Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TikTok goes dark in the US

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 1001 posts

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#671

Post by etothet »

firefoxd wrote: post #294

This morning I felt the urge to download TikTok for the first time. I did, but I didn't bother creating an account. There is a passage in the book Life of Pi, where Pi's family is gathered and ready to leave India for Canada. And his mother does something out of the ordinary: > The day before our departure she pointed at a cigarette wallah and earnestly asked, "Should we get a pack or two?" > Father replied, "They ha…

It feels like you downloaded it primarily so you could share this related passage.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#672

Post by neither_color »

Febra33 wrote: post #662
neither_color wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as we're not discussing ways to circumvent the American firewall, since there isn't one, we can still say that one country tries but sometimes fails to live up to a free speech ideal perfectly -making exceptions for national security- and the other is blatant authoritarian.

"Sometimes" fails. If sometimes is every day.

Semantics aside, there's an objective list of who bans or censors more, and it's not even close. Not by an order of magnitude. Source: the great firewall's existence.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#673

Post by coliveira »

scarab92 wrote: post #599
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…

> If only we knew what happened in that classified briefing Most likely, the rationale will be similar to Huawei and Kaspersky. Not based on actual historical misbehaviour, but rather the amount of power you’re allowing their respective governments to have over US citizens / infrastructure. There are very few “from first principals” thinkers in the world, especially amongst TikTok’s younger audience. Most people take…

If that is the what happened, they made the best case for shutting down US owned social networks across the world. It is not a specific case of misbehaving, but the power they give to the American government that can collude with these oligarchs such as Elon Musk.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#674

Post by jordanb »

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…

> classified briefing that made them vote together across party lines.

Romney pretty much said it was Israel. They think that--but for tiktok--zoomers would be supporting the genocide in gaza.

My guess is that Trump will negotiate with China that tiktok sticks to the party line on Israel and then it's allowed back in. Possibly it will come with some kind of verification system for someone in the US to pre-vet narratives going forward. Fortunately China already has sophisticated systems for this pre-vetting which they are currently using on their own population.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#675

Post by mindslight »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #583
psiconaut wrote: post #480

There's an interesting cognitive bias in the western media that tends to define freedom of the press (and freedom of expression) as exactly what is perceived as freedom in this side of the iron curtain. Libgen domains are "seized", and tiktok "goes dark", but of course other countries "censor" porn or news outlets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index

Censoring is different to banning though. Banning in this case is the correct word to use, censoring isn’t. You can censor things on a platform, you can’t censor a platform entirely - that is a ban.

The censors in this case are Apple and Google, acting at the behest of the US Government. This news isn't about Tiktok censoring, rather about it being censored. Apple and Google are the platforms/publishers.

(There are also a whole host of other service providers that might be put into the position of being censors if Tiktok were to ignore the law and continue working for sidedloaded apps).

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#676

Post by refurb »

tomjen3 wrote: post #534
ChicagoDave wrote: post #376

I'll bet none of the people responding here actually read the Supreme Court decision. This isn't about data that people agreed to allow ByteDance to scrape. It's about ByteDance going beyond that and scraping contact information of NON-TikTok users, which could be used for blackmail or in other illegal and adversarial ways. Everyone knows U.S. companies gather user data. Oracle had been doing it for decades. This is…

The supreme court also said you don't have a right to control your own body a few years ago. They have been political (and thus unreliable) for years.

No it didn't.

It said the conjured-up-out-of-nothing right in Roe v. Wade was not a valid argument that the federal government (through the Constitution) explicitly protects abortion.

Even legal scholars on the left admitted before the decision Roe v. Wade was a decision on very shaky ground and liable to be overturned.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/06/john-hart-ely-do...

So it was overturned, and the decision was the state's, not the federal government under current laws.

Nothing stops Congress from passing a national law on abortion. If they do, then the Supreme Court will recognize it.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#678

Post by TrackerFF »

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…

If it isn't clear to anyone yet:

Trump is the kind of guy that likes to create a crisis, so that he can be the knight in shining armor that comes to save people from it. Whether it is a constructed one, or a real one, that's what he does.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#679

Post by billylindeman »

wilg wrote: post #148
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…

None of those arguments are the salient one, which is that a geopolitical adversary has control over a major influence vector on US public opinion. They could simply have divested.

"They could simply have divested"

What an odd thing to say. Why should a company that started the biggest social media app in a decade "divest" it to US oligarchic interests when it's a global application? It makes no sense.

This is the largest affront to American freedom since the patriot act, and the fact that people are celebrating it on some red-scare bullshit is terrifying.

I am personally disgusted that my government thinks it should be in the business of telling me what apps I can have on my phone. I am a grown adult, and a taxpayer, and the US Government has no fucking business telling me where I can watch and/or post videos.

Maybe it's time to build a decentralized alternative so this never happens again.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#680

Post by IAmGraydon »

wilg wrote: post #148
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…

None of those arguments are the salient one, which is that a geopolitical adversary has control over a major influence vector on US public opinion. They could simply have divested.

It's amazing to me that people don't recognize the influence that this kind of platform has. I know it goes against the prevailing idea that American corporations are evil, but American companies are interested in making money while China is interested in the disruption of western society. They are not the same level of risk.
Post reply on HN