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Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

congress.gov

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Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#201

Post by 1659447091 »

charlieflowers wrote: post #20
gretch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the concern of the bill is and it's completely transparent. Just read the first 2 pages of the bill and you can see the concern is, in the words of the bill, a "foreign adversary" and their ability to "sabotage or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology products and services in th…

The real concerns, in order of importance, are: 1. This is a way of getting memes to the masses that we (the US political establishment) can't fully control. 2. Meta and others are getting their asses kicked revenue-wise by Tik Tok. Like any business, they'd use anything they could to fight back. Turns out they can use China fear mongering, so they are. 3. (Added) Believe it or not, there's nationalistic pride here.…

> Surprising then that we don't ban Hondas and Toyotas, even though they're far superior to American cars (but at least they're made by Asians who are _allies_ I guess).

Both Honda and Toyota build a lot factories in the US, creating a lot of jobs for US Citizens that actually show up to vote. All while American brands move to Mexico, Canada etc.

TikTok might as well be the same as "BigTech" but with the bonus of being Chinese—that is something politicians can work with. I think the root of the problem, though, is we (humans) are easy to manipulate, but I dont even know how we can even begin to tackle that.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#202

Post by agilob »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #106

I feel like they could have done this by creating a bill saying that US social media companies must be given the same access and freedoms to the Chinese market as TikTok has to ours. It would put the onus back on the CCP, they would never allow it and they would get TikTok banned in the US without being the ones to directly ban it. I am sure someone smarter than I can tell me why this is not a viable strategy.

Please quantify access and freedoms.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#203

Post by ggfdgfwww »

ReptileMan wrote: post #76
honeybadger1 wrote: post #64

I don't feel any sympathy for Tiktok considering they block and remove content that goes against the CCP's narratives. So yeah, it's fair game when they do shit like that.

[flagged]

what is being censored? arent there a million other platforms where you can post video content?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#204

Post by atlasunshrugged »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #106

I feel like they could have done this by creating a bill saying that US social media companies must be given the same access and freedoms to the Chinese market as TikTok has to ours. It would put the onus back on the CCP, they would never allow it and they would get TikTok banned in the US without being the ones to directly ban it. I am sure someone smarter than I can tell me why this is not a viable strategy.

I agree, but it's not a viable strategy because Congress doesn't have jurisdiction over what China does and does not allow in their country. So you would then have no trade, but in what categories? Does it include software for vehicles, a major market for Detroit automakers? Does it include software like Oracle? It's just not that clean to have tit for tat reciprocity

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#205

Post by mistermann »

throwaway4837 wrote: post #176
withinboredom wrote: post #164

Maybe someone will scroll all the way down to this comment. Probably not. For half a decade, I have lived outside of the US, and I've watched as it has fallen to shit in slow motion. I make a decent chunk of income in USD and this terrifies me... but this. This move saddens me. There are only so many hours that congress has to make real decisions ... and this, this is what they spent their time on? Talking about how…

Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children. This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their qu…

> Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children.

This overlooks the "possibility" that those platforms have an "agreement" of sorts with the US Government. The Twitter Files have gone into some of that, but be careful: it is possible for things to exist that each individual/civilian may not have knowledge of, even though most people seem to be strongly under the impression that this is impossible, perhaps because it could be considered (or, has been marketed as) [only] a conspiracy theory.

> This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear. The narrative of child safety, for example the story about the kid who commit suicide because of their "for you" page, is being used as a kind of legal "pretext" so they can ban TikTok.

It is plausible that there are certain ideas that they would not like the minds of the American Public exposed to, certain conversations they would prefer they do not have, etc. There is a surprising amount of detail to reality, but we miss out on most of it (and often do not realize it), for a variety of reasons.

The thinking on these sorts of matters one reads in this thread is rather eye opening....I suspect a lot of the styles of logic that are perfectly acceptable in threads on this topic would be very unwelcome when writing software.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#206

Post by eganist »

withinboredom wrote: post #164

Maybe someone will scroll all the way down to this comment. Probably not. For half a decade, I have lived outside of the US, and I've watched as it has fallen to shit in slow motion. I make a decent chunk of income in USD and this terrifies me... but this. This move saddens me. There are only so many hours that congress has to make real decisions ... and this, this is what they spent their time on? Talking about how…

Speaking at least with my background:

Foreign adversaries have learned exactly how to weaponize our free and open internet against our own people. Regardless of the fact that our kids are most vulnerable, China's seemingly made a point of outsourcing their most polarizing algorithmic decisions to the rest of the world but not to their own population, which is essentially a tacit admission of their awareness of the dangers of social media to their own people.

At this point, I'd venture that politicians in the US are trying to grasp at whatever they can to mitigate the risk while still maintaining their election chances. Easier to "blame China" and get re-elected than it is to dump on their own constituents for not monitoring their kids' social media habits.

And frankly, I'm okay with that. Even if a parent does their best, there'll be second-hand influences through all the kids raised irresponsibly through their parents, and nothing can be done about that aside from homeschooling or going off-grid, which is unsustainable for nearly everyone.

I'm fine with a combination of the bill introduced + bills like the one passed in Utah placing curfews on kids since parents have proven to be so bad at parenting their own kids as to present the nation with an emergent aggregate risk to national security.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#207

Post by [deleted] »

withinboredom wrote: post #187
threeseed wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) The government can do more than one thing at a time. b) There is zero appetite from the GOP for gun control. Until that changes the status quo persists. c) Information about US citizens (which can be used to manipulate them) being handed over to the Chinese government is something that the government should be concerned about.

I mean, you can buy that information for 'practically free' (amortized per person), you don't need an app for that.

[deleted]

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#210

Post by chimeracoder »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #196
hitpointdrew wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's MUCH WORSE than the Patriot act. This bill is absolutely horrific. And calling it at bill to "ban TikTok" is extremely disingenuous as it egregiously goes well beyond that.

Why? It seems focused on only applications/products from a few countries of concern

> Why? It seems focused on only applications/products from a few countries of concern

...or any country that the Secretary of Commerce unilaterally decides is a "national security" concern.

That's an incredibly sweeping power to grant.

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