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

Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

congress.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 741 posts

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#371

Post by [deleted] »

deltree7 wrote: post #343
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…

Don't worry about the US. It is still the greatest country and will remain so for at least 50 years. It's reddit/HN who have never traveled or lived outside US that has jaded your view of US. You know which country released chatGPT? or NVIDIA A100 or made a huge step towards Quantum Computing / Nuclear Fusion? I'd rather congress focus on irrelevant details, while startups solve / tackle important issues. When it rea…

[deleted]

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#372

Post by Dalewyn »

graeme wrote: post #355
gus_massa wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi from the rest of the world! > Foreign adversaries have learned exactly how to weaponize our free and open internet against our own people. Do you think that we should ban all the Chinese apps and also all the American apps?

Possibly. But, many countries are formally US allies, with deep security integration. So an American owned application is not as threatening as a Chinese owned application. America also generally allows businesses and media from foreign companies to take part, whereas China has no such reciprocity. Security arrangements are real things that can't be merely handwaved away as something that "should" not exist in one's…

Put more bluntly: Even the likes of Facebook and Google are, ostensibly and ultimately, operating for western interests.

The likes of Tiktok operately strictly for Chinese interests, and Chinese interests do not align with western interests.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#373

Post by Mountain_Skies »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #338
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…

Giving too much power to out of touch, senile old men seems to be a global issue.

You will of course, in the name of gender equality, monitor how many women vote each way on this bill, right? Were you even aware that women are allowed in Congress?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#374

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

Adraghast wrote: post #274
etrautmann wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's a fair bit more complicated than that. They could choose to show all of the "you're a nerd!" videos to youths in other nations and all of the "look at what I did using science and engineering!" videos to youths in their own nation. It might be considered that such a move would put them in a more competitive position years to decades down the line.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#375

Post by greenie_beans »

humanistbot wrote: post #3

If the concern is privacy and security, which apply to all social media platforms, then why not pass actual privacy and security laws that would apply equally to all social media platforms, regardless of who currently owns it or may own it in the future?

that would be reasonable, wouldn't it?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#376

Post by Dalewyn »

alexose wrote: post #324
eganist wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 da…

> 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 Exactly. We're a decade into the social media experiment now, and it's absolutely clear that it in its current form it doesn't make us smarter, it doesn't make us happier, and it doesn't bring us closer. If anything, it makes people sick and it weakens the social fabric.…

>I think it's important to know what an incredible position this is to be in,

The old saying goes that knowledge is power; everyone here with deep knowledge of computers and the things they enable really are in a blessed position.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#377

Post by OzyM »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #356
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…

Debating the minutiae of the number of school shootings is just...sad. The total number of children who should die in school shootings should always be 0. It's not even particularly hard. Practically every country in the world manages to achieve that target.

And the ideal number of suicides is 0, and the ideal amount of spyware is 0, etc. All of these are targets, but an ideal doesn't give you further information on how to prioritize

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#378

Post by Mountain_Skies »

goatlover wrote: post #269
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.

Fuck the US government. There should be mass civil disobedience over this if it somehow passes. Let them try to prosecute millions of citizens. This is no better than what the CCP or Putin's regime does to it's own citizens. I see that the EU and UK have similar designs to control the internet.

Hyper-partisanship has created an army of citizens who are quite ok with the government being authoritarian with no limits on its power as long as they're convinced that their ideology will be the one in control of the monster being created. The monster of course will follow its own path, crushing all that get in its way, not giving a damn about the ideological fantasies of those who allowed it to be created.
Post reply on HN