I was really pro open internet. I remember the old internet and feel nostalgia about it that probably won't ever completely fade.
I am Ukrainian, and when some years ago my government banned the most popular social network at our country - Russian-made VK, I felt strange about it. I kind of understood some of the security concerns, but didn't feel like they were enough to turn off my open internet fantasies and free-speech absolutism.
Now I totally get it and am happy that it happened sooner that later. Turns out that the security concern was as real as it gets. Russia gets info from VK to jail hundreds of people, and at least they one less weapon to use against Ukrainians.
And I have to admit that I've used VK and probably wouldn't stop doing it if my government didn't ban it. Now I am kind of hoping that they will do the same with TikTok. With all of this experience I still have no strength to quit it by myself.
I mean, your govt is banning enough of the shit with some real questionable reasons(while keeping some actual questionable things/traditions alive) that being skeptical is probably still the best bet.
and let's not pretend that the UA govt has had a history of transparency lol. Being better than Russia has been a low bar in the eastern bloc. -30 is better than -70 but it's still far below 0.
> I mean, your govt is banning enough of the shit with some real questionable reasons(while keeping some actual questionable things/traditions alive) that being skeptical is probably still the best bet.
Such as?
> and let's not pretend that the UA govt has had a history of transparency lol. Being better than Russia has been a low bar in the eastern bloc. -30 is better than -70 but it's still far below 0.
Why bring up Russia here, and disparage by faint praise Ukraine?
This is not related to anything in the original reply.
I used to be on Twitter more (Masto now) and this type of reasoning is seen from the Russian Twitter farm accounts, and I note the account making this reply is new.
1. I did not write what I mean, to say the account is new : I mean to say, it has sprung into life, for this thread. Farm accounts can be brand new, and many are, but you also find accounts which have been around for a long time, and then start being used. I suspect Farms constantly make accounts, bank them, and then consume them however many months or years later.
2. Having read the comments from this account, I does not feel like a Farm account. However, I could be wrong. Farm accounts in my experience use different approaches - some are combative, some are mild, some use the usual twisted Russian or Chinese logic ("we had to invade Ukraine because of NATO!", etc).
> I mean, your govt is banning enough of the shit with some real questionable reasons
I love advocates of democracy and freedom of speech always taking up the time, in the middle of a brutal war no less, to show us the righteous path.
Well guess what: war is the absolute worst enemy of democracy, there can be no polite debate and pluralism while the enemy is blowing your children up. A country defending from a aggression is a fascist state where everybody has an assigned post and maintaining the chain of command is an existential duty. Democratic armies do not exist.
It's no coincidence that all authoritarians and fascist tend to start wars or invent enemies, they long for this state of total control where the whole nation is forced to rally behind them. For Ukraine, that enemy is very much real and the resulting fascism is the only way forward as an independent nation. There is nothing "questionable" about it.
As for advocating for freedom of speech, yes, there is place for that after the Russian aggression ends. Or one could try to setup a booth in the Kremlin square and promote those ideas into a country that, allegedly, is not at war with anybody.
This attitude leads to generals sabotaging the Christmas Truce and way more deaths than necessary. Very very few wars are against invaders who want to kill everybody.
That's an insanely naive form of pacifism justifying acceptable genocide. If killing 0.99% of the population for geopolitical goals is acceptable, then 0.99% of the population of all states will get will get killed, currently roughly 80 million people. Because any country has at least one enemy with some geopolitical goal.
I cannot put into words how revolting this idea of yours is, and it's exactly people like you that need to be silenced in times of war for any chance of durable peace.
War is always and everywhere a result of insufficient deterrence - the enemy will only be dissuaded if they are guaranteed a response that far outweighs any potential wins.
Your speculation is baseless. Basically no countries and states want to kill under a percent of another country. I can't think of a single example.
World War 1 killed a lot more than 1% of the involved population.
Honestly, just giving up and "losing" WW1 would have been way less bad for the commoners than actually fighting was.
The problem with wanting to fight wars is that deterrence doesn't work (e.g. see the past 10 wars). The incentives leaders are subject to often makes starting a war the best option for them personally, even if its bad for the population.
Btw: its exactly warmongers like you who need to be silenced to have any chance of a durable peace that doesn't kill a million Iraqis ;)
The fact that you lump together invasions and wars of choice, like the Iraq war, with wars of necessity like the Ukrainian resistance against such an invasion, and prescribe that same cure against "warmongers" - when I was clearly talking in context only about the second case - should probably be a cue I need to stop entertaining this conversation.
I know you are well intentioned and believe in the things you say, but you should probably think this stance more thoroughly.
I see UA before Zelensky and after as two completely different countries politically. Most of the things UA gov was criticized for seems to be mostly an effect of Russia's influence.
Out of curiosity, what has Zelensky done to improve Ukraine before the war, other than not being a Kremlin puppet?
As I understood it, before the war he was sliding down in the polls, becoming unpopular because there haven't been the massive crackdowns on corruptions he was campaigning for (like in his TV show), with him also being uncovered in the Pandora papers as having various hidden assets [1] and only his resistance to the Russian making him the most popular leader ever.
There's a ton of white washing of Ukraine since the invasion. Just as with everything else, it's not enough to just think that one side is more correct, they must be completely exemplar.
> Out of curiosity, what has Zelensky done to improve Ukraine before the war, other than not being a Kremlin puppet?
Incremental progress. Getting rid of Kremlin influence and corruption is enough for one presidential term.
This is also why I hope for Zelenskyj to step down after the last Russian has been driven off Ukrainian territory. There is no greater feat a President can achieve than saving the country from such an aggression - if he steps down, he'll be remembered for the rest of his life in the glory he and the defenders of Ukraine deserve. If he stays in office, his legacy will be tarnished by the everyday muck throwing of politics - no matter if legitimate or not.
Ukraine under Zelensky is almost completely an authoritarian state, all opposition is banned and either jailed or left the country. All mass media are under government control or left the country. Courts are under total government control, well known murderers are freed from prisons as they were murdering people that were against current government. Business under total control and either does what’s told or gets taken away. You don’t like something and dare to voice your concerns? Welcome to the frontlines or a nearby forest with a 2m digged hole! You think there’s no more corruption? Have you noticed that more and more governments are concerned with all the weapon systems smuggled to their countries from Ukraine? Yes, they steal provided weapons and sell it for profit. You sent water and food aid to Ukraine? Local authorities are selling it to locals. Ukraine is a dystopian society. And no, it’s not just a result of war, all the processes started years ago and were just rushed as soon as the war started.
It's interesting in and of itself that ByteDance allows this.
Perhaps PLA believes that bleeding Russia dry via America expending all of her reserve weaponry means that that American combat power can't be used in the Pacific. If you squint hard enough, it might actually be in CCP's interest for Russia to extend itself in Ukraine because it means that the Americans spend infinity dollars and burn through stocks of key weapons. It's Machiavellian but it makes sense.
I may be wrong, but to my eye, China has a direct interest in Russia being successful in its invasion of Ukraine : the invasion of Taiwan.
China is and has been - as Russia did, prior to its invasion - massively expanding its armed forces.
To my eye, there is absolutely no defensive need for this - India is not about in invade, for example. There is only one use for all this weaponry; Taiwan.
I swim a lot, and I meet people in the pool.
Two weeks ago or so I met a South Korean diplomat - in the pool :-) - and we discussed the situation. South Korea very much is looking to see that Russia is defeated, to discourage China from invading Taiwan.
China also has a direct interest in seeing Russia defeated. In the event of a full on Russian defeat, Moscovite power over the vast territories of Russia will weaken greatly, which can allow China to expand its influence in the Russian Far East. Russia has a lot of resources that China needs, such as natural gas, oil, and fresh water. Already, we are seeing Russia selling resources to China at below market rates. This is why I believe the US will take actions to prevent a full collapse of the Russian state.
The west will never allow a break up of Russia, it serves as a useful bulwark against China. So they won't allow the Chinese to expand their influence to the Russian far east either.
Don't see how Russia succeeding in a winning settlement of an artillery war on its land borders would greatly change China's chances of success using their much bigger army to wholly capture an island which the US might honour its commitment to directly intervene to defend. Russia having a horrible time of it is a reminder to China that military annexation of Taiwan wouldn't be easy, but the basic problems with trying (even a victory would involve absolutely levelling what they consider to be their own territory and kissing goodbye to most of their overseas trade, and the US might actively intervene to defend Taiwan) remain the same regardless of Russia's success or failure, as will their confidence their own army doesn't have Russia's weaknesses.
I suspect the Chinese are more bothered about the delicate balance of other consequences (strength and unity of West, central Asian nations prioritising China over Russia for alliances, Security Council implications, trade implications) and aren't necessarily sure which outcome will be best overall for them.
Russia's success in taking Ukraine, and eventually big parts of the EU, was somewhat hinged on the idea that nato, and to a lesser extent the EU as a whole, could be broken up by doing things like threatening Germany with a cutoff of natural gas.
This sort of breaking up of NATO cohesion would allow China and Russia to act more freely in the world without a unified opposition.
What China and Russia were betting on was that the EU would be weak in the face of tension, and realistically that was a pretty good bet because the EU looked pretty.
They attacked, that didn't turn out to be true, and all their best laid plans are going to shit before their eyes as the EU unifies in the United States pros like 10% of our military capacity at Ukraine and manages to make a tiny country of like 25 million people compete effectively with the country of 150 million that is like three times the size.
China still wants Russia to be a strong unified country, because they want a Russia opposed to the west so that the west is now divided between two fronts.
But aside from that, every single one of their plans has gone about as long as it possibly could have.
Russia was not able to take Ukraine but in a few days
The west did not fall apart
United States has gotten stronger economically.
Economic sanctions have been incredibly effective, without firing a single shot.
It has become clear that given a choice between security and economic progress, countries choose security. China was betting on the ability for their large experts and import market to prevent countries from standing against them.
People were claiming this was going to be the decade of authoritarians against waning democracies, but all of a sudden it looks like this is going to be the decade of strong democracies against waning authoritarians.
It's about the international reaction, not (only) about the outcome of the fighting itself.
China can see the price the intensional community levies upon a war now, and, in case Russia accidentally wins, they can also see the price of occupying an otherwise independent nation.
Mind you: Taiwan isn't recognised as an independent nation by nearly as many nations as Ukraine is.
