> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness

I must live in another universe because it all feels fake.

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.

> I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead

Somewhat paradoxically, I am actually more comfortable giving out private data to foreign countries than my own. I mean, what is Xi Jinping going to do with a US social security number? If I am in the US, it will be hard for bad people in China to reach me, because there is a border between the two countries, in every sense of the word. There is no such protection if me and my data are both in the same country.

Xi Jinping can have my social security number, in fact, he can have my whole life, it is not like he is going to do anything to an random guy who lives in a foreign country. I will definitely won't give these data to a neighbor I barely know because my neighbor can do something I don't want him to do with it and may find some motivation to do so.

Funnily enough, the lawyer who quit Meta has resorted to doomposting on .. Linkedin. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/meta-lawyer-lemley-quit...

My tiktok feed was night and day better compared to IG reels. IG reels is simply attrocious memes. Like the same recycled crap over and over again. Where my tiktok feed always felt fresh. Makes me embarrassed that Zuck and co can't make the feed better. I thought this was America!

> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect

They're very different, and I understand what you're getting at comparing it to the hyper-manufactured perfectly glossy Instagram culture, but I wouldn't call TikTok 'authentic'.

Of course, Tiktok is large and there's many different subcultures there, but overall I think TikTok is heavily drenched in Irony. It's a stark difference to the very fake Instagram, but that doesn't make it authentic.

Are tiktok dances 'authentic'? They might have started as just innocent kids doing a fun little dance, but the moment anything turns into a trend I think it loses authenticity. The whole NPC live streaming trend[1] from a few years ago was anything but authentic. TikTok 'suffers' from the exact same paid 'influencers' promoting whatever garbage of the day, and even has its own version of affiliate marking spam with 'TikTok shop' junk.

[1]: https://theconversation.com/people-are-pretending-to-be-npcs...

> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness

Yknow creators get paid _by tiktok_ to do natural ad placement in their videos?

It’s just as fake as everything else, if not more so.

> 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

Just break the addiction to both apps. It's not good for you anyway

Link in bio is literally killing instagram, it’s so anti user for the sake of $$ so people don’t link out easily

The best account on TikTok is that old man who champions his cause of stopping circumcision. One must ask oneself why it's not considered on the same plane as genital mutilation in our so called modern civilized society.

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.

The fact people are using either is mind numbing. Such a waste of life.

>TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness

Probably the most bizarre thing I've read on here in the last few days. You actually believe that what you're seeing on TikTok is real? It's literally the antithesis of base reality. It's a living, breathing delusion.

TikTok has simply beaten FB and YouTube, its algorithm is much better. That's why it has to be killed now in the US, big tech needs to be protected.

> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness

I'm shocked how easily manipulated people are by social media. The vast majority of TikTok content is very intentionally produced, largely to attempt to generate revenue or, at the very least, to feed ones ego.

The "real" people you see on there are all, to different degrees of success, actors. Nearly all of the spontaneous/I can't believe this happened!/caught on camera style content is entirely staged.

Likewise all of the "freedom of speech must be protected" posts are laughable. Everything on TikTok is ultimately created for and prompoted to ultimately drive profit.

This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.

Virtually all media you see is very heavily filtered and manipulated to ensure you're getting the right message.

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?

YouTube Shorts doesn't even get a mention?

It's more like telling people that they're gonna have to visit a mobile site instead of use a mobile app.

Strange, I found Instagram Reels' algorithm to be much better suited to my interests than TikTok's, and I've tried both multiple times, deleting them multiple times and seeing if it would improve, but TikTok's never did.

Reddit is absolutely terrible, it has an extreme far left bias and banned anyone with a different opinion.

Very interesting. To me TikTok is nothing but memes and useless stuff. Whereas Instagram has been an amazing community for many of my passions. And now Threads is gaining in popularity as well (it really feels like hope scrolling in comparison to X's doom scrolling). I wish it wasn't owned by Meta, but if TikTok actually gets banned I would say good riddance. Something about Instagram/Threads is just perfect to me.

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"?

> 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.

"“I would rather stare at a language I can't understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday."

https://www.wired.com/story/red-note-tiktok-xiaohongshu/

I wonder what would happen if we shut down all the socials.

HN excluded of course.

