and cavalier fashion?
we don't need the evidence for TikTok's case when we already have the evidence of what Facebook is capable of (think about their A/B testing people without ethical considerations to whether they can be made depressed by showing them certain posts ... or the many other ways US social media giants are now critical to shaping the political discourse outside of the US from the UK to Myanmar to Hungary ...)
this isn't about hacking or 0days or even spying on Americans but about whether we allow them to control a machine that allows continuous manipulation of billions of people outside China.
Letting a non-ally control a social media platform and what content billions of people around the world are fed (or NOT fed) is too much of a risk for the US. Ofc the US does it too but their logic is that they're the "good guys".
If you think the CCP having this data could be a problem, you can't wait until they collect it all and use it in order to stop them.
There is a reason laws like GDPR prevent even the mere collection of data, and don't wait until Google does something wrong with the data in order to stop them.
This just seems like yet another case of Republican double speak. Say one thing do a different thing that just coincidentally happens to grab power over others.
Also, what is the method of using a 60 second video platform to share messaging with a crowd who will immediately scroll past anything heavy (or just plain stop using the app) to get to the next funny video? It seems a ultra low effectiveness medium for controlled messaging.
I am not R or D, I am Russian programmer who lives in Russia and likes to read.
One of things I've read already long ago is about priming: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5266685/
Showing one different pictures change walking speed, at the very least. And effects can last as long as year: http://www.bm.ust.hk/mark/files/staff/Bob/mkwyer-JCP-2014-24...
TikTok, being a massive analytical (see other discussions at HN) and priming platform, allows for quite interesting effects on the humans to be discovered and/or tested.
Facebook is primarily text which is low bandwidth and it goes through higher thinking. TikTok is high bandwidth from the start and is primarily analyzed using much older parts of brain.
I do not like Facebook (don't have account) and I vehemently hate TikTok.
Edit: To add necessary context for those unaware, TikTok's audience in the US is politically liberal. The buy out of Trump rally tickets a few months ago was organized there [2].
It's true that we should be talking about the security implications of foreign control over our social media platforms. It's also true that we should be concerned about a targeted ban (instead of, say, a general crackdown on foreign social media) on what amounts to a meetinghouse for Trump's critics by the Trump administration itself.
[1] https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/07/07/tiktok-...
Today Facebook is mostly images, livestreams and videos.
Agreed. Reading and writing are recent inventions and involve thought and deliberation. There's a reason why such skills were rare and highly valued in antiquity. It's reasonable to assume that a medium with an emphasis on text is less prone to (but not entirely exempt from) manipulation.
On a somewhat unrelated note, people like Elon Musk believe that "information overload" can be solved by increasing the bandwidth between the medium and the brain. I wonder if that's true, or whether the lower bandwidth is necessary because our newer brain (prefrontal cortex) simply isn't fast enough.
Sure, this is all hypothetical, but it's not unthinkable in an all out cyber war. Nations are stockpiling zero days and other hacks just to have an advantage when it becomes necessary.
Note: I don't have TikTok, so no clue if they actually use location services, but every app seems to do that nowadays, so I just assumed it does.
The iOS app doesn’t request Location permission.
Or the could just buy that information from the phone companies or data brokers.
In regards to the value of 60 second funny videos to share messaging, part of the strength here may be exactly because it's a platform for short, funny videos; as long as the ideas being communicated can be slipped into a funny video in a subtle way, people are hearing them without even realising it. (e.g. perhaps videos making fun of American leaders, undermining their authority etc. - certainly not hard to do with certain leaders...)
A free press also includes a free press for people you disagree with.
the same can be said for imgur but it's very effective in presenting political content to a young audience which is as you say scrolling past. what makes it to the top is self regulating (by user upvotes) and still imgur has plenty of political content on the front page (twitter or reddit cut-outs with links to both OC and "deeper reading"). So I can't see why the same wouldn't work on TikTok (oddly one of the videos where a make-up tutorial was shared contained anti-Chinese content and criticism of how Uyghurs are treated - which went viral. Not sure if this is proof but it is certainly evidence that this isn't impossible).
Politics is huge on TikTok.
TikTok relies much more heavily on an algorithm than FB, though. FB primarily pushes content posted by your friends, while TikTok pushes anything that might interest you. They can subtly influence you. If they hate Trump, the can push joke videos about tax returns and his sexual assault allegations or something. In other words, try creating an unconscious association between Trump and evil in your brain.
Another issue is that, if TikTok becomes crucial for advertisers, we give China power over these companies. Hiring people who have publicly expressed anti-chinese opinions or donating to the wrong politicians might suddenly ban you from the platform.
