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TikTok goes dark in the US

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Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#901

Post by zuminator »

mcherm wrote: post #766
bakuninsbart wrote: post #725

As a European, I find it quite outrageous to demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held. It is the old-school imperialist school of thought. If you think Bytedance is harming Americans, despite following american law, then amend the rules for social media companies. Or at least be honest enough to say: "The free market is great, but only if we hold all the cards".

An an American, I also find it outrageous. In fact, as I understand it, our most fundamental law (the Constitution) clearly guarantees "freedom of speech and freedom of the press" which specifically means that the government may NOT shut down a particular publisher because the government does not like what they say, or who it is that owns them. Unfortunately, our Supreme Court unanimously disagrees with me about what…

We already do that in the electoral process. Campaign contributions are "speech," while at the same time we ban foreign nationals from such speech (although as far as I know the constitutionality of the issue has not been tested beyond the 9th Circuit.)

https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/05/16/1...

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#902

Post by einrealist »

It is absurd that users are not angry at TikTok for not protecting their data. Instead, TikTok weaponized the user base and made them belief that it is a free speech problem while they collected swaths of data and allowed it to leave US jurisdiction, into the hands of the Chinese government.

And Democrats just sucked at messaging. Its not a "TikTok ban". The message should have been about data protection.

And yes, it would be far better to pass something like the GDPR. But I guess, with the power of the US media companies, the TikTok law was a compromise.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#903

Post by sanderjd »

ok123456 wrote: post #704
moviet wrote: post #695

(Perspective from an American) Information is the gold of the 21st century. Whoever controls the flow of information has all the wealth and all the power. Therefore, data is the greatest currency in the world. This outcome was never intended to happen, but ByteDance is taking a chance that the American government will relent. We’ll see in a few months who wins the stalemate. TikTok has an immense amount of cultural p…

I'm an American too, and I trust an app that has "china" somewhere in it's org chart more than Zuckerberg or any meta product.

Well that's very naive. It sounds like reverse polarization. Thing A is so bad that Thing B is less bad just because it isn't Thing A.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#904

Post by jMyles »

WA wrote: post #369
rented_mule wrote: post #221

What's to stop TikTok from serving their website from non-US servers to all comers? Using it in a browser is not as smooth as an app, but there must be apps out there that are nothing but a WebView to URLs on a single domain (like you can do in Mac Safari with File... Add to Dock...). Submitting / watching videos wouldn't be that different. It seems to me the only recourse the US would have is building The Great Fire…

Laws don't care about technical aspects. ByteDance must comply with the law, meaning, they need to stop offering the service to US citizens, no matter where the servers are hosted, for example, by geofencing their product. If they don't comply, they risk fines. They can only ignore this if they don't care about doing business with the US ever again and their owners never want to set foot in the country again.

> Laws don't care about technical aspects.

On sufficiently long time scales, which will win?

And why are we so afraid to admit the answer to this question?

How can it get any more obvious that nation states are no longer a compelling organizing principle for peaceful, civil society?

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#905

Post by iamEAP »

My (limited) understanding of this law is that it works by barring US companies from doing business with ByteDance, primarily hitting App Store providers and cloud service providers.

There’s a world in which they could have migrated services to an off-shore cloud and continued to serve the existing users who already had the app installed (with the disadvantage that they would be unable to evolve the app itself, since no updates). It would have bought them time to figure out a long-term, legal fix.

…But instead they chose to just block all users with US-based accounts.

Someone made the calculation that failing the app loudly for US users was the better strategy.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#907

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #725

As a European, I find it quite outrageous to demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held. It is the old-school imperialist school of thought. If you think Bytedance is harming Americans, despite following american law, then amend the rules for social media companies. Or at least be honest enough to say: "The free market is great, but only if we hold all the cards".

This is the most disappointing part. We've let some of our companies do sketchy stuff because it's so hard to see where a new ecosystem will go ahead of time, and really hard to roll back popular ecosystems. But finally we have the political will to make a change for the better, and instead of ruling that 'oh turns out it is bad to allow XYZ, so here are some new rules preventing XYZ,' we're ruling that 'oh turns out it is bad to allow XYZ, so here are some new rules saying only I get to do XYZ.'

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#908

Post by TrackerFF »

crandycodes wrote: post #712
moviet wrote: post #695

(Perspective from an American) Information is the gold of the 21st century. Whoever controls the flow of information has all the wealth and all the power. Therefore, data is the greatest currency in the world. This outcome was never intended to happen, but ByteDance is taking a chance that the American government will relent. We’ll see in a few months who wins the stalemate. TikTok has an immense amount of cultural p…

If the government was also addressing the concentration of power in the American social media apps, I’d buy it. If this was about making laws on what info phones could record about you, I’d buy it. If this was about establishing transparency laws to allow the government to better enforce the privacy laws it has, I’d buy it. If it was a law saying recommendation algorithms can’t be used for political content, I’d buy…

Like it or not - when it is a US company that does it, the powers that be in the US can do something about it.

When it is a foreign platform controlled by a foreign government, the US government can't do shit about it.

It boils down to national security. We live in an age where (dis)information campaigns have real consequences.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#909

Post by whimsicalism »

einrealist wrote: post #902

It is absurd that users are not angry at TikTok for not protecting their data. Instead, TikTok weaponized the user base and made them belief that it is a free speech problem while they collected swaths of data and allowed it to leave US jurisdiction, into the hands of the Chinese government. And Democrats just sucked at messaging. Its not a "TikTok ban". The message should have been about data protection. And yes, it…

tiktok data is in the US, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#910

Post by whimsicalism »

mancerayder wrote: post #817

Let's put aside freedom of speech and Meta v China for a moment: Has anyone suspected foreign interference in our social media during the height of the culture wars in the last decade? We had people encouraging civil unrest on the Left (whenever there was some police shooting or event where racism was suspected), and we had people encouraging civil unrest on the right (an immigrant committed a crime, or similar). We…

i think we are more than capable of causing unrest all on our own
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