Imagine outing yourself as someone who uses these mind numbing apps.

> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity

Oh wait, you're serious? Let me laugh even louder!

How do I downvote this.

>TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness...

LMAO

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Related ongoing thread (though not much there yet):

‘TikTok refugees’ flock to China's RedNote - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709236

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

Even Top 1 in the german app store where TikTok isn't banned. People identify on Red as TikTok refugees

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.

It's pretty wild in there...I remember seeing the comment 'IN THE CLERB, WE ALL LEARN MANDARIN'...I went in there and started commenting about Tienenman...curious if I'll get banned. It's very wild to see so many CCP memes and Chinese military people making content. Very odd experience so far.

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).

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.

Looks like that app may have a backdoor https://x.com/d0tslash/status/1878959715033694492

It definitely won't last because even the medium is different. TikTok is all about short videos, but most of the content on Xiaohongshu are static images, and some even an image of text.

I would be amazed if the company who runs that application wasn't working around the clock to make it a better tiktok replacement and to retain this swath of new users.

It wouldn't be that hard to keep users separated by location.

Is there a problem with Youtube Shorts? Or Facebook videos?

It depends on how they respond over the next 1-2 weeks.

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.

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/...

[3]: https://x.com/TaylorNoakes/status/1766612105426596297

> 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".

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".

> 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.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/9901

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-...

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.

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...

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.

Wrong - it's practically impossible to buy video and audio data at the PII level like Tiktok is getting.

it's been said many times, it's a national security risk, and it is very obviously one. Tiktok has already gone against the wishes of the US, there's evidence Chinese engineers accessed Tiktok data hosted in the US (related: project Texas). It's so easy to sway public opinion when you own the largest megaphone to the people... That's literally what's happening right now on tiktok.

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.

but your 2. implies China has control rather than the US.

Isn’t that what the government has been saying?

> 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...

> 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...

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.

This is exactly it. If China allowed fully uncensored American social media to operate in China I’d had zero issue letting them do the same in the US.

But the CCP wants to have their cake and eat it too. Fully repressive social media lock downs and censorship for their citizens but exploiting the west’s values of free speech and debate.

Couldn't you argue the opposite? That is, if we are so opposed to China then shouldn't we do the opposite of them? I don't think it seems very American to change our policy to be more like the "enemy"

Sure but that is the ruling class's perspective.

What about the people who want TT? You can not hold them hostage to Chinese people not having TT or other apps. That's what the current Red Note revolt is all about.

TikTok is banned in China.

> China already bans practically all the popular US social media apps and similar apps/websites

Sorry but not ALL of them. Myspace is not banned lmao

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Maybe this soundbite applies in an information vacuum like North Korea or ironically, and to a lesser extent, China. But in an environment where there is too much information for people to process, and truth is drowned out by lies and nonsense on social media feeds, it works against society.

It's bad enough that US based social media corporations are allowed to wash their hands of responsibility for the content on their platform and add to the executive bonus pool in the process. But having a hostile government control a platform is just insane.

There is a middle ground between being bundled into the back of a police car if someone speaks against their government, and freely allowing enemies to manipulate your population.

There's nothing free-flow about TikTok, though. Like Twitter/X, Instagram, etc it's actually a carefully curated experience that can be tuned opaquely by whoever runs it to control the flow of information. The US took umbrage to this being in the direct hands of a foreign adversary.

TikTok is a restricted information environment controlled and manipulated by literal tyrants. Subjects that are disfavored by the CCP are heavily penalized by their algorithm [1]

if you are looking to safeguard against tyranny step 1 is to not have the CCP be in full control of your country's public square

[1] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...

Google the phase "flood the zone with shit". Your strategy only works if most of the people speaking/writing are genuinely trying to make the world a better place. If state actors are trying to flood the zone with anything and everything, then it becomes impossible for John Everyman to distinguish signal from noise.

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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).

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.

The only reason social media is popular is Americans are too lazy to find stuff on the open web. They'd prefer the lazier option of the single web site deciding for them what to see and think about.

There's zero chance most will put in effort to access TikTok.

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.

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.

