Tiktok is actually surprisingly national in how it serves its content. If you're outside the US you don't see most American accounts except the ones that go very viral.

Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.

Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.

It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.

> This is going to be an interesting experiment: A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.

China has had such social networks for a long time. Their Weibo and Xiaohongshu are two prominent examples. Weibo started as a copycat of Twitter, but then beats Twitter hands-down with faster iterations, better features, and more vibrant user engagement despite the gross censorship imposed by the government.

My guess is that TT can still thrive without American content, as long as other governments do not interfere as the US did. A potential threat to TT is that the US still has the best consumer market, so creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization, thus snatching away TT's current user base in other countries.

> Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it?

This is a weird fantasy, but it brings up an interesting point. The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture. Especially when compared to Japan or Korea, countries with a fraction of the population but many, many times the influence.

I wish the CCP didn't wall off their citizens from the rest of the world in the name of protecting their own power. Think of the creativity we are all losing out on.

> This is going to be an interesting experiment: A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.

For whom? UK users?

TikTok users who use the Chinese version are not consuming content from US creators. They won't notice this ban at all.

I presume the US market is the dominant target market for ads / influencing, a quick google search suggests it is 75% of the global spend. So the other issue is not just losing US influencers but all influencers will take a haircut. I don't know how much of popular content is paid for by such revenue but taking a 75% haircut could put a real damper on content producers - especially those who make it a full time job. I don't know if that'll make it better with an increase in proportion of more organic content. I personally don't use TikTok - I waste enough time on HN.

There is an additional separate issue that influencer is a coveted 'career' for many children (~30%), so not only would it wipe out many jobs it'll kill their dreams. I guess like cancelling the space program at a time when kids really wanted to be astronauts.

I think there is a lot wrong with society and TikTok is part of it - but that's a much longer discussion for some other time.

> widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.

As of January 2025, the countries with the most TikTok users are:

Indonesia: Has the most active users with 157.6 million

United States: 120.5 million

Brazil: 105.2 million

Mexico: 77.5 million

Vietnam: 65.6 million

Pakistan: 62.0 million

Philippines: 56.1 million

Russian Federation: 56.0 million

Thailand: 50.8 million

Bangladesh: 41.1 million

> but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.

Can't really disagree, but it's my favorite place to pirate fonts. Typing out site:vk.com <thing I want> feels like a real life cheat code.

There are such products. Outside of America whatsapp is a dominant social app but its use internally is almost mute despite being an american social app.

Tiktok america is over 50% of tiktok revenue I think that more than anything else would choke out growth world wide.

Orkut was one American social network that barely had any American content because it was taken over by Brazilians.

I think it’s going to be a lesson to Americans about just how little their content actually matters to the other 96% of the world.

I don't think it will survive because non American cultural exports are not quite there yet you have to be born outside the US to understand the reach of Hollywood/cultural export as an opinion shaping tool

But then again Telegram survived and they had to resort to kidnapping the CEO so if it does survive the US pretty much gifted that space to a geopolitical adversary

But I'm pretty sure Langley/MD folk thought about this and are betting on it not surviving

How will YouTube shorts, and instagram stories pivot? They already aren’t seen as true rivals, but maybe they can change or spinoff a third brand. The gold in TR has always been its algorithm. Maybe they can fake it. How easy will it be to circumvent via vpn? Will other English content on tt skyrocket? Eg uk and Canada.

It will still legally have American content, but only propaganda :)

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/biden-administration-quiet...

No more exporting of Murican culture and ideologies. Kinda cool on a second thought.

It will take ages for that to happen. AFAIK the "ban" only really removes it from app stores, I don't think it even requires store owners to force it off of phones that have downloaded it already.

> Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it?

TikTok does not exist in China, they have their own version -- Douyin -- that complies with their more stringent privacy laws.

I remember pre-Musical.ly TikTok here in Japan, and it was MUCH better then. In fact, it noticeably degraded when Musical.ly was folded in.

American social media culture revolves around money and sex in a way that isn't as popular in Korea/Japan/S. Asia—roughly speaking, the original scope of TikTok's userbase, since Douyin has always kept Chinese users separate.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of garbage social media content in Asia, but it's more boomers and gen-z era that consume hentai/money flexing/politics/etc., so that nonsense was almost completely absent in the early days of TikTok, when the users were mostly Asian teenagers and young adults trading choreography, in-jokes, and showing off their video editing skills.

TikTok is banned in India too

I main duckduckgo, but I use Yandex more than Google these days. Incredibly useful for stuff power people in the US want to censor (and I suppose, Google is useful to russians for the exact same reason).

I don't think US content will disappear from TikTok. Most viral creators know how to use VPN. No one's gonna leave such a huge pile of eyeballs on the table.

Is TikTok big in Europe? Is Europe big on social media?

How unprecedented. The non-United Statesians will be SHOCKED when they interact with each other unmediated by the Americans.

How about WeChat, little red book, … in fact the mainland version of tt, …

Some other countries banned tiktok too, e.g. India

India also just banned TikTok, I wouldn't be surprised if bans became widespread outside of America with any country worried about China's geopolitical power.

India also banned TikTok a while ago

First, I still don't think the ban will actually happen. The current administration will punt the issue to the next and Trump has already signaled he wants to save Tiktok, whatever that means. That might be by anointing a buyer that he personally is an investor in. Tiktok may choose to still shutter in the US rather than being forcibly sold.

But there's a biger issue than loss of American content should this come to pass: the loss os American ad revenue for the platform and creators. A lot of people create content aimed at Americans because an American audience is lucrative for ad revenue. If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?

Utopia

If a US-based alternative appeared which not only substituted performatively, but also monetized creators and influencers enough to put everyone else to shame, people could not help but notice and migrate there in droves.

It would be pretty cool if there was a respectable capitalist with enough money, or if that won't do it then a bigger more-respectable political organization or something, and Tiktok would be nothing but a memory of how things used to be before they got better.

Think about it, a social force or financial pressure strong enough to reverse unfavorable trends, even after they have already gained momentum.

And all it takes is focusing that pressure in an unfamiliar direction that could probably best be described as "anti-enshittification".

I know, that's a tall ask, never mind . . .

> This is going to be an interesting experiment:

Unclear. Biden and Trump both have stated that they will decline to enforce this law.

Instagram and Facebook is more popular outside the US and China than TikTok.

Or Indian content. It will probably end up getting banned in a lot of places over time.

Until trump lets it sink, tgis is mwaninvless.

Cash bribes are how laws are define now. Is america avaluable audiemce?

They'll be on RedNote within 2 weeks.

Other's have said it; but TikTok was such a nice format for media. It emphasized what the creator can provide its users; what content was legit; entertaining, informative, etc.

Whereas Instagram and FB are more about personal "branding". You post the best version of yourself and it's rewarded with engagement. Where on TikTok the emphasis is on the content; even creators I follow and have seen dozens of videos on I couldn't tell you what their account name was.

On TikTok you put up or you were shut up.

The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks. Maybe YouTube shorts.

I have a lot of Japanese friends and travel between Japan and here frequently. TikTok is huge in Japan and a lot of my For You Page is content trending in Japanese spheres. I don't live in Japan so being able to plug into Japanese media is a very, very convenient thing.

I'll probably continue trying to use the app if possible since I mostly connect with Japanese content, but I will say there's also a fun world of Japanese creators who straddle the English and Japanese speaking words who are about to lose an outlet to the English speaking world, and I feel really bad for that too.

The "algorithm" is also just so much better than Reels and others. I spent an afternoon of PTO training my algorithm a couple years ago and it's been great ever since. My partner and I share TikToks with each other all the time and. we shape each other's algorithm and interests. Reels fixates too much on your follows and Youtube Shorts is honestly a garbage experience. Both platforms really reward creators building "brands" around their content rather than just being authentic or silly. I treat Reels as the place for polished creators or local businesses who are trying to sell me something and TikTok as the place for content. I find that I get a lot less ragebait surfaced to me than I do on other platforms, though I admit my partner gets more than I do. We both skip those videos quickly and that has helped keep this stuff off our FYP.

An important thing to remember is TikTok was one of the first platforms that was opt-in for short-form content. Both Reels and Shorts was foisted upon users who had different expectations of the network and as such had to deal with the impedance mismatch of the existing network and users who didn't want short-form content. TikTok's entire value proposition is short-form content.

I don't create for TikTok, I have never had a TikTok account, and I don't use TikTok, outside of being exposed to videos on other sites, or occasionally clicking a link.

I had been exposed to DouYin before, but my first experience of TikTok in real life was someone at a party, holding their phone, exclaiming something along the lines of "I can't look away, it's so addictive." It was uncomfortable, and I'm aware of how fake this sounds, but it happened.

But I think this is very bad.

With Section 230 in crosshairs, EARN IT being reintroduced every year or two, and access to books and sites being fragmented across the US, things are very already bad, and have the potential to get much worse. TikTok being banned is censorship, and presents a significant delta towards more censorship.

Congress didn't just "ban TikTok", Congress banned its first social media. This is case law, this is precedent, this is a path for banning other social media apps.

I think this is bad because I think this is the start of something new and something bad for the internet.

I'm pretty upset about it honestly. TikTok's algorithm has always done a fantastic job of providing interesting clips in a way that Facebook and Instagram has never been able to provide. I will say that upon a new account, it's mostly garbage, but it quickly learned what I was interested in and what I would tend to engage with. It also does this while showing me considerably fewer ads than the meta platforms.

All the other content recommendation systems force you into a ghetto and are highly auto-regressive. They only show you content like they already showed you, so you will never be exposed to new things. This hampers discovery, and you end up with only a few winner-take-all accounts with mass appeal and mass distribution (e.g., "Mr. Beast") who are broadly not interesting or specialized.

TikTok is more stochastic and is more likely to give wider circulation to niche and esoteric subjects. Booktok could never happen on YouTube shorts or Instagram.

Using those other platforms is like shouting into the wind. You could have videos up for years and not get 50 views. With TikTok, a random video could be seen by 250k people.

A corollary to other systems being so auto-regressive is that they are much more dangerous for vulnerable people. If Instagram decides to start showing you extremist or otherwise political content, that is all you will see. This is the "rabbit hole" effect that people have commented upon. This doesn't happen to the same degree with TikTok; while this content can be recommended, it's not all that will be recommended.

TikTok provides the "human" element that IG and YouTube do not.

On IG and YouTube the algos are shoving "creators" in my face, which is fine sometimes. But TikTok surfaces randos whose only followers are their own family members, and they happen to be talking about something unique or funny in one video out of dozens that got only 2 views.

On IG and YouTube, the algos give me brightly lit faces, brightly lit homes, professional editing. On TikTok, I get people speaking quietly from their bed, or their recliner in what is obviously a trailer, or in the passenger seat of their car at Safeway, double-chinned and sleepy-eyed, saying something hilarious or just talking about their day or maybe sharing something they just realized.

On IG and YT, I get a video of someone falling on their face plastered with poorly worded captions and one or more logos for some social media company. On TikTok, I see the original video of that person falling on their face from the original account, and if you go to their account it's obviously just a real person who made a funny video by accident one time.

All the things that IG and YT force on me certainly exist on TikTok too, and you can surround yourself with that content if you like. But if you don't want that kind of content, TikTok lets you choose.

IG and YT don't give you that choice.

Not a content creator, but a TikTok user for several years. I really feel like the app changed my life. It opened my world to new cultures and ideas, brought me out of my comfort zone, introduced me to several real life friends. I made big changes in my life as a direct result of TikTok and have improved my life and health significantly as a result. I’ll be really sad to see it go.

I've found something like a very efficient sorting into communities of shared interest, and something egalitarian in being able to see people with 0 views and get reactions from them.

It's by contrast to say, Youtube and X, where The Algorithm (tm) sustains a central Nile river of dominant creators and you're either in it or you're not.

That said, I think the political questions are rightly the dominant ones in this convo and those color my lived experience of it.

