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TikTok’s Poison Pill

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Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#341

Post by aeternum »

neves wrote: post #318
danaris wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what the GP was referring to, but... There are some serious concerns about bottled water in the US, particularly with how the manufacturers (like Nestlé) often get the water for free or at preferential rates, then sell it with a huge markup, and how some of it is (from what I've read) sourced from places like California, which need the water very badly. There are also very serious concerns about Nestlé in pa…

Nestlé also is famous for exausting the natural resources.

Natural resources should be owned by the government and rented to the highest bidder.

It's kinda crazy that we do this with wireless spectrum but not with resources like water, oil, gas, etc.

Even land should probably work like this. Rather than a property tax, you pay a yearly rent on the land, afterall the US gov is spending quite a bit to protect it from forceful seizure by other nations.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#342

Post by Animats »

"Poison pill" is the wrong phrase here. That has a different meaning.

TikTok is not a social network. It's a short-form Youtube competitor. It's an entertainment system.

China has WeChat, which is much closer to Facebook in style. It's mobile-first, which turned out to be a good decision. It handles messaging, shopping, ads, banking... It's a closed replacement for the Web. TikTok is mostly push, for timepass (a useful term from India), and WeChat is mostly pull, for doing stuff. Users have both, and they don't compete much.

Facebook is trying to be both, and is now doing both badly.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#343

Post by crakhamster01 »

angio wrote: post #133
partiallypro wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this detracts from concerns about Tiktok and the CCP though. Just as Microsoft funding anti-Google pieces doesn't detract from Google's near monopoly status in online advertising. Competitors do that all the time, you can't let that be a distraction from what the underlying problems are.

Most of these articles single out TikTok when they apply to all big tech companies. Clearly the call should be for better privacy protection laws that protect all citizens from all present and future tech companies.

As engineers, it often feels like enforcing one policy regardless of the actor is the best solution, but I think it breaks down in practice.

For example, imagine if your email password was given out to two individuals - one is your significant other, and the other is a random dude on the internet. In theory, good password hygiene should be maintained no matter who the individual is. In practice I would be (and should be) vastly more worried about this random dude than my partner.

Trying to figure out a generalized solution for big tech may prove to be too hard, and is frankly a waste of time when there's a credible geopolitical threat on our doorstep.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#344

Post by 8note »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #101
withinboredom wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said they elect their leaders democratically which is simply not true no matter how you want to phrase it. The president is elected by an electoral college and not a democratic vote.

But the electoral college ultimately derives its members from people who are voted on by the general electorate. The electoral college is an abstraction so that the states in the United States are able to have a check and balance on federal power. Having a direct democracy of 300 million people would be a bad idea, a lot of political philosophy has been written on why. If you build on a library that builds on library…

Every country is ultimately derived by its people though.

Rather than a boolean, democratic is better understood as a numeric value.

"How democratic are you?" not "are you democratic?"

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#345

Post by 8note »

partiallypro wrote: post #112
fxtentacle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

This is like saying the US had segregation and internment camps in the 40s, so it had no moral standing on the USSR and Nazi Germany committing genocide. Which would be complete nonsense.

if youre going to make that comparison, its worth noting that the nazis did draw their inspiration from America.

For a long drawn out analysis: https://youtu.be/R1gcipAvplY

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#346

Post by 8note »

vorpalhex wrote: post #246
angio wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically US companies are allowed in China as long as they follow the local regulations (which probably involves following Chinese National Security Letters etc). What OP proposes and the EU is doing is to allow anyone in the market as long as they follow strong privacy laws. Existing apps can defend themselves in court and only get banned after a sentence from a judge.

The specific regulation is having a Chinese Communist Party member on the board and having the owner be a Chinese citizen.

The second requirement in that definitionally excludes american owned companies, other than dual citizens

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#347

Post by MichaelCollins »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #304
MichaelCollins wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other platform owners are bad, I don’t need them to be equal to China before doing something about it. I agree. But by the same token, we don't need to do something about the others before doing something about TikTok. Where would we be today if we accepted the argument that before addressing tobacco companies we must first address alcohol companies, and before addressing alcohol companies, we must first address to…

> ... before addressing tobacco companies we must first address alcohol companies > Arguing that X shouldn't be regulated because Y is not yet regulated is never a legitimate argument. Either you've got the question wrong, or your position is more disagreeable than you think. It seems to me that the question is whether Chinese X should be regulated when American X is not regulated. It is still technically X vs Y but…

The problem with "not X until Y" arguments against regulation is you can swap the Y and X around depending on the context of the conversation and use this to disingenuously argue against all regulation while pretending you're only interested in fairness.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#348

Post by llbeansandrice »

harvey9 wrote: post #154
account42 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a "narrative" to describe western nations as corrupt. All you need to do is look at wealth inequality over time: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Wealth_i...

You push a narrative by including 'western' there. Non western nations also have tremendous wealth inequality.

You are also pushing a narrative. You can't ignore the basis of the hypocrisy of the west: the west purports to be better. You aren't just not doing better than the comment above, you're doing worse.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#349

Post by nonrandomstring »

xtian wrote: post #146
nonrandomstring wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just make one rule for all. This is the correct solution of winning the moral high ground. What Russia has been doing for several decades (see Yuri Bezmenov [1]) is leveraging the "west's" inner discontent. Every time a Watergate or Snowden happens it's a gift to them. It exposes our 'hypocrisy', and failure to live up to our own democratic standards. That fuels the narrative of the western nations as corrupt. We'r…

How do you know that pointing out the ‘hypocrisy’ is the propaganda rather than the idea that these values as commonly understood have any basis in reality in the first place?

I think that's a fair objection. I don't know. But my lived experience in a family who have sacrificed a lot on the alter of democratic values leaves me with a strong bias for which I make no apologies.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#350

Post by greenthrow »

nixcraft wrote: post #5

There is lots of talk going around TikTok, especially now geopolitics has been added to this kind of discussion due to ongoing tensions between two giants. Instead of banning or removing the TikTok app, how about the US government put a firm privacy policy that forbids TikTok, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co from collecting excessive data on users? That would be a better solution, IMHO. Let users download…

How on earth would you enforce such a law on a company headquartered in China?
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