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House panel unanimously approves bill that could ban TikTok
(edition.cnn.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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Fuck your whatsboutism. This is good news; tiktok is a propaganda machine.
The cyber security professional inside of me wants to agree with you. The Liberal in me doesn't want to give the government the authority to ban speech and what citizens are allowed to watch.
So you’re going to shut down YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc as well right? Considering they all do the same thing and FB even interfered in an election?
Then do so. This idea that tiktok is any worse because it's Chinese is ridiculous.
I'm really not. I want Congress to pass actual laws, not operate as an adjunct to American Corporations.
Lol, we've been round and round on that one. You know my position.
Well for something that never works it's tried impressively often. And it's no coincidence Biden's messaging changed after Michigan and Super Tuesday.
Either the propaganda is working or there's no hope for any of us. And I'm not saying this facetiously.
The idea of a company in China versus in the West is very different. In the West a company has near complete autonomy within the confines of law in the democratic country it's in. In China, a company is completely beholden to the will of the CCP. Smaller companies are not worth getting involved with, but larger companies like Bytedance and Baidu are effectively corporate offices of the CCP.
We're talking about a communist dictatorship that's constantly threatening Taiwan with invasion and death threats. Goes around the South China Sea harassing the countries there by attacking their military and civilian ships with high power water cannons. Putting nets and markers right up against those same countries, in some instances within 50 or so kilometers. Then there's the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people. The constant suppression of any negative news. The complete isolation of its people from accessing the internet or news from the rest of the world. It just goes on.
China is an adversarial power to Western nations and even many Asian ones.
The issue isn't that Bytedance is simply Chinese. The issue is that China does not allow a single bit of information leaving its borders without its explicit say so. Which is why any Chinese company that conducts any business outside China has CCP officials stationed at the company's offices and have to examine and approve everything that goes out.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
military and civilian ships with high power water cannons
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
So what's the difference between the CCP getting it for free from Tiktok and paying for it from an "American" corporation?
None of what you said matters in this. Not when Zuckerberg is specifically courting China to spend advertising dollars and buy data.
Is the money changing hands making the end effect any different?
TikTok is both a sacrifice to make it look like something is being done and a called hit on a competitor.
Whataboutism at its finest.
That word does not mean what you think it means. In fact throwing China's human rights record out there like it matters in preventing American consumer data from flowing to China is far closer to whataboutism.
The only thing that matters in stopping American Consumer Data from being collected by the CCP is stopping American Consumer Data from being collected by the CCP.
If that's your stated goal then you need to hold all the data vendors accountable, not just the scary Chinese one. Because there's nothing stopping them from selling it to China right now. There's a whole chain of articles about Facebook and Meta doing this for over a decade. And you're worried only about Tiktok.
Gee I wonder why that might be?
And how is this accomplished when the CCP has direct control and direct access to the company that develops the app collecting the data?
Well that's a massive assumption. Please show me where I said "I'm only worried about TikTok".
Obviously it doesn't. But this doesn't accomplish that goal. It's like saying I hate bananas, let's ban PBJs.
If you want to ban foreign countries collecting data then make that the law and ban TikTok when they break it. And then ban Facebook when they break it. That's how good legislation is done. This kind of targeted bullshit is just a gift to Musk, Zuckerberg, and whoever runs Google and Apple these days. They're going to funnel data to the CCP just as fast as they can make a profit from it.
The entire algorithm thing is also bullshit. Facebook has been courting the CCP for advertising for over a decade. To think they won't use targeted ads for an info op is just fucking naive.
That's partially true. But there's a difference between having access to a dataset vs having direct control over an app, which includes the algorithms and content being shown.
In any case, if it goes through to a full ban, you can still use the app. It just cannot be distributed on any app stores. It would still be possible to sideload it (on Android).
And that will discourage a lot of people from using it, which would be the point.
I also would like to see any reports or studies showing China buying data from other social media platforms.
Oh? And what would that difference be?
If that needs to be spelled out to you, then that explains your position.
You're either not too smart to understand, or you're a tankie of some kind.
You also completely dodged the part where you need to backup your claims about Facebook selling data to China.
Buddy. I'm not the one here who's naive and I'm not a tankie.
Facebook being sued for giving data to Chinese companies with tighter relationships to the CCP than Bytedance is literally headline news right now. I'm not going to spend time linking reality to you.
The fact is you're bending over backwards to defend an unconstitutional law with unprecedented powers. The common sense and constitutional law is staring you in the face. Make it illegal on pain of ban to give, or sell American data to a sensitive country; or otherwise cause American data in your company's control to come into their possession.
There's one paragraph that removes the xenophobia, holds the entire data industry accountable, and is constitutional.