I personally like the stupid time wasting app. There is a little pig on there that they dress up in little outfits and you can watch it eat treats

My wife, well into her 30s, initially got an inkling that she might be on the Autism spectrum after being exposed to TiKTok videos of high masking, high functioning women who talked about their Autism.

After many years and dozens of tests and questionnaires and appointments with speech pathologists, occupational therapists and psychiatrists, she was formally diagnosed last year with Level 2 Autism (there are 3 levels here in Australia).

After years of being misdiagnosed with various forms of anxiety or depression (and none of those drugs or treatments being helpful for her), this has been life changing. So much of her early childhood and past life now suddenly makes sense.

We used to be very bad at diagnosing autism in girls

technology changed our life. especially internet and smart phone impact a lot on social engagement between peoples. if people spend much time on internet or smart phones daily, if it is not tiktok, it will be something else. should we go back to non smart phone time? or even roll back to no internet time? maybe no electricity time.

technology is just like a tool. how people use it matters not the technology itself can be evil. tiktok's algorithm helps speed up information delivery to the people who likes it. eventually it helps to form a community of people online who like similar thing or have similar options. people needs to be aware of the content on any platform has "survivorship bias". seeing couple of examples is not representing the whole.

Not a content creator and use it regularly. My algorithm is mostly silly stuff, music, etc. I'm not convinced there's a discernible risk to national security, and as someone with a lot of libertarian views, I think the ban is an overstep by the US government.

The "sticky"-ness is real, but many will flock to the TikTok copies in other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, anyway.

Regardless, I enjoy the platform. It's fun to reference the viral sounds/trends on the platform with other friends that use it.

I don't have an account, but how about this: I don't want the government to ban websites or apps in general, and certainly not for who owns them.

The internet was supposed to be a global thing, where it didn't matter who you were and everyone could connect to everyone. That is the internet I grew up with.

As a millennial, I use TikTok as a “normie” version of Reddit. The algorithm has a similar vibe. It puts content in front of me that I’m likely to be interested in, exposing me to quite a diverse set of content. The instagram/youtube algorithms don’t come anywhere close in comparison.

It’s a guilty pleasure in the dopamine sense, but also surfaces a lot of informative content if you bias towards that! I suppose it depends how you use it.

> Anyone here who's not a TikTok content creator reasonably upset about losing access to the platform? Can you tell me why it will sting for you?

I like living in a country where the government does not get to decide what I'm allowed to read/watch/see. The TikTok ban chips away at that in a meaningful way.

I value this above most other concerns, including vague worries about "Chinese spying".

I'm pretty upset about it and I am not a creator.

I'm not just upset because I have a general dislike of being told I'm an idiotic, addicted, communist stooge who is easily brainwashed. I am used to folks telling me that- it started when I was writing anti-war editorials in the early oughts, so there is nothing new in that.

What I regret is that I have been following a number of quite-good political discussions on the platform, with a nicely diverse group of interlocutors.

While the discussion generally leans far left, there are many flavors of that left:

not a lot of tankies, mostly just people between "dirt bag left" and "black panther party", lots of women, BIPOC, trans folks, academics, working people, indigenous folks, queer folks of all stripes, activists, and folks who just don't like authority.

Those conversations had been very hard to come by on Yt, Ig, or Fb.

I think it's the response format for videos. I don't think it's worth bothering to speculate about other reasons, though I did note that several legitimate left news sources were shuttered in 2020 when Meta and Tw started their political purge.

Anyhow, I know that folks in the US have very little regard for political autonomy, so I am not surprised that this happens, and compared to the carceral state and the happy ecocide of the planet this is a very little thing. But I will still miss it.

I'll try to directly relate this to something you are familiar with.

> Can you tell me why it will sting for you?

Imagine Hacker News without the comments.

> The only thing I get sent from TikTok are dances and silly memes

That's like saying Hacker News is just old links about useless stuff from other parts of the internet.

> I was really surprised that my daughters (avid teenage TikTok users) are much more relieved than mad.

A sense of relief may be a coping mechanism. I've heard laid-off colleagues inform me they felt relief in the immediate aftermath; granted, the lay-offs were pre-announced before they communicated who would be "impacted", and it was at a high-pressure environment; but the human mind sometimes reacts in unexpected ways to loss outside of one's control. Rationalization is a mechanism for ego defense.

It's annoying to have to take the time to train my recommender on a different platform. I'm sure I could get YouTube Shorts to eventually give me an equivalently pleasant experience, it's just a pain.

I don't really care either way. I used TikTok and uninstalled it since I found myself watching more than doing. Even if you curate your algorithm to 'good' stuff, it's still just consuming.

TikTok has replaced Reddit for me (I can expand more on why I stopped using Reddit, but it's not related to TikTok) in terms of "checking what's up on the internet" or as Reddit would put it "Checking the homepage of the internet".

I trust TikTok's "algorithm" to give me quick and entertaining short-bits about what's going on, what's interesting, etc. It learns what I'm into effortlessly, and I appreciate how every now and then it would throw in a completely new (to me) genera or type of content to check out. Whenever I open it, there is a feed that's been curated to me about things I'm interested in checking out, few new things that are hit or miss (and I like that), and very few infuriating/stupid (to me) things.

Its recommendation engine is the best I have used. It's baffling how shitty YouTube's algorithm is. I discover YouTube channels I'm into form TikTok. Sometimes I'd discover new (or old) interesting videos from YouTube channels I already follow from TikTok first. For example, I follow Veritasium and 3Blue1Brown on YouTube but I certainly haven't watched their full back catalog. YouTube NEVER recommends to me anything from their back catalog. When I'm in the mood, I have to go to their channel, scroll for a while, then try to find a video I'd be interested in from the thumbnail/title. And once I do, YouTube will re-recommend to me all the videos I have already watched from them (which are already their best performing videos). Rarely would it recommend something new from them.

On TikTok, it frequently would pull clips from old Veritasium or 3Blue1Brown videos for me which I'd get hooked after watching 10 seconds, then hob on YouTube to watch the full video. It's insane how bad YouTube recommendation algorithm is. Literally the entire "recommended" section of youtube is stuff I have watched before, or stuff with exactly the same content as things I have watched before.

Here is how I find their recommendation algorithm to work:

YouTube: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? Here is that video again, and 10 other "brisket smoking videos". These are just gonna be stuck on your home page for the next couple of weeks now. You need to click on them one by one and mark "not interested" in which case you're clearly not interested in BBQ or cooking. Here are the last 10 videos you watched, and some MrBeast videos and some random YouTube drama videos.

TikTok: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? How about another BBQ video, a video about smokers and their models, some videos about cookouts and BBQ side dishes, a video about a DIY smoker, another about a DIY backyard project for hosting BBQ cookouts, a video about how smoke flavors food, a video about the history of BBQ in the south, a video about a BBQ joint in your city (or where ever my VPN is connected from), etc. And if you're not interested in any of those particular types, it learns from how long you spend watching the video and would branch more or less in that direction in the future.

Another example is search. Search for "sci fi books recommendations":

YouTube: Here are 3 videos about Sci-Fi books. Here are 4 brisket smoking videos. Here are some lost hikers videos (because you watched a video about a lost hiker 3 weeks ago). Here are 3 videos about a breaking story in the news. Here are 2 videos about sci-fi books, and another 8 about brisket.

TikTok: Here is a feed of videos about Sci-Fi books. And I'll make sure to throw in sci-fi book videos into your curated feed every now and then to see if you're interested.

[dead]

It's amazing to me how many people are derailed by the free speech argument.

This is about who controls the network, not the content on the network.

There is a law that only U.S. citizens can own TV stations. That's why Murdoch became a US citizen (allowing him to buy Fox). This is in a similar vein.

Simple answer. A chinese owned company has no such rights or protections. Free speech does not apply. The law also does not censor content (so no free speech violation anyway). The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security). Big difference.

This is a limitation on foreign control of TikTok, not a limitation on speech. TikTok can stay in the us market if it eliminates the foreign control

Congress is explicitly empowered in the Constitution to regulate foreign trade. Free speech is not relevant.

Interesting that the reference linked is in reference to must-carry regulation. The tiktok scenario is the opposite though? Must-not-carry that content! I suppose Uncle Sam's sword cuts both ways.

I really like reading these because they come with annotations: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-9-1/ALD...

Also, more directly for those in the back, the actual first amendment:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The first amendment doesn't guarantee the speaker a venue for their speech. You're still free to say whatever you want to say, so long as it doesn't cross any other laws, in or on whatever other private venues or town squares you so choose.

To turn your question around, rather than spending time defending TikTok I wish people would spend time thinking about the need for actual privacy laws. The kind of laws that outline data governance and the extents to which an individual can expect their individual privacy to be respected. Maybe then we can play less whack a mole with invasive and potentially harmful social software.

Sweet summer child, do you think TikTok would've been banned if it didn't come into focus as a hotbed for pro-Palestinian content?

"The issue in the United States for support of Israel is not left and right. It is young and old. And the numbers of young people who think that Hamas' massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly odd. And so we really have a TikTok problem."

"[TikTok] is like Al Jazeera on steroids."

- Jonathan Gleenblat, ADL.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelCrimes/comments/1i3vwll/we_ha...

Something very appalling has just taken place in the USA. Old people have muzzled the free speech of young people. Americans spend more hours on TikTok than on television (but it mostly skews to young people), and now it's been taken away.

That's not right.

Publishing is speech (Bernstein vs United States).

Unpublishing the app would avoid the effects of the Act.

That's a great point. Hadn't thought about that angle

The easier answer is ”This is really eating into Meta’s revenues”

Because there is no "TikTok" ban and never has been.

There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law. TikTok is completely legal under the law as long as they divest it. However, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.

> But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.

> Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.

That was explicitly brought up in oral arguments by the court, and the response by the US Gov was: "The act is written to be content neutral."

The court's opinion explains that they agree the law is "appropriately tailored" to remain content neutral. Whether it's "enemy propaganda" or not is, in their view, irrelevant to the application of the law. TikTok can exist in America, using TikTok is not banned, the owner just can't be a deemed "foreign adversary", which there is a history of enforcement (to some degree).

The replies here seem slightly off base. The Court acknowledges that 1s amm. free speech issues are at play. A law can regulate non-expressive activity (corporate ownership) while still burdening expressive activity, which is the case here. In such instances, the Court grants Congress more leeway compared to laws explicitly targeting speech. It checks that (1) the govt has an important interest unrelated to speech (it does), and (2) the law burdens no more speech than necessary (arguable, but not obviously wrong)

The first amendment doesn't apply here. You can say whatever you want anywhere else on the internet. You can print what you want anywhere you want. You can distribute what you want anywhere you want. Bytedance refused to sell TikTok so it's being shut down. They could divest, but they didn't.

There weren't any laws passed banning Soviet associated agencies from publishing based on chain of ownership. Nothing to do with SCOTUS.

Read the opinion, the law was upheld on intermediate scrutiny. It doesn't ban based on content, it bans based on the designation of the foreign parent as an adversary. Since it's not a content ban, or rather because it's a content-neutral ban, strict scrutiny does not apply.

Without strict scrutiny, the law merely needs to fulfill a compelling government interest.

> But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling?

Read the decision. They thought the act was content-neutral, and they thought that the espionage concerns were sufficient to reach a decision w/o having to involve the First Amendment. Gorsuch and Sotomayor weren't quite so sure as to the First Amendment issues, but in any case all nine justices found that they could avoid reaching the First Amendment issues, so they did just that.

US has banned foreign ownership of TV/Radio stations for over a 100 years.

To oversimplify:

You can say whatever you want on a telephone call.

BUT:

The telephone network is regulated. Your cell phone must comply with FCC regulations. You personally may have a restraining order that prohibits you from calling certain people.

IE, if a phone is found to violate FCC rules, pulling it from the market has little to do with the first amendment.

>But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling?

Apparently the owners of the operation are not US citizens operating in the USA and don't have any first amendment rights because that's part of the US Constitution and doesn't apply to other countries.