This used to be the case, but is very very far from the case now in my experience. Most facebook newsfeed content is algorithmically driven too (to the point that it's mostly put me off using facebook and pushed me to instagram where most content is still from people I explicitly chose to follow).
I think it's very naive to think that FB is not doing that.
So...like following Trump's tweets. That's indeed a great danger.
Look into what is mined. Look into how algorithms get optimized to influence behavior. See a recent paper on this with using social media to shut down a power plant. Memetic warfare is real and it’s been going on in cyberspace for a while now. Every single bit of information is manipulation.
Every social network is a memetic warfare piece and TikTok is a primary target.
Lol at the downvoting. Bunch of brainwashed people here already.
You don't have to look far to know this hypothesis won't stand up to any scrutiny. Not only are TikTok users typically in the age range less likely to vote, but everyone is susceptible to propaganda and lies. There is a lot of US produced propaganda out there aimed at the older generations which is being lapped up by a public thirsty for negative partisanship and divisive rhetoric.
If the Tiktok generation has been undermined, then it's by the older generations who benefited from more favorable situations, grabbed the wealth and power for themselves, pulled the ladder up and now refuse to see how any of this is an issue and will fight to maintain an unequal situation as long as it favors them.
Citation needed. Come on.
> It feels like we're talking past each other.
I completely agree! I do feel like you and I and Ben (even after reading Ben's post) are still talking past each other. I am completely lost at the point where you say "A and B, therefore C, the US should ban TikTok." What is it about the combination of success and external control that means TikTok should be banned? Ben wrote:
> This [video-based content-rich algorithmically-controlled feed] both explains why TikTok succeeds, and why it is an app the United States ought to be concerned about.
I think that's a jump to conclusions that is illogical it does not follow from the priors.
You, Ben, and other advocates of a ban on TikTok try really hard to explain and prove Fact A, that TikTok is a uniquely successful mobile-first semi-social network/information sharing platform. You also describe Fact B, that ByteDance is vulnerable to CCP influence which is ideologically opposed to the US. You do well on both counts, I agree completely with these facts, they're pretty indisputable. I would probably use "different from" instead of "opposed" to frame the philosophical differences in a less antagonistic way, but still, I'm with you on these facts.
http://english.www.gov.cn/ is another platform that's controlled exclusively by the Chinese government. But no one's proposing a book-burning, that the US firewall all information controlled by the CCP or those with ideological differences. Twitter is a popular information-sharing social platform, and there are Chinese actors on it, but this argument isn't extended to suggest that it be banned, either. But somehow, a platform that does both must not be allowed to exist? I don't get it.
Is it that hard to understand? Twitter and Facebook will at least try to make a genuine effort to root out and ban "coordinated inauthentic activity" by the Chinese government (and if they don't they could probably be compelled to do so): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/23/facebook-.... A Chinese-owned TikTok won't: either it won't do it at all, or it will make a fake/bad-faith effort.
Similarly, Twitter and Facebook may gather a lot of non-public user data, but there's pretty much no chance that any of that data will be willingly handed over to Chinese intelligence.
It should be noted that Chinese intelligence is not exclusively after top secret government data: they're also interested in many kinds of mundane information that you might be surprised by that can be leveraged to get it: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/politics/trump-china-t....
Personally I think all the effort and resources spent policing social media platforms is a complete waste and malinvestment. This looks like an overreach of government power.
By extension should we ignore someone who's selling 1 gram of heroin at a time but we should definitely put a guy transporting 1 ton of industrial hemp in prison, on the ground that hemp can be turned into pot, somehow.
You’re misreading that line. It’s: “This explains why TikTok succeeds, and why it is an app the United States ought to be concerned about. <continue reading post to find out why>”. The author subsequently explains why.
You mention that you get Fact A and Fact B. Fact C isn’t, “Therefore, TikTok should be banned”. Fact C, according to that post, is that China has begun ideological warfare. For supporters of a ban, Fact D then, is “The US should respond with defensive manoeuvres”. A ban is a defensive move. Nobody’s advocating for an offensive counter-attack (by running misinformation campaigns on their own social media platforms for instance). It’s perfectly reasonable to defend when under attack from a foreign entity.
Whether you think the US is under attack is the real question. But you said you agree with Fact B, so you agree that the possibility for China to use TikTok as a tool for ideological warfare is definitely there. The authors argument is that, combined with the evidence we’ve seen so far (censorship on domestic platforms, censorship on foreign platforms), maybe the US should be taking China’s own words on the matter more seriously.
