The migration app of choice appears to be .. xiaohongshu, or "little red book". I'm guessing this won't last since it wasn't intended to have lots of Westerners using it and neither government is going to be happy with that scale of unfiltered contact between ordinary Chinese citizens and US citizens.
In the meantime, it's the place for Luigi Mangione memes.
for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book despite the association, obviously they could have been better about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in either language:
The social media app Xiaohongshu (小红书) does literally translate to "little red book" in English. However, this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was informally known as "Hongbaoshu" (红宝书) meaning "red treasured book" and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (毛主席语录).
The apparent connection in English comes from translators using "Little Red Book" for both terms (maybe due to training or an agenda? who knows, choosing word-by-word translation for one and popular translation for another), even though they're distinct and unrelated in the original Chinese, and of course in the official desired English "RedNote" too.
However, for any Chinese people who also know English, the association is obvious.
I asked an actual Chinese person about 小红书 and they assumed I was talking about Mao's book until I clarified.
The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia, trying to tie anything Chinese to scary, nefarious communists. I doubt that they were thinking of Mao at all when making the app, Xiaohongshu is an app tailored for young, wealthy, cosmopolitan Chinese as an alternative to Douyin which is more for the masses, I wouldn't call that very Maoist.
> The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia.
Is it paranoia if Mao Zedong is still revered? If the government is the communist party? I realize the CCP is not perfectly communist in many ways but they are unapologetic about communism and their roots.
It is a coincidence that the original work did not mean little red book. But thats how it was translated, and the translation of the app is correct. So obviously now when you have the same name coming from a country that doesn't denounce communism I think it's fair to be concerned about communist influence.
In English, it seems to be called rednote. But I doubt that it will be a real successor. At the moment it's a funny meme, and for some people satisfied cultural curiosity. But we already see the problems appearing, from the poorly localized interface, to people getting banned for reasons outside their understanding.
My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.
My kids in HS and their friends all downloaded “Red Note” this week. I said “what about Reels?” — “That’s for you and mom”.
Well technically I am in high school and Neither have you used ever instagram (okay maybe for that one time , I wanted to propose to my crush , (turns out she didn't have insta , so I had to talk to her friend asking her on my behalf where they said no [aww man])
and I live in India , so tiktok's banned. There are many indian alternatives to tiktok's that I have seen , But rednote being chinese just makes me wonder if its gonna survive.
Y'know things are just different yet so the same. The same fomo happened during the facebook time is now happening with red note.
“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” as Mark Twain is often reputed to have said. (I’ve found no compelling evidence that he ever uttered that nifty aphorism. No matter — the line is too good to resist.) (source https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/)
Wait, you proposed to your crush? Proposed as in marriage proposal and crush as in romantic feelings for someone seemingly unattainable? You also asked her friend to ask for you via Instagram?
I know we come from very different cultures and I have no intention of judging you, but can you perhaps give me a clue as to how this would work? I'm intrigued, to say the least.
How do the youths feel about Snapchat's TikTok knock-off? Is Snapchat available in India?
Proposal via instagram is certainly a move.
I guess propose means „asking out“, or he proposed to her over her friends afterwards and they said no…
That's surprising to me. I'm 23 and Reels is, as far as I was aware, a big complimentary app to TikTok in my generation. To frame it as a Reel I saw;
"TikTok is vape and Reels are cigarettes".
TikTok's algorithm is _super_ curated and targeted, like a Mr. Beast video. Instagram's is pretty good but if you can get your algorithm to the brainrot cluster with everyone else then you'll get a lot of out-of-left-field, grungier content you might not find on TikTok.
I think once RedNote gets banned or the meme fades people will mainly flock to IG. There's still a void of creator based features that IG can't fill, so maybe a competitor will pop up if IG can't replicate the environment well enough.
I use none of these things and that still hurts more than it should.
> In English, it seems to be called rednote.
I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
> My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.
If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.
> > In English, it seems to be called rednote.
> I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
I'll tell you a funny one like that in another language:
Instagram reels are well... short-form videos usually with music/audio and effects.
It's pronounced something like "real" but longer.
Anyway, in French that word "reel" is printed the same but since most people don't practice spoken English it's read and pronounced "réel". Something like ray-hell (notice the é). And it annoys me to no eeeend :D.
So, among French-speaking community management crews and social network teams you hear "réel"/ray-hell all the time instead of "reel".
And how do you translate "réel" into English ? You guessed it: it's "real".
It's called REDnote—小红书国际版 in the Google Play store. That's the exact way it is currently listed.
What law is that exactly?
"Protecting Americans’ Data From Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024"
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520...
https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7520/BILLS-118hr7520eh....
One could argue, and I think with a strong case that if this law applies to TikTok, it would also apply to Twitter (Saudi investment) and Snapchat (also Saudi investment).
Saudi Arabia is not on the list. It's Russia, Iran, North Korea, China.
> (4) FOREIGN ADVERSARY COUNTRY.—The term "foreign adversary country" means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.
As written there are several problems with your theory: A) The bill is about transfer of user information, not investment in a company. B) Saudi Arabia owns a small, non controlling interest in Twitter/x C) Saudi Arabia is not on the list of foreign adversary countries
So you’d have a hard time making that ‘strong’ argument.
> and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it
"Little Red Book" is the literal translation of the original name but that's not the only way companies approach global markets, especially with longer to say names. It looks like they sometimes use "REDNote" (as it appears in App Stores), "RedNote", and sometimes just "RED" depending on the context (e.g. their advertisement/promotional email address is red.ad@xiaohongshu.com).
As to how they got there with it? "Little Red Book" is just an awkward mouthful to refer to compared to the alternative forms they used.
You're being facetious. The name Xiaohongshu is clearly a reference to Mao's book. And it's incorrectly translated as "Red Note" specifically to avoid the reference, not because it's a "mouthful".
If there was a German app called "My Strawberry" and you found out that the original German name translates to "My Struggle" you'd be very curious as to why the English name is so different and what they're trying to hide.
Re: Xiaohongshu - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42714339
Can you explain the connection between "kampf" and strawberries? I don't speak enough German to get it or Google it.
Also, not coincidentally, explicitly Communist-coded which isn't helpful for not getting banned in the US.
> and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
It's actually just what it's called in the US app stores: "REDnote—小红书国际版"
Yeah but "little red book" (xiaohongshu) in mandarin is not actually how the original Mao Little Red Book is called in Mandarin, either formally or informally. Informally in mandarin it's called hongbaoshu (literally "red cover book" and formally, as you can imagine, is like Quotes from Chairman Mao).
So this is a case of translators with an agenda translating two phrases with different original mandarin renditions (hongbaoshu and xiaohongshu), and picking and choosing the style of translation (base on usage vs based on character) to get the English translation to merge both of them as "Little Red Book".
Little red book means something different in 1970s China. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...
People are trying to do away with that association, but it still boggles my mind why the app is called LRB in the first place.
> If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.
We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds. Unless they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.
> We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds. Unless they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.
The way the law is written, any adversary-controlled social network with more than 1 million MAU could be affected.
I think they'd ban it if it started gaining traction outside of Chinese immigrant communities. And it'd make sense to do it early, now that they have the legal power to do so, since it'd avoid controversy. No one would have cared about the TikTok ban if they did it when it was at 1-2 million MAU.
Because the posts are called notes and the book is a notebook, capiche?
Tiktok is buggy, lacks undo in obvious places, and has seemingly random transient UI changes. Nobody cares.
Rednote could be a fad that fades, but technical problems won't be decisive.
Well it's more... Xiaohongshu is for cosmo PRC cool kids (read: lean wealthy), and also a large ecommerce portal that targets that demographic. Not sure if the userbase is interested in... western and RoW "riff raff" shitting up the content for too long. I say this more as an insult to Xiaohongshu, I like TikTok (or Douyin) because I like seeing entrepenurs sell neon signs and industrial glycerine between my swipes.
Rest of World had an informative article about Xiaohongshu few months ago, it seems indeed to be a combination of Instagram and Tripadvisor. Chinese people that are able to travel are using it to find the "authentic" places.
https://restofworld.org/2024/xiaohongshu-southeast-asia-tour...
It's also TIGHTLY controlled, with people complaining on Twitter and elsewhere that their posts are under 48 hour review before posting. The rules are also quite strict around LGBT issues etc, and not in favor.
Most of all though it's just a very silly protest, given that the "tiktok ban bill" is really a "hostile foreign-power controlled platform divestment bill" so Xiaohongshu will just be next on the block in the unlikely event that it becomes popular.
"Hey Homie, it's Tony,"
I've never been so interested in advertisements for commercial equipment before that guy.
> cosmo PRC cool kids (read: lean wealthy)
What does this mean?
XHS is for cool GenZ, bias female, urban, has money / disposable income, think coastal elite. I guess more lifestyle/gram, pushes beauty, fashion, wellness, food, luxury goods etc. Douyin (TikTok) is for masses... "less cultured" audience, more working class / hillbilly, pushes some of the above occasionally but also everything else from cheap widgets to industrial equipment.
Or the Chinese version of instagram, by short
For more down to earth contents I heard that Kuaishou (They made KLING AI video maker) is more suitable.
well-traveled kids from well-connected families
As a casual observer, I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious successor? The UI is better than TikTok ever was and a lot of the most popular creators are already mirroring their content there?
Shorts has a way worse algorithm, I don’t use TikTok because it’s too addictive but I get bored of YouTube shorts after like 5-10mins most times, which actually for me is a Feature but for YouTube itself is a drawback.
Not disagreeing with you as TikTok obviously works for a lot of people, but its recommendation algorithm never came anywhere near working for me after several attempts at it over fairly long periods of time.
I can't say I like YouTube shorts a lot, but there's often some I find interesting in a long enough window of time — the problem there is more the signal to noise ratio than the volume of the signal. TikTok just feels like my personal signal is just nonexistent.
Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on under the hood. There's such a huge difference between how much people like TikTok and how I feel about the content, and I don't understand why TikTok would have such a hard time with me in particular.
In general I'm kind of souring on algorithmic-driven social media, or at least short format (video or text). I don't have anything against it in principle, I just find I enjoy longer format posts and articles more in experience.
Tiktoks algorithm takes a while to get used to but it is pretty tameable. Quick way that works for me:
- avoid attempts based on "unliking" things, I'm pretty sure it treats it as engagement. Instead swipe bad content away.
- avoid "accidentally engaging", like replying to a comment you feel is wrong or watching something you don't like because you were trying to see where the speech was going. Disengage ASAP with unwanted.
- positive feedback for whatever video starts getting close to what you want.
- positive implies staying the whole clip, liking, viewing comments, commenting, liking comments and the strongest of all, sharing the video (you can send it to a telegram conversation with yourself or whatever, not sure if the link you shared ever being opened is accounted for but I think nope). Do this on purpose, like if a video is cool just open the comment section and like all comments without looking.
-try to "navigate". If you want to see tech and it's currently showing you music, maybe engage with music production or Spotify tricks when they appear. It might not be the tech you're looking for, but it's closer to tech than a teenage girl dancing. You'll eventually be shown things more relevant to you, at which point you grab that current.
Also do not try to rush the process. I think updating your interests is not instant, and session time might be a metric as well.
This is fascinating, I'm curious -- do you find yourself generally thinking in this way when using TikTok? Do you find that your peers that use TikTok do something similar?
This is just completely foreign to how I consume media. The idea that I need to try and "trick" an algorithm into showing me what I want is just completely unappealing. I'd much rather go somewhere else and actively seek out the content that I want, rather than trying to fight a system that seems like it would prefer me to be a passive consumer.
"Passive" not in the sense that I shouldn't be engaged, clearly, as the algorithm rewards engagement. But passive in the sense that I should not be seeking out what I want to see, I should just be reactive based on what I am shown, and then the platform will decide from that what I really want.
Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why would I want to bother with that?
You don't have to do any of this. He's just explaining more about how the algorithm works.
To a first approximation, TikTok simply shows you more of what you watch. If you swipe away a lot of stuff in the first second or two, it stops showing you that kind of stuff. If you watch complete videos, it shows you more like that.
I'm aware that this is how the algorithm works, but the parent comment is not just explaining how it works, they gave suggestions based on things that "work for me".
So I am specifically trying to sus out how common it is among tiktok users to have this sort of strategic thinking around the algorithm, since it's not something I've heard much of before.
This is very common and I would even say a necessary part of using algorithmic social media now, basically awareness of the algorithm and interacting with content in a way that keeps your algorithm tuned to what you want. For example I avoid clicking anything political on YouTube because as soon as I do, my suggestions become full of political ragebait.
Anecdotally TikTok has the best content for me as well. I can’t even place my finger on why I like it more than IG. I don’t know if it’s the slight differences in the content if surfaces. Even if I am just looking through music on both apps (I play guitar) something about TikTok is more pleasant and I really am not sure what.
I'm in your boat. I tried out TikTok out a few times, including making a new account, but it never showed me good content. I had maybe one or two longer sessions, but never felt the need to go back, like I (unfortunately) do with Reddit or Youtube. I could never understand why it was so popular, but maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.
I think that's part of why it's always been a little bit of a head scratcher for me — I didn't really go into it curmudgeonly, I was genuinely interested in it, people seemed to like it, and I was interested in something new. It just never worked out at all for me.
I even had people telling me in all seriousness "I must secretly like the content", as in the algorithm knows better than I do what I like. Which is kind of a weird and maybe even disturbing idea to buy into if you think about it.
I was told to keep at it, which I did. I'd put aside for a long time, go back to it, repeat the process over and over again. Eventually I just gave up. I always felt like it was targeting some specific demographic by default and never got out of that algorithmic optimization spot for me.
Same with Instagram Reels. Occasionally I'd be scrolling going "man my Tiktok feed is bad today", and then I realise it's IG.
At least between Subway Surfer Reddit narrations and other garbage, TikTok shows me stuff I know I want to see. Instagram reels will start with something I'm interested in and very quickly pivot to people seemingly in the midst of psychosis, or literal porn. No matter how much I manually report as not interested.
there are so many low quality shorts, really makes it feel like a waste of time. never had that feeling on tiktok
I feel a lot of people have compare TikTok that they have used for countless of hours and where the algorithm has zero'd in in their preferences to a more vanilla YT Shorts. I used shorts for a few months heavily, and pretty much every video was in some way relevant to my interests (which is also why I don't consume short form video anymore, it's waaaay to addictive).
It doesn't need to be better than TikTok though, just better than xiaohongshu
Maybe people developed a fetish for Chinese.
"Fetish" is the wrong way to look at it, but it does seem connected. The explanation I've seen is basically a unified "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me, so instead I'm going to give my data to China even harder". It's a generation of kids who grew up (mostly correctly) assuming all of their data was already all controlled by corporations in league with the government. Worrying about data privacy is too quaint to even consider.
There's of course a chance of algorithmic meddling, nudging people to a different Chinese app, but I think spite is a far simpler answer.
> I've seen is basically a unified "fuck you ..."
My wife is exploring RedNote for this very reason. "You're telling me I have an easy way to make the US government upset and the more I use RedNote, the more upset they are?" was her line of thinking. She explained that it makes her feel like she has a morsel of control over a group that previously didn't give a damn.
Her father would also be upset if she starts learning Chinese because of his political tendencies. It's basically a two-for-one deal of learning about another culture and learning a foreign language.
I live in the US. I mean, if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me? Oh wait no, that's if I give my data to Google or Meta.
> if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me?
Flip the question around to your familiar villain. You’re a U.S. intelligence chief, and have a trove of embarrassing—possibly worse—information about ordinary Chinese citizens. How can you use this to make them useful to you?
This is a very first level consideration of things like this. In general it would not be particularly useful because exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement which would not only curtail these efforts (or even completely backfire in the case of double agent stuff), but could also blow up into a giant international controversy.
And for what? What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"? The risk:reward ratios are simply horribly broken in this sort of case. By contrast when your own government is doing this to you, you have nobody to turn to, and they can completely destroy your life in ways far worse than the threat of somehow revealing your taste in videos.
The options available to that intelligence chief in your scenario are probably bad for China, but are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
I kinda get why the US is banning tiktok, I don't get why you'd expect most of tiktok's users to care about those reasons.
You only need to look at the news for how many Russian citizens are tricked by Ukrainian telephone con-men into giving away all their money and then setting fire to banks/trains/various military installations in the hope of getting it back. I'm already expecting to see that in the US and elsewhere when the inevitable happens. Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens, how easier would all of this be?
You can't make extraordinary claims like that without providing a source. Especially considering Wikipedia has this to say:
> In August 2023, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued official warnings about a new form of phone fraud in which Russians are forced to set fire to military enlistment offices through pressure or deception. The authorities claim that scammers call from the territory of Ukraine and choose elderly Russians as their victims. The Russian government has not yet offered any evidence of their claims. Russian business newspaper Kommersant claims that fraudsters support the Armed Forces of Ukraine and organize "terrorist attacks".
Emphasis mine.
> Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens
You don't really have to imagine this.
Kommersant is a way better source than the Russian government anyway.
Your comment just reiterates the same point which I was already questioning. My response to JumpCrisscross already applies perfectly to your comment.
From China’s perspective, the things the US intelligence official could to China’s citizens is worse than what China could do to those same citizens.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for some citizens to feel the same
As a US citizen living in the US, I think it's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the US government. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to even consider, and seems just as ridiculous that a Chinese citizen could feel the same.
Even leaving aside the state's monopoly on violence, agents at any of multiple three-letter agencies could easily ruin my life. An IRS agent could randomly decide to audit my last decade of tax returns. A law enforcement agent (local, state, or federal) could deliberately incorrectly mark my vehicle as stolen. They could SWAT me on a trumped up basis. They could just black bag me, and throw me in some dark pit.
China could probably hack me, and fuck up my digital presence, including my finances. But the US government could easily skip a few steps and just declare those finances illegitimate in a variety of ways much more difficult to undo.
> it's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the US government
Sure, individually. If you think about more than yourself, you should recognise a collective threat that requires a modicum of sacrifice to protect against.
> are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
Yes. It's riskier for the FBI to fuck around with an American than it is for the CIA to fuck around with someone in Russia or China. Particularly when we're dealing with extorting someone using embarassing, but not necessarily criminal, information.
Or just, you know, sowing chaos. Again, if the CIA had a list of Chinese citizens who may be mentally unstable and are obsessing over e.g. the Uyghurs, could that not be put to use in a way that's harmful to China and that person?
Your risk of being fucked with by either Beijing or D.C. is incredibly low. ("Fucked with" meaning being harassed for legal behaviour.) Given the existence of such a database, however, the chances of fuckery at the population level is almost 100%. What President wouldn't want a call they could make that would tumble a foreign adversary into chaos for a few days?
Would make a change from fetish for Japan.
You must be 40. Japanese fetish is only for weirdos, whereas 15% of young girls will say their favorite band is a South Korean one.
Or South Korea. :D
A large part of it is obviously negative polarization: you tell people they can't use a Chinese app, they're going to use a different Chinese app. Hence the pictures of Luigi.
It's worth asking why Reels/Shorts didn't take off and those companies had to ask for their competition to be banned instead. Everyone agrees that "the algorithm is better", but this is very hard to quantify. Perhaps something about surfacing smaller creators? Quantity/quality of invasive advertising? Extent to which people feel particular kinds of rage content is being forced on them?
Main reason besides the algorithm is in my opinion that TikTok has wide but hard boundaries when it comes to content. This leads to diverse but relatively safe content.
It is not 4chan where you think twice before clicking a link to avoid emotional damage. It is also not Reddit or Youtube where you do not bother to go because you permanently encounter stuff that is inconsequentially blocked and you are still not safe from trauma. I think most platforms other than TikTok try to be too strict, fail to enforce their unrealistic rules in any comprehensible form and therefore suck for most intellectually curious users.
This has been my experience and it is what people are reporting from red note.
In comparison to instagram I have found it far easier to explore, for instance, black women making leftist political critiques of Harris engaged in long conversations with black women who were actively supporting Harris.
Similarly, it has been much easier to find discussions about Palestine, labor rights, indigenous US culture, and numerous other topics.
I think those conversations are probably find-able on Ig or Yt, but I have had much more difficult time with those platforms. It's been hard for me to find much engaging content that is close enough to my (admittedly anarchistic) political and cultural views that the conversation changes what I think in useful ways, so I avoid that work on things like FB. These platforms do suck for doing anything other than keeping up with pictures of my nieces.
My feeling is that in general the TT algo doesn't really care about US politics so it just shows me engaging content, whatever that might be for me.
People here can call that "addictive", but in doing so it quickly discards any agency for people who have any actual political disagreements with the radically centrist US political mainstream.
I am used to that flippant dismissal- Allen Dulles would have rather believed in mind control than believe that US military personal who encountered Koreans were swayed by genuine empathy for a legitimate political-economic position.
By contrast, my feeling is that various other governments don't really care what folks in other countries think about the world so as long as it's not objectively porn or gore they just let conversations happen.
That is, of course, quite dangerous if your power relies on maintaining narrative consistency for the population you rule- that's why China and other authoritarian folks do things like limit what can happen on social media in their countries...
The whole concept that one's views can be changed by what they were compelled to watch is what leads to the circus of absurdity in modern times. The fact that the media, corporations, and political establishment will all aggressively repeat a statement only to be rebuffed by the public at large seems to have no affect on their insistence on believing in this nonsense.
If it were true than the countless nations which turned to extreme censorship and propaganda to try to maintain themselves would be still standing. Instead, they invariably lose the faith of their people who simply stop believing anything (or supporting their own government) and at that point their collapse is already imminent - even if it might only happen decades later. See: Soviet Union.
Or for some predictive power - once China's economy reaches its twilight years where you have to juke the books and redefine exactly how things are measured just to keep eeking out that 1 or 2% growth per year, their entire political system will collapse. People would be happy being ruled by a group of authoritarian mutated frogs who demanded you ribbit in loyalty 6 times a day, so long as their economy and society was booming from the average person's perspective. It's only when things slow down that people start looking more critically at the systems they live under.
Rednote and TikTok has 'novelty' content type that originally cultivated in mainland China. The memes, reactions pic, etc don't really exist on reels/shorts.
My god, in this thread you can tell who actually used TikTok and who only read about it
it’s painfully obvious
reels cannot seem to give me anything other than America’s funniest home videos style content and thirst traps, while on tiktok I get critical analysis of todays events, planet money-esque content, discussion of analytic philosophers i’m interested in, etc. it’s truly no contest.
Reels just wants to basically treat me as a generic male with some bias towards what my social graph likes. I also hate that my likes are public on reels.
e: not sure why this is downvoted, just trying to provide color to an earnest question
This is exactly my problem. Instagram thinks they can just apply your demographics to an algorithm and find what you like. Tiktok figures out your demographic based on what you like. Tiktok listens, ineffectually tries to sell you things, and gives you what you enjoy; Instagram tries to fit you to a mold, and then sell things to that mold, then give you slop popular within that mold.
Planet, money, style economic analysis, is that the vibes woman?
But I would be curious how to make sure I get that kind of content I would love philosophy and current events.
Somehow I’ve trained my algorithm is only show me superhero clips, I think because I was watching all the Marvel movies during the pandemic and then didn’t really use it again since then
I don't understand your first question at all, but tiktok lets you reset your algorithm and try again.
Be diligent about not spending too much time watching something if it's not what you want your algo to be, sometimes I can get in loops where I watch something because I'm confused by it and then just get a lot of confusing content.
I've never saw Luigi or Aaron Bushnell suggested to me by YouTube, unless I search them
I think that's why, just saying
I spend a lot of time on YT, and less time on Instagram... and 0 time on TikTok, where I never created an account.
YT Shorts exist exclusively for YT creators who want to publish bite-sized pieces of content for their audience with a much lower expectation of polish than their normal longer form content. Perhaps the algorithm also presents "random" YouTubers', too, but the vast majority of what I see is put out by the publishers I'm already following (or other very similar publishers in the same ecosystem).
I would suggest that TikTok's successor is Insta Reels. Reels are almost exclusively entertainment and because they tie into Instagram's broader user/connections network the UX is much better than TikTok. Nobody goes to Instagram to figure out how to replace their garbage disposal -- this is squarely YT domain. If YT Shorts can make inroads in the entertainment market [without feeling like a commercial break between pieces of actual content, which is the impression I have and the way I use it].
I don't use TikTok, but my understanding is that they are just a lot better than anyone else with the algorithm. Somehow where Meta built a social graph, TikTok built a graph of videos (no need to know who you are, they can just suggest videos based on other videos you watch). And it's apparently difficult to catch up (presumably because they have more users so more data to make better predictions).
That would, IMO, explain why people use TikTok and not something else.
As to where they go after TikTok is banned... I feel like there is also a factor of "Oh you want to ban chinese apps? Let me show you". Not sure whether it will last, though.
I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.
Of course an app you have used for thousands of hours is going to know you better than the one you tried for half an hour
Then be prepared to be surprised? I don't know why its better but it actually is night and day different. The best uneducated way I can describe it is YouTube sticks you into a model that only classifies people in large groups. Oh you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-right talking heads. TikTok has a model that is tailored just for you. Oh you like video game streamers that play Tarkov? Here are some videos of other games similar to Tarkov.
I don't think I've ever seen the alt right on YouTube, but maybe that's the mystery of the algorithm. Or of the definition of "alt right".
Or more likely, just a mystery for yourself.
This is honestly kind of shocking. Do you just avoid looking up any kind of political video?
I found your comment surprising. I have literally never even considered looking for political videos online. They're enough of them shoved in my face everywhere I turn without me needing to seek them out.
If you look at his most recent comment history you can see a trend of either being a troll or an unaware/aware jerk. Not entirely surprising.
Yea, this definitely explains the comment.
No, I watch political videos, but nothing as far to the right as the alt right, I don't think. Maybe once?
I'm surprised. I've been blocking Jordan Peterson videos for years from YouTube, and I still get recommended something with him in it weekly. I also don't watch political videos generally on the platform.
