Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

991–1000 of 1001 posts

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

#993

if you've been to China, you'll know that they ban all western products: facebook, google, etc etc and replaced them with their own variants. If they want to run around free-range without any restriction with their own products then they should respond by loosening restrictions in their own country. This is an absolute no-brainer. If you want Tik Tok in the US, lower your middle finger. Am I missing something?

> If you want Tik Tok in the US, lower your middle finger. Reciprocity isn't the main reason. It's become a legitimate national security problem. We're no longer in the early 2000s where we could delude ourselves into thinking China wasn't a rival. They're clearly revisionist, with their aggressive approach to resolving border disputes and rhetoric about forceful reunification of Taiwan being on the table. They are b…

> their aggressive approach to resolving border disputes

China hasn't fought a war in 40 years. In recent years, there have been some border skirmishes with India between unarmed soldiers (it's not even clear which side initiated them) and some naval confrontations about a few islands with no shots fired, but that's about it. Meanwhile, the US has been fighting wars all around the world.

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

#995

I hope this will show the severity of threats countries face from social media and that things are no longer business as usual. Every European country /and/or EU/ECC as a block, as well as every other nation or block, should follow this up as soon as permitted to have all social media apps operated by a foreign country be subject to the same legislation. TikTok will have to sel to the US, Netherlands, France, Germany…

>Certainly, a small state has the same rights and the same cause to protect their citizens from the surveillance and manipulation from foreign owned social networks. Next up, we could migrate government systems away from foreign IT software and services. The FOSS world has plenty of capable offerings, and it's not as if the choices were made on technical merit in the first place. I'd love to see Free Software and ope…

All FOSS developers may be foreigners for a project. Is it ok to use that then?

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

#996

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone please explain to me what the security threat is? I still haven't understood it. If it's that China will know more about Americans through data ingestion, they can already do that. Americans willingly upload every little bit of their lives to YouTube, Twitch, and tons of other platforms. Not to mention that Temu is the most downloaded shopping app in the US. And what kind of attack can TikTok information…

I *think* the main national security argument is that TikTok can tweak the algorithm to incite discord and inflame conflicts within the US. They can do this far more effectively from their own platform than by doing it on other social networks via bots and fake accounts. I tend to come down with the same opinion as you though. It's all still essentially a first amendment issue and the negatives I listed aren't going…

Yeah, unfortunately "inciting discord" and "inflaming conflicts" is very well protected by the First Amendment. It's the entire negative consequence of truly allowing free speech (not counting movie theater fire exceptions). I guess we're gonna throw that out all on a whim in 2 weeks...

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

#997

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone please explain to me what the security threat is? I still haven't understood it. If it's that China will know more about Americans through data ingestion, they can already do that. Americans willingly upload every little bit of their lives to YouTube, Twitch, and tons of other platforms. Not to mention that Temu is the most downloaded shopping app in the US. And what kind of attack can TikTok information…

> Can someone please explain to me what the security threat is? I still haven't understood it. Facial recognition database and tracking people at a global scale. With advances in computing power and unsupervised machine learning, correlating a person with the person's surroundings is now largely or fully automated – what used to take forensic experts weeks, months or years to hunt down a person by poring over indirec…

Why is a facial recognition database dangerous though? The vast majority of Americans publicly upload pictures and videos of their faces online in a way that it would be trivial for any nation state to gather them up.

Everything you've pointed to can be done already by mining the publicly available treasure trove of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc. A pretty small team can scrape these sites and do what you're insinuating.

And lastly, I still don't see the danger of releasing this info? I mean, can't any foreigner travelling on a tourist visa record public vistas for 30 days and essentially do the same thing?

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

#998

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone please explain to me what the security threat is? I still haven't understood it. If it's that China will know more about Americans through data ingestion, they can already do that. Americans willingly upload every little bit of their lives to YouTube, Twitch, and tons of other platforms. Not to mention that Temu is the most downloaded shopping app in the US. And what kind of attack can TikTok information…

That a foreign nation with aims not aligned with the US has the dominant social network with the CAPABILITY to use this influence to influence the US, collect data, shape the minds of youths and future voters etc etc. that is enough for me.

>the CAPABILITY to use this influence to influence the US

But this is communist era logic used in some countries to this day to ban "foreign" and "corrupting" materials. Forgive me if it smells like repression and tastes like repression, I think it is repression. Shaping the minds of youths is not the exclusive purview of the US political class. That's some 1984 logic...

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

#999

Can someone explain why the previous "ban" was blocked but this wasnt? As I recall TikTok filed for an injunction and they argued it was unconstitutional (violated the 5th ammendment) and the injunction was granted. Then Biden rescinded the executive order and it ended there.

As I understand it, the unconstitutionality of the initial executive order was based on the balance of power in the US government. Doing this kind of thing by executive order is not allowed. Doing this kind of thing by passing a law through Congress is allowed. The Constitution gives a lot of power to the legislature, especially given the interpretations of the Commerce Clause over the history of the US.

That would make sense if the initial reasoning wasn't that it violated the constitution. Neither executive orders nor laws can violate the constitution.
Post reply on HN