> Perhaps PLA believes that bleeding Russia dry via America expending all of her reserve weaponry means that that American combat power can't be used in the Pacific.
They are seriously mistaken. Unlike Europe whose capacity in manufacturing anything from ammo to tanks and jets has gone downhill over the last thirty years and who haven't seen an actual fight since the Balkan wars and the early years of Afghanistan, the US has logistics nailed down and is in well-trained condition from the adventures of the last twenty years. Should China ever decide to enter war against the US, it won't end up pretty for them.
I would be very hesitant to suggest that the engagement of limited artillery, ammunition, and side equipment in UA is remotely on the order of magnitude the United States is capable of mustering from its reserves alone. It doesn't make sense because manpower is more expensive to train and maintain than equipment, and the US isn't deploying manpower.
> Perhaps PLA believes that bleeding Russia dry via America expending all of her reserve weaponry means that that American combat power can't be used in the Pacific.
If this is their plan then this is a very poor plan. Russia is a land war, and most of the equipment we're giving to you crane is not the sort of equipment that we would ever use in a war anymore.
There's also just the fact that soldiers are often a bit crap at opsec it just doesn't always get them killed. I have doubts anyways that China would be feeding Russia strike targets based on tiktok usage anyways so they'd be stuck to using the videos to guide strikes based on the nation-state equivalent of GeoGuesser. That can be fantastically accurate but it's much slower generally.
relative to Russia, yeah? China isn't like, literally invading them. China could get ByteDance to pass location data to Russia, but it doesn't seem like China really wants to get in the middle of the war.
It's very rare to read such honesty on the internet.
While the internet has been in existence for a while, it is actually still quite young in the sense of affordable democratization of access to the internet. This does raise a lot of questions regarding long term effects of the internet.
While the current threat actors were relatively predictable, I wonder how in the long run nations can protect themselves from threat actors which are currently still seen as allies? On long timescales allies can become threats and threat actors can become new allies. Does this mean the concept of international companies and services will fragment? Currently Europe is trying to organize more domestic manufacture of semiconductors. Will the future see a race of nation states to be as self-reliant as possible? On the level of individual humans the prepper who wants to make his own shoes / computer / ... is ridiculed, while blocks / nation states / ... are taking steps in such directions...
Again, I thank you for your honesty, most people would just be embarassed for their past activity on foreign platforms, and not highlight it to others.
Actually half of Russian internets went south. Do you, Ukrainian, want to google something on your mother language? Use Tor or wait tens of years while Ukrainian-speaking folks use to speak enough for you to be able to google anything on cyrillic languages. Seems like you, English speaker, do not help your not-English speaking nation a lot.
TBH, that applies to anyone. In any field, especially technology, googling in English gives you much better results than in native language. (except country-specific knowledge).
Good luck searching anything about 1c database (maybe the best accounting software I have ever used). And this is only the top of my head, Russian culture used to be huge. A lot of country-specific knowledge get blocked and I very disappreciate that people who use to think that there is anything better than a free access to any information.
In the US I’m not really afraid of China. There are some people who should be, but I’m not. I’m annoyed at American companies who bow to their wishes, but I’m also annoyed at American companies who censor to advertisers so nobody says “fuck” on YouTube and my level of annoyance is about the same.
Some other places would do good to ban tiktok and people concerned about national secrets and the like sure should, but I’m just some dude leaking plenty of information plenty of places and china is among the least of my concerns.
TikTok is a massive platform that can be used to subtly influence popular opinion through its algorithmic feed. That should make you afraid, even if you don't believe you'll ever be targeted as an individual by China.
What’s the worst case? That China subtly influences the American youth to be less supportive of Washington’s wars? Because TikTok has tons of ‘ex’ CIA and FBI manning the Trust and Safety Dept just like the other socials
That’s the kind of fight I’d like to have though. A good thing to stand up for.
I could also probably be fired for things i say on the internet with my real name, but i think it’s worth standing against that kind of thing and not being afraid of it even though it’s entirely possible. (I do on occasion say things which are very much not well thought out, rude, just to trigger good discussion, or because I’ve had too much wine or am feeling ornery… in other words I’m not ashamed to be human)
Little guys don't have their mansions paid for with the money coming from China. So it makes perfect sense they would be less afraid than LeBron. They have less to lose here, and a way less likely chance to actually lose anything at all due to this.
All those rich celebrities are not afraid of China per se, or any other rich totalitarian regime (the World Cup in Qatar comes to mind), they are just too corrupt to care about anything else then their huge pay checks. The same for companies so.
Makes sense, if you think about it. because it is just peak capitalism, unchecked by anything else then the need for money (the best approximation for power the west has).
I am afraid of China. China has developed missiles that can evade our ability to detect them until it's too late. Meanwhile our military is busy with initiatives like... declaring "Sir" and "Ma'am" as gendered language that should be eliminated.
The fact that American boys are increasingly preferring video games to sports should also worry you. There is a shortage of fit young American men for special-ops programs like the SEALs, etc.
The military is perfectly capable of solving more than one problem at a time. This issue is being dealt with in addition to the other items you read about in the news.
The USA, technologically and manpower wise is doing fine at the moment in addressing these external threats.
> The fact that American boys are increasingly preferring video games to sports should also worry you.
You should not worry about the fighting ability of the average Chinese man vs the average American man. U.S. has the most violence-ready population of young men on Earth, and it's not close.
Maybe Latin America or parts of Africa and the Middle East beat us in terms of willingness to commit violence, but we have much more resources, training, and equipment. China has none of this.
In fact, you should be worried about our young men choosing to exercise this violence against you here before you worry about some kind of military defeat at the hands of the Chinese.
"addiction" and "just ___" are kind of mutually opposing forces. It can be difficult to understand addiction from the outside, as the solution seems obvious, but the internal world is not straight forward to navigate.
If the only way the poster is going to cure their social media addiction is through government intervention, I would suggest finding alternative means of addressing the issue.
I think even those who came into contact with addiction and substance abuse may fail to realize that social media dependence is a very similar thing.
We can get technical - drugs and booze are psychoactive, while social media is behavioral addiction. Even so, the habit-building loop and the compulsion that stems from it is effectively the same.
So, I don't think it's condescending to say "just quit it". I suspend my Twitter account from time to time when I realize I built a habit loop again, and the "urge" just goes away.
If you delete your facebook and twitter accounts you lose access to the only customer support channel in many places. If you delete faceboom you lose access to local second hand markets, you lose access to information about community events, you cannot participate in group chats, you get harangued at every social event if you try to share another contact channel.
I haven’t found ostracism for using channels outside of Facebook. I have plenty of friends and acquaintances that I keep in touch with via Snapchat, email, and text.
I certainly feel ostracized for not having a Facebook account. Chambers of Commerce, Community Groups, and it feels like most queer people expect you to be on Facebook, and if you aren't your on the outside.
Its very similar to not being a blue bubble in some regards, but Facebook has a much broader scope than just being a messenger platform.
Excited for the EU to fix the closed messenger issue, then I can have 3rd party clients to bridge all my communications securely into one unified view, just gotta make sure that these large companies don't try and open up these platforms by hiding your end to end encryption keys on their servers :D
I'm very much okay with being ostracized by people who don't care enough about me to stay in touch outside of social media. I actually prefer to be ostracized by anyone who'd judge me for bubble color.
I deleted my facebook during Lent in 2017 as part of a social media "time out" and never brought it back.
Interestingly enough, friends started calling again. Quitting social media cold turkey is great because you get to find out who is actually important in your life, and you find it out really fast.
Thank you for adding excellent context, as you usually do, dang. It's strange how so many discussions on this topic seem to proceed with no prior inputs, it's puzzling.
> General counsel Erich Andersen wrote to staff that a “misguided plan was developed and carried out by a few individuals within the Internal Audit department this past summer”, adding that those involved “misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data” in violation of its code of conduct.
Ah yes, straight from the playbook: management gets caught being mischievous and throws a few underlings under the bus to save their own asses.
You could probably put a bunch of spin on it that "China has been committing human rights abuses right here in the UK", "threatening journalists", "accessing personal data to track them in their home life", and that "as the government of the people we say that this is not ok".
A move to Paris will both optically look, and could again be headlined as TikTok trying to skirt the rule of law to make sure they can keep stealing your data.
Announce some extra investment into tech industries using the fines collected from TikTok, using any assets you may have frozen and prevented from leaving the country if needs be, in order to bolster jobs.
I think the government of the day could spin it into a PR win.
This seems like a lot of typing for what, up until Brexit Got Done, could have been expressed with the two-character word "no", as in, "no, ByteDance, no."
Now it's 'optics' and geopolitics.
These two scenarios are not equivalent. One gives ByteDance vastly more leverage.
They probably don't know all of them, if the Party knows what it's about.
In the old Soviet system, you had people who were openly members of the Party, political officers placed in your organization. But you also had KGB agents placed in your organization that you didn't know about, because their job was to keep an eye on you.
> could be agents for the communist party operating without the knowledge of the regular management
Isn't that worse? Management being unable to make commitments, because they don't control their firms, the Party does, is the central problem with Chinese companies.
In which case, there would be evidence of that. Prosecutors are notorious for wanting the biggest fish out there. While their might be bigger players that are getting away with this, it's also not unreasonable to think that it happened as the evidence shows.
Basically, rather than make stuff up, I'd rather go with what the evidence shows and what can be proven. It's easy to hide in a big company, and it's at a bigger company where it's a lot easier to abuse your position without anyone else, including higher ups, knowing.
I feel like this is talking out of both sides of the mouth.
If the issue is that corporations aren't following data privacy laws, build the privacy into the tool at the software/ecosystem level (e.g make signup without true name / phone number / IMEI a legal requirement, signup without location sharing a legal requirement) then it'll be impossible to track journalists for both Chinese and American companies.
This is detracting from the fact that we have an actively hostile actor with a huge platform here in our country, and that needs to be handled as soon as possible.
I totally support broad regulation of privacy law. TikTok is a much deeper concern. I don't like seeing a good cause used to distract from another good cause.
Depends hugely on who you are and what happens with the politics.
CIA and FBI are very big threats to you, which is why you vote regularly to ensure that your rights are represented and those agencies aren't able to abuse their power.
China is a much more distant and abstract, but much more serious threat.
If the FBI or CIA fucks up, they will put let's say 10% of people in prison for opposition to the state.