Then you either curate your feed very well or you don't use YouTube at all. Spend a couple of days indiscriminately watching whatever slop the algorithm recommends and you'll start seeing some eyebrow raising content.
> you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-right talking heads
This is something that infuriates me about youtube, to the extent that I wonder if it's deliberate. Those guys feel like the propaganda the platform wants to sell me, whereas on the Chinese platforms there isn't the sense of HERE IS THE TWO MINUTE HATE PROPAGANDA VIDEO CITIZEN you sometimes get on other platforms.
I wonder if its simply just a pattern over the last N years with Google where they maximize everything for ad revenue. I honestly don't know how TikToks ad revenue looks like but from a consumer point of view it appears for whatever reason they have mostly corporate ads where YouTube has the lowest value garbage (perhaps highest paying) ads on MLM and getting rich through real estate.
Edit: As a weak comparison I think about Prime Streaming vs YouTube or Hulu. Ignoring that ads suck. Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it. YouTube throws whatever highest paying garbage at you as much as possible. I tried Hulu once with ads, painful, every like 7mins you are getting an ad and often the same ad over and over.
It's also worth noting that TikTok has the "TikTok Shop" that allows people to sell directly through the app. Perhaps this allows them to rely less heavily on advertising. I certainly see virtually zero ads on the app. Ideally this is because they've identified that I'm a terrible person to sell ads to, but perhaps they're just less aggressive about pushing them.
> Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it.
Sure, I just stopped using prime when they introduced ads. It's also the number one complaint about the service and it regularly shows up any time the service is mentioned. I also can't remember a single ad played that was actually relevant to me.
Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.
Reminder that YT used to be pretty decent about (music) recommendations until, I’d say, 2015-ish, that’s how I discovered lots and lots of very cool and interesting (music) stuff that I listen to this day.
Not sure how they managed to screw that up, but screw it they did, and nowadays the sidebar, or even the plain search, has become unusable.
Try it. I've been using Youtube for a decade and its recommendations are a total crapshoot these days. TikTok figured out my preferences within 15 minutes just based on which videos I liked and watched, and it can change course extremely quickly if you get bored of a certain topic.
The total number of hours I spent Youtube must outnumber the total number of hours I spent on TikTok by at least 100:1.
For me the normal video recommendations are awesome on Youtube, I regularly find very obscure super interesting stuff in my recommendations.
For shorts it is abysmal, I only get horrible recommendations there - no idea why it is so different.
I think youtube is deliberately not showing good recommendations to boost ad revenue
When I tried TikTok for the first time in 2020, it had my preferences dialed in within about 15 minutes.
I tried reels when it first released, and gave up after an hour of constantly being shown videos of scantily clad women.
Any video platform is engaged in a constant war against being the OnlyFans sales funnel. Mind you, this also has a false positives ban problem.
it absolutely is, i routinely do a vanilla algo run on reels vs tiktok to compare and it’s crazy how much better it is.
reels is really, really bad - it is surprisingly hard to get it to stop showing you some combination of “funny prank videos” and onlyfans funnel content.
> I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.
I've watched probably 1000s of hours of youtube and it's still pushing crap at me that I would never watch in a million years (edit: eg "How to create Smart Contracts using ChatGPT" or "Abusive tough guy picks fight w the WRONG GUY!"). Maybe it's better if you like a specific genre of video essays or whatever but in terms of a replacement for tiktok it's completely irrelevant.
Reels is at least in the conversation, but the UX is ass and the culture there is a dumpster fire. Granted, I haven't had a meta account for about a decade (the ad obsession just destroys the experience) so this is all hearsay.
Reels is just as bad as you remember, both in content and in presentation (the app is a dumpster fire).
> not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes
Well, and what about the actual content? If all you have is a bunch of garbage it doesn't matter how good your algorithm is if all it can do is find the best garbage to push at the user.
As others said, you should try it. I did, and I was impressed how quickly it gets me to lose a lot of time.
I've put Tik Tok on my phone three different times now and used it each time over a few days and it seemed like I was scrolling endlessly and finding nothing.
YouTube's recommendations are terrible, but I usually open YouTube when I'm looking for something specific and it's amazing in that regard.
Instagram is somewhere in the middle. I mostly follow people I actually know so the videos are interesting because of that.
Are you "liking" videos? That's how I steered it in the right direction because it wasn't doing much for me when I first started using it. It only took a few minutes for it to latch onto my interest and then the watch time took over.
I tried TikTok and it was awful. I didn’t find a single interesting video. I haven’t tried it since. I’m curious what people actually watch on there?
I suspect that the algorithm is taking in inputs that maybe we don’t consider. Not just swipes or likes, but maybe even how still the phone is while you watch it or if you blink less, signs you’re more focused on the video. Maybe they don’t have access to that telemetry but I think that’s kind of the vein of how they measure attention more than just touchscreen actions
I use both and YouTube Short produces mostly just garbage for me. AI voice videos that will get your attention, but has little content. TikTok's algorithm on the other hand is much better and provides quality, half-long-form content.
Because for 5-20 dollars you can drive hundreds of thousands of people if not millions of people to your video, product, meme, whatever... Youtube, not so much.
As someone that uses both, YouTube shorts it's _not_ superior. Two very simple reasons:
1. the algorithm sucks 2. it will consistently fail to load content quickly enough when scrolling unwanted content
Shorts is garbage.
There are so many UI elements on top of video that end up blocking what you're trying to see. There is no way to hide them.
YouTube also destroyed its search.
> The UI is better than TikTok ever was
I cannot disagree more. I just scroll on tiktok and tiktok populates the scrolling with videos I want to see, and it takes about ten minutes to signal to tiktok what content you like and don't like. Youtube, meanwhile, is an exercise in a far too-busy UI with thumbnails and comments and text and buttons—it's inherently a desktop app shoved into a web browser. Nice if you want to search for a specific topic and watch a four-hour video on it, but terrible for entertainment or killing time.
The only use I have for youtube are in solving these two problems: 1) where can I find a music video and 2) how do I do x
...but the focus on the interface obscures why youtube shorts won't ever take off: youtube is extremely bad at pushing content I want to watch. I've heard this over and over and over again and I know it's true for me, too.
> I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious successor
It might be eventually.
(GenZ) People are migrating to RedNote now to lift a middle finger. It's more of a meme.
Let's see if the ActivityPub Loops in time (made by the creator of Pixelfed): https://loops.video/
Shorts is absolute trash. It does not have critical mass and will repeat the same videos to you over and over.
EDIT: I want to overemphasize just how bad it is. It feels like a project someone whipped up in coding bootcamp over a week. It feels like it has zero ability to pick the next video correctly and it genuinely repeats videos between sessions.
It's not as addictive. TikTok mastered the hyper-addictive algorithm.
IMHO good riddance. Anything bad for the mindless addictive chum industry is good for humanity. Now do Instagram, Facebook, Xhitter, etc.
Shorts is almost there. IMHO all it needed to do was be a separate app and not try to get you to sign up for YouTube Premium every 2 seconds.
Reels needs to be more disconnected from Facebook for it do anything similar.
Why do you say the Shorts UI is better? It seems exactly the same to me.
If it feels the same, you're not familiar enough with either app to make that judgement.
If I'm not mistaken the 'killer feature' of Tiktok is not the player, but the editor (Capcut?)
Yes, although Capcut is a separate piece of software. You can in theory make content with it for any app. In practice, Tiktok is so dominant that a lot of popular Reels content has Tiktok watermarks on it.
Every time in the last year that anyone has shared me a link to a short video on Facebook or Instagram, it has a TikTok watermark on it. This leads me to assume that most of the content on FB or Insta that I would actually want to see originally comes from TikTok.
No 2x speed playback doesn't help
the community on TikTok is friendlier and more uplifting compared to YouTube shorts
I loathe YouTube Shorts entirely.
TikTok has a great e-commerce integration, no one else is offering this at the moment.
Sometimes I visit forums where people share video snippets, I've never seen sexy stuff snagged from Shorts, but a lot from TikTok.
I think both Alphabet and Meta suck at seductive material.
both shorts and reels give me so much more brain dead content than tiktok and it’s really hard to get out of that rut
> it's the place for Luigi Mangione memes
I read a lot about TikTok the last few months from users all over the web. Trust me, that's not what TikTok is actually full of, its just what algorithm you got sucked into, for whatever reason. I assume there's some specific bubble for "current viral thing" that you're locked into. Make an alt and like completely different content, you'll see that your feed will be night and day.
Additionally, what's worse is, I've seen posts of people unable to get out of the algorithm bubble on TikTok no matter how many videos they dislike. I think some people even try blocking the accounts. It's the weirdest algorithm. I assume it works for MOST users (when its not a "MEME" Bubble, its likely content you actually like), but if you shove someone into a niche meme bubble, it can get weird.
tiktok easily lets you reset your algo, not sure if reels does the same
The "it's" to which that sentence is referring is the previously mentioned "xiaohongshu, or "little red book"".
Teens are rebellious & want to be far away from parents.
It disqualifies mainstream apps like Twitter, Reddit, BlueSky, Reels & now Snapchat as well. This leaves Tiktok and now international apps like Xiaohongshu as the obvious alternatives.
The more the US govt. forces youths to use American mega-corps, the less they want to use it.
I don't think rebellion has anything to do with why kids use Tiktok. Nor do I think the US has any interest in forcing kids to use social media...
It’s not why they use TikTok but it’s why they don’t use other social media apps. Once an app becomes too popular with older people the quality and vibes decrease, plus everyone feels awkward about posting.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about outside of generational gaps, new social media apps are fun because you add all the people you’re comfortable with. After some years you now have a ton of connections from past stages of life, and start feeling restricted again in your personal expression.
Plus there’s the dual use issue – IG is too commonly shared now so I have current and former coworkers there plus everyone I’ve ever been interested in as friends or more at a party. So it’s not the place I’d want to feel free and creative.
IG tries to solve some of this with Close Friends and other lists but people don’t really want to spend their time constantly organizing a list of friends.
No, but rebellion definitely has to do with why there is a shift towards Xiaohongshu, which is obviously even more Chinese than TikTok ever was.
Hilarious categorizing TikTok as non-mainstream. I get what you mean, but the most popular thing is pretty much mainstream by default
parents aren't on Discord
Even Top 1 in the german app store where TikTok isn't banned. People identify on Red as TikTok refugees
Looks like that app may have a backdoor https://x.com/d0tslash/status/1878959715033694492
The backdoor named "backdoor", the l33t h4ck3rs strike again.
If it's for spying on Chinese people inside Chinese territory, there wouldn't be any need to hide it.
Quite plausible. To what extent can a backdoor escape Android/iOS sandboxing?
> To what extent can a backdoor escape Android/iOS sandboxing?
Chances of that happening are close to 0.
It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information, is to give your data to another Chinese app instead. Not that I'd feel any less safe with Chinese companies having all my cat picks & ranting than I feel with American companies having the same (particularly under the upcoming regime).
Not that it makes a lot of difference to me, facebook is the only social-media-y thing I use and that is just under sufferance (only way to easily keep tabs on what is happening with some people, mainly family) and because I sometimes like to “breakfast with Lord Percy”. I might try bluesky at some pint as many contacts are moving from fb to there (though that seems rather twitter-like and that has never appealed to me even before I even knew Musk existed).
> It is amusing
Well, the US government has just successfully antagonized a bunch of their citizens...
It's amusing on the "interesting times" sense, no doubt. But it's not something unexpected. They have been antagonizing their citizens for a while by now.
At some point, something breaks and you get either an autocracy or real change. Some people claim they are already there but this is really still not clear.
Related ongoing thread (though not much there yet):
‘TikTok refugees’ flock to China's RedNote - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709236
It depends on how they respond over the next 1-2 weeks.
I think that the law "banning" TikTok applies to any Chinese app with over 1 million US users, so Xiaohongshu/Rednote or anywhere else the TikTok refugees flee will be a target - except YouTube shorts and Facebook/Instagram reels of course.
No, the law doesn't give a users threshold: it names ByteDance and TikTok specifically, and provides a mechanism for the President to add new companies controlled by a "foreign adversary country" to the list. So anything at all by ByteDance is banned, but RedNote is owned by a different company that would have to be targeted separately under this law.
https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7521/BILLS-118hr7521rfs...
> No, the law doesn't give a users threshold
It does have a threshold:
> (ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on which a relevant determination of the President is made pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);
So if it stays unpopular, it's protected from this law.
> but RedNote is owned by a different company that would have to be targeted separately under this law.
I think that's a foregone conclusion if it actually gets popular with Americans.
Ah, you're right—it's not a threshold that automatically kicks in at a certain number of users, but the president can't add one to the list until they reach that threshold. Thanks for clarifying.
I have a friends group where everybody is hopping to this in the group chat. They are so eager to run from one addiction to another - and I told them so. They are so eager to give China all their data and to focus their own lives around an addictive app. It's baffling. Go live your life, enjoy not being indoctrinated by bullshit and having your time wasted by manipulative algorithms.
"I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead than go back to using Instagram Reels"
I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and telling everyone to go to LinkedIn.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.
The algorithm is genuinely very good. That's why I deleted it.
It's very addictive and not always just shoveling slop.
I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian. Neo-china...
Your perception of TikTok likely depends on your TikTok for you page. If you spend time cultivating it, the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.
This seems to be less true on YouTube and Reels unfortunately.
You're both right! There was a good article/discussion on on this yesterday, but tldr: They are authentically fake! As in, the creators are not putting up a show with a 'real' person behind the persona, the algorithms have remade whatever person there use to be such that their 'authentic' self has become the persona.
The US gov's intention was not at all to shut down TikTok. It was to force ByteDance to sell it.
The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt, and their unwillingness to sell under the circumstances kinda proves their whole First Amendment claims are made in bad faith. Something deeper is going on, and it's not about your social security number.
This isn't rocket science. What's going on is having the keys to the kingdom with regards to serving videos to influence the mind of a user with extremely precise targeting.
China doesn't want USA doing that, and banned their social media. USA doesn't want China doing it because they've been doing it all over the world to everybody since Radio Free Europe, and likely before.
If you feel that the national security angle is a farce, do you similarly feel that the DoD banning TikTok on government systems was just for show? https://defensescoop.com/2023/06/02/pentagon-proposes-rule-t...
The DoD banning an app on their network is a lot different than banning it competely in the US. I would think DoD should ban most apps connecting to their networks that aren't work related. I feel this whole effort is either in bad faith or isn't being transparently communicated to the public.
They famously failed to ban strava and some military assets were unintentionally disclosed on the strava heatmap by soldiers logging their cardio jogs through facility hallways.
It was not for show. It acknowledged its success and was to limit its success. Then limit it as a "potential" vector for intrusion. Kaspersky was removed from the US on the same basis.
NatSec should not even be needed. A simpler reason could be that China bans foreign social media apps from operating in China, so Chinese apps should be treated as such.
Reciprocity is not a good idea. Why would we want to copy every bad foreign law?
well, probably yes
i think there are obvious reasons why bytedance would not want to spawn a US-based competitor and why a US only social media network would be ineffective.
this is exactly the same as what China does with their gfw, they allow american apps to divest and be owned by a chinese company.
Wrong
1. China asked American SNS companys to 'obey Chinese laws', which mostly refer to content control and data ownership, these companys refused, China didn'tforced them to sell 2. Are you sure to play the 'same as what China does'? hey, we are a totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial regime, are we same? think twice
2. The game can be slightly different. "hey, we are open by default. but if an authoritarian regimes wants to exploit our openness by marketing their apps while at the same time banning our apps from their market, then we will strike back".
paradox of intolerance and all that..
Heck, China forced Apple to divest iCloud to the government of Guizhou.
it's about data ownership, part of data compliance, citizen data can not be pass to abroad, of course, it's also about content censorship
Microsoft and Tesla accepted the same rule
You can understand it as the US gov requiring TikTok's data must be hosted by Microsoft in the US
1. Yes, China forced the sale of Uber China to Didi - this is well documented.
2. Did I say that? No. I am opposed to the tiktok ban
China forced the sale of Uber China to Didi - this is well documented
really? > https://www.bbc.com/news/36938812 > https://www.heritage.org/international-economies/commentary/...
Let me tell you a cruel fact - Uber is completely unable to compete with Didi. You have no idea how fierce the competition in this industry in China is.
Uber died before it grew up in China
Uber got 33%+ market share.
From your article:
> If Uber had become a commercial success in China, Chinese authorities ultimately would have clamped down to protect their domestic competitors.
> firms that do occasionally find success often face headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access to the domestic market.
> Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-wealth fund.
> "Uber China" sought local investors. The hope was that, with local investors, the Chinese operation would be spared some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed on foreign businesses.
China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism. Not sure where the profit is in denying that, given your own sources seem to clearly state it and even name a number of channels through which the state puts their thumb on the scale, not just regulatory but also through financing.
You can ignore my following comments if this will make you feel better...
> *If* Uber had become a commercial success in China, Chinese authorities ultimately *would* have clamped down to protect their domestic competitors.
classic demonizing and loser's execuse
> firms that do occasionally find success often face headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access to the domestic market.
every other demestic companys face headwinds from Chinese regulators, just like I mentioned above, and Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, they all in same situation, some of them couldn't handle this so they leaved, some stays
Also, DiDi once were banned more than 2 years by authorities, it survived
> Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-wealth fund
The 'STATE-BACKED' is a typical word used by certain people, it's just some kind of gov investment funds, there're dozens and invested thousands private companys, it's a Socialism country, it's called socialism, what do you expect? Didi is not even a state-owned enterprise. And is this equals to "force to sell"?
> some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed on foreign businesses.
Bruh
> China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism.
That's true, and? many Chinese people also have intense domestic favoritism
BTW, Apple is losing market share in China. However, take it easy, I don't think Apple will be sold to Huawei. Moreover, Apple is produced by Chinese and Indian, why bothered?
Are you an agent of the Chinese government? There are multiple indicia that you are.
Ehh...yes?
If we played the same as China does, we'd be hacking Baidu through a vulnerability in a Microsoft web browser until they withdrew completely from the American market.
Have you heard of the NSA
I'm not saying we don't hack them.
I'm saying we don't hack them with the goal of driving them out of the American market, which is what happened to Google's PRC operations.
> If we played the same as China does, we'd be hacking Baidu through a vulnerability in a Microsoft web browser
We don't?
With the goal of driving them out of the US?
I just typed https://www.baidu.com into my browser bar, hit enter, and their page loaded.
I mean, the Chinese government was never going to let the US just take their company at bargain basement prices.
Didn't something similar happen with Grindr? It was Chinese owned and sold without nearly as much excitement. Given the inevitable bidding war from multiple interested parties I would be surprised if they couldn't get a fair price for TikTok
Do you think that ByteDance is primarily concerned with the economic considerations for TikTok, or do you think that it is something else?
Do you think that there is a price at which they would be willing to sell it?
Social media is the front line of an ongoing cyber war. It is a matter of propaganda and social engineering.
Imagine if Japan owned all the newspapers in the run-up to WWII.
That's not to say China is the only one with propaganda.
> I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
Exhibit A for banning tiktok right here
Funnily enough, the lawyer who quit Meta has resorted to doomposting on .. Linkedin. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/meta-lawyer-lemley-quit...
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect
I feel like this is what so many people (including myself) are missing about TikTok.I'll be honest I saw TikTok largely as an "extension" of Reels and vice-versa where folks with a following on one will post to the other because they are so similar and that would increase their reach.
It's more like telling people that they're gonna have to visit a mobile site instead of use a mobile app.
A glaring example of the fakeness of insta reels I saw yesterday was comments regarding the LA fires. On multiple reels, I saw the exact same back and forth exchanges between a handful of accounts. I thought maybe it was some kind of caching issue but there were different accounts commenting on in the fake threads across reels. Good way to boost engagement for the bot accounts.
YouTube Shorts doesn't even get a mention?
Is it actually Instagram Reels that is inauthentic, or is it the content that people post there? The Instagram Reels service is just that - a service people can use to post videos, same as TikTok. It's the people who choose to use the service that cause it to seem inauthentic, not the service itself. If everyone migrated from TikTok to Reels overnight, then wouldn't Reels become more "authentic"?
The comment and quote is telling of the zeitgeist. I would be more aghast by it, but then I remember that my SSN has been a subject to multiple data breach notices in past year.. so.. what is one more bad actor at this point?
>TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness...
LMAO
"At this point, we have to accept that younger generations—precisely the people who have been raised on quantified audience feedback for their every creative gesture—have an unrecognizable conception of authenticity."[0]
[0]https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-mrbea...
Given how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers and how similar the functionality of TikTok and YouTube Shorts, I feel like the only explanations are:
1. The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a domestic one
Or more likely, given that there are so many other industries that didn't get a ban:
2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
The big issue isn't data security; it's propaganda. Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't) there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans. Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
And even if you disagree with the national security reasons for disallowing China to control a major U.S. social network, there is still the issue of trade reciprocity - nearly all of the U.S. Web companies are banned in China.
Not just trade reciprocity, but ideological reciprocity. The argument that the US should allow TikTok because “free speech”—while China bans American platforms because of censorship and also dictates content on TikTok because of censorship—seems obviously broken. Seems like the rule should at least be something like “Europe is welcome to blast propaganda at our teenagers for as long as we get to blast propaganda at their teenagers.”
we should probably start banning books from China too, for the same reason
That isn't even a remotely realistic propaganda threat, while tick tock arguably is.
Looking forward to Europe banning Meta and X considering how their CEOs are meeting weekly with their government overlord, quite clear those social networks are in the pocket of the new US government.
No, no, you can't do that. Than they'll come after you and claim how you're not free, you don't support free market and whatnot. Banning is tool for them, but not for you.
Any country is free to do this.
The US didn’t “ban” anything. If the EU required Meta to divest I imagine they would do that rather than shut down and lose billions.
You think US Meta would relinquish tech to EU Meta? You think they're better then TikTok?
Yeah, we're not buying that story anymore.
US tech companies sell themselves to European tech companies all the time, Meta would definitely sell.
This ban only applies to foreign adversaries (e.g. China, Iran, and Russia).
Hum... Brazil already demanded explanations about the new Meta moderation rules. I remember reading the same about the UK, but I'm not sure.
Musk making threats against the UK government has gone down badly: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/uk-counter-ext...
> Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't)
Posting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook will get your account terminated for "supporting terrorism". The pro-western censorship regime on FB is extremely strong. US lawmakers specifically cited the amount of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok as why they were banning the app.
Sources:
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
annoying AIPAC is the quickest way to find out how 'flexible' the US is regarding it's 'freedoms'. Free speech on campuses are squelched, all to support a genocide.
Speaking of foreign propaganda, does anyone remember when one of the most destructive advocacy organizations in the US was found to be heavily influenced by Russian spies? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44885633 (Fox news for balance (!): https://www.foxnews.com/world/timeline-of-suspected-russian-... )
>Speaking of foreign propaganda, does anyone remember when one of the most destructive advocacy organizations in the US was found to be heavily influenced by Russian spies?
"heavily influenced by Russian spies" seems like a stretch. The BBC article you linked basically says she attended some NRA conventions/events, and got some NRA officials to travel to Russia. There's no indication those activities actually changed anything.
> one of the most destructive advocacy organizations in the US was found to be heavily influenced by Russian spies
Your links do not back up this claim. Both indicate that Butina was likely a Russian spy and desired to influence the National Rifle Association (NRA). However, neither article gives any example of successful influence, however minor.
i absolutely reject this great firewall style of thinking. I’m an American, an adult, and I can read and watch whatever I want.
I just want to remind everyone that China/Russia is doing everything you dislike the West doing right now. Please talk when China/Russia opens up. Right now they spew propaganda into our societies with no way for us to retaliate. I don't like censorships but these one-way attacks are a weakness to democracies, not strengths.
Open internet only works as long as everyone is friendly. The world is increasingly becoming not friendly.
You know the whole idea of “oh, all of our problems are actually because X, Y, Z boogeyman!” thing? Yeah that. Watching from outside, it feels like political landscape of the US knows that they have lost the global competition and scrambling to get back on its feet. Everyone just keeps yelling “no, no, don’t look what’s happening inside, because everything is so much worse in other countries, they’re about to completely fall down! Those europoors with no ACs, China is about to collapse for the 50th time in the last 10 years, Japan is basically dead etc etc.”.
Literally same arguments used by Iran.
It’s fascinating honestly. Soon we’re going to have “we need government to be able to DPI and block propaganda!”
> Literally same arguments used by Iran.
All governments/nations have some level of self-interest. That doesn't mean they are all equal in their motivations or approaches.
China is literally controlling the narrative through TikTok. Why shouldn't the US respond to that?
> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans
Is the argument itself correct or not? Or do we evaluate it based on motivation, i.e. it's ok when we do it because we have good reasons for it? Sounds like the ends justify the means to me.
The correct approach would be to increase the critical thinking skills of the population, increase transparency, require corporations to make algorithms fair and equitable. Require all feeds to be chronological or some other uniform, fair rule for showing posts. No boosting certain viewpoints, or paid promotions. But these things would bother corporations and politicians in the west as well as the external forces with "bad motivations", so just ban the external social networks.
The EU I think has a better approach, of course made possible because we don't have any powerful social networks of our own, and so nobody lobbies against these rules. I'm sure the DSA and DMA would be different (if they existed at all) if at least one of FAANG was European. Nevertheless, the concept is better.
The chinese government couldn’t care less about tiktok, your brain has been poisoned by usa propaganda against china
> propaganda
It's so amusing seeing the society that lionizes itself as the paragon of open society and can't stop boasting about the effectiveness of free-speech soft-power compared to sclerotic communist propaganda now having panics over short video apps.
Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton could never think that.
Well, maybe we will be on yeltsin-on-supermarket stage soon?
We haven't allowed a foreign adversary to own a media company since 1934.
This is just updating the standard. TikTok is clearly a massive threat, how is that not obvious?
https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli....
