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House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

nytimes.com

161–170 of 1001 posts

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns? Because we are not China and our institutions are built on presumption of freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. If we start emulating China, we will become China. Our institutions are supposed to be robust enough to handle local and foreign propaganda and if they are not, then censorship is certainly not a solution that w…

US Citizens still have the same freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. Those rights don't extend to foreign adversaries. If you want to relay Chinese or Russian or Ukrainian or Israeli or Hamas propaganda, you are completely free to do it, without censorship. Limiting the ability of any of those countries to project it within the US is reasonable stance.

You're limiting the information US Citizens can get from the outside world - therefore you are limiting their freedom of thought and access to information.

I think it's a dangerous road to go down, the US is already extremely inwards facing and suffers from not knowing much about the outside world. I've had hundreds of US Citizens talk to me face to face who don't know what language we speak in Australia, don't know we use different money, not know the seasons are backwards, not know it's a 15 hour flight, not know we don't have a president, etc. etc. (this list is endless). US Citizens are not very well educated about how things work in other countries, clearly to their own detriment.

Just yesterday I was talking to a friend in the US saying my friend has 18 months fully paid maternity leave and he almost fell over. His wife got 10 weeks. Many countries do things better than the US, and it's dangerous to limit US Citizens learning about that, else they will have no notion things can be (and are) better elsewhere, and should be improved.

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at it is the fact that China does not let American social media in its market. Why should America give China access to it's markets when that's not reciprocated?

TikTok is banned in China.

But ByteDance, TikTok's owner, operates it's own analogous app in China, Douyin

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#163
It really is a shame, in my opinion, that this is how the US has decided to deal with this issue. I understand how TikTok is a propaganda threat, but also see how Facebook, Twitter/X, or most any other social media is susceptible to that same manipulation. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to legislate the threat away effectively.

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#166

Don't be fooled by talk about security or privacy. This is simple Nation State realpolitik. TikTok is a propaganda threat controlled by a non-friendly state to the US. Any other way to look at this is naive.

Is there any evidence it's been used for propaganda? I don't use TikTok a lot, but it seems very non-political (maybe it's my filter bubble). The real cesspool of hatred and madness is Facebook - but of course Congress doesn't care too much about that. As far as I remember from the previous elections the Russian bots were operating on US based platforms

non-political is political. Do you imagine that there aren't people making political TikToks? Or that non-political themes don't affect politics? Or that bubble control doesn't affect politics?

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#167

Don't be fooled by talk about security or privacy. This is simple Nation State realpolitik. TikTok is a propaganda threat controlled by a non-friendly state to the US. Any other way to look at this is naive.

What's your point? China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns? "The supreme art of war is to defeat the enemy without fighting", e.g. to undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions, to gain the ability to compromise our critical infrastructure, and to influence our…

>> China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?

Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.

>> undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions

It seems like Americans did a pretty good job of this themselves at the last election cycle. A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result. How much worse can TikTok make things?

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#168
post #82

I'm going to ask an intentionally stupid question. TikTok is largely just kids dancing and other innocuous videos, even if Bytedance is sucking up all that data and sending it back to the CCP, how does that constitute a national security threat?

Kids dancing, kids talking about how Osama bin Laden was right, propaganda about ongoing wars, ...

All protected viewpoints whether we agree with them or not.

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free trade should go both ways. It's ridiculous to let Chinese apps and websites operate in the West when China blocks so many Western sites and apps: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...

The basic benefits of free trade (based on comparative advantage) do not require both parties to engage in it They make a superior dancing video app, so then engineers in silicon valley can go work on something else instead

The point is that they get to access the Western market with their dancing video app, but Westerners aren't allowed to access their market with the apps they make. That gives those Chinese companies an unfair advantage in potential market reach.

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#170

Don't be fooled by talk about security or privacy. This is simple Nation State realpolitik. TikTok is a propaganda threat controlled by a non-friendly state to the US. Any other way to look at this is naive.

Another way to look at it is the fact that China does not let American social media in its market. Why should America give China access to it's markets when that's not reciprocated?

Americans claim to value open access to information. We could go even further and implement a copy of the great firewall of China, but should we?
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