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Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

congress.gov

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Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#271

Post by yed »

tomcar288 wrote: post #254
spogbiper wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you point out where the bill says this? I'm not practiced in reading this kind of thing and struggling to find it

FYI: i heard about that in a news article, I didn't actually read the bill.

I've read the bill and while I'm not a fan for more general reasons, it doesn't say anything like this at all. The bill is strictly about foreigners from designated US "adversaries" having an ownership stake in large technology companies operating in the US. The text cherry picked in some of these news articles is just a list of the types of technology companies the bill specifies should be the prioritized when evaluating which foreign owned companies should be scrutinized.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#272

Post by revscat »

chimeracoder wrote: post #239
petilon wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This bill is absolutely horrific. In what way? Explain that, and let readers decide if it is horrific.

> In what way? Explain that, and let readers decide if it is horrific. The bill allows the Secretary of Commerce to unilaterally ban products associated with countries of their choosing, with a 20 year prison sentence for any US citizen who attempts to use a VPN to circumvent the access ban.

That have a million or more users and are owned by adversaries of the United States.

Seems reasonable.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#273

Post by threeseed »

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.

Please provide me a dataset I can buy that has video feeds, so I can do facial recognition, as well as deep behavioural insights.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#274

Post by Adraghast »

etrautmann wrote: post #229
withinboredom wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not just the data, it's bidirectional. The concern is that by adjusting the algorithm they can influence the population (e.g. to make math and science perceived as uncool). Not sure how seriously to take that but in principle it seems like a large vulnerability that is challenging to close off without actions like what we're seeing.

> Not sure how seriously to take that

I can help with that: not seriously at all. Calling someone a nerd has been a thing for the better part of a century. How long has TikTok been around?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#275

Post by YellOh »

satellites wrote: post #232
YellOh wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Washington Post data, there were 393,289 students enrolled at schools during shootings in the past 10 years[0]. (Note this is total enrollment, not those present or injured) In 2022, there were ~25.1 million teens[1], of whom ~67% used TikTok[2], for a total of ~16.8 million on TikTok (totally ignoring anyone under 12 or over 17). I know the numbers are hacky because the first group includes younger chil…

The person you’re replying to said that the possibility of being shot at school is psychologically taxing. This would apply to all students at all schools, not just ones where a shooting literally happened. It is relevant because of how frequent school shootings are now, compared to say, 30 years ago. Columbine shook the country when it happened, now we’re at a couple Columbine-style incidents per year. You can say “…

I agree shootings do large societal harm past the students at the school (though to be fair, I'd say the opposite side could correctly argue that TikTok makes lasting changes to children/society beyond just the ones that use it (and may be correlated with depression/suicide, which is also profoundly sad))

Surely you have to do some kind of math eventually, or else you'll end up prioritizing whatever sounds the most dramatic instead of the things that actually matter (consider people who are more afraid of sharks than drowning, even though shark deaths are 1 in 4,332,817 and drowning deaths are 1 in 1,134)

I acknowledge that the numbers I'm using are not, by any means, conclusive. And I'm not saying we should prioritize TikTok above shootings just because it's more common. But this seems like a reason to get better evidence about the way the world is, not refuse to touch numbers because some harms are too sacred to attempt to quantify.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#277

Post by goatlover »

brigadier132 wrote: post #152
charlieflowers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

You are also ignoring the fact that China does not allow our social media companies to operate in their jurisdiction. So part of this is a sense of fairness. Why do they get to operate here if we can't operate there?

Because the US isn't China, not should it try to be.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#278

Post by threeseed »

falcolas wrote: post #243
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.

FWIW, that data is being stored on Oracle servers in the US, with provisions on how it can be accessed as part of some of the agreements reached under Trump.

But according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users [1]

It is irrelevant if the data is stored in the US if Chinese government have tools they can use to search for dissidents, journalists etc

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#279

Post by akerl_ »

yed wrote: post #271
tomcar288 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI: i heard about that in a news article, I didn't actually read the bill.

I've read the bill and while I'm not a fan for more general reasons, it doesn't say anything like this at all. The bill is strictly about foreigners from designated US "adversaries" having an ownership stake in large technology companies operating in the US. The text cherry picked in some of these news articles is just a list of the types of technology companies the bill specifies should be the prioritized when evalu…

The bill doesn’t require an ownership stake, it even includes provisions to consider an entity hostile if the holding is indirect.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#280

Post by chimeracoder »

revscat wrote: post #272
chimeracoder wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In what way? Explain that, and let readers decide if it is horrific. The bill allows the Secretary of Commerce to unilaterally ban products associated with countries of their choosing, with a 20 year prison sentence for any US citizen who attempts to use a VPN to circumvent the access ban.

That have a million or more users and are owned by adversaries of the United States. Seems reasonable.

> That have a million or more users and are owned by adversaries of the United States.

No, it is not only restricted to services that are owned by adversaries of the United States. The text of the bill is very clear and much broader.

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