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Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

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Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#781

Post by arduanika »

alcoholic_byte wrote: post #631
georgeecollins wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China. You can't own a broadcast station in the US as a non-US citizen. Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen to buy Fox. I don't know if I agree with this but you can't say there is no precedent for it in the US or in China.

I think, also with respect to the comments to this comment, we need to appreciate the minute nature of this scenario and statement. Journalists and your everyone else enjoys free speech, it must not be curtailed, neither must it be fostered. While companies as a disembodied judicial entity cannot have speech in the same sense as people of flesh and blood, they can, simply based on their properties, act as an amplifie…

Good, nuanced analysis.

Also, it's nice to see a bipartisan bill in the national interest. There used to be a saying, "politics stops at the water's edge." Every so often we remember that.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#782

Post by coin »

benced wrote: post #615

The WTO allows China to ban American social networks - which would otherwise be required to be allowed under its general principle of parity - because of its "public morals" exception ( https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/repertory_e/g4_... ). I personally don't think that exception should exist and I'm OK banning it solely on trade parity grounds.

Furthermore, TikTok itself is banned in China. The counterpart in China is Douyin, which has limitation for minors, like mandatory STEM videos and limited hours during school days.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#783

Post by asadotzler »

mjfl wrote: post #551

The problem with the logic, that a geopolitical adversary shouldn't control a social media company, is that our domestic political system has, as of late, acted quite adversarial to its own population. For that reason, it's not clear to me if China is really a foreign enemy, or an enemy of an enemy. For now, I and many of the younger generation clearly consider it to be the latter, and I will resist all efforts of th…

You can vote out your own representatives, you cannot do the same for China. If this isn't an obvious distinction to you, maybe consider why.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#784

Post by nimih »

codelord wrote: post #767

If you are on TikTok and you don't think CCP has all your personal data TikTok has collected from you, I have a bridge to sell you.

I think this is a pretty commonly held belief at this point in time, and I'd be somewhat surprised if you could change even a single American TikTok user's behavior by convincing them of it, since, anecdotally, people seem to lump it in with their general feeling that tech and advertising companies already harvest and share vast amounts of personal information, and conclude that protecting that information is a lost cause, and they may as well use the fun app.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#785

Post by jeswin »

consumer451 wrote: post #777

I happen to personally agree with the general concept of making the CCP divest from the leading social media platform in the USA. I also wonder if the KSA should be forced to divest from X/Twitter. Prior to owning part of X/Twitter, they did this [0], which led to to the worst of what one could imagine. What is happening now? But my main question is, are there any other examples of forced divestiture, aside from Fire…

> I also wonder if the the KSA should be forced to divest from Twitter.

There is no equivalence. The KSA has no ability or ambition to shape the world. The royal family just wants to keep their kingdom business running, and even for that they're dependent on the US.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#786

Post by asadotzler »

autoexec wrote: post #242
onepremise wrote: post #218

I think people are conflating way too many issues here with politics vs actual threats. China and Russia are not our allies. The CCP and Kremlin do not have our best interests in mind or even our most basic needs. They want to be global super powers and spread dictatorships. Democracy is a threat to absolute power. For years, the CCP and Kremlin authorities have been spreading disinformation to polarize politics in o…

TikTok isn't violating any US laws. If the US outlawed 'spreading disinformation to polarize politics' they'd have to ban youtube/facebook/twitter/reddit too. Do you think we should block all websites in China and Russia? Should we block their IP space entirely? We used to say that censoring the internet was something that only happened in Evil countries like China. We'd poke fun at their Great Firewall, but to prese…

Foreigners weren't breaking our laws in 1934 when we banned them from owning radio and TV stations. Are you all really that poorly educated in US history? Have schools really deteriorated that much in the 35 years I've been away from them that kids don't know we have laws governing mass media in this country?