If China is allowed to gain upper hands on the United States, it will result in broad scale societal problems which I couldn't even begin to estimate. Imagine a world where Russia is allowed to take Europe. Imagine a world where the United States is convinced to stand by as Taiwan is invaded and our chip supply is shut down.
They are very different threats, and should be treated very differently. The FBI and CIA are immune system type systems, where China is a guy with a knife.
The CIA and FBI have checks on them and are balanced as we speak. China is a fully rogue actor with no balancing systems to prevent it from damaging our society.
Both can kill you, both will kill you if given the opportunity. You shouldn't worry not about the guy with a knife because your immune system can kill you in 5 minutes if it wanted to. You should worry about both.
>>which is why you vote regularly to ensure that your rights are represented and those agencies aren't able to abuse their power
That never works out in practice as the administrative state (which includes the FBI and CIA) are soo far removed from representative government they are basically unaccountable at this point, that is with out even getting into the idea that 1 vote in a nation of 350 million plus holds no real power anyway, or the problems with First past the post, or countless other topics around voting
"Democracy" is more or less an delusion those in power perpetuate to ensure the cattle think they have a choice
>>Imagine a world where the United States is convinced to stand by as Taiwan is invaded
I think we already live in such a world.
>>The CIA and FBI have checks on them and are balanced as we speak.
Do they? In any real sense? We have confirmed and rumored massive violations of constitutional rights both here and abroad yet there is no accountability. From the Torture report, to massive violation of 4th amendment via "parallel construction" to even the possibility of actual assassinations..
Who exactly are they accountable to? it is certainly not the people, or the constitution
> "Democracy" is more or less an delusion those in power perpetuate to ensure the cattle think they have a choice
I had a much larger post, but I'm going to only respond to this one now, because it sums up basically off the disagreements and no further discussion is going to resolve anything.
I don't agree with this sort of cynicism at all, and I very much do believe that while it is very flawed, democracy ultimately is still doing its job.
I understand the resistance cynicism, however your statement about democracy seems to be more faith based than any kind of data
What data do you have to support the position that "democracy ultimately is still doing its job. " further what "job" do you believe democracy is doing.
I can point to many data points that show it is not, the for mentioned lack of accountability. The fact that most of the voting population does not even vote. I can point to research studies like that from political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Paige [1] that shows Average citizens have little impact on public policy. I have all kinds of data, and clear examples in history to support my position, I would be interested in seeing a counter offer
> Have you seen journalists attacking a dictatorship while living there, and go unpunished? Have you seen the same, but on democratic countries?
After Glenn Greenwald reported on the 2013 leaks, the IC and news media started up a bunch of threats of treason and were questioning his status as a journalist (to make him more legally at fault)
This doesn't necessarily contradict your statement, given we state the obvious that the US govt (and executive agencies especially) are not democratic
Snowden wasn't a journalist, he was a contractor with a security clearance who leaked classified information to others and didn't go through any legally recognised whistleblowing channels. He broke the law and the conditions of his clearance.
Now you could argue that he still did a good thing, and perhaps that would have been taken into account by the jury in what would have been a proper trial in a civilian court had he not left the country.
None of the journalists who reported on those leaks were imprisoned or harmed. In fact, those on beats that require them to have accreditation to the White House, Pentagon, etc still have that accreditation.
This is fundamentally and vastly different to what happens to journalists in China, Russia, and similarly authoritarian states.
Well this brings up another failure or short coming of our implementation of "democracy". How can the voting public hold the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc accountable as people here seems to claim we do by voting if we are not allowed to know what they are doing, and if anyone that is given access to info about what they are doing releases that we put them in a cage or drive them out the country.
"National Security" is often used to cover up government abuse, the public only knows of a few rare instances of this abuse and based on those I can pretty much assume the abuses are FAR FAR more extensive than has been reveled to the public and there is great incentive by government to classify everything to ensure there is never any accountability. Just look at the actions around these JFK files that multiple administrations have tried to declassify, or the Torture report that clearly the CIA violated the law even during the investigation
You must have immense trust, not backed by any rational data to support that trust, to proclaim Snowden an enemy of the people simply because he violated state secrets laws, laws that IMO should be unconstitutional in the first place, and are completely antithetical to a functional democracy.
If the government can keep secrets from the voters, then the voters can not hold them accountable, it is as simple as that
In your scenario the CIA plays the equivalent role of a Chinese agency in the original one. Agencies within their own local government play the equivalent role of CIA.
Maybe for US citizens, but not so much for everyone else since 2001, hence why the EU effectively banned US companies in 2015 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I
(China/TikTok is even worse of course.)
It's just a taste of our own medicine. We sit here in the imperial core and expect that nothing we do globally will ever come back to haunt us (except it has and likely will again). We think that exporting our ideas and culture is good for the world, but that's just as unlikely to be true for us, just as it is for China.
I'm sure the us would love an EU/UK with private health care and weaker unions and labor laws.
Is it tho? Is it worse than Cisco or bcci? What about CryptoAG? Instagram and Meta literary have got shadow profiles on near every single person on the planet....
Two party system with entry barriers for new parties isn't a democracy. It's a system that's only slightly better than a single party system like what you have in PRC.
> I don't agree with this sort of cynicism at all, and I very much do believe that while it is very flawed, democracy ultimately is still doing its job.
Democracy is good, yes, but blindly asserting that USA == democracy is an incredibly naive, elementary school textbook level take of how our society propagates itself (not saying you're asserting this, but addressing the hypothetical point)
That kind of cynicism is also a seedbed of authoritarianism, ironically.
It's rocket fuel for demagogues, who swoop in and exploit it and turbocharge it even more (see Trump). They say the old system isn't working, they promise to disrupt it. The old rules aren't working anymore, give me all the power, I alone can fix it.
> "Democracy" is more or less an delusion those in power perpetuate to ensure the cattle think they have a choice
Democracy is a system that ensures that whoever has the actual power also holds the formal power.
The only direct result of this is that it makes revolutions unnecessary. But indirectly, it also makes revolution-like changes much more common, what is really great.
What democracy isn't is a system that empowers the small people, or that removes power imbalances, or whatever propaganda you've got. There are many visible false features about it that lots of people believe. But that doesn't mean it's a bad system, it's the best we currently know about.
The primary strength of democracy is removing people that mistreat us, and it is a real power in a properly run democracy. Lose that power, and democracy dies.
I do generally agree voters have little influence on policy.
> "Democracy" is more or less an delusion those in power perpetuate to ensure the cattle think they have a choice
Like him or not, Trump was very much not the preference of those in power, and very much was the preference of many people in America. That shows the people do have power.
Yeah, as much as he disgusted me, it was really interesting watching him subvert the powers-that-be by defeating the Republican candidates one-by-one until he was the only one left, and then winning the general election largely because so many people really hated Hillary. What was sad was observing how, at the beginning of the primaries, most Republican voters seemed to hate him, and only a small core of extremists really liked him. But than after he was elected, the rank-and-file Republican voters all changed their opinions of him and became True Believers. It was an interesting exercise in group psychology I think.
An aberition in the system is not a rule. Look what happened after the person that was supposed to win lost. That will never happen again the system will see to that
> They are very different threats, and should be treated very differently. The FBI and CIA are immune system type systems, where China is a guy with a knife.
This analogy is great, because it's a better analogy than you think. Immune issues kill a LOT more people than knife attacks in the USA every year. In general, external enemies are less dangerous than internal enemies. It's easy to rally people against an external enemy (see the Robbers Cave Experiment in psychology), but much harder to rally people against an internal enemy.
There are 0.60 knife deaths per 100k people in the USA. [1] There are 3.97 deaths for SAID per 100k [2], and that's just the first type of autoimmune issue that I googled for off the top of my head.
Rome faced plenty of external enemies over the years, what actually caused the fall of Rome was internal.
> Immune issues kill a LOT more people than knife attacks in the USA every year
When there are 100 million Americas with 100 million CIAs and all governments are ruled under a common government that makes all knife stabbings and war illegal, that maybe something that is the truth in geopolitics as well.
Until then, this isn't an analogy that works very well.
>If China is allowed to gain upper hands on the United States, it will result in broad scale societal problems which I couldn't even begin to estimate. Imagine a world where Russia is allowed to take Europe. Imagine a world where the United States is convinced to stand by as Taiwan is invaded and our chip supply is shut down.
When You're Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression. The world doesn't need to imagine, because we had to stand by while the US launched illegal wars in Iraq, continues the unjust economic sanctions on Cuba just just for election politics, or all the shenigans the CIA pulled in South America in the previous decades. Heck just this month the US has said it will ignore a WTO ruling[1] just because it says so and everyone will have to stand by.
The multipolar world threatens Americans so much because they'll finally have to live like there's another version of themselves in the world.
"CIA and FBI are very big threats to you, which is why you vote regularly to ensure that your rights are represented and those agencies aren't able to abuse their power."
Never worked, will never work. Big people/elites will always have access to every data. The pretext will be "National Security" or "Children". It is like baptist vs bootleggers, so voting won't solve the problem.
In that world without American support, Russia would probably have been occupied or severely weakened by the Nazi in WWII, and history would have been way different. Just nitpicking, I agree on principle.
That is a very curious reading of history not shared by the majority of military historians in either the West or East.
For example, according to the US military (See The West Point Military History of the Second World War which is available on Kindle), without US support, WW2 would have lasted 1-2 years longer but the Soviets could have defeated Germany all on their own, both without lend/lease and also without any US involvement at all in the war on Europe. Here is what the West Point history says at the start of their section on Lend/Lease:
"Although nearly half the population and the great industrial regions of the Donets remained under German occupation, the Soviets still found men for new armies and vastly increased war production. They defeated the Germans at Stalingrad almost entirely through their own efforts and would probably have won the same victory if they received no assistance at all."
Or you can read When Titans Clashed by noted British historian David Glantz, which reads
"If the Western Allies had not provided equipment and invaded Northwest Europe, Stalin and his commanders would have taken twelve to eighteen months to finish off the Wehrmacht. The results would probably have been the same, except that Soviet soldiers would have waded at France's Atlantic beaches rather than meeting the Allies at the Elbe".
It is sad that many in the West don't know that 80% of German war deaths were at the hands of Soviet soldiers.