If a platform is afraid that an adult might see a particular piece of information or a particular idea, and be radicalized by it, they've not adjusted to the Information Age. We might need a better way to authenticate trustworthy sources, but I don't think the attack from Tiktok is a sharing of authoritative facts, it's at worst a message that the Chinese government is less evil than the US would like to represent them.
> China is not simply resisting Western ideals of freedom, but seeking to impose their own
And that it is likely they would be willing to use TikTok to further their ideology in the US:
> China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?
While no one is proposing banning the other platforms you mentioned that are influenced by China, I feel like that is irrelevant from the TikTok argument. If the two statements above are taken at face value (or the whole article really), then it seems to me that TikTok is indeed a concerning platform when it comes to preserving liberal ideology.
If we were debating something like "where shall we go for lunch, Restaurant A or B", most people here likely wouldn't have trouble identifying (or wouldn't deny the existence of) attributes that one might take into consideration (price, location, quality, cleanliness, decor, types and variety of dishes, friendliness of wait staff, etc), and differences in the values of those attributes.
If we slightly change the context to one where rather than comparing restaurants, we are instead comparing software applications (excluding code editors and operating systems, let's say: alarm clocks), most people could likely still competently exercise their systems analysis skills.
But if we make one more slight context change, from comparing alarm clocks, to comparing TikTok to Twitter/Facebook/etc, some very curious things start to happen. Suddenly, people seems to no longer have the ability to reliably identify attributes of each application, or that the value of those attributes differ.
What is the nature of this small context change, such that it seems to have such a remarkably negative effect on the systems analysis capabilities of human beings? On its face, the conversational behavior seems clearly illogical - and yet, based on my 10+ years on HN, I have a rich intuition that the average intelligence level around here is very high.
Something seems very paradoxical about this situation.
Regardless of the risks and challenges increasingly posed by companies that have, at best, murky relationships with the folks in Zhongnanhai, attempting to circumvent this process is an outrageously offensive and damaging to the long-term ability for the US to be able to assert rule of law and democratic processes as the way forward.
One can cynically argue it was always a flimsy patina anyway, but the behavior of, whatever this is at the moment, is disorganized, suffers from shifting reasoning, dubious personal intervention by POTUS, and lacks the due process that we demand of the US government. There has been not a single shred of meaningful evidence presented to the public that TikTok itself is engaged in active spying or intelligence gathering on the part of the Beijing. I would not be surprised if the federal government had evidence that Bytedance is using TikTok for nefarious reasons, but as the saga has dragged on it becomes increasingly unclear what evidence exists. First it had to divest; now it has a "strategic partnership" that's somehow still being sold as a divestiture?
On what basis are we to trust the random proclamations of an executive branch that blatantly and unabashedly lies to the press and the public at-large even over trivial nonsense, declares all unfavorable news as "fake" and suffers endless information leaks from people who have repeatedly been burned by its mercurial cast of characters?
See Japan 1980s
Nah, the ideology is manufactured - we were just fine doing business with them and we keep being just fine doing business with the Saudis or any number of ideologically 'opposed countries.
1: https://bikez.com/motorcycles/kawasaki_kz_700-a1_1984.php
Furthermore, the CCP has 90+ million members. With the number of employees that Bytedance has in China, you'd expect — by proportion — that they have thousands of employees that are CCP members. But it's just a couple of hundred.
Bytedance's founder has made an effort to make this a global company, not a Chinese company, not a "CCP/state company". He believes in internationalism.
And yet here we are: Mike Pompeo calling him a "mouthpiece of the CCP", and many people on Hacker News believing that Tiktok is a big conspiracy to hack the United States. All without a fair investigation into who Bytedance is, how much of these fears are actually founded, or whether there are more productive solutions than kicking out all things Chinese.
The irony. Can you imagine what all this does to his pro-US stance, or what it does to all the pro-US people in China for that matter? Treating China as an enemy is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> In addition, ByteDance on April 25, 2019, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau (公安部新聞宣傳局) in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.
Your article is also treating Tiktok and Douyin as if they're the same thing. They aren't, they are separate networks and datasets.
That mindset is an affront to what it means to be American and it is much more of a threat to our country and the rights of our citizens than TikTok could ever be.
See: the PATRIOT Act.
Defenders of the trumpalump wanabee emperor are looking for ways to make this rational.
If it's a national security issue for Tiktok to operate in the US, it's a national security issue for facebook to operate in Canada.
Lol. The next conflict has been upon us for a while. Trade sanctions. Embargoes. Proxy wars. Information campaigns. We cannot see the forest through the trees.
If it needs to be expedited, then it the POTUS should expedite the case, but we can't have arbitrary decisions being made like this without evidence, or we're like the CCP?