Because this is not about the first amendment? This just happens to be a company that runs a social network. Congress regulates commerce with foreign nations and made the decision, as it has in many other cases, that a foreign nation can not be the beneficial owner of TikTok. TikTok then made no effort to divest, giving away the game if you want, and predictably lost this challenge.

This case was not about speech. It was about a vehicle for speech having a high risk of being used for espionage and PSYOPS. If TikTok was the only vehicle available for people to post on the internet, then maybe the First Amendment argument would hold water.

This decision doesn't tell people they can't speak any more than, say, shutting down a specific TV station or newspaper which has been used for money laundering or which is broadcasting obscene content.

Like you can just go read the opinion. It goes into detail on exactly this question and is easy to understand.

TikTok doesn't do speech. Users on TikTok do speech. Banning TikTok doesn't prevent any users from printing / distributing / disseminating their speech.

The first amendment doesn't have any provision regarding the potential reach or enablement of distribution of the speech of the people.

Because the 1a protections are not very strong despite the foundational myths, and neither do the judges value this right highly, it is often trumped by "security", so this isn't a major erosion.

> why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling

because it's not about whether TikTok can operate, nor is about content on TikTok

it's about ownership and control of the platform

Because it has the option for selling

If the option wasnt there, it would have stricter first amendment scrutiny

They could have still banned it other ways though

and the first amendment aspect is also torn apart in other ways in the court ruling

Creating and distributing in the USA, sure. That is allowed. This is why the government isn't regulating Chinese content on Instagram, for example.

The issue here is that TikTok "content" (aka the algorithm that decides what content you get to see) is created abroad and controlled from abroad. The data collected by the app goes abroad. So then it becomes an import/export issue, and the government can and does regulate that.

This is why the government has already agreed to letting TikTik be run by a US entity. You can have the same content and same algorithm, just kept within the borders of the USA.

The justices said this was not about first amendment. It was about security and securing the users in the country

Text publications don't run software that reports to adversarial countries.

Print media is different. It is much more exhausting to read a newspaper because critical thinking circuits are automatically engaged.

You are more removed from the content because everything is in the physical world. And even within a single newspaper there are so many different topics that it is hard to be in a bubble.

The Internet automatically leads to bubble creation, 200 character messages and indoctrination.

It is more like loudspeakers they had in villages during Mao's tenure blaring politically correct messages. Or like the Volksempfänger (radio) during the Nazi era. Interestingly, many of the most destructive revolutions happened after the widespread use of radio.

Of course the Internet isn't nearly as bad, but most people are completely unable to even consider a view outside of their indoctrination bubble.

Because America, obviously, needs their own great Firewall. I don't see any other reason. Also no idea what you are talking about, a country that has values like this doesn't ban random social media sites and propagates them as bad propaganda without evidence.

The entire notion that there's a free speech angle here is a disingenuous red herring by Tik Tok to muddy the waters.

Speech is in no way being limited or compelled - you can say the exact same thing on dozens of other platforms without consequence. You can even say it on tik tok without consequence. You can even publish videos from tik tok in the US just fine.

This law is about what types of foreign corporation can do business in the US, and what sorts of corporate governance structures are allowed.

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First amendment rights is the only argument that I agree with keeping TikTok alive. However if there is proof that China is manipulating the algorithm to feed the worst manipulative content to Americans then I do think there’s a national security concern here.

The TikTok ban is security theater through and through.

Chinese spy agencies don't have to make an app that millions of American teens use to harvest data on them. American companies have been doing the job for them.

They — just like the FBI, NSA, American police departments and almost every TLA — can just buy the data from a broker, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/nsa-finally-admi...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government...

The brokers don't care. They'll sell to anyone and everyone. And the people they sell to don't care either. They'll process and re-sell it too. And on and on, until it ends up in the hands of every interested party on Earth, i.e. everyone.

So don't worry, the Chinese already have a detailed copy of your daily routine & reading habits. Just love this new world that we've created to make $0.002/click.

EDIT — if it makes you feel any better, the Chinese are doing it too!

https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...

> The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals.

It's one of those things. If you asked most Hacker News readers how they feel about the authoritarian government of a single party state literally controlling the algorithm that determines everything you see, most would swear up and down that they would never stand for it.

But yet what happens in practice is people line up to defend it. I can only guess most of the people defending it are active users and aren't aware of how distorted their perception of the world is by the content they see there.

I am of 100% of the same opinion as you. I have told people for years about the cyber warfare going on and that we're losing it, and they just don't seem to care and want that serotonin hit and ignore the rest. I also want curbs on other social media, but TikTok and the war of China against the US on the internet is in a league of its own. The CCP are no doubt funneling the data to their servers, and no doubt have plans for further damaging our youths' minds through brain rot of tiktok diverting them from far more productive activities. There's a reason CCP has strong curbs on similar apps regarding young people in their nation.

We just don't care. We know the all the American TLAs are on our phones, so what's a few more Chinese ones? It's a problem for Washington war wonks to freak out about, not teens in Omaha.

> Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.

Is there any evidence of this? FWIW, I saw plenty of tiktoks talking about the China hack

So, should we also ban Chinese companies Alibaba, Baidu, Haier, Lenovo, Tencent, and ZTE from operating in the United States? Why just TikTok (Who is ironically also banned in China)?

And should Israeli companies, like those associated with NSO Group, face similar scrutiny after reports of their tools being used to hack U.S. State Department employee phones?

> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones

Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.

I can think that China is up to no good with my data and still be mad at my own Govt for doing the exact same thing. The outrage is not that TikTok is banned, it's that Zuckerburg is doing the exact same harms to America that China is alleged to be doing, but only 1 app is banned. Hence people flocking to Rednote rather than using Reels.

There's at least three separate reasons that justify banning TikTok. If Trump bails them out, it's a complete betrayal of his base and the country at large.

1. Competitive balance. China does not allow US social media companies. If we allow theirs, our industry is essentially fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

2. China controls the algorithm for determining who sees what. This gives them tremendous ability to influence public opinion, and consequently public elections. That cannot be allowed to stand as long as China is hostile to the US.

3. China gets extremely detailed data about the interests and proclivities of millions of Americans, including military personnel and elected officials. This data is not otherwise publicly available and can be used for blackmail and other manipulation. Which is completely unacceptable when we have no mechanism to punish them from doing this short of global nuclear war.

Even ignoring the enormous threat to national sovereignty, TikTok has no redeeming qualities. It's an addiction machine that profits off people wasting away in front a screen. That alone is not a reason to ban it, but it sure does make the case stronger.

Banning TikTok is a clear-cut positive for the American people. Every American adult should be in support.

I think the fallout from this is many Americans like myself don’t see China as our enemy. Based on the recent RedNote phenomenon, Chinese citizens don’t see it that way either.

Maybe the uniparty in the USA should make it a priority to improve the life of everyday Americans and not Zuck and Elon. Young people don’t care who the establishment is warring with because they know the establishment doesn’t represent them, they represent themselves.

> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening

This. It's this. Don't waste your time thinking past this answer, you already nailed it.

> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.

I would say both at the same time

> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.

No, it's just information asymmetry shaping public opinion. The US lets its dirty laundry air out. US whistleblowers, press, and historians dig up every shitty thing the US has ever done and US citizens are free to discuss it, sing about it, turn it into movies and viral memes, etc. China doesn't allow this. No one in China is going to become famous by calling for justice for those killed by Mao or exposing MSS-installed backdoors in Chinese telecoms. That kind of talk is quelled immediately. The result is that public discourse trends more anti-American than anti-China.

> They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department.

Please cite your sources. After decades of watching American propaganda, we know all too well that it is trivial to make up shit from thin air and have a large segment of the population eat it up.

Everyone outside of the US already knows the American three letter agencies and their allies like the Mossad can access, hack or destroy all their networks if push comes to shove. Most network services all over the world are run on infrastructure owned by a handful of American companies with deep defense and government ties - AWS, Google, MS.

As other powers arise, they will naturally want equivalence. The American government may decide that is not in their interest to make this easy - but I'd suggest as Hacker News community, we retain the ability to see beyond propaganda and balance contrary viewpoint.In this case (or the case on Nippon steel),how does one differentiate between "security" considerations and potentially a straightforward cash grab attempt by rich American investors?

The interesting thing is that, using these tactics, the supreme court has made the legal case for every other country to ban US owned social networks! My opinion is that the US government has made another stupid move.

Tbh I think this has a lot more to do with sympathy for Palestinians and the last year of protests on college campuses.

Besides, who cares if China is listening to us through the app. China and I have no beef with one another. China feeds me and clothes me and builds most of the stuff in my life and I give China my money. It's a good relationship! Much better than my relationship with this state, tbh.

Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone. Regardless of which apps I choose to rot my brain with, neither the US nor Chinese government should have any say in it, period.

If a red line is not drawn, websites will be next, then VPNs, then books. And then the Great Firewall of America will be complete.

> The United States is currently in the middle of a cyber cold-war with China.

The United States Government is. I'm a United States citizen. Importantly, they're not fighting for me or my stability, they're fighting for the stability of oligarchs. They will gladly destabilize me and my life in service of the ruling class.

Appeals to nationalism only work on nationalists. I'd need a good reason to be a nationalist. The very few listed reasons are some vague reference to freedom as if just saying that makes it true.

Get back to me when it's "China is threatening your guaranteed housing!" or "China is going to roll back the statutory work holiday laws in the US!" or "China is attacking the information systems used for our guaranteed child care program!"

It's really simple: if you want people to love and defend the US and what it purportedly stands for, then give them concrete reasons to do so. Improve their quality of life.

Until then, leave me the hell out of the fearmongering about China. I'm much more fearful of the systemic policies of the US making me homeless than some nation state's cyberopium ruining my mind or protecting information systems that were intentionally left insecure in service of profit and the intelligence apparatus.

> They hacked all of our major telco's

Can I see the evidence?

>I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.

Exactly. Everyone is having fun bidding adieu to their Chinese spys. And I think they're losing sight of the fact that there's abundant reporting on harrassing expats and dissidents internationally, pressuring countries to comply with their extradition requests, to say nothing of jailing human rights lawyers and democratic activists and detaining foreigners who enter China based on their online footprint.

Most of the time I bring this up I get incredulous denials that any of this happens (I then politely point such folks to Human Rights Watch reporting on the topic), or I just hear a lot of whataboutism that doesn't even pretend to defend Tiktok.

> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones

This paternalistic framing is the disconnect between you and those opposed to the ban. The idea that it's TikTok insidiously worming its way onto American phones like a virus. In reality, people download the app and use it because they like it. This ban will, in effect, prevent people from accessing an information service they prefer. You must acknowledge this and argue why that is a worthy loss of autonomy if you want to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it.

If it helps, reframe the ban as one on a website rather than an app. They're interchangeable in this context, but I've observed "app" to be somewhat thought-terminating to some people.

For the record - I would totally support a ban on social media services that collect over some minimal threshold of user data for any purposes. This would alleviate fears of spying and targeted manipulation by foreign powers through their own platforms (TikTok) and campaigns staged on domestic social media. But just banning a platform because it's Chinese-owned? That's emblematic of a team-sports motivation. "Americans can only be exposed to our propaganda, not theirs!" How about robust protections against all propaganda? That's a requirement for a functional democracy.

People are now using Rednote, so what’s new?

Senator I'm Singaporean.

How can you call Americans naive when over and over again for the past 2 decades there have been non-stop news stories about how the US Gov spends insane amounts of effort ensuring the technology Americans use is not fully secure? Maybe you should understand that the public can actually recognize Machiavellianism.

edit: before you downvote me, how many of you remember:

- Bullrun

- PRISM

- Dual EC DRBG and the Juniper backdoors, that too also were exploited by secondary adversaries

- FBI urging Apple to install a backdoor for the govt after the San Bernardino shootings

- the government only recently mandating that partnered zero-day vendors must not sell their wares to other clients who would then target them against Americans

- Vault7

- XKeyscore

- STELLARWIND

- MUSCULAR

etc.?

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> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones

Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.