The reason why historians believe this is because of the timing. The vast majority of Lend/Lease aid was delivered in 1945. Only 20% of aid was delivered before 1944 to the Soviets, but by that time the tide had already turned (Stalingrad, recognized as the turning point, was in winter of 1942 to the start of 1943). By the time Lend/Lease really took off, the Soviet army was already vastly larger and more capable than the German army, which was in full retreat. During the dark days of 1941 and 1942, Lend/Lease was miniscule, primarily consisting of things like cans of spam and beans. The Soviets derisively called Spam "The Second Front", because instead of delivering the promised second front, they received cans of spam in small quantities during the darkest period of the war for the Russians in 1941-1942.
The massive factories and military gear were sent after the Germans were retreating, and therefore most historians believe they had the effect of speeding up the collapse of the German forces, which was the main effect of the Normandy invasion as well.
I agree on the importance of timing also regarding the then new weapons the Germans had, like the V2 and the first jet airplanes. We'll never know, but it is possible that having one more year of research and production at disposal could have changed things.
V2 is not going to make up for a deficit of 12 million troops. Red Army went from about 1 million men to 12-14 million men by 1945 (which number it depends on whether you count the Navy and other branches). Germany invaded with 3.7 million men and by the end of 1942, the Red Army was both larger and better equipped than the Wehrmacht, which was already experiencing shortages.
I mean, it's not even close. And the Soviet Union, with enormous quantities of oil, iron ore, and other raw materials, could mass produce tanks, planes, and heavy weapons in massive quantities.
This was why Stalingrad was so important -- it was the gate to the Soviet Oil fields, and once that gate was closed, the war was basically over. Had Germany been able to capture the Caucauses, one could argue that the USSR would be starved of energy and so dependent on the US or some other nation to supply it. But that never happened.
I think the comment you're replying to is specifically addressing the browsing data discussed in the post... I don't see how any of these issues are related to Bytedance having your IP history
It's a different story if you are a Chinese national in the US, have family in China, are reporting on China, etc. But for most Americans it probably matters more if Google is sharing your info with various three-letter agencies.
> The CIA and FBI have checks on them and are balanced as we speak.
Considering the director of the NSA lied to congress about what they were doing and got away with it, I'm not sure we should be putting much faith in any checks or assuming the balance of three letter agencies.
I guess there is a tacit assumption that you and the US government have some shared goals, but that you share fewer goals with ByteDance or the government of China.
I guess most Americans aren’t very scared of the feds “because they have nothing to hide”, which as we know is a false sense of security in any surveillance state. But it can still be true that you have /more/ to fear from the government of China, given that they can have economic impact on your life at a macro level.
>>tacit assumption that you and the US government have some shared goals
My goal is to live my life free from abuse, coercion, and infringement of my natural rights as a living human
the governments goal (be it china or US) is power, and control via the exclusive authority to initiate violence on the people with in the sphere of influence
Different governments have varying degrees of alignment with your goal. Despite how flawed the US govt is, I don't see how someone can think the US govt and CCP are equivalent in their misalignment with your desire.
If the government couldn't do that to you and other people don't you think others would abuse you instead of the government? In that case your interests are aligned.
The us constitution has either authorized the government we now have or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it has proven to be unfit to safe guard the natural rights it was created to protect against the onslaught of authoritarian policies that have largely ignored all limits placed on government authority
The FBI and CIA have both good and bad effects on a US resident whereas China's national security establishment has only bad effects (if it has any significant effects).
There is no disadvantage to a US resident from stopping them from spying on US residents. Both the law-and-order type of US voter and the don't-tread-on-me type agree on that.
Would you be concerned if your childrens' school curriculum had to get pre-approval from the Chinese government? That's the quantity of exposure we already have. An entity beholden to the CCP has an iron grip on the attention of America's youth.
Faced with a choice between preapproval from China and the status quo, which is de-facto preapproval from right-wing Christian Confederate revanchists in Texas [1], I... well, I honestly don't know which option I'd pick.
Either way, I'm not getting an objective education.
The average person would never come in contact with the fbi or be put in a cage randomly. Ask your neighbours / friends if they have heard about anyone in their circle who had this happen to them in some form.
That fear is from tv using it so often it seems true.
What does the average American need to fear about China? Very little in terms of impact to daily lives.
What does the average American need to fear about being secretly recorded by a neighbour? Very little.. they still think its creepy
The FBI has the power to put you in a cage, and yet you are not in a cage. China regularly puts its own citizens in a cage or worse for offenses that are perfectly acceptable here, such as criticizing our leadership. China is a large and powerful country. China is an authoritarian state whose leadership would unquestionably impose their will on us could they. Recording data about us now to be used in 10, 20, or 50 years in the same ways they are actively using it agains their current citizens today doesn't seem far fetched, however unlikely at this point in time.
Interesting take. Many teens and 20-somethings using TikTok today will be looking to get elected 20 or 30 years from now. They may also end up as CEOs.
Would be a shame if their youthful TikTok private videos and DMs happened to be leaked to the press. Unless…
You and I, we're nobodies with no power. We share a country with people who do have power. The power they exercise impacts our lives. Those people have weaknesses. Those weaknesses can be exploited.
If you ran an intelligence service, you might want to identify targets, prioritize targets, and potentially create a graph of social connections.
Tiktok provides picture data (geolocation, timestamps, hashes, potentially facial recognition and OCR), location data, time data (hours app is opened), private message data, and data on hobbies/interests, I assume there is profile and private message data as well.
That's all without bringing up the glaring problem which is damaging institutional trust. Promoting anti-science videos or showing one group very pro videos and another group very against videos is damaging to our very social fabric. Amplifying things that feel intuitive but aren't correct is dangerous.
The threat model you perceive is that our authoritarian government would oppress us. The threat model that is happening is that external governments are causing chaos within our borders, amplifying division, and sewing distrust.
You perceive the government to be a bigger threat because of how you imagine you might exercise power, maybe you want to unionize, maybe you worry about police abuse, maybe you worry someone might take your guns, maybe you hate taxes. That misses the bigger picture... out of the following people, would you prefer them to be "compromised" by the CIA or by China? Soldier, Politician, Judge, CEO, Engineer, nuclear scientist, EPA regulator, Chief logistics officers, FCC employees, Bankers, etc.
I think the answer is pretty obvious, but I'm open to an explanation of why it is not.
> You perceive the government to be a bigger threat because of how you imagine you might exercise power, maybe you want to unionize, maybe you worry about police abuse, maybe you worry someone might take your guns, maybe you hate taxes. That misses the bigger picture... out of the following people, would you prefer them to be "compromised" by the CIA or by China? Soldier, Politician, Judge, CEO, Engineer, nuclear scientist, EPA regulator, Chief logistics officers, FCC employees, Bankers, etc.
> I think the answer is pretty obvious, but I'm open to an explanation of why it is not.
Who has the motive and opportunity to do things that screw over regular folks? It's a lot easier to think of cases where the CIA has something to gain by keeping someone in or out of jail who shouldn't be, or routing money or weapons somewhere they shouldn't be, than where China does. Low-level disruption would be a poor use of their assets that's not worth the risk. CIA employees have a lot more reason to be in zero-sum competition with regular Joes.
I say this in good faith: I don't understand what you are trying to express.
Can you give concrete examples of who the CIA would want to jail or not? Why do CIA employees lose when regular Joes gain and regular Joes gain when CIA employees lose?
Who decides who should or shouldn't be sent weapons. How informed do you think you are compared to the people who make the orders to route money or send weapons?
I am not a CIA lover by an means. At best the CIA supports countries like Ukraine and Taiwan. At worst CIA plays "realpolitik" and puts American interests, particularly those of Americas upper class/aristocrats, first.
> Can you give concrete examples of who the CIA would want to jail or not? Why do CIA employees lose when regular Joes gain and regular Joes gain when CIA employees lose?
What I mean is they're a lot more likely to be entangled with everyday life. Just a lot more chance to get mixed up with a senator who can send more budget their way, or even a local sheriff who asked too many questions about the permitting for something they were building, or hell, one of the guys who bullied the agent at school. The amount of people who can meaningfully influence something a PRC agent cares about is likely to be smaller, just because there's so much more domestic politics than international politics.
The FBI has that power, but at least in theory they don't want to. That's the balance we strike with government: we give them the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, in exchange for some kind of believe that they won't mis-use that force.
The FBI has at least some kind of supervision, from elected officials who ultimately answer to their constituents. That's a long way from a guarantee, but it's more than nothing, which is what you have on China.
China can't (legitimately) put you in a cage, but they can do a lot of other things to make you really unhappy, and there's nothing you can do about it. Whether that nets out to be more or less scary is up to you, but there is a difference on which to make the distinction.
Me, I'm not really so sure that this app represents all that big a threat compared to all of the other things. My concerns are more with the intermediate: large corporations without the power to put me in a cage but with the power to do a lot of other bad things. Including just plain losing my info by accident, something neither the FBI nor China is likely to do.
I won't use any names but Smusshia helped get Donald Duck elected. What could Chmina do? How could they erode our society? The implications are enormous, and not even theoretical by this point. A lot of societal attack on us has already been documented.
Because like all dragnets they may snag some big fish who it could be helpful to track/compromise. Everyone else on the platform provides a reason for the main targets to use it.
We should do the one because it covers both cases.
A TikTok that doesn't have the ability to do bad things isn't an issue. Focusing on TikTok pretends that it's the only hostile actor with a large platform in <country> that needs to be handled asap
You can handle Facebook and TikTok at the same time by putting in strong privacy regulations, along with all the other similar hostile actors
I'm very skeptical that there is such a thing as a regulation which can keep a state actor with zero transparency like TikTok in check.
Even if you move all of their code and mandate that they have a shell company in the United States, and you mandate that none of American data ever goes to China, they can ignore you. You validate that every request only stays in the United States? How do you validate that there's no communication between the two systems?
The state they operate in is going to make whistle blowing very difficult, not ever allow proper auditing into the state apparatus which ultimately controls the company.
You can administrate code, but unless you actually build that code yourself and basically understand it from the ground up with every single update, which is going to be nearly impossible, it's going to be very easy to sneak features through.
The problem is, keeping this safe is going to be a herculan task, and we're just not up to it. Facebook is tame in comparison, because at the end of the day they're subject to our open media, transparency laws, corporate auditing, and all of that other fun stuff.
We can reasonably pass regulations that help keep Facebook in check.
We cannot reasonably pass regulations which we'll keep
TikTok in check.
