ipython

It is a bit more subtle, as a better analogy is “protection racket” ala the Mob.

Paramount for example is implying that they may settle the lawsuit Trump filed against cbs as this would help their chances to approve a proposed merger with Skydance.

So. This hasn’t happened yet. It’s just a bill sponsored by a nut job representative. Not a law. Not even put up for debate yet.

From your definition, North Korea forbids the “import” of most of the Internet for normal citizens. The fact that Kim jong un can drive around a Mercedes is just showing the supreme leader can get whatever he wants under a despotic state- if through some miracle this stupid bill became law and Trump wanted to run deepseek on his government laptop I’m sure he could do so as well.

I think there are reasoned arguments about TikTok, export control, etc. Heck I’m old enough to remember the Clipper chip debate (go google that if you’re <30yo)

But you undercut yourself when you say that we are “more closed” than the ccp. That’s demonstrably false. Just starting with the gfw for one.

Sorry. I am typing on my phone and researching on a tiny screen is difficult. I don’t have any anger toward you- I am passionate about this subject (although not sure what I personally can do about it)

I’m curious to hear more about your viewpoint. I’ll refrain from editing my comments.

Oh, absolutely. And they’ve managed to create multiple diverse income streams as well- so if this little racket is shut down, well we have a shitcoin for sale, or some branded sneakers, how about a bible or watch? Heck why not just have a publicly traded company with your name on it and no business fundamentals as another vehicle for grift.

Any fraction of one of those schemes would have doomed a previous administration. Now we’ve become numb. It’s disappointing.

It’s objectively gotten worse over the past decade+. Unfortunately the anti-slapp laws are fragmented and therefore don’t have the intended effect. Plaintiffs can easily venue shop, and there is no slapp protection in federal court. Even if you do live in a state with an anti-slapp statute, you may still end up with hundreds of thousands of legal fees if the plaintiff just dismisses the suit (essentially a legal DoS). See for example https://horwitz.law/victims-of-slapp-suits-cannot-recover-th...

Not to mention the very lawmakers who need to pass such laws on a national level are the very ones abusing the courts. Devin Nunes is one of the most egregious offenders.

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/truth-social-ceo-devin-...

At this point I feel that this is as close to an end run around the 1a as you can get.

Ah, that’s different then. I am sympathetic to your viewpoint but unfortunately it seems that we no longer are playing on a level field.

And what legal basis does X have in their suit against former advertisers?

Also the current president did successfully extract a settlement from meta for kicking him off their platform for what meta considered at the time violations of their ToS. Not sure what the legal basis was there either.

Basically rich, powerful people feel empowered to use the legal system as a cudgel. Our new president has shown this approach works- as he has extracted multi million dollar settlements from Facebook and abc for hurting his feelings.

I’ve had this done to me by a spiteful neighbor. It’s a terrible place to be, as defending yourself - even against a totally baseless lawsuit - can easily bankrupt an individual. Businesses find its cheaper to pay off than fight, as they are only focused on the bottom line (see for example the success of patent trolls, until brave individuals like Lee Cheng fought back, regardless of the cost)

I wonder, why not expose their “free speech” hypocrisy by signing up to advertise on X with ads that do nothing but taunt Elon? Then, when they ban your account, sue X that they won’t let you advertise on their platform.

There's some accusations along those lines: https://futurism.com/trump-admin-accused-ai-executive-orders. It wouldn't be too far fetched to assume that rushing to release these so quickly may have involved some shortcuts resulting in typos and a lack of polish.

Thankfully the submission is self aware- the first sentence of the article is literally:

> This is a book about large language models.

That's neat. I just tried something similar:

    FORTUNE=$(fortune) && echo $FORTUNE && echo "Convert the following output of the Unix `fortune` command into a small screenplay in the style of Shakespeare: \n\n $FORTUNE" | ollama run phi4

And on cue - Trump has signaled his intention to stall the ban via executive order. The wording of that message is like kryptonite to that man. It’s simply begging for him to come out and say “see only I can fix it!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/19/technology/trump-tiktok-b...

Do we have actual numbers on signups for RedNote though? I feel that if I’ve learned anything in the past ten years of social media, a lot of noise is made by a very small percentage of users (not necessarily even people).

I agree that young folks feel the pain more acutely - inflation, education and housing costs hurt the most as they have the least amount of income/savings.

I’m not sure I would elevate TikTok to that degree though - we have some serious issues especially for young men. Not sure that scrolling through TikTok videos is actually fixing any of that- it’s like saying “don’t take away the heroin, it’s the only thing that makes me feel happy”

“Millions of people that use this application for their livelihood” - citation needed

A bit over dramatic. I don’t foresee soup kitchens overflowing from TikTok influencers suddenly unable to house or feed themselves.

You’re very quick to accuse someone of being “confused” and that their arguments can be discarded out of hand but show no credentials yourself.

Ultimately, Novak was jailed for his speech no? And cohen was remanded to solitary confinement for his refusal to waive his first amendment rights? If a police department or the federal government decides to overstep in the future what exactly keeps them from doing so? It’s established from these cases that through 1/ qualified immunity and potentially (granted this happened after the case, and rank and file would not qualify…) 2/ presidential immunity for official acts, that any citizen could be detained for speech the reigning administration or local officials do not like, without consequence.