Everyone focuses on tiktok which is kids making stupid videos, but zoom which almost certainly has massive amounts of highly sensitive info going through it, seems to raise very few eye brows comparatively.
He was pranked and wants to retaliate.
Are you seriously suggesting that its easier to gather psychological data from short videos than it would be from therapy sessions held over zoom? Why would that even be more valuable to china than the traditional industry espinoge that would be trivial to extract over zoom. Hell, why would you expect that short videos made for the express purpose of trying to gain popularity would be more telling about someone's personality than their candid work interactions?
Just seems a slippery slope, or how do you know if an American app isn't funnelling data to CCP.
The problem is mobiles open us to such attacks.
Various forms of location data gathered from it, e.g. the location of any member of the military that uses it.
Launching pad for zero days if China feels the need to root someones (or many someones) phones.
Massive social graph, massive amounts of behavioral data. Useful, for doing things like identifying who was likely recruited by a spy agency or identifying potential assets that can be turned.
Potential to pressure speech that China prefers, e.g. by rewarding popular creators with money only if they don't say things China likes, or by decreasing the reach of people who say things China dislikes.
Potential for foreign control of the general trends of content people see. E.g. tweaking the algorithm so "it just happens" to suppress the potential to suppress topics china would prefer we didn't talk about (e.g. their "re-education" camps) or to boost topics they would prefer we did (likely things like political infighting).
Most of these involve various levels of overtness. Many of them it probably only makes sense to start doing once you've captured the market (right now it's more important to onboard more people than to push a message). But I would view all of them as real threats if I was the US government.
Are you sure you need an explanation?
Your linked position is that this is basically an ideological war, and that China won't quit until it has destroyed "liberalism." So why are you advocating the destruction of a key aspect of liberalism, the right to the free spread of ideas?
This reeks of classic red scare techniques. Those damn Chinese are more concerned with destroying our way of life than internal affairs, and we must abandon our values to stop the risk.
But I am. HN is a forum of quite intelligent people and surprises me to see so many people see US as a bastion of freedom...
The information on TikTok probably isn't valuable, but we know how rich Facebook has gotten by building social graphs. The same is true of many social apps.
That or the president wants a Friendly social network to manage the news cycle of the election instead of a social network that is not so much influenced by him.
Those who control the news has the power to change perceptions.
The article never hones in on anything specific to TikTok or makes a claim. From what I can tell, the two potential issues are concern of data collection with what that feeds and then a concept of influence.
The former feeds a learning algorithm that shows what people find entertaining, funny, interesting. Could this be weaponized? Potentially. My best guess how is that it simply shows what people in various regions like and dislike, providing food for propaganda and policies. So the app is just a vacuum that feeds some external process that may or may not feedback through the app. No doubt this very thing with Facebook’s data was weaponized in the 2016 U.S. election by Cambridge Analytica and other entities.
The latter possibility is one of influence. However, I do not see how TikTok is unique in this. In a different timeline, Facebook or Twitter or a multitude of other sites could have easily been used to hijack the rally, so that example is weak. If anything, the example is damning since there is a large possibility that Trump’s war on TikTok is one of personal vendetta that has been hypernormalized in the context of actual concerns between the U.S. and China and general concerns of the influence of social media. Further, there is factual evidence of Facebook being weaponized by organized groups to start protests and riots and people being influenced by foreign efforts.
From my stance, the question is why is just TikTok a concern? If it is a legitimate concern, which it probably is at least in theory, then these same concerns apply to other social networks. The other question is where does this all stop?
I agree it's a bit paranoid to block Tik Tok, but maybe if these company found a business model that didn't require my name, age, graph of all my acquaitance and pictures of all of this, maybe that would be better for the worlds ? Maybe we SHOULD ban social media on the principle that the risk of abuse outweighs any advantage ?
It's sadly, poorly communicated.
The CCP has entities within all Chinese corps to ensure they follow CCP policy which includes censoring individuals for all sorts of reasons. They will flag individuals for speaking out, possibly having them face arbitrary incarceration - all sorts of dystopian stuff.
This is well documented, and it's why 'WeChat' is getting banned outright.
TikTok is a slightly special case, because it's not an overt tool of CCP control, that said, anything and everything grabbed by TT can be used by the CCP for any and every reason.
Imagine if Donald Trump could order FB to provide detailed data on any Chinese user at any time, for whatever purposes.
I've referenced here several times how China literally has CCP entities within every company, this is 'normal' there I'm loathing to have to look up the reference yet again, but it's public information.
