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Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

congress.gov

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Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#401

Post by djha-skin »

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…

Really HN? The top voted comment is "this country has gone downhill"? This isn't Reddit. We're supposed to at least say something novel here, and hopefully interesting. How has the country gone downhill? Why is this decision so uninteresting? This comment also completely ignores the very interesting geopolitical aspects of this bill. On the surface it does look like something innocuous, as implied, which is why people might double-take and want to look deeper.

Pathos-heavy comments like this one with no real meat disappoint me. Surely we can do better.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#402

Post by all2 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #378
goatlover wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that the people who kick off an authoritarian government are typically the ones who die first. The revolution eats its own. See the brown shirts, the multiple rounds of beheadings during the French revolution, the Bolsheviks, and so on. So whoever hopes the government will continue to support them generally hopes in vain. The machine has two goals: continue existing, and expand its power.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#403

Post by ddoolin »

withinboredom wrote: post #270
ddoolin wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok disappearing from tens of millions of iPhones overnight (I have no idea about Androids) would probably work pretty well. If I had to guess, almost none of those people can jailbreak their iPhone to get it again, either. Your option would be to switch to Android and learn to sideload apps (which I think is pretty damn easy these days). The point is not to enforce against individual users, just to remove it from…

You can freely install apps on your iphone. All you need is an Apple computer. It only can be used for a week? before you have to install it again. I don't pay apple a dime and still develop software for iPhones occasionally without any issues. Also, websites are pretty powerful. Apple even allowed websites to send notifications now.

The government has multiple tools it can use to ban websites as well.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#404

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #289
throwaway4837 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children. This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their qu…

Well yeah, ByteDance directly takes orders from the Chinese government. Big Tech can also take orders from the American government, but America is bound by the rule of law and isn't actively imprisoning millions in concentration camps so it's way better

America actually has a greater percentage of it's citizens in prison than any other country, including China.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#405

Post by ddoolin »

mattmcknight wrote: post #357
ddoolin wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok disappearing from tens of millions of iPhones overnight (I have no idea about Androids) would probably work pretty well. If I had to guess, almost none of those people can jailbreak their iPhone to get it again, either. Your option would be to switch to Android and learn to sideload apps (which I think is pretty damn easy these days). The point is not to enforce against individual users, just to remove it from…

It has a website. I've used the website, never the app.

True, but those can also be banned (in a literal or practical sense).

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#406

Post by lazyeye »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #193
lazyeye wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But its not open markets if one partner blocks all access to it's own market? In what other trade context would this scenario be acceptable? And how does giving access to an authoritarian regime, famous for controlling speech, promote free speech?

Consumer choice is unequivocally good. Besides, the problem is already solvable. People could simply stop using TikTok if they agreed that its disadvantages outweigh its benefits. No one is forcing them. This is a vote with your feet issue, plain and simple.

Ridiculous argument.

A lot of people choose meth.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#407

Post by jedberg »

gorwell wrote: post #214

Did anyone notice that the bill doesn't even mention Tiktok??? If it's a "bill to ban TikTok" why doesn't it name the target? It's a red herring. This is the Patriot Act for the Internet. Ironically they're copying the CCP playbook and want the same level of sweeping control with the implementation of a Great Firewall. It's extremely broad and includes everything connected to the internet that has >1M users in a year…

Because it's unconstitutional to make a law that targets a specific person or company. They have to be subtle and use generic terms to describe who is affected by the law in a way where TikTok ends up being the only company that qualifies right now.

It's also good practice because it prevents TikTok from just making a new company that is exactly the same.

Edit: changed illegal to unconstitutional because someone below was confused.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#408

Post by djha-skin »

gorwell wrote: post #214

Did anyone notice that the bill doesn't even mention Tiktok??? If it's a "bill to ban TikTok" why doesn't it name the target? It's a red herring. This is the Patriot Act for the Internet. Ironically they're copying the CCP playbook and want the same level of sweeping control with the implementation of a Great Firewall. It's extremely broad and includes everything connected to the internet that has >1M users in a year…

Interesting that the senator from Virginia introduced the bill. After all how many of us have a great portion of our traffic being served out of us-east-1?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#409

Post by dragonwriter »

all2 wrote: post #402
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that the people who kick off an authoritarian government are typically the ones who die first. The revolution eats its own. See the brown shirts, the multiple rounds of beheadings during the French revolution, the Bolsheviks, and so on. So whoever hopes the government will continue to support them generally hopes in vain. The machine has two goals: continue existing, and expand its power.

> The problem is that the people who kick off an authoritarian government are typically the ones who die first. The revolution eats its own. See the brown shirts, the multiple rounds of beheadings during the French revolution, the Bolsheviks, and so on.

But, except for maybe some of those in the French Revolution, those are mostly foot soldiers, or leaders who fell victim to distinct subsequent revolutions, not the people who kicked off the resolution getting eaten by it.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#410

Post by dsfyu404ed »

boopmaster wrote: post #394
withinboredom wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [The] US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China. Yeah, except that any business can just buy that information. I can buy your day-to-day movements for dirt cheap. I own a non-American company (though I'm still an American citizen, but that isn't a factor), and it is insanely cheap to get information about any American you want. Hell, BingBot will tell you all about…

I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership, but I assume at face value that there is some very embarrassing facts that our local spooks are not keen to share with China. What does the great firewall of America look like, from the infrastructure & interface angle? Would we want to share that with China? Your Google searches and all your metadata tha…

>I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership,

The propaganda part.

Remember a month ago when everyone's feed had a video in it from the TikTok CEO encouraging people to side with TikTok.

They are scared shitless of not being mostly in control of that kind of power when applied to Americans. They are worried that the next Saddam is going to pay TikTok, or some future foreign competitor to torpedo whatever the next WMD lie is (and this will be done with Chinese blessing because that will be in their geopolitical interest).

The possibility was easy to ignore back when all the social media giants were American and the feds had jurisdiction and soft power over them. Now there's a new entrant that China has jurisdiction and soft power over. They want the status quo back. Hence why all the bill language is mostly about preventing foreign ownership.

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