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The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

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Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#211

Post by rdevsrex »

pjc50 wrote: post #56
darkteflon wrote: post #12

Utterly ridiculous to allow TikTok to continue to operate in the current geopolitical climate. China is a surveillance autocracy and has been engaged in adversarial conduct against the West for years - including extensive psyops. Shut it down, yesterday. Build a local clone so that people can get their fix or whatever. China sure as shit doesn’t allow its citizens to cough up their personal information for algorithmi…

sigh can we not have targeted-by-nationality bans and instead have .. rules? If Tiktok the app is performing surveillance, ban surveillance by apps . All of them. Or make it technically impossible to escape its little sandbox, and let people have their entertainment.

Not nationality, nation states that are known bad actors.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#212

Post by xadhominemx »

CyanBird wrote: post #108
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surveillance isn't the primary issue. INFLUENCE OPERATIONS is. China's ability to direct content to achieve their strategic goals, and to do so at a very granular level, is too great a risk. Its not the only property with this capability (cough, 4chan/pol/, cough), but its by far the largest.

> China's Tiktok is not China, Tiktok is owned by a private company All the arguments that you are using can be successful leveraged against any Inqtel funded private company (of which there are plenty), so I'd recommend you to speak in a measured way

Absolutely not. China is an authoritarian state with no rule of law other than what the CCP says goes. There are no meaningful firewalls between corporate operations and the Chinese government.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#213

Post by computerfriend »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #18
Reason077 wrote: post #2

Besides the obvious concerns about tracking/spying, TikTok has great potential as a propaganda tool to gain subtle influence over America's youth. For example, its algorithm could be tweaked to elevate content that is favourable to the Chinese Communist Party.

TikTok can't do anything worse than domestic advertising/marketing firms already do. The idea that the CCP wants American youth for any purpose that doesn't already align with American businesses--who depend on the slave-labor priced cheap stuff from China to sell to them--is ridiculous.

> TikTok can't do anything worse than domestic advertising/marketing firms already do.

Can't it?

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#214

Post by bruckie »

p0pcult wrote: post #165
deeblering4 wrote: post #153

TikTok as-is presents a massive attack surface for (d|m)information and worse. And the version available in the US is highly addictive with numerous bubble creating feedback loops. The amount of engagement and time spent on the app is incredible. The creators know this and provide an alternate version called Douyin used domestically which optimizes for educational content and has additional rules/safeguards https://w…

Compelling news story, but is there a less-tabloid source? In my cursory Googling, I haven't been able to find anything. Murdoch-owned media is pretty low in my trustworthiness/objectivity rankings.

Was the original edited? It currently points to BBC, which is not Murdoch-owned.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#215

Post by solardev »

pjc50 wrote: post #187
solardev wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China isn't going to listen to your rules. Ban whatever you want, Chinese companies don't have to comply, and don't have to tell you when they're not complying... Unless you audit every foreign app's source code and sign its binaries, those laws are meaningless. And if you do that you're really just swapping foreign advertising for domestic wiretapping. shrug Lose-lose.

> Unless you audit every app's source code and sign its binaries Isn't that called "an app store"? Good luck getting non-signed binaries on an iPhone. My point is that if TikTok is somehow able to escape its sandbox and perform surveillance, that's a fault in the sandbox, and there should be a general process for handling this otherwise you just have to deal with the next week's app "TokTik".

There's not really a process for monitoring what happens on an internet-connected app's backend.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#216

Post by gsk22 »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #132
uniqueuid wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument makes no sense, because we do not want to mirror other countries. Instead, there are substantial arguments about freedom of speech and accountability. Even though they are messy, they are what we need to apply here because they are a legally binding framework that we built over decades. By the way, I found Levitski and Ziblatt's book "How Democracies Die" [1] a pretty good treatment of these issues of b…

How does freedom of speech or more specifically the first amendment apply to a foreign owned and operated platform? If you reframed it as something else would it be different in your mind? Say, you had a foreign news service that employed American citizens to read news that was perhaps even sourced in part from American reporters but they editorialized it so that it always favored their side and belittled the America…

Sounds like you're describing RT America, which operated unimpeded until fiscal realities forced it to withdraw from the country. Was it a scummy network? Yes. Was it protected by 1A? Also yes.

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#217

Post by [deleted] »

kube-system wrote: post #185
jasonlotito wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China isn't going to listen to your rules And then they are banned. Not because they are China or TikTok, but because they break specific rules we hold everyone to.

Espionage is covert by definition, and is already illegal. Spies break foreign laws as a part of their job description, and yet, they still exist.

[deleted]

Re: The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

#220

Post by mountainb »

uniqueuid wrote: post #61
karp773 wrote: post #20

The very fact that not a single western social network is permitted to operate in China is a sufficient reason to ban TikTok in America.

That argument makes no sense, because we do not want to mirror other countries. Instead, there are substantial arguments about freedom of speech and accountability. Even though they are messy, they are what we need to apply here because they are a legally binding framework that we built over decades. By the way, I found Levitski and Ziblatt's book "How Democracies Die" [1] a pretty good treatment of these issues of b…

Not really... you are out in left field here. The fundamental rule of international trade regulation is reciprocity within classes of goods and services. It flies in the face of basic WTO principles to allow one partner to ban a whole host of services without reciprocal penalties. In practice, this sort of reciprocity gets broken all the time, but it doesn't make sense to say "we don't want to mirror other countries" when in trade policy, mirroring is a basic mandate of the WTO framework.
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