New information has come to light about ByteDance that's rather scary, from NPR:
"ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming has made public statements showing he is "committed to promoting" the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party."
"ByteDance, according to the document, employs 130 Chinese Communist Party members at ByteDance's Beijing office."
"ByteDance employees organized a party in which they faced a Chinese Communist Party flag, "raised their right hand, clenched their fists, and reiterated their guarantee as a party member and vowed to never betray the party.""
This is pretty serious stuff in an autocratic nation with no judiciary etc.. The CCP is effectively forcing control of the entity, even on the basis of morale.
It would be one thing for Trump to be able to legally order FB for data, can you imagine the farce of him requiring FB employees to 'Pledge their fealty and loyalty to the GOP'?.
It would be better for the US Gov. - probably in concert with other nations to make some 'new rules' on this, because it's simply not going to work to have Chinese media apps in the 'rest of the world'. I would say the same for Russia and some other states.
Finally - there are simply issues of trade, on the basis alone, China wouldn't allow an American TikTok in China without censorship, and frankly, I suggest they just wouldn't allow it no matter what.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/26/917134452/new-doj-filing-tikt...
It's about how much you're willing to (or forced to) give up in the name of national security.
1 https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/home/2020/8/5/bytedance-hea...
[edit] added source.
Bytedance has TaoTiao inside China, which shares TaoTaio user information with the CCP, the same way that Apple has Apple Guizhou, which shares iCloud data with the CCP.
Neither Bytedance, or it's TikTok subsidiary, exist inside China, so there's no reason to suspect data sharing with the CCP without evidence.
Keep in mind that one is a political party, the other one is a country.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/12/30/army-follows-...
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/09/18/us-bans-wecha...
Since the sole arbiter of what constitutes a national security matter is the executive branch, whether or not it represents a material threat to national security is very much up for debate, proclamations aside.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...
is that confirmed or is that a believe you have ?
Orientalism and westernism
Are we, years after the Snowden revelations, still pretending that USA is any better?
I suspect Tiktok is bending backwards to accomodate Trump, rehosting data in Oracle.
Fellow citizens you should be more afraid Trump monitoring you than CCP. If he gets reelected and you didn't vote for him, that is world Im scared of
The approach Trump is using is arbitrary, and he seems more interested in engaging in crony capitalism than actually protecting the US.
This approach undermines the rule-of-law in the US, which alongside its democratic processes, is what US holds up as its reason for moral superiority in the world.
If the executive and they rest of the US really cares about this issue, then put legislation through congress. Put those much vaulted democratic process to work, and don’t support executives that seek to undermine those processes.
Really? They seem quite fine with the states last I looked, you 100% sure that statement shouldn't be the other way around?
Does the CCP demand everyone on Earth follow their communist ideals? Does the CCP send drones to go bomb weddings and children in far away countries they really have nothing to do with?
Honestly they are a refreshing superpower and do far less horrendous shit to the rest of the world if you ask me. Sorry about your failing broken nation but someone needs to say it.
Even the EU is over your constant need for war with Iran/China/$NEXTBADGUY and not playing ball, perhaps get a bigger toupee for the president and stop building an entire economy on perpetual warfare next time?
That might be an advantage to the Communist party but it's not an advantage to China as a nation, or its citizenry.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/20/gangster-capitalism-and-th...
Edit: Why did I think Instagram didn’t start in the US?
There is not enough information included in the article to meaningfully comment on the situation.
Edit: here is the order, which is very short: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.222257/...
The opinion is under seal, and the parties have been directed to raise objections to unsealing it, if they wish.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.222257/...
Nichols says while emergency economic powers of the president (IEEPA) give Trump broad latitude on national security, TikTok falls under an exemption for "informational materials," like a news wire and "personal communication"
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/judge-will-rule-...
The problem with not having a link isn't when you're already skeptical but when you aren't.
It's a messy problem, as checking news items takes a lot of effort and it's just impossible to deal with the news volume nowadays. Ideally I'd love to see some cooperative effort to check news items by many people with different ideologies/biases, but I think there's currently not enough manpower for that and it's also very easy to end with a biased set of checkers.
China for having uncomfortable amounts of government control/vision over the data and operations of Chinese social media companies.
And the USA for singling out Tik Tok seemingly arbitrarily, and banning it for "national security" reasons without going into any detail about what they are or what evidence they have for them. (And it potentially violating 1A rights, being inconsistent with treatment of other foreign companies etc etc).
It’s McCarthyism all over again.
This type of behavior, coming from the very top of the US government, is unacceptable. It’s an erosion of your freedoms and needs to be vehemently fought.