The propaganda on TikTok comes disguised as Americans sharing points of view that just happen to serve CCP interests. Often the creators are expressing a genuine (but rare) viewpoint that China just needs to amplify. This isn't about keeping Americans from reading Pravda.
It's not hard to imagine the messages China will be pushing to weaken support for assisting Taiwan in a conflict. "Don't waste money propping up the corrupt Taiwanese government, spend it on health care /tax cuts at home!"
Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.
Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually. Hospitals running out of medical supplies will hit WAY sooner than your existing 4090 needs to be replaced by a new Taiwanese product.
This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline. Surely you can at least admit this. It's just a battle of propaganda, except China unfortunately has common sense on its side in many of these arenas:
USA should not be spending hundreds of billions maintaining a WW2 power projection strategy, 80 years later.
>> Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.
> Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually.
Yes, but let's not use that as a justification for letting it get worse.
> This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline.
The whole f*ing modern economy runs on semiconductors, and the most advanced ones are fabbed in Taiwan. You might have a point if Intel wasn't falling on its face, but it is, so you don't
The way we stop making this worse, i.e. reducing our trade deficit with China and in general, is by doing virtually the opposite of what Washington is currently doing.
Rebuild the republic instead of wasting everything on hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion.
I disagree (I don't know what "military power projection over China's coastline" even means - do you think the U.S. has military bases in Taiwan?), but the point is that these issues need to be debated by Americans without the other side surreptitiously trying to sway public opinion.
> I don't know what "military power projection over China's coastline" even means
That's the problem. There's massive lack of historical education on this topic. The Taiwan issue greatly predates TSMC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_chain_strategy
> these issues need to be debated by Americans
Yo can we drop the whole “our government executes on the will of the people charade”. If you think your average American has any say in their governments foreign policy I have a bridge to sell you.
I can't admit this and have no idea what you're talking about. You're right that Taiwan isn't more important to the US than China or any other major trading partner; the key difference is that China is not threatening to invade and conquer any of the other trading partners. Demanding that belligerent countries should not invade their neighbors is not a "WW2 power projection strategy", as China understood perfectly well when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
What? Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton would never have allowed a hostile foreign government to own a major communications platform.
Bush and Bill would still laugh about nailing jelly to the wall
Elon Musk seemed to leverage Twitter to try to manipulate the US election along with a myriad of other underhanded actions.
Should Twitter be banned as a propaganda / risk to US democracy?
Totally. Only US billionaires should control the US propaganda algorithms.
> Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
They don't have to, Fox News does it for free /zing. But for real I wouldn't see a problem with it. Less now that the world is more globalized than ever, I can get news from every corner of the globe both from our allies and enemies.
Could they be subtly pushing a narrative of communism or something, sure but this kind of "news is biased towards its owners" is beyond commonplace at this point. Jon Stewart just did a whole bit about why he couldn't criticize Apple or China.
To be clear, Russia pays those right wing trolls a fat chunk of change
Citation needed.
> 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
If the last four years are indicative of anything, it's that the US government has fairly limited control over the narrative on American social platforms.
I lost count of how many times I saw people typing in "FJB" and "MAGA".
"FJB" and "MAGA" are within the bounds of allowed political discourse and were encouraged.
"Throw the bums out" without any additional coherent political project is precisely what the elites allow and what allows them to maintain power.
I mean, if you want to ignore the fact that the JB was Joe Biden and he was quite literally President of the United States when that was a trend, sure.
Same with MAGA after January 6th.
Why would you have to "ignore" those facts?
It was a concerted effort to channel quiescently conservative voters into national electoral politics.
Neither of those challenged the super-structure.
Or, maybe, those things they don't see as a problem.
These shifty foreigners, however... Xenophobia isn't just some old timey things we use to do
Facebook is extremely censored re: the genocide in Gaza
TikTok is not
Is it censored, or do most people just not talk about it on Facebook?
It's interesting how incredibly supportive of human rights that a platform in bed with the CCP became, no? Do you think that China's human rights bugaboos are often discussed on their internal social networks?
It's amplified.
No, I do not think China's bugaboos are allowed on TikTok for the exact same reason the US's are not allowed on Facebook
I mean, I've seen plenty of dissenting material against the powers-that-be on Meta platforms over the years, but okay.
Police brutality (both viewpoints), COVID conspiracies, election conspiracies, etc. are not particularly hard to find on there.
Is posting about CEOs allowed there?
Yes? I've seen plenty of Facebook posts about how CEOs are greedy, criminal, ripping us all off, etc. I'm really not sure how you could have gotten the impression that it's not allowed to talk about CEOs on Facebook.
there's a billion people on facebook, i am sure people talk about it
It's possible, but ultimately it's hard to tell, especially in regard to the American users.
The results of the election would point to the idea that most American voters aren't so perturbed by what's happening in Gaza as to want an administration that would be at least as effective in reeling in the Israelis as the Biden administration was. Whether that's right or wrong, well, that's another discussion.
It's a chicken-or-the-egg problem. Do people not talk about Gaza on Facebook because it's censored, or do people not talk about Gaza on Facebook because no one was talking about it to begin with?
Which party should I vote for to help the people of Gaza?
lol, doesn't matter at this point.
Given the history I'd say that the incoming administration will be less sympathetic to the Gazans than the outgoing, but, again, it doesn't matter at this point.
The Biden administration was obviously not effective at reeling in Israel at all.
Give it a few months.
>that most American voters aren't so perturbed by what's happening in Gaza as to want an administration that would be at least as effective in reeling in the Israelis as the Biden administration was.
It's not hard to be at least as capable as somebody who's completly incapable. Think what you will of Trump, but in one meeting he had a solid deadline for implementing the ceasefire agreement the Biden admin has had floating since May. There weren't even any changes to it, so what the heck has Biden been doing?
If that cease-fire holds, I'll be very surprised.
More likely than Biden's incompetence is that Bibi now has a variable solved for in the geopolitical calculus: the American election now has a winner. He finds a kindred spirit in Trump and thinks he is now working with an American administration that will let him do whatever he wants without even the appearance of trying to rein him in. There is no Rashida Tlaib in Trump's party.
But that's on a different subject than the greater thread discussion.
People in Gaza are celebrating the proposed ceasefire and Zionists are angry about it. I’m no Trump fan but it does indeed look like he’ll be better than Biden (who was the worst).
The people in Gaza are probably desperate enough to accept anything at this point and everyone involved has a long history of going back on their word.
Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and supports West Bank settlements. To suddenly give an Iran-backed militia a win goes against literally everything in the grand scheme of things.
Are they desperate enough to overthrow Hamas?
I'm with you that Biden has been doing worse than nothing, and has been stringing us along with this ceasefire that will never come, while at the same time using UN to block any sort of resolution.
But don't kid yourself that Trump is better. He supports the settlement of the West Bank and has recognized Jerusalem as exclusively Israeli.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/11/trump-cabinet-is...
The Republicans are just as on board with the genocide as the Democrats are, if not more.
The question is whether it's a ruinous empathy thing. It's much too early for me to be confident that the current ceasefire is actually going to work better than the last one. But if it does, it's a pretty strong data point for the idea that credibly taking either side is better for the Palestinian people than flailing around trying to support both.
Is this in favor of a one state solution, with Israel being the one state?
genuinely confused - Biden has not been remotely empathic towards Palestine.
tiktok is extremely censored re: genocide in xinjiang. facebook is not.
Great, so we have TikTok where we can access information that's being censored by the West, and Facebook to access information that's being censored by the East. What's the problem? Information wants to be free.
There are places in the west where you risk losing your job just by mentioning the ongoing genocide that is happening now in Gaza. I'm not defending the CCP in any way, it's just that power corrupts and abuse of power happens pretty much everywhere.
Not disagreeing, that's exactly my point, the govt wants to be able control the narrative
i feel that we overuse the word genocide nowadays, in a way that almost amounts to holocaust trivialization
if this is referring to Gaza, many Holocaust experts are willing to call what's happening there a genocide
i think i’m pretty clearly referring to Xinjiang.
if the Rohingya genocide is a genocide, then I can see the case for Gaza (the UN definition of genocide is quite broad) - but still feel that there should be a word distinguishing the stuff that happened in the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide from less systemic killings occurring in the background of conflict. A lot of the power of the word “genocide” comes from the implicit comparison to the Holocaust, but none of the events we are discussing really come all that close barring Rwanda.
Yep. The Chinese state is guilty of a number of things in Xinjiang, but genocide is not one of them.
Have you ever wondered re: genocide in xinjiang is just another lie produced by the US gov?
No, of course, but that's exactly where the fun lies.
... genocide denial is fun?
checking ignorant comments is fun
To be honest, this is my primary motivation for browsing HN.
Trump won, the Russian misinformation campaign is over now. You can stop making stuff up about Jews now.
To echo what other comments have said about it being propaganda related, we can already see this occurring today:
https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/A-Tik-Tok-ing-...
Totally. I find it very interesting that we tend to criticize China for their protectionism, but as soon as something out-competes US companies, it gets banned: Huawei, DJI, TikTok.
Of course it cannot be said like this, because "free speech" and "democracy", so the official reason is "national security".
Mercantalism begets Mercantalism. If their mercantalist policies become successfull then unfortunately we'll need to also assume similar policies to protect ourselves, aka Beggar Thy Neighbour, and everyone loses in an arms race of tariffs and subsidies.
That's exactly why free trade proponets oppose those policies, but the CCP didn't want to reform so we'll go the opposite way.
This claim is incompatible with the reality that the U.S. runs an enormous bilateral trade deficit with China.
well china does it too with google,fb etc back then, and other nation do it too
albeit not outright banned it all together but sometimes they prefer homegrown company/technology
Sure. I just noted the irony that the US discourse has sounded a lot like "we are better than China, we are more free" for decades.
In some ways, this is still true, even surrounding this decision.
Do you think there were many people standing outside of government buildings in Beijing protesting the potential ban of Facebook and Google while politicians of different political parties were debating the ban in the country's primary legislative body? Do you think you could launch a campaign for office on repealing said ban in China?
But we are, there is no irony. China has the great wall and massive corporate espionage games to steal state and corporate secrets. The US and its various federal intelligence agencies have certainly done nefarious things but never quite as documented at the level as China's. They actively monitor all of their Social Media, block most foreign social media. I can easily go to any Chinese social media/website from the US.
> "we are better than China, we are more free"
Anyone who disagrees with this is either not being honest or is not aware of what extent China restricts it's citizens.
But wouldn't you say that there is some irony there, still?
I see multiple comments saying "shut up, we're not China!", but that's not what I meant :-). I just meant that there is some irony here.
And that next time we criticize China's protectionism, we may take a step back and think that we do it too, sometimes.
I mean, let's be clear: Facebook and Google are very much banned in Mainland China.
I cannot argue on the TikTok as strongly but I can see strong arguments on why Huawei and DJI are national security risks. Some of this is more educated guesses so not defensible with numbers. We know most major companies in the Chinese market have extremely close ties to the CCP. No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms but I believe the CCP takes it to a next level. We know for a fact that the CCP and chinese entities play extremely hardball when it comes to corporate espionage. Some of the stories we have seen almost read like a spy novel. Certainly Huawei and DJI make some incredible products but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure, I do believe it warrants major concern for national security.
I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy compared to the easier explanation, China is a fairly crafty bad actor in a lot of cases. 99% of the imported products from China are not getting blocked, just the ones that have very significant national security risks.
> I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy
I am not proposing a conspiracy, I am merely noting some irony in the fact that the US are doing protectionism here.
> No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms
Well, most of the Western Internet goes through the US, and we know for a fact that the US try to extract as much as they can from whatever they can (remember Snowden?). Also the US are very fine with US companies owning all the data of a big part of the world, and they would be really pissed if some country started banning them "for national security reasons".
> but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure
You don't need to connect the drone to the Internet. Technical solutions would most definitely exist, I am convinced of that. The reason DJI is being banned is because DJI is 7 years ahead of anyone else, and the gap is getting bigger every year. It really, really sounds like the US drone companies have been lobbying a ton because they just can't compete.
> 99% of the imported products from China are not getting blocked
because it's impossible.
the US offloaded low-added-value manufacturing to China, exchanging paper dollars for cheap industrial goods. When China tries to upgrade to high-added-value industries, like chips, guess what? National security risks!
just enjoy cheap goods and nature resources from 3rd world...
I am not sure I follow your point. There have been both National Security risks as well as protectionist economic policy enforced against china that benefits domestic players. In a lot of those protectionist cases, there is either a case of China flooding the market or there are cases where the government makes a choice that its beneficial to keep domestic manufacturers alive.
In the above provided examples its quite clear that there are possible national security risks involved with China being involved in US infrastructure and technology. If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
If you have better example beyond hyperbole I am all ears.
> If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
If DJI was from the EU, the US would manage to buy it.
> If DJI was from the EU there would not even be a discussion.
1. of course there'll be no 'national security risks' because EU is an ally, and the US is spying on it
2. even though, troubles come to US's allies sometimes, like what Alstom and ASML met
3. EU products are mostly less compatible, overall, it cannot challenge the position where the US holds in the global value chain, so pose less of threat
You still have not given any evidence how DJI is not a national security risk?
Read some of the many stories out there about the NSA, please. They have backdoors into internet infrastructure. If any country is a threat to information security, it’s the USA.
Did you read my comment? I explicitly called out backdoors, you should read comments closer. It most definitely happens within the US but the ties between the US government and corporate entities are no where as perversely intertwined as they are in China.
So you would say for sure that the NSA has definitely never been used to give advantages to US companies? I could totally imagine Boeing receiving information in order to win a contract against Airbus.
After all, we know for a fact that the US have been spying on European politicians.
It's important to say that the US had TikTok with Vine, but is so corrupt that it let Facebook buy it to shut it down.
Yup. China has been kicking Silicon Valley's butt for some time now, and I don't see any signs of that changing any time soon.
This drives the point home:
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38242135-ai-superpowers
It was with the 2020 version of the algorithm till they changed things see https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
I'm not referring exclusively to TikTok but tech in general. China makes SV look entitled and lazy.
> how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers
A law passed at the same time as the tiktok ban attempts to address this:
> a) Prohibition It shall be unlawful for a data broker to sell, license, rent, trade, transfer, release, disclose, provide access to, or otherwise make available personally identifiable sensitive data of a United States individual to— (1) any foreign adversary country; or (2) any entity that is controlled by a foreign adversary.
In support of (2): https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
I personally see this as the beginning of a slippery slope - a move that follows in the footsteps of China.
Only legit reason would've been trade. China won't "import" our products, so we do the same. But that seems like not the reason.
it's not the same data or data quality. the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of the american public (psyops). What russia is doing through their trollfarms, china is doing through tiktok.
> the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of the american public (psyops).
I don't buy it. If that were actually the concern, we would be talking about banning Facebook and X for manipulating Americans to vote against their own interests and hand over more power & money to the platforms' owners. Facebook has done way, way, way, way more harm to America and Americans than Tiktok ever did. The Tiktok ban is an illegitimate handout to America's oligarchs to protect them from having to compete. It's nothing to do with protecting Americans from manipulation.
American corporations have free speech rights. Chinese corporations do not.
I'm not sure that's true, and even if it was, the law as passed requires American companies to not serve the app from their app stores, which is a restriction of American company speech.
> we would be talking about banning Facebook and X for manipulating Americans vote
in fact, there is alot of talk about this. wasn't that the main reason Musk bought Twitter?
> wasn't that the main reason Musk bought Twitter?
Yes.
> there is alot of talk about this
There's a lot of talk by politicians about banning Facebook & X in the US? Really?
> The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a domestic one
China certainly engages in security theater for their own economic advantage as well. It's no coincidence that any American internet company that tries to operate in China gets throttled or "accidentally" blocked by the great Chinese firewall. And no, economic retaliation against China isn't "stooping down" to censorship of China. That would be like framing the EU's retaliatory tariffs against Trump as a punishment to European bourbon lovers.
> The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
Yes, but people do not appreciate what that really means. Countries need to eat the consequences of influencing domestic media, so you at least need to maintain a weak form of checks and balances. For example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.
On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...
Wrong - it's practically impossible to buy video and audio data at the PII level like Tiktok is getting.
In the words of Noam Chomsky [1]:
> [Manufacturing Consent] argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
The problem with Tiktok, as far as the government is concerned, is the lack of control on narrative when Meta, Twitter and Google are an extension of the US State Department (eg [2]).
The Tiktok ban came together in a matter of days as a bipartisan effort weeks after the ADL said (in leaked audio) that they have a "TikTok problem" [3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[2]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
Mitt Romney basically came out and admitted that the reason for the TikTok ban was that young people were getting unfiltered access to information about the genocide in Gaza.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
3. The government is concerned that having a company that's beholden to a foreign government control the algorithm that feeds the rising generation much of their worldview may not be a good long term plan.
This has a passing resemblance to (2), but the key difference is that the government doesn't believe they have control over the narrative on Facebook, they just know that a foreign government doesn't. It's strictly better from the perspective of the US government to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism (after all, that's how all of the older generations' world views were shaped) than to risk the possibility that an adversary is tipping the scales.
What I don't understand is why the politicians insist on talking about spying as the concern. The people who are pro-TikTok are pretty clearly skeptical either way, and "think of the children" is usually the most effective political tool they have.
Funny you mention Raw Capitalism:
It shows a point I like to bring up often that Capitalism and The Free Market are directly opposed. What capital (a fancy word for shareholders) want is an infinite money machine and that is easiest with a monopoly. Hence, banning a competitor that's doing too well in the free market.
To the other part, I consider your 3 and my 2 the same, the US doesn't want us getting Chinese info and has their own perfered sources instead.
In the free market the monopoly buys out the competitors. No need for banning. Shareholders, the embodiment of greed, will just follow the money.
In a free market, there are monopolies, by definition.
If you're saying that capitalists will inevitably contort a free market to an unfree one, via whatever means (often mergers) then we agree.
IMO. a common misconception is that allowing all mergers is a "free market" policy when it is not
are no monopolies*
They're strictly not equivalent—yours believes the US has a substantial amount of control over Facebook, mine does not. I can't change your belief, but I can draw a distinction between our beliefs.
I think it's better to say it the other way round: Facebook and to a much greater extent X has a substantial amount of influence over the US government.
> to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism
.. by the guy sitting next to the President? It's not yet clear what this "DOGE" thing that Musk has been given by Trump actually is, but it sounds like part of the government to me and has "government" in the name?
> 2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
This was the case for the first attempt, but then TikTok gave the US government access to everything. So the effort completely stalled, and the only people still banging the drum about it were R's who had run on anti-China rhetoric.
Then Oct. 7th happened, and the followup genocide that the US decided to go out of its way to participate in. The most, and most influential, anti-genocide activity was on TikTok, simply because TikTok has a hold on the young audience and young content producers, and being young they aren't cynical and hollowed out inside, and can't justify being silent in order to protect their own incomes and families (which they don't have yet.) The Lobby quickly picked up the dropped ball and carried it over the line, and Biden continued his unbroken record of being completely humiliated by Bibi, a regular criminal before he was a war criminal.
Now the ban is a zombie, because opposition to (and support for) the genocide is now set in stone, and it already looks like Trump has ended it even though he isn't in office yet through the technique of placing the slightest amount of pressure on Bibi.
All we'll have left is a horrible soon-to-come Supreme Court decision that enshrines the idea that bills of attainder explicitly intended to limit free speech are ok now because China. Which is also because Russia and also because Hamas, and because Maduro, and because hate, and because sowing discord, and because, because, because...
-----
edit: and if the Trump peace fails, and all the kids migrate to some other platform, that platform will be attacked. They lucked out that TikTok was owned by China, and Americans are such racists that they could use that racism to get them to agree to silence Americans speaking to Americans. But before, they were attacking every social network for allowing speech from Trump supporters, people criticizing covid policy, always Palestinians, women who don't accept transwomen (to get the libs onboard), etc...
Absolutely
US citizens do not want this.
Every news article descending into tangents on any other point than that is part of why we can't have nice things.
The whole country has turned into some sort of lower primate improv troupe where whatever stupid thing comes up gets a "Yes and let's" diversion instead of an adult in the room standing up and cutting the crap.
We certainly _do_ want this. I think the fact that we let a foreign company own a social media platform in the first place is preposterous. As others have said, we would never let the CCP own a TV broadcast, why should we let china own a major social media platform? That's just absurd.
There are foreign-controlled TV networks in the US. Not over-the-air, but that's probably due to them being niche more than anything.
Part of it is almost certainly due to the FCC controlling licenses for what is broadcast over the air.
> US citizens do not want this
Ha ha, I guess you are discovering, many many people do want this.
The users for sure don't want this. Among non-users, I'd say there's a sizable difference (let's say 50/50)...
Many things aren't that democratic when you look at it like that!
No one who actually uses it or understands it wants this. This is like vegans banning steak.
It's like the non-addicts banning heroin. You don't have to be a Tik Tok user to understand that it's bad for it to be PRC-controlled!
Why is it bad when China (supposedly) creates propaganda on tiktok but it’s good when the US creates propaganda on facebook?
You’re not a government, you’re a person. Either way you’re being manipulated, and the US government definitely doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
That is a fine take, but the assumption that all other forms of media masses of people are exposed to aren’t also propaganda is a foolish one to make. We have an entire advertising industry in this country. Something like $300 billion in ad spend a year in the US. Ad spend is literally propaganda lest we forget.
> aren’t also propaganda
It's not that other propaganda doesn't exist, it's that a likely intended effect of Chinese propaganda is destabilization and/or delegitimization of hostile governments. Ad spend is more about destabilizing consumers' savings.
yeah because they wont censor gaza information
You're getting it. It is like vegans banning steak!
> "lower primate improv troupe"
> "No one who actually uses it or understands it wants this."
"Everyone's generalizations are stupid, except mine."
The Senator you voted for this probably voted for this so yes, America does want this.
Pew has it at 32–28 in support of the ban[0]. I think that's pretty low for a bipartisan effort where the opposition hasn't really had a chance to air it's case.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/05/support-f...
The ones that use the app don't want this. The ones that don't use it ... don't care.
Naturally either you don't want it. or you don't care.
My opinion on this has not changed since Trump tried to ban TikTok in his first term [0]: if the USA wants to ban TikTok for XYZ reason, they need to pass a general purpose law in Congress that applies equally to all foreign-owned companies.
Singling out TikTok without a universal principle or law leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, and the US gov. will just be playing whack-a-mole with whatever the TikTok successor is.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/944039053/u-s-judge-halts-tru...
I think part of the problem is everyone thinks they are the "adult in the room" and everyone else is the "primates". I agree policy discussions are a bit of a farce though (in a sorta funny twist places like TikTok are responsible for that since the engagement metrics have a tendency to promote nonsense and lies)
Hey, the ADL president is a US citizen, and he said "we really have a TikTok problem."
America has an Israel problem.
We all live in a bubble that consists of the people and things we interact with. People in your bubble not wanting this doesn't mean other people outside of your bubble don't.
US citizens most definitely want this.
Some, sure, highly unlikely a majority does if you look at how many Americans use TikTok
How many of those people voted? The young people who don't vote don't want this and the old people who do vote do want this. The outcome is predictable.
> Privately held ByteDance is about 60% owned by institutional investors such as BlackRock and General Atlantic, while its founders and employees own 20% each. It has more than 7,000 employees in the United States
That’s probably a very stupid question, but is how this is a Chinese company when 60% are owned by American funds?
Same way the Singaporean CEO is part of the CCP: He's not, it's not, but there are a lot of vested interests like Facebook lobbying to treat them as the boogeyman.
The tiktok ban law forbids chinese ownership of 20% and chinese control of 100%. That is how it is a chinese company, either by 20% ownership or 100% contro.
In the US government's view, as expressed in its brief in the Supreme Court:
"Because of the authoritarian structures and laws of the PRC regime, Chinese companies lack meaningful independence from the PRC’s agenda and objectives. As a result, even putatively ‘private’ companies based in China do not operate with independence from the government. Indeed, “the PRC maintains a powerful Chinese Communist Party committee ‘embedded in ByteDance’ through which it can ‘exert its will on the company.’ ... the committee includes “at least 138 employees,” including ByteDance’s “chief editor”
...
"Even assuming that the law would recognize Zhang as a bona fide domiciliary of Singapore and not the PRC, ByteDance would nevertheless qualify as being “controlled by a foreign adversary” under one or more of the other statutory criteria. For instance, ByteDance is “headquartered in” China, which is sufficient on its own.... ByteDance also is “subject to the direction or control of ” Chinese persons domiciled in China (in particular, Chinese Communist Party officials), which likewise is sufficient on its own."
http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-656/336144/20241...
Presumably, the relevant factor here is not ownership on paper, but who has real control via being able to tell Bytedance employees (including the executives) what to do. Which, in this case, is assumed to be China’s government leaders.
Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban access to a popular website? I imagine this ban will go down exactly the same. Never underestimate a bored teenager's ability to bypass tech restrictions. Heck maybe this is what is needed to finally get a new generation out of the comforts of their tech walled garden and get their hands dirty.
Don't underestimate the human ability to "settle for less" if said less requires less effort from them. There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality ; Netflix is just easier. They will settle for the "easy" solution, which will be any one of the TikTok clones already existing (YT shorts, reels, whatever).
Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results. Some random pirating streaming site is unknown and probably not even easily discoverable on google (you have to use yandex for that).
I stick to pirating with adblockers because it is more convenient, there is a much bigger library of content and I don't have to share any personal info or pay for anything.
If you know the words “yandex” and “adblocker” you are already 90th percentile ability to pirate content
Netflix is absolutely easier to use than any form of pirating for the vast majority of their userbase.
Everyone in this thread talking about how people will “just get a VPN” to use TikTok have zero concept of the technical abilities of TikTok’s user base
Even just having a PC hooked up to your TV in the first place is rare. People have locked-down smart TVs or STBs.
I wouldn't mind paying if it wasn't setup in a way like "oh want to watch that movie? subscribe to this service" at one point I was paying for maybe 5 different providers eg. Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax, etc...