The question of what's the difference isn't some cute gotcha thing. Datasets are storage containers. China will keep their data in one too. So what is the difference between getting everything Facebook can scrape and getting everything TikTok can scrape?
And you need to look up targeted advertising. It's literally creating a custom algorithm on everything from Reddit to Facebook to Google Search. Which is why it was used by the Russians to impact our 2016 elections via Facebook. Yet another reason your demand for evidence about Facebook is ridiculous.
I looked it up, and you're right that there's an issue there. But that's an issue with an American owned company giving data to an adversarial country (two actually, China and Russia). It's 100% absurd and shouldn't be allowed with heavy penalties. But that's still a different issue than the one we're talking about.
Two things: I'm not American, and it's not unconstitutional anyways. There's nothing in the bill that says no one is allowed to use it. And the first and preferred option of the bill is to sell ownership of TikTok to an American firm, essentially to divorce control and influence of China from the largely American userbase. If, and only if, the transfer of ownership is not possible then the app is to be delisted from all app stores.
That means that it's still possible for existing users to use the app and it's still possible to install the app through official means without either thing being illegal.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/proposed-us-tiktok-ban-not-fair-chinas-foreign-ministry-says-2024-03-14/
Another interesting thing is that the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said it will protect its rights and national security interests (paraphrased). What on earth does TikTok, an app that's Chinese owned and banned in the very country that owns it, have to do with Chinese National security?
That a very telling thing to say.
I can agree with this, but the TikTok bill has nothing to do with xenophobia. If China wasn't an adversarial country actively bullying and threatening other countries with war and annihilation then it wouldn't be an issue.
In fact, let's go a step further and implement sweeping data protection laws so that our data can't be sold for any reason.
No, it's not a "cute gotcha thing". It's pointing out the difference between passive data collection and active control to influence content.
I know very well what it is. I work in the tech sector (IT/programming) adjacent to cyber security.
Right, so if you think targeted advertising is bad when company A sells data to company B, who then builds algorithms to target people for political party C, imagine how bad it is when that entire process is vertically integrated and directly controlled by a foreign adversary. And to add to that, we're not even just dealing with ads anymore, we're dealing with grassroots-like influencer content with talking points from the CCP.
You gave me an example of one really bad thing and said it's the same thing as a different and extremely bad thing.
Both of them are bad need to be addressed. But with TikTok being run by a CCP-influenced company in a country that laughs at American laws, there's little recourse to deal with it.
You get a pass on this because you're not an American and most Americans don't know what a Bill of Attainder is. But it's a law that targets a single person or organization. And the Constitution outright bans it.
SCOTUS has also historically been very unhappy with attempts to weasel word around the Constitution. Their position has consistently been if the effect is to do something that would be unconstitutional then it is unconstitutional.
That said. There's no reason to target a single company when we can regulate the industry just as easily. Unless the actual intent is to force a private sale for the benefit of American billionaires.
But with your response to an actual bill and over a decade of American data vendors selling everything to China; I can see that you don't care about regulating the industry. You just want to punish China. Nobody is refuting the horribleness of China. But there isn't any evidence they've even tried to do anything to the international version of TikTok. Or that the Singaporean company that runs TikTok would listen to them
So yeah I'm against giving the US government powers it's called corrupt in every country that's used them. Especially in response to xenophobic jingoism. This is being done the wrong way, for the wrong reasons.
Right, because me saying that Facebook and other social media selling our data even just for advertising is not ok and we should introduce laws for strong data and privacy protection equates to me "not caring about regulating the industry".
Sure there, bud.
Nonsense.
Ok, I get this, but it gets murky when the "organisation" being targeted is a corporate office of a government party.
I'm not claiming to have the answer, but as a non-American I can't get upset at such a bill. Simply because it would push back against a country that lately had been getting away with everything and causing severe and deliberate harm in other countries, including mine and yours.
are we going to ban youtube as well? which has more than tiktok? or lemmy for that matter? or any other forms of social media?
people who fear monger tiktok make me worry that they fail to see the bigger picture.
tiktok isn't the problem. the fact that propaganda is monetized is the problem. and banning tiktok will fix nothing whatsoever.
Propaganda is a major problem no matter what.
I mentioned in another comment that Tiktok is a massively direct pipeline to the minds of younger people by the CCP. Studies have demonstrated that the Chinese only version of Tiktok (Douyin) promotes positive content to users whereas Tiktok promotes highly negative content. To the point that a study concluded it was affecting the mental health of younger people.
How do you differentiate purposeful manipulation vs it being a natural effect of Western social media? I stopped using Facebook and Twitter because it was obviously toxic and affecting my mental health. I use TikTok a fair amount and don't find it nearly as bad.