This isn't McCarthyism, and to call it that shows a lack of understanding of what McCarthyism actually was.
Whether or not the ban is appropriate, there is nothing arbitrary about it.
I'm making an assumption here that because of these two things it's mostly generally accepted that the Chinese surveillance state is "worse" than the USA surveillance state (and I largely agree with that take, but figured I should still state my priors here in case this isn't uncontroversial).
Previously, when China did the same, this was widely viewed as an unfortunate restriction their freedoms -- the actions of an intrusive, authoritarian government.
Now that the US is itself considering doing the same, many in the west have suddenly adopted the attitude that China had it right all along.
Very surprising!
But China blocks American companies from their market, or extracts unfair concessions from them. So the US should do the same until they change their practices.
It's similar to how countries that want peace still need militaries -- that isn't a contradiction because militaries can help achieve peace. Similarly here, if you want free and open markets, you need to punish bad actors, like China, through things like sanctions.
The reason why we're stepping it up is because China has shown that they can domestically grow successful tech and social media companies that can penetrate the US market. It's not so much national security that's the issue more than it is insecurity in our fundamental beliefs that our system is inherently superior because they're now crossed the barrier higher up in the value chain. We gave them manufacturing just like we gave domestic immigrants the "dirty" jobs that no one wanted.
Maybe that is true. I'm not sure. But if this is the real reason and national security is a fig leaf, then it is contrary to the rule of law and the constitution.
This is largely untrue. First, American companies have a far larger market presence in China than vice versa. Second, American companies have made massive returns on investment in China. They're in China because it's profitable for them.
There's a view that developing countries should immediately open their markets to complete, 100% unfettered access by all foreign companies. That might be great for foreign companies, but it would be terrible development policy. The host country would risk destroying any domestic industry it has. Developing countries benefit from some level of protectionism. There's nothing unfair about that - advanced companies from developed countries have enough of an advantage that they can still compete. Asking for 100% market opening on day 1 is like asking to eliminate weight classes in boxing in the name of fairness. That would be great for the heavyweights, but not so much for the featherweights.
Then this is a case for WTO, which was successfully used in the past to resolve those kind of issues.
This needs a little more motivation. 19th-century China (and indeed, early 20th-century China) systematically broke the feet of all upper-class women, preventing them from ever being able to walk normally. But I don't think the primary reason we don't do that is that China stopped doing it.
Imagine, for example, an extremely convincing book is authored that convinces anyone that reads it that the United States government should disolve itself and its citizens should pledge fealty to China.
Quite credibly, the book could be described a national security threat to the US.
However, I would still argue that the book should not be banned, and that any country that wants to honestly describe itself as "free" could not ban the book.
Being a free country means giving citizens the right to engage with ideas that might not be aligned w/ the interests of its government.
In this case, I'm not convinced there is - the nature of the alleged national security threat is very different from security threats in the past.
From recent actions in Hong Kong, it has been evident that the CCP will arrest and imprison people for criticising the CCP. If the suspicion is that the app gives the CCP access to vast amounts of information (including people's political views via their posts) on individual members of the public, including on the Chinese diaspora (placing relatives at risk in China or they themselves if they visit them) that is a different category of "national security threat". It's not just that it makes political or military strategy harder, or even that it foments domestic dissent (foreign propaganda of the past). The allegation is it directly puts civilians in jeopardy.
If the conclusion is that the app is such a threat (puts civilians in jeopardy to a foreign government), it would be odd to support its presence in app stores, used in playgrounds, etc.
The US Government is attempting to restrict the activities of certain Chinese companies to prevent private information from getting out.
OK so one country... mildly contained. Now finish the job and do the other 193 countries.
In fact we should start a movement to migrate away from any US based OS or programming languages, cleaning our IT stack from foreign interference.
Late-stage capitalism, per Wikipedia:
> Since 2016, the term has been used in the United States and Canada to refer to perceived absurdities, contradictions, crises, injustices, and inequality created by modern business development.
Sounds just like this TikTok fiasco.
At very least consider China bans foreign apps because they won't help the CCP oppress their own citizens, which is obviously not the case in the US.
Really third world country stuff where extreme nationalism is used hide crony capitalism.
Will TikTok remove Chinese propaganda on their platform, how would that conversation even go at their offices? Can we trust that TikTok will not in future censor things that China finds uncomfortable such as Taiwan being an independent country?
Just a few months ago HN was getting exercised about the rights of Hong Kongers. I'd say it is wholly consistent with the political beliefs of the average HNer to want to see a social network operating from within an autocratic state to be banned from operating, or at least under heavy scrutiny.
