Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 401 posts

Re: U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly

#151

Post by wil421 »

cabaalis wrote: post #123
wil421 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked my wife’s kid sister, she’s 19 and in college. Her and her boyfriend had no idea about it being Chinese. It was the hot thing at the moment and that’s all they really cared about.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the Chinese don't know that. It's long been my opinion that you simply cannot destroy the west without mutually assured destruction, so nukes are out. You can't invade and subsequently operate because Americans will never acquiesce to foreign rule, and we are individually armed. The only way to undo the US/west is to have it undo itself. Seed dissent and promote divisions and h…

Agreed. Authoritarian governments with morally questionable methods were and are better than the West at Humanint and propaganda. Russia and China are two good examples. I recently saw a documentary about North Korea. It was talking about the Clinton talks, NK would study everyone they would speak to. They also knew with an election would change guards and wait to get what they wanted.

Foreign adversaries must be loving the divide America has at the moment with our 2 party system. They are also trying to divide us by race, economic class, and create a divide with the police.

Re: U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly

#153

Post by kmonsen »

dv_dt wrote: post #140
vkou wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is said for non-US consumers, who consume US-made media (Which is consumed world-wide, and has in many places, displaced local media.)

While the US doesn't hard censor media like China, I'd agree there is something of a soft censorship/ignoring of many topics. And, if you think about US based hard restraints, there are certainly onerous restrictions with rules attached to financial services imposed by the US into foreign nations.

The censorship is completely different though, if you want to write "Fuck Donald Trump", or give a detailed account of his crimes on a US platform, it will not be censored. Try the same in a Chinese owned platform about f.ex. something as obvious as Tianmen.

There are some things such as porn that is censored in many areas.

Re: U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly

#154

Post by triceratops »

EpicEng wrote: post #110
fruzz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, as a Canadian consumer using American social media platforms, we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality. This argument of who censors makes sense for Americans, but it's more about picking your poison for people from other c…

>we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality No, you're subject to corporate censorship policies. Let's not pretend that individual platforms regulating content is the same as government censorship. Please show me how their policies a…

> Also, doesn't Canada have a few laws on the books regarding how people are allowed to address other people, specifically, LGBTQ people?

Not really. Canada prohibits hate speech and discrimination against LGBTQ people. The whole "using the wrong pronouns is now a criminal offense" meme was made up by someone looking for something to be offended about/sell books about how PC culture is ruining everything.[1]

People can be sued for discriminating on the basis of gender identity or expression. Repeatedly using the wrong pronoun can be used as evidence of that, but probably has to fit into a larger pattern of behavior. And that's the kind of thing you could credibly sue an employer or business for in the US as well.

1. https://factcheck.afp.com/no-canadians-cannot-be-jailed-or-f...

Re: U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly

#155

Post by tanilama »

EpicEng wrote: post #110
fruzz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, as a Canadian consumer using American social media platforms, we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality. This argument of who censors makes sense for Americans, but it's more about picking your poison for people from other c…

>we're subject to American censorship policies. Tumblr / Facebook / YouTube being most notable in their filtering of LGBT content and suspending accounts of LGBT users, because of the American governments stance on human sexuality No, you're subject to corporate censorship policies. Let's not pretend that individual platforms regulating content is the same as government censorship. Please show me how their policies a…

> corporate censorship policies

Which in a large part with preference tailored to US

Re: U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly

#156

Post by amazinzay »

freeflight wrote: post #120
pdabbadabba wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you referring to, exactly? There certainly is no enforceable law in the United States against LGBT content. There theoretically are restrictions on "obscenity," but they are virtually nonexistent in practice. The only law I can think of that resembles what you're describing in any way is our, indeed, quite aggressive ban on child pornography. And I'm no expert on Canadian child pornography laws, but I'll bet…

> What are you referring to, exactly? There's a pretty good meme about differences between European and American media take on censorship [0]. It's now locked behind an Imgur login due to being NSFW (over a single nipple), but the basic premise is that US media would censor a nipple away, leaving the person recognizable, while European media didn't take issue with the nipple, but instead censored her face to protect…

To view Imgur NSFW content without logging in, simply add ".jpg" to the end of the URL.

Re: U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly

#157

Post by chrisjc »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #116
feelthepress wrote: post #10

Oct 14: "TikTok has moved into Facebook’s backyard and is starting to poach its employees" https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/tiktok-has-mountain-view-off...

If they're highering engineers at "20% above Facebook compensation", it really doesn't make sense. In china they could higher roughly 15 top engineers for the price of 1 engineer in the bay area (in China there's an even bigger surplus of engineering talent).

Makes perfect sense. Poaching FB's (or any competition for that matter) employees potentially makes them easier to compete with and increases the cost for FB to compete.

Re: U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly

#158

Post by huac »

sgustard wrote: post #134
Merrill wrote: post #75

Musical.ly was started by entrepreneurs in Shanghai. Although it may have had US and Japanese investors, I don't think it was an American company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly >"It’s the first company to be headquartered in China, designed in China, but popular in the US," said Greylock investor Josh Elman. "Finally we’re seeing talented people who live in that ecosystem in that world and actually transce…

Well the Reuters article says it's a US company, as does https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/musical-ly .

the US government says it's a US company, so...

Re: U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly

#159

Post by 24gttghh »

lonelappde wrote: post #139
justinzollars wrote: post #86

TikTok is actually a great app. When I was a kid in the 00's my friends and I used to carry around a video camera to make music videos. With TikTok you can do it with your cell phone. They beat SnapChat, FB and Instagram on experience. Censorship is something serious to consider, but these are mainly kids making music videos. They aren't using it to organize campaigns.

It's sickening to think of music and art as something that is great when its restricted to only be meaningless.

I don't think GP was trying to say that exactly, but I am glad you phrased it like this. It is indeed sickening to think of music and art as meaningless.

Re: U.S. opens a national security review of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly

#160

Post by semiotagonal »

kick wrote: post #118
hos234 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their incentive is History. Specifically Louis XVI. Good ol'Louis knew things were messed up and he tried to rectify things. But it was too late.

That's not an incentive at all; they're much more likely to just buy bunkers: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-... When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daugh…

As if the helicopter pilot isn't gonna just kick the guy off and get his own friends and family to the bunker instead.

EDIT: Not to mention whoever built the bunker knows where it is. "Ownership" isn't going to be a real thing in the circumstances where a bunker is necessary.

Post reply on HN