It's also possible that there's manipulation in the other direction. In their own app they could be artificially increasing positive content while allowing the natural social media toxicity and ragebait to dominate in other areas.
My personal opinion is that TikTok is a way that peer to peer information and news travels very quickly in a way that they can't control, and they don't like that. As with all things, they want to keep us isolated.
Well, Tiktok is owned by a Chinese company. Every major Chinese company, especially ones that operate outside of China, have CCP offices within the company. The "rights" that individuals and companies have in China are at best a facade. What the CCP says to do is what happens.
The major difference is tested by looking at how the algorithm promotes or suppresses certain topics. Tiktok has a Chinese counterpart called Douyin (which IIRC is the "original" Tiktok) that's only available to people in China. The findings point to more positive content being promoted on Douyin and negative content on Tiktok.
What's also noticed is that Douyin heavily promotes anti-west and specifically anti-American propaganda. And promotes pro-China and pro-CCP stuff, such as "China has solved homelessness and homelessness doesn't exist there" and "China has solved poverty". The second one is technically true on paper, because they recently reduced the poverty threshold to $600 a year.
On Tiktok huge pro-CCP campaigns have been discovered and that content is constantly being pushed. They use Western shills mostly and the propaganda aspect is cleverly veiled.
In the context of Tiktok, that doesn't make sense. And what's even more ironic is that Tiktok is Chinese owned, and people in China have zero access to the outside world. People are going to jail or even disappeared now for simply using a VPN. News coming out of China is almost completely censored. China has basically become North Korea with more money. And they have direct control over the content on the most widely used social media platform in the West.
I'm not here to be pro-china, and I definitely believe that they're putting those things in douyin. I'm just not convinced they're purposefully putting negative things in TikTok purposefully to harm mental health.
This is anecdotal and my personal experience, but I haven't noticed any pro-ccp things on my personal algorithm. What I do notice is anti-US and anti-capitalist content by Americans. Whether or not they are shills, I can't say for sure, but it feels like it would border on conspiracy theory thinking to suggest that many of them are.
To clarify the isolation comment, I mean that TikTok is a place where community building and the spreading of ideas or news (not necessarily good or bad ideas/news) spreads rapidly, especially among young people, in a way the people who run traditional media can't control. Taking away this tool makes us more reliant on forms of media that they do control.
This is true for many platforms like Reddit, Lemmy, Mastadon, etc., including ones that no longer exist like Vine. There have always been pages on the internet to share censored free content, and there likely will always be. The issue with Tiktok being a "way to spread news" is that most of the content is just "hearsay" without being verifiable. And that means false information spreads quickly and easily on Tiktok. There's a reason most of the flat earthers have flocked to Tiktok lately.
Additionally, Tiktok is terrible for searchability. The platform isn't designed to work that way. It's designed to just doom scroll and you see what the platform tells you to see. The only other time you see something else is if someone shares a video. The random nature of the next video is where the issue lies, and considering it's a CCP controlled company that controls the algorithm that picks the next video, I wouldn't trust it with a video of watching paint dry.
There have been many studies demonstrating that the TikTok algorithm is hugely problematic.
I agree with you. The difference between the other platforms mentioned and TikTok is that TikTok is where the action is right now, so it's the target. The unverified hearsay problem is certainly there, but I don't think it's inherent to TikTok more than any other platform. No matter the platform, rage and engagement are the most important things so the algorithms will always reward them. Even YouTube's algorithm has been highly criticized for funneling people down extremist pipelines.
The TikTok algorithm is incredibly efficient at locking people, especially young people, into scrolling forever. That's bad. However that same criticism has been made against more traditional social media platforms too. Twitter especially has a similar although less effective problem.
Besides vague gesturing at China, I don't see any problem that TikTok has that isn't already present in other social media platforms. If we want to go after all of them, I'd 100% be for it, but this legislation is too targeted and creates a dangerous precedent imo.
100% agree on the searchability. It's totally unusable.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-pushes-potentially-harmful-content-to-users-as-often-as-every-39-seconds-study/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-04-20/tiktok-effects-on-mental-health-in-focus-after-teen-suicide
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/tiktok-risks-pushing-children-towards-harmful-content/
The issue is measurable.
I'll agree with you up to a point. The difference here is the interests of the company. The money angle is easy to understand and figure out, because there's no reason to hide that.
It's less obvious or easy when the intention is to influence people away from a societal or political ideation. So many people hand-wave away the fact that Bytedance is a Chinese company. The reason is that most people think "company" like Google or Microsoft in a democratic country, where access to data has (mostly) a lot of red tape and legal protections.