Trump's narcissism notwithstanding, the natsec issue with these apps isn't that US citizens are communicating with others, including foreigners. It is that they are installing what may very well be Chinese government spyware on their phones, with detailed tracking and keylogging.
FWIW it would be interesting to keep an eye on what kind of permissions and access some of these PC gaming platforms have to peoples' workstations, as well.
But it's also worth addressing.
As near as I can tell, it is unfounded; there is almost no evidence to support it. The one potentially shady thing I know of that TikTok got caught doing was checking the clipboard every second, which it no longer does. TikTok's explanation is that it was an anti-spam feature. I know of no network analysis showing they were sending back the clipboard contents, or that they are sending anything other than normal analytics.
(Also, as an aside & for what it's worth, I personally think the data collection of Facebook is far worse than anything alleged against TikTok. They require you to provide your real name, they encourage you to give tons of other personal info, & they use trackers to tie your fb profile to your browsing history on non facebook websites. Then they sell targeted access to this profile to any advertiser that cares to pay, as their primary business model.)
(As a second aside, if TikTok is somehow gaining access to more personal info than standard analytics stuff, I would view that, for iOS devices at least, as a security flaw. I'm not that familiar with Android, but I assume the same applies there.)
Lastly, if TikTok is doing something nefarious, the proper way to handle it in a country ruled by laws is to have laws against the nefarious activity and prosecute the company for violation of said laws.
The president waking up one day and declaring TikTok bad and banning it is ridiculous, authoritarian behavior.
IMO :-)
PRC blocks applications which are critical of the regime and are not openly sharing data with the CCP[1]. The US is blocking applications due to legitimate concerns[2]. I don't know how both can be the same.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
It is a reasonable assumption that the CCP, which has expressed ideological opposition to the spread of democracy, will not be using information it gathers on US or European citizens in order to defend or promote democratic rights and freedoms globally. It's a reasonable assumption that western governments, who do have an ideological intention of spreading democracy and western-style freedoms, probably would want to promote individual rights and freedoms (and that is why China was wary of them).
How you see a stick depends on whether you think the person holding it will brandish it for or against you.
And when was America doing this? I seem to recall the last 15 years as being full of America attacking and occupying foreign nations to claim resources.
I'm more afraid of the guy holding a stick over my head than the guy a mile away, no matter what that dude is up to.
Apparently they were spending $10-$30 to acquire an active user and expecting to generate $5 of revenue per user in the US, implying a revenue payback period of 2-6 years.
Some ugly unit economics.
Cash coming from the CCP is pretty much infinite, especially given the massive US trade deficit.
The internet has turned into a war zone of perception management involving state and non state entities. The non state entities are able to do things in quite powerful ways never before possible for a civilian level technology. Any hacker with creativity and GPT2 can manipulate hordes of people with a human in a loop pattern.
These services are causing the world to become politically unstable by stoking up rage for the purpose of selling ads. This is the biggest threat to our shared future.
Now that America has lead the way, it's hopeful we'll see such a response.
Shut em all down !
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/09/ftc-s...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/03/599069424...
If you can't give a shit about the security of your user's personal information / safety , you shouldn't exist.
No, it's not. The power the President is asserting might be authorized under statute, though that's actually one of the questions in dispute.
I agree that this doesn't align with the US's general approach to this sort of thing. That is a fault with the US's general approach, not with privacy protections.
Email's early versions weren't strongly privacy-protecting.
Most social media already obey GDPR for European users (I suspect TikTok included), so having this law in the US will benefit every user everywhere by forcing companies to treat everyone uniformly with a higher level of protection by default due to the majority of their userbase being covered by such laws.
There’s not an equivalent of the notion that every human life has intrinsic value, which is traced back to Christianity.
Therefore there isn’t a specific reason why it is wrong for the government to kill an arbitrary number of innocent people if it furthers the overall good.
That’s just one example.
Edit: I didn’t mean a specific reason, I meant a specific and overwhelming, basically non-negotiable reason, which maps to an equivalent in to the U.S. as an example.
i dont accept US moderation in my life with YouTube, twitter, or facebook. the fact that we're arguing the merit of CCP moderation of our youth is strictly a nonstarter; its crazy talk.
/sarcasm
If I decided to start calling it PHTT (Protocol for Hyper-Text Transfer), I'd be rightly viewed as a complete idiot.
TikTok is under fire because it’s a piece of software from China. We’ve turned a blind eye to hardware security and the fact that the iPhone and nearly every other mainstream consumer device is manufactured in China and likely contain backdoors far more sinister than userland applications can muster. We can not and should not have such double standards when it comes to foreign policy.