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#787

Post by rzz3 »

returningfory2 wrote: post #38

The work "ban" is in scare quotes for a reason. The law doesn't ban TikTok. Rather, it bans TikTok from having Chinese owners. If the law stands, the end result will likely be that TikTok will be sold to US owners, rather than TikTok going away. It's surprising to me that this this pretty significant distinction has been glossed over both in media reporting and in general comments here on HN. To be clear, I'm not sup…

It’s alarming to me that you think the owners of arguably the most successful social media company in the world would sell it only to appease a single country. It comes off as a typical American perspective of thinking they’re the center of the world. At TikTok’s current global growth rate, they could exceed the entire user base of the USA in just a few months. I’m not sure how that user share corresponds to revenue as I’d assume the US is a lucrative market,but I just don’t see it. And TikTok has directly said they won’t be divesting.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#788

Post by arduanika »

mhardcastle wrote: post #411
returningfory2 wrote: post #38

The work "ban" is in scare quotes for a reason. The law doesn't ban TikTok. Rather, it bans TikTok from having Chinese owners. If the law stands, the end result will likely be that TikTok will be sold to US owners, rather than TikTok going away. It's surprising to me that this this pretty significant distinction has been glossed over both in media reporting and in general comments here on HN. To be clear, I'm not sup…

For what it's worth, "play money" betting site Manifold is currently at a 69% chance of sale versus 31% of shutting down. https://manifold.markets/mint/conditional-on-the-tiktok-ban-...

Buzzkill! Everybody else on here was having fun opining that it's 100% certain that China pulls the plug, or conversely that a sale will happen, and you just had to point out that it's an empirical question where nobody can read the CCP's mind. Boo.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#789

Post by TaylorAlexander »

jeswin wrote: post #785
consumer451 wrote: post #777

I happen to personally agree with the general concept of making the CCP divest from the leading social media platform in the USA. I also wonder if the KSA should be forced to divest from X/Twitter. Prior to owning part of X/Twitter, they did this [0], which led to to the worst of what one could imagine. What is happening now? But my main question is, are there any other examples of forced divestiture, aside from Fire…

> I also wonder if the the KSA should be forced to divest from Twitter. There is no equivalence. The KSA has no ability or ambition to shape the world. The royal family just wants to keep their kingdom business running, and even for that they're dependent on the US.

> The KSA has no ability or ambition to shape the world.

This seems obviously false. They host conferences talking about how they want to shape the world. KSA has interests, and they will want to use any power they have to further their interests.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#790

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

faeriechangling wrote: post #716
hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's somewhat of a sinophobic/red scare dogwhistle and provincial protectionism insecurity gasp of declining global influence because it doesn't necessarily matter who owns it when day-to-day operations are led by the same people with the same interests and allegiances as before. Domestic politicians compete to look tough by seeming to attack convenient, distant foreign adversaries in symbolic ways. US news media is…

If this is Sinophobic, China must be pissing its pants terrified of the United States. It's a shame for the two of them I guess. >The reason is Americans, in aggregate, are under-educated compared to the rest of the world Objectively wrong. It's one of the most educated countries in the world, just mediocre compared to the rest of the OECD. They're more educated than China, no matter how well a small number of urban…

Comparing wintermelon and oranges. Live a few more decades and then your definition of "objective" may face reality. The higher education system of the US is selectively excellent, but 0.5-0.75% of Americans have top tier university degrees. Only 39% of Americans have any college degree at all, but this includes online and colleges that accept anyone. Fewer and fewer Americans read books of substance, or any books at all. America is deeply anti-intellectual from its founding arising from the culture of English settler merchants, with a tiny core of intelligentsia that grew around exiled religious movements.

a. Quantitatively

- Reading: Canada is 3rd, America is 24th

- Science: Canada is 7th, America is also 24th

- Math: Canada is 9th, America is 39th

^ There should be negligible differences between them given vast similarities.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/02/15/u-s-stude...

b. Qualitatively - Meet and talk to enough people from Asia (Japan, China, Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, China) and Europe (Iberian and Eastern) & UK. And then talk to many Americans from anywhere other than from the coasts. Conspiracy theories, misinformation, MAGA, and QAnon are the mainstream norm rather than the exception. The difference is: they don't have government censorship, a totalitarian regime, or social credit habits as an excuse for their ignorance. There are billboards with borderline racist MAGA slogans in the South US.

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