> Even if you move all of their code and mandate that they have a shell company in the United States, and you mandate that none of American data ever goes to China, they can ignore you. You validate that every request only stays in the United States? How do you validate that there's no communication between the two systems?
> The state they operate in is going to make whistle blowing very difficult, not ever allow proper auditing into the state apparatus which ultimately controls the company.
You can have auditing and whistleblowing on the US entity (and include a promise of asylum in the whistleblowing protection), and big fines if they ever send data offshore.
The idea that government and companies could have significantly different goals and operate under different authority is seen as a very western notion in china. It isn't possible for a chinese company to directly defy the wishes of the chinese government.
Jack Ma is a good case study, one of the most influential and successful businesspeople in china, and he was summarily thrown in jail for merely discussing ideas the CCP didn't like. There was no legal process, he just dropped off the grid completely, and then some time later the chinese government made ominous statements about how he was "embracing supervision."
No, it isn't. The idea of private companies existing to make money is exactly the same in China as everywhere else. Companies talk about serving the public good (as they do in the US as well), but they really just care about the bottom line.
> he was summarily thrown in jail for merely discussing ideas the CCP didn't like
He wasn't thrown in jail. He was pressured to stop directly criticizing the government, after he publicly criticized China's financial regulators.
Right now, TikTok faces much greater political pressures from the US government than it does from the Chinese government. It's a private company trying to make money, and trying to avoid scrutiny from both the Chinese and the US governments.
All companies in China are under the control of their state. TikTok is a state actor.
No, not everyone in China is a state bot. However, every company has to keep at least a few party members on their board and obey state controls constantly.
> All companies in China are under the control of their state. TikTok is a state actor.
Couldn't the same be said of companies here in the US? We know the government is collecting data from US corporations. Should other countries be blocking Google, Facebook and Microsoft?
The same could not be set of companies in the United States, and such controls would very quickly or lawsuits and all sorts of backlash.
Companies do cooperate with the government, but for the most part that cooperation is either voluntary, or clearly defined by law which mandates cooperation.
There is still some reason for concern, but there is much less reason for concern.
We now know that as a practical matter, American companies do cooperate with the US government in spying, influence operations, etc., and that the US government has a massive surveillance apparatus that is highly opaque and beyond the control of the American public.
That's why the sudden concern about TikTok theoretically being a problem comes across as an excuse for going after yet another Chinese company, as a way to pressure China and hamper its development.
But our government depends on those other apps spying on you and violating your privacy so that they can collect a copy of all that data for themselves. If we solved the problem with actually providing privacy protections for the American people against unwanted spying by corporations the US government would have to back to spying on Americans themselves.
Tiktok isn’t only dangerous because of the data they harvest. It’s the epitome of algorithmic social media, which can be extremely damaging to society, and also a tool for propaganda and disinformation.
Mainly due to different government systems/markets. Each nation applies certain rules to protect interests and favored companies. An article that described some is here [1].
> we have an actively hostile actor with a huge platform here in our country
I was going to say that if user is addicted to TikTok (or other hostile application) and also concerned about surveillance/tracking - they could use a dedicated burner phone with fake info, no contacts.
> I totally support broad regulation of privacy law.
I later read this from Wikipedia:
"As of January 2020, researches found that governments of 155 countries have been mandating SIM registration laws; in some countries, prepaid users must submit biometrics like photos and fingerprints."[0]
The data really isn't the concern. It's a mild concern in long term as we have kids grow up to be presidents and their stupid stuff is on this media platform who can dig it up and blackmail with it.
The real concern is the ability to use the website as a propaganda outlet
> This is detracting from the fact that we have an actively hostile actor with a huge platform here in our country, and that needs to be handled as soon as possible.
Can you clarify what you mean here? I realize people are unhappy with how Elon has run Twitter but who do you expect to do what?
Forget corporations, I'm concerned about what the governments are doing with this data to harm people (especially those under their own jurisdictions).
ByteDance isn't the problem, the CCP controlling it is.
> The only issue now is (it seems), that it's the chinese doing it and not facebook/google or local telcos.
No. That is also an issue, few who are informed despute the need to address those as well. There can be more than one problem in need of solving at a time.
Well sure, but somehow noone was bothered by the local three-letter agencies getting the data from the telcos (and google, facebook, etc.), until the chinese did the same with their app.
Plenty of people were and are bothered. Clapper lied to Congress for a reason. Google accelerated their plans to encrypt inter DC links. And at least in the US tech companies release the quantity of requests from the government. FOIA is also a thing. Obviously not enough, yet far beyond any accountability for the CCP.
That's often antithetical to the point of using social media. The data that most people share on social media are either inherently identifying, or easy to deanonymize.
Companies use phone number for signup because phone numbers cost money, and it serves as a proxy to allow companies to generally avoid having people make hundreds of thousands of burner accounts.
If they won't follow one set of laws, how will another set of laws reliably solve the problem? They can just disobey those laws, too. Anonymous login credentials can be de-anonymized in all kinds of ways.
I often wonder what high-level American executives that work at these Chinese companies feel like, specially when news like this comes to life. Do they feel like they're just doing their job? Are they afraid of getting arrested? Do they think that the massive comp packages they get is worth the risk?
Lots of cognitive dissonance going on, I would bet.
They're likely very much bought into the CCP and think that their work that furthers the interests of the CCP, including the tracking of potential dissidents to their political party, is fine. You don't see American tech workers batting an eye at tracking data being used to target who was at the Jan 6 protests, and frankly I don't think they'd care if it was also used against Alex Jones if he was there in a journalistic capacity.
In the US now, every story that has anything to do with China is reduced to "the CCP."
This is a story about a tech company abusing its access to user data to try to track down which of its employees were talking to journalists. This could be a story about a Chinese company, an American company, or a company from pretty much any country.
High level executives at ByteDance are members of the CCP and closely work with the CCP. Journalists are reporting on ByteDance because of allegations that are implied in this quote from the article:
“TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists,”
The ongoing controversy with TikTok has always been about the concern of the government of China using TikTok data and manipulation of its content in clandestine ways. It all goes back to CCP.
* Zhang Yiming, founder / CEO of ByteDance until 2021: not a member of the Communist Party.
* Kevin A. Mayer, COO and CEO of TikTok during 2020: not a member of the Communist Party.
* Rubo Liang, CEO since 2021: not a member of the Communist Party.
* Lidong Zhang, Chairman of ByteDance China: I can't find any reference to him being a member of the Communist Party.
* Alex Zhu, founder of Musical.ly, the predecessor of TikTok, and former CEO of TikTok: not a member of the Communist Party.
I'm sure there are some executives that are members of the Communist Party, but looking at the top people, that just doesn't pop out.
> The ongoing controversy with TikTok has always been about the concern of the government of China using TikTok data and manipulation of its content in clandestine ways.
That's the way literally every issue even tangentially related to China is spun in the US nowadays. This is actually a story about a tech company trying to find leakers by looking at the user data of the journalists they met with. It gets turned into a story about how the Communist Party is going to infiltrate and undermine the United States, using an app that teenagers use to show off their dance moves. The paranoia about China has gone just a bit too far for my liking.
Considering that a lot of kids join the communist party like it’s literally a school club, I don’t see how being a member or not is really very interesting. It’s like registering as a Democrat or Republican in states that require that, except there is a bit of gating in the youth organizations looking for good students, or legacy members, etc…
American execs aren't any more or less ethical than Chinese ones. The difference is what is and isn't legal or acceptable. They likely just thought they'd get away with it or they're not culpable if it wasn't their order.
News Corp hacked phones to track people, they just got caught and punished.
* Golden handcuffs, but intending to move away once they vest.
* Actively trying to move away, but want to have a new role at that/better level lined up.
* They might've been eased into it through deception (e.g., someone raises a concern internally, they're assured that's not happening or has stopped, and only later it's in the news that it's happening anyway).
* Or, really, "tech" has pervasive ethical flexibility. Figuratively, the same kind of people who were looting pension funds in the 1980s are now selling out computer users, and they've normalized a lot of sociopathy, so the party is open to a lot more people. Normalized, it's easy to rationalize doing just a little more. Example: "Oh no, they're monitoring journalists." Which is something almost every startup Web site starts participating in, on their first day of business, when they add third-party trackers, and then often they add to that.
Laws are meaningless without enforcement, and good luck getting US law enforcement to enforce laws that they themselves are breaking routinely. We need a whole culture shift in government if we're going to have any hope of fixing this.
I generally agree, but that's no reason why we shouldn't push for a law banning use of private data like this now. It seems like a first step towards that culture shift we want. And even if enforcement of this new law is lacking, I bet in the TikTok situation the US gov we be happy to enforce it.
Selective enforcement and laws that are designed not to be enforced degrade the very rule of law and rules-based order that we're supposedly trying to protect here.
US states can take action, and California is. The new CPRA that takes effect Jan 1 2023 establishes a state funded agency to enforce the laws that have effectively only been able to be enforced by civil lawsuits by the people whose privacy is violated.
At the same time, TikTok is much more likely to follow the laws of China than the US, while Facebook is the reverse. China is an adversary of the US that does things like let fentanyl flow unfettered here and withhold vital data on Covid, if it were Spotify (based out of Sweden) it would be very different
This is so far from the truth in how you're stating it and in this context.
* Tesla is only alleged as having hired PIs, and the claim came from a disgruntled former employee that was fired for cause. Let's not treat this like fact. There is zero evidence other than this person's claim.
* The alleged target of the alleged investigation was a Tesla employee, not a journalist, that was actively leaking confidential information (and admitted to doing so) with deliberate intent to harm his employer. The SEC also declined to provide the leaker with any sort of whistleblower status.
* There is no evidence Tesla used data outside what was freely accessible on company devices, which literally every large corporation on the planet monitors.
* The leaker was later successfully sued for $400,000 by Tesla and found guilty of several criminal offenses. It was also revealed (and admitted to) that his legal defense was bankrolled by The Funicular Fund, which is a known Tesla short-seller.
Whatever complaints people have about how deep the tendrils of the US government have infiltrated into US companies, there is at least some separation and the rule of law. Yes, the government can get warrants for pen registers, issue NSLs and the like but there's still a process for that.
This simply isn't true for the Chinese government and Chinese companies.
But the other issue, which is both more palatable and more general, is one of reciprocity. China deliberately restricts Western companies from their market. A key component of trade is reciprocal market access.
> Yes, the government can get warrants for pen registers, issue NSLs and the like but there's still a process for that.