That is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that if I have a tiktok channel, and the only way for people to see it is through a hack, then obviously my channel won't do that well.
The bored teenager will learn ways to get tiktok. But the bored tiktokker won't learn ways to get the audience on tiktok
> Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban access to a popular website?
Uhhh there are many websites that are banned in the USA. Otherwise working URLs that wont work in the USA. Mostly hostile state actor stuff.Iran, NK, etc. The fact that you don't know about it just says how effective it is.
Sure, VPN. But (serious question, not rhetorical) is that going to get the app on your phone? And are you going to go to the trouble when the algorithm thinks you're eastern european? When the user base is smalelr?
Popular creators will leave, if they can't monetize their content anymore. Then, everyone else will follow the creators to whatever platform they will end up on.
AFAIK most teenagers use iPhones in US. What are they going to do? I'm Apple fanboy but this is the exact type of power they shouldn't have.
Maybe you agree with the ban, I'm curious how would many people be feeling around year of 2028 after a few years of oligarchs consolidating their power and designing an obedient society through full control of the communications. Maybe you have ideas against H1B or maybe you use birth control, there's non-zero chance that you will be enforced into the correct opinions.
If it works on 75% of the population, that’s good enough. The other 25% will give up and move on as well, because people flock to social media where the others are.
how would this actually work? iOS is so dominant among US teens it's crazy, and the ability to sideload on that platform is nonexistent even to very technically savvy users.
If the holding power of TikTok is strong enough (which it just might be) then you might actually see teens start to switch to Android.
I wonder how many Android users would actually sideload it. Same happened with Fortnite for a few years, and idk how many people did that.
Fortnite never had even a hundredth of the smartphone screentime as Tiktok. I honestly think a lot (at least 5 million) Android users will sideload it once it comes to that.
you won’t
I don't think it would be as unlikely as you'd think. It's not impossible for a significant amount of people to get a cheap Android for these apps, after all iPhones are a result of iMessage.
“Large portions of US teens will get second phones for one specific social media app” is an absolutely wild thing to predict seriously
Most US teens probably already have a second smartphone-like device, and large portions of them have purchased them purely for one specific social media app.
I'm not saying it's more likely that not, but I am saying I wouldn't be surprised. If you replace "one specific social media app" with "iMessage", it has already happened.
I think it's more likely that people would simply use the browser
I got popcorn ready to see how the masses of iOS users will react to the TikTok ban
This ban does nothing about the mobile tick tok website. You don’t need to be a techie to use the browser on your cellphone. Yet it is a point of friction compared to an app with native notifications. And given the expectations of the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade into safe app store apps instead of the scary web, people are legitimately concerned.
The "War on Drugs" ensured that when an American dies from a drug overdose it is an American company, like Purdue Pharma, that made money killing them.
And when an American is brainwashed into believing a lie, it better damn well be an American company that sold them that lie.
That is the dream this country was built on.
Banning individual apps in this manner is wrong, IMO. In a country where concepts like freedom of speech and restrictions on government censorship are not insignificant considerations (in theory, at a minimum) a decision like this is unfortunate. China bans apps... tons of apps... in order to maintain strict control over the content and identity of users. This strategy is not something the US should be mimicking.
The claim that it's a "national security" risk and the ban is needed to mitigate that is silly. If it is really that then ban it from government facilities and devices. The actual risk from TikTok is no greater than the risk from Facebook, Instagram or any of a myriad of apps.
The correct thing to do would be to strengthen laws that address the core concerns so that we are protected from ANY app that represents a threat to privacy or security. Just banning a single app (and then another, and another...) is ridiculous and goes against a number of things this country is supposed to stand for.
Congress shall make no law respecting ... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble ...
unless they mumble 'national security', and then screw the constitution ...
Americans finally discovering their constitution is interpreted all day every day is the funniest thing on the internet. You also don't have free speech, and your rights to bear arm are very restricted.
It makes no sense to me how this is an argument of free speech.
I assume you are saying this is curtailing the creators speech? However the creators can move to any other platform, they are not being restricted in what they can say or produce.
So perhaps the concern is about TikTok's free speech; which, thank god the constitution does not protect a foreign adversaries right to free speech.
Free speech includes the right to receive/hear speech. TikTok contains lots of speech that US citizens have the right to hear.
I agree, though not when broadcast by a foreign adversary (per the 1934 law).
Forcing a sale to a US company also enables that to continue. Additionally, it does not protect the right for users to receive/hear speech from EVERY outlet, this same speech is permissible on any other platform - simply not one mediated by an adversary.
I'm very curious about this case, actually. My top questions
- difference between actually broadcast and potentially broadcast. Can the government suspend someone for potentially doing something?
- More on the right to hear speech -- you're saying that I cannot receive speech from foreign adversaries if I choose to do so myself? IMO this is well within my rights
- Do platform effects (e.g. recommendation) count as speech? For example, I may choose to post on TikTok bc it circulates in 24h to a specific audience - if TT got changed, does this mean that my speech got curtailed? (right to assemble, etc)
There are still a million places online people can organize and assemble so I don't really see how this right is being meaningfully infringed here. It definitely doesn't seem clear to me that this clause means the government needs to maintain every avenue of assembly to the point this is a constitutional issue.
THIS!
If you listen to the arguments that TikTok made before the Supreme Court, the court is extremely dubious of the free speech argument. And this has been a court that has been very favorable to free speech overall.
Its the fact that 140 million of us chose to assemble in this place ( app ) that IMHO should have weighed much higher as a concern, over speculative spoooky dangers. No actual harm to the country was shown, just supposition, which equates to us trusting the government when it strips out constitutional rights away.
Congress does have the power to regulate foreign commerce however. Not that I disagree with you, but rarely can something be distilled to a single concern.
It is a balancing act for sure, but is it 'right' to have all those choices, but only as long as they sufficiently support governing body overall worldview?
Foreign corporations do not have free speech rights.
Doesn't matter, US citizens have the right to receive the speech on TikTok
I actually think that they do — tourists to the US have free speech protections. There are many foreign-owned press outlets operating in the US (Forbes, Al Jazeera, RT, CGTN etc.) that are also protected by the first amendment.
I don’t understand why, with so much advanced warning that users would need a good replacement for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are still so bad. Why not invest in matching, at least, every TikTok UX feature? And beyond that, how are these two leading AI companies really unable to make a recommendation algorithm that actually shows people things they like?
We'd be better off without a clone, whether its owned by a Western company or not.
If X ne Twitter knew what they were doing, now would have been the obvious moment to relaunch Vine.
I've been wondering for the past couple of years, why did Vine fail but TikTok succeed? Based on my increasingly fuzzy memories of Vine and my rough understanding of TikTok as a non-user, they appear to be pretty much the same app.
Lack of variety in videos. 6s videos limited the amount of content that could be included to the point where all videos were essentially short comedy skits. TikTok keeps you engaged by showing you a variety of different genres of video. This includes comedy, but also educational videos, sports highlights, video game clips, etc.
Add to this TikTok's algorithm for deciding what content to show you based on how engaged you were in the previous videos and you end up with a "For you" feed that drastically varies from person-to-person. This keeps it fresh and enjoyable at all times.
Youtube tries to do a similar thing by presenting you videos that are similar to your interests, but in my experience it usually trends towards what is likely "more profitable". Meaning longer videos from well-established creators to juice as much ad revenue as possible from the user.
TikTok feels night-and-day in comparison. On TikTok, I can watch a 3 minute educational video on how elevators work, and then scroll once and see 3 second video of a grown man pretending to be a duck
TikTok’s algorithm for the feed and their data science and recommenders are pretty amazing. You can tune it to show you what you like really quickly and it’s effective. Mine is tuned to old house preservation and restoration, a couple guys doing skits as blue collar workers that are some of the funniest parts of my day, motocross videos, and some dog/animal content. I’ve never liked a video or commented on a video, it’s just so effective using dwell time and they have so much data that they can give you exactly what you want and little that you don’t. There is no politics on my feed. I challenge you to get that with twitter, reels, threads, Facebook, vine… any of them
I think we remember Vine through rose colored glasses. There was nothing on vine that was addicting, other than some very famous videos, that are still treated as relics. And everyone knew about those videos, because of how the feed was organized. TikTok is way more tailored-to-the-user.
> There was nothing on vine that was addicting
Well that sounds like a selling point to me.
It's "selling" if you're not going to spend hours on it. Kinda the opposite.
vine could only do 7 second videos which hurts long-term
Until 2020, most TikTok videos were 15 seconds or so. They only switched to 30 seconds and later 1min+ after gaining huge traction. I guess 7 seconds is pretty short, but it the algorithm that was pretty simple.
The precursor to TikTik (Musical.ly) "failed" as well. I think it's because while apps of that era were able to achieve the viral moment, they failed to convert that into advertising and sponsorship $$$. TikTok, Instagram etc. have perfected that pipeline.
Vines were limited to six seconds, so the medium was a little different. That seems easy enough to change however.
Seems to me like they just gave up?
I doubt they have the engineering experience to launch anything at this point. They try to do a weird tiktok like thing where watching a video on mobile will randomly scroll to another video, but I think this probably has more to do with juicing "unregretted user seconds" than anything.
Americans may turn to experience of other countries. E.g. in Russia Istagram has been blocked for years, however it does not really stop everyone from using or running business in it.
> The outcome of the shutdown would be different from that mandated by the law. The law would mandate a ban only on new TikTok downloads on Apple or Google app stores, while existing users could continue using it for some time.
Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for existing users? I.e. why would they choose to do more than the minimum required by the law? It's nice that they want to point people to a way to download their data, but they could also keep showing videos after notifying people of that option. What's the rationale here?
The obvious play would be to incite those active users to take action by letting their congress critters know their opinions in an effort to have them reverse their vote
They did try that last year though it did generate a lot of calls in absolute terms and it didn't actually work as political pressure for them to vote against the ban.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/07/tiktok-us...
Getting congress to reverse something seems much harder, in that they also have to get someone to introduce the bill, get it through a committee, get it scheduled for a vote, etc, in both houses.
> Getting congress to reverse something seems much harder,
The GOP is absolutely flip flopping on this issue since Trump has also reversed on the ban idea. That's why the TikTok lawyers' arguments to SCOTUS were to just delay the ban until after Jan 20 so the incoming administration could weigh in on the matter.
> in that they also have to get someone to introduce the bill, get it through a committee, get it scheduled for a vote, etc, in both houses.
I think you are forgetting that the GOP just took control of both houses. It will not be that difficult for them is that's what the orange man says he wants.
If there's an escape hatch, I think it's more likely that Trump directs the DOJ to defer enforcement, first temporarily. Some deal will be made where Trump stipulates some stuff about content moderation, including removing TikTok's ban on political ads. Once TikTok has agreed to act like X, Trump can direct the DOJ to delay enforcement indefinitely, but keeping the law on the books as a sword of damocles to keep leverage.
those plays can easily backfire - like when tiktok first did it
although there are success cases, like prop 22 in california and uber
The threat of losing something vs actually losing something is not the same though. If TikTok did something with all of the tracking data they did for each user so they could show the contact information for their Rep and Senators to make it easy for everyone with clickable links directly to phone numbers/emails would increase that engagement. It would also just show how creepy AF their tracking is. So maybe just a screen like PH does that refuses access to their content with a screen that says talk to your reps.
no, i think the negative reaction in political places would be exactly the same if they did this again
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/krishnamoorthi-gallagher-ti...
again, I think you are not considering the loyalty to the incoming president and that his party now controls both houses of Congress.
> again
you didn’t mention anything about either of those two points in your previous comments, but sure
Sure I did, just not to you directly. Read the full thread and the time stamps
not sure how you expect me to take into account things you are saying in different threads after i made my original comment
> Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for existing users?
What business would choose to keep operating if it can't gain new customers? Think about it. The law makes it impossible for tiktok to grow or be profitable. What advertiser would be interested in a platform that will lose users every day and won't gain more in the future?
The law was sneakily and intentially written to outright ban tiktok. It would be like congress creating a law saying you specifically cannot buy more gas. You can keep using the gas in the car, but you can't fill up your tank anymore. Would you spend thousands to fix your car? Change the oil or the tire? No. You'd either sell the damn thing or just throw it away.
Political pressure. There are more Americans on TikTok than voted in the last election. I think the parent company is calculating that they can draw attention to the government taking away something the users love and turn that into political pressure to undo the law. We’ll see what happens, but I’d imagine they are right. Taking away the opiate of the masses has not worked out for governments in the past.
Many of those users are not eligible to vote.
People in the US have the right to petition the Government, regardless of their eligibility to vote.
The downloading your data thing is actually part of what is required by law.
Drawing attention to the stupidity and agenda-driven approach of the USG by causing pain to millions of users, is my guess.
I created a quick tutorial on how to backup and download all of your TikToks.
You are linking the wrong script in the initial tweet. You meant to link to this one: https://gist.github.com/kukicado/e92b31601117060f6895ecefc98...
Maybe the Chinese people will be able to teach the US people how to side-load APKs (on Android) and use a VPN.
That would be ironic.
No it wouldn't be ironic because all of that is allowed.
In fact, existing tiktok users are welcome to keep the existing app on their phone.
What's being banned is the commerce.
> No it wouldn't be ironic because all of that is allowed.
The irony is that China is usually the one considered "less free" by the US, and in this case Chinese citizen could help US citizen "regain their freedom".
> In fact, existing tiktok users are welcome to keep the existing app on their phone.
My understanding from the article is that ByteDance will redirect US users to a website and prevent them from using the app.
Side-loading APKs are still needed for new Android users, not too much difference right? Exactly like the workarounds you need to find when you want to install "Risky applications" on a Chinese Xiaomi phone.
As a Chinese hated CCP for the internet censorship and decided to be an expat, what's going on these days is changing my world view.
One thing that would make social media much better, is forcing providers by law to ensure everybody sees the same content.
Example: I can be on Reddit in subreddit A. You can be on Reddit in subreddit B.
We would obviously still see different content.
But ALL members of subreddit A MUST see the exact same topics in the exact same order with the exact same comments and likes/dislikes.
This would help build up a more shared “worldview” like mediums such as radio and TV did; you chose the channel, but everybody on the same channel gets the same information.
This would then allow the service provider and potentially government agencies, as well as users themselves, to moderate harmful content or false information more reliably.
Originally (and I don't know if this is still the case) the case for randomizing the content view on Reddit a bit (fuzzy numbering) was as a layer which helped prevent vote manipulation and brigading/bandwagoning. There may be similar reason for other platforms where not being exactly the same is unrelated to tuning the types of information presented to people. I.e. I don't know how much it matters that "all member absolutely must see the same exact order" as much as "the ordering defaults are not gamed for individual engagement"
Even then, I'd settle for "must have the option to use chronological/absolute vote based/similar type by default" type option. I'm not as convinced I know what others need to do to save themselves as much as I'm I think it'd be nice if it to be easy for us to be able to choose how we engage with content feeds (regardless what the platform is).
And then there is a matter of content groups when it comes to exposure rather than the addictive nature. Does it really make a difference if people end up seeing only /r/MyEchoChamberA and /r/MyEchoChamberB anyways. After all, each is perfectly representing the same echo chamber to all of the users who bother to browse there.
>This would help build up a more shared “worldview” like mediums such as radio and TV did; you chose the channel, but everybody on the same channel gets the same information.
That would be a nightmare, going back to the bad old days when people's worldviews were entirely decided by whatever flavour of government propaganda their preferred TV station happened to favour.
Oh yea, thank god we left that world behind completely. It would be terrible like, some major news network was completely in the tank for one of our political parties, and a huge percentage of the population kept it on basically 24/7. That would completely poison our discourse. Good thing the internet fixed that one.
On what order would you show things? Upvotes/downvotes? Could work but "social" media implies we all have different social circles, so my social circle of friends is very different from yours. I can probably see posts from my friends which you won't (since you're not friends with them) Maybe I follow certain pages that you don't. How do we still have the same feed then?
> One thing that would make social media much better, is forcing providers by law to ensure everybody sees the same content.
This sounds terrible. I don't want to see the same content as everyone else. A good chunk of Youtube right now is rightwing content that I don't have to see.
obviously bad policy for many reasons, but as a geriatric millennial I'm selfishly happy. As long as the ban continues, I will never have to sit on the bus and listen to those horrible robot voices blasting nonsense out of someone's phone speakers.
If Vine dying taught us anything its that the content from Tiktok will outlive the platform by being reposted to others. That voice will never die unfortunately.
There’s nothing worse than listening to the audio of someone else scrolling TikTok
Hearing the same 10 second clip of a song 20 times
I’m sure they will move to some other platform.
Are you sure you're actually thinking of people using youtube shorts or facebook?
And nothing of value was lost.
Won’t the website still work? Or do kids these days only open apps?
I'm tearing my hair out... how is the solution here not just better data privacy laws? Doesn't that solve all the issues, both domestic and international?
It's not about data privacy - it's about social control. I don't know why it's always lost on every commentary that the TikTok ban became a widely bipartisan issue after October 7th.
TikTok was the only large social media platform that did not overtly deplatform Palestinian users and sympathizers.
Because the point is to funnel people to US apps where the US Govt has control of the narrative
Data privacy is not the concern, or else they'd have done what you suggest
Because it's not necessarily about the / data privacy/, it's about the ability of a foreign adversary to influence the American populous in subtle ways over time.
By simply suppressing topics, or elevating trends they might find helpful in swaying the populous.
That's what propaganda is and it works.
> By simply suppressing topics, or elevating trends they might find helpful in swaying the populous.
Isn't that exactly what US media does as well? Every media has an owner with his own interests, the information they'll provide you will be carefully crafted to not harm those interests.
I believe there was a bill that addressed this, but if failed shortly before the TikTok stuff.
Privacy is irrelevant in this case. It’s a free line of propaganda for almost all our youth at their most vulnerable age.
At some point SCOTUS will have to revisit the massive deference they give the other branches on natsec issues. We are days away from a new president applying blanket tariffs to everything on the same grounds. What isn't national security in that light? They might as well start with this case and send an early message. Otherwise they'll be fielding all manner of lawsuits over ridiculous overreach for the foreseeable future.
Tiktok is obviously a massive national security risk, and I find it funny people don't see that.
It is extremely well established that propaganda has great value, and so allowing a foreign adversary the capacity to potentially control the information your citizens receive in a clandestine way is insanely dangerous.
Yes, we should also forbid books published by Chinese publishing companies because the CPC might pressure those companies to put propaganda in the books.
We should also forbid Hollywood from selling movies in China, because as we've already seen that means the movies are being adjusted to get approval in China.
We should also forbid Chinese citizens talking to Americans, because they might convince Americans on a topic we don't can't allow American minds to be changed about.
The first two don't apply because they don't share the hyper personalized nature of social media. No two people see the same thing so it's impossible to react to foreign propaganda. Books and movies don't work that way.
Third example is irrelevant because it's impossible to achieve the efficiency (reach) that social media has.
I don't really see your point. Tiktok is a video library. With the exception of private videos, anything hosted on the app can be viewed by anyone. Whether or not the app provides a personalized algorithmic selection of videos does not have any bearing on the more fundamental question of whether American's have the right to access foreign media.
Of course it's relevant. TikTok should be considered a broadcaster. We have not allowed foreign ownership of a broadcaster since 1934.
A book does not broadcast in the same way.
We live in a democracy. If you get enough people to vote for this platform, then sure let's do it.
You can't compare a popular bipartisan law to a hypothetical thing you just made up.
Peoples' votes matter
It would have been farcically easy to legislate that any large social media company have to expose their algorithm to a regulator, with a capacity for spot checks and immense sanctions if they fail to comply.
If your argument is "we can't allow any foreign owned social media to operate in the US", then how can you possible argue that the rest of the world should allow American applications?
I think the American government is contorting its public argument to avoid saying this plainly because there are many American companies that control information for most of the world, and they don't want other countries to go "Hmm, hang on a minute..."
Can you provide examples of China controlled propaganda happening on Tiktok?
Things that are factually true don't count, obviously.
Reddit is the exact same - just a propaganda machine
I disagree. While I think there are definitely biases on Reddit, there is a difference between users, individual moderators, or even established sub policies having a political leaning versus an algorithmically masked propaganda machine like TikTok.
Call me old fashion, but I put more faith in a profit seeking US company (recently public) with light government oversight than a foreign owned black box.
You might be missing the fact that there is a significant amount of bots on Reddit pushing certain agendas giving the impression they're foreign sponsored.
you may be right that there is a, "significant amount of bots on Reddit pushing certain agendas". However, Reddit is fundamentally designed to incentivize authentic engagement and to punish bots. If it wasn't the case before is certainly is now given the fact that they are now extracting value from the authenticity of data on their platform via AI Training data sales. Reddit is fiduciarily encouraged to tamp down bots and spam because they are financially incentivized to have the most genuine data.
All of that aside it is irrelevant because we are talking about third parties (users/bots) pushing propaganda vs the platform owner itself pushing propaganda.
I'd vouch for fake-ness of political Reddit as well
it's easier to see phrasing and logical inconsistencies when you don't share the opinion that gets forced, sadly
> It is extremely well established that propaganda has great value, and so allowing a foreign adversary the capacity to potentially control the information your citizens receive in a clandestine way is insanely dangerous.
I would say that allowing a ~foreign adversary~ anyone the capacity to potentially control the information your citizens receive in a clandestine way is insanely dangerous. Why do we let domestic ones do it? We're seeing what they're doing to our societies.
the problem is that similar efforts in other countries have been criticized as "internet censorship"
either Russia and Indonesia are in the right - or US is in the wrong
National security risk to which nation? The kids on TikTok seem to understand pretty well why it all the sudden was wrongthink.
Allowing the government to control the information its citizens receive is dangerous.
Perhaps other countries will ban social media companies for their own national security.
IMO they should be for children under 15.
Countries like China, where TikTok is from, already ban US social media.
The other countries you’re presumably thinking of are our allies and typically our propaganda aligns with their (governments’) interests. China’s interests do not.
What if any practical effect will this have on American users if 150M of them already have the app downloaded? A pop-up that doesn't block use of the app?
Haven't seen anything about an IP ban/block (ahem, great firewall), nothing's going to block anyone from business as usual on Sunday right?
There's no 'shut down'. And other than a bunch of misinformed users jumping over to RedNote briefly or whatever, the only difference will be an oddly American-free app for the rest of the world?
According to the article, they are voluntarily shutting down in the USA despite that not being required by the law. So yes, there is a potential shut down. Time will tell is they really do it.
Yes, you can do an IP block and you can also detect VPN clients and block those.
If the companies is barred from doing business with US users then they will be required to take reasonable steps to block those users.
I'm not assigning a cause, but US culture, these days, seems to encourage folks to treat others as "NPCs," and that can have rather bad consequences.
It's always been an issue (sort of human nature), but it seems (to this battered old warhorse), that it's a lot more prevalent, these days, than it was, just twenty years ago.
Can you elaborate on this phenomena?
It's really rare for me to be pro-intervention when it comes to the government vs free-industry but TikTok has become undeniably, geopolitically hazardous for the US. The dismal bit of it is that nation state backed, habit-forming propaganda apps are only likely to proliferate.
Can you provide examples of China controlled propaganda happening on Tiktok?
Things that are factually true don't count, obviously.
I continue to be baffled by people who simultaneously believe that TikTok is dangerous because of Chinese propaganda that may happen in the future, but that all the other social media networks are not dangerous despite the mostly Russian misinformation and election interference that has been ongoing since 2016. So far as I can see the important part is not who owns the network, but just how easy it is for misinformation to be published, and basic info like "is this poster a real human?" or "was this person paid to say this?" or "is this a factually incorrect statement?" are not readily visible to users.
This move shouts “you win China, your products are superior than ours”. We hate losing at our own game don’t we?
I wonder if this will have an effect on iPhone sales vs Android. On android the app can easily be side loaded while on iPhone (in the US) it's incredibly difficult for the average user.
I am not saying that it's good or bad, and the geopolitical situation has changed a lot, but I miss the relative innocence, openness, and sense of unity that characterised the 2000-2010s internet.
We are slowly going in the direction of European internet, American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
The 1990s-2010s Internet was a golden age in the sense that even though the Internet was a child of the US military-industrial-research complex, political powers didn't yet perceive it as a potential threat vector or even comprehend it at all ("the internet is a series of tunes"). Many of its users also came from academic or technical backgrounds, which helped to maintain shared cultural values (although this was constantly eroding over time - see "Eternal September").
Social media and "Web 2.0" were probably the death knell for this era - while they were wonderful for democratization of the Internet's benefits, the merger of Internet culture and non-Internet culture meant that all the ills of the latter were inflicted on the former.
> The 1990s-2010s Internet was a golden age
It was the golden age because from the 1990 to 2010, the internet was majority american. For the entire 90s, the internet population was something ridiculous like 95% american. Fun times.
> in the sense that even though the Internet was a child of the US military-industrial-research complex, political powers didn't yet perceive it as a potential threat vector or even comprehend it at all ("the internet is a series of tunes").
Comprehend it at all? Are you joking. Maybe the dumb politicians didn't know it but certainly the real people in charge certainly knew it's potential.
> Social media and "Web 2.0" were probably the death knell for this era
The death nell of the era was the smartphone which allowed millions of computer illiterate peoples around the world to join the internet. The demographics of the internet was definitely changing in the 2000s, but the arrival of the smartphone toward the end of the decade accelerated the demographic shift. Now americans make up a small portion of the internet population.
>For the entire 90s, the internet population was something ridiculous like 95% american.
Do you have a source for this claim? It doesn't sound realistic to me.
> European internet, American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
Not sure about the European one. Unlike Russia or China, we don't seem capable to produce our own services, or to not use the US ones. Maybe it'll change with the increased hostility of US government and tech CEOs?
> seem capable to produce our own services, or to not use the US ones.
Like the China/US situation, as soon as there's friction against using the US ones people will switch to local competitors. There was a UK competitor to Facebook around the time of its launch called "Friends Reunited". Technologically these things are not as hard as recruiting users, overcoming the natural monopoly effects, and handling moderation.
