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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

#391

Post by DeonPenny »

coliveira wrote: post #351
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…

> given China's extreme behavior on restricting US Internet companies from their market, this is more than fair game. Except that the US always complained about this behavior from the Chinese government, but now it wants to adopt it as normal. It looks like the Chinese way of doing things is winning...

Yeh america way assumes theres a free and fair market. Since of course it isn't with China you have to protect you interest.

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

#392

Post by Karunamon »

dang wrote: post #298
Karunamon wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Well..

It's nonobjective in that the title guidelines carry subjective judgements.

Its' nonconsistent because of the previous problem.

It's unintuitive for the reasons you described above.

I think the reason it sticks in my craw so much is what I'll call the "rake to the face" phenomenon. Much like stepping on a rake in a dark shed and getting whacked in the face, it's usually surprising, usually unexpected, and usually painful (though mentally rather than physically.. "where did that article I read earlier go? No way it got flagged off.. Oh, there it is, they messed with the freaking title again. That was a waste of 5 minutes.")

This is worse when a descriptive title that actually calls out why someone should be interested in the article is reverted to something generic, which IMO, actively makes the site worse in furtherance of The Rules, which is never a good thing.

----

That aside.. If I could float a feature request that doesn't require any rule changes? Put a [*] or some other signifier next to titles that have been modified, and have it grey out over time (kinda like how comments get lighter and lighter as their score falls) and eventually disappear. Per your own search example, title changes are rare enough that there likely wouldn't be many on the front page, and it would give people like me who lose track of renamed articles a place or two to look.

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

#393

Post by pdabbadabba »

freeflight wrote: post #292
pdabbadabba wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing missing from all of this is any actual evidence of government pressure.

From [0]: "YouTube is facing criticism after a new artificial intelligence program monitoring "extremist" content began flagging and removing masses of videos and blocking channels that document war crimes in the Middle East."

From [1]: "Facebook said it has to restrict nudity for cultural reasons."

I'm not saying this isn't important. I'm not even ruling out some sort of indirect and informal government role. (Government policy and culture are intertwined!) But they fall far far short of supporting the false equivalency drawn in this thread ans elsewhere between western companies removing content due to TOS violations, etc. on the one hand, and content being removed literally, and undisputedly (as far as I've seen) in response to direct commands by the Chinese government.

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

#394

Post by pdabbadabba »

forgetfulusr wrote: post #383
pdabbadabba wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But GP's comment was about the US government , not restrictions placed on content by American companies voluntarily (or due to pressure from the broader US culture). I agree, of course, the US culture is restrictive in some ways, and this can come through in the practices of US companies (the culture is also quite permissive in some ways). But this is different in important ways from the restrictions being impos…

Aren't those mainly hidden behind gag orders though? Isn't that enough proof? We can't even tell what was censored presumably for our safety.

Don't think so. We know that there are some allegedly national-security-related takedowns where the government has sought gag orders. We know about them because the companies sometimes object, and the request becomes public. Then there the other types of content being discussed in this thread such as LGBTQ content, adult material, etc. where I don't think there is any reason at all to believe that gag orders would be involved.

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

#395

Post by [deleted] »

oefrha wrote: post #372
mgraczyk wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> musical.ly appears to have always had its head office in Shanghai until the acquisition. That's not true. I have not found a specific date, but the Shanghai office did not exist at the time musical.ly was founded. I have not found any references to the Shanghai office from before late 2015.

I searched for the Chinese name of the company (found on Wikipedia-zh) and immediately found all the information about how the company was founded and funded.[1] It was founded in Shanghai on 2013-08-01. Not being able to find any reference on the English-speaking part of the web doesn’t mean it couldn’t have existed. [1] https://www.jfz.com/pe/d-C6e3ie12gj.html

[deleted]

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

#396

Post by ceejayoz »

tsegratis wrote: post #382
dang wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. That breaks the site rules. Regardless of what you're battling for or against, using HN this way destroys the curiosity that the site exists for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I like your approach @dang However I'd still like to be able to view flagged messages -- maybe click to view? More generally I'd like to be able to hear the unpopular opinions, and see them discussed constructively. Rather than them being flagged and voted off Though I agree -- remaining constructive is essential

Go to your HN settings and turn the showdead setting to yes.

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

#397

Post by stickfigure »

vageli wrote: post #389
stickfigure wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird that this is being downvoted. What is the US government going to do, create a China-style great firewall? Even the (right-) wingnuts would be sharpening their pitchforks.

> Weird that this is being downvoted. What is the US government going to do, create a China-style great firewall? Even the (right-) wingnuts would be sharpening their pitchforks. So, if I want access to EU market I can avoid GDPR and other European regulations so long as I keep my server out of Europe?

In practice, you can.

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

#398

Post by headsupftw »

RandomBacon wrote: post #359
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…

> is the real-time interests of millions of 16-24 yo Americans reported back to the Chinese government a national security concern? Yes. They are kids today, but they might be a Senator, CEO, or President tomorrow. Or they might grow up to be an average person, but with a sensitive job and a Chinese intelligence officer needs background on someone to flip them. They don't need sensational information, just insight on…

Oh please.

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

#400

Post by guuguuguu »

crematoria wrote: post #277
quaquaqua1 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nobody is stereotyping the Chinese people! Google and Apple have publicly stood up against the US government, and the US doesn't (publicly and legally, at least) meddle with companies to anywhere near the same extent as China. When I support Google, I support Google alone, but when I support Tencent, it feels a little like I'm supporting the Chinese government, too.

Imagine being this native.
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