If TikTok is denied its ability to operate in the United States, how can an App Store who operates within the bounds of the law allow it on its platform? I admit this is an interesting issue to consider - unlike the radio spectrum the government doesn’t “own” the internet.

It wouldn’t be too crazy to consider that an App Store would require apps to register using a legal entity in the country that it operates within - you need a way to bill the entity, resolve disputes within that country etc.

I think the more interesting question is denying access to the web site inside the US. There’s no single gatekeeper in that case.

You mentioned that you want this theoretical social network to “catch on” to consumers. Therefore - it kind of has to be practical to do so.

It could be a bit of both. The popularity of TikTok indicates that their algorithm for picking relevant videos is pretty damn good. So they may consider that the US market is worth sacrificing for their sovereignty.

Ok so I quickly typed up a response- there is a lot of nuance that’s not going to be captured in a few sentences.

The government has absolutely imprisoned people for speech it doesn’t like. In the Parma case, a citizen put up a parody page satirizing the local police department, he was jailed for several days awaiting trial. And the Supreme Court ruled that the victim was unable to sue the police department for doing so because of qualified immunity: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court.... Parody publications The Onion and The Babylon Bee both filed amicus briefs to the Supreme Court, which are hilarious reads btw. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022...

Recently there was also the case of Michael Cohen, where it was found that he was remanded to solitary confinement as retaliation for him refusing to give up his rights to publish a book critical of the sitting us president: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-files-first-amendme... and https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=122506763932389.... This brings up an interesting issue as the administration pointed to an undisclosed nda (assumed to be agreed to as private citizens) was used as an argument for the federal government to intervene as a criminal matter not civil.

I find your argument about forcing the app store providers to remove the TikTok app compelling. I was curious how the Supreme Court handled that issue in its recent opinion on the matter and a quick skim didn’t find any references to app stores. See https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf.

My first thought is that if TikTok is barred from operating in the United States, it may simply be a condition of the store policies to have a legally recognized operating company in the country before your app can be approved for the store. So in this case the government is not directly demanding the store to remove the app, but rather the store itself simply enforcing its own t’s and c’s

Finally, there is plenty of precedent for regulating foreign speech - for example FARA which is very wide reaching. https://www.justice.gov/nsd-fara/frequently-asked-questions

And to that point LinkedIn makes an active effort (in my experience) to highlight the most extreme political comments (I assume for the same reasons as any other social network- anger is a simple formula to fuel engagement).

It insists on sending me push notifications of the most bizarre conspiracy theories, even after I muted the accounts. Super frustrating when all you want is basically an electronic business card catalog.

I totally get what you’re saying. I just don't know how you actually implement this at global scale. I dislike Facebook and have not used it in over a decade, but I do believe they at least used to try and enforce real name policies.

TIL. In 2021 the ccp released a white paper titled “China: democracy that works”

https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/whitepaper/202112/04/cont...

https://news.cgtn.com/news/whitepaper/China+Democracy+That+W...

They absolutely do require confirmation in some cases - https://www.facebook.com/help/1090831264320592

Of course that’s not foolproof and there are millions of bot accounts by facebooks own admission. But at the scale of billions of active users across the globe I’m not sure what approach could be 100%

I’m not advocating that we abandon democracy. To use your argument the other way around, why should we treat china as a democracy as it doesn’t pretend to be one? They don’t allow our businesses to operate on an equal footing there, so why afford them easy access to our markets?

In the case of any foreign ownership of mass media, it is trivial to weaponize that platform to wage asymmetric war against a political adversary by driving division in between the population through lies, half truths, and selected context. That’s why the US has laws to ban foreign ownership of broadcast media outlets.

What’s interesting about this argument is that the playing field is highly asymmetric between the us and china. China explicitly firewalls out large amounts of the internet from its population. If you want to do business via an e-commerce in china, you cannot do so without explicit permission, license and partial Chinese equity share - for example https://developers.cloudflare.com/china-network/concepts/icp...

On the other hand, we have much more relaxed restrictions going the other way. Why not consider “fairness” from that perspective as well?

Banning foreign ownership of broadcast media companies is not new. It’s just that the laws have lagged the shift from broadcast linear mediums to the internet.

Source: the FCC specifically prohibits certain ownership of broadcast stations by foreign entities:

“Section 310(a) prohibits a foreign government or its representative from holding any radio license.

Section 310(b)(3) prohibits foreign individuals, governments, and corporations from owning more than twenty percent of the capital stock of a broadcast, common carrier, or aeronautical radio station licensee.”

https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli...

Undoubtedly this is related to the incorporation of generative ai responses in search results. Compute requirements to create that little answer box have to be astronomical, so this is the way they can shed bot traffic to keep their costs down and avoid… providing training data for rival llms?

Ironic then that the only way llms were trained were through mass scraping of web content through those same bots ……

I disagree with the EFF here too but I am so happy that there is a good faith well reasoned argument on the other side. This struggle is what makes democracy work.