A confrontation has long been brewing over the Microsoft Ireland "safe harbor" case.
> We are slowly going in the direction of European internet, American internet, Chinese internet, Russian internet...
That has always existed, you just may not be aware of it if you are from an English speaking country, because those other parts are not easily accessible without knowledge of the respective languages.
I 100% agree, I think social media has been a complete mistake, facebook's creation is my version of eternal november since I joined the web in 1999
The big reason I think it changed is that the internet went from being a place for nerds and geeks, when there was a technical barrier to getting online, to a place where there is essentially no barrier. As a result the web now reflects the innocence, openness, and intellectual curiosity of the average person, since the internet has become a daily part of everyone's life not just a subsection of the world that appeals to us.
I miss that too. I was in China before 2005 and the Internet was pretty much free. I used to speak to the quake editing group on IRC about mapping until deep into the night.
I think it's going to get more segmented. And not only that, the hardware, the OS, everything.
That said, I believe HN is a good platform. I don't think it's banned in China and people here can keep politics out of technical discussions, at least for now.
Not only,
European computer, American computer, Chinese computer, Russian computer...
European OS, American OS, Chinese OS, Russian OS...
European programming language, American programming language, Chinese programming language, Russian programming language...
Just like in the good old days of computing during cold war.
Bound to happen when the internet becomes weaponized, unfortunately. It's kind of crazy to begin with that we put all of our public infrastructure on a network Russia and China have wired access to from their home countries and it's lasted this long when you think about it.
I understand why they do it, and it makes sense. Still, it's amazing how quickly that open world has closed down.
"I miss being 9 years old"
It wasn't possible to share videos with the world in 2000 unless you owned a television broadcasting network. In 2000 you could not freely socialize with Chinese people on the Internet.
You still mostly can't freely converse with Chinese people because of the language barrier.
That shrinks by the minute, thanks to AI-assisted translators.
I had a long-distance relationship with someone when I was in my very early 20s who does not speak English nor my first language. I do not think language barrier is a difficult obstacle to overcome today if it was not much of an issue 10 years ago.
As someone watching Quicktime and Real Player videos in 2000, it was surely possible.
Why doesn’t China simply open up for domestic competition? What are they afraid of? It’s a serious question. Are they that much afraid of their consumers switching to Western products? I frankly think it’s overblown. Chinese people will simply stick with homegrown products at this point. It’s way too entrenched for anyone to enter their market and succeed. I think they have made enough progress to open up their markets and they have so much to lose by growing anti-sino sentiments abroad all because they didn’t want US tech monopolies to compete in their home turf. Maybe 10 years ago it made sense but Chinese tech companies can compete on merits at this point. They have the ecosystem to compete without govt protection.
> Why doesn’t China simply open up for domestic competition?
China does allow competition. It's just that google, facebook, etc chose not to follow chinese laws.
> they have so much to lose by growing anti-sino sentiments abroad all because they didn’t want US tech monopolies to compete in their home turf
Funny how microsoft, apple, tesla, etc are competing in china?
You are just parroting stale propaganda.
> China does allow competition. It's just that google, facebook, etc chose not to follow chinese laws.
HAHA, thanks for giving me a good laugh
Typical pathetic response from a silly political activist. There are tons of american companies operating in china. I listed few of the biggest. Google used to operate in china. But when china tighten their laws, google chose not to follow them and left. Probably because google, like facebook, are state sponsored propaganda outfits. Unlike tiktok...
You're assuming it's about economics, but it has almost nothing to do with that. Foreign companies like Ford and GM can and do sell in China.
The reason China restricts foreign internet companies specifically, is because the government lacks control over what information is shared on such apps. China is a dictatorship where free speech is considered dangerous.
And that’s my point really. US tech companies have all kowtowed to CCP for the past two decades trying to gain access to the second largest economy.
They did, largely what China did is make any companies that want to do business in China partner with a local company. From there what happened in many cases is the foreign company had their IP stolen and then shut out of the market.
China doesn't want western companies operating in China, they want western IP owned by Chinese companies operating there. That's why so many companies have pulled out of that market.
Pretty sure Google was allowed but decided to pull out (maybe due to censorship demands from China) not sure about facebook.
Facebook was allowed until 2009, it was blocked because it was allegedly used by ETIM to organise the 2009 Urumqi riots, and facebook refused to cooperate with the Chinese police.
> What are they afraid of?
Definitely not the consumption of foreign products.
The PRC remains a totalitarian government which built itself on an environment where they exert total control over public communication. There are long lists of topics that you simply cannot cover, analyze, talk about or even discuss privately via internet media in China. There's no way to do that if those discussions happen on Snapchat via a data center in Oregon.
Does the CCP need to do that? It's a reasonable question with answers more complicated than I'll be able to offer. But for sure they want (desperately) to do it. Thus, no foreign media in China.
小红书 (pronounced Xiaohongshu) is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance (EDIT: I’m wrong, it’s a different company, see below). It’s currently #1 on the USA App Store.
The people on there are super kind and accommodating to all the “American TikTok refugees” today! Lots of little Mandarin 101 classes, UI tutorials, and co-commiserating about government overreach.
I have a negative view of all of social media, but I think banning it is extremely politically unwise. Appreciate the hospitality of these users inviting us into their platform for a bit
No that is a completely different app. The Chinese TikTok (Douyin) isn't on US app stores.
> 小红书 (pronounced Xiaohongshu) is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance. It’s currently #1 on the USA App Store.
抖音 Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok by Bytedance...
Oops. TIL
Good riddance. CCP is laughing the US can't even agree in an outright ban.
I've never felt inclined to use TikTok. I've always kept my online presence psuedo-anonymous, all the way back to AOL days. I don't use Meta products at all.
The day TikTok is banned I will create an account and post a video showing my face, in which I will state my name and address.
Good.
And I want this to set a precedent that we CAN reign in the social media companies.
I have some concerns about TikTok, as well as with a shutdown, but if I can imagine a silver lining of a TikTok shutdown, it would be if huge numbers of teens are inspired to learn the tools and awarenesses to not be total b-words of Big Tech.
In this fantasy, initially it would just be to get onto a particular Big Tech (but Chinese) thing that "grownups" don't want them doing. But then they'd start to realize they're also being exploited there, and also by many of the people who are pitching circumventions. And eventually they'd figure out and create genuine empowerment. And rediscover better conventions for society, where everyone isn't either exploiting or being dumb. And it would just be the grownups who are hopelessly b-words of Big Tech, and the teens just have to roll their eyes and be patient with them. Then those teens become grownups and have kids, and raise them to not be airhead b-words. And those kids teach their kids, etc.
Of course, within several generations, the lessons would be diluted and then forgotten, and people would get dumb and shitty again. But society would have improved enough that at least there's room for people to backslide, and fritter away what their great-grandparents achieved. :)
Has anyone written up exactly how TikTok is a distinct national security risk?
The best I’ve heard is “they get your data”, which is something they surely can buy from Facebook through an intermediary, “they influence content”, which is a moderation decision that every social media app does, and “there’s a part of the report to congress that’s redacted”, that could be a recipe for tuna casserole for all I know.
Edit: I’m assuming the downvotes are a way of saying “no”? I would assume that “national security threat” would involve some sort of concrete standard of harm or risk that could be communicated beyond “just trust us”. I haven’t even seen concrete examples of what content they influence, just people assuring everyone that it happens and it’s Bad.
> TikTok... estimates one-third of the 170 million Americans using its app would stop accessing the platform if the ban lasts a month.
If customers care that little about the product, maybe it's a good sign that it isn't providing significant value to their lives.
You can also read this as despite being banned TikTok expects 2/3 users to find ways to circumvent the ban
surely this will be the big break for bluesky
Haha there's no shot. Apples and oranges - completely different platforms and features.
I know, it was sarcasm
I dream of the day we give ourselves a decentralized protocol that, while providing an opt-in way of following current events, offers us an extreme breadth of content without being a hypercapitalistic, attention-grabbing nightmare that tries to get us to compulsively consume absolute junk constantly, at the cost of everything else. In the meantime, looks like Sunday is gonna be a fun day.
ActivityPub is exactly that. Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, etc.
What you're asking for exists.
It doesn't. I'm talking about true decentralization (peer to peer), not federation (the worst of both worlds). It should also be uncensorable and come with some implementation that does away entirely with the idea of "social media" or "microblogging". Just a better version of what the web 1.0 was.
true decentralization means it will be rife with bad actors taking over the network in decentralized methods. it won't work and will be ultimately result for illegal activities.
decentralization != morally beneficial for the masses.
So basically, tiktok will be unavailable in the US for 24 hours until Trump takes office and then he'll probably extend the deadline
When the President literally owns a competitor called "Truth Social" do you think he will not take the America First pledge??
Honestly I'm fine with this. I look forward to a break from the nonsense until whatever comes next to replace it.
noahpinion has a great post [1] on this today and he points out the interesting observations we can make: 1. because it's "Beijing" who is tasked with deciding whether or not TikTok can be sold makes it extremely clear Bytedance is not an independent private company the way it would be the case in the US. They are legally required to obey CCP directives [2] 2. Beijing had every opportunity to sell the application off, and in fact they did just that with another app called Grindr some years back [3] without any fanfare. 3. That Beijing would rather close TikTok entirely, rather than sell it, shows how deeply important it is to Beijing that TikTok does not come under the control of another nation, including the US. it's well established that the government censors speech on TikTok including the speech of US citizens [4]
noah bangs on the "the government of China is really trying to weaken or destroy the economic capacity of the US" drum pretty hard and it's hard to disagree with the many books and arguments he cites. The current rush to Rednote has a lot of TikTokers making the argument that "See? Chinese people are great!" which is where they are confusing sentiment about the citizens of China with that of the Chinese government itself. It actually is great if there's a big cultural interplay between young US and Chinese citizens (not sure w/ Rednote though), so that we would be able to counteract a key propaganda point from Beijing which is that the TikTok forced sale is some kind of strike against the Chinese people. It's important that the point be made that this is about the hostility of the Chinese government itself, which is pretty clearly a hostile adversary to the US.
[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tiktok-is-just-the-beginning
[2] https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/experts-agree-byte-da...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168079/grindr-sold-chine...
[4] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...
A forced sale would essentially gut them of their proprietary algo, which is leagues ahead of anything YT or Insta has. This algo and the associated TikTok assets can still be used a billion different ways around the world and in other apps.
Why would they ever want to help create an international competitor that could compete with them? I don't think any business would want to do that. Obviously the CCP has a level of access if they want it to data hosted in China, that's how it works with every company that has a physical location there.
that is exactly noah's point, that TikTok is an extremely potent application. Except it's not "a business" deciding this it's "a government", and China does not want to pass off this much capability to shape public opinion to the US while losing it themselves.
noahpinion is generally very insightful but I don't think his analysis holds water here. ByteDance is a major Chinese company -- if the EU tried to force the sale of Google you can sure as shit expect "Washington" to have strong feelings about this. The implication that Beijing controls ByteDance is not really supported by this evidence.
>Bytedance is not an independent private company
PRC banned exporting Bytedance algo. By that logic, no US companies are independent private companies due to US export controls. And TBH both points are true.
>Grindr
Grindr was foreign company acquired by PRC, and sale was reversed by CFIUS. Selling an acquired foreign company is geo/politically different than having your domestic company nationalized/appropriated by another. Which is quite literally a strike against Chinese people. Even PRC has never forced a US company from divesting US ownership, because that's a retarded tier of "hostility" only US hubris can imagine. And it's particularly retarded tier analysis from Noahpinion who thinks Chinese people won't view divestment requirement a PRC company as hostile against Chinese entrepreners, who are Chinese people.
> PRC banned exporting Bytedance algo. By that logic, no US companies are independent private companies due to US export controls. And TBH both points are true.
Chinese state control over private companies is far more pervasive, and less bound by rule-of-law, than that of the U.S. Export controls are not even the H2O molecule at the tip of the iceberg.
> Even PRC has never forced a US company from divesting US ownership
Bytedance is not being forced to divest; they can leave the market, just like Google and many others had to leave China.
>more pervasive
US spectrum export controls have been every bit as pervasive as PRC ones, pretending muh "rule of law" is a distinction without difference at this point. It's functionally the same.
>forced to divest
If US law is forced divestiture, then Bytedance is "force" to leave, because having US nationalize a PRC company is obviously a nonstarter except for the terminally stupid like noahopinion. Unlike Google + western platforms who "chose" (read: not banned) to leave because they "chose" not to comply with PRC laws that applies to all companies, including domestic PRC ones. The difference is US has no equitable law, i.e. some sort of data privacy law, that enables Bytedance to operate in US... while following the same laws that US companies do, as if Bytedance wasn't already bending backwards following additional requirements that US platforms do not have to follow (i.e. functionally Oracle JV).
Like fine, Bytedance needs to follow US laws, except US laws is designed specifically to prevent PRC companies from operating, vs PRC laws is designed to allow everyone to operate, just said operation is onerous - see retarded reciprocal argument that US companies should operate in PRC without abiding by PRC censorship laws that domestic platforms has to abide by. There's a reason FB and Google had internal programs to re-enter PRC market compliant with PRC laws (before being axed by internal dissent), because it's still feasble for US platforms to operate in PRC while being US (or at least JV) owned. So let's not pretend what US is doing is the same thing - PRC is more rule of law, US rule by law in this comparison. But again, functionally that hardly matters.
> US spectrum export controls have been every bit as pervasive as PRC ones, pretending muh "rule of law" is a distinction without difference at this point. It's functionally the same.
As I said, export controls are such a minor part of the problem as to hardly be worth mentioning. The pervasive control I'm speaking of is things like the fact that ByteDance (like all large Chinese companies) would have an internal CCP committee with influence over personnel and strategic decisions.
> having US nationalize a PRC company is obviously a nonstarter except for the terminally stupid like noahopinion
This is wrong on many levels. No one is talking about nationalizing TikTok (which is not a PRC company) and certainly not ByteDance.
>CCP committee with influence over personnel and strategic decisions
Party committees as part of 93 company law basically creates dumb shit like organizing staff picnics for companies with more than 3 CCP members, which is basically any reasonably sized company since 1/8 of country are CCP members. It is much more minor than export controls. The "pervasive control" exists in the sense that there is higher level coordination like META having US intelligence on board, or forming partnerships with said agencies. Fixating on minor shit like internal CCP committee is propaganda trying to pretend somehow US companies are less influenced by geo/politics when they are every bit as much. The big stuff is again, distinction without difference.
> TikTok which is not a PRC company
This is being obtuse like people pretending TikTok being based in Singapore/incorporated in Caymen somehow seperates it from Bytedance's (quartered in Beijing) PRC roots. I'll grant you DE-nationalizing isn't "technically" the same as nationalizing, but geo/politically it's obviously a none starter just like if Beijing told Boeing they would have to divest from US ownership. PRC would never allow US to normalize that kind of behaviour, and vice versa. DE-nationalizing tiktok, i.e. nationalizing by parties other than PRC is another distinction without difference.
Right, the CCP committees are just there to organize picnics. Sure.
Look, I think anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in both places understands that there is a major difference in the way private companies relate to the government in China versus in the U.S. For example, it's far more common for U.S. companies to sue the government over laws or policies they disagree with, whereas in China it's just taken as given that officials have a lot of discretion.
You bring up Meta having US intelligence onboard - I assume you're referring to the Edward Snowden / PRISM revelations. Remember that this was a huge scandal precisely because the idea of American companies working with intelligence agencies to spy (even inadvertently) on Americans is considered so repugnant. Whereas in China it's just taken as given that the government can read your WeChat (or whatever) messages whenever they feel like it, and any encrypted messaging apps that gain a following are quickly removed from app stores.
This is not a distinction without a difference; China is a totalitarian state where you have essentially no right to speech or privacy. The U.S., for all its flaws, is not like that.
> DE-nationalizing... geo/politically it's obviously a none starter just like if Beijing told Boeing they would have to divest...
Can you not see the hypocrisy here, when China functionally bans almost the entire U.S. internet sector?
> Sure.
I mean yes? That's what they do - dumb "political work" activities. It's not the high level strategic coordination, which I said exists (as they do in US), but citing pedestrian CCP committees ain't it. It's Karen from HR buying birthday cakes tier of activities. As someone who spent significant time in both places, sure, PRC companies doesn't fuck with central gov, US companies gets to try to. But push comes to shove, US companies cave, so for the purpose of foreign policy and geopolitics, especially with respect to great powers competition, it's a distinction without difference, because US companies will be subservient to national security interests, with minimal discretion, as they should be. Reminder much chip restrictions were done without industry input / consultation before roll out. Because US system capable of unilaterally laying down the law as well as CCP.
>is not like that.
Yes and NSA totally dismantled domestic spying / FVEY hack to spy on host nationals via third countries (rule of law you know) because Americans found it repugnant, except not. Ex-CIA hires still deciding facebook content policy on "misinfo". US voters thinks lots of things US gov does are repugnant, but functionally cannot change it, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
>functionally bans
Except PRC doesn't. Entire US internet sector is welcome to operate in PRC, provided they follow onerous (expensive) PRC filtering regulations. Which they choose not to. US platforms functionally choses not to operate in PRC, because they don't want to follow the same PRC laws that PRC companies has to follow. Let's not forget these platforms were blocked post 2009 minority riots for actual valid national security reasons, FB/Twitter refused to censor / filter calls for retaliatory violence. Queue PRC platforms implementing onerously expensive human moderation... which later western platforms adopted following NZ shooting, myanmar killings etc. We have TikTok following the same US laws every other US platform follows... and more (again, Oracle basically JV arrangment), i.e. TikTok operating at regulatory disadvantage. Incidentally after getting up their expensive human moderation programs, FB/Google tried but internal dissent killed efforts because they spent the money and can scaling system to PRC. If anything PRC would LOVE if western platforms returned, followed PRC law, and start handing over dissident info per PRC cyber security regulations / get squeezed by PRC influence.
The hypocrisy is thinking they're remotely comparable situations when TikTok chooses to compete in an unfair US regulatory enviroment and western companies choose not to compete in a fair regulatory PRC enviroment. TikTok even offered to basically have US intelligence/oversight on all US activities. The hypocrisy is there is no onerous, concessions TikTok can do to operate in US as a PRC company, even ones that puts it at significant competitive disadvantaged (extra regulatory costs) vs western platforms choosing not to shoulder the same regulatory costs as other PRC companies (100,000s human moderators ain't cheap). Extra hubris when proponents of "CCP ban US platforms" thinks US platforms shouldn't follow PRC laws and somehow are victims. Or that complying to same filtering laws is the same as divestiture. It's difference between house rules being, clean your dishes, versus get a sex change.
Surely the value of the TikTok user base is >$0 even without the algorithm. Why not sell that part of it?
Whose buying? For how much. But maybe for the same reason Meta alleges it doesn't sell user data, because there's 7 billion other potential users who wouldn't look fondly at it. Counter productive as long as there's other routes for growth.
Some Japanese tried to buy one the these supposedly perfectly "independent private compan[ies]", and the US president said no, but that's completely different I'm sure.
right instead Biden ordered US Steel to close and cease all operations, just like Beijing is doing to TikTok. /sarcasm
there is no comparison between these events
TikTok has entire RoW (excluding India) market. Assuming US only bans in US... which TBH we don't know. There's no comparison because TikTok is still massively profitable without US, whereas US Steel is still a mess without JP.
> because TikTok is still massively profitable without US
Do we know that? In almost all cases for mobile apps, the US is far and away the largest and most profitable market for any business. I'd also be surprised if the TikTok shop for example is profitable (or available?) outside the US.
I think something like 8/18B revenue (mostly ads) this year is from US. So it's subtantial, but 10B is not chomp change, and theoretically TikTok has growth potential since TikTok algo is competitive with western platforms, which cannot be said for US steel vs other modern metallurgy facilities. Compared to douyin in PRC, TikTok hasn't even began monetizing / ecommerce, which TBH would probably kill its popularity.
This is silly, the US is only 15% of Tiktok users.
This is an absolutely ridiculous line of reasoning. Tiktok has over a billion users, and about 150 million of those are American. It would be downright stupid to sell all of it just for the US market and it would set an absolutely disastrous precedent.
> That Beijing would rather close TikTok entirely, rather than sell it, shows how deeply important it is to Beijing that TikTok does not come under the control of another nation, including the US
I don't think it is important because of how 'powerful' a tool it is. I think it is more than being forced to sell it would be losing face and a humiliation (a la 19th century's Inequal Treaties). Also, they don't have to sell it altogether as the issue is only with the US.
So they just shut it down in the US and can say that they don't give in to blackmail while pointing out how hypocritical the US are ("free speech but only if controlled by the US" sort of angle).
why did they sell Grindr when presented with an identical set of constraints / demands ?
The two cases are just very different, why are you even comparing the case of an investment company buying a stake in an existing app with the original creator being banned from owning what they created?
Given that (as the article mentions) the ban essentially only directs Google/Apple to remove the app from their US stores, what's the rationale on ByteDance's part to immediately revoke existing US users' access? My naive assumption was they'd want to keep it going and support the current dead version of the app for as long as possible to continue squeezing US revenue for at least a few more months until that becomes untenable. Are they instead hoping to rally the user base into mass protests and pressure lawmakers into reversing the ban?
As far as I know there's no real calculation, it would just be for revenge.
ByteDance is very pissed about how they are being treated and so they would rather burn it all down than hand it over to some American.
It is endlessly fascinating to me that people ascribe emotions that individuals experience to organizations, companies, nation-states, etc.
As the article says ByteDance is a massive company with thousands of employees in the US alone. It’s ridiculous to think a corporation of that size operates as if it was a singular (and extremely petty) individual, especially to the detriment of its own self interests.
There’s a dozen potential motivations for pursuing this strategy and none of them boil down to being “pissed”.
I'd like to offer an alternative perspective: TikTok's main revenue comes from China. Succumbing to the US gov would challenge the domestic nationalism, thereby causing more losses.
I was surprised by that too. I assumed we would see a sudden interest in android and iphone jailbreaking.
I say this as someone who was in high school as the first wave of social media sites (early Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.) came up:
Just get rid of all of them. They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.
Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones. If you have to combine your online interactions with people with the interactions you have with them in real life, you're better off, and that doesn't happen when social networks span the globe.
First, people say things like they can't not use Facebook because it has marketplace, etc. shows there has clearly been an issue of not enforcing any kind of anti-trust laws for the past 20 years since US v Microsoft in the browser wars days.
The FTC over the past four years has taken a turn here and is starting to do that work again, it's slow but it needs to continue.
Second, these companies behave as publishers without any of the responsibilities/liability. This has to stop. If you publish just a chronological feed that's one thing. But when you algorithmically decide what people see when, and now introduce your own AI bots into the mix, you're 100% a publisher and need to be legally responsible for it. That legislation needs to be updated to reflect this.
Third, much of the root issues stem from advertising. These companies are driven to get and keep as much of your attention as possible simply so they can sell that attention to advertisers. If we all paid for it, the design of these services would be different. I'm not sure how to tackle that but it seems a start is privacy legislation to prohibit user tracking and sale or sharing of personal data.
> First, people say things like they can't not use Facebook because it has marketplace, etc. shows there has clearly been an issue of not enforcing any kind of anti-trust laws for the past 20 years since US v Microsoft in the browser wars days.
Europe is in some capacity doing that. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/facebook-marketplace-t...
Or just address the core element of advertising that creates the perverse incentive — the ability for an auction to determine what you see. Paying to be a part of a digital phonebook is fine. Recommending things is fine. But skewing your recommender against the highest bidder maybe not.
I deleted my Facebook in 2016, and when I tried to create a new one they banned me as "inauthentic". I've seen people complain about the site demanding a government ID scan, but I'd have been willing to prove I am who I am if given the chance.
Now I can't delete my Instagram, which I was using FB SSO for. They ocassionally send me marketing emails that I might want to engage with so and so's content.
How, when you nuked my goddamn account for no reason?
Anyways, if I had the money I'd short them -- they seem to be completely unconcerned with the few who'd consider giving them a second chance.
As for Tik Tok, as with Telegram having it's servers in Russia, I think the real issue is the data is in control of the PRC, rather than whinings about "fake news" -- people have consumed supermarket check out drivel like the Weekly World News for years, it's just moved online.
Is this a common issue? I deleted mine around the same time. I recently moved to a small town where many of the restaurants and businesses use Facebook which kind of forced me back on. When I tried creating a new one the same thing happened, and there was no way of reversing this decision.
Same with me, who "needed" to join FB because that is the main communication platform for a leisure activity. Apparently I am a fake person.
Did you try signing up with a different email address,
If you deleted an account, how are they sending you emails? Are you in the EU?
Solid point!
> Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones.
Herein lies the rub. How do you decide what the threshold is? Who gets to decide what that threshold is, and how do you do it without inviting accusations of regulatory capture?
If you make it blanket all social networks, then things like discord and even public slack orgs will inadvertently become collateral damage. If you make it focussed on only a few large ones, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, then something else will pop up to take it's place. It'll become a game of whack-a-mole. Users are supposedly already migrating in droves to some other TikTok clone.
I'm not really sure what the solution is though. Regulate the shit out of it to the extent where it becomes a government-provided utility or something?
The reality is people want social media because they are addicted to it. Getting rid of social media will be like the war on drugs: completely ineffective. The danger here is that the drug is very easy to create, impossible to control and extremely lucrative.
My passing thought is to prohibit advertising and user data monetization and it might solve itself.
We also have regulations on usage, like truck drivers can only drive X hours a day, force some type of consumption limit the networks are required to enforce. We have similar laws regarding where, when, and how people can consume things like alcohol so could also do something like that. Some amount of it is ok, but as you say we’ve now learned it’s so addictive we need to force people into moderation of their consumption.
Honestly this is probably the most realistic solution. The only reason all the shit ragebait addictive content is so bad is because it drives ad revenue.
