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TikTok goes dark in the US

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Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#481

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

hunglee2 wrote: post #440

Bottom line is: it is reasonable for governments to exercise control over the information environment their citizens experience, especially when social media has such potential to sow chaos and instability. Look at how the US internet fuelled the fires of the Arab Spring / HK protests / Jan 6th / Any number of colour revolutions in Europe. Even today, we see X being used as a platform to encourage protests against go…

Pandora's box is open. For an in depth take on the subject, check out "The Revolt of the Public".

TL;DR Communication technology has changed the relationship between rulers and the ruled, and we are just beginning to see what that might mean for the future of civilization. The book promises a lot but doesn't quite deliver. Still interesting reading.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#482

Post by jimkleiber »

haizhung wrote: post #465
hunglee2 wrote: post #440

Bottom line is: it is reasonable for governments to exercise control over the information environment their citizens experience, especially when social media has such potential to sow chaos and instability. Look at how the US internet fuelled the fires of the Arab Spring / HK protests / Jan 6th / Any number of colour revolutions in Europe. Even today, we see X being used as a platform to encourage protests against go…

It seems you are being downvoted, but I see this similarly. Elon musk applying pressure in German elections or UK politics via X/Twitter is basically exactly the problem with foreign interests controlling your social media; so I kinda hope the ban does set an example for other countries. Maybe, once the inflammatory platforms like X & Facebook are banned in the EU, then we can also get a social network that is not fu…

I hope one day these platforms are governed by the people using them. "Users" are humans who have little voice in the decision making of their digital nations.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#483

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

The United States has become a parody of itself.

Six years ago, The Onion mocked the idea of TikTok being dangerous to the US as a paranoid fantasy.[0] Now, that position is bipartisan consensus. China hysteria appears to have no limits.

0. https://theonion.com/xi-whiz-1844838344/

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#484

Post by csin »

ljlolel wrote: post #403

In related news, people are flooding social music service Hangout.fm to discover new music

I was curious and gave this site a shot.

You know what would be great for a music site? If someone new was able to instantly hear music!

Nope. After 5 mins of UI Ninjutsu, I gave up.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#485

Post by beepbopboopp »

AirMax98 wrote: post #98

It's a shame that it's come to this. I feel that all arguments that TikTok is unhealthy or spyware and bad for our general public are valid, but the same arguments also apply to Instagram/Twitter/Whatever. Rather than have some sort of further regulation for what data any application can collect and present to Americans, we've just brought the hammer down on the millions of people that use this application for their…

Please be serious.

Any suggestion that TikTok poses no real threat to U.S. interests is staggeringly naive. Imagine if CBS, NBC, FOX, and ABC were all owned and operated by the government of America’s greatest adversary—that’s essentially what we’re dealing with. Meanwhile, Chinese citizens are explicitly barred from accessing TikTok in China, and American social media companies are shut out of China’s market altogether. There’s no credible argument that TikTok doesn’t undermine U.S. interests; the only reason people are reacting so emotionally now is that our government took far too long to address this blatant national security risk.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#486

Post by crazylogger »

WA wrote: post #369
rented_mule wrote: post #221

What's to stop TikTok from serving their website from non-US servers to all comers? Using it in a browser is not as smooth as an app, but there must be apps out there that are nothing but a WebView to URLs on a single domain (like you can do in Mac Safari with File... Add to Dock...). Submitting / watching videos wouldn't be that different. It seems to me the only recourse the US would have is building The Great Fire…

Laws don't care about technical aspects. ByteDance must comply with the law, meaning, they need to stop offering the service to US citizens, no matter where the servers are hosted, for example, by geofencing their product. If they don't comply, they risk fines. They can only ignore this if they don't care about doing business with the US ever again and their owners never want to set foot in the country again.

The funny thing here is that complying means they never do business in the US anyway. So potentially it is beneficial for Bytedance to still serve US viewers but keep no physical presence in the US, and deal only with non-American advertisers (e.g. US viewer see ads from SHEIN, Aliexpress, Ctrip, etc.) and still profit from this operation. Those companies will pay Bytedance in China, outside US control.

This is pretty much how US internet services operate in the rest of the world: YouTube have no physical presence in, say, Nigeria, but Nigerians watch YouTube just fine. That’s what the internet was all about. We’re connected by default, unless a government actively implements a firewall to stop it.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#487

Post by t-3 »

hunglee2 wrote: post #440

Bottom line is: it is reasonable for governments to exercise control over the information environment their citizens experience, especially when social media has such potential to sow chaos and instability. Look at how the US internet fuelled the fires of the Arab Spring / HK protests / Jan 6th / Any number of colour revolutions in Europe. Even today, we see X being used as a platform to encourage protests against go…

> it is reasonable for governments to exercise control over the information environment their citizens experience

It's reasonable for governments that don't entertain the notion that their citizens have freedoms of association, speech, etc. For countries where those concepts are legally enshrined in the country's own founding documents, no, it's not. Part of living in a democracy is having the responsibility to inform yourself and make voting decisions based on your own understanding. Letting the government tell people who they can and cannot listen to flies in the face of the very idea of democracy.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#488

Post by roca »

epolanski wrote: post #434
jandrewrogers wrote: post #308

A point I think most people don’t understand is that the government interest in TikTok has little to do with exploiting user data per se, a lot of other companies do that. The issue is that TikTok is somewhat unique in being aggressively weaponized in currently very active “grey zone” conflicts. This has been an open secret in national security circles but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone…

Is there solid evidence about that? The only study I've seen said that TikTok wasn't any more biased than other social medias.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tiktoks-content-political-subje...

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#489

Post by sharperguy »

beepbopboopp wrote: post #485
AirMax98 wrote: post #98

It's a shame that it's come to this. I feel that all arguments that TikTok is unhealthy or spyware and bad for our general public are valid, but the same arguments also apply to Instagram/Twitter/Whatever. Rather than have some sort of further regulation for what data any application can collect and present to Americans, we've just brought the hammer down on the millions of people that use this application for their…

Please be serious. Any suggestion that TikTok poses no real threat to U.S. interests is staggeringly naive. Imagine if CBS, NBC, FOX, and ABC were all owned and operated by the government of America’s greatest adversary—that’s essentially what we’re dealing with. Meanwhile, Chinese citizens are explicitly barred from accessing TikTok in China, and American social media companies are shut out of China’s market altoget…

It's more like, if China started their own news network and American citizens began to prefer it over CBS, NBC and FOX because of the extremely shoddy level of content available on those local networks.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#490

Post by bloomingkales »

daemoens wrote: post #231

The app was shutdown a couple of hours ago in the US and this was the message all TikTok users saw when they opened the app.[1] The same guy who pushed for a ban massively last year, is going to save the app despite the security concerns he and most of our government said they had. If only we knew what happened in that classified briefing that made them vote together across party lines. [1] https://a57.foxnews.com/st…

https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...

Vs

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/iran-tiktok...

Mitch Hedberg:

My belt holds my pants up, but the belt loops hold my belt up. I don't really know what's happening down there. Who is the real hero?

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