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A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

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Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#91

Post by rdlecler1 »

Clubber wrote: post #66
glimshe wrote: post #62

Let me rephrase this as what will probably happen: the TikTok ban will be barely felt and will likely add to the American Economy as competitors that aren't tied to China appear. And if TikTok can't be perfectly emulated, it will actually increase the productivity of Americans who are now being held captive by a foreign-controlled algorithm which is fine-tuned to exploit physiological weaknesses.

Adam Curry theorized on his podcast a few years ago that the TikTok ban chatter was a protectionist move to help Facebook, Twitter and other US social media companies.

Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen because the US wouldn’t allow a foreigner own a major media company. This is 100,000x worse.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#93

Post by ramblenode »

glimshe wrote: post #62

Let me rephrase this as what will probably happen: the TikTok ban will be barely felt and will likely add to the American Economy as competitors that aren't tied to China appear. And if TikTok can't be perfectly emulated, it will actually increase the productivity of Americans who are now being held captive by a foreign-controlled algorithm which is fine-tuned to exploit physiological weaknesses.

Why not also ban Instagram? Its algorithm is not categorically less harmful than TikTok's. And its parent company has been known to sell Americans' data to foreign brokers and intelligence analysts.

What many of us who opposed this ban are frustrated about is that there are major underlying problems with all large social media companies, and the "foreign adversary" angle gives these companies cover to keep abusing their users just because they happen to be incorporated in the right country.

Most of the TikTok concerns could have been subsumed in a user-rights bill that prevented data from being shared with third parties and limited the scope of what an algo-feed could do under Section 230's safe harbor. Of course, this would have required some real legislating that would have upset some very large donors, so we get the "foreign adversary" bill instead.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#94

Post by Modified3019 »

FredPret wrote: post #77
alephnerd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trump started it It was the OPM breach [0] and the brutal eradication of the CIA network within China [1] that tipped the scales Mutual US-China espionage has been common for decades, but these two actions were a step too far. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme... [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932012_killing_of...

I did not know about [0]. All I heard from up here in Canada was when Trump starting saying "China" a lot.

And it wasn’t just the CIA roundup, it was in multiple political/economic/military domains around 2012 that China started making clear their decision to suddenly reverse what had been decades of putting in a ton of effort and money into embracing the west. This caught many by surprise because the behavior seems bizarre from a western point of view. Instead China became increasingly aggressive to it’s neighbors and started using the west as adversaries to try to fan the flames of its version of nationalism, in order to distract from their many home issues.

There was a reluctantly growing recognition of this, but Trump finally forced the public recognition of the issue in his characteristic camera grabbing way. Whether his efforts and characterization of the issue where ultimately helpful or harmful… is quite debated. Likewise our current attempts at a response continues to be occasionally questionable.

If you are curious beyond more than this extremely barebones summary, there are a mile of books and days of videos on the topic, though I don’t have any personal recommendations offhand since that isn’t really my wheelhouse, just something I watched build up over the years and start effecting my industry (agriculture).

It’s similar to how Europe had increasingly considered Russia to be moving into their big umbrella despite the occasional murder here and there. Hence the oil pipelines and deals. It took until the second time that Putin made his move on Ukraine before the illusion that Russia was ever a geopolitical friend was finally shattered.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#95

Post by slowmovintarget »

zooq_ai wrote: post #67
glimshe wrote: post #62

Let me rephrase this as what will probably happen: the TikTok ban will be barely felt and will likely add to the American Economy as competitors that aren't tied to China appear. And if TikTok can't be perfectly emulated, it will actually increase the productivity of Americans who are now being held captive by a foreign-controlled algorithm which is fine-tuned to exploit physiological weaknesses.

Why does HN and other Tech elitists treat creator/influencers with disdain that they don't show the same sympathy as they would to other professions?. This is akin to saying "Mom and Shop Retail closes? who cares, the workers can go work at Walmart" "Coal Industry shut down? who cares, they can learn to code" It's not easy for someone to easily rebuild audience from one platform to another or easily transfer the skil…

Your analogies are all wrong. It's sad for people who built their businesses on TikTok, but it's the same tragedy that it would be for those businesses built on a dam that must come down to avoid a larger disaster.

The people who pinned their livelihoods to TikTok are casualties, if and only if TikTok doesn't sell. If the company just shuts down then we'll know two things:

1. The primary reason for its existence was not a profit motive (hence no reason to sell, if China can't get influence powers from it).

2. The commercial facades holding the bag were not the ones calling the shots.

If TikTok is sold to a "friendly" company, we'll know less, but it also means that none of those duped people whose livelihoods you're opining about will be touched.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#96

Post by caeril »

volf_ wrote: post #61
paxys wrote: post #39

Do they think TikTok's user base will disappear overnight? There are a thousand competitors out there, and one of them will fill the gap. There may be a temporary disruption, sure, but that is still better than having a key chunk of the American economy (and young American eyeballs) directly controlled by the CCP.

