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

reuters.com

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

#291

Post by CharlesColeman »

yorwba wrote: post #258
CharlesColeman wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I absolutely do not understand why there is so much hate for Chinese people, Chinese companies, or the Chinese government. > please do not act as if your statements about Chinese nationals I think it's misleading to bring up the Chinese people in this way: the "hate," if it can even be called that, is for the Chinese government and the CCP . The real or imagined influence of the CCP over Chinese companies is causin…

> the "hate," if it can even be called that, is for the Chinese government and the CCP. You may only hate the government, but you should be aware that many of those who seem to be on your side criticising the CPC do in fact hate everything Chinese. They think that not only the government, but all Chinese people are untrustworthy; that all Chinese companies are mere fronts for the government that should not be allowed…

>> the "hate," if it can even be called that, is for the Chinese government and the CCP.

> You may only hate the government...

Hate is actually not a very good word to describe the situation, IMHO. I only used it because the GP did, but I quoted and questioned the choice. If I had to describe it, I would say it's moral disapproval coupled with a recognition of incompatible goals that requires some kind of response.

> You may only hate the government, but you should be aware that many of those who seem to be on your side criticising the CPC do in fact hate everything Chinese.

I find that a bit hard to square with the support of Chinese things by the same group, like the Tiananmen Square and Hong Kong protests (for instance). I don't doubt that there exist people who are racist against Chinese people, but I think the overlap with HN is small, and definitely small enough that it's a derail to bring up on a vague prompt like in the parent of this subthread.

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

#292

Post by freeflight »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #175
freeflight wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes. This is a fair point. I would emphasize, though, that this is about US culture, not US government or law. Interestingly, part of the whole point of the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is to maintain a lot of separation between these two things.

> this is about US culture, not US government or law

But these things do not exist in a vacuum.

Ask anybody working on the tech and legal ends of the adult industry and you will hear quite horrific stories about having to jump through so many hoops just for finding a payment provider.

For a while, these used to be www dominating issues, and how they were dealt with in the US, often ended up being the de-facto global standard.

A very recent and relevant example for this is footage out of the Syrian Civil War on platforms like Twitter and YouTube.

Over these past years, whole swats of videos have disappeared on the basis of being tagged as "terrorist propaganda" [0]

In a very similar vein how "Napalm Girl" ended up getting censored as child pornography [1].

By now even Reddit has learned to "selectively forget", as all undeleting/uncensoring sites that used to work, have stopped working.

Just because it's not some US government agency playing the censor, but rather the US government pressuring US companies into self-censorship, doesn't make this kind of censorship any less real in its overall impact.

[0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/youtube-ai-deletes-war-cr...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031

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

#293

Post by dang »

nullc wrote: post #207

So HN changed the headline to remove TikTok which is a name I reconized and replaced it with "ByteDance" and "Musical.ly", which I've never heard of before. It was originally displayed on HN the same as it is in the article. From the article, I know that the new headline is more precise. But it's much less informative, I wouldn't have clicked the article under this name.

We changed the title because the actual story, as stated in the first paragraph, is distant enough from the article title as to make that title misleading. "U.S. opens national security investigation into TikTok" connotes something very different from reviewing a specific acquisition. Actually Reuters is usually a lot more careful than that.

As for whether the headline says TikTok or ByteDance, the only thing I care about is what readers will complain about least. If we make it say ByteDance, that's correct, but people will accuse us of trying to bury the lede because no one has heard of ByteDance. (Why on earth would we do that? Obvious answer: we must be controlled by the Chinese state, or some other sinister interest. How people come up with this stuff...)

The problem is that if it says TikTok, people will complain about the title being incorrect. I've flipped it the other way for now; let's see what's worse.

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

#294

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

nostromo wrote: post #30

I would support a wholesale ban on Chinese acquisitions of American companies until American companies are allowed to acquire Chinese companies (or otherwise operate in China). These ridiculous double standards from China are not free trade, and we should stop pretending it is.

American companies can and do buy Chinese companies. Foreign ownership restrictions have been relaxed or dropped entirely in most sectors in China over the last two decades.

Complaining that American companies can't invest in China is strange, given that until fairly recently, the flow of investment was almost 100% in that direction. It's only in the last few years that Chinese companies have begun investing significantly in American companies.

As for "operat[ing] in China," American companies have a massive presence in China. Where are you getting the idea that American (or foreign) companies can't operate in China? It's the most important market for all sorts of Western companies. The restrictions on tech companies, specifically, have to do with political censorship. Companies that censor have access.

