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EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

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Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

#101

Post by [deleted] »

henrikschroder wrote: post #93
unethical_ban wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media algorithms are nuclear bombs for the mind. And they are beholden to whoever holds the detonator. It just happens that a lot of people are happy with China holding it. When the mind-reading algorithm provides each user with their own reality to live in, then we are talking about editorializing. And allowing a communist, anti-Western government direct control over that power does not seem reasonable. inb4…

> rage-inducing profit seekers That pretty accurately describes Twitter and Facebook these days. TikTok, not so much, which you would know if you had used the platform. (Or, you have used the platform, and you prefer rage-inducing crap, so it continues serving that to you ) The proponents of the ban keep mentioning some kind of nefarious "communist" propaganda, and some kind of nefarious privacy data access, but I've…

[deleted]

Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

#102

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tmnvdb wrote: post #96
uludag wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically this is exactly why I think TikTok is so important. Obviously every media site is used for manufacturing content, from NYT to Facebook. Also, obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted. Wouldn't it be good then to have checks and balances to this, by having media not under the US government supervision? Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the pu…

You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet. It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated…

> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.

That's how it's supposed to work in the US. For example, "hate speech" isn't actually one of the things the government is allowed to prohibit under the First Amendment.

But then the government passed a whole bunch of laws they don't actually enforce, and then instead of actually enforcing them, they started threatening to enforce them if platforms didn't start censoring the stuff the government wanted them to, i.e. "take that stuff down or we'll charge you with the antitrust violations you're already committing".

This is basically an end-run around the constitution for free speech in the same way as parallel construction is for illegal searches and the courts should put a stop to it, but they haven't yet and it's not clear if or when they will, so it's still a problem.

> It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.

Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa.

Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

#103

Post by 1659447091 »

lolinder wrote: post #18
braiamp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a better way: privacy laws. The US government decided not to use it.

Privacy laws don't solve the real problem, they would only solve the fig leaf that politicians are hiding behind when it comes to tiktok. The actual problem is and always has been control over the content being fed to users. It's not an issue of privacy, it's an issue of voter manipulation. It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP do…

> It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.

I think it's more likely that it's able to pass muster when the threat is a foreign state. The US may be more limited in what it can do with it's own entities (I don't know for sure) and would probably receive far more push back from the courts if they tried heavy handed measures before going through the proper legislation regulation (as states are doing) or the FBI route(if it were in their realm of bad). The threat that is more concerning than US owned and operated companies getting US citizens to vote for their prefered US president, is a foreign state slowly radicalizing US citizens(without their knowledge it's happening) against themselves (the US), more than voter manipulation.

Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

#104

Post by [deleted] »

User23 wrote: post #89
llamaimperative wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You're musing that a fucking trade war could possibly be placed above freedom of speech? The answer of which "values" should win is 110% clear.

Just out of curiosity, do you think the 2nd amendment obligates the USA to sell foreign enemies any and all weapons?

[deleted]

Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

#105

Post by cship2 »

tmnvdb wrote: post #96
uludag wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically this is exactly why I think TikTok is so important. Obviously every media site is used for manufacturing content, from NYT to Facebook. Also, obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted. Wouldn't it be good then to have checks and balances to this, by having media not under the US government supervision? Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the pu…

You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet. It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated…

>You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.

Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.

Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

#106

Post by alisonatwork »

onei wrote: post #98
tmnvdb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet. It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated…

Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.

I can't speak for Tiktok, but the CCP did explicitly shut down Bytedance's very popular Neihuan Duanzi humor app, and put pressure on them to change the Toutiao algorithm because it was promoting inappropriate content. It's not much of a leap to think that by the time Douyin started getting popular Bytedance had learned their lesson and would proactively moderate their platforms to stay well within the party lines. In theory Tiktok should be independent of that since it targets foreign users, but in practice any media product coming out of a Chinese-owned company is going to be influenced whether explicitly or incidentally by CCP policy.

Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.

Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

#107

Post by cbg0 »

monero-xmr wrote: post #76
isodev wrote: post #58

It’s funny how they’re shutting down TikTok because it’s “manipulative and anti-democratic” while that’s a core trait of every algorithmic/engagement social media. Twitter and Threads should be banned as well then.

If the government can’t ban a business entity then doesn’t that say something about control? We have an app controlled by a communist dictatorship. They can keep the app running by selling it, but they won’t. What’s perplexing to me is leftists love how companies in America can be forced to sell and broken if they are declared monopolies. But if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers suddenly forcing a sale is…

Your last statement is a pretty silly generalization, and I don't think you need to bring in left/right extremes into this. For a lot of folks this is more about precedent on being able to ban anything the current establishment disagrees with, which has its own merits, even if you want to say that it's strictly being done because China controls it, which is not 100% of the reason why.

I despise communism myself, as my country went through 45 years of it. I agree with TikTok being forced to sell, and I'd like to see all social media sites offer more transparency mechanisms to NGOs and government agencies to show how their algorithms really work to have some watchdog be able to check if what we're seeing is heavily manipulated, especially during election years.

Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

#108

Post by mmooss »

uludag wrote: post #88
lolinder wrote: post #3

> Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally. These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature, increasingly so in the age of LLMs. They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astrot…

Ironically this is exactly why I think TikTok is so important. Obviously every media site is used for manufacturing content, from NYT to Facebook. Also, obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted. Wouldn't it be good then to have checks and balances to this, by having media not under the US government supervision? Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the pu…

> obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted

That's not at all obvious to me. On what grounds, moral or legal, should the US government tell anyone what to publish or promote?

Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

#109

Post by mmooss »

logifail wrote: post #85
lolinder wrote: post #3

> Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally. These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature, increasingly so in the age of LLMs. They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astrot…

> They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astroturfing the platform and/or manipulating the algorithm (either through paid advertisements or by owning a platform and controlling the algorithm outright) Anyone willing to take a good-faith stab at why this couldn't equally well be a description of traditional media too - say - the WaPo?

The Washington Post has changed considerably in the last few months, specifically from being fiercely free to being bought.

> couldn't

Hypothetically, almost anything could happen.

Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban

#110

Post by _t9ow »

monero-xmr wrote: post #76
isodev wrote: post #58

It’s funny how they’re shutting down TikTok because it’s “manipulative and anti-democratic” while that’s a core trait of every algorithmic/engagement social media. Twitter and Threads should be banned as well then.

If the government can’t ban a business entity then doesn’t that say something about control? We have an app controlled by a communist dictatorship. They can keep the app running by selling it, but they won’t. What’s perplexing to me is leftists love how companies in America can be forced to sell and broken if they are declared monopolies. But if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers suddenly forcing a sale is…

> if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers

I suspect that people pattern-match this declaration to McCarthyism.

Additionally, the US has been invoking national security for a series of extremely dubious moves recently as well -- e.g. Biden's latest decision to block the sale of US Steel to Nippon on shaky grounds of national security, and his administration's recent policy to introduce export limits on GPUs to all countries except 18 (most US allies, NATO or otherwise, are now unjustly being restricted in how many GPUs they can import). Coupled with the incoming Trump administration's threats of trade war and expansionist designs on Greenland, people -- especially non-Americans, also in countries that have historically been friends of the US -- are very quickly running out of goodwill for the US, and in light of these events naturally the TikTok ban is seen as just another draconian attempt by the US to practise (economic) imperialism.

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