The cherry on top, though, is that Western governments are far more sinister than China. Your local government has the capability to act upon the surveillance data that they collect on you, since you are in their jurisdiction. China, by comparison, can’t do anything to you except protect you from such local surveillance.
If the US dislikes China so much, place an embargo and see how long it takes for Uncle Sam’s evil empire to crumble.
See perception management: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_management
Don't forget: TikTok is under fire because Zuckerberg convinced Trump that it should be.
In other words, if you think it's OK to steal our intellectual property, then we do the same. OK, to ban, block and force business structures, we treat you exactly as you treat us. Ban chunks of the international internet? No problem, you are treated the same.
Yes, I know this is simplistic. Yet, I think there's merit to the idea that we treat each other as we each choose to treat the other. I don't say this in a religious sense at all (atheist). I say this as a starting point from which a relationship can be refined and framed in less sophomoric terms. The alternative is to start from a position of absolute contempt for the other it is difficult to shift the relationship towards the middle. Just look at the, sadly, plentiful history of contentious divorces for examples of this.
BTW, I am not saying this in a US-centric fashion. China has been predatory to almost every nation of the world. From the tip of South America to the northern reaches of Europe and everything in between. They ought to live by the same rules they impose on everyone wishing to do business in China.
Another thing that deeply bothers me are the Chinese companies listed in US stock exchanges, none of which seem to comply with US regulatory and accounting requirements. In other words, they are likely as opaque as can be, or worse, they could be fabricating financials. US and other investors could be in for a horrific awakening as investment in these companies could very well be a house of cards.
I do believe framing the TikTok problem in terms of national security is wrong.
The correct term would be "global security". The US happens to be mounting resistance at this stage, yet other nations should think this through carefully. The most important fact to understand here is that the Chinese Communist Party has their hooks into absolutely everything in China. It might look benevolent when you buy your $28 blender at Walmart, but, in the long term, the equation that drives decision-making at the CCP isn't one that seeks to improve the lives of the Walmart shopper. Read Sun Tzu, it's all there. Now add ideology, motive and objectives.
As a parent I do not want my kids anywhere close to these algorithms. I also don't care for my kids to be anywhere close to the Facebook algorithms.
Imagine, if you will, if the US federal government had --by force, by law-- full access to all of the data from Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Would you be comfortable with that reality?
I would not. Not one bit.
Why then, is it OK for the CCP to have their hooks into everything that reaches international shores that has "Made in China" in it?
I think it is fair to say that nobody is comfortable with their own government (anywhere in the world) having detailed access to all of their most intimate social media/internet data.
How could anyone be in favor of the CCP having exactly that access through, quite literally, every Chinese company doing business internationally?
For me, from a Libertarian/Classical Liberal perspective, this isn't about hating China --I do not, they should be free to do as they please within their own nation. This is about a general principle:
No government in the world should be allowed to sink their hooks into internet companies to turn everything we touch with our phones, computers and TV's into surveillance data from birth until death. That would be --and I hope everyone agrees with this-- unequivocally wrong, evil, disturbing and can lead to nothing good in the long term.
This is not how free human beings are supposed to live on this planet. Going from free animals roaming the plains to being entries in massive databases with unique identifiers tattooed on our backs is far from freedom. It's the internet turning humanity into cattle. Add the power of government to that and anyone should be able to understand why this TikTok mess is the right fight to have at this moment in time.
If not now, when?
Only its US operations.
From the Wikipedia link for ByteDance:
> ByteDance's first app, Neihan Duanzi, was shut down in 2018 by the National Radio and Television Administration. In response, Zhang issued an apology stating that the app was "incommensurate with socialist core values", that it had a "weak" implementation of Xi Jinping Thought, and promised that ByteDance would "further deepen cooperation" with the ruling Chinese Communist Party to better promote its policies.[7][8][9]
> It has garnered public attention over allegations that it worked with the Chinese Communist Party to censor and surveil content pertaining to Xinjiang re-education camps and other topics the Party deemed controversial.[18][19][20]
[0] https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/mitron-c...
This is a really naïve world view—not that TikTok isn't potentially a channel of propaganda, but that we somehow are free of propaganda in the US. The Trump administration is a source of propaganda. The Democratic party is a source of propaganda. Propaganda is basically any speech from any biased source. The only significant difference between China and the US isn't that one practices propaganda but that China limits their propaganda to only one source.
Blacklisting "propaganda" from sources you don't like is in fact censorship. If we start blocking China because we don't like what they are telling us, why stop there? Why not start blocking propaganda from the Trump critics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/technology/apple-no-longe...