Now I'm sure anyone reading that would laugh and say "have you heard of Snowden?" which is absolutely a fair and correct thing to say. So with that in mind, Western companies still have a ton of autonomy and legal protections from their governments when compared to China. In China a "company" like Bytedance or Baidu are more like "corporate offices" for the CCP.
So Tiktok is effectively owned by the CCP, and it's the Chinese Communist Party that's coding the algorithm on Tiktok. There's no other way to approach it.
No, it's not vague gesturing. This is 100% a demonstrable issue. The I-Soon leaks demonstrate that. China is absolutely an adversarial country to places like the US, Canada, and Europe. The fact that they have covert Chinese police stations in the US and Canada to track and intimidate Chinese citizens in these countries is being alarming.
It baffles me that people even want to use Tiktok on the fact that it's CCP owned in the first place.
https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1765823031966904671
Thank you for those resources, they are pretty compelling, especially the Twitter thread, which if true, is good evidence that China has used the data to target specific individuals. That's a problem. And the individual bit is important because I'm unpersuaded by "mass data collection" arguments because a) everyone is doing that and no one seems to care and b) basically the same data is freely purchasable.
The harms associated with the first few links are definitely real, but I would certainly be interested in an apples to apples comparison to other platforms, especially YouTube.
But I think it's also important to recognize that there is a lot of good that comes from TikTok as well. If I can get personal here, I've moved away from family and friends to work a demanding job, and I've found some sense of community on TikTok with people who are into the same hobbies as I am, which I've had difficulty finding IRL. It has also given voice and community to [certain groups of] marginalized people, and, (for better or for worse) is a major platform by which creators can generate revenue by which a lot of them survive.
Obviously a lot of that COULD and SHOULD be hosted on a different platform without all these issues, but right now they are not, so we need to make sure not to throw the baby out with the bath water.
I pointed it out in other comments, but I feel as if the current bill provides too much power to the executive to unilaterally ban foreign outlets from functioning in the US. I'm not a nutty free speech absolutist or anything, but I think anything that has the potential to shut out alternative perspectives like that takes us closer to Chinese style censorship, not farther away.
Ironically, I wonder if a better solution is mandatory integration of positive content algorithms like it seems like douyin has. But then the question is, who picks what's positive? Is religion positive? Patriotism? Depends who you ask.
All in all, I think social media of all kinds has been basically the worst thing to happen to the world in my lifetime, but I think that that the cat is out of the bag on it and we're just pretty fucked.
Thank you for the honest and level conversation here, I do appreciate it.
Thanks for sharing that perspective.
Btw, everyone zones in on the "ban Tiktok" narrative, whereas the proposed bill actually says that Tiktok would need to be sold to another company not in China. That's the bill's first choice, but if that's not possible, THEN ban Tiktok.
do you have a link to that study?
https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/china-is-hurting-us-kids-with-tiktok-but-protecting-its-own/
https://www.newsweek.com/douyin-tiktok-use-link-favorable-views-china-public-opinion-poll-1855311
I can't find the study I'm thinking of. It's been at least 6 months since I saw it. But these articles at least backup some of what I said.
Lemmy is also a propaganda machine, let's ban this platform too then.
So you're going to shut down YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc as well right? Considering they all do the same thing and FB even interfered in an election?
I would 100% be for shutting those down. Doing so would probably lead us into the next Renaissance.
so is instagram and facebook but you don't see people rabidly want to ban them.
Instagram and Facebook aren't run by the CCP
yes they are run by the us empire, which has a more violent history.
still not seeing the point of banning one over the other
You're just spouting whataboutism. It's not an argument, it's a deflection tactic.
I have no love for Instagram or Facebook. IMO they should both be banned and have all data erased. The planet would be better off without them.
But that's not the topic of conversation.
The US isn't an adversarial country to itself. The CCP is an adversarial country to the US, and most of the world.
Ah yes, so the CCP is A-OK because you claim they have a "less violent history". Makes perfect sense.
Tell me, how many people died during the Long March and the "Great" Leap Forward?
In any case, the bill is not about banning TikTok. The bill is about selling ownership of TikTok to a US owned firm to take away control from the CCP. And then only if a sale cannot be arranged, to ban it as a last resort.
the real enemy of the world is the US by a long shot. what the US does warrants invasions and wars on 3rd world countries by the US, the same isnt true for china.
no country has such a dark and murderous history. my country is on that list and we are suffering from the consequences still, decades later.
and yes, having people die of starvation in one of the poorest countries in the planet is sadly expected. no system of government can fix a country that huge overnight.
banning shit like tiktok like you have a huge moral highground is hypocritical at best when US apps are doing it all around the planet.
e: how could i forget the genocide you are sponsoring