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Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

congress.gov

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Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#551

Post by kevando »

gonehome wrote: post #478
Hilarity1 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok is one vehicle for influence - and there are hundreds. Millions use TikTok. To them, you’re not removing their “adversary”, you’re removing their fun. From the outside, this looks like the United States is controlling the media - something it’s already accused of by 1/2 of Americans. This action will reiterate that for some and make it true for more.

New accounts on issues like this always make me wary of the 50cent party (kind of a case-in-point example of the kind of nation state influence operations and risk). [0] It shouldn’t have gotten to this level, but it’s where we are. Users will move to reels or something else that takes its place without the national security risk. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

yeah i found it noteworthy that your comment had mostly green user replies. thanks for sharing this, i didn't know about the 50 cent party.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#552

Post by andrekandre »

gonehome wrote: post #413
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…

The data isn’t the risk, it’s more the ability for CCP to leverage influence. https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/ Dialing up things to cause unrest, dialing down stuff critical of the CCP. It’s not an issue about data, or even an issue about speech, it’s an issue of ownership of a media company by an adversary that will weaponize it against you. Who controls and owns media companies is a reasonable national…

  > it’s more the ability for CCP to leverage influence.
like they cant influence twitter, facebook and all the rest?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#553

Post by RoyGBivCap »

RandallBrown wrote: post #426
twoodfin wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect NSL’s to be used in criminal convictions? What does that have to do with national security? Isn’t the whole point of an NSL to get something for legitimate national security purposes that couldn’t be legitimately acquired for criminal prosecution?

If you're doing something that threatens the nation's security, you're probably committing a crime.

Well, yeah. The security of Britain's colonies as a wee bit threatened by the War of Independence. The crown very much considered it a crime. But was it wrong?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#554

Post by dragonwriter »

andrekandre wrote: post #552
gonehome wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data isn’t the risk, it’s more the ability for CCP to leverage influence. https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/ Dialing up things to cause unrest, dialing down stuff critical of the CCP. It’s not an issue about data, or even an issue about speech, it’s an issue of ownership of a media company by an adversary that will weaponize it against you. Who controls and owns media companies is a reasonable national…

> it’s more the ability for CCP to leverage influence. like they cant influence twitter, facebook and all the rest?

> like they cant influence twitter, facebook and all the rest?

Well, no, that’s more Maximum Bone Saw’s purview than the CCPs, and that foreign influence isn’t (at least per the initial list written into the proposed law) considered adversarial.

(EDIT: That’s specific to Twitter, not Facebook and all the rest.)

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#555

Post by lazyeye »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #533
lazyeye wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but govts can try to minimize the damage from people making bad decisions. Which they do constantly, across all areas of society. And what you describe as "neo-liberal mumbo-jumbo" I think for most people would be seen as simple commonsense.

It's a social fact which is different from an objective fact based in reality.

ok well I think for most people this "social fact" aligns exactly with reality, and as you've already stated, people are always rational actors so...

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#556

Post by soderfoo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #517
shepherdjerred wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States does not have a strong democracy. Half (more or less) of the population believes the election was rigged.

> The United States does not have a strong democracy. Half (more or less) of the population believes the election was rigged. From various recent polls, it looks like somewhere between 30-40%, somewhere under 2/3 of Republicans and Republican-leaners and basically no one else.

30% is about par for the course when it comes to contemporary controversial POTUS elections [1][2].

It seems to ebb and flow: each side takes their turn being the aggrieved party and then alternate next go around (2000, 2016, 2020).

Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.

The tapestry of dysfunctional patchwork that make up the American Constitutional Republic, while tattered and frayed before, has found ways to persist.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2000/12/01/many-questio...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4687/seven-americans-accept-bus...

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#557

Post by creato »

caf wrote: post #538
gonehome wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the USG would have allowed the USSR to buy NBC? These aren’t new issues, there are certain types of corporations where there is a national security interest in American ownership and capability (see also: Intel). Ownership of airlines is another example, you can’t have a foreign controlling interest in a domestic airline (Richard Branson couldn’t save Virgin America due to this). There are good reasons f…

In the case of airlines it is just straight up protectionism. There's no national security risk there: if push came to shove in time of war the government could simply seize the assets and operate them as they saw fit.

If that’s your view, then it seems better to be up front about the ownership limitations than pretending otherwise until a war comes along and pulling the rug.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#558

Post by firen777 »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #480
throwaway29812 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the same level of sweeping control with the implementation of a Great Firewall The same level ?

Genuine question: can violating the Great Firewall lead to a 20 year prison sentence? What about a $1M fine?

If you are small fish watching Twitch and Pornhub, couple of weeks, maybe.

If you are a dissidents influencer or online figure, on the other hand, you will be lucky to even be found out why you disappeared.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#559

Post by throwawaylinux »

dragonwriter wrote: post #517
shepherdjerred wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States does not have a strong democracy. Half (more or less) of the population believes the election was rigged.

> The United States does not have a strong democracy. Half (more or less) of the population believes the election was rigged. From various recent polls, it looks like somewhere between 30-40%, somewhere under 2/3 of Republicans and Republican-leaners and basically no one else.

For the most recent presidential election maybe. For the previous one a majority of Democrats including many high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.

Clearly you aren't going to have a large contingent of deniers of elections that your favored party won.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#560

Post by chaosharmonic »

tuxpenguine wrote: post #537
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…

I think this is exactly the manifestation of social media's influence on a person's view on America. I came from another country and lived in America now. If we watch the news from social media, you will inevitably get the sense that the country is in decline: guns out of control, sky-rocketing house and medical expense, non-functioning government etc. In reality, you take for granted the freedom that you enjoy here,…

If you have a problem with that, why limit this to TikTok?

Not that it isn't at least a little reasonable to be wary of adversaries having access to a data collection platform, but the problem also gets meaningfully less substantial in general if you put meaningful limits on these companies' capacity to grow and eat each other in the name of building empires of surveillance capitalism.

Meta in particular is pushing hard on that angle while hand-waving away the fact that Facebook has a history of treating society as a large-scale experiment. It's manipulated users' mental health on purpose, meddled in elections by selling users' data directly to campaigners, and furthered incitements of everything from genocides abroad to the attack on the Capitol. They're feeding into attacks that single out TikTok specifically, as part of a broader pattern that Facebook and Zuckerberg personally have exhibited of trying to buy or clone nearly anything that represents competition. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp. They tried to buy Snapchat. They've lifted the primary functionality of several large competitors, ranging from disappearing messages to basically all of Reels.

Instead of just taking the blunt-instrument approach of banning social media platforms from within the borders of specific foreign countries, we arguably should be having an entirely different conversation about banning the business practices that make TikTok a problem.

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