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

All they're really banning is the app on the App or Play store basically. Anyone who still has tiktok on their phone can continue on and even make a new account. Anyone who cares enough can probably get a cracked APK too

TikTok will probably die slowly not suddenly

The duopoly of app store and play store makes this kind of ban much more effective. India banned TikTok and nobody uses it over here now. It's simply too hard to download the app. Google won't let me download it even when I'm traveling abroad.

Banning websites has been very hard, but today's closed marketplace ecosystems make banning apps much easier and people are not motivated to find loopholes.

When Ukraine banned russian social networks in 2015, all the teens had free FSB-sponsored VPNs running on their phones in no time. Like, almost 100% of them. In mere days. Now leaking not just the social network data to russia, but rather the entirety of their traffic.

Let's see if US teenagers are as savvy and motivated.

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.

> 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?

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, whatever your current opinions oh these are there's non-zero chance that you will be enforced into the correct opinions.

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.

> US citizens do not want this

Ha ha, I guess you are discovering, many many people do 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...

I'm for the ban chiefly on the grounds of economic fairness in access to markets. China doesn't allow access to any US social media products. We should only open our doors to Chinese companies conditioned on reciprocation.

I am a US Citizen and I 100% want this. I think this is far too small a step; I think all social media should be banned.

I’m a us citizen and I do want this. Speak for yourself. China bans us social media. Us should ban Chinese social media.

The Senator you voted for this probably voted for this so yes, America does want this.

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."

US citizens most definitely want this.

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...

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.

So what if a conflict breaks out and the CCP essentially use TikTok as a pathway directly into the brains of millions of Americans. Let's say they tweak the algorithm with a button press to create confusion and public discord when we should be united to protect taiwan.

That's a possible tool of disinformation.

If they would ban what they think tiktok does wrong. Mr Zuckerberg would be very sad I guess.

But so much this, just banning TikTok will change nothing but more distrust in American politics

I broadly agree with this, but there was a path for the Tiktok app to not be banned, which is basically the China playbook of handing over control to a domestically controlled entity. Which in the case of a social media company with the reach of Tiktok i don't think is unreasonable.

Strengthened laws would be welcome, but all the social media companies would resist this as hard as they can. I don't see any real regulation happening until there is a crisis of some sort that will push it through against all the lobbyists and bought politicians.

As someone in Australia which I assume is fairly similar, we really don't use VPN's, at the very least the average person doesn't and their use isn't common knowledge. However I have friends in China like you, where VPN's are used by the majority.

We are used to having access to pretty much everything we want access to.

The most popular apps and services used around the world are largely readily available in the US and do not need VPN's to use.

A Tiktok ban is in my memory probably the first time that a major platform used by the masses has been banned for use in the US. Because of the lack of VPN usage by every day people, I'd say everyone will flock to Instagram rather than continuing to try accessing Tiktok. If nobody else you know is using Tiktok, then why use it would be the question.

Almost nobody uses a VPN here, just the geeks and people who need it for their corporate job. We're not used to this at all.

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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.

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.

I’m puzzled too. By the rationale I read here, Europe should ban all non-European social networks (which would be great since we don’t really have any). Whilst TikTok based propaganda is clearly being used to wage war on European elections, US propaganda targeting Europeans is equally being peddled by US tech giants as well. Social media is truly the worst widely accepted invention of the 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.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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.

> ensure everybody sees the same content.

Terrible idea.

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?

> 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.

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

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.

Drawing attention to the stupidity and agenda-driven approach of the USG by causing pain to millions of users, is my guess.

The downloading your data thing is actually part of what is required by law.

> Does anyone have thoughts on why TikTok would choose to stop for existing users?

For the same reason Google or Facebook or many other major players might choose to stop operating in a jurisdiction that's trying to impose restrictions on them that they feel are unconscionable, rather than knuckling under?

The "national security" angle that FedGov is attempting to hang this all on is pretty bullshit... defense contractors that do classified work for the DoD can be foreign owned!

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.

Because better data privacy laws would be bad for American companies for collecting the same data.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

The only real irony is your continued use the word.

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.

Yeah good thing they banned facebook as well which provably has a huge fake news / propaganda problem while tiktok... while tiktok has.... um... while tiktok... quick, tell me what propaganda tiktok has been pushing that's so much worse than FB or twitter or IG! You can do it! Can't you?

Welcome to Oligarchy America. From now on billionaires will get their hands on whatever they can, with a shining approval from the government and the FTC. DOGE will privatize what's left of public services so they can have that too.