It's not hard to see the pattern: any Chinese tech champion that does as well as, or better than American companies will find itself in legal peril. Huawei didn't get in trouble after hacking Nortel, but they got sanctioned much later, when their 5G base equipment was well-received by the markets. TikTok had the best ML-based recommendation systems when it burst in the scene, Google and Meta still haven't quite caught up yet.

There's no compelling argument or evidence of data collection with TikTok, to my knowledge. Theres more evidence of data collection and aggregation with American platforms than TikTok. Additionally, TikTok is operated independently within the USA and hosted on American servers. I think if there's any opportunity to regulate data collection, TikTok seems to have positioned itself defensively and seems to be distant from being used as an example. The only thing that seems to matter with this ban is that TikTok is mostly owned by a Chinese company.

I'd love to be corrected, but I haven't been provided any evidence or information that suggests this ban was justified at all.

I’d love to see that happen as much as you but it really is irrelevant for this case. The truth is that this case is about which government gets to brainwash the masses. By far and away the greatest threat Tiktok poses to the US is a foreign government having that ability to control public opinion en masse.

None of the litigants proposed that, and neither did the act in question. The court doesn't usually address matters outside the controversy in question, so it's no surprise that they didn't here.

From a geopolitical perspective, this issue about 3 items:

1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans.

2) Data- TikTok collects massive amounts of data on 100s of millions of Americans. Opens many avenues for spying, extortion of influence, etc.

3) Reciprocity- Foreign tech companies are essentially banned from operating in China. Much like with other industries, China is not playing fair, they’re playing to win.

Insofar as TikTok has offered a “superior” product, this might be a story of social media and its double edge. But this far more a story of geopolitics.

> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.

Source? I could only find this.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...

The government doesn't care about addictive anything, this is about control and access. If they cared about life or citizens in general they would fix healthcare and maybe introduce any kind of gun control. This is the same government that was slanging cocaine in the 1980's...

It’s not about the algorithm but about the owner of the platform.

The same algorithm in US possession isn’t a problem.

> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.

Source?

You could substitute anything you don't like (gambling, alcohol, gacha games, convenience foods, televised sports, reality TV) for "social media" in the above and it makes as much sense.

Note that the Supreme Court decided the argument based on national security grounds, not content manipulation grounds.

Justice Gorsuch in his concurrence specifically commended the court for doing so, believing that a content manipulation argument could run afoul of first amendment rights.

He said that "One man's covert content manipulation is another's editorial discretion".

Maybe it was just a genuine outlet for interconnected entertainment compared to other platforms. American's have always sought similar entertainment since the dawn of the 'couch potato.' Now we can go back to consuming curated narratives/influence on our good ole traditional grams and tubes.

China doesn't need Tiktok for opium. They have the real thing as well.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-fentanyl-pipeline-and...

That might be true but it's irrelevant. Why? Because that's not the issue the government tackled. Arguing "national security" with (quite literally) secret evidence is laughable. Data protection too is a smokescreen or the government would've passed a comprehensive Federal data protection act, which they'd never do.

It's hard to see how the government would tackle algorithmic addiction within running afoul of First Amendment issues. Such an effort should also apply to Meta and Google too if it were attempted.

IMHO reciprocal market access was the most defensible position but wasn't the argument the government made.

That being said, the government did make a strictly commerce-based argument to avoid free speech issues. As came up in oral arguments (and maybe the opinion?) this is functionally no different to the restrictions on foreign ownership of US media outlets.

What needs to happen is that all of these platforms need to be straight up banned. TikTok is getting picked on because of its ties to China, but why is it better for Zuckerberg or Musk to have the capabilities that are so frightening in the hands of the CCP?

The US social media billionaire class is ostensibly accountable to the law, but they're also perfectly capable of using their influence over these platforms to write the law.

One plausible theory for why the politicians talk about fears of spying instead of the real fears of algorithmic manipulation is because they don't want to draw too much attention to how capable these media platforms are of manipulating voters, because they rely on those capabilities to get into and stay in power.

"Too addictive" is such a nonsensical way of saying "accurate".

Nicotine being legal but TikTok is not tells you everything you need to know about government wanting to control the "addictiveness" of social media.

> beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

I think the government could fix it with a screen time limit. 30 mins for under 18's, and 1 hour for everyone else, per day.

Maybe allow you to carry over some.

After that, it's emergency calls only.

The symmetry for opium is fentanyl which China senda to the US by the ton.

I'm with you except for the last sentence.

What's happening to TikTok is not a good proxy for the trajectory of social media companies in the US, esp Meta. They've got plenty of tailwind.

I think that’s besides the point given the entity that is banning it. It’s because it’s Chinese. An equally addictive Western-made app would not have been banned.

And generally speaking as a culture we are too liberal to ban things for being too addictive. Again, showing that it is not relevant in this case since it will not inspire bans of other addictive (pseudo) substances on those grounds.

I am surprised someone has not attempted to reverse engineer it or make something very similar.

I think TikTok and social media in general is much more insidious than opium, because it is hard to know if you are using an addictive product, or what product you’re even being sold (like if you are being sold a subtly manipulated information diet). For example, it just came out that TikTok staff (in the US) were forced to take oaths of loyalty to not disrupt the “national honor” of China or undermine “ethnic unity” in China and so on. TikTok executives are required to sign an agreement with ByteDance subsidiary Douyin (the China version of TikTok) that polices speech and demands compliance with China’s socialist system. That’s deeply disturbing but also undetectable. It came out now because of a lawsuit.

See this for more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855

EDIT: the link above doesn’t work for others for reason, so here is the source story: https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...

Why are people upvoting this.

> this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

I think politicians have scrutinized american social media and they're 100% fine with the misery they induce so long as they are personally enriched by them.

> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China

TikTok isn't anywhere near as destructive as opium was. Hell, purely in terms of "mis/disinformation" surely facebook and twitter are many times worse than TikTok.

Surely the appropriate modern parallel is fentanyl.

I wish it were a reckoning for social media, but reading here shows there's plenty of people here who are passionate about "China bad" and see this only through that one lens. And they seem to think it is strictly about TikTok.

Does anyone have any link to some docs explaining how it works?

> Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that social media is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

Come on. We all know that TikTok was banned because the US regime couldn't control it.

If they really wanted to ban vice, they would have banned Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and their kin a long ago.

I disagree that social media is a vice. There's nothing inherently wrong with better communication. Although it's hard for me to see the value (or appeal) in TikTok.

Americans have faced so little strife domestically that they're unironically comparing social media addiction to the Opium Wars

That's a great analogy.

> I think everyone is kind of aware that social media is a vice

I don't think this is true. Everyone that is reading this forum might even be too strong. The majority of people happily eating the pablum up as the users of TikTok can't even tell the blatantly false content from just the silly dancing videos.

> this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

Could not be more wrong. "Society" is not deciding anything here. The ban is entirely because of idelogical and geopolical reasons. They have already allowed the good big tech companies to get people hooked as much as they want. If you think you are going to see regulation for public good you will probably be disappointed.

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I remember trying out TikTok and realizing in horror that it was a slot machine for video content.

> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.

Apparently?

What's the obvious about it?

I don't understand the argument here, Tik Tok would maximize their monetization in US but not in other markets?

I don't buy it.

> TikTok is perhaps the most impressively addictive social media app ever created.

What nonsense.

> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.

"Apparently"? Tiktok was forced to separate itself into a chinese version and the non-chinese version by the US because we didn't want "da ccp" controlling tiktok.

> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China, then Britain introduced stronger, more disruptive versions, forcing a stronger social reaction.

There is no historic symmetry. Unless china invades the US and forces americans to use tiktok. Like britain invaded china ( opium wars ) and forced opium on china's population.

What's with all the same propaganda in every tiktok/china related thread? The same talking points on every single thread for the past few years.

Congress passed a law banning it. Where else would you solve it?

> But from a high level there is nothing stopping congress from regulating any instance foreign trade.

Incorrect- federal powers do not override constitutional rights like free speech.

> this decision is not an emotional one but for the nation, just like the opposite party does for its nation

I'd argue that it is an emotional decision for both, and it does seem ironic that the US would be following China in restricting a platform that people see as a major tool for free speech. Whether you agree with that or not the optics are terrible, and the users are very aware of it. If this is really a big concern then they would also ban facebook/instagram/snapchat, but they aren't being included in this, despite having a worse track record.

Direct from the horse's mouth: https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-mcca...

"enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”

And just yesterday I saw a news where UK had best music revenue ever, and I do not think US is published but first 1/2 of US also had record sales. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/cn858xgng2vo)

And I agree, even for me, music discovery is (was) via TikTok.

I imagine you'll get the same content on YouTube shorts or Facebook reels? I don't like using apps, so I never bothered with Tiktok, but tiktok watermarks are still on most of the short videos I view, content creators are either putting their work on multiple platforms, or someone else is ripping it off and putting it on different platforms.

I’m hoping https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ takes off

wber.org

You misapprehend what textualism is. It does not say that every legal case can be decided by interpreting written law. It is merely a philosophy of how to interpret written law when its meaning is what's at issue. What American lawyers call "textualism" is how most continental european courts interpret written laws. It would hardly merit a label, if it wasn't for a long history in the 20th century of jurists departing from written law in making decisions. In this case, there is no dispute about what the written law means. It's about applying a pre-existing legal concept, the freedom of speech, to particular facts.

Another example that highlights the distinction: Justice Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court's preeminent textualists, is also one of the biggest proponents of criminal rights. Those cases similarly involve defining the contours of pre-existing legal concepts, such as "unreasonable search or seizure." Nobody denies that such questions are subjective--in referring to what's "unreasonable," the text itself calls for a subjective analysis.

This was a unanimous decision. The only points where Sotomayor and Gorusch disagreed with the majority decision was whether TikTok's operation qualified under strict scrutiny for first amendment considerations, but both agreed that even under strict scrutiny, the law would have survived the challenge.

Much of the decision is indeed based around an analysis of the words written by the legislature.

It's not really speculation, though. Certain aspects of the intelligence relationships between the US and China are highly asymmetrical already.

For example, Chinese nationals can enter our country and gather information on our infrastructure, corporations, and people with relative ease because English is prevalent, and foreign nationals have, with the exception of certain military/research areas, the same access that US citizens have. On the other hand, foreign nationals in China are closely monitored and have very few rights, assuming they know Chinese, are physically in China (Great Firewall), and know how to get around in the first place.

China has unfettered access to our media ecosystem, research, patents, etc., and they do their best to create an uncompetitive/hostile environment for any other country to attempt the same on their territory. Some of this has to do with trade—to be fair, these are intertwined—but the situation regarding intelligence is bleak.

What exactly is your issue with this, as a textualist?

>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; . . .

This is foreign commerce. It falls under the explicit jurisdiction of Congress.

I'm no fan of textualism but I don't think it had much to do with this case.

SCOTUS didn't have much to work with aside from level of scrutiny. They defer to Congress regarding national security.

Rather I think this a good example of how people go through the steps of delegimitizing institutions if it dosen't agree with their opinion. If the Supreme Court's opinion is "shaky" then I guess the Pro-TikTokers would teetering on pole in the middle on the ocean.

I'd use the term 'originalism' rather 'textualism', but you have a point. For 1st amendment cases, the court hasn't (yet) tried to use their new fangled originalist methodologies. In fact justice Gorsuch wrote separately in the Tiktok case to dig on the levels of scrutiny.

I think it's understandable, in a Chesterton's Fence sort of way - they better make sure that if they're going to start using a new methodology, it works better than what they use now, (these weird judge-created levels of scrutiny), but there's so much 1A precedent that is hard to be confident.

For 2nd amendment, they have used 'originalism' already. There isn't nearly as much precedent in that area, and so they were able to start more or less from scratch.

> a compelling national interest (which in turn seems based on speculation about the future, rather than a factual analysis of events).

I keep seeing this claimed, but these aren't hypothetical risks. China has managerial control over ByteDance. China has laws that require prominent companies to cooperate in their national security operations, and they've recently strengthened them even more. China has already exercised those powers to target political dissidents. This is the normal state of affairs in Chinese business; this is how things work there. It isn't like the west where companies have power to push back, or enjoy managerial independence.

