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TikTok goes dark in the US

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Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#971

Post by abduhl »

yencabulator wrote: post #951

It's coming back: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/19/24347280/tiktok-ban-shutd... Anecdote says the app is currently having network trouble, so I expect there's some devops minions having a sweaty moment, but the ban is (to be) postponed (and in the meanwhile not enforced).

I cannot even imagine the indemnity provisions that were entered into by TikTok to give its network providers enough risk mitigation to turn the taps back on. As far as I can see, the app stores still are not listing ByteDance-related apps so it seems that TikTok could not assure Apple and Google.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#972

Post by d_burfoot »

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 also an American - I think this action makes us look weak and scared. Like our tech can't compete with Chinese tech. Strong nations act according to a set of principles, even if doing so is sometimes inconvenient or dangerous. Weak nations are constantly compromising their principles in order to survive.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#973

Post by mcoliver »

And just like that Trump overturns it. Lost opportunity to actually break the psychological hold tiktok has on people. How can a single branch (in this case one person) override the other two branches of government? I thought that's what checks and balances were all about? The farther we get from "well that's a law, but we are going to selectively enforce it" the worse we will get as a society (see the former DA Gascons Los Angeles policy on not enforcing theft). Repeal the laws that don't make sense and enforce the ones on the books. The alternative is that we will continue to accumulate laws to the point everything is illegal and their enforcement determined by individuals which is effectively the same as no laws and everyone is subject to those with power. That is an existential threat to freedom.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#974

Post by coin »

yencabulator wrote: post #951

It's coming back: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/19/24347280/tiktok-ban-shutd... Anecdote says the app is currently having network trouble, so I expect there's some devops minions having a sweaty moment, but the ban is (to be) postponed (and in the meanwhile not enforced).

> against arbitrary censorship

Such hypocrisy given that the non-China version of TikTok is banned in China.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#975

Post by coin »

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…

> the same arguments also apply to Instagram/Twitter/Whatever

Those apps aren't controlled by a foreign adversary with a history of ignoring data privacy laws (example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...)

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#976

Post by firefoxd »

redcobra762 wrote: post #788
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…

> But this ban is only because it failed to conform to manufactured consent. Are you saying that TikTok was banned because the company would not generate specific content? That's not at all how the app works, so maybe I am misunderstanding what your claim here is.

Not at all, the same way the US government does not ask Facebook or other media to produce specific content. However they still send take down requests and guidelines.

TikTok being a foreign entity was under no obligation to conform to the US government, well at least not until now. With the exception to illegal content.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#977

Post by ParetoOptimal »

gyoridavid wrote: post #632
FilipeMaia wrote: post #394

The Communications Act of 1934 limits foreign ownership of many communication technologies such as TV. TikTok has easily more influence than most TV channels so it does not seem strange to limit its foreign ownership. If the purchase of US steel by a Japanese company threatens national security, surely the ownership of TikTok is also one.

On the same logic, youtube, facebook, google, etc. should not be owned by the parent company in other countries than the US because of the influence they have on ppls opinions (on policital elections and whatnot)

Maybe we should go farther. Should Samsung divest because so many Americans have a Samsung Galaxy?

Who knows what could be on those chips.

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#978

Post by nobodywillobsrv »

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…

It seems like tiktok crowd is uniquely deranged however. The Palestine nonsense woke a lot of us up to TikTok brain

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#979

Post by jandrewrogers »

IAmNotACellist wrote: post #331
jandrewrogers wrote: post #308

A point I think most people don’t understand is that the government interest in TikTok has little to do with exploiting user data per se, a lot of other companies do that. The issue is that TikTok is somewhat unique in being aggressively weaponized in currently very active “grey zone” conflicts. This has been an open secret in national security circles but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone…

"Grey zone conflict" sounds a lot like our powers are upset they don't have the level of control over information that the adversary has. They want to be the ones to censor, suppress, and promote, rather than another country. The goal isn't more open access to information.

This misunderstands the topic, it literally has nothing to do with information access.

The Chinese government invested a lot for decades in R&D around population-scale behavioral manipulation, including running a lot of experiments on their own population. It was an impressive research effort; other countries invest in this too but the Chinese commitment to mastery of it was next level. Not an issue.

These capabilities and techniques can make populations wired into it dance like predictable puppets in aggregate but they don’t work that effectively over generic undifferentiated communication channels because humans are too chaotic. It requires tight real-time feedback, control, and instrumentation of the information channels with sufficient critical mass population-wise to matter. Those kinds of tight feedback and control loops under direct control of government systems for constructive manipulation aren’t really a thing at most social media companies. You can spam propaganda but that is qualitatively inferior.

Divestiture of TikTok removes the access and control the Chinese government needs to effect outcomes with TikTok beyond typical propaganda and influence operations.

Most countries desire this capability but the technical implementation and requirement of sufficiently tight control of the channel has been a formidable barrier. China outright banned any vehicle that had the potential to allow foreign governments to do the same in their own country.

All of this has been known and discussed in national security settings for decades. The difficulty of implementation in the real world made it mostly a hypothetical risk at any non-trivial scale until TikTok.

The most insidious aspect is that sophisticated operational analytics has made it such that the manipulation may seem completely unrelated to the desired population-scale effect, it is not propaganda in a conventional sense. Done well, the individual never perceives it but the aggregate effect reliably emerges. The extent to which humans can be analytically manipulated in very indirect ways at scale is both fascinating and scary.

(Many years ago I used to work on problems related to population-scale operational behavioral analysis. China was on the cutting edge of this research even back then. None of the experimental theory is new, but apparently the tech finally caught up.)

Re: TikTok goes dark in the US

#980

Post by geor9e »

etchalon wrote: post #314
geor9e wrote: post #141

Apple and Google created individual APIs to serve up phone number, contacts, exact location, device model, time zone, clipboard data, photos, files, and cookies to 10 million different random app developers to harvest to their heart's delight. US government passes law against just one of them for using said APIs. Are they going to fix the root of the issue, or just play whack-a-mole forever?

Congress should ban operating systems is a hell of a take.

Just seeing how far we can stretch these strawmen, if you found out httb:/funvideo.ru got root access to your OS, not by any exploits, but by the intentional design of the OS, it's a hell of a take to be mad at funvideo.ru
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