And when that's done they'll consolidate into a few monopolies and we'll basically be back in the Gilded Age.

Doesn't "yt-dlp https://www.tiktok.com/@YOURPROFILE" also work?

You are linking the wrong script in the initial tweet. You meant to link to this one: https://gist.github.com/kukicado/e92b31601117060f6895ecefc98...

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

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.

I’m sure they will move to some other platform.

Are you sure you're actually thinking of people using youtube shorts or facebook?

You probably might not know whether that's coming from Tiktok, or instagram, facebook, youtube reels and shorts.

Tiktoks isn't the only provider of that type of content.

No really. The Shorts and Reels algorithms are so one dimensional. They both interpreted me disliking smug milquetoast rants about Republicans and Democrats as not wanting politics in my feed at all. I do want the politics, but I don't need it hammered into my head that Republicans are dumb as bricks. I don't need to see the performative Tom Cotton and Jasmine Crockett clips that have already been shown 100 times.

TikTok's algo, OTOH, somehow understands that interests are multi-dimensional and that maybe I just want a different kind of politics or discussions that go deeper than cheap shots. I never in my life thought I'd encounter an anti-Marxist right-libertarian who actually read and is familiar with all three volumes of Capital, but TikTok figured out that I'd find it interesting.

I agree that it is unusual that YouTube and Instagram don't seem to be trying harder to court TikTok users. I assume this is because it would expose how much of an unpopular alternative they are.

The user base is probably more important to the quality of the feed than the interface or the algorithm.

We'd be better off without a clone, whether its owned by a Western company or not.

That's mostly true and it's a good thing for the US to prevent hostile, autocratic, foreign powers from gaining undue cultural power.

The US censorship of Chinese social media apps on these grounds sure makes it look like China was completely justified in doing it first.

It demonstrates Western weakness. Remember, during the Cold war the "iron curtain" was meant to prevent Soviets from seeing Western culture, political points of views.

The United States does not feel confident in its ability to persuade Americans that it's model, culture and political ideals are superior to global alternatives. Hence a Western Iron Curtain.

> Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.

Religion is distributed through churches, synagogues, mosques etc, the medieval equivalent of a digital social platform. A social media platform is kinda like the Vatican but x10000000.

Repeating my other comment:

Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider has to bake American policy position into its algorithm, what's going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own algorithm?

From here on out, are only US government collaborating social media apps going to be allowed to scale? If so that is a chilling effect on speech. I want to use my own algorithm. I don't need China nor the USG to tell me what I want to watch. I'm perfectly willing to write my own feed algorithm to do it, I tinker with several on Bluesky right now. Will this be banned?

Is there even a single phone that doesn't have a component that's derived from China? It's never been about security. I agree, the US wants access and they can't make a foreign company comply, even trying exposes the US.

Other countries have rules, make rules, the reality is they don't want to make rules because that might persuade foreign companies from not doing business here. Why make rules when you can get a warrant from a fisa court preventing any and all public scrutiny and getting everything you want?

Gives you some idea of the massive amount of data available to US authorities derived from the US domination of privacy invading services.

They know it's a threat because they wrote the book on it. That's also why we'll never get decent privacy legislation.

> it’s never about protecting the privacy of private citizens—that’s just the justification

...but it wasn't. It was clearly and explicitly about national security.

Ok. What if I think nobody should have that power?

> Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.

Fox News and talk radio demonstrate that isn't true in the US.

> Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.

There is no evidence for this belief. Really for either religion or for "social networking platforms".

You could maybe make the claim that this is true in terms of reach, but the implication here is that "these mediums can be used deliberately to influence people in a chosen direction", and this is just kind of silly. It's fun to imagine that some nefarious powers (or benificent powers) have some magical insight into how to make people believe things but this just isn't true and I think intuitively we all understand that.

To make the case that this is true you would have to do an examination of all attempts to spread messages, not just look at successful cases where messages catch on. Nobody has the power to do this on demand through some principled approach, or else they would be emperor of the world.

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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.

I was surprised by that too. I assumed we would see a sudden interest in android and iphone jailbreaking.

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.

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.

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.

Foreign corporations do not have free speech rights.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Lord_Shang

Can you elaborate on this phenomena?