> Textualism might give the court some useful definitions, but it is after all still called, quite literally, an opinion.

I don't think you understand SCOTUS' decision here. They are not banning TikTok. Congress is doing so (actually forcing a sale of TikTok or be banned). They are simply ruling whether Congress acted unconstitutionally by doing so. In other words, if they overrule Congress, they would have to show how Congress' ruling contravenes the Constitution, when the Constitution grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce and decide matters of national security.

But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA. Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publication s were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.

What changed now?

Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.

Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.

It's opinion regardless of the specific legal philosophy. Each philosophy makes decisions about what kinds of information, sources, context, etc are considered to form the "correct" interpretation. Those decisions are opinions.

"Shaky" compared to what?

Isn't the inquiry made MORE subjective by incorporating extratextual considerations?

Or do you just mean that textualism is oversold, and delivers less than it advertises?

Since I'm a reasonably well-known textualist, I'll bite:

First, the court was not asked to reconsider the meaning of the First Amendment. In the US, we generally hew to the rule of "party presentation," which generally provides that courts will consider the parties' arguments, not make up new ones on their own.

TikTok's claim was that application of the statute in question to it violated the First Amendment's clause that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." The Supreme Court has considered the interpretation and application of that clause in...well, a whole lot of cases. TikTok asked the court to apply the logic of certain of those precedents to rule in its favor and enjoin the statute. It did not, however, ask the court to reconsider those precedents or interpret the First Amendment anew.

Since the court was not asked to do so, it's no surprise that it didn't.

Second, as noted, the court has literally decades' worth of cases fleshing out the meaning of this clause and applying it in particular circumstances. Every textualist, so far as I'm aware, generally supports following the court's existing precedents interpreting the Constitution unless and until they are overruled.

Third, even if one is of the view that the Court ought to consider the text anew in every case, without deferring to its prior rulings interpreting the text, this would have been a particularly inappropriate case for it to do so. A party seeking an injunction, as TikTok was, has to show a strong likelihood of success on the merits. That generally entails showing that you win under existing precedent. A court's expedited consideration of a request for preliminary relief is not an appropriate time to broach a new theory of what the law requires. The court doesn't have the time to give it the consideration required, and asking the court to abrogate its precedents is inconsistent with the standard for a preliminary injunction, which contemplates only a preview of the ultimate legal question, not a full-blown resolution of it.

Fourth, what exactly was the court supposed to do with the text in question, which is "abridging the freedom of speech"? The question here is whether the statute here, as applied to TikTok, violates that text. Well, it depends on what "the freedom of speech" means and perhaps what "abridging" means. It's only natural that a court would look to precedent in answering the question. Precedent develops over time, fleshing out (or "liquidating," to use Madison's term) the meaning and application of ambiguous or general language. Absent some compelling argument that precedent got the meaning wrong, that sort of case-by-case development of the law is how our courts have always functioned--and may be, according to some scholars, itself a requirement of originalism.

What are you talking about? The decision was unanimous.

It's questionable what a more functional democracy would actually do, since there hasn't really been one in history. There's been other forms of democracy, but they've all had their flaws, and none of them so far have acted in the interests of all the people in that country.

> In a more functional democracy we would see that mass data collection of any sort, by any company (foreign or domestic), is a national security risk.

You obviously don't mean "democracy," but some other word. We don't see mass data collection as a problem because most Americans don't care about privacy. The only reason this Tik Tok thing is even registering is because of the treat of China, which Americans do care about.

Claiming that “mass data collection” by our own government is inherently a natural security risk is not an assertion based on rational evidence.

Most Reddit is just Twitter screenshots. There are few from BlueSky now but that is pretty recent.

But there is also lot of OC rage-bait.

AI generated slop, of course

Didi/Uber was more complicated than just data stuff.

At a high level, chinese tech culture is an insane no holds barred cage match with very little legal structure to protect IP or employees or anything and most companies who enter fail at participating in this.

Didi did a lot of corporate espionage and sabotage at uber china. They'd have "double agents" working for uber they'd pay to f stuff up. This type of thing is not practices in america because it is extremely illegal, but it was fine in China at not something that uber could do "back" to didi. There were people on the uber china fraud team paid by didi to tip off fraud networks on how to fraud. In the last year in china, they moved a ton of important work back to US offices because the china office was "compromised".

If it reaches more than 1 million monthly active American users, it too can be subject to the same scrutiny under the law in question.

This is very misleading "news" and it doesn't illustrate anything, a bunch of users installed rednote out of protest, but this is a fully chinese app with 100% chinese content and 99% of users will move to youtube, instagram, etc

Fake news.

It's not ostensibly, it's an app completely focused on china; did you mean a different word?

It asserts how critically powerful platform media is now and that the government sees it as an essential part of managing their citizens

Sure, guy, and Bluesky will become the new Twitter.

I feel like the protest move to RedNote will be short lived. The censorship there is draconian - if you say even the slightest thing that offends the CCP on red note, you get banned. See this discussion on the subreddit for TikTok (https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i2wll3/how_to_not_...).

Something I read that’s interesting - RedNote changed the English name to cover their actual name - the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true).

They dont need to wonder. The US is constantly operating media propaganda campaigns around the globe interfering with elections and promoting coups.

Democratic outcomes that don't agree with our politics are officially deemed illegitimate, even if the elections are certified as fair.

It would be crazy to believe the US is somehow shy about running psyops when we openly arm rebels and bomb countries.

And they’re right to. In the news today: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/european-union-o...

Other countries that were concerned about this started blocking websites of their adversaries decades ago.

Sure. It's a reasonable concern regardless of what country is doing it or having it done to them.

TikTok is banned in China. We're just joining in

Sadly they won't, that's just one more reason for e.g. the EU to censor more social media on the grounds that one of their """allies""" does it too.

Right?

I'm a Canadian. Almost every major Canadian newspaper is owned by American ideologically-conservative hedge funds, the only variance is how activist they are in their ownership. Our social media (like everyone's) is owned by Americans, men who are now kowtowing to Trump.

And meanwhile, Trump is now incessantly talking about annexing our country. The Premier of Alberta is receptive to the idea.

So, how should a Canadian federal government responsibly react to that?

Isn't https://www.tiktok.com exactly this?

> I'm surprised TikTok isn't trying to push a web version,

They have a web version that's surprisingly capable. Not sure if tiktok.com will be blocked on Sunday.

I wonder about that: wouldn't the law force internet providers to blanket block any and all web versions of TikTok?

If the President had over Meta and X the sort of control the CCP has over TikTok, Instagram and Twitter would be banned in most countries. The only reason this is debated so much here is we’re (in my opinion correctly) very cautious about free speech.

> The idea that the CCP could drive our national conversation somehow (still murky) bothers me.

Even if all the CCP can do is modify how often some videos and comments show up to users on tik tok, there's a chance that level of control could have been enough to instigate the whole jump to red note we're seeing. After all, the suggestion originated within tik tok itself as the videos talking about it (and the comments praising it) went viral. Sure everyone was primed to do something with the deadline approaching, but it's entirely possible that the red note trend isn't an organically viral one, but a pre-planned and well executed attempt to throw a wrench in the works.

red note's infrastructure seems to have had no problems absorbing millions of new users at the drop of a hat, cloud scaling is good, but that kind of explosive growth in mere days, when unexpected, often results in some visible hiccups. Maybe the engineers are just that good, or maybe they had a heads up that it'd be happening.

Utter speculation on my part, but I've found it interesting I've not come across anyone else mention the possibility.

> It seems all the folks who “have it on good authority” that this is a dangerous propaganda tool, can’t share what “it” is.

No need to speculate too hard here, there are plenty of examples of censorship on TikTok: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok

Censorship is a form of propaganda, and even the very obvious/reported examples we've seen reported over the years are pretty bad. And you have to assume that there is more going on than is actually reported/noticed, especially in subtler ways. It's also just obvious it's happening in the sense that the Chinese government has ultimate control over TikTok.

They make up lies that they tell them in the SCIF.

It's just theater.

The "reasonable threat" is that TikTok prevented US leaders from being able to control the conversation around Palestine. Nearly half of the country has realized how insane sending tens of billions of dollars to fund genocide is, when previously it was unquestioned.

You mean the young people now on Rednote complaining that they can't buy groceries?

Maybe. Network effects are strong, though. I wonder how much losing access to the US market sets back TT's financial & competitive positions

A simpler explaination, politicians were worried that Tiktok may influence mit-term and presidential elections, but it turns out a good place to run campaigns.

Then Gaza happened.

2025, despite all this going on for four years, Gorusch complains bitterly about having had to rule on the case in less than a fortnight

The whole thing, including Biden setting the deadline for literally the last day of his presidency, strikes me as extremely odd. I have no idea what the real story is here, but it very much seems that what is happening is not at all what it seems.

> Who really owns TikTok? Who is the true decision-maker behind the scenes? Who is so wealthy and powerful that they’re willing to let $100 billion vanish?

They're hardly "letting" it happen. What exactly can you do when the US government decides they want to smash your business and take your stuff?

You really believe their value could drop by 90% because of this? 90%!!!

And it was an unanimous decision. When was the last time we had those for such an impactful decision I wonder?

Reply

The interesting bits from the text[1], relative to the now flagged sibling

-----

(3) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—

(A) any of—

(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;

(ii) TikTok;

(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or

(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or

(B) a covered company that—

(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and

(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—

(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and

(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.

-----

The way I read this is that Congress is bootstrapping the law with its own finding that ByteDance, Ltd/TikTok are Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications, but then, in (3)(B), the President is responsible for determining any other entities this law should cover given previously stated parameters (what they mean by "covered entity" here), using the procedure it then provides.

I believe that addresses the concern about this being a "Bill of Attainder".

Edit: Obviously IANAL, but it also doesn't appear that this issue of this being a Bill of Attainder was raised by TikTok, nor was it considered in this opinion. Perhaps they will do so in a separate action, or already have and it just hasn't made its way to the court(?), but if it were such a slam dunk defense, you think their expensive lawyers would have raised it.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...

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[flagged]

[flagged]

Plenty of good answers have already been put forward. But in case you're asking in good faith, here are the two main ones:

1- It's in the interest of the US government to protect its interests and citizens from governments that are considered adversarial, which China is. And unlike other countries, the Chinese government exercises a great deal of direct control over major companies (like ByteDance). If TikTok was controlled by the Russian government would we even be having this conversation? (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)

I think social media in general - including by US companies - does more harm than good to society and concentrates too much power and influence in the hands of a few (Musk, Zuck, etc.) So this isn't to say that "US social media is good". But from a national security standpoint, Congress' decision makes sense.

2- If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on. But those are blocked (along with much of the Western internet) or heavily filtered/censored. TikTok itself is banned in China. So there's a strong tit-for-tat element here, which also is reasonable.

The whole case turns on foreign adversary control of the data.

1) You can not protect users from being influenced by the media they consume-- that is basically the very nature of the thing.

2) This is not about protecting users of the app, this is about preventing a foreign state from having direct influence on public opinion.

It is obvious to me why this is necessary. If you allow significant foreign influence on public opinion, then this can be leveraged. Just imagine Russia being in control of a lot of US media in 2022. Or 1940's Japan. That is a very serious problem, because it can easily lead to outcomes that are against the interests of ALL US citizens in the longer term...

It’s bad because China has different interests than the US. Imagine if a war breaks out in Taiwan and they send targeted propaganda to members of the US military.

Indeed - if the US is this afraid of a popular social network under foreign control then every country outside the US should be petrified.

And domestically in the US - citizens should be demanding the dismantling of the big powerful players - which ironically the US government is against because of it's usefulness abroad..... ( let's assume for one moment, despite evidence to the contrary, that the US government doesn't use these tools of persuasion on it's own population ).

For the same reason you're okay with the US military being present in the US and not the Chinese one.

Check out the scandal in Romania, some guy that had less than 5% in polls got 30% because of tiktok. Other candidates had tiktok campaigns too but probably didn't use bots.

