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

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

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 350 posts

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

#251

Post by brookst »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #250
brookst wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about copyright infringement, false advertising, sharing classified documents, tobacco advertising? There are a LOT of special cases. Maybe there shouldn’t be and all of those things should be free from government interference, but the status quo is that plenty of speech is regulated.

Copyright enforcement is not a form of censorship.

So basically controls on speech that are good are not censorship and therefore good, but ones that are bad are censorship and therefore bad? That doesn’t feel like an especially defensible view.

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

#252

Post by hrtar »

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…

The "small minority" label has been applied to Trump supporters on social media, yet they have won in the elections twice.

Manufacturing consent still works via the traditional newspapers. That is where "the (current) truth" originates from. That is what is amplified on social media, including here. It takes years of struggle of independently minded people to argue against mainstream. Often after two years mainstream takes the position of independently minded people and takes the credit.

TikTok is different in that it addresses teenagers. They don't have any political power and will change their opinions in their 20s/30s. The data collection and blackmail arguments are still valid. But they also happen in the West, except that three letter agencies collect compromising material on domestic and foreign politicians.

I mean, really? On social media anti-China sentiment is at an all time high. This Chinese manipulation operation must have really failed.

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

#253

Post by Forbo »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #250
brookst wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about copyright infringement, false advertising, sharing classified documents, tobacco advertising? There are a LOT of special cases. Maybe there shouldn’t be and all of those things should be free from government interference, but the status quo is that plenty of speech is regulated.

Copyright enforcement is not a form of censorship.

It most certainly is abused that way. See every garbage DMCA takedown request submitted by scumbag corporation du juor.

This doesn't even take into account the endless lobbying by Disney to pervert copyright law into what it is today.

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

#254

Post by AnthonyMouse »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #133
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102

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. 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.

Anti-trust laws are the obvious example that was already listed in the post you replied to, e.g. Meta wants to be able to buy Instagram and Apple wants to lock all iPhone users out of third party app stores. But the government has passed so many laws at this point that you can hardly walk down the street without committing a felony, see e.g. Three Felonies a Day, to the point that it's now only a matter of prosecutorial discretion that any given person isn't in prison.

They've also threatened to pass new laws that the targets wouldn't like if the targets don't "voluntarily" do things the law isn't allowed to make them do.

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

#255

Post by llamaimperative »

threatofrain wrote: post #248
llamaimperative wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what you asked: > When values are in conflict, which should win? In the hierarchy of values, where does economic world position stand in terms of national concerns? The answer is simple: when economic world position is in conflict with the value of freedom of speech, then freedom of speech wins. If you disagree you can go amend the Constitution accordingly.

The US constitution will absolutely permit war as a response to trade conflict. The US has already gone to war for such reasons with smaller countries. We were speaking on the value of speech. What values should prompt us to send youths to die abroad? What does the constitution say about the hierarchy of values here? I'm just asking for a framework for determining which values are superior under conflict.

> The US constitution will absolutely permit war

Right, and it doesn't permit infringement of First Amendment rights.

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

#256

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tmnvdb wrote: post #179
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102

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. 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…

> "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." The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, t…

> The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, they can access a wide range of national and international media that is quite diverse.

What you need is not just diversity but independence. You can find all kinds of views on social media, but if there are only a handful of social media sites and the government can lean on the sites themselves to suppress things they don't like, that's not independence.

> It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.

It's obviously not optimal for the only alternative to be the CCP. What you would really like is to have no major platforms at all and instead have thousands of federated independent smaller services hosted in every country in the world. Which was basically the web and email/usenet until Google took 90% search market share and then devastated the former by downranking smaller sites and the latter got displaced by non-federated walled garden social media that actively suppresses third party client interoperability.

So now you practically need the resources of a state to put up a viable rival to that stuff, and maybe the problem you need to solve is that.

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

#257

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

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…

> The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.

Personally I don’t think singling them out is anti democratic, because this platform and Chinese run companies in general have issues unique to them.

TikTok lied under oath about the location of data they claimed was stored in the US. That’s fraud and has concerning privacy and national security implications:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index....

This is why divestiture to an American entity with no ties back to a mainland China owner makes sense - it severs the tie that results in illegal surveillance. It’s not a ban on specific content or even the app - just a ban on the owner.

Another issue - it has also come out that TikTok (not Douyin) employees have to uphold the goals of the CCP as part of their job:

https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...

And then there’s the basic lack of reciprocity in market access, since all non Chinese social media is banned in China and yet their apps can access consumers outside China.

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

#258

Post by Cyph0n »

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #126
quanto wrote: post #100

A former sausage maker here. I (used to) design these engagement/recommendation engines for a large corp, did academic research in the field, went to conferences, etc. In general, I wholehearted support the freedom of speech, and if it were any other case, I would agree with the EFF statement here. However, knowing how the sausages are made, I am reluctantly agreeing with the ban, at least for now. People underestima…

I detect an undercurrent of pride that drives you to ascribe undue agency to your work. "Brainwashing" isn't real. Bleak material circumstances sow division, not memes. Oversocialized urban professionals have only pushed this narrative because media is an abstract low-friction environment where they can pretend to still exert control and avoid ever addressing real problems. A "national security risk" is only a proble…

First, it is much easier to blame everything on a boogeyman than to invest actual effort in improving the lives of Americans and investing in their education. Tale as old as time.

Second, the US realizes that it cannot reliably manufacture consent if its citizens are not tuned in to the information sources that it can influence.

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

#259

Post by tw1237128 »

petre wrote: post #169
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…

Precisely how Russia tainted the Romanian presidential elections using Tiktok dormant accounts to hijack another PR campaign. I'm with the SCotUS on this.

There has been very little public investigation. This is what I could find:

https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...

The Romanian National Liberal Party (opponents of Georgescu) bought the campaign. Their hashtag was "hijacked" (whatever that means) to boost Georgescu instead.

I do not know how TikTok works. Perhaps it is as simple as Georgescu supporters simply using the paid for hashtag for their own messages.

So, according to this article, the Russians did nothing. The Liberal Party engaged in questionable TikTok interference and Georgescu supporters jumped on the bandwagon.

The Western media falling silent on the issue would indicate that this politico.eu is correct.

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

#260

Post by altfredd »

tmnvdb wrote: post #179
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102

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. 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…

> "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." The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, t…

First they ousted 8chan because of something-something-terrorism something-pedophilia. Then they have banned RT, because Russia and US are clearly at war (nope). Now they are banning TikTok for "spreading propaganda".

The "wide range of national and international media" you can access is shrinking rather quickly.

Post reply on HN