381–390 of 677 posts
Something revealed in the recent court filings was how Bytedance spent over $1 billion in advertising on Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat. Apparently they were spending $10-$30 to acquire an active user and expecting to generate $5 of revenue per user in the US, implying a revenue payback period of 2-6 years. Some ugly unit economics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any business with china is a national security issue. There's plenty of evidence to the level of dictatorship in China. It's your responsibility to look at its history and make reasonable conclusions from it. If you want some sort of smoking gun evidence you're not going to find it, unless you somehow have a security clearance in China good enough to gain knowledge about their operations. It's a Chinese company, they…
Ok, but how is Tik Tok a national security issue, but the fact that damn near every electronic device available on the market is manufactured in or out of components manufactured in China doesn't seem to be one?
A single laptop has likely hundreds of processing units, running unknown software, often with direct access to the memory buss. Building a secure devices however where every bit of code and every bit of hardware is designed domestically (and preferable in house) is so prohibitively expensive that no one do that. The hope is that if there is a security fault then someone else will find it and report it, and so a reputation system is the only economical viable method for hardware security in most consumer devices.
Yes any Chinese owned company is a potential national security risk. CCP is already known to manipulate their citizens with propaganda on their news and media sites. Tiktok gives them that acres to manipulate/meddle in other countries. What I'm strongly against is handpicking tiktok and wechat. This should be a law passed by congress which effectively limits companies blacklisted countries like China,Iran to US marke…
This is a really naïve world view—not that TikTok isn't potentially a channel of propaganda, but that we somehow are free of propaganda in the US. The Trump administration is a source of propaganda. The Democratic party is a source of propaganda. Propaganda is basically any speech from any biased source. The only significant difference between China and the US isn't that one practices propaganda but that China limits their propaganda to only one source.
Blacklisting "propaganda" from sources you don't like is in fact censorship. If we start blocking China because we don't like what they are telling us, why stop there? Why not start blocking propaganda from the Trump critics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any business with china is a national security issue. There's plenty of evidence to the level of dictatorship in China. It's your responsibility to look at its history and make reasonable conclusions from it. If you want some sort of smoking gun evidence you're not going to find it, unless you somehow have a security clearance in China good enough to gain knowledge about their operations. It's a Chinese company, they…
>It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights. Neither Bytedance nor TikTok are Chinese companies. It's true that Bytedance has buildings in Beijing, and a Chinese app (Taotiao) that is a Chinese subsidiary, but Bytedance is a Cayman's Islands company and TikTok doesn't even have servers inside China. For purposes of the Chinese National Intelligence Law compelling the company to share user information wi…
It's strange how so many in the US have adopted the mindset that it's important, for national security, to deny its citizens access to foreign social networks. Previously, when China did the same, this was widely viewed as an unfortunate restriction their freedoms -- the actions of an intrusive, authoritarian government. Now that the US is itself considering doing the same, many in the west have suddenly adopted the…
The US is a democratic government with the rule of law, as seen in this very example with a judge blocking the order.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ban all Chinese apps?
Yeah. I don’t buy this argument until they ban all Chinese apps. As far as I can tell, it’s just a way to cut off younger voter’s access to information that is critical of Trump. And that’s a generous reading.
If you deny voting rights to a certain group of people, politicians just don't have to care about them at all. They can do things that hurt that group, and no one is going to hold them accountable.
At this point, I believe we should stop discriminating based on age.
It's strange how so many in the US have adopted the mindset that it's important, for national security, to deny its citizens access to foreign social networks. Previously, when China did the same, this was widely viewed as an unfortunate restriction their freedoms -- the actions of an intrusive, authoritarian government. Now that the US is itself considering doing the same, many in the west have suddenly adopted the…
It'd be better if Chinese companies could freely operate in the American market and American companies could freely operate in the Chinese market. But China blocks American companies from their market, or extracts unfair concessions from them. So the US should do the same until they change their practices. It's similar to how countries that want peace still need militaries -- that isn't a contradiction because milita…
The reason why we're stepping it up is because China has shown that they can domestically grow successful tech and social media companies that can penetrate the US market. It's not so much national security that's the issue more than it is insecurity in our fundamental beliefs that our system is inherently superior because they're now crossed the barrier higher up in the value chain. We gave them manufacturing just like we gave domestic immigrants the "dirty" jobs that no one wanted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can understand this attitude in the general public but it’s completely bizarre from HN engineers. Expect more more optimism for FBI/NSA backdoors in encryption next.
It's only bizarre if you consider ByteDance as some plucky startup that is being repressed by USA. If you consider it to be under the thumb of the Chinese state then blocking it seems to be the best action to preserve free speech. Will TikTok remove Chinese propaganda on their platform, how would that conversation even go at their offices? Can we trust that TikTok will not in future censor things that China finds unc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Instead, I believe that it is a national security issue Are you uncomfortable adopting that belief with literally no concrete evidence that anything of the sort is actually occurring? I don't know how you reconcile rule of law with such drastic interventions in the rights of companies without evidence of wrongdoing. If anything you can come up with in your most paranoid fantasies can be the basis of shutting down a…
Read the replies from Chinese nationals on HN defending TikTok. Even they don't pretend you can say anything you want there. Their argument is "How much time would you really spend discussing Tiananmen or criticizing the CCP? Is it really worth losing contact with your friends or colleagues who use TikTok and WeChat?" In my opinion, absolutely. Stop it now before it gets too powerful to ban. WeChat already has 19 mil…
The status quo is that you only need some minor skill at language games to talk about forbidden topics without using any keywords that trigger censorship. With a ban in place, at least one of the participants additionally has to circumvent their country's firewall to reach the other side. Censoring censored media even more is not a good way to fight censorship.
I'm also not sure why you think "How much time would you really spend discussing Tiananmen or criticizing the CCP?" is talking about TikTok, since you can absolutely do that there https://www.tiktok.com/tag/tiananmen
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely Facebook’s a bigger issue than 60 second videos since any bad actor can target messaging at susceptibile users and no one will know. This just seems like yet another case of Republican double speak. Say one thing do a different thing that just coincidentally happens to grab power over others. Also, what is the method of using a 60 second video platform to share messaging with a crowd who will immediately scrol…
TikTok is the generation that is most malleable to propaganda in a way that can undermine an entire generation. TikTok also has history of recording telemetry that’s extremely alarming. Look into what is mined. Look into how algorithms get optimized to influence behavior. See a recent paper on this with using social media to shut down a power plant. Memetic warfare is real and it’s been going on in cyberspace for a w…
You don't have to look far to know this hypothesis won't stand up to any scrutiny. Not only are TikTok users typically in the age range less likely to vote, but everyone is susceptible to propaganda and lies. There is a lot of US produced propaganda out there aimed at the older generations which is being lapped up by a public thirsty for negative partisanship and divisive rhetoric.
If the Tiktok generation has been undermined, then it's by the older generations who benefited from more favorable situations, grabbed the wealth and power for themselves, pulled the ladder up and now refuse to see how any of this is an issue and will fight to maintain an unequal situation as long as it favors them.