Social media is a legitimate threat to any countries democracy if used wisely. It is dangerous to have one of the biggest ones in the hands of your enemy when they can influence your own countries narrative to such an extent.

I thought it was less about the data and more about the control China had on what Americans saw, and how that could influence Americans.

If China could effectively influence the American populations opinions, how would that not be bad?

This is being positioned as a national security issue that a foreign government has so much influence over the US public (and data on people if they want, like geolocation, interests, your contacts, etc).

Note: I'm not saying I either agree or disagree ... just pointing out the dynamics in the case being made.

The concern isn't broadly that "social media companies have data". The concern is the governing environment that those companies operate in, which can be coopted for competing national security purposes.

This isn't a consumer data privacy protection.

The concerns here are obvious: For example, it would be trivial for the Chinese military to use TikTok data to find US service members, and serve them propaganda. Or track their locations, etc.

Two extremely obvious reasons:

First, it's a national security issue for a company controlled by the CCP to have intimate data access for hundreds of millions of US citizens. Not only can they glean a great deal of sensitive information, but they have the ability to control the algorithm in ways that benefit the CCP.

Second, China does not reciprocate this level of vulnerability. US companies do not have the same access or control over Chinese users. If you want to allow nation states to diddle around with your citizens, then it ought to be a reciprocal arrangement and then it all averages out.

Because for all of Mark Zuckerburg's flaws (or Elon, or whoever), America is unlikely to go to war with him?

The rational for why TikTok should be banned in the United States is precisely the same rational why Xitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al, should be banned in other countries.

Meta, Musk, and others have no right or grant to operate in the EU, Canada or elsewhere. They should be banned.

In addition:

• US data brokers can still sell data to foreign companies (out of control of US and thus indirectly to Chinese companies).

• Chinese companies can buy US companies (thereby obtaining lots of data).

If we killed user-tracking, then that would solve a LOT of problems.

Because US is not really a free country.

It is obviously way better on this matter than China, but in principle, liberties are selectively granted in US and in China.

The TikTok ban topic has been stale for long time before it became the main harbor for Pro-Palestine content after it became under censorship by US social media thus depriving anti-Palestine from controling the narrative, effectively becoming a major concern for AIPAC et al.

Data collection is more of a plausible pretext at this point.

> But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it?

China blocks facebook/twitter/instagram/pinterest/gmail/wikipedia/twitch and even US newspapers.

So clearly they don't think it's okay for a US-company to do it (and are at least an order magnitude stricter about it)...

Why do we need a good answer? Does US need to be a good guy on some made up rules? Post Soviet collapse, US could have just taken over a bunch of territories. We don’t alway need to be some faithful country when the rest of the world is always messing up asking for millions of Americans to spill blood. I think RoW take US goodwill for granted. We don’t need to play nice. That’s not how competition works.

There is a rule of law issue here.

Say, for example, congress passes and the president signs a law that says that product sponsorships in videos need to be disclosed. If a US company (or a European, Australian, Japanese, etc) country violates that law, we're pretty sure that a judgement against them can change that behavior.

China? Not so much, given their history.

It sounds like you have ignored all the answers and then you're saying there's no good answers?

If you want to convince someone they're not good answers you would have to at least engage with them and show how they fail to be correct/moral/legal or something. Pretending they don't exist does nothing.

Yes, all of them should be stopped from doing it. And end Third Party Doctrine. I 100% agree.

Why would you want an outside nation to have an outsized influence America's social fabric? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60 Chomsky laid out manufacturing consent decades ago and while his thesis revolves around traditional media heavily influencing thought-in-America, the influencing now happens from algorithmic based feeds. Tik Tok controls the feed for many young American minds.

> But its perfectly fine for a US company to do it?

It's not perfectly fine, but you need to start with companies of foreign adversaries first.

While I agree with you about domestic policy, I'm not sure why it's inconsistent or hypocritical to deal with an external threat posed from those who want to destroy or harm you.

The details specific to China and TikTok are kind of moot when talking about broad principles. And there is a valid discussion to be had regarding whether or not it does pose a legitimate national security threat. You would be absolutely correct in pointing out all of the trade that happens between China and the USA as a rebuttal to what I'm about to offer.

To put where I'm coming from into perspective, I'm one of those whacko Ayn Rand loving objectivists who wants a complete separation between state and economy just like we have been state and church and for the same reasons. This means that I want nothing shy of absolute laissez-faire capitalism.

But that actually doesn't mean that blockades, sanctions and trade prohibitions are necessarily inconsistent with this world view. It depends on the context.

An ideal trade is one in which both parties to that trade benefit. The idea being that both are better off than they were before the trade.

This means that it is a really stupid idea to trade anything at all at any level with those who want to either destroy or harm you.

National security is one of the proper roles of government.

And I don't think you necessarily disagree with me, because you're saying "we should also be protected our citizens from spying and intrusions into our privacy" and yes! Yes we absolutely should be!

But that's a different role than protecting the nation from external threats. You can do your job with respects to one, and fail at your job with respects to the other, and then it is certainly appropriate to call out that one of the important jobs is not being fulfilled. Does that make it hypocritical? Does it suddenly make it acceptable for enemy states to start spying?

By all means criticize your government always. That's healthy. But one wrong does not excuse another. We can, and should, debate whether TikTok really represents a national security threat, or whether we should be trading with China at all (my opinion is we shouldn't be). It's just that the answer to "why its bad when China does it but it's right when it's done domestically" is "it's wrong in both cases and each can be dealt with independently from the other without contradiction"

optimistically, this is the first step towards banning or at least forcing more transparency for all algorithmic feeds. there's absolutely similar concerns about the leadership of American companies being able to sway public opinion in whatever direction they choose via promotion or demotion of viewpoints. but it's only been possible to convince those with the power to stop them of the danger from China, because while probably none of the companies have "America's best interests" at heart when tuning their algorithms, it's much clearer that China has reason to actively work against American national interests (even just demoting honest critique of China is something to be wary of)

I don't think any big business sees protection of its users as a solution to anything.

It's about psychological manipulation of Americans. TikTok is a completely different experience in China. Social media influences us in negative ways. And the Chinese government can and does take advantage of that.

Judging by your karma and registration date, you spend some time here on HN. There have been lots of good answers why; they are the many prior discussions of this topic.

You are just seeming to ignore them for whatever reason.

Where in that CNBC article does it say that it's fine for US companies to do that? I don't see that anywhere, yet that's the point you're claiming is being made.

It is, and if this a stepping stone to that conversation, that’s a good thing. Great even. If you expect to have everything at once, you’ll make no progress.

There's no room for equality and fairness when it comes to global political rivals especially when there's stone cold evidence of mischief.

The comparison isn't even close. TikTok's relationship with the Chinese government is well-documented, not "supposed". They are legally required to share data under China's National Intelligence Law. The Chinese government has also a track record of pushing disinformation and find any way to destabilize Western democracies.

Douyin (The Chinese Tiktok version) limits users under 14 to 40 minutes per day and primarily serves educational content, while TikTok's algorithm outside China optimizes for maximum engagement regardless of content quality or user wellbeing.

US tech companies pursuing profit at the expense of user wellbeing is concerning and deserves its own topic. However, there is a fundamental difference between a profit driven company operating under US legal constraints and oversight, versus a platform forced to serve the strategic interests of a foreign government that keeps acting in bad faith.

It's perfectly fine for a South African immigrant to do it, I really don't understand the problem either.

same reason China forbids or controls US companies operating in China. This is just tit-for-tat.

> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?

Maybe. But there is a huge constitutional distinction between foreign and domestic threats. And the supreme court was pretty clear that the decision would be different if it didn't reside with a "foreign adversary".

I think you have no good answer to this, you should do some soul searching.

Action against Tiktok doesn't preclude action against US companies

The problem is framing information access as a threat. It is not and that's fundamentally not a First Amendment positive stance. If I want to gorge myself on Chinese propaganda it's my right as an American.

Clearly the US government would like only US companies to collect this kind of data. Eliminating the biggest competitors for companies like Google, X and Meta is likely just the icing on the cake.

Not only that, but there's no evidence at all that Tik Tok's been feeding China any data. None.

Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.

Everybody forgot already US spying on Merkel's phone?

But that's okay, because America is not bound to any rules I guess. Disgusting foreign policy with a disgusting exceptionalism mentality.

> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?

Indeed, but at the point we are in history the steps to get that done - aka, copy the EU GDPR and roll it out federally - would take far too long, all while China has a direct path to the brains of our children.

Because it's not the TWEAKING of the content tho tis the problem. It's the ability to manipulate individuals using fake or altered content.

Not sure why this is a hard one to understand but with the ability to individualized media, you can easily feed people propaganda and they'd never know. Add in AI and deep fakes, and you have the ability to manipulate the entire discourse in a matter of minutes.

How do you think Trump was elected? Do you really think the average 20 something would vote for a Republican, let alone a 78 year old charlatan? They were manipulated into the vote. And that is the most innocuous possible use of such a tech.

ever hear of election tampering?

Why do you care if a chinese company is banned from business in the US? All sorts of american companies are banned from doing business in China

Data = Money, the rest is capitalism

my wife can yell at me and spend my money and my neighbour can't, because you know different case

This is essentially a whataboutism argument...

Because China is a rival geopolitical power and the US is... us.

It's a national security concern. I get that there's a lot of conversation and debate to be had on the topic but the answer here is very straightforward and I don't understand why people are so obtuse about it.

Domestic governments shouldn't let hostile foreign governments the ability to exert soft power over 1/2 of their population. Hence why China banned all USA based tech companies from operating there.

Because the Chinese are openly hostile towards the United States and its interests, whereas American companies have a vested interest in the U.S. and are beholden to its laws.

I don't know why realpolitik is so hard for technologists to understand, perhaps too much utopian fantasy scifi?

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.

That's not how the law works.

The law levies fines against distributors of the app, it doesn't ban possession or block the operation of the app itself.

Ie, Google and Apple are forced to delist TikTok or face heavy fines

That’s a good point. Apparently VPN popularity is already exploding in states that PornHub had to block.

Maybe we will finally get the decentralized computer network we thought we were building in the 1990s (as a combination of software overlays and point to point unlicensed wireless links).

What ISPs blocks? American ISPs don't block anything. The US government prefers to seize domains and hosting.

We're not (yet) like the UK or EU where rights holders can click a button and have IPs blocked without due process.

trump finally got the (fire)wall he wanted

Not at all the case except for the largest ones. It is hard to grasp the distribution capacity of TikTok. It WILL put your content in front of people interested in it. It's crazy good at that. Also, a lot of money came in from the live streams within the app.

I made $400 making tiktoks as a hobby. I would say its much easier to earn money on tiktok, but harder to earn huge sums. A lot of people are currently making ends meet with what they get from Tiktok.

It's been banned in both of the largest countries.

That's the opposite of what I've heard

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...

Can you explain further? Sounds important but I don't understand.

TikTok cannot be sold because the algorithm cannot be sold under the export control laws enacted by China.

Who are they actually supposed to be selling to? Given the US has pretty active antitrust for now, I can't really think of anyone who has both the money and expertise to run it and would be allowed to buy it.

Why would I sell my business just to appease some gangsters on capitol hill?

And yet Polymarket has the ban probability at 84%. If it's not going anywhere, you stand to become a very wealthy individual.

I'd be stunned if Trump saved TikTok, that would be really inconsistent with his anti-China rhetoric, which is one of the consistent policies he has.

I found this comment by scrolling endlessly.

This law does not impose a Great Wall on the Internet in the U.S.

I don't get this take. China is constantly stealing US IP. The US simply wanted to cut out the foreign influence, while allowing free speech of the users. That's a simple plan and makes a lot of sense. China doesn't allow any of the big US platforms to influence their people for a similar reason, and it's valid. What you pitch is a very optimistic Communist outlook, which has never panned out anywhere in the world where the experiment was tried.