I do think there's one exception/problem: youtube. While there's a lot of pregnant spiderman-elsa crap on it, there's also tons of historical, educational, investigative journalism, etc etc etc content there that strikes me as distinctly more valuable than literally anything that's ever existed on facebook, tiktok or even twitter.
And in addition to the backlog, there's an economics problem. Having good, free, easy, available video hosting is a huge good. It's also ridiculously expensive (videos are big, and you have to render multiple qualities of them, and store them forever) and a hard engineering (network and software) problem (what tiny % of video upload constitutes 90% of the actual network traffic? but you also have to brace for videos from nobodies going viral and needing to be served to the entire globe).
So how do you fund something like this? Normally I'd say, well, damn, this sounds like a utility. But given the political climate we're going into for the next 4 years, and the fact that even healthcare is privatized (well, the part of it that can generate a profit... unprofitable customers are of course pushed to the taxpayer)...
I think we'd have to carefully define what a 'social network' is. In my opinion, YT is not a social network. The UGC parts of Amazon.com, like reviews, do not make it a social network either. YT is a broadcast / streaming service with some small layer of UGC (I say small because, honestly, if the entire comment section was eliminated I don't think anyone would miss it, it's meme worthy bad in most cases.)
Or maybe it's just me and don't use it that way and others do? I subscribe to some things, watch a lot of videos mostly has a lurker and almost never even dip into the comments. I have exactly 0 connections with people I know on YT. It's more of a modern television channel than anything in my case.
Is there any reasonable definition of "social network" that includes TikTok, but doesn't include YouTube Shorts?
Maybe YT needs to ditch Shorts under this hypothetical, I don't think it's the enriching part of the service the comment above was referencing
There is a lot of variation in community and comment quality on YouTube. Similar to Reddit there is a massive long tail of smaller communities and topics which absolutely have vibrant and real, helpful comments. And on the biggest channels and videos there is a lot of bullshit and low quality comments. Both are true at the same time so it would be a shame to stamp out the genuine communities and connections
Youtube ain’t a social network and you can watch all of it without an account.
if the problem is advertising and data monetization, why am I so addicted to /this/ website?
I have had a much harder time quitting Hacker News than I ever did quitting Facebook. I've been off Facebook for ten years yet I keep logging in to leave stupid comments here.
Is that because of advertising and data monetization?
I don't think "addictiveness" is really the problem. I've been "addicted" to Wikipedia for 20+ years too.
The voting system (everything it entails in terms of visual design) is addictive.
I do not see the correlation either, other than people buying stuff because an ad popped up, but that is not their primary reason for being on Facebook.
Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.
> Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.
Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if nothing is flagged? What should be flagged?
> Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator.
Because those are two orthogonal things. You aren’t sending a letter to be displayed by everyone and their dog on this planet to see.
You can also print flyers, pamphlets, books, posters, and all such things without submitting them to a human censor (c.f. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/p... for this usage).
Yes. To one address at a time. If you do a mass send, you'll get regulated at some point, too.
It raises the cost of the service therefore the need of user data monetization, I feel like this would backfire. I’d limit the revenue via bans on ads and data monetization.
great way to burn out people and scar them for life, look at all the stories of facebook moderators etc.
Nah, they would use AI, and as such, would not really limit scale.
My social network is WhatsApp and Telegram: 1-to-1 messages and some groups where I usually know everybody in them. That's the threshold.
I was interpreting the poster as saying "you, yourself, the reader will be better off cutting this out of your life" in which case your questions are irrelevant.
Of course, it is possible they meant to come up with a holistic plan for improving society in three short sentences, as your reply assumes.
Which would, I suppose, indirectly make the case that social interactions online tend to be pointless and a little silly.
Get rid of behavioral advertising. You'll find that most or all of the negative things people have in mind when they say "ban social media" go away.
In the US, at least, a government-run social media site would be impossible to moderate, because of the First Amendment. It becomes a Nazi bar immediately.
> early Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.
This was really a fun time and it was a whole new vista for interaction. It was really something to enter a new age.
That feeling didn't last long, but I still got value from Facebook until the early 2010s.
FB Marketplace is definitely the best way to buy and sell anything locally. Of course you will have to filter through the usual flakers and what not but that was always the case since craigslist days.
But for actual social media? Burn it all down lol
Facebook groups is also a decent way to build communities.
Honestly, Facebook without the push for reels / videos isn't that bad. (now you can crucify me)
you can easily block those with extensions. that's what I do. I just use if for some local interest groups, marketplace, and messenger for some family/friends.
People say that, but I've long since abandoned my FB account and sinkhole facebook domains. I miss CragisList for that. Used it a lot a decade ago.
>FB Marketplace is definitely the best way to buy and sell anything locally
I really wish they had some kind of auction component to deal with multiple interested parties / reduce flakers, but I imagine eBay has some crappy software patent that they wield with an iron fist.
> I really wish they had some kind of auction component to deal with multiple interested parties / reduce flakers, but I imagine eBay has some crappy software patent that they wield with an iron fist.
Facebook Ads has auctions for selling ad slots. They have the technology, they just reserve it for their real customers.
FB Marketplace is the best way to buy stolen goods cheaply - not sure about authentic goods.
I have sold plenty things on there and none of them were stolen. I buy broken vintage electronics (60s, 70s, 80s) for cheap and resale them after I fix them. It's not a lot of money but it's a way to pass the time on a boring evening.
I remember so fondly coming home from high school and reading over my friends posts, curating the pins on my pin/cork board, messaging friends who would otherwise not be savvy enough to join MSN or IRC or yahoo messenger...
Now I feel physical disgust when I look at the FB logo
The real issue with Facebook is the inability to tune easily. One of the reasons I use Instagram and Threads is because I feel I can easily tune the algorithm with likes. I can keep up with my friends via stories. I dont need to post on my "wall" stupid stuff like the beer im drinking. Instagram + Stories feels like the best medium to see what my friends are upto with short stories and images. The explore feed can be tuned so I get content and threads fills the void on X and its terrible algorithms. I agree, "deleting" facebook or simple just leave it on deprecated mode and never use it besides market place is the best thing you can do. I dont give a crap what person's political view is and dont need to see a news feed based on triggers.
I love that I can have multiple profiles in IG and Threads, each tuned like you talked about for a specific interest of mine with no cross-pollination
The real issue with Facebook is that they help precipitate the TikTok ban [1].
Not that TikTok should have stayed, but the fact that Meta was pushing for this and now stands to benefit massively should be concerning.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
I'm in favor of letting people pay for their own smaller instances, like something Facebook esque, and you can invite all your relatives. They can join your instance. But someone (or maybe its a group effort) has to pay for it. Zero ads, just friends and family.
I've thought about this a lot.
I don't think I'll ever build it (I have another idea in the works consuming all my time), but I'll go a step further and share my other thought on it:
The less they use it, the less they should pay for using it. So if your goal is to keep up with relatives via sharing photos / videos, you can do that, and bug right out. So now there's a financial incentive to use it less, but it serves its purpose, like email.
Smaller instance can become big. Say you set up a small instance and invite your family. Then family members want to invite their family, or friends, or whomever. How do you manage that?
I think the answer is what we see with Mastodon, etc. and that's federated/distributed social networks.
A restaurant can become big. Say you have a food critic showcase your restaurant and hundreds of people show up. How could we possibly deal with this problem without the aid of the smartest, most amazing, totally really smart, awesome at leet code, software engineers?
This won't help with the dopamine craving. Most peoples' actual friends can't produce enough content.
The sooner we treat it as an addiction the faster we'll think of treatments.
basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s of known people. I thought about this recently… It was really better times.
Even decentralized mastodon is too big and it makes it far too easy to post BS and hateful / unhealthy stuff. Plus there are far too many posts you can’t relate to or just don’t want to read („algorithm“ or not), without even mentioning the bubble effect, much worse there than on X to be honest.
Smaller communities which you can connect to /disconnect from plus a good combo of RSS feeds to get news. That’s probably it.
There's a strong part of me that thinks that a model not unlike BBSes with Fidonet might be the way to go. Everyone gets to have their own little bastion of the 'net that they control, filled with their own content (games, warez, text files, the good ol' shit) and global email/forums/chat provided in a decentralized way. When people are arseholes, you cut them off by blocking them from your server, and we all move on.
I keep toying with building a modern version of that using some of the existing fediverse infrastructure, but I just don't have the time or attention span for it. Partially because my attention span was fried by Instagram.
> go back to old SMF/php forums
Some of us are old enough to remember when those were already the enshitification stage, and would prefer to go back to usenet
"Eternal September" was a more serious problem than we knew.
Ahahah I believe you! Some forums were really bad. :)
> basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s of known people. I thought about this recently… It was really better times.
I'm going to take a wild guess and assume this is how you grew up?
It's simply a better model to connected online. I use present tense because the "better times" didn't really go away: it becomes Discord servers.
The bad part, of course, is that Discord is owned by one single entity and not indexed like the open web is.
I did, and it truly was better. Threaded forums are far better at facilitating complex discussions, organizing information, and making the information accessible. Today, most communication is happening inside the walled gardens of Facebook, Discord, etc. That information is effectively being lost rather than being neatly organized and easily searchable.
Kind of, yeah.
IRC, simple php forums, no TLS, easy stuff. Nowadays we're full of technology and very poor content. In no way can mastodon (mentioning because it's the defacto decentralized social media) solve that problem. It's really easy to post stuff that shouldn't be posted.
On the other hand, crappy looking forums, slow internet connection, you really had to take the time to think about what to say and mainly why say it in the first place. It was more about the content than about quantity.
The problem is not the social network in itself, but the fact that companies are manipulating what you see to maximize the bad aspects of the network. Companies should have strict limits on the kind of algorithms they use to generate a feed.
Recently I’ve been imaging a world where social media algorithms were tuned to help people instead of “driving engagement” with ever more outrage bait. Oh you’re watching clips about machining and by your data profile you’re an uneducated adult? Here are some trade school, financial assistance, and self help links to nudge you toward a better life! What a world that would be.
Doesn't China's national TikTok equivalent do that?
I'm fine with going back to 100% chronological feeds. Show events as they happen and don't put a hand on the scale.
That's how social networks usually build their base then they switch to an algorithmic feed to satisfy advertisers once their user base is big enough.
“We will teach you to be free”
Idk Xanga was peak non toxic social media. Pretty much just blogging. I miss it.
Yeah that and LiveJournal. And then it just kept going down from there in terms of self-expression, effort, quality, personal, actually-SOCIAL-media, etc.
"Social media" went from blogging and commenting with your friends and others to watching videos of ads interspersed with random memes and shit.
Quite a slide.
That can't happen, the 1st amendment protects us from that sort of overreach with lots of precedence coming before it. What can happen is severe penalties for companies and adults who allow minors to get on social media. That is the sort of regulation that can happen if the USA Congress really wants to do something. They can also regulate foreign propaganda sneaking like with TikTok, there is precedence for it. Also severe penalties and jailtime for threats (terrorism, personal) done online, they should be taken seriously and tracked down and prosecuted as if the threat was made against me if I was standing on a street corner.
The more you ban, the more "centralized" and "massive" the platforms you don't ban get. Unless you literally ban everything.
One has to be extremely naive to think Google (youtube) lobbyists didn't play a role in this Tiktok ban.
Big things aren't necessarily centralized, and you can replace big things with lots of small ones.
Meta certainly lobbied for a TikTok ban:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
Ah so that's why he's sucking up to trump now.
The early waves of most communities is 'better'. Strangely this is really consistent, even if you've been on sites quite a bit.
One of the rules of moderation I believe in, is that the workload depends on the nature of the people in your community.
Oh, so communities follow the rules of subculture founding and decline ???
So there should be a point where things that were not cool, become cool again?
The literal terminology we use to refer to them directly correlates with their slide. They were "Social Networks" and were all about the network effect of having a connection to people IRL reflected online. That meant you could also go additional links out. They are now "Social Media" and they are largely just one-to-many platforms for media. They have completely crowded out most of the original benefit of being a social network.
why? you don't have to use them. should HN be banned?
This is the level 0 of reasoning about these topics...
We live in organised societies, nobody is forcing you to do crack but people doing crack will definitely lower the experience of everyone they interact with (and more given the burden on shared goods like healthcare, infrastructures, &c.), that's why we collectively decided that crack shouldn't be sold to 13 years old kids.
Now of course this is very flawed and we'll always have things slipping through the cracks (alcohol, tobacco, junk food, &c.), but unless you want to live in a mad max type of world you have to accept some level of regulation, and that level of regulation, in a working society, should be determined through politics
If tiktok is crack, HN is honey. One becomes problematic much quicker than the other, when you see a kid spending 5 hours a day on HN hit me up
This is not an actual argument because you can make it about anything.
Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.
Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.
If you can use an argument for anything it’s not a very convincing argument.
Cool, you can use the argument I was replying to for everything too. I guess we're back to square one then.
If you think skiing and cooking have as much of a negative impact as social media as on entire generation of kids I doubt we'll find common ground to go further, usually it requires a bit of good faith
yeah, that makes sense. Everything has a cost, TANSTAFL.
This is the second philopsiphical point of economics. Everything is a choice between costs.
Im curious how else you would put it?
Won't someone think of the Children!!!?
Social media is just the demon of the day. In the 80s it was that damn rock music ruining our kids and in the 90s it was violent video games and rap.
Every generation has their "this thing is corrupting the youth" moment.
Yeah sure, Socrates was worried about books too... now if you can't see the difference between rock music and kids spending 5+ hours a day doomscrolling I think we'll have a hard time discussing anything. Feel free to share the studies showing the negative effects of books and rock music on kids by the way, because there are plenty of these when it comes to social media, especially the doomscrolling type.
Following your logic everything new has to be desirable, that's a tough position to defend imho. Just because new trends were incorrectly criticised in the past doesn't mean every new trend is good until the heat death of the universe, logic 101
> and kids spending 5+ hours a day doomscrolling
Let's stop pretending adults do not do it too.
Oh yeah absolutely, but the comment specifically says: "Won't someone think of the Children!!!?"
Children are in a crucial period of their lives when it comes to forging habits, learning skills, developing addictions, &c.
I don't recall violent video games and rap music influencing elections.
I wish it had - I’d vote for the person fighting for my right to party
The impact stated is wildly outsized. I read a microsoft report regarding this that was heavily touted and one of the "prime" examples given was a 1M view Twitter video.
Teens don't get addicted to Hacker News
Almost any form of media can be addicting. Kids these days might watch TikTok, but my worst addiction since young age has been reading online news.
Once I got diagnosed with ADHD and tried stimulant medicine, I noticed that the time I spend reading news, social media and playing games dropped dramatically. So, effectively all these activities have been nothing more than drugs for my dysfunctional brain. When my brain isn't deficient in dopamine, I seem to automatically spend most of my time on something more useful. Probably wouldn't be writing this if my meds weren't wearing off at this time of day.
HN is too slow for that, if you spend the time kids spend on tiktok every day here you'll get bored to death.
yep tiktak has far more serotonin spikes per "next item" per unit time than hackernews.
Meanwhile I’m reading this while I should be coding
Speak for yourself. I've been using hacker news since high school, 10+ years ago and haven't been able to stop.
HN is the most addictive social media I've ever used.
speak for yourself
hacker news has a lot of ideological community problems but HN is not "massively centralized", it's just a narrow window into the US tech scene with a relatively small community of people.
I think there's a great argument that says the first amendment is not a suicide pact. The social media environment right now is having an unprecedented destructive effect on US democracy. I think TikTok is right there as a key player in spreading weapons-grade, state-sponsored mush to younger people.
every generation thinks they’re the first to argue that there are negative effects of free expression.
It's not free expression when someone else chooses what everyone sees.
Threads is notorious for de-boosting posts with external links. This is a deliberate choice which filters facts and external references out of the conversation.
Or you can just delay the feed of posters you don't like. They arrive at every debate a day late, while your favourites go through immediately. And to more people.
And so on.
There's nothing free about any of this. It's covert behaviour and sentiment modification.
With a newspaper you get an editorial angle, so you can choose it if you want it.
Social media pretends to be a neutral conduit. But it's carefully curated and manipulated, and you don't know how or why.
Editorial discretion is absolutely part of free expression
I recall similar arguments about the printing press.
“But the masses will be able to access the scripture without guidance! Society will crumble!”
You know, I think lots of us on HN, can at least be the people who can and should go to next levels of this discussion.
So yes - we should definitely agree that all new technology for publishing (publishing? COntent creation?) result in issues of free speech.
I will say that each of these, have had different issues, and that from Radio onwards, we are dealing with several issues (side effects ?) that become more intense with each new media developed.
I'll jump to the end, but Social media is definitely different from the printing press.
We certainly get new and improved benefits, such as the distribution of publishing power to individuals.
At the same time, we are getting issues with an abundance of content, that people need content to be eye catching, in order to gain an audience.
Theres also a tendency for networks to consolidate over time, so at the start of the radio era, or TV era, you have a bunch of cable networks, then over time they start collapsing into larger groups, which are better able to survive.
Fully admit that these are highly generalized, I am just thinking of what others can chime in with.
Not entirely inaccurate! Martin Luther's 95 Theses propagated from Germany to England in a matter of weeks, thanks to the printing press. I think society got better but it sure did change a lot.
To be fair, scripture doesn't actively change to increase obsessive engagement at the expense of all else.
it does, just more slowly - modern religions are absolutely the result of natural selection for virality and fervor in the field of ideas
I'd argue the two are like comparing apples and oranges. Yes, there is a competition of ideas, but accepted scripture is changed so much more slowly than society itself that it cannot exploit the zeitgeist of any one trend. More importantly, it doesn't change differently to each individual to maximize addictive interaction. The slowness is a feature. I'm not saying there aren't some problems with religion being exploitative, but the responsiveness is what makes social media a much more effective manipulator.
TBO, TikTok and Twitter are far more diverse than HN, which is merely an echo chamber, only slightly better than a subreddit.
Although I like HN more than TikTok, it's so funny
What matters is not the diversity of the overall userbase but the diversity of what gets shown to you. From my (limited) experience TikTok is hyper-targeted and will narrow in on your interests/biases quickly and keep you in that bubble.
HN (and reddit) generally lacks this hyper-targeting. Obviously, just the act of going to HN is selecting for a certain cross-section of opinions, but once you're there what you see is determined by the community and not by your own personal preferences.
It sounds like you’re saying that personalized feeds are the key problem?
Tiktok(or other algorithm-suggesting platforms) provides echo chambers for each user
HN/subreddit provides a single echo chamber for everyone
that's why I like HN more, I don't want to be in my echo chamber, I perfer visiting your chamber
You're welcome here, and you're welcome to express contrarian views—that's an important part of an intellectually curious community, which is our goal with HN. However, we need you to do it while sticking to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You've unfortunately been breaking them in various places already.
I know how hard it is to be in the minority on a contentious topic without getting provoked (and then becoming provocative oneself), but that's what we need commenters with minority views to do. Otherwise we end up having to moderate the accounts, not because we want to suppress minority views but because we have to enforce HN's rules.
I've written about this extensively because it's such a consistent phenomenon. Here's one post if you (or anyone) wants a fuller explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722. There are plenty more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's in your interest to do this, because then you maximize the persuasive power of your comments. Conversely, if you succumb to the pressure to be indignant and/or snarky and/or flamey and so on, that ends up discrediting your views, which is particularly damaging if they happen to be true: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
(p.s. I'm an admin here in case that wasn't obvious)
sorry being snarky, hard to help it, my bad, again
and there's misunderstanding, I was not provoked, at least in the comment above
it's not a critique to HN, in fact, isn't it obvious that HN inevitably ends to a echo chamber? unpopular opinions greyed out, popular opinions ranked up, wasn't it design to be this?
it's not that bad, most communities are echo chambers
I mean, you're not wrong. I come to HN to see how awful the tech ghouls are being today.
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
"Echo chamber" is a tautology by this point. What's bad about a narrower focus? It's good to cross pollinate on occasion but you're not going to ever get to deep discussions when you have the same arguments over and over with people who share little common ground. I don't come to HN to read what flat earthers think about that gorgeous photo of the Earth's curve taken by an astronaut, and I can have productive disagreements with other technologists.
> I can have productive disagreements with other technologists
Only for tech topics
Things went ugly(but fun!) for political/geopolitical topics, 'unpopular' opinions will be grayed out, opinions survived coalesced into the essence of the Anglo-Saxon spirit
but HN is centralized, so you agree if HN exceeds some arbitrary amount of users it should be banned? how ridiculous. tiktok is not any better or worse than facebook, youtube, or the mainstream media.
Hell, I'd make that arbitrary amount 300.
That's about the number of social connections the human brain is really meant to handle.
Its worse for the US Govt in that they cannot secretly ask them to control what gets seen
First wave? You must have missed yahoo groups.
And of course someone will reply to this and mention usenet.
For all complains of the toxicity of the platforms. For now, the contents over there are written by your fellow human (maybe AI in a few years). Just focussing on platform closure for me indicates that we resigned from fixing our fellow folks.
But it's not the "folks" that are the factor, generally. The mechanisms of many major social media platforms actively amplify the worst aspects of the worst people, while suppressing the best parts of the best.
Someone put the microphone too close to the speaker. As the feedback rings our ears someone reaches out for the power switch. Do you call out "but the start of the feedback was the music from the band, turning it off won't fix the band"? :)
Assuming that social media is an evolution of traditional media.
The traditional media loves to chase negative news (If it bleeds, it leads) and we let that happen (muh free speech!). So it is logical that social media amplified the negativity of society, coupled with algorithms evolution and instant broadcasting the impact is amplified.
Fck around and find out I guess.
Yep, I'm very careful what kind of content I feed my subconscious these days.
Watching news is like begging for nightmares, and most of it's made up anyways.
> we resigned from fixing our fellow folks
We have. It's A) too expensive, and B) we can't agree on what "fixed" looks like. "Think of the children" type scare-legislation is going to fill this void.
I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed. There was a time when you'd have a couple dozen friends on Facebook, who were people you actually know in real life, and you'd check Facebook, read you feed in chronological order, and then reach the end. Like with email.
The algorithmic feed, in addition to time spent on social media, has also intensified online discourse in a way that I believe to be harmful to society. What people see now is not the most recent things their friends were posting, no matter how banal, but whatever it is that the algorithm judges most engaging. Truth doesn't matter. Now the conspiracy theories and weird new age shit that your one hippy friend posted constantly have an audience. That kind of thing is engaging, so it floats to the top.
I'd be perfectly fine with just banning social media altogether. Never before in history has the value of a barrier to entry to publishing something been more apparent. But as a compromise, I would accept banning the algorithmic feed.
Treat algorithmic feeds as "publications" by machines. Treat these social media companies as publishers and allow them to be sued for libel, with damage amounts based on reach.
If there's no algorithmic feed and the company is truly just a self publishing utility then keep the section 230 protections
Yup, I absolutely don't understand how they're able to get away with choosing material to promote and then not call themselves publishers.
They're acting as editors for a publication. Hold them accountable like the publication companies they are.
Want to continue getting safe-harbor exemptions for user submitted content? No fucking algorithmically chosen feeds.
CDA 230 was written specifically to overturn a defamation ruling that held online platforms responsible for content; this was specifically a result of Jordan Belfort - the Wolf of Wall Street - suing to censor negative opinions of his fraudulent investment offerings.
Prior to that lawsuit, the existing law regarding defamation was that you could hold a newspaper accountable for what they had printed, but not the newsstand selling the newspaper. The courts in the Jordan Belfort cases decided to categorize online services based on their moderation policy: if you published literally anything sent to you, you were the newsstand[0]; if you decided not to publish certain things then you were a newspaper.
In case it isn't obvious, this is an unacceptable legal precedent for running any sort of online service. The only services that you could legally run would either be the most free-wheeling; or the most censurious, where everything either has to be pre-checked by a team of lawyers for risk and only a small amount of speech ever gets published, or everything gets published, including spam and bullshit.
To make things worse, there is also standing precedent in Mavrix v. LiveJournal regarding DMCA safe harbor[1] that the use of human curation or moderation strips you of your copyright safe harbor. The only thing DMCA 512 protects is machine-generated feeds (algorithmic or chronological).
So let's be clear: removing CDA 230 safe harbor from a feature of social media you don't like doesn't mean that feature goes away. It means that feature gets more and more censored by the whims of whatever private citizens decide to sue that day. The social media companies are not going to get rid of algorithmic feeds unless you explicitly say "no algorithmic feeds", because those feeds make the product more addictive, which is how they make money.
The "slop trough" design of social media is optimal for profit because of a few factors; notably the fact that social media companies have monopolistic control over the client software people use. Even browser extensions intended to hide unwanted content on Facebook have to endure legal threats, because Facebook does not want you using their service as anything other than a slop trough.
So if you want to kill algorithmic feeds, what you want to do is kill Facebook's control over Facebook. That means you want legal protections for third-party API clients, antitrust scrutiny on all social media platforms, and legally mandated interoperability so that when a social media platform decides to turn into a slop trough, anyone so interested can just jump ship to another platform without losing access to their existing friends.
[0] Ignore the fact that this is not how newsstands work. You can't go to any newsstand, put your zine on it, and demand they sell it or face defamation risk.
> I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed.
Bringo.
The day Facebook implemented the feed as the main page rather than the original homepage was the day social media went sideways. It's little more than a Skinner box with a bright candy coating and it has just gotten more egregious over time. It's right on the tin, "Feed".
I'd be interested to see how much R&D budget has gone into hiring persons in the field of psychology to tweak the dopamine treadmill over time.
I distinctly remember when the chronological timeline was done away with, people were extremely pissed.
I remember the day they introduced the chronological newsfeed! People were pissed about that. Nobody wanted a list of all their wall posts to be published to everyone who could see them.
Prior to newsfeed, FB was obviously an N-N platform, but the interactions were more 1-1. You used the network to find and connect, but you interacted with individuals (on their wall). The newsfeed tipped the focus toward 1-N interactions, and direct messages solidified that (no more wall posts).