> This simply isn't true for the Chinese government and Chinese companies.
Huh? Do you think the Chinese intelligence services don't have to go through processes and approvals before grabbing user data? It's exactly the same thing - sure it's a secret court that rubber-stamps every request put in front of it, but that's no different from how NSLs work.
There is no requirement under the Chinese National Intelligence Law for intelligence agencies to go through courts for access. There is no due process for those affected. That law also compels companies and citizens to actively assist intelligence agencies.
> There is no requirement under the Chinese National Intelligence Law for intelligence agencies to go through courts for access.
Maybe our translations don't call it a court, but there will be processes. In practice, what does the FISA "court" guarantee that the Chinese intelligence service bureaucracy does not?
> There is no due process for those affected.
Much the same as the US, right? The courts have ruled that people don't have standing to challenge the NSA's large-scale surveillance programmes, the warrants are granted by secret courts, the usual rights of appeal don't extend to those courts.
> That law also compels companies and citizens to actively assist intelligence agencies.
Which is much the same as the National Security Letter system, no?
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner argues that even if there is nothing wrong with Tiktok it ought to be banned because it gives China a crucial edge in the development of AI tools that American companies don't have. China is able to freely access Western markets but not the other way around.
> Finally, there’s the fear that China will be able to use TikTok’s data to power its AI innovations. That’s an advantage the US won’t have because its social media apps are banned in China and because there aren’t laws that would compel social media companies to hand over data just because the government wants it.
> “They are aggregating literally billions and billions of images of not just Americans but people from around the world who are using TikTok,” Warner said. “That gives them so much more data to help them create tools that can be utilized in the AI world.”
> That’s an advantage the US won’t have because [its social media apps are banned in China and] because there aren’t laws that would compel social media companies to hand over data just because the government wants it.
Wait, why would it be an advantage for creation of AI in the US if social media companies (or company) could be more easily compelled to give our data to the government? Given that it's the social media company we are expecting to produce the AI anyway.
Because Bytedance and similar orgs are merged with the CCP. So they pass data up the chain, and the CCP can make new rules, investments, and directives with it. This allows the CCP to accelerate with this data in ways that the US cannot.
So CCP gets full access to American residents, without reciprocating US social media actions within it, and then compels Bytedance to give it access.
There are tons of valid criticism for the US intelligence community, but when it isn't agenda driven they can be right about a lot of things, for example knowing that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine.
If you are talking about the very latest invasion of Feb. 2022 and not the start of the war in 2014, then they don't have much credit there, since not only various third parties have been pointing this out for months, the Russians literally told them (in January IIRC ?)
As a reminder for everyone, as a Chinese domestic corporation providing Internet-based services/telecom services, Bytedance is legally obligated to provide active engineering cooperation for database-replication and a pipeline into its internal systems to the Ministry of State Security (MSS).
This is not some obscure conspiracy theory but well documented mainland China domestic law.
A bit of meta commentary but I’ve noticed in recent years a phenomenon where people will adamantly defend something because they associate attacking it with their political opponents.
You see this very clearly in the conservative response to US support of Ukraine. You’d expect to see more conservative support for simultaneously defending a free people while also destroying a primary adversary for pennies on the dollar but instead you see a lot of skepticism because the Democrats are all over supporting it.
I also see a similar phenomenon with TikTok, where I think some people defend it principally because banning TikTok was “a Trump thing” and more generally China-hawkishness is viewed as “a Republican thing”.
Perhaps, but these two things are very very different, and while I think your observation is apt it only exists at the margins (i.e. on twitter).
You can steelman an argument for supporting Ukraine in their war that goes something like "bleeding Russia dry means they won't be able to enter into the Pacific as a co-belligerent with China in a potential WWIII scenario".
Similarly, you can steelman an argument for banning TikTok that goes something like "this algorithm can nudge people into believing certain things in a measurable way, and it's bad that an adversary (PLA) has the ability to do this in our country, so we should stop that".
GOP skepticism of support of Ukraine is linked to that aforementioned goal, which we've probably achieved at this point. Why continue to print money and weapons and send them to a place 99% of America couldn't find on a map without googling, especially when this adversary has been shown to be a paper tiger?
Democratic skepticism of the TikTok calamity is, yes, linked to Trump Syndrome to a certain extent, but I think its also an adherence to boilerplate neoliberalism where you let companies compete in a globalized way, and banning TikTok because its Chinese has a tinge of racism (not me saying that, I'm outlining why the Democrats would be skeptical of a ban).
I think the steelman for supporting Ukraine in the war is stronger than that.
1. It provides security for Europe, which benefits us.
2. Our military expenditures are massive in general, we have sent roughly $50B in aid thus far which is around 3% of our 2022 DoD budget. If you consider the military a tool to destroy specific enemies, of which there are two main candidates, spending a marginal 3% (or more!) to destroy one of them is incredibly cheap. Personally I would invest 3-5x as much without blinking. The returns look great.
3. War is bad, starting wars is bad, and invading smaller neighbors to set up puppet regimes or annex them is bad. The best way to prevent this in general is to make starting wars look like an extremely bad idea which will definitely destroy your country.
4. Showing that we will doggedly defend countries to which we owe no special allegiance is an extremely good deterrent and raises the expected costs of invading (for example) Taiwan. China might see a more limited investment in the defense of Ukraine and say “ok, well Russia couldn’t afford to match that but I can. Expensive but on the table” whereas open ended support till Russia collapses is substantially scarier.
And this is only reasoning from an America-first perspective. Considering only how these are good for us, I would expect conservative support to be more full-throated. That said, it is true that mainstream conservatives are definitely much more normal on this front.
1. This is true if and only if the United States signs up, completely, for security of the entire European Continent. The armies of Germany, Poland, and Great Britain are just too small to do this (France isn't even worth mentioning)[1]. And, as the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan made painfully clear, the rest of NATO is unable to conduct air operations without direct support and coordination from the United States. There's a high cost to this, and we should go into it eyes wide open if this is the security responsibility we are assuming. To top it all off, the US Army is facing a serious recruiting crisis. We may need to consider a draft if we are going to shoulder the burden of securing all of Europe (again).
2. Aid to Ukraine is over $100B at this point, but I agree that there is some significant return on investment here if the aim was to degrade Russian military power via a proxy war. While we're sending some high-end stuff (HIMARS, rumors of MIM-104s) that would be useful in the pacific theater and are hard to replace, doing so has ground Russia down so bad that they're stuck in the defensive for the foreseeable future.
3. I don't really care about this. I'm interested in what makes sense for the security of the United States and what makes American citizens better off - economically or otherwise. It's like saying "murder is bad, we should punish murderers really hard so that other people don't murder". Sure, I agree.
4. I think this is mostly fantasy, or an insane game of chicken. If we're in Ukraine until the Kremlin collapses, that would catastrophically reduce security for an entire hemisphere because of the ensuing chaos a fractured and broken Russian Federation would represent. Many, mostly on the Left, seem to think this is actually a good idea but it isn't. I doubt this is actually the goal of the State Department, and since China isn't stupid they likely doubt it as well. So on balance, whatever the US does in Ukraine I'd judge to have very little impact to PLA's calculus on a Taiwan invasion.
[1] It is worth mentioning that Poland has plans to double the size of it's ground forces. But until this actually happens, this remains a plan and not existing combat power.
It sounds like we're mostly on the same page, but to argue the 3 point a little harder- war is bad for business and I don't like gas prices going up. Everyone should sit down and chill the fuck out and it is good (for us) to ensure that's in their best interest too.
Yeah the gas thing is a whole different dimension to this, that involves absurd domestic politics in Germany. It's actually a little surprising that the State Department let Germany go as far down that path as it did, and didn't stop the pipeline in its tracks back in 2010-2011. Maybe we were still in the "Russia Reset" fever, and were okay with letting Germany spread its wings a bit and build it's own energy policy.
Of course, this admits that these other NATO members are client states of the Americans, which is an ugly (but mostly true!) thing to say out loud.
Like I said before, TikTok must be fined in the billions for abusing the privacy of its users. This is not the first time that they have done this but now it is clear that they have admitted this.
They have been caught once [0] and have been caught again this year [1] and lied about accessing the sensitive data of its own users [2], [3], [4] and admitted it here. Clearly the fines in [0] and [1] are extremely low and the fine must increase in the billions since these are repeated privacy violations and haven't learned anything from it.
There is no excuse for billion dollar fines for TikTok.
Were the journalists foolish enough to install the app (not victim blaming but come on) or does the TikTok app scan for other wifi signatures in the vicinity and that’s how they correlated the locations?
> Were the journalists foolish enough to install the app
Foolish doesn't describe it, if they knew they were taking a calculated risk.
Suppose they knew there was a risk the app could be used to track them, and maybe even a risk that tracking data could be used to assassinate them. But if TikTok tracked them with the app, that could also become part of their story against TikTok and thus advance their journalistic career. Fortune favors the bold.
There are multiple data points that can be used and/or correlated to determine location, including IP address, if permissions are enabled, nearby Bluetooth devices, nearby WiFi MAC addresses, connected cell tower, and of course GPS. Also they don't even need to be installed on the journalist's device, but their child/spouse/coworker/close friends would also do.
Of course we should blame the victims here. They are supposed to know what to do in a hostile world, if they don't they are not good journalists.
It is like staying that a company that got hacked because it did not put in place basic security gets a free pass because Russians/Chinese/NKs are bad.
If the journalists were targeted by a sophisticated back I would be completely sympathetic. Here they were simply careless.
You know you shouldn't install that app. You know you shouldn't enter that neighbourhood. You know you shouldn't wear that skirt. You know you shouldn't have said that. You're simply careless.
Pfff. If you are a professional, fail at your job, and blame the adversary then it you are an incompetent professional. Incompetent because you do not understand where the problem is.
I wonder how my boss would say if my answer to being hacked was "hey, blame the attacker - I am the victim here and should be consoled. It does not matter that I should have known!".
Then there is the "skirt case" - something as a French I am sadly aware of. My personal perspective is that the police should aggressively react to such harassment. And punitions should be drastic. And that deep changes in the way we handle ghettos we built ourselves should be undertaken (this is much more difficult than the first two ones but effectively the only way forward).
With this said, I will not go to a cité (more or less a ghetto) with a "Fuck Allah" shirt and wonder why my head was chopped.