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

#295

Post by dang »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #250
nullc wrote: post #207

So HN changed the headline to remove TikTok which is a name I reconized and replaced it with "ByteDance" and "Musical.ly", which I've never heard of before. It was originally displayed on HN the same as it is in the article. From the article, I know that the new headline is more precise. But it's much less informative, I wouldn't have clicked the article under this name.

This is a completely ridiculous title change, doesn't match the article title, and totally obfuscates the relevance of the article.

It's routine HN moderation. The site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ask for the original title to be used except when it's misleading or linkbait. When a title is either of those things, we change it. We do that routinely. The issue is following the site guidelines. There's zero intention to obfuscate.

In this case, the article title is in my judgment misleading—not hugely so, but enough to be worth changing. We changed it to language from the first paragraph, which is where articles typically say what they're really about. If that's obfuscating, then the article obfuscates itself.

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

#296

Post by dang »

rshnotsecure wrote: post #264
nullc wrote: post #207

So HN changed the headline to remove TikTok which is a name I reconized and replaced it with "ByteDance" and "Musical.ly", which I've never heard of before. It was originally displayed on HN the same as it is in the article. From the article, I know that the new headline is more precise. But it's much less informative, I wouldn't have clicked the article under this name.

https://news.ycombinator.com is run by M5 Hosting out of San Diego. M5 Hosting is also known as M5 Computer Security out of San Diego. These firms are a strange choice for a place like YCombinator to host I think.

That insinuation is so obscure that I can't even guess what you're insinuating.

It's a small hosting company with good support. It's a nice fit with the spirit of this community. I have no idea what alternate names they have.

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

#297

Post by dang »

GetOutOfBed wrote: post #235
radcon wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also edited a headline for a #1 ranked story about Blizzard and the Hong Kong issue, removing Hong Kong from the headline entirely. HN sort of reminds me of China -- a dictatorship with zero transparency and a penchant for manipulation. Edit: Can't forget the spineless bootlickers who are hopelessly devoted to the state! You know you've struck a nerve when the best 'reply' they can offer is a silent downvote.

With China you know who is in charge. With Hackernews it is a bit more opaque.

I'm in charge of Hacker News. What would you like to know?

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

#298

Post by dang »

Karunamon wrote: post #238
radcon wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also edited a headline for a #1 ranked story about Blizzard and the Hong Kong issue, removing Hong Kong from the headline entirely. HN sort of reminds me of China -- a dictatorship with zero transparency and a penchant for manipulation. Edit: Can't forget the spineless bootlickers who are hopelessly devoted to the state! You know you've struck a nerve when the best 'reply' they can offer is a silent downvote.

That's assuming an awful lot of unncessary bad faith. While the title guidelines are enforced here in an incredibly nonintuitive, nonobjective, nonconsistent way, that's no reason to imply malfeasance.

Thanks for the defense, but I feel a need to pipe up for HN moderators also. It's not true that the title guideline is enforced as you say. If it were, the threads would be full of complaints about titles, when in fact such complaints are an order of magnitude less common than they were, say, 5 years ago. This subthread is an exception, and you'll notice that we've attempted to accommodate the complaints by editing the title again.

We have spent years calibrating how we handle titles and it's one of the most consistent things we do. I know it can be nonintuitive to casual readers at times, but that's because applying that guideline is surprisingly complicated in practice. If it were your job, you'd soon find that as well. Also, people only notice the cases that stand out, which tend to be the edits they dislike and feel we got wrong (which maybe we did). That's a sample bias. Probably less than 5% of title edits even get noticed. Maybe even less than 1%.

We're always happy to answer questions about it, as well as to change titles in response to user feedback, which we do regularly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

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

#299

Post by hos234 »

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…

You are pointing at irrelevant people who don't belong to actual power structures. Ex-yahoo exec seriously? How can you even compare the Reddit CEO to Louis XIV. SV people have an overinflated sense of their importance in actual Power Hierarchies.

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

#300

Post by headsupftw »

nostromo wrote: post #30

I would support a wholesale ban on Chinese acquisitions of American companies until American companies are allowed to acquire Chinese companies (or otherwise operate in China). These ridiculous double standards from China are not free trade, and we should stop pretending it is.

So are you saying that currently American companies are NOT allowed to acquire Chinese companies or operate in China?

There are a few instances where that's true (there are also a few instances where Chinese companies are not allowed to acquire U.S. companies or operate in the U.S.) but you said "I would support a wholesale ban on Chinese acquisitions of American companies". So again are you insinuating that at this moment, no American companies are allowed to acquire Chinese companies or operate in China?

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