I believe GP is comparing pre-feed and post-feed days, not chrono feed vs algo feed.
For its first few years, Facebook had no feed at all.
You are correct, but the introduction of the algorithm is indeed just as if not as significant as the introduction of the feed
You just say "bingo"
That's the wrong movieshow, ya dangus.
For your health
> It's right on the tin, "Feed"
+5 Insightful
Algorithmic feeds are wonderful, but unfortunately their goals as implemented today do not align with anyone's best interest except shareholders.
I don't have tiktok, but I used to watch a lot of YouTube suggestions. I finally took the app off my devices and used a suggestion-blocking browser extension. I could only find stuff that I actively searched for. After a few months, I took a peek at suggestions and it was actually great: pretty much only videos I was legitimately interested in, steering me towards useful tiny channels, etc. I still keep it blocked, but check it once daily just in case.
The problem is that algorithmic feeds want you to just keep watching and will absolutely probe all of your "weaknesses" to keep doing so. Instead of trying to support you, it says "how can we break this guy/girl down so s/he keeps watching...".
Until the feeds say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't serve you another video. You should go outside and enjoy the day", then it should be treated more as a weapon aimed at one's brain by a billion or trillion-dollar corporation than a tool.
> I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed.
More than that too, my recollection is that those early social media sites were considered "separate" from the real world. It'd be seen as odd to take it "seriously" in the early days.
The big change I noticed was when my (our?) cohort started graduating college and started sanitizing their Facebooks and embracing "professionalism" on the then nascent LinkedIn. I distinctly remember being shocked at that, and the implicit possibility that employers would "care" about your Facebook posts.
How far we've fallen.
What are you actually saying? The government should make these websites illegal?
I like tiktok. I scroll for a bit in the morning and watch some funny videos. Who are you to say that's immoral and shouldn't happen?
The government’s banned owning media with too much reach before, placing limits on audience size per owner.
We no longer know how to actually govern the country, but it used to be entirely possible.
Bring back IRC
It never left. I've been consistently on IRC since the 90s.
They 100% are - I fantasize about world in which they dont exist.
Completely disagree with this take. TikTok has helped me grow my business, helped me learn new skills, which I am now monetizing, has educated my kids on math concepts that were otherwise too abstract or poorly taught in schools. I have personally developed a historical knowledge of many concepts that I was unaware of previously. I’m not saying it’s a substitute for reading books, but it sure can point you to the right books to read while supplying the right context on what you might learn from them.
Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people. This sort of confirms what I had feared for a few years now: that Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech. It would be too much of a threat to their core, calcified beliefs that there is no such thing aa American exceptionalism.
Let me lay out how this works:
The US occupies a new office downtown. China wants eyes on a specific room, and the choice spot for monitoring it is someone else's apartment. This person happens to own a bakery also in town, and it sort of seems like the apartment is a reach for them as it is.
Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.
6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".
This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.
Might as well ban electricity in case the Chinese manage to use it to do bad things, same (insane) logic applies.
While your scenario might make for an interesting Tom Clancy novel there's no evidence any of that is happening and no one involved in this ban with any authority is arguing that this is something they're worried about.
I agree that their example is absurd, but China has definitely used social media accounts to influence opinions on Hong Kong, Xinjiang etc. American social media companies cooperate with investigations and flagging of this propaganda. On the other hand, TikTok is almost certainly being pressured by the CCP to promote it and obfuscate any investigations.
You might want to get your paranoia checked out. I'm not even going to bother asking for the many sources that support your overwhelming reason.
Russia had Bernie Bros and Magatards brawling with each other at pre-planned rallys across the street from one another. And they didn't even have access to the facebook algo.
Citation needed.
Devil's advocate: Can this not also happen on literally any other social network? Can this kind of shit not also be initiated by domestic agents, or agents of allied nations, or even just some bored haxor group with a penchant for chaos?
If what you said is the primary reason for banning TikTok (bad actors can do bad things), it's also a valid reason to ban literally every social network, or possibly even all user-generated content on the internet.
To your first paragraph, yes, across the board, and yes to more scenarios than you even laid out here.
To the second, you misunderstand the issue the US government has here. It is not that the social network is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority. It is that it is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority that they are enemies with.
Whether you consider them your enemy, whether they consider you theirs, whether you think that China really is or is not an enemy of the US government, and whether you consider the US government your enemy or not is all irrelevant to the point at hand, as interesting as they may be in other contexts; this is about the beliefs of the US government.
China has similar concerns and has already taken numerous similar steps, and it's equally not any sort of hypocrisy or anything because the principle they operate under is not about the existence of control, but who has the control.
On non CCP controlled platforms, they cannot chose what stories to "organically" promote and who to promote them too. Most people have no concept of the 99% of posts to social media that never get traction.
They can still kind of do it, but it requires a lot of work to fool other companies algo's into artificially promoting what you want. Much easier to just call up Bytedance and say "We need everyone in this area seeing this tiktok tomorrow".
If you think domestic social media companies aren't capable of silently promoting certain content at the request of someone with influence... you wouldn't happen to be in the market for a bridge, would you?
Non CCP controlled platforms can definitely choose what stories to promote. Musk does it every day on twitter. Oligarch controlled social media is just as much a blight as government controlled social media.
Of course they do, but they aren't interested in toppling the west.
All that is great, except for the part where the algorithms that collect your reactions to content and then choose new content for you in a feedback loop—which as you point out, can produce valuable effects as well as harmful ones—are a black box under some approximation of direct control by the CCP.
And it would be better if "the algorithm" were under control of some unelected managers in a billion dollar company owned by finance capital?
I keep seeing this stated as a reason for banning tt but I've yet to see any evidence. During the supreme courts oral argument last week they referred to a sealed appendix with more info, when they were passing the legislation they also referred to secret evidence that Americans can't see. I don't want to give in to conspiratorial thinking but if its as bad as they claim then we as the public have a right to see the evidence and decide for ourselves.
Evidence as to CCP control? Or evidence to another thing?
Because something that is very important to understand about China, or any other totalitarian regime, is that the people in charge don't let something like TikTok happen without having a fairly good grip on the people running it. That's just authoritarianism 101.
You've just described the reason for this TikTok ban.
Evidence that they are using the app to influence US users in a direction that would benefit the ccp and hurt the USA.
If you catch someone planting bombs under all your bridges, you don’t need evidence that they’ve detonated any to take them down.
I laid out in another comment how this works, but the gist of it is that the CCP can use the populace as dumb actors to achieve their goals.
China has secret agents they need to move through an area. Why not have an asian hate awareness rally in that area at the same time?
Nobody attending that rally would have any idea they are acting as decoy agents. None would report seeing CCP propaganda on tiktok.
Maybe you're the dumb actor posting on behalf of American tech moguls?
Here's a study showing TikTok tilts toward positive views on CCP and away from negative ones, unlike trends on other socials.
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Peer-Reviewed...
Think of it this way:
"TikTok would rather shut itself off from the U.S. market than divest its ownership from the CCP.
That is not the action of a rational corporation and really tells you who calls the shots at TikTok."
Should I feel better or worse about it being the CCP instead of a tiny group of billionaires? From where I'm standing the cabal of tech billionaires appear to be a bigger threat to me as a normal american. Do you think this is naive?
I agree. It's the same class of people that helped China become the world's factory that is now saying what it has always been. These are the same people that is still running America.
> Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people
1. There's plenty of speech you can't say (fraud, libel), so speech is believe it or not regulated.
2. This isn't about free speech per se, it's about the right of a company to exist. the government has broad leeway to regulate which entities do or don't have the right to have limited liability. if TikTok were a unincorporated business entity and the owners were liable for lawsuit the story would be different.
3. the government forcing a sale is individual free speech maximalist position in this situation, because the users of the platform can still have their free speech. if tiktok doesn't take the deal, then the "loss of free speech" is on them, not the government.
4. America, which is supposed to be a bastion of free commerce, forced the sale of Merck away from germany (there is still a german merck with the same name). this is no different.
> Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people. This sort of confirms what I had feared for a few years now: that Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech.
What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?
> What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?
Let me expand this: what in the law prevents someone from going to TikTok.com and seeing the same content?
The ban is on (a) apps in the app stores and (b) hosting by American companies. It’s not sanctioning TikTok à la Huawei.
In May 2019, the U.S. government placed Huawei on the Entity List, which restricted American companies from doing business with it without a special license. This included Google, which meant Huawei lost access to the licensed version of Android and key Google services, including the Google Play Store. As a result, Huawei could no longer pre-install Google apps like Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and other essential services that many users in Western markets rely on. Huawei was once a strong competitor in Europe challenging Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers. It effectively limited Huawei's competitiveness in Western markets and diminished its momentum when it was at the peak of its challenge to Apple and Samsung. The same will happen with TikTok in the U.S. Under the umbrella of national security, competition is being sidelined.
Until two police officers come and frogmarch you to the back of a car when you are saying something the government doesn't like there is free speech.
Most people are just annoyed their social media addiction is being interrupted when they moan about account bans, or app bans in this case.
Hell, even some of the "restrictions" on free speech that are legitimately on the books in the US aren't actually enforced.
Get a ham radio license and use profanity when you transmit. Seriously. Do it. Odds are, the FCC does nothing. The thing they do when they do catch you is send you a letter saying "please don't do that".
Are you sure that the "historical knowledge of many concepts" isn't a CCP slanted version of history? Or whatever suits the CCPs current interests? As a trivial example, do you think you are getting an unbiased view on Tiananmen Square or whether the US should back Taiwan in a war?
they aren't banning it. They gave tiktok an out -- sell to an American company or non adversarial country, if ByteDance doesn't bite on that, then that's on them.
Xi? Is that you?
That may be the case for you, but that's by definition anecdotal. I personally have seen the content consumed by a number of kids, and the amount of dubious at best information on the platform is absolutely rampant, and younger kids don't yet have a filter to know the bad from the good. Parental oversight can help, of course, but from my own observations, parents aren't for the most part monitoring what their kids are consuming.
Of course, my take is likewise anecdotal, and you may take it for what you will. That said, boiling the entirety of the American sentiment to fear of a "threat to their core" is disingenuous. Criticism of the effects of the app are as valid as its merits, regardless of what conclusions you draw based on your "fears".
This isn't banning dubious information. I only have to look at what my mom sends me videos about from Facebook.
No, it's not, nor did I state that it is. It is, though, making it more difficult for something I find detrimental to the development of kids to proliferate.
You, as an adult receiving that video, have the (hopefully) developed sense of what is accurate information or not, as well as the time to gestate on the content of that video and apply critical thinking. You can delete the video and move on with your life.
Tik Tok sends 15 seconds worth of such information, good or bad, and doubles down on detected interest, leaving little to no time to process before moving on to the next clip which is likely tailored towards the first clip's subject. Couple that with the suggestibility and naivete of children, and you end up with reinforcement of thin, poorly informed opinions based on information that may or may not even be remotely accurate.
The idea of banning all dubious information is a strawman.
>Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech.
Americans love free speech. American oligarchs hate it.
Free Speech != freedom to do literally anything.
We don't even have free speech, btw.
You can't yell FIRE in crowded rooms with impunity, you can't say untrue things about people that harm their businesses or put their lives in danger with impunity, etc.
The idea that our politicians should not be allowed to ban something being owned by a foreign company (especially when our companies aren't allowed to operate in said country, especially when we don't exactly have friendly relations with said country) - is, IMO, absurd.
To the post indicating shouting fire is legal - I believe the parent’s intent is to indicate there are consequences to it. From the article —
>> The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise. However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as involuntary manslaughter, assuming the other elements of that crime are made out.
It is actually legal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...
https://www.whalenlawoffice.com/blog/legal-mythbusting-serie...
It is SOMETIMES legal, which means that it is in the other times illegal.
Not necessarily that either. You’ll only possibly receive a charge if your conduct was intentionally misleading with purpose to harm. Yelling “fire” in a theater while in a Gen Z crowd (“this is fire”) or while listening to Metallica (“Fight fire with fire”) isn’t going to get a charge either, even if it possibly causes a stampede. The crime therefore could be accomplished with far more alternative words than just “fire.”
The point is: Legal experts unanimously agree this analogy is terrible and should never be used. The Supreme Court also thought so, completely overturning the case it originated from just several years later.
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Posting like this will get you banned here.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: I took a quick look at your recent comment history and it seems just fine (other than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42713605, also in this thread). If you'd please post like that and not like this, that would be good.
Its not ok to over-moderate against jokes, especially when you can't even point to the guideline that was broken here (though, I'm sure you could take any comment from anyone and find at least one guideline that was broken. Every comment in this thread could be banned for "political or ideological battle") (emphasis again on the word "guide" in "guideline"; are these bannable rules, or are they guidelines?)
The voting system exists and works more than well enough to bury bad comments. That's why my comment up there is at -4; it was bad. Problem is solved.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
oh please, just trying to be funny
have wanted to do this meme for so long
my bad though
Oh, sorry if I overreacted. I'm sensitive on this point because I want to protect accounts like yours and I know how strong the forces are that push them towards provocation, then flamewar.
By "accounts like yours" I mean ones that express minority views on any divisive topic. That is valuable to the community but, unfortunately, there is a lot of pressure on anyone who wants to comment that way, and it often doesn't go very well. We've seen this over and over.
I wrote a longer reply to you about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42714563. Just wanted to add some context.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
Whoa there bro didn't you see Zuckeberg's latest podcast, he built facebook to bring people together! He paid good money for that corporate beastie boy makeover too-- show some damn respect.
I think 90% of the negative social impacts would go away if they just did reverse chronological, opt-in news feed.
The black box algorithms are the problem.
You can not because the money invested into this is to large. Same with AI - half of which is used to build a personal cheerleader/ hype-train for everyone using those apps now.
If you want to end that, you need to actively sabotage it, by creating fake users who eat resources for not add-revenue. Feeding crack to children has to become economically unviable for the world to change.
I think around here people will all agree with you, the problem is that in practice this isn't at any level about cleaning up peoples experience of each other. it's economic protectionism injected with yellow-scare nonsense reminiscent of the 20th century. they're gleefully making the large ones worse while closing down anything which doesn't benefit US oligarchs
I understand your point, but I don't think it works like that for teenagers. Teenagers need to connect. They will go where the others go, because that's exactly what matters to them.
It's not that they deliberately want the addiction. The addiction is a consequence of it, but they go to TikTok because their peers are on TikTok.
They can connect in person. Like they did exclusively up until the mid 00s.
I think peers is also a strange word to use. When I joined Facebook in 2007 you were more-or-less sorted by where you went to high school. You connected with people you knew.
I'm sure that still exists on some level, but social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs. An influencer isn't your peer. It's like considering Billy Mays (may he rest in peace) your peer in 2007. No, he's a dude who sold you Oxy-Clean, but he was on TV a lot.
I was bullied in high school because I was so different.
I was also a new kid so it was hard to join an existing clique in a small town.
Online groups saved me. It not only let me stay in contact with my old friends, but also let me meet new people with similar interest so I didn't feel so alone.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. have mostly killed off the places where online groups formed when I was a kid.
Reddit seems just like every forum, but with a mostly default skin
Exactly. Subject specific forums and blogs are just ghost towns these days.
I don't think your story is uncommon especially for people who had trouble fitting in, however I would bet that places like facebook or instagram were not where you found your online groups. More likely to have been forums or online games. Very different environments and consequences.
Facebook is not "online groups", and it is known to statistically lead teenagers into higher rates of suicide.
Connect in person as a teen when everything is designed around cars and stuff a lot more expensive. Where cops arrested for you for loitering. Where people see kids going home from school as 'they're up to no good'. A lot of the past locations are gone and no longer accessible for todays youth. Even fast food places want you gone as fast as possible.
> social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs
That's what it is, but that's not how teenagers perceive it, I think.
I see it like this: if all your friends watch the news everyday and spend a lot of time talking about it, you will end up watching the news as well. To connect.
If all your friends watch a lot of sport and meet for that, you may well end up learning to enjoy sport as well.
If all your friends know the trends on TikTok and talk about it...
>Teenagers need to connect.
But not in a tiktok-way. They have more than enough social contacts when they go to school. No one need tiktok.
I went to a school with over 1,200 students and still had no friends. Kids can be extremely cruel to their neurodivergent peers. I wasn’t able to learn social skills until university .
Things would have been a lot different if I had access to the internet.
I’m sorry to hear that happened to you.
Unfortunately, the data about mental health outcomes of teens who consume social media is not positive, so I’m not sure things would have been better.
Xanga allowed kids to connect and be social that otherwise weren’t able to in high school. But do we want to raise a society of Xanga kids, or do we want to solve the root problems why they couldn’t be social in the first place?
(Or am I asking the same exact question two different ways, a distinction without a difference?)
> No one need tiktok.
And we should not underestimate teenagers: if they have something better to do than swiping on TikTok, they do it. Parents must help them have better things to do.
But still, if all their friends know and talk about the TikTok trends, they will feel disconnected if they have no clue. That's how I meant that they "need" it. They need to "connect" as in having the same references as their friends.
That’s kind of like telling parents that they should tell their kids to eat their vegetables when sitting next to McDonalds.
Nah, it is more like parents telling their children to eat healthy, while they themself go to McDonalds.
Most parents are addicted to smartphone and don't go with their children outside. I would start the investigation into root causes right there.
Yes, and? Parenting is an active job. It can be done. Take a lesson from Steve Jobs and say "no" a lot.
> They have more than enough social contacts when they go to school.
If you ever found yourself being the "weird kid" in a small town high school, you might see it different.
I found myself being the "weird kid", and I'm glad I had the Internet in general, but I'm also glad the Internet wasn't yet advanced enough to seem like a complete replacement for in-person socialization. I knew I was missing something by playing Runescape instead of talking to people, knowing that drove me to forge in-person connections when I did have the opportunity, and the fact that I had to actively engage with the Internet instead of passively scroll through it gave me at least some baseline for doing that.
Yes, I generally agree. As a parent of teens I think this as well.
But social media isn't the cause of alienation. It's a symptom.
So if theoretically you ban addictive social media platforms and prevent the formation of any platform with more than a million users, then yes, teenagers will go where their peers go, but that will not necessarily be where teenagers on the other side of the country go. It will also not necessarily be a destructive algorithm-oriented social network designed to maximize time spent viewing ads.
My friend group had a phpBB forum back in the day. I spent hours on there because I liked hanging out with that group of friends, not because it was profitable for some megacorp.
yea I don't think people are grasping how different places like Myspace or forums or online games are compared to modern social media.
How do you explain the children/teenager loneliness spike since ~2008-2010 if these things are the pinnacle of connection ?
Social media is not connection.
This is a trite (and arguably silly) comment bordering on neo-Luddism. The genie is out of the bottle. There's really no going back.
Worse, it's treating symptoms as the problem. We, as a society, deify hyper-individualism. This is to such an extreme that people actually in completely and utterly selfish ways are glorified and celebrated because "freedom".
Social media happened after we destroyed community and any sense of collectivism. Unhealthy social media habits are a consequence of that. They didn't cause it.
Where once you needed just one job to live, you now need 5. Every aspect of our lives is financialized. We spend 30 years working to the bone to pay for a house that cost 1/10th what it did 30 years ago. The high costs of housing have destroyed all the so-called "third places".
Federating services does nothing to the core problem here. I find HN's obsession with federation, which literally solves zero problems for users and creates a bunch of problems, bizarre and out-of-touch.
The problem is capitalism.
What practical alternative do you propose to capitalism?
Please stop advocating for censorship and authoritarianism.
This is the USA, we don’t do that here. (Except when we do, as in this terrible case, but it’s not what we are about.)
If you don’t like them, don’t use them. Don’t force other people to share your views and opinions. We like social media and choose every day to continue to use it.
App bans are simply state censorship, nothing more. It’s a real shame we don’t have methods of sideloading to bypass such idiocy on the part of the USG and the chokepoints at Apple and Google.
At least tiktok.com will still work.
What content is being censored? Creators are free to post their videos on other platforms.
Also note that the law doesn’t force TikTok to shut down, it requires divestment. The fact that they choose not to divest says a lot about how they view the platform.
The comment they are replying to suggests taking down all the major social media networks by government force ("Just get rid of all of them").
Arguably, even if you are not prohibiting the content itself, if you take away the means for your content to spread far & wide, that's the same as censorship.
I find this quite disturbing.
I read it as a personal recommendation to delete the apps, not as an appeal to ban them for everybody
This is how you end up with the UK's Online Safety Act. And personally, I'd prefer to have international networks where you can get exposed to different opinions; my life would be in an objectively worse place if I had only had the opinions of the people of my country to go off of.
There's a lot of issues with social media - I don't think anyone denies that. But not everyone thinks like the HN crew. What about the millions of users who actually enjoy FB and use it to connect with friends and family? To pretend that use case doesn't exist seems naive and biased. There's a reason these companies are so big - some people actually like them. Maybe they're the naive ones and we need to save them from themselves, but I don't think it's that black and white.
I want to respect the user here, but also they need to be saved.
The companies are big because they’re advertising machines with intense targeting abilities, which makes for a great place for advertisers to spend money.
Plenty of people enjoy Facebook, and plenty of people enjoy drugs and gambling and all sorts of destructive behaviors that many nations regulate. I think we can recognize that it can be fun and have utility, while still being dangerous or problematic.
If you had to convince people to pay for Facebook as a subscription, would people use it the same way? Would they still find utility there? Would they prefer a competitor?
I have a facebook account from my college days, but I don’t use it and neither does most of my network. My parents, despite being deeply suspicious and tech-savvy have started using it more and more to “connect” with family. In reality, I’ve seen their usage and it’s mostly generic groups and memes and similar stuff. I suspect that most people experience the same reality, and respectfully, I think society can survive without that.
To postulate, I think there are a million “better” ways to connect with friends and family, but I also think that there’s no one App that can do everything for everyone. My extended family bought a dozen smart picture frames, and everyone adds photos to a joint account we all share, and that has replaced a social feed for pics of kids/grandkids. I think people would be better served finding what works for them and letting it be bespoke to their family/friends.
> They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.
At least as far as kids are concerned, current evidence does not readily support this common believe.
Sabine Hossenfelder writes: "The idea that social media causes children mental health distress is plausible, but unfortunately it isn’t true. Trouble is, if you read what the press has written about it, you wouldn’t know. Scientists have described it as a “moral panic” that isn’t backed by data, which has been promoted most prominently by one man: Jonathan Haidt."
Video for more insight, if you are interested: https://youtu.be/V95Vg2pVlo0
Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist, she's not an expert on mental health. She might be right, she might be wrong, but she isn't a source of truth.
The chart with the number of suicides for children going up is not a moral panic, but a grim reality.
> she's not an expert on mental health. She might be right, she might be wrong, but she isn't a source of truth.
It's FB but for the purpose of studying effects of social media on mental health it should suffice:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/facebook-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-internal-report-sho...
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/how-social-medias-toxic-conten...
Suicides were higher in the 1980s than now. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have any apps back then.
The cause might be different, 1980s were 45 years ago. Half a century ago.
The causes for suicide might've changed in the last 50 years.
Also, the number of children suicides was in a downtrend before it went up again:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-...
The moral panic is social media being the reason for the suicides going up, not the fact that suicides are going up in itself.
Right, but correlation does not equal causation. Kids are also increasingly aware that they live in a neoliberal hellworld, and their chances of maintaining the lifestyles their parents and grandparents had are slim to none.
I’m losing family members to conspiracy theory YouTube channels.
The crackpots had a greater barrier to transmit back in the day. They had to get an FCC license or know someone with a radio station. Even then reach was limited unless you could reach a deal to transmit nationwide.
I personally believe our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff. It’s very hard to overcome.
I agree completely, social media is essentially a dopamine addiction. Steve Jobs had an apt quote regarding what you said "our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff."
> When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.
So Hossenfelder is now a psychiatrist and a sociologist?
bah, I really dislike "scientist influencers". She isn't versed in the subject, she's no better than Haidt.
From that point of view, the press and journalism should not exist.
“Sociologist” is more of an anti-qualification. In any case let’s not rely on appeals to authority. I think we are intelligent enough to judge the evidence ourselves.
No, but she doesn't have to be in this context. She's a very capable critical thinker who knows how to do very thorough research, which is all someone has to be to determine that there is, in fact, no data to support the claims.
She’s not a capable critical thinker, quite the opposite, in fact. Completely unimpressive.
They might not be causing literally mental health issues, but they're certainly radicalizing a lot of young folks into some really toxic behaviors and beliefs.
I don't really want to watch a video, but do you have a write up somewhere? The last rebuttal I've read (I think from the books that kill podcast) basically dismissed Haidts claims by saying that the increase in anxiety related disorders was due to increased self reporting. And the podcast seems to have ignored the graph on the next page in Haidts book, which showed a correlated increase in emergency room admissions due to anxiety related disorders.
> Sabine Hossenfelder
Why would a physicist's opinion on mental health carry any weight?
What is causing the record level of mental health disorders in children?
Actually getting kids tested for them.
Are children actually experiencing mental health disorders at a higher rate, or are we just classifying pre-existing variations in personality as behavior as mental health disorders at a higher rate?
The DSM used to break mental health disorders down into what it called the multi-axial system. Axis 1 being the least impacting diseases, and axis 5 the most severe. At some point we had so many disorders that more than 50% of the population was seen to have Axis 1 or higher mental health disorders. This meant that more of the population was regarded as mentally ill than were considered "healthy."
Rather than accept that >50% of the population being classified as mentally ill might be a sign we were thinking about things in a backwards way they just got rid of the multi-axial system in DSM 5.
Problem solved.
I agree with your skepticism on this, but youth suicide rates have been steadily climbing. Unless we were misclassifying suicide, it seems like there is a rising mental health crisis.
What skepticism did I express? There are two possible explanations for the value of a metric changing: either the thing being measured has changed, or the methodology of conducting the measurement has changed. I honestly do not know which is the case here.
Suicide rates were higher in the 80s
And it got lower before going back up.