TikTok has one of the lowest bars to monetization out of all the major social media networks. There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They all have short form video, but TikTok has a lot of fea…

Awful lot of people on "Hacker" News incredibly worried about the livelihoods of people who look pretty and dance for 15 seconds for a living.

Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind. The entire business is social engineering of our brains, en masse, and you should care as much of the livelihoods of these people as you would about an Enron executive, or Madoff or SBF associate.

That said, it doesn't matter who controls the platform. If it gets banned or purchased, the show still goes on, and the world is still worse off for it.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#97

Post by drivingmenuts »

caeril wrote: post #96
volf_ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok has one of the lowest bars to monetization out of all the major social media networks. There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They all have short form video, but TikTok has a lot of fea…

Awful lot of people on "Hacker" News incredibly worried about the livelihoods of people who look pretty and dance for 15 seconds for a living. Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind. The entire business is social engineering of our brains, en masse, and you should care as much of the livelihoods of these p…

I suspect that most people on hacker news, when they say content creator, that’s a stand in for “customer”. Banning TikTok hurts their customers which in turn hurts them by interrupting their flow of income.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#98

Post by jtriangle »

nozzlegear wrote: post #68
jtriangle wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly won't disappear overnight. In fact, they will be very, very upset with those that took their platform away. Millions of upset people, and, if you're worried about the CCP, well, they'll have plenty of time to tell those millions of very upset people anything they'd like. So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people…

Is your argument that we shouldn’t ban TikTok because the CCP can manipulate upset users? Isn’t that one of the reasons we’re banning it in the first place?

No, not making an argument, just a comment that, if you're worried about the CCP data mining US users, banning tiktok is a bad way to fix that problem.

Realistically, this falls under the "solving a human problem with tech", which is to say, it's not going to work. What you need to do is to educate the users. The problem is, the USGOV is data mining US users, and, if they were to educate users on how to avoid CCP data mining, they'd also defacto be educating them on how to avoid domestic data mining as well. Of course, that would be a net-positive for society as a whole, it'll just never happen. They could also pass comprehensive user privacy protections, which, they won't do for similar reasons.

What you're really seeing play out here, is USGOV/CCP incentives matching, and the USGOV having a hard time navigating this legally because we do have at least some protection against massive unilateral government actions, whereas China has nothing of the sort.

You're free to think about data mining, narrative shaping, etc, any way you'd like. I know many think that it's nbd, many think that only the CCP doing it is bad because the USGOV is a force for good, many think that the CCP doing it is ok but the USGOV doing it is bad.

I really do think that if you think the CCP is bad, and tiktok is used by them somehow, directly going after tiktok is a very bad idea that'll likely result in a lost court case and tiktok being a permanent fixture, along with any other app in a similar situation, because calling China a foreign adversary is, well, extremely hard to prove in court, no matter how true it is. Doing nothing would be better, and, if something must be done, teaching people what they're dealing with is the best option, even at the expense of a loss of domestic capabilities.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#99

Post by jtriangle »

fragsworth wrote: post #88
ok123456 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the TikTok ban will be barely felt Banning TikTok will cause an entire generation of Americans to lose all trust in their institutions. Whatever vanishingly small influence China may or may not have through TikTok---still completely unproven innuendo---pales compared to the absolute public relations coup that would win were it banned. If you think cynicism is bad now, there will be zero trust in the democratic proc…

You're way overdramatizing this. Tiktok has already been banned in several countries (like India) for similar reasons and without any of the catastrophe you're suggesting. People can and will switch platforms, it's not that big of a deal...

You, and those in charge of writing and voting for this legislation, massively under-estimate the popularity of tiktok in the US among normal people, ie, normal people who aren't normally subject to the government banning something they enjoy.

It's one thing to ban menthol cigarettes, most people don't smoke. Most people use tiktok, it's probably similarly addicting, and they're going to cut them off cold-turkey. It's not going to go well, and they're going to burn what little good will the government has in the eyes of people under 40.

It'd be a completely different story if they were doing what should have been done a decade ago, and regulated data collection out of existence with this bill, which would actually be to the benefit of everyone that's not Meta/Snap/X/Alphabet.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#100

Post by jtriangle »

ok123456 wrote: post #69
glimshe wrote: post #62

Let me rephrase this as what will probably happen: the TikTok ban will be barely felt and will likely add to the American Economy as competitors that aren't tied to China appear. And if TikTok can't be perfectly emulated, it will actually increase the productivity of Americans who are now being held captive by a foreign-controlled algorithm which is fine-tuned to exploit physiological weaknesses.

Why have all the TikTok competitors launched by US social media companies been total flops, then?

Because their algo is really, really good. Scary good. And it had a ridiculous amount of money funding the marketing machine behind it to onboard users.

US startups don't have access to that kind of capital, and even if their algo is better than tiktok, users make or break it, so they can't really get off the ground.

I'd say the closest idea is snapchat, and, that was/is massively hampered by the semi-slimy reputation it has. Sure it's profitable, but, had it never been used to send lewd images among college kids, it could very well have been as big as tiktok.

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