Extremely weak argument. Just because one platform is shut down does not mean the right to free speech is affected. A platform, mind you, under full control by the Chinese Communist Party, who do not allow ANY form of free speech to exist in the country they have under their thumb.
EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban
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Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban
#92[dead]
Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most of US history people's access to information was controlled by a few powerful news/media corporations and the Supreme Court did nothing to stop that. It's no surprise that when we finally get a decentralised information transmission system not beholden to the elites, the Supreme Court doesn't want to lend it a hand.
Social media algorithms are nuclear bombs for the mind. And they are beholden to whoever holds the detonator. It just happens that a lot of people are happy with China holding it. When the mind-reading algorithm provides each user with their own reality to live in, then we are talking about editorializing. And allowing a communist, anti-Western government direct control over that power does not seem reasonable. inb4…
> rage-inducing profit seekers
That pretty accurately describes Twitter and Facebook these days. TikTok, not so much, which you would know if you had used the platform. (Or, you have used the platform, and you prefer rage-inducing crap, so it continues serving that to you)
The proponents of the ban keep mentioning some kind of nefarious "communist" propaganda, and some kind of nefarious privacy data access, but I've yet to see someone show concrete examples of what that would look like.
My TikTok feed contains a ton of funny cat videos, Europeans shitting on clueless American tourists, OF models hawking themselves, the ubiquitous dance videos, people making caricature cringe videos, and a bunch of viral meme videos. And a lady drinking Costco peach juice.
Where's the propaganda? Not in my feed, that's for sure.
Where's the rage-inducing bait? Not in my feed, that's for sure.
What privacy data can the nefarious CCP access about me? That I like cat videos and memes?
Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution for the other half of the problem is anti-trust divestment of client apps from hosted services. Let TikTok (and Faceboot, and so on) keep their own assortments of services. But the mobile and web apps should be spun out into different companies, only communicating with openly documented APIs that are available for every other developer/user. This won't solve the issue with propaganda that still manages t…
This doesn't make any technical sense. The key part of what is at issue with TikTok and other social media companies is editorial control over the ranking algorithm. The ranking algorithm is not done on the client, and I don't see how it can be. And even if you could do it somehow, that is in direct conflict with the other main complaint people have about social media apps ("selling your data"). FB had an API that th…
Discovery algorithms are part of client presentation and should be under control of the client, regardless of beign commonly done where the database lives.
From the technical perspective, for things where your view is limited to friends that is straightforward to do on the client. Global discovery using metadata can be done using deterministic searching which condenses the view of the database enough that the client can then rank those results however it'd like. And global discovery from a pure firehose is likely even within the reach of a modern personal computer.
As far as apps taking a copy of data, the first obvious control is that its only apps you choose which have access to your data. And for the general problem, that is the point of privacy legislation - which was taken as a given by the comment I was responding to.
Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
TikTok is used for far more than cat videos which is why it's a considered a threat to those in power. There are freely flowing ideas and narratives which they cannot control - except now they are by restricting access to it. Instagram doesn't have the same culture at all and it's not a substitute. TikTok is a like a digital "third space" for communities, and just like the real life equivilents, is slowly disappearin…
Why shouldn’t TikTok just divest, then? Bytedance could make a huge amount of money by selling TikTok. And then that huge influx of money could keep TikTok operating forever. The fact that they’d rather shut down is pretty telling.
TikTok is outcompeting its US rivals Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts because their algorithm for choosing which videos to put in front of users is simply superior. Divesting means that they would need to sell that algorithm as well, which is pretty obviously worth a lot more than their US market, which is why they're making this decision.
Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban
#96> Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally. These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature, increasingly so in the age of LLMs. They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astrot…
Ironically this is exactly why I think TikTok is so important. Obviously every media site is used for manufacturing content, from NYT to Facebook. Also, obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted. Wouldn't it be good then to have checks and balances to this, by having media not under the US government supervision? Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the pu…
You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban
#97I was saying the same thing when they decided to take down Silk Road /s
Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically this is exactly why I think TikTok is so important. Obviously every media site is used for manufacturing content, from NYT to Facebook. Also, obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted. Wouldn't it be good then to have checks and balances to this, by having media not under the US government supervision? Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the pu…
You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet. It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated…
Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.
Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet. It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated…
Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.
There is good evidence that topics the CCP does not like are significantly underrepresented compared to other social media platforms.
I would add that if you know the CCP you would be extremely surprised if they did not take such an opportunity for information warfare.
Re: EFF statement on U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold TikTok ban
#100A former sausage maker here. I (used to) design these engagement/recommendation engines for a large corp, did academic research in the field, went to conferences, etc.
In general, I wholehearted support the freedom of speech, and if it were any other case, I would agree with the EFF statement here. However, knowing how the sausages are made, I am reluctantly agreeing with the ban, at least for now.
People underestimate how powerful these tools can be. Based on simple, readily available "anonymous" data, we can already impute your demographics data -- age, gender, family relations, occupation, income, etc -- using a decade-old ML techniques. In some cases, we can detect which stage of your emotional journey you are in and nudge you towards our target state. What surprised me about Cambridge Analytica was its ineffectiveness, at least as reported. There are plenty of teams out there that use these techniques to greatly further their gains, whatever those may be.
In Primakov doctrine, information warfare through sowing discontent and/or eroding psychological well-being is very much real and actualizable. I am not claiming that a foreign government is currently single-handedly controlling TikTok to brainwash the American youth; we do not have conclusive proof of that. However, the fact that such a tool is in a foreign country's arsenal is itself a massive danger to America's national security.