From the oral arguments it was immediately obvious that Alito and Thomas had already decided their opinion --- as had the other judges, frankly. They were very skeptical of the ByteDance/petitioner's argument. The Act at issue was written in a very specific way to neuter a lot of their points. Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the US Government, is also an extremely good SC lawyer in oral arguments. A Per Curiam decision is not surprising at all, most people who follow the court were expecting it.

China is an ethnostate. What does China offer the future to anyone who's not Chinese? Chinese nationals in the United States have substantially more rights than they do in China.

You use colonialist as a slur, but China has literal colonies in Tibet and the Uyghur land.

You could have read either the law or the decision, linked in the comments here, to get the answer to this question.

From the decision:

> Second, the Act establishes a general designa-

> tion framework for any application that is both (1) operated

> by a “covered company” that is “controlled by a foreign ad-

> versary,” and (2) “determined by the President to present a

> significant threat to the national security of the United

> States,” following a public notice and reporting process.

> §2(g)(3)(B). In broad terms, the Act defines “covered com-

> pany” to include a company that operates an application

> that enables users to generate, share, and view content and

> has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. §2(g)(2)(A).

> The Act excludes from that definition a company that oper-

> ates an application “whose primary purpose is to allow us-

> ers to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel in-

> formation and reviews.” §2(g)(2)(B).

It’s very difficult to recreate the network effects of an app like TikTok. If it were easy, Zuckerberg would have already done it.

It doesn't defeat the purpose. You can just make a new ban. There would be less friction since there is already an example.

Tik Tok said they'll fully shut down. They'd rather go dark now than have a slowly-degrading experience, since users won't be able to update the apps.

>Not even in Europe we have such crackdown on freedom

Telegram?

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

> I think this is a massive over reach. You can argue to restrict social media to those over 18, but Americans should have a right to consume content they choose.

Ain't about that.

> What's next, banning books by Chinese authors?

No

> Banning Chinese Americans from holding key positions in social media companies, after all they might have uncles in the CCP!

No.

The whole thing with social media is network effects though. The added friction of a VPN, though small, is just so much larger than "click download, open app"

You won’t need a vpn. TikTok isn’t getting blocked. It’s getting delisted from the App Store. The app will still be on your phone.

This is not a good outcome, this is Meta shooting itself in the face.

Inconvenience?

I suspect that this was the original plan, and that the ban was a bluff in order to incentive this. Thus why both Biden and Trump are "panicking" about it.

I don't really agree with this line of thinking if you consider the addictive part of TikTok.

Imagine the US legalized and exported meth. All of a sudden, the US is "competing" because everyone is hooked on drugs. We had Opium wars in a somewhat similar vein as the social media wars.

This is like paying doctors to say only evil foreign cigarettes cause cancer. Buy American!

Daniel Dennett was strong proponent of alternative information distribution mechanisms in case of internet goes down for everyone. We haven't even studied such scenarios.

We got something similar with social interactions during covid lockdowns (if your country had those). Btw i feel like people would go literally MAD, I can see it when just WhatsApp crashses for just a couple hours (doesn't happen often but I remember people's reactions when it happened). You can get a feel of what it would do for yourself by getting a dumbphone and limiting yourself from accessing social media.

People would just switch to a different service.

I have trouble lumping those 5 services together. Maybe its something to do with me being a middle-age American male?

Instagram/X/TikTok: Hot garbage. Good riddance. Ban them and this country is a better place.

Whatsapp/YouTube: Actually quite useful. The former for real-time global communications. The latter for visual how-to's of all kinds (bicycles, home maintenance).

> Overall, I view this is as an admission to US populace and the world that the US is a weak-minded country that can easily be influenced by propaganda.

That is quite a silly assumption to make

i don't think the gov is concerned with the 0.01% of people that are both capable of and motivated enough to do this.

even if you did do this, what content would you be watching? all us based creators will be gone.

This isn't a privacy or data collection matter. What Meta, X or any other company that is not de facto controlled by the CCP does or doesn't do has no bearing on this particular case.

What you're really complaining about is that too many people agree with Georgescu. The way mainstream media works, only a few candidates get air time so there's little competition. Georgescu was able to build a following on the alternatives so the election was suspended (without motivation) and new regulations put in place to make sure no un-approved candidate stands a change.

They were so busy banning Șoșoacă and demonizing the best candidate (Simion) that they forgot about Georgescu.

We were already a laughing stock for banning a candidate (Șoșoacă). Now we've suspended democracy and postponed the election 'til kingdom come.

This is laughable, even with your depiction of the events. The candidate in question (Georgescu) had a very popular platform, and was supported by a large bases or Romanians on the left and right.

He was, however, opposed to further expansion of NATO.

If these ideas are too scary to let general public even consider, then democracies have to step in and censor the media. And that begins by banning TikTok, the largest platform where a narrative like this can bypass the existing power structures.

> Turns out China (or here, Russia) infiltrated the country, waged an enormous disinformation campaign and succeeded by getting their chosen candidate elected.

But in the US, Russia also has waged enormous disinformation campaigns on US-based social media networks. Taking the problem of foreign (dis|mis)information, election interference, etc seriously requires that we do more than ban one network based on the ownership of that company. After TikTok gets shut down, Chinese influence operations can still use Twitter/X, Meta, Reddit etc. We need better tools and regulations to make these campaigns visible stoppable in real-time, rather than just banning one network while leaving up multiple other vulnerable networks. This ban is political theater, where the US can act like it's doing something while not having to address the harder parts of the problem.

> A. They seem to rather abandon the app rather than receive tens of billions by selling it

I think this is weak evidence of them being a mostly political tool. Valuations based on their actual use are well above what anyone has actually offered to pay. And disentangling US operations from the rest of TikTok would not be straight-forward; do you merely cleave it in two? Given network effects, would cutting off the US component to sell it make both the US and non-US portions less valuable?

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/15/tiktoks-us-unit-could-be-wor...

one would think the ranking member on the House Intel Cmte - my very own Rep - would agree with you, given how he'd be way more privy to such things than you, me, talking heads on TV, etc. yet he disagrees and cites free speech concerns [0][1].

in my mind none of these reasons add up. if this were truly about influence ops on social media we would not have blinders on for our own platforms' role in them. remember Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 campaign, or Facebook's role in the Myanmar genocide? or more-recently the ops Israel ran? furthermore if this were really about our data, we would again not have blinders on. the CCP can still purchase our data as we're all up for sale given our lack of data privacy/protection laws.

as such i tend to side with my Rep: this is bunk, and the pretexts flimsy. i believe the answer is to focus on education - critical thought particularly - and enacting data privacy/protection laws. i do not believe that would lead to 1).

now will that happen? i'm doubtful tbh. our own govt loves the fact that we're up for sale, for it allows them to side-step the need for a warrant. have a great weekend.

[0] https://www.ctinsider.com/columnist/article/tiktok-ban-jim-h... [1] https://himes.house.gov/2024/3/himes-statement-on-protecting...

Are we that good already?

Thrilling

Market intervention through administrative measures is never a good thing for any country.

Not sure if sarcastic or not, I'll bite. If tiktok infringes some kind of data privacy laws, punish them. If the data privacy laws of the US are bad, improve them.

But this? Just because some... not so bright soldiers use tiktok to upload videos of their base? What else is there so bad it requires a total ban? It seems like hypocrisy to me, when Meta, Google, X also have similar data available and also don't want to adhere to for example EU laws.

Do you think a Great Firewall of America is a good thing? Because that is what this ruling enables.

It is not banned in Canada

Agreed! You think HN is different?

That will never work. The TikTok audience doesn’t have the attention span to support such long form content.

Yes, the "we have a Tiktok problem" statement is proof of that.

How?

Remember we’re all in a tech bubble here. 99.9% of TikTok users don’t know what sideloading is.

Its a business. With ad and an e-commerce network to support that content. Without that connection, it will die.

china banned US apps like since forever.

>TikTok increasingly has become refuge from censorship occurring on other platforms

do you have a source for this? if anything other platforms are shifting to less editorial control -- see recent announcements by Zucc https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mis...

Yeah this is why I don't like the "tit for tat - they banned facebook, insta, etc." argument.

We're supposed to be better than them, but we stoop to their level.

I think many have tried but face an uphill battle of unless a significant majority is willing to relocate, the prevailing content will be things that are deemed undesirable/bannable on other platforms, which distracts potential users.

Having a completely decentralized solution also comes with the issue of future governance. If a single entity controls the direction (even if the spec is open and you can host it yourself), then it's not decentralized. If you end up with a consortium then you'll face the same issue of email, innovation is hard to spread as you need multiple actors with competing interests to agree.

If your vision is having multiple entities providing different experiences tailored to individual taste, they might start consolidating and effectively forming several disjoint platforms.

p.s.

The web can be said to be decentralized but it's dominated by large players all the way from hosting to browsers. If all three major browsers don't agree on your proposal, it's effectively dead. Who's to say entrenched players won't arise in your vision of a decentralized social media?

You mean PeerTube? Perhaps it could also be combined ith I2P.

Nah, centralized apps have won because mass appeal and market momentum hinges on factors almost entirely other than an app's technical architecture.

> completely anonymized, uncensorable alternative.

So a fountain of child sexual assault material?

just think a tiny bit about why that would be a bad idea

We have that. Welcome to the World Wide Web.

We all walked into the walled gardens and went "ooh, looks mighty nice in here!"

Your concern about losing the dominant culture status is useless. Recent geopolitical situation clearly shows soft power is useless. Hardpower is where everything is at.

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From pure PR perspective, it is a win for China; sometimes it is not about the money. US used to be much smarter those kinds of optics.

You say that as if they only operate in the US. The US represents less than 20% of their user base.

I mean, it was a ban when China did it to Facebook, no?

Yes. TikTok.com is legal as long as it isn’t hosted here.

What's interesting is that RedNote doesn't have the same level of segregation as TikTok, so the US and China users are having a lot of interesting interactions. Assum the app doesn't get banned, it'll be interesting to see if the experiences get more silo'd

> if the end result of this was another several years of congressional drama about a different Chinese app

No need. If it’s Chinese and has more than 100mm (EDIT: 1mm) users, Commerce can designate it a foreign-adversary controlled application and designate it for app-store delisting.

It’s even better than that. “Red Note” is the softened version. A more direct translation is “Little Red Book.”

Isn't Red Note planning to segregate based on IP to prevent US Influence from those TikTok refugees? The original CN users aren't exactly happy with the newcomers either, and the TikTok refugees themselves are getting quite a culture shock with regards to cultural attitudes to LGBQT or even basic "leftist" activism like strikes and collective bargaining

Anyways, those alternatives are not so algorithmically driven, and especially if it's forcing actual user interaction and discussion that certainly would be good for Americans to understand what the mainland Chinese are really thinking and saying domestically. Because if you go to the actual main discussion forums like Weibo, oh boy it's not going to be pretty.

Honest question: why would an American consciously seek out multiple Chinese apps on purpose?

The most literal translation of 小红书 is “Little Red Book”, which recalls the famous book of quotes from Mao Zedong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...

I'm pretty sure it would be more a quick "Add this app to the TikTok court order".

Why would you love that?

Why do you love this?

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It’s a clone being inorganically pushed to fill vacuum.

Apple doesn't have to and doesn't choose to allow alternative app stores outside of the EU.

They've announced that they won't enforce the fines required by the law. But yes, selective enforcement of laws is legal — it's how prosecutorial discretion works.

the law doesn’t ban tiktok it just grants discretion to the president to ban tiktok

The companies still take risk not obeying the law. Most large publicly traded companies will not task the liability risk based on a wink and a nod.

Congress writes the law but the executive enforces the law. They can choose not to enforce the ban.

Do you think Apple, Oracle and Google are going to thumb their noses at the law?

Trump initially championed the ban during his first term

> The legislation allows the president to put a 90 day hold on the ban too.

Only if there is an in-progress divestiture and only before the ban goes into effect.

Aka, TikTok/Biden would have to announce a sale is in process and Biden would have to enact the extension before the 19th.

There seems to be a lot of misinformation around this, no surprise given the TikTok user base..