We live in a world where there seems to be a contradiction between "common sense" and "justice". Justice and equity is the most important but it does not mean that we should not think WHEN WE KNOW that the world is not ideal yet.
I was wondering this myself. Tiktok surely needs location data permitted to track, no? I'm sure there are some heuristics it can use, perhaps pinging servers or image matching pictures but surely this could all be solved by putting TikTok in a container with specifically limited permissions.
Images probably have location data in the EXIF as well that can be used for this. If notifications cause background data fetch from their servers that could also probably leak IP address.
"The Chinese are stealing your data and spying on you! This is deeply immoral and unprecedentedly bad!" - The Americans Stealing Your Data and Spying On You
Yeah. Ban TikTok, have an American company make a clone.
Why is this insanity allowed ? China doesn’t allow Western social networks. Why do we allow our strategic enemy to have software on our phones? End this madness. Stop the sale of Chinese tech in the West, period. It’s all backdoored.
(if you think they are interested in “co-living” go talk to the Kremlin on how that went. China is bidding its time but their intention is to end US dominance. They tell us this and they release papers on how they intend to do it. If you think that’s ok, great. I don’t see how a democratic rule of law country, flaws as it may have, being replaced by a brutal dictatorship, is a good option).
To me this doesn’t really address the bigger picture. Why is this tracking even possible? Why don’t we build better security in to our products? Is it because US companies built their business on this same type of tracking? Perhaps that’s the issue we should fix.
Perhaps you thought me under the impression Russia hasn’t had a state security service since the USSR collapsed, but obviously I know that. The point is that one can better cloak the warmed over Cold War paranoia they’re peddling under the guise of knowing what they’re talking about if they avoid warmed over Cold War terminology.
It sure smells like it when you're using terminology outdated by 30 years. Don't use anachronisms if you don't want people to think you're anachronistic.
You may as well call Russians "Soviets". Yes, it's many of the same people in the same buildings, doing the same sort of bullshit. But they aren't called Soviets anymore and if you go around calling them Soviets, you'll going to have people think that you're stuck in the 80s.
Broken analogy; "Facebook" still exists and their CEO is still Mark Zuckerberg; the fact that Facebook is now owned by Meta hasn't changed this; the name "Facebook" was not discontinued. "Google stock" is an anarchonism, but at least "Google" still exists.
The KGB doesn't exist anymore. They are now the FSB. The "KGB" still exists in the same sense that "The Soviets" still exist, neither call themselves that anymore, nor do they have any subsidiaries called that.
Fun fact : during the late 2015 Mariupol elections, almost 50% self-identified as Russian, 80% as Ukrainian, fewer than 20% as European, and more than 50% as... Soviet !
(Note also that this happened not too long after a pretty bloody phase of the war, though of course less bloody than what we had since last February, especially in Mariupol.)
The KGB has not existed for decades, but its spiritual successor, Russia, is almost certainly still performing spy operations and generally you can assume when someone says KGB they mean Russian spies.
That’s exactly my point. Apple moving some production to India (or so I read) is a good first step. Western production moved to China due to Chinese strategic efforts to locate our industrial production there. We should have our own strategic effort of our own to reverse that.
Production moved to China because China began allowing foreign investment, and Chinese labor was cheaper. Foreign companies made their own decisions to take advantage of cheap Chinese labor.
This wasn't some sort of nefarious Chinese plot. The US also wanted China to open up to American investment.
China made a large effort to woo western companies to manufacture there. Afaik they built special economic zones, it was a deliberate effort by the govt. If it all happened by accident then why didn’t manufacturing move to India? Both China and India moved to the GATT at the same time afaik.
They wanted to join the WTO so that their exports wouldn't be subject to high tariffs and other barriers.
The issue is that there were no
> Chinese strategic efforts to locate our industrial production there
There was a Chinese policy of encouraging foreign investment, but that's not a strategic plan to remove another country's industrial capacity, which is how OP framed it.
Because the statutory (not to mention constitutional) implications are staggering: what about our government's structure do you think gives it the authority to outright ban social media companies? Do you want it to have that power, or do you just want to government to casuistically ban the things you think should be banned?
Note: this is entirely independent from whether TikTok is bad, which I'm more confident than not it is. But contorting our already contorted national security laws around it is not a tenable solution.
You don't need to ban it. Just forbid US companies from doing business with TikTok, and their users will plummet when they can't pay for CDNs in America.
We should tax downloading and using the app. Maybe show some warning labels and horrific photos of what the app can do to you if you use it too much. Ban its use in certain areas.
It worked for limiting cigarette use and TikTok is at least as bad for you. I think it’s worth a try and the legal precedence is already there.
What an odd question. The government bans things all the time - can you go and buy unpasteurized milk right now? Or walk into a weapons store and buy brass knuckles? But heaven forbid, we’re abandoning our principles if we ban a data collection platform owned and operated by a genocidal undemocratic government.
Of course the government bans things all the time. The question is of kind: unpasteurized milk and brass knuckles exist in regulatory environments that don't meaningfully impinge upon civil liberties.
It's not even clear what statute you'd use to "ban" TikTok. Is it a national security risk?
it is a national risk but i imagine there's also economic / trade grounds in the fact that china doesn't let american companies compete in their market.
I don't see any reason for it not to be in the purview of government.
It is in the purview of the government. That's not the question; the statutory justification for a ban is the question.
Every single country on this planet of ours engages in some form of protectionism, whether we like it or not: again, it isn't clear what casuistic justification explains singling out China's protectionism, and even then banning just one company involved in it. Italy doesn't let us sell the sawdust we call "Parmesan," but I'd prefer it if we didn't ban selling the real thing in retaliation.
Finally, for the national risk: what, precisely is the national risk? You can argue (correctly!) that they're a bad actor given this news, and I would be more than happy to see those involved in the surveillance of journalists see the inside of a court. But this doesn't even come close to meeting the standard for a national security risk, weak as that standard has become.
It seems we're sliding into a new cold war, but the US is still contemplating its strategy. Banning a vastly successful social media outright needs to be aligned with that strategy, and not to mention how unpopular taking away an addictive app would be with the voters.
The American clones are garbage. The problem with protectionism is it leads to less competition and therefore worse products. If you want apps to stop tracking people just make it illegal for apps to tracks people. Country of origin is irrelelvant.
Country of origin is still very relevant. China has National Security Laws that compel companies and citizens to provide access to and actively help their intelligence agencies. The CCP right now can lawfully order TikTok to push a version with a backdoor and then gaslight the US about its existence if found, e.g. oh that was just an innocent software bug. Or to secretly provide user data and lie about providing it.
I'm going to have to disagree : if you allow (for instance) a giant like Google Search to operate in your country, you can pretty much say goodbye to competition in the search engine space.
CCP is part of bytedance and it's more than likely they'll follow government requests. The OP was about journalists, not regular users mind you.
Edit: CCP has a committee inside of ByteDance. Also CCP has power over all chinese companies. (Wanted to answer that to the subcomment but there is no answer button)
Doesn't matter. China's laws allow it to compell any Company to hand over any information it requires.
That means ByteDance is effectively beholden to the CCP, and since TikTok is owned by ByteDance, it gives the CCP unfiltered access to all TikTok data.
ByteDance is beholden to both the US and Chinese governments. The US government also has enormous power to coerce ByteDance (and other tech companies), and right now, ByteDance is under much stronger political pressure from the US than the Chinese government.
ByteDance actually can structure its operations to separate its US and Chinese apps as much as possible, to limit the ability of either government to access data from the other country. It's not a state actor, and is actually trying to avoid coercion from both the US and China.
The US has to get a court order which bytedance can challenge in a court room.
If the CCP requests data they have no choice but to hand it over. There is no way bytedance can structure its operations to prevent the CCP requesting data.
> The US has to get a court order which bytedance can challenge in a court room.
As we've seen, the US is perfectly capable of building up a massive surveillance operation, and of tying the tech companies into that operation, without the involvement of any real court (i.e., something other than a secret rubber-stamp like the FISA court), and indeed without the public even knowing that such a system exists.
The US also exerts other forms of extra-legal pressure on companies. It can and does threaten tech companies to play ball, or else. When WikiLeaks published documents that embarrassed the US government, the US government froze all of their financial accounts, simply by telling the companies involved (e.g., PayPal) to do so. American tech executives know that they can face regulatory action if they say "no" to requests, so they have a very strong incentive to comply with demands to provide data, censor content, and help US government influence operations (see the recent revelations that Twitter worked with the US government on covert influence campaigns using inauthentic accounts).
> There is no way bytedance can structure its operations to prevent the CCP requesting data.
The Chinese government can request whatever it likes, but ByteDance can structure its operations to make those requests impossible or difficult to fulfill, or to make it so any attempt to fulfill such a request will be highly visible. The Europeans have exactly the same problem with regards to the US, which is one of the reasons that GDPR exists.
As I said before, right now, ByteDance faces much stronger political pressures from the US than from China.
However, beyond all this theoretical argumentation about which government exerts more control over ByteDance, the argument that TikTok is a security threat is absurd. It's primarily a platform for little funny videos, dance videos, etc. The motivation for banning TikTok is clearly just part of the larger tech war against China, and the general hysteria that has developed with regards to China in the US. That's why a thread about a tech company misusing user data to try to identify a leak has turned into a discussion about "the CCP."
> ByteDance faces much stronger political pressures from the US than from China.
Of course! Because tiktok should be banned everywhere.
> The Chinese government can request whatever it likes, but ByteDance can structure its operations to make those requests impossible or difficult to fulfill
LOL no it can’t. They would not risk getting thrown in jail for nothing by refusing a request from the CCP.
> American tech executives know that they can face regulatory action if they say "no" to requests, so they have a very strong incentive to comply with demands to provide data, censor content, and help US government influence operations (see the recent revelations that Twitter worked with the US government on covert influence campaigns using inauthentic accounts).
Companies challenge data requests all the time. The fact is you cannot challenge that request with the CCP.
Unsure why you’re hell bent on defending the CCP with whataboutism. Because what the US does isn’t even close to that of China.
> Because what the US does isn’t even close to that of China.
The US actually appears to have a much more extensive global surveillance system than China does. Nothing even remotely comparable to what Snowden revealed has yet come to light about China.
> They would not risk getting thrown in jail for nothing by refusing a request from the CCP.
