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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

#301

Post by throwaway2048 »

dang wrote: post #295
throwaway2048 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enou…

Intent to obfuscate was not implied in my statement, apologies if it came across like that.

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

#302

Post by [deleted] »

quaquaqua1 wrote: post #196
mustacheemperor wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of discussion seems a bit off the topic of the thread, but I want to respond to you. Based on your last paragraph, it seems to me like it should be pretty clear why there is so much hate for the Chinese government and the companies that act as agents for Chinese government censorship and oppression policies. There are many Chinese nationals suffering and dying in concentration camps _right now_. Am I oblige…

I do not deny any of the claims you have made about concentration camps, human rights abuses, corporate interests etc. But I would really like to understand why there is a double standard in the minds of "my fellow Westerners". Boeing, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, Halliburton, Lockheed, and the whole Washington aparatus in general have been (in)directly responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people in t…

[deleted]

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

#303

Post by mindslight »

root_axis wrote: post #276
kccqzy wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what? The eighteenth-century ideal of free speech in a public forum has now become de-facto mediated by private companies acting in their own interest. Some may believe in free speech more rigorously than others (say Reddit, as compared to Facebook). The fact that the government cannot censor speech matters less and less nowadays, given how much speech now passes through private companies' control.

> free speech in a public forum has now become de-facto mediated by private companies acting in their own interest This statement is misleading. Some public internet forums owned by large corporations are mediated by companies acting in their own interest. Nobody is required to use those forums and many alternative forums exist, other individuals or firms are also able to create their own online public forums subject…

You're being disingenuous. Your assertions apply in some narrow senses, but are seemingly inapplicable to the overall situation. For most of society, webcrapps are currently the de facto town square. A clique of companies has obtained the position of censoring the vast majority of interpersonal speech, period.

But sure, there are practical angles in the US where, for example, if we could shift the popular focus to Free software, We could regain society's Freedom of Speech. Perhaps you're focused on the technicalities because you're trying to work towards that - but talk constructively rather than dismissively. It helps nobody to push a stubborn idea that there is some strict distinction between USG and the S&P 500. Whether the political bureaucracy controls corporations or corporations control bureaucracy, it's all government.

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

#304

Post by dang »

radcon wrote: post #227
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.

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.

What headline was that? Obviously we're not removing Hong Kong from Blizzard titles because of some sinister agenda. If we were, we suck at it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I hope HN readers have gotten smart enough to notice how when commenters make grandiose claims like this about manipulation, they never provide links. That's because the facts never support the grandiose claim.

Curious to see what the real reason might have been, I skimmed through the last 30 or so titles with Blizzard in them and didn't find one we'd edited in this way, or even at all. Perhaps I missed it. But whatever we did with any such title, it would have been because of the site guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

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

#305

Post by Angeo34 »

ahbyb wrote: post #255
mgraczyk wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this myth that musical.ly was founded in China before, but it's hard to believe if you look at some basic facts. One cofounder worked full time at SAP in SF bay area for several years before and after musical.ly was founded. The other says on his LinkedIn that he was working in Santa Monica for several years on either side of the founding. They lived, worked, and founded the company in CA.

Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang don't sound very Californian to me.

Neither do German (What you Americans call Jewish) or Russian/Ukrainian names sound English yet they are by far the biggest majority of your country way ahead of the Anglos. More likely than not a European American has its roots somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe.

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

#307

Post by sinkelfink »

root_axis wrote: post #252
kccqzy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when these private companies become large enough they become the de-facto public forum.

Why? So what?

In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or William Barr. America most definitely has such a system.

And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.

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

#308

Post by dang »

tastroder wrote: post #274
claudeganon wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if anyone ever built an HN title change tracker. Seems a trivial project for the audience of this site.

https://hackernewstitles.netlify.com/

That's a cool site! But some of those are edits made by submitters, not moderators.

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

#309

Post by bredren »

Scaevolus wrote: post #219
bredren wrote: post #17

It was clear to me how threatened Facebook was by TikTok when I brought it up with an employee in June. They kept mentioning infinite scroll, and that everyone was supposed to be thinking about how to incorporate that into product. After zuck discussed TikTok directly recently, I’m not surprised google and fb lobbyists would press for this investigation. One question I have, is the real-time interests of millions of…

Facebook has released a TikTok clone, Lasso, but they miss a lot of basic things that made TikTok popular, both from a policy perspective and from UX. It's much less competitive than Instagram's cloning of Snapchat. Initially Lasso only supported registering with a Facebook account, defaulting to exposing your real name to the world. TikTok let you browse anonymously and register with just a phone number or email acc…

Interesting notes. Lasso is currently only focused on Mexico.

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

#310

Post by kmonsen »

yorwba wrote: post #231
adventured wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"TikTok also says China does not have jurisdiction over content of the app, which does not operate in China and is not influenced by any foreign government." If it's a Chinese company, why is TikTok saying that China has zero jurisdiction over the app? Besides that, the US can require that Bytedance peel off TikTok / Musical.ly. If Bytedance wants access to the US market with that app, it will have to play by US rule…

> If it's a Chinese company, why is TikTok saying that China has zero jurisdiction over the app? ByteDance is trying very hard to run TikTok and Douyin (抖音, the Chinese version) as separate companies that happen to share the same code but not data. For one, this is because they're well aware that Western governments are suspicious of foreign companies having access to their citizens' data. Secondly, having Chinese an…

Not sure how they can do that in a reasonable way since it is not open source? And just because the data is not in China does not mean the Chinese government does not get access, it is more like the other way round. If the data is in China you can be sure they have full access.
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