You could use the exact same argument with the Earth temperature: it was higher 50 millions year ago.
Teen suicide rates have been falling in Europe and most of the world. North America has edged back up to 1990 levels, and it's largely alone in that trend.
Europe and the rest of the world has social media as well. And of course 1990 didn't have social media.
There are a lot of reasons teens can feel hopeless, and I think the hyper-partisan political atmosphere / circus, coupled with the existential crisis and very real career crisis caused by AI, at least in the common understanding, the rapid heating of the Earth, etc. I would attribute all of those as dramatically more likely to lead a child to seek an out more than social media, even if the latter is much easier to blame.
In 1990 there were zero identified exoplants. Now there are 4000+. It isn't that there is the creation of lots of new planets, but that we started looking for them in earnest, and had the means to identify them.
Being diagnosed is the likely reason there is an explosion in mental health disorders. We go to lengths to apply a diagnostic label on every child. The massive variation in humans means that a huge portion are going to fall to the sides of the curve on all sorts of gradients. Older HNers will remember having a wide variety of kids among their cohorts, with "nerds", depressives, the hyperactive, the super driven and focused, and the manic depressives, etc, but likely zero were actually diagnosed in any way. Now you could apply a diagnoses on literally all of them.
This isn't judgmental, and it's good to know what people are dealing with, and to offer treatment or medication where possible.
Other children.
The parents.
Lemon8 is taking over?
I tried it for about a 1/2 hr and it was nothing like TikTok in terms of content, UX, or the algorithm. More of a fail than Reels or Shorts, or any other wannabe clones.
It's currently down (503 Service Temporarily Unavailable), so no, it's not taking over
RedNote is
Hope they do that worldwide soon too!
This is about censorship
Which makes all the positive comments about rednote hilarious. It's like two proles in 1984 talking one another about how they're gonna defect from Oceania to Eastasia because citizens are treated just so much better there!
Again I note the distinctive lack of self-awareness from the demographic that is moving away from TikTok to a communist country value harboring app like RedNote
The Rednote or "Xiaohongshu" in Chinese is literally referring to the Mao Zedong's propaganda book the modern counterpart being "Xi's Book of Thoughts"
It's frightening how much young Americans hate their own country and the values that have allowed them this much freedom.
"communist country"
I didn't realize China had eliminated class and that companies were worker owned.
Can anyone enlighten me as to what this TikTok ban is supposed to be about? It feels a bit satanic panic from a distance.
Yes! In fact the US court system does a great job of things like that.
https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2024/12/24-111...
I recommend you start reading on Page 33 if you are impatient.
In extremely short. The PRC is an extremely active cyber threat, hacking things all over the US, in large part to gain access do gain access to datasets about U.S. people. Including hacks of the Goverment's Office of Personnel Management, of a credit reporting agency, a health insurance provider.
The PRC has a strategy and laws of using its relationship with Chinese companies, and through them their subsidiaries, to carry out it's intelligence activities.They specifically point to the National Security Law of 2015 and the Cybersecurity law of 2017 which require full co-operation with Chinese authorities and full access to the data.
So one half of their justification is the significant risk of China using TikTok to conduct espionage in the form of gathering a huge dataset on Americans.
---
Another half of the risk is, as everyone else here is already saying, their ability to influence Americans.
This is not an entirely theoretical concern as TikTok would like you to believe, the Government reports that “ByteDance and TikTok Global have taken action in response to PRC demands to censor content outside of China”.
And all evidence is that it would happen in the US the second the PRC decided to ask for it.
If they wanted our datasets they could just buy it lol,
Remember Cambridge Analytica?
It's not about getting our data. The TikTok algorithm is already being used to sow discord by showing stuff the PRC wants impressionable Americans to see. This ability of an adversarial foreign nation to surgically push individualized propaganda to consumers in another country is pretty unparalleled in human history. TikTok is the ultimate propaganda machine.
At this point, I trust Xi approximately as much as I do Zuck and Musk with my economic future.
‘There are three fires’ is not an argument against putting out any one of them.
Can you link to some evidence of any of those claims? US politicians' statements do not count as evidence.
It sounds like they were complying with a Russian law?
TikTok is basically the same as Facebook/Instagram/Y.T.Shorts but with a different owner
Well... yes... it's the owner the government is concerned about.
The law requires that ownership of TikTok be changed before it continues operating in the US, not that TikTok stop operating.
Right, I guess I'm agreeing with you that social media is an effective propaganda machine (they're ad companies and what is an ad but propaganda to buy a product) and the US Govt wants one where they set the tone.
I was disagreeing with GP that seemed to act like TikTok was uniquely a propaganda engine
I think the fact that the PRC would rather burn it all down rather than allow it to be sold speaks volumes that it's not about TikTok as a business venture.
It's also possible that the US market just isn't as valuable or profitable to TikTok/ByteDance as we assume.
They do just buy it. The opinion mentions that. It turns out they want even more data and also do things like hacking to steal it.
> The PRC’s methods for collecting data include using “its relationships with Chinese companies,” making “strategic investments in foreign companies,” and “purchasing large data sets.” For example [...]
In fact it treats the Chinese investment into TikTok as basically a form of "just buying it" with regards to the information gathering justification for banning it.
Excellent summary, thank you.
It's generally not wise to let your geopolitical rival have extensive influence over your populace, which is why CCP doesn't let American companies like Meta operate in China.
Turnabout is fair play.
There's also the signaling and red meat factor for politicians. Easy headline to be "tough on china", requires less explanation than pacific trade deals.
Yes, but then we also need to realise that pretty much the whole world outside of China is 'controlled' by American tech companies (both hardware and software/apps)
So if the US think it is not OK to have something like Tiktok owned by a Chinese company the rest of the world might wonder if it is OK for them to have everything owned by American companies...
The usual story, it is OK for the Americans to have military bases all around the world, much less so when it comes to any other countries.
All of those military bases are there in partnership with and at the invitation of the host country. The US doesn't just slap down a base in Poland and say "deal with it."
You mean the Government of the host country, not the people.
See: 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.
1990 Gulf War is actually an example of the Saudi Arabians asking for coalition troops to defend them.
2003? I'll give you that one.
Regarding 1990, nonetheless, prolonged U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War became highly controversial though, fueling anti-American sentiment.
Uh yeah the government? I'm not sure if you expect the US to go out and poll everyone in the whole country first or what you're trying to imply, but governments usually coordinate with governments.
> See: 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.
War is war, it sucks but it's been a part of human history for all of human history. That said, those wars are over. If Iraq no longer wanted US bases in their territory, they could ask the US to leave.
I think in 2020, Iraq's parliament did vote to expel foreign troops, yet the U.S. military presence continues albeit in a limited capacity.
You are right, governments usually coordinate with governments, but my point is that the consent of the government doesn't always align with the will of the people, particularly in cases where public opinion is suppressed or ignored.
Well the alternative, in realpolitik terms, is having everything owned by Chinese companies.
I suppose they're free to pick.
Absent any of these conversations is, in my experience, any notion of what exactly China aims to achieve with TikTok that is so sinister? I'm not even arguing, I wouldn't doubt China has plans or another that involve America, specifically that wouldn't be too great for America, I'm just struggling to connect TikTok to any of them, and any discussion seems to take it as granted that the shifty Chinese government is up to something with it.
So it's several things. Bear with me because finding news reports that I remember is difficult now because search results are flooded with stuff about the ban so I can't find what I'm looking for.
One concern is a general one that the Chinese government is directing the recommendation algorithms to act as propaganda. So subtly shifting user's opinions in favor of things that suit it and away from things that don't.
Another is that it is using TikTok to surveil journalists, emigres, and other persons of interest who are using TikTok. My understanding is there are credible reports of journalists being targeted by the Chinese government, where they used TikTok to find their personal details, location, etc.
There's also been increasing reports of the Chinese government operating detention centers in the US and other countries, where they bring kidnapped Chinese nationals. Basically arresting nationals on foreign soil. In some of these cases at least TikTok has been implicated as the method of locating them etc.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/764194/intelligence-officials...
Discussion of this has all been out there over the years, but the way it's been covered has admittedly been weird. Maybe this is yet another sign of a fractured media landscape, but I think some of it has to do with the US not doing a great job of publicizing some things, possibly because it involves intelligence services.
I'm generally very in favor of unfettered freedom of speech, but have mixed feelings about this case. I guess I still side on that, and am skeptical about a ban, but this is getting into different territory and also don't feel strongly about it. I think the effects of foreign (and domestic) propaganda in social networks are very real, and although I generally think censorship is a very bad idea, I'm not sure I can blame a country for wanting an app banned if there's solid information that another country is using it in this way; it seems to be in this gray area of espionage versus free speech which is kind of an unusual territory to be in. Also, I'm fully aware that the US probably does similar things, but two wrongs don't really make a right to me, and if China produced solid evidence of the US doing something similar I wouldn't blame them for banning something either on similar grounds.
To me this all just maybe speaks to the need for a shift to open decentralized social network platforms. I realize that's easier said than done, but there's so many examples in the last few years of problems with control of centralized platforms (by private, government, or private-government combinations) leading to huge problems, either in reality or in appearance (which can sometimes be almost as equally concerning).
If these things are truly happening -- especially the alleged arrests on US soil -- then that should be really easy to demonstrate to the American people. That the government hasn't bothered to prove the allegations is telling.
Of course, if the allegations were proven, the people would demand more action than merely banning a video app. Action which would have an huge negative impact the economy and would be unpopular among the powerful. So maybe that's why they haven't bothered?
So literally all the same things the US does, but because China's doing it, now it's wrong. Got it.
I am being glib but I do want it understood that I appreciate the nuance and documentation you put the work into to show. It's just that, literally every one of these I already know about the United States doing so the outrage on it's part feels incredibly, hilariously hypocritical.
Oh, you could probably make some effective arguments that they're using it to influence American thought in a way that's designed to diminish the US as a world power through internal strife.
Israel/Hamas would probably be an example.
Its clear to anyone that's looking that what's happening in Gaza is a genocide
For example, here's the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
Wikipedia is the subject of a very large pro-Palestinian propaganda campaign:
https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...
And they have banned several of those involved, though obviously each of the thousands who participated should be banned:
https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-833180
What about the groups linked in the wikipedia article: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices and the United Nations Special Rapporteur ?
Those seem less biased sources than The Jerusalem Post
The source here isn't the JP, it's wikipedia. Wikipedia investigated and banned the editors. JP is just the reporter. You can find other news sites with the same news, or Wikipedia itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_the_Israeli%E2%8...
Those human rights groups, unfortunately, have a long history of bias and foreign influence. The closer they are to the UN, the more political they are. Literally half of the UN's resolutions pertain to Israel - while 99.999% of war deaths, famine, modern slavery, etc, happen without Israel being involved. The UN was led by a literal Nazi in the 70s - Kurt Waldheim - and the last few UN Secretary Generals have said that there is a serious bias against Israel there (obvious from the obsession).
No, it really isn't. 45k dead, half militants, is really quite good a good ratio for warfare.
Many repeating this absurd claim deny what happened on 10/7, deny the decades of Arab attacks on Jews prior to 48, and the 1300 years of genocide, rape, and displacement of Jews by the Muslim empires prior to that.
I don't believe that many of those repeating it really believe it either. If you thought this was genocide - on the scale of the horrors of the Holocaust, with 6 million Jews and 12 million total dead - and all you did was bitch on the internet, I'd be ashamed to know you.
This is war, this is how it goes. And Hamas and the 2 billion Muslims that hate Jews - along with Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments sowing dissent - have clear control over the narrative on TikTok.
> No, it really isn't.
I wonder what you know about Genocide better than experts in Holocaust studies and other genocides themselves.
William Schabas, author of the 741-page textbook, "Genocide in International Law" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
John Quigley, author of the 300-page book, "The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
@martinshawx, author of the books "What is Genocide?" and "War and Genocide" - says it's a genocide.
@dirkmoses, author of the 600-page book, "The Problems of Genocide" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
Raz Segal, author of "Genocide in the Carpathians" - says it's a genocide in Gaza.
Amos Goldberg, author of books on Holocaust, says it's a genocide in Gaza
@bartov_omer, author of several books on Holocaust and genocide, says it's a genocide in Gaza.
But why to listen to the experts in law and genocide studies? Why to bother to read the extensive human rights reports?
Listen to @piersmorgan instead; he has a gut feeling.
> This is war, this is how it goes.
Yeah, war is how "I was just following orders" German troops justified killing 12m+ in concentration camps. Goebbels said, "The Jews are responsible for the war. The treatment they receive from us is hardly unjust. They have deserved it all." Don't be like Goebbels.
> the 2 billion Muslims that hate Jews
Yeah, well: I know a handful Muslims who married Jews.
> and all you did was bitch on the internet, I'd be ashamed to know you
Same.
Unfortunately, popular opinion - at least of the far left - has always been united against Israel. In fact, many of those authors called it a genocide before this war. You can find plenty of such accusations on Twitter from prior to 10/10, when Israel started responding to the attack. You have many groups blaming Israel for all sorts of absurd things - like the fires in California. I wish I was joking. If not for Israel and the Jews, we'd have world peace - at least that's what you'd think if you listened to these groups.
It is an extension of populist antisemitism. I encourage you to think about this on your own: why is Israel condemned for 45k deaths in a war they didn't start, where half of the killed are militants, where Israel is literally providing aid to their enemy, while the Houthis, responsible for 300k dead in the past decade, including many children via starvation, who have brought back slavery in Yemen, are lauded for attacking western shipping and have fanboys of one of their murderous pirates? Where is the criticism for Muslims planning terror attacks against the west, and against individual Jews globally? Why do leftists love the idea of jihad and intifada, but not a nation defending itself?
Meanwhile, most "genocide" decriers seem to have ignored the tens of thousands of rockets, missiles, and drones launched at Israeli civilians from Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. They ignore the videos of Gazans chearing in the streets and spitting on corpses. The open calls for exterminating the Jews from the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ, Iran, and more. There is one side calling for the extermination of the other and taking actions to make it so - the Muslims trying to destroy Israel and calling for and taking actions to kill Jews globally.
I mean, I'm not on TikTok at all and Israel is committing a genocide. China didn't tell me that, the Israeli's killing Palestinians en masse told me that. Because that's what the word "genocide" means.
It seems to be if the US Government wants not to be associated with a genocide-committing country they should just... do that. TikTok might have the largest share of the pro-Palestine mood as it were, but like... it's on all the platforms. Because again... they're committing a genocide, and filming it.
I would argue that even though you're not on tiktok, you are being influenced by the narrative that China is pushing. There are numerous genocides happening in the world today. Sudan. China (try talking about THAT one on TikTok...). Why aren't those being treated with equal concern? Because China knows that only the Isreal/Gaza one is a wedge in America, so they push that to sow discord.
Which one is the US funding, and using UN vetos to continue?
We're an active participant in, its not a surprise its the one we (USA ppl) care about.
> Why aren't those being treated with equal concern?
I mean I can't speak to other people's experience, but as an American, I'm uniquely pissed off with the Israeli one because my tax dollars are paying for it, and because the White House could stop it at a time of their choosing, as they've done before.
What makes this a genocide and not every other war where far more people, including more civilians, died? And at higher ratios of the dead? You can find hundreds of videos of Israel targeting militants, Hamas using schools and hospitals as bases, and more.
Nearly a million died in the Iraq war. In a single battle, Mosul, almost as many were killed as in Gaza, including similar ratios of militants and civilians. In Ukraine, far more have been killed, both combatants and civilians - and Russia clearly targets civilians there, and they started the war (while Hamas started the Gaza war). In Syria, half a million died, mostly civilians. Ditto the Lebanese civil war. Ditto the Yemen-Houthi war.
Social disruption. That's plainly clear given that Douyin is prevented from having the destructive content that proliferates on TikTok. Keep your competition mired in anti-inellectualism for a generation and it accelerates the rot.
It's taken for granted that the shifty [any] government is up to something because they always are, 100% of the time. Why would you expect the evil overlords to not be up to something with the big evil brainwashing program that has access to almost everyone on earth?
This but unironically.
Seriously, given all the crazy shit that's been uncovered in the last 20 years — PRISM, Five Eyes, Cambridge Analytica — why would an influence campaign run over one of the world's biggest social networks controlled by the actual, real life authoritarian Big Brother state be the one scenario that crosses the line from plausible to fantasy for you?
Politicians realized just how powerful the corporate surveillance and propaganda system is, and they don't want to share it with China.
Except people may be migrating to Rednote (which you have heard, is Chinese).
Government intervention at its finest.
This guy gets it. They don't care about anyone's privacy, save their own. This is yet more coddling of American industry, bought and paid for by generous political donations to keep the scaaaary Chinese apps from stealing honest, hard working red-blooded American's data... so that American apps can steal honest, hard working, red-blooded American's data.
It's not a coincidence that this comes along with similar cybersecurity/anticompetitive pushes against Chinese routers, drones, and EVs.
According to the people gunning for it seems to be mostly about controlling what content Americans can see in order to keep public opinions in line with foreign policy goals. (i.e. pro Israel)
>While data security issues are paramount, less often discussed is TikTok’s power to radically distort the world-picture that America’s young people encounter. Israel’s unfolding war with Hamas is a crucial test case. According to one poll, 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe that Hamas’s murder of civilians was justified—a statistic notably different from other age cohorts. Analysts have attributed this disparity to the ubiquity of anti-Israel content on TikTok, where most young internet users get their information about the world
from:
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/Ha...
I think there's an important distinction between "keeping public opinions [pro Israel]," as you claim, and discouraging the dissemination of content that radicalizes (for lack of a better word) viewers enough to justify and support the murder of innocent civilians by a terrorist organization, as the Senator claims.
Red panic, racism, and corporate welfare. The usual motivating factors in US policy.
It's far more complex than that. TikTok is a Chinese company with immense reach and influence that can shape American public discourse. A global superpower cannot allow another global superpower to influence its population so significantly through social media (which is also why Facebook is banned in China).
I hope this doesn’t sound overly cynical or conspiratorial. My sense is that there’s panic about unfettered access to what’s happening in Gaza on TikTok, which is shaping Gen Z’s perceptions in a way that isn’t deemed acceptable by the political establishment. US-based companies seem to have processes in place - direct or indirect - to suppress the reach of such content.
This is overly conspiratorial, because the timeline doesn't line up. Gaza has only been in the news since October 7th 2023.
The government first started talking about banning TikTok in 2018 (under Trump). Ordered them to divest of US interests and prohibited transactions with them in 2020 (under Trump). The latter of which was overturned by the courts.
The current administration took over in 2021, and in 2021 labelled the PRC as a foreign adversary. Discussed the threat to the US through the PRCs control of software applications and teh vasts swaths of information available from their users, directed agencies to find risk mitigation measures, and started a long process of negotiating with TikTok over how exactly it continued to operate.
The act ordering divestment is the inevitable consequence of those talks failing... those talks failed sometime late 2022 or early 2023 (the last proposal under them was in August 2022).
The push for the TikTok ban only went bipartisan after October 7. It was stalled out before that.
The sudden resurgence of the years-dormant campaign to ban TikTok, and its rapid legislative success this time around, were directly because of Israel and Gaza. From the mouths of senators: "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down (potentially) TikTok...if you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I know that's of real interest..." (https://x.com/wideofthepost/status/1787104142982283587)
Jacob Helberg, a member of a congressional research and advisory panel called the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, has been working on building a bipartisan, bicoastal alliance of China hawks, united in part by their desire to ban TikTok. Over the past year, he says, he has met with more than 100 members of Congress, and brought up TikTok with all of them.
[...]
It was slow going until Oct. 7. The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok, Helberg said. People who historically hadn’t taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw as an increase in antisemitic content posted to the app.
^^^^^^
Same reason they passed the nonprofit killing bill bipartisanly, for whatever reason this seems to be a huge deal for the people in government right now.
Perfect analogy. Keep in mind that most US lawmakers still think the internet is a series of tubes - and we don't want OUR tubes dirties by some pinko commie tubes! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!
My prediction, based off raising kids and working with teenagers? The teens are going to give a big ol' Yankee Doodle Middle Finger to Uncle Sam. They'll flock to any social media site not hosted by a US megacorp.
If you don't understand why that would be then I posit you haven't spent much time around teens.
The concern is China specifically. If TikTok were owned by a German company there wouldn’t have been any concerns.
Sounds to me like the United States just handed South Korea a gift.
I downloaded Rednote and was already blown away by just the app quality. So much better than X. I'd never used TikTok but I really hate the idea of our government censoring what I can and cannot see. Rednote has a bunch of great content on it too. Thanks for the Streisand rec US gov!
?? X/Twitter is not the main competitor to TikTok/RedNote. Meta's Instagram/Instagram Reels is.
And YouTube Shorts?
I was commenting more on the code quality and app performance. It’s very well written.
The content is good too though. It’s nice to see so much amazing Chinese cooking.
Meanwhile many are going to another chinese app, RedNote.
That seems unlikely. The play store lists it at 10m+ downloads and it's still a very Chinese app. I checked it out myself. This is people trying to troll the US government
what seems unlikely? it's simply a fact that many are going to the other app. as you said yourself, 10m+ downloads on play store, #1 on ios app store, etc.
RedNote don't have english user interface, and it have worse censorship compare to tiktok or facebook.
Unless you want to learn Chinese and/or spend time to navigate around the content modulation system (not very hard, it just different), the experience ain't great.
I'm not talking about the quality, I'm saying that red note has been getting a wave of downloads as tiktok gets closer to its imminent ban
I think they do have an English user interface since yesterday, which may still be unpolished. TikTok is available in many countries under their own languages though.
Rednote is a popular meme at the moment for obvious reasons. But TikTok has around 170 Million users in the USA. What you see at the moment is a loud minority checking out the app and creating content. This is something happening all the time with Social Media and especially TikTok, loud minorities doing something, and people hard overrating the numbers. There is simply no way that with Rednotes state at the moment, we will see a significant number of users switching from TikTok to it. Maybe at the end we will see some millions switching.
sure, but it's a fact that millions have downloaded rednote in the past week. I think millions is "many"
That depends on the definition of "many". Some use it relative, some absolute. On its own, Millions can be a big number for a service, but in relation to the absolute amount of TikTok-Users in the USA and Globally, it's just a few, a handful, more than 3, less than a majority.
I think its name is actually Xiaohongshu - "Little Red Book" (you know, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T... )
They are simply different translations, period. The book you mentioned is usually referred to as "红宝书" (Red Precious Book). Don't know where the translation on Wikipedia comes from.
Search "小红书 毛語錄" in Google. You can see it is referenced in both way.
The name 红宝书 is popular in mainland China. Chinese from Taiwan or other se asian community just call it 小红书 or 毛語錄
You mean it isn’t a Harvey Penick tribute?
Hahaha
Guess what
1. As you mentioned, Xiaohongshu, is the same name of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
2. The CEO of Xiaohongshu has the surname Mao
3. The headquarters of Xiaohongshu is located near the site of the First National Congress of CPC
obviously, this is part of CPC's conspiracy
Once again, digital drug addicts getting their supply cut off and running to the next hit.
Neither this TikTok "ban" or the new app "Rednote" are going to last in the long term. They will run back to TikTok again.
Would have been better to fine TikTok in the billions just like we already have done for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and all the other social networks.
But this is all temporary.
TikTok practically saved my life by exposing me to alternate worldviews and the spiritual nature of existence, so the US government singling it out feels like a personal attack to me. To think of all of the people earning independent side incomes on TikTok - one of the few places outside of eBay/Craigslist/Uber/etc where that's even still possible - who will lose that lifeline, well, words like travesty barely convey the loss.
I also don't buy the national security argument. Considering how much of our personal data is leaked through all of the other social media apps, as well as international ad markets, that argument is nonsense. This is about the US government and corporations going to any length to control the narrative as the US falls to authoritarian dystopia and fascism.
I'm disappointed in the Democratic Party for not standing up for free speech and the rights of its constituency. It's forgotten where it came from, and what its goals are. This move means that there effectively is no Democratic Party - we just have two Republican Parties, both beholden to their corporate overlords (Meta and X/Twitter), as well as the billionaires behind them (Zuckerberg and Musk).
It's also tragic beyond words that Donald Trump may be viewed as TikTok's savior if he lifts the ban after he takes office. After he has undermined so many aspects of American tradition and our institutions. It reeks.
And most of all, I'm at least as mad at all of you as I am at myself for not organizing to stop this ban. 170 million TikTok users and we can't come together in solidarity to have real leverage on our elected officials? As in, withholding our participation in keeping the web running? Talk about ineffectual.
The more time goes by, the more I'm giving up on the tech scene. We've lost our values on such a fundamental level that we are now the clear and present danger threatening the American democratic experiment. Shame on all of us.
If we keep losing the way we are, and with the rise of AI and unprecedented wealth inequality, we have maybe 5-10 years left before revolution. We've entered a Cold Civil War, divided along ideological lines. I dearly hope I'm wrong and it doesn't come to violence, but after watching America's decline as a beacon of freedom post-9/11, the safest bet is continued cynicism.
...Good?
There are reports that they want to sell the US branch to Musk as a contingency if their appeal to the Supreme Court doesn't work. So this whole thing might wind up making things even worse.
Nah, bad.
I don't think TikTok shutting down is great for its users (of which I am one). There are genuine areas of concern but I have concerns about US based social platforms as well.
It's hard to unpick these thoughts and it's harder to decide what a good outcome would look like.
Looking at a lot of user's feeds, its algo doesn't feel as "rage-baity" as the ones from YT or Insta. Even normal platforms, like FB and Twitter push rage bait to the top. TikTok seems to avoid those pitfalls in a lot of cases.
Anecdotally, I can confirm.
In general the algorithm seems flexible to me; on TikTok I find it easy to scroll away or flag unwanted content as "do not show again"; and in my experience the algorithm adjusts well to that.
"Chinese leaders simply think that TikTok, unlike other apps, is so important that they would rather destroy it than see it escape their control." -Noah Smith