This is a very cartoonish view of how things in China work. The Chinese government knows that an attempt to leverage a company like TikTok (or Huawei) to spy on foreign countries could backfire and damage Chinese companies abroad. So far, it appears not to have used these companies for spying to any measurable extent. The NSA hacked into Huawei's systems, and found no evidence of spying. British GCHQ regularly audited Huawei's hardware and operations, and never found any evidence of spying.
> The fact is you cannot challenge that request with the CCP.
If the Chinese government requests data from TikTok, an American company, that sits on US-based servers, TikTok actually can challenge that request. US laws will come into play, and it will not be a simple matter to transfer the data (particularly in secret).
> If the Chinese government requests data from TikTok, an American company, that sits on US-based servers, TikTok actually can challenge that request. US laws will come into play, and it will not be a simple matter to transfer the data (particularly in secret).
Lol the CCP doesn’t need to go to tiktok it goes to the parent company to access data. Bytedance. Which we know has infact accessed data from China.
But it’s clear now that you support the CCP so this is a pointless conversation.
>"China doesn’t allow Western social networks. Why do we allow our strategic enemy to have software on our phones?"
I agree with this. Things should be reciprocal. I do not think China is the enemy though. More like a strategic competitor. Trading with the enemy is a crime, right?
>"(if you think they are interested in “co-living” go talk to the Kremlin on how that went"
Why do you equate China with Kremlin? I think China is way smarter and has managed huge economical achievements while Putin is pissing away immense potential that Russia has. If we talk about co-living it is the US that after WWII was attacking and wrecking numerous countries killing directly and indirectly millions. China so far has harassed its own population only and has yet to do anything even remotely approaching what the US has done on international scale.
>"China is bidding its time but their intention is to end US dominance."
Now here comes the real reason. The US dominance - you sure this is what the rest of the world wants? How about we try without subservients to a single country.
>"I don’t see how a democratic rule of law country, flaws as it may have, being replaced by a brutal dictatorship, is a good option"
Nobody wants that. But it is the US (and allies) that keeps taking away more rights and freedoms. If you compare for example 90s and now people look more and more like cattle. You can't blame China for that. I think somebody else is responsible.
I actually liked the Trump method, which was to force them to sell the US arm to a US company and sever it from the Chinese. I don't know why that never came to fruition; it looked like it was nearly a done deal (Microsoft was the leading bidder.) Making a competitor from scratch would just open up the userbase to another state actor, though it could give a window for a Vine return.
Except that this story reveals the obvious reason this wouldn't work. How do you reliably keep that US "arm" from being co-opted? How do you make sure that the software isn't phoning home to China regardless of what the US arm does?
Oracle and Walmart reportedly at that time brokered a deal to run the US arm of TikTok. Do you trust them? Walmart certainly isn't politically neutral, by any stretch. Meanwhile, Larry Ellison was a leading figure in the effort to subvert the 2020 election. He was on the Nov. 14 election subversion planning call, along with "Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.); Fox News host Sean Hannity; Jay Sekulow, an attorney for President Donald Trump; and James Bopp Jr., an attorney for True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit that has promoted disputed claims of widespread voter fraud." (source: WaPo)
This doesn't seem like a solid plan, to put it rather mildly.
Larry Ellison defecting to China doesn't seem like a likely scenario, I don't think he'd like life as an international fugitive, slave to a host with a history of treating their own native billionaires harshly. Barring such a flight, the US Government can get their hands on him if that becomes necessary, but I doubt it will.
This detached observer way of looking at the world is mind boggling. There is nothing contradictory about arguing for the good and arguing against the evil. I think this mindset stems from a fundamental uncertainty in our values, and conclude that our values are just as good as any others. It’s simply not true.
No. TikTok is run by a state hostile to the ideals of freedom and our western way of life. That alone is enough of an argument for banning it: because of values are good, and we don’t want their values. If they are not willing to go above and beyond to demonstrate they will do the same, then ban it. They are not entitled to our attention, our children's attention, or any of our other resources.
The idea that US is good and China is evil is absurd. Other Americans do far more to destroy "ideals of freedom and our western way of life" than China does - hell, I'm pretty sure that with the current US polarisation, both sides would say they have more in common with China than with their US opponents - and they'd be right. Take any concept of "freedom" or "way of life" that you care for, and half the US is currently against it. TikTok is a bogeyman that has done nothing to Americans that Americans weren't already doing to themselves.
The US is good-er. There are bad people in the US of course, but this will always be the case and can’t be a reason we restrict ourselves from increasing the good in the world. This argument boils down to “there are bad things and bad people even among us, so we have no moral standing to prevent any more evil”.
Again, no. That fatalistic attitude doesn’t help anyone and is just a suicide pact. We have a responsibility to expand the good in the world. That includes domestically with rooting out our evil, but also includes keeping China out.
Your comment only makes sense since you are an american. The entire premise of your argument completely false a part when you have actually experienced what the "goodness" of america, say in the middle east, means.
No, it makes sense because my values are good and I happen to be American.
This is exactly my point. You’re saying “because the US has done bad things in the past, it has no moral standing to do good in the future”. A lot of bad happened in the Middle East, some parts caused by the US, so that means we can’t ban the evils of China in our country and minimize their harms abroad?
Try this: focus on increasing the good in the world. Don’t be hamstrung by “well the US has done bad things before”. “We can’t do good anymore because we’ve done bad before” is not a valid argument. And no, none of this makes China equally good.
It’s not your job to weigh all the countries of the world on some balance to decide who’s been the most good. That’s that detached observer mindset again, and it does nothing but occupy your mind and sap your agency while bad things continue. Your job is to increase the good in the world. If you don’t care to do so, then get out of the way
We’re not in the world of what ifs and ethical debates.
We are in a world where our strategic enemy has a foothold on our digital lives and will likely use it against us. This is evidence. We should treat our enemies as enemies. China doesn’t consider itself to be in a friendly competition for dominance. Neither should we.
Remind me. Why should the rest of the world put up with Google and Facebook? Free trade for me but not for thee? This hypocrisy is maddening.
Companies need to comply with PI laws. Then there is no need to find excuses to keep approved spyware companies operating depending on where the stockholders live.
Little different when the CCP is ok the board of the company and controls its decisions. Look at what happened to Didi when they did one thing without consent from them. I don’t think you are comparing the same things.
Not entirely true, they just have to follow Chinese law if operating within China, but they mostly refuse to. For instance facebook wasn't blocked in China until 2009, when it refused to release information on suspected terrorists.
You can argue those laws US companies would have to follow in China ae wrong, but they are still applied more-or-less evenly. If you want to respond in kind then make privacy laws that Chinese companies would find difficult to follow, but are none-the-less applied evenly.
>if you think they are interested in “co-living” go talk to the Kremlin on how that went. China is bidding its time but their intention is to end US dominance.
It's interesting that Americans consider "co-living" to mean continuation of US domination.
Why do we have to follow the Chinese example? If an app is a National security threat, as TikTok is being proven to be by every revelation, then ban it.
Why do we hold ourselves up as “we have to follow the standard”? Standards are defined by previous action, and it’s by acting that we alter the course of reality.
Also, I’m not American. I just read history enough to know that there’s always a dominant country in world affairs. And I know I wouldn’t choose a brutal Chinese authoritarian regime to lead us into the next century.
Maybe the future is everyone using TOR, BTC, and ZKproof smart contracts? The first 30 years of the internet have proved us all to be very naive when it comes to the power of state coercion.
Always is. Bad apples. Rogue actors. Acting alone. Examples
made. Lessons learned. Public assured. Throw the low rank scapegoats
under a bus. And keep praying we're as stupid as you make yourself
look.
No sh*t! No surprise here at all. Stop using big tech, start controlling your data, and then these corporate gloryholes (which you're clearly on the wrong side of) will stop existing...
I feel like this is what comes from someone who doesn’t have anything to lose by abandoning these platforms. Yes, you can stop using big tech platforms and controlling your data, what’s the reality of doing that? Who are you making videos for and whose videos are you seeing? Can you get all of your friends and family to use Mastodon? Do they want to? How about sharing pictures of your kids with your parents?
None of the big tech solutions are good, but they are where people are.
How do you propose we "ban" it from the United States? Should it be illegal for me to run TikTok on any of my devices? Do you want the US government to compel Apple and Google to delist TikTok from their app stores?
Before answering, consider carefully whether this is a precedent you want to set. Some in government may want to do the same for Twitter.
The result of this will be millions of American teen girls learning how to "sideload" apps onto their device. Of course, a significant percentage of them will end up sideloading malware onto their device at the same time.
The funny aspect to me is that the senators pushing to "ban TikTok" are the same senators pushing for an "open App Store" bill. But I don't see how you can have it both ways.
Sure you can sanction TikTok. Are you going to jail every middle schooler who "does business" with them by downloading the app from unofficial sources?
Or perhaps you want to force ISPs to drop connections to TikTok servers?
> The funny aspect to me is that the senators pushing to "ban TikTok" are the same senators pushing for an "open App Store" bill.
There's also a lot of overlap between the politicians who want to ban TikTok over concerns that user data might go to China and politicians who block proposed data privacy laws that would stop US companies from selling similar data (or worse, such as ISPs selling browsing data) to data brokers.
Ban TikTok and anyone in China can get similar data on US citizens by just buying it from US data brokers.
How so? That would make it so that the cost per US user is negative since TikTok would not be getting revenue related to US users but would have hosting costs for them.
But if TikTok really is as useful to the Chinese government to be the threat that the politicians trying to ban it make it out to be, surely the Chinese government would be willing to eat those costs to keep it going here.
I assume by sanction OP means you can’t do business with TikTok which means TikTok won’t have any ads to show for these people and make no money from it. Pretty sure they’ll stop supporting US market when that happens.
> funny aspect to me is that the senators pushing to "ban TikTok" are the same senators pushing for an "open App Store" bill
They're both about open markets. China is not only a closed market, it's threatening our open-market allies.
> going to jail every middle schooler who "does business" with them by downloading the app from unofficial sources?
If they download the app from unofficial sources and then send it money, somehow, or get money from it, somehow, yes, they'd be treated like someone trading with the Taliban. If they're just using the software, no, that's like using open-source code written by an Iranian.
That's not quite right. You can still access KF if your ISP isn't peering with CenturyLink which recently gave in to a pressure campaign. There's not a single court order or law in the United States forbidding an ISP from routing packets to them.
In the context of any other trade relationship would it be acceptable for China to block all access to its own market, whilst still expecