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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

#131

Post by jazzyjackson »

spokaneplumb wrote: post #19
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature The US Gov has a mandate to preserve and uphold democracy. Shuttering communication is prior restraint - an anti-democratic action. Platforms have no mandate to preserve and uphold democracy.

Restricting who can own what, however… that’s long been fair game. In my dream world we’d get something like the rules we had, until fairly recently, restricting max broadcast media audience control in a given market for a single owner, but for Web platforms. Don’t like being limited to five million users or whatever? Then use a standard that puts control over curation and presentation in the hands of the user. Want…

Creative + precedence, I like it. How can we get the fediverse enough funding to lobby Congress?

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

#132

Post by jazzyjackson »

gunian wrote: post #128
User23 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nothing new. Google's instrumental role in the "Arab Spring" is old hat by now.

If you correlate the hacks of anonymous to that you will get an interesting picture to say the least :) As someone that loves dev stuff it is so beautiful not a single soldier deployed but an entire region destabilized and so many people killed

I was paying attention to telecomix and US forces in-country maintaining cellular infra to fight against the information blackouts but what was going down on 4chan?

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

#133

Post by blackqueeriroh »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102
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…

> 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 allowe…

What laws did they pass that they didn’t enforce but then threatened to enforce? Because from my perspective that statement smells like bullshit.

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

#134

Post by jazzyjackson »

User23 wrote: post #90
suraci wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is nothing new. Google's instrumental role in the "Arab Spring" is old hat by now.

Although i would never put it past the DoD under Clinton to manipulate an election here and a revolution there, my impression of Silicon Valley during the Arab Spring is a bunch of self congratulatory preening over the power of social media.

I always felt the CIAs greatest trick is letting people credit them with overthrowing governments, a power they don't actually possess, except to tip the scales with a little gun-running. Same with the so called Twitter revolution. Assange and Manning can take credit for leaking the cables, but the anger was domestic and already extant.

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

#135

Post by ok_dad »

accrual wrote: post #47
munchler wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It required specific legislation to ban TikTok. I would say that's pretty extraordinary. I think even the EFF should admit that allowing the Chinese government to control a major American social media app is an unacceptable security risk.

It's amazing that all three arms of the government can come together so quickly to ban an app, but we can't have affordable housing, public healthcare, a higher minimum wage, or send kids to school without bulletproof backpacks.

Stop talking about that or they'll ban HN next!

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

#136

Post by thiagoharry »

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…

> In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent. The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.

Which should be a major concerning point. Censoring a powerful media gives more power to the censor than censoring less powerful ones. Now the censor has the power to ensure that only US government and related big tech corporations are allowed to manufacturate consent over the public, with no way of having options of different views. Suddenly the media becomes even more dangerous.

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

#137

Post by ReptileMan »

gorgoiler wrote: post #32

It is hard to love the notion that banning a third party’s app is infringing upon my own right to free speech. If it were a ban on the Internet then that seems to make more sense. It’s analogous to a ban on paper, pens, or bullhorns. I can be sympathetic to the idea that, for some people, one particular proprietary app is their main tool for expression, even if that’s hardly ideal. A ban on routers made by a specific…

The first amendment at its core is - if someone wants to say something and someone wants to listen to the first one saying it - the government has no right to prevent or interfere with the process. Banning the app trough which information flows is interference.

And the government doesn't offer any kind of remedy - you can't pick up your whole social cluster and move to another platform.

tiktok didn't had its 1A rights infringed, but every american that wants to listen to clips of old episodes of friends does.

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

#138

Post by jazzyjackson »

phito wrote: post #86
logicchains wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most of US history people's access to information was controlled by a few powerful news/media corporations and the Supreme Court did nothing to stop that. It's no surprise that when we finally get a decentralised information transmission system not beholden to the elites, the Supreme Court doesn't want to lend it a hand.

Wait, since when is TikTok decentralised?

The information is decentralized (a hundred million different sources...), just not the infrastructure.

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

#139

Post by mdhb »

_t9ow wrote: post #118
dqv wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence. If you're talking about the study about hash tag counts, that's not good evidence. https://www.cato.org/blog/lies-damned-lies-statistics-mislea...

> You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence Unfortunately very common these days; people who say this probably hope that they won't ever be asked to provide receipts.

I think the question is actually asked incorrectly in the reverse.

Maybe start with the not at all controversial position that China is effectively an authoritarian dictatorship who is well known to use censorship and public manipulation as one of its key levers of control and then ask if you have any evidence whatsoever that for some reason they wouldn’t include TikTok in that mix?

The way actual professionals in the field look at this problem is through a lens of:

1. Do they have the capabily to take this specific action? (A resounding yes)

2. Do they have the intent to take this action? I mean this is where you would look at literally all of the other instances where they did choose censorship over free expression and also come to a resounding yes.

3. Do they have the opportunity to take this action? Which is also a clear yes as defined by their own national security laws and other methods of control over what TikTok does.

Thats how people have come to the conclusion that it’s a legitimate threat even in the absence of some smoking gun where people wrote everything down and then conveniently leaked it for you.

At some point you have to be able to make decisions in the absence of perfect information and this is specifically how threat modelling works just to provide some context because some of the comments here are incredibly low quality.

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

#140

Post by Paradigma11 »

dralley wrote: post #67
error_logic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The voting algorithm needs to change so that destructive (negative) campaigning is not so effective. Duverger's law makes campaigns devolve into undermining and destroying the competition, with the two parties hosting primaries to see which of them can "turn the wheel" the hardest before the general election where they claim "don't worry I won't crash the car!" despite their prior incentives. If we used plurality vot…

>The voting algorithm needs to change so that destructive (negative) campaigning is not so effective. No algorithm is going to fix this, it's human nature. Negative campaigning has been a constant of elections since elections were invented. At best you can tamp down on the aggressive engagement feedback loops. We should probably do that, but it's good to stay realistic about outcomes.

The difference is that if your party A spends x amount of resources on negative campaigning on another party B instead of on yourself and B is only one of 4 competitors (B,C,D,E) the other 3 will stomp you.
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