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US House passes bill to ban TikTok if owners won't divest

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Re: US House passes bill to ban TikTok if owners won't divest

#21

Post by NickC25 »

_akhe wrote: post #10
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #2

Not always a popular sentiment, but I don't really mind treating a country's companies as that country treats ours. I know this TikTok issue is far more nuanced (who the backers/owners are, how data is treated etc) of course.

China bans sites & apps from the West that violate their laws - the ad tracking, monitoring, censorship & influencer/fake news we have here... the funding schemes and market monopolizing that companies like Facebook do in the West is just not legal there. Can you blame them for not wanting it? Companies that don't violate Chinese laws and approach China with realistic deals are allowed to operate there - you can play…

Disclaimer: I worked for, and helped start, a company that contracted with Tsinghua University. The list of demands they had was....well, enormous. We couldn't even say that we were our own company, whenever we faced a client within Tsinghua, we had to tell them that we were an operation owned and run by Tsinghua. Why? Because we weren't Chinese.

>* Can you blame them for not wanting it?*

No, I don't blame them at all. I applaud it, considering the fact that I find modern social media to be cancerous and dumb.

>you can play WoW in China because unlike Facebook it's not involved in censorship, severe privacy violations etc. and Blizzard actually worked with China (NetEase)

You're omitting details. Blizzard didn't "work with" NetEase, they basically gave them the IP and ability to sell the game in China as well as ownership of all servers that host Chinese players. Microsoft did the same thing with their Office suite and Azure cloud services....because they aren't allowed to independently operate in China.

BTW as much as you think it's a private company, NetEase is an arm of the Chinese government.

>The West just wants to counter-block Chinese apps like TikTok in retaliation for them upholding their own rule of law.

Not quite. China is extremely protectionist of their own homegrown companies. They don't allow foreign competition. This creates an uneven playing field. The west simply wants to play by those rules, too.

Re: US House passes bill to ban TikTok if owners won't divest

#22

Post by scotty79 »

wcunning wrote: post #16
_akhe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China bans sites & apps from the West that violate their laws - the ad tracking, monitoring, censorship & influencer/fake news we have here... the funding schemes and market monopolizing that companies like Facebook do in the West is just not legal there. Can you blame them for not wanting it? Companies that don't violate Chinese laws and approach China with realistic deals are allowed to operate there - you can play…

They also ban TikTok -- the Chinese version doesn't push the type of content TikTok does and doesn't mix international user data into the local version. Notably, several other countries with mediocre relationships with China also ban TikTok, for example India.

Maybe that type of content is illegal in China but not it the US?

Re: US House passes bill to ban TikTok if owners won't divest

#24

Post by jncfhnb »

jnovek wrote: post #6

I’m not comfortable with this. I understand that TikTok may represent a national security concern but it’s also a platform that younger generations use for protected speech. What’s the message that we’re sending to this group?

The message is that the us government does not want your protected speech moderated, curated, and amplified according to the whims of a hostile foreign nation

Re: US House passes bill to ban TikTok if owners won't divest

#25

Post by jkestner »

Johnny555 wrote: post #8
jnovek wrote: post #6

I’m not comfortable with this. I understand that TikTok may represent a national security concern but it’s also a platform that younger generations use for protected speech. What’s the message that we’re sending to this group?

I think the message is: "The government only wants your personal data harvested by American companies so they can monitor that data"

That's the problem I have with this, that Congress is banning a company instead of the practice they're supposedly worried about. But how else is the FBI supposed to spy on us? I mean, besides the renewed and expanded FISA Section 702, and also illegally.

Re: US House passes bill to ban TikTok if owners won't divest

#26

Post by usrnm »

NickC25 wrote: post #14
Johnny555 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the message is: "The government only wants your personal data harvested by American companies so they can monitor that data"

I think the message actually is "The government only wants your personal data harvested by companies that aren't run by an enterprise operated by actors from a hostile foreign government which itself is hellbent on taking America's place in the global economic and soft power hierarchy"

So competition is suddenly a bad thing when you're losing? Okay

Re: US House passes bill to ban TikTok if owners won't divest

#27

Post by api »

Mindless2112 wrote: post #3
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #2

Not always a popular sentiment, but I don't really mind treating a country's companies as that country treats ours. I know this TikTok issue is far more nuanced (who the backers/owners are, how data is treated etc) of course.

You don't even have to go that far. TikTok isn't available in China. (There's a Chinese app that's similar, but it isn't TikTok.)

They realize that engagement farming not-actually-social media is toxic brain rot.

Re: US House passes bill to ban TikTok if owners won't divest

#28

Post by celdon25 »

_akhe wrote: post #10
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #2

Not always a popular sentiment, but I don't really mind treating a country's companies as that country treats ours. I know this TikTok issue is far more nuanced (who the backers/owners are, how data is treated etc) of course.

China bans sites & apps from the West that violate their laws - the ad tracking, monitoring, censorship & influencer/fake news we have here... the funding schemes and market monopolizing that companies like Facebook do in the West is just not legal there. Can you blame them for not wanting it? Companies that don't violate Chinese laws and approach China with realistic deals are allowed to operate there - you can play…

> unlike Facebook it's not involved in censorship

I guess you don’t know about the “F word and SH word” incident with the blizzard GM and the pro player getting banned from overwatch 2 for swearing and appeal rejected despite the words being filtered by a profanity filter that defaults to enabled.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/blizzard-confi...

Re: US House passes bill to ban TikTok if owners won't divest

#29

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #18
SpaghettiCthulu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China recently forced Apple to remove Signal from the App Store. What reasonable Chinese law did that app violate?

You added the word "reasonable" because you knew it was a bad argument and you wanted to find a way to make it subjective. You prefer to argue about what you think is reasonable.

[deleted]

Re: US House passes bill to ban TikTok if owners won't divest

#30

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

mindslight wrote: post #20
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #2

Not always a popular sentiment, but I don't really mind treating a country's companies as that country treats ours. I know this TikTok issue is far more nuanced (who the backers/owners are, how data is treated etc) of course.

I don't really mind that per se. What I do mind is the government letting domestic companies run roughshod over the population with surveillance/influence for the past few decades, and then when a significant enough foreign company finally does it, focusing on that foreign company while continuing to ignore the longstanding deeper problem. Rather than focusing on TikTok, how about a general solution of a US GDPR plus…

> how about a general solution of a US GDPR plus anti-trust enforcement

I'd agree if such a solution was also being considered and would take the same amount of time. How long do you think it would take to write and pass such a bill? I think it would take so long to be essentially a useless diversion. It's an idea that people would push who never want any of these changes because it sounds like a viable alternative but it's impossible in practice.

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