As China bans TikTok too, this move shouts “We don’t want this app either.”

its not about their official data collection. It is a safe assumption that TikTok app is used to spy on targeted users and their surroundings, just google it.

Tiktok is popular on a global level. They'll just block access to US users with a link to the details of the ban, and let things stew up the heat until the US budges.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?

[I made the same comment elsewhere, but I'm putting it here too because I'm really puzzled by this.]

Primal.net and yakihonne.com speak nostr protocol and are both pretty slick implementations.

Primal recently launched “build your own algorithm” along with a feed marketplace.

P2P doesn’t work for social, see SecureScuttleButt. Rabble has moved pretty firmly into the Nostr camp. He’s one of the top minds thinking about decentralized social media. Study nostr and don’t dismiss the relay model lightly.

It's just ease of use. I tried to make a mastodon account early into the xitter takeover. I spent probably half an hour trying to make a account before I decided if it was gonna take me this long that there was no way it would ever catch on anyway so I should just give up.

Even if it was technically doable and user-friendly, you'd end up with a toxic cesspool filled to the brim with neonazis and CSAM, which only deranged individuals would want to engage with.

What kind of content do you think's going to end up filling a platform like that?

You can do that, except nobody would use it.

It can. https://loops.video/

If it becomes too popular, though, Congress will probably pass a law to force you to use some oligarch-approved alternative.

The Reuters article says

> Users who have downloaded TikTok would theoretically still be able to use the app, except that the law also bars U.S. companies starting Sunday from providing services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of it.

Are you sure that the website and the native mobile app use different CDNs, or a CDN which won't be affected by the ban?

That would be amazing, honestly. Big Tech needs to get the fuck out of our lives...

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!

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...

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.

> 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.

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?

Reddit is the exact same - just a propaganda machine

Can you provide examples of China controlled propaganda happening on Tiktok?

Things that are factually true don't count, obviously.

Can you, someone, anyone in this toxic wasteland of a thread please point out what propaganda you're talking about? Point to an actual thing that justifies banning something 140M Americans use daily and don't just expound upon your vague national security paranoia.

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..."

National security risk to which nation? The kids on TikTok seem to understand pretty well why it all the sudden was wrongthink.

They do see it, they just support that very foreign adversary (or may even be such adversaries).

"The internet is obviously a massive national security risk, and I find it funny people don't see that"

"Libraries are obviously a massive national security risk, and I find it funny people don't see that."

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

Allowing the government to control the information its citizens receive is dangerous.

What do you mean national security risk? What risk to whom, exactly? Do you mean that the algorithm can portray communism or China in a positive light? Can you provide an example video that constitutes this threat?

For years people have dogged on North Korea, Iran, China and Russia talking about how the government controls information by banning apps and by creating firewalls blocking access to parts of the internet. Now when the US introduces censorship people like you welcome it with open arms. Something of value is lost, our ability to access information freely

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.

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.

Politicians realized just how powerful the corporate surveillance and propaganda system is, and they don't want to share it with China.

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...

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).

Red panic, racism, and corporate welfare. The usual motivating factors in US policy.

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.

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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!!

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Pretty sure Google was allowed but decided to pull out (maybe due to censorship demands from China) not sure about facebook.

This isn't a 'great firewall' solution. It just prevents google/apple from hosting it in their app stores. If tiktok wanted to they could still host it from outside the USA and let people access it via the web (or sideload the apk on android). Having said that tiktok has announced if the ban does occur they will shut down service on Sunday.

It might be pretty simple, if it's just a protest banner and an information website as Reuters said. You can't see TikTok's issue tracker but you can read the Wikimedia Foundation's tasks to implement the Wikipedia campaigns about SOPA and the 2019 EU copyright directive.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T203095

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_...

ActivityPub is exactly that. Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, etc.

What you're asking for exists.

?? X/Twitter is not the main competitor to TikTok/RedNote. Meta's Instagram/Instagram Reels is.

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I'm rooting for a Twitter ban in Europe. Musk has shown willingness to temper with elections in at least two European countries, and the ban would also leave a message for Zuck.

https://www.newsweek.com/australia-social-media-ban-teens-wh...

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.

IMO they should be for children under 15.

You can also read this as despite being banned TikTok expects 2/3 users to find ways to circumvent the ban

Haha there's no shot. Apples and oranges - completely different platforms and features.

