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Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

congress.gov

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Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#51

Post by abeppu »

ellisv wrote: post #40
abeppu wrote: post #23

So, they're clearly trying to describe what they're doing in general terms. I'm not a lawyer, but I wonder if that's partly a constitutional matter -- just going after TikTok by name based on a knowledge of _past_ access to American data by staff in China would sound like an ex post facto law. So they have to frame it as being about a class of services with relationships to a group of foreign adversaries. But then ar…

If you were to name a company specifically, the company could fold and reopen under a new name. But moreover, laws should be about behavior. You don’t ban Philip Morris, you ban selling tobacco to kids and smoking indoors.

You _should_ have laws about behavior.

This is not that. But Congress has had years of opportunities to develop actual data privacy laws and they haven't. They held proceedings focused on a single company. The tagline for this post is specifically "Senate Bill to Ban TikTok" for good reason: it was written to target a single company.

We _should_ be concerned about companies which have personal data on basically everyone and have no real limitations on how it's used, but FB is gonna keep operating. We _should_ be concerned about a government that can gather private data about Americans by secretly working with a corporation. But AT&T's cooperation with the NSA never really hurt it.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#52

Post by madeofpalk »

Gigachad wrote: post #25
charlieflowers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real concerns, in order of importance, are: 1. This is a way of getting memes to the masses that we (the US political establishment) can't fully control. 2. Meta and others are getting their asses kicked revenue-wise by Tik Tok. Like any business, they'd use anything they could to fight back. Turns out they can use China fear mongering, so they are. 3. (Added) Believe it or not, there's nationalistic pride here.…

When the memes involve destroying the school bathrooms and stealing cars. It's probably worth considering what control is had over it.

Would love to see the overlap of people concerned about threats to the conditional right to own guns, and those who are completely unconcerned about this direct attack on freedom of speech.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#53

Post by madeofpalk »

holler wrote: post #45
gretch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the concern of the bill is and it's completely transparent. Just read the first 2 pages of the bill and you can see the concern is, in the words of the bill, a "foreign adversary" and their ability to "sabotage or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology products and services in th…

China has banned nearly all US social networks already so is this really surprising given the current status quo?

Because China has strict censorship laws, so should the US?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#54

Post by primitivesuave »

A strategy doomed to failure: kick the far-right off Twitter so they can plan a revolution on Parler. Kick the QAnon people off Facebook so they can reorganize on Gab. All this will ever achieve is to scatter people into deeper and darker ideological echo chambers.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#55

Post by freewizard » 

    (10) ICTS COVERED HOLDING ENTITY.—The term “ICTS covered holding entity” means any entity that—
    (A) owns, controls, or manages information and communications technology products or services; and
    (B) (i) has not less than 1,000,000 United States-based annual active users at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered holding is referred to the President; or
    (ii) for which more than 1,000,000 units have been sold to persons in the United States before the date on which the covered holding is referred to the President.
    (11) INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS OR SERVICES.—The term “information and communications technology products or services” means any hardware, software, or other product or service primarily intended to fulfill or enable the function of information or data processing, storage, retrieval, or communication by electronic means, including transmission, storage, and display.
this seems pretty broad, not just TikTok, but WeChat, Little Red Book, Yandex and any cellphone made by Chinese companies has 1M+ unit sold may all be subject to same restrictions

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#56

Post by dymk »

primitivesuave wrote: post #54

A strategy doomed to failure: kick the far-right off Twitter so they can plan a revolution on Parler. Kick the QAnon people off Facebook so they can reorganize on Gab. All this will ever achieve is to scatter people into deeper and darker ideological echo chambers.

Good, they're doing more harm on Twitter and Facebook anyways

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#57

Post by NLPaep »

spiderice wrote: post #48
sct202 wrote: post #36

I'm fine if TikTok gets banned, but I feel like Facebook and all the other social media incumbents owe Americans a bunch of money for their biggest competition being banned.

> I'm fine if TikTok gets banned How are so many people (especially on HN) fine with this? Haven't we criticized "The Great Firewall of China" for literally decades? How is this not the start of that? Genuine question. This ban seems to set horrible precedent to me. Bet everyones "coolness" with it makes me think I'm not understanding something.

The media is the fourth branch of government. It is wildly considered to be essential for a healthy democracy. You don’t want to have it controlled (for many people) by an untrustworthy and adversarial party, especially when they have a long track record of censorship and are trying to extend their own influence and rules globally.

We can still say and post what we want - it’s not content that’s being censored.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#58

Post by waboremo »

gretch wrote: post #7
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's not what the concern of the bill is and it's completely transparent. Just read the first 2 pages of the bill and you can see the concern is, in the words of the bill, a "foreign adversary" and their ability to "sabotage or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology products and services in th…

When you are also banning VPN access to whatever tools you deem under the control of "foreign adversaries" (which, more people should look up the government's actual definition on this lol), then privacy is very much a core narrative. If it was just about China then Chinese apps would have been banned off Apple and Google stores years ago.

This is going to be one of those things Americans look back at, like the PATRIOT act, and wonder how the hell they allowed it to happen all because of one app/event.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#59

Post by vkou »

spiderice wrote: post #48
sct202 wrote: post #36

I'm fine if TikTok gets banned, but I feel like Facebook and all the other social media incumbents owe Americans a bunch of money for their biggest competition being banned.

> I'm fine if TikTok gets banned How are so many people (especially on HN) fine with this? Haven't we criticized "The Great Firewall of China" for literally decades? How is this not the start of that? Genuine question. This ban seems to set horrible precedent to me. Bet everyones "coolness" with it makes me think I'm not understanding something.

You're understanding everything just fine. Speech advocates should be livid about this, but their silence on the question is quite telling.

As the sibling post mentions, the public is too stupid to be allowed to be communicated at by an untrustworthy and adversarial media. Of course, untrustworthy and adversarial refers to foreign enemies, not domestic[1] ones.

[1] Fox and friends, et al, would be the poster children[2] for untrustworthy and adversarial, but they are our untrustworthy and adversarial media firms, so mysteriously, they get a free pass.

[2] Just imagine if the 'batshit right-wing conspiracy' half of the US media landscape were ran by the Kremlin (Or some other boogieman of the week), instead of a billionaire from Australia. Same content, different source, would drive people utterly livid.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#60

Post by tcmart14 »

reb wrote: post #27

So we can just calling time-of-death on the United States' social tech dominance now, right? Domestic tech companies shamelessly sold access to American users for manipulation by "foreign adversaries" for years, made billions, suffered no lasting consequences. Then Chinese Vine walks in, smokes everybody else in ~24 months, the mad South African buys and destroys Twitter, and Mark toddles off the cliff of irrelevance…

No, we do the most American thing imaginable. Just like we did with the space race, we got to the moon first therefore we won, even though we weren't first in much anything in the space race at the time. So I fully expect we ban TikTok then declare one of the American social media networks the winner of the social media race.
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