The law targets other companies that would be breaking the law if they continue providing services for a China-owned TikTok past the ban date. The statute of limitations is five years, past a Trump presidency. No, an executive order can not cancel a law. Google, Apple & co would be exposing themselves to a lot of uncertainty and risk, and for what?

We don't know that the secret evidence was that TT doesn't promote U.S. propaganda. We can surmise, but speculation can be wrong. Besides, the justices might simply have revealed that secret evidence, had it really been just that. But they claim they didn't even consider the secret evidence. Unclear whether they took a peek, but they say they didn't consider it.

One of the few federal powers in the constitution includes "control over foreign commerce". Somehow a Chinese website is now "foreign commerce". China bad.

I think that covers it.

Any country has the right to this kind of ban, that's what national sovereignty is all about.

A different issue is whether doing it is the right decision or not.

And another issue is the hypocrisy. When China did it, the unanimous opinion from the US (both the official stance and what one could hear/read from regular people, e.g. HN comments) was that such bans were authoritarian and evidence that there was no freedom of speech in China. But now suddenly it's a perfectly fine and even obvious/necessary thing to do...

Being neither from China nor from the US, this paints the US (who have benefitted a lot from riding the moral high horse of free market, etc. for decades) in a quite bad light.

Should the EU ban US social networks for pure economic reasons (so we roll our own instead of providing our data and money to US companies, which would almost surely be good for our economy)? The argument for not doing it used to be that freedom should be above domestic interests, one embraces the free market even if some aspects of it are harmful because overall it's a win. But the US is showing it doesn't really believe in that principle, and probably never has.

China bans US businesses because it has an autocratic, ethnocratic government. The US is banning a Chinese business for obvious national security reasons.

So they were right about banning the US social media platforms then, right? Because according to this court opinion, having foreign social media is a menace to national security. It's funny to see Americans argue for a great firewall lol.

I'm not sure about that... They'll surely continue to use buzzwords "freedom","democracy" for their geopolitics seo.

Commenting on your own posts sucks, but let me add:

The current status of insanity is that the US is threatening to invade a EU country by force to annex it to be able to exploit natural resources and gain a strategic military position.

Again, let me repeat, as very clearly a lot of people are now completely numb to insanity and just filter it out:

THE US IS THREATENING TO INVADE A EU COUNTRY. YES. SERIOUSLY.

Was US Headlines for one day, now drowned in other madness already.

Anyway, you won't have any democratic say on this anyway, so let's just gamble:

Jeff Yass will bribe Trump heavily, and Trump will then lift the ban next week, no matter what his Supreme Court sock puppets want.

> I can agree to an extent that TT (and social media in general) is an addictive app and harmful to youth and society in general.

You could say this about Fox News, scratch-off lottery tickets, Cocomelon, or anything you don't like.

As with anywhere, laws are toothless without enforcement.

In some cases, they are enforced ruthlessly on one group of people, and not on others. This is a feature, not a mistake, by the way. Well, a feature for those with power, not normal citizens.

The real question is:

"Does America have justice?"

It's not a recent one either. The issue of select enforcement of our laws has been around as long as I can recall, and before I was born. It's not even unique to the United States.

What I find most upsetting as part of the normal citizenry, is that rather than taking things to court and finding that the laws need changed, they tend to go the route of charges dropped or pardons when the laws affect them.

I would have less of an issue with the rich and powerful folks avoiding prosecution if they at least did it in a precedent setting way for the rest of us.

That's the injustice.

Knowledge of civics among the media is unfortunately not much higher than the average person, which is a real failure considering that they are supposed to be an entire “estate” of democratic society.

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

> but maybe it won’t be a law if one guy decides he doesn’t like it

Are you talking about a presidential veto? What are you saying?

Creating three branches of government that all have to agree that a law should exist (legislative) is constitutional (judicial) and should be enforced (executive) has proven to be an excellent method of keeping bad laws from negatively affecting us. Despite being seemingly simple on the surface, it's created a process a bit longer than what a single Schoolhouse Rock video can teach us, and it's too much for legacy media to handle.

Maybe they only learned from the aforementioned Schoolhouse Rock video, because they seem especially bad at understanding anything outside of the legislative branch. Not only does the legislative branch need to pass a bill into law for it to become a regulation, without objection by the judicial branch to its constitutionality, but the executive branch needs to write that law into a federal regulation, and the legislative branch can reject any new regulation they believe doesn't comply with the law, as can the judicial branch, who can also reject the regulation if it isn't constitutional as written, even if the original law that created it was.

It's no wonder that legacy media's wild misunderstandings of how laws and regulations work only get a small snippet of time, between their more entertaining and feel-good stories that drive viewership and revenue.

Fortunately we are no longer stuck with just legacy media, so I recommend finding a news source that actually knows what they are talking about. I've found the best bet is to get news from outlets and aggregators that specialize in a specific topic, shielding them from the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, and forcing them to publish news that is actually correct.

This is why I come to Hacker News for my tech news aggregation. For political news, my favorite so far has been The Hill, especially for videos like their Daily Brief and Rising videos published on YouTube. I'm open to more, so if anyone has any recommendations, let me know.

This is just checks-and-balances at work, is it not? It’s by design.

“I was proud to join 352 of my Republican and Democrat colleagues and pass H.R. 7521 today. CCP-controlled TikTok is an enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”[1]

[1] https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-mcca...

U.S. national security: "mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions"

And give me a break on "young Americans’ mental health".

This bill was about pro-Palestine content ... "being mobilized by CCP" and was harming young people's health.

The fact that none of this was put forward by the lawyers makes me think the tiktok lawyers were incompetent.

Wait until you hear about how one ordinary guy on a jury can nullify a whole law. Our system is geared to err towards enforcing fewer laws.

Both Biden and Trump have said that they will not enforce this law. So not just "one guy", but two :)

Any parent (and even us non-parents who've spent a lot of time around kids) know that the best way to get teenagers to stop doing something, is to start doing it yourself. If you forbid them to do something, it's basically inviting them to try their hardest to do it anyways.

Under a million kids moving over to RedNote for a week or 2 means nothing. There is no whack a mole. Tiktok algo is the sauce, nothing else has the sauce. People enjoyed the sauce.

The big one is called RedNote, and it's actually fairly well done.

The Red Note nonsense is just a meme, somewhat fittingly. First, because the only place you see coverage of all the "kids flocking" is... on TikTok itself. It's always a red (heh) flag when your source for big important events comes only from the affected parties.

But secondly because Red Note is subject to exactly the same regulation as TikTok, for exactly the same reason. There's no protection or loophole there, this app is just a district court injunction away from a ban too. Literally no one cares, they just love to meme.

https://www.xiaohongshu.com

Can confirm. I had no idea about RedNote till my 18yo niece sent me a link to download it.

It isn't really whack-a-mole though, because despite the media coverage there is no "TikTok ban bill." Instead it's a "Hostile nation can't own majority stakes in media companies in the US" bill, and this SCOTUS ruling sets the precedent that can be enforced on as many entities as required.

On a more amusing note the Chinese did NOT expect a bunch of Americans to show up on RedNote, and they're not thrilled so far. It seems that sharing details of how to organize labor unions, protest against your government, 3D print weapons, and so on wasn't what they were hoping for either. There's allegedly talk of them siloing off the new joins from abroad.

I think it's a troubling sign that American cultural decline is much broader and deeper than Trumpism.

US should ban the Internet. Lets have huge LAN parties in every country instead!

Come on, we are Communist China

don't be like us

> but even the fact that this could have become a thing

So you're upset that the Biden admin attempted to sway the court with secret evidence. But any admin always could behave in that way, and nothing you can do can stop that. The fact that the court decided to ignore that secret evidence should be comforting. Sure, nothing forces the court in the future to stick to that, but this is always true as to everything.

Look at what foreign adversaries are already actively doing: working to turn Americans against each other. Social media is the perfect tool to spread discord. Russia has troll farms that create fake news stories, manipulated photos, and incendiary memes targeted at both sides of the political spectrum. They've even orchestrated in-person protests and counter-protests to those protests, though those efforts have been less successful. Now imagine that instead of merely using fake user accounts to this end, an adversary controlled an entire social network, including its algorithm and its content guidelines and could tailor manipulative content on an individual basis.

US Govt has a lot more limited say on what content is pushed or neutered.

Content relating to the genocide happening in Palestine for example, is much more restricted on US sites.

My representatives represent me, my country, its citizens and its government. They specifically do NOT represent foreign entities.

They have been wondering about that for many years quite explicitly.

Officials at the EU should first wonder why there is no European equivalent of Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Tiktok (the list could continue forever).

Even if it where, such a company would not find the same obstacles in entering the American market as in would in China.

An EU controlled app would be allowed in the US as none of them are foreign adversaries.

Yup I'd be ok with banning TikTok because all of the US web services that are banned China, but this makes it seem like every country should have their own everything

Maybe they'll cite this ruling as part of a reconsideration?

Exactly, Americans want to voice their opinions whenever a foreign country considers banning or regulating an American social media platform. It's a clear double standard. The U.S. government banning foreign companies is fine, but when a foreign country bans an American company, it’s called censorship or something like that?

Popular sites come and go. It has admittedly been a few years since we had a big shakeup of where people go to doomscroll, but this is not a paradigm shift -- it is just a chance to see who picks up the slack. It is mildly interesting speculating on whether an existing site will absorb it or if something new will come along. And it is possible TikTok will just keep running. But either way, people gonna make content, people gonna consume content.

This is always the risk of building your castle on someone else's land (or cloud).

It's insulting to compare libraries to TikTok.

TikTok isn't going away and the content isn't going away. It's just not accessible in the US.

a lot of chronic illness sub communities are bad and would be good to lose, just like cryptic pregnancy fb etc - they trigger latent mental illness in people

We have an archiving institution for stuff like that. Relying on a private business to maintain a catalogue is nonsense.

Is no one downloading the best content?

I download all my favorite YouTube videos because inevitably some disappear.

There are plenty of other places they can upload that content.

Nothing will be lost. It will be trivial to access this content, obviously. The internet has gotten extremely adept at routing around censorship.

All of these points apply to YouTube, which has arguably higher quality content on all of those things.

And for every video of quality on the platform, there's one that's blatant political propaganda, one that's blatant conspiratorial misinformation, one that's sexualizing children, etc.

It's a mixed bag. It has no more to offer than any other social network. Less, some might argue, because of how easy it is to crosspost to the other video networks.

The only way this is different from the loss of other social networks, Vine most closely, is the government is shutting down the site and collapsing the ecosystem rather than private equity.

We also risk losing so much utter nonsense and false information that I'm not at all worried. You want to learn history and science? Buy some (vetted) history and science books.

The number of times I had to correct my step-son when he repeated something he "learned" on TikTok is disturbing.

Unimportant example: He "learned" from a TikTok video that the commonly repeated command of "Open sesame!" is actually "Open says me!". That's not true, and all you have to do is read the story "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" to know that the story actually hinges on the fact that the secret word is the name of a grain/plant.

Another example: He "learned" that the video game character, Mario, is not saying "It's a me, Mario!" with an Italian accent. He "learned" that he is actually saying some Japanese word, like "Itsumi Mario!".

One more: He "learned" that "scientists" now think that "we" originally put the T-Rex fossils together incorrectly and that the animal's arm bones are actually backwards, and should be reversed to reveal that the T-Rex actually had little chicken wings instead of small arms. Anybody who has seen how bone sockets fit together knows that's nonsense.

Forgetting the political theory and morality of the ban, I say good riddance to the constant firehose of bullshit and lying morons on that app.

No one is deleting data. You just can't run the app in the US anymore. If someone cares to archive this junk, they can just do it from Australia or wherever.

You honestly believe most of that hasn't already be re-uploaded to other platforms and more of it won't be re-uploaded over the next month?

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Facebook / Meta are not controlled by a foreign adversary as designated by the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". Thus they cannot become subject to the distribution restrictions designated by that law.

The core factor in the law is control by a foreign adversary, it's not a law that outlaws data collection.