When the President literally owns a competitor called "Truth Social" do you think he will not take the America First pledge??

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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'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.

Idk Xanga was peak non toxic social media. Pretty much just blogging. I miss it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

why? you don't have to use them. should HN be banned?

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

They 100% are - I fantasize about world in which they dont exist.

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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.

First wave? You must have missed yahoo groups.

And of course someone will reply to this and mention usenet.

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?

Bring back IRC

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 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.

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.

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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.

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.

> 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

The most disheartening part of this ban is that it’s just about the only thing the government can agree on. IMO Mitt Romney slipped the truth in saying: “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. 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."

TikTok is the first and just about the only place I’ve seen content about corporate greed, the accelerating disappearance of the middle class and the real downstream effects of US foreign policy that hasn’t been whitewashed.

The ball is in China’s court now, if they can provide a space where this class consciousness can continue to grow they’ll easily get equal/better (though I think magnitudes greater) returns than Russia’s recent social campaigns.

if you trust the CCP (which to be clear refers to the government of China, not the actual people who live there, just like any country) to be more respectful and magnanimous to its citizens and human rights overall than the US, you might want to do some research on that (and not on Tiktok)

Oh stop, it has nothing to do with xenophobia, the CCP has a terrible spying and human rights track record (organ harvesting, concentration camps, child labor, etc.).

Nothing to do with the Chinese people as a whole, and everything to do about their overlords.

Before you do some whataboutism, yes the US spies, even on it's own citizens. That is a separate issue we should make sure doesn't happen.

Two things can be bad and is not an excuse for more spying or letting foreign adversaries broadcast psyops.

I feel the same.

I think there are two things in play.

First, folks on this site don't know what real propaganda looks like. Based on growing up in Texas, as far as I can tell you'd have to publish and mandate textbooks to make a meaningful impact on peoples' belief systems. I have seen it happen, and I've had the experience of often leaning that things I had thought were true (or some underlying assumption) was in fact false, and then been able to trace that to my early education. So propaganda feels likely, but it also doesn't seem like some easy magic that can happen at the behest of some autocrat somewhere.

Unfortunately the folks here don't really have much perspective to judge the ways in which their own assumptions about the world are shaped by the rhetoric of the systems that raised them.

Second, many people likely generally haven't had many positive and genuine experiences on social media, or at least not on contemporary short-form video social media. Having been on the net since usenet days, I believe that it's possible to learn how to have those kinds of experiences, just as it's possible to engage with trolls and have a bad day or whatever. I don't consider HN to be fundamentally different than other social media sites, but I also understand that is a marginal view.

However, since folks here have generally never used something like Tiktok in a way that has had a positive impact in their life, the folks using it look like they are addicted doom scrollers instead of people highly engaged in conversations with their community.

I've personally gotten a lot out of Tiktok- the quality of the discussions there is much higher and more diverse than HN. I've also interacted with a lot of folks there in ways that make me fairly certain that I am dealing with actual humans and not, like, a PRC Botnet or something.

It's tough for me to disregard my own experience:

TT doesn't feel any more propaganda-laden than any other media stream, and certainly not in ways that are driven more by the PRC than by the content creators themselves

Further, I feel a little fury at folks who are happy engaging in whatever crappy media they like: mass sports, bad sitcoms, poorly written TV news, etc and feeling like the hour they might spend with that is somehow better than the half hour I might spend listening to some lakota guy talk about some nuance of tribal politics, and then have the gall to tell me that I'm addicted.

However, at the same time those folks apparently have a lot of power- they can happily elect folks who will hake it harder for me to hear some conversations that I found useful. So I suppose it's important to understand that these sociopaths view me as just another addicted, over-propagandized NPC.

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

The concern is China specifically. If TikTok were owned by a German company there wouldn’t have been any concerns.

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

I think its name is actually Xiaohongshu - "Little Red Book" (you know, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T... )

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.

> TikTok practically saved my life by exposing me to alternate worldviews and the spiritual nature of existence

If what you say is true then perhaps the credit is due to something that’s Above being subject to the whims of society & you never needed the clock app & “the beacon of freedom” was acqui-hired sometime around the age you think we’re headed back toward & the cynics are the sages.