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Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

congress.gov

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Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#661

Post by bandyaboot »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #638
bandyaboot wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doesn’t accomplish anything since any laws of any substance are guaranteed to be struck down by what has become a hopelessly partisan SCOTUS.

I have some hope that a more creative approach to the gun situation would help. The typical blue state approach of "ban everything, except allow a select few people to pay thousands of dollars for a license" definitely won't work. At the same time, the NFA has held up for a very long time and there haven't been any challenges to it yet despite the reputation of today's Supreme Court.

There is always something similar to Texas’ creative approach to solving the abortion situation—outsourcing the trampling of rights to citizens via civil lawsuits. Though I have a sneaking suspicion that SCOTUS would have a change of heart about intervening in such a situation.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#662

Post by charlieflowers »

mistermann wrote: post #238
poulsbohemian wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is mind boggling, and at the same time not surprising at all, that China is enforcing a humane policy to protect its children when we are not willing to do the same. By whose standards? The United States has never been an ideologically cohesive nation outside some basic principles of representative democracy - and even those have been challenged at moments in our history. The moment you get beyond the basics of a…

> I don't have Tik Tok installed, my kids only get the "reruns" off YouTube, but frankly I find it a bit extremist that the US government wants to ban an app that looks to me like people doing funny dances in their living rooms. There is a wide variety of content on TikTok. One category is (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people who watched the Congressional "democracy" theatre on the TikTok ban realizing that their s…

True, I think the political elite made a big mistake, revealing the clowns behind the curtain. The younger generation, even with their default disgruntlement with the system, still might've taken another decade to figure out just how much the emperor has no clothes.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#663

Post by andrekandre »

gonehome wrote: post #644
andrekandre wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the point is, banning tiktok just means influence can move to these other platforms via other means (troll farms etc), it doesn't solve the issue (unless you want to ban twitter et. al) but perhaps i am missing some obvious point?

There’s a distinction between adversaries trying to cause trouble within American companies and a foreign hostile government effectively owning the company and dictating policy in its own interests.

if they were forced to divest from bytedance would that be satisfactory?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#664

Post by sudosysgen »

yed wrote: post #651
sudosysgen wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Here is the definition that the bill uses for "transaction": > (17) TRANSACTION.—The term “transaction” means any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology product or service, including ongoing activities such as managed services, >>>data transmission As you can see here, mere data transmission is considered to be a transaction. I…

You're right, the definition of transaction is quite broad here. However in order for VPN to run afoul of this bill, the gov't would first need to enforce the bill by banning individual users from accessing specific sites on the internet, which the VPN would then bypass. That kind of censorship has never been permitted under the first amendment and I don't see anything here that changes that.

No? They would just need to blanket ban websites for everybody, which is something that has already been done in the US many times.

If you're not going to be banning internet services, how can you possibly ban TikTok? It has a website, you know.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#665

Post by lazystar »

alexose wrote: post #324
eganist wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking at least with my background: Foreign adversaries have learned exactly how to weaponize our free and open internet against our own people. Regardless of the fact that our kids are most vulnerable, China's seemingly made a point of outsourcing their most polarizing algorithmic decisions to the rest of the world but not to their own population, which is essentially a tacit admission of their awareness of the da…

> China's seemingly made a point of outsourcing their most polarizing algorithmic decisions to the rest of the world but not to their own population Exactly. We're a decade into the social media experiment now, and it's absolutely clear that it in its current form it doesn't make us smarter, it doesn't make us happier, and it doesn't bring us closer. If anything, it makes people sick and it weakens the social fabric.…

history repeats itself. what did the folks in the 1890s do when hearst controlled the newspapers?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#666

Post by dang »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #659
dragonwriter wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one question you present evidence of is not questioning the legitimacy and validity of the election; there is a difference between believing (rightly or wrongly, with or without sufficient cause) that improper activity effected the popular vote tally and believing that the election is illegitimate. You present no evidence relating to actual election denial.

[flagged]

You've broken the site guidelines egregiously here, and have unfortunately been doing that a bunch elsewhere. We've warned you multiple times before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34429933 (Jan 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30858404 (March 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29085513 (Nov 2021)

If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you. Therefore could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? Including, but not limited to: not being snarky, not calling names, not making personal attacks, not posting flamewar comments, and not using HN primarily for political battle.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#667

Post by bigmattystyles »

theaussiestew wrote: post #649
bigmattystyles wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be free to post the equivalent of `Fuck Joe Biden` but about Xi or other leaders without any fear of repercussion. Be free to critique without fear of being disappeared.

This is a warped perspective of censorship in China. Many people do post things like that and they’re completely fine. No one ever got “disappeared” for criticism of the government or complaining about corruption. In fact, I don’t think disappearing is even a thing, it’s more like if you want to subvert the government then you’ll get a visit from the police telling you to pipe down. But if you’re complaining about go…

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/29/1068696336/hong-kong-police-r...

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#668

Post by lazystar »

eganist wrote: post #206
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…

Speaking at least with my background: Foreign adversaries have learned exactly how to weaponize our free and open internet against our own people. Regardless of the fact that our kids are most vulnerable, China's seemingly made a point of outsourcing their most polarizing algorithmic decisions to the rest of the world but not to their own population, which is essentially a tacit admission of their awareness of the da…

begrudgingly agree on all points. the gamestop/amc stock manipulation in 2021 demonstrated how vulnerable western society is to a social media campaign that, at first glance, appears benign. even if china wasnt involved with that incident - which began on chinese-owned reddit - it demonstrated that governments are at risk to any social media company with diverging goals.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#669

Post by gonehome »

andrekandre wrote: post #663
gonehome wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a distinction between adversaries trying to cause trouble within American companies and a foreign hostile government effectively owning the company and dictating policy in its own interests.

if they were forced to divest from bytedance would that be satisfactory?

Probably? I think that was one of the options iirc (ownership by an American company via a sale), but I don't really know enough about the specifics to have a strong position on the implementation.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#670

Post by spaceman_2020 »

OzyM wrote: post #377
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debating the minutiae of the number of school shootings is just...sad. The total number of children who should die in school shootings should always be 0. It's not even particularly hard. Practically every country in the world manages to achieve that target.

And the ideal number of suicides is 0, and the ideal amount of spyware is 0, etc. All of these are targets, but an ideal doesn't give you further information on how to prioritize

No country has managed to bring the total number of suicides to 0. Which tells you that it’s a harder problem.

But again, practically every country has managed to being the total number of school shootings to 0. Which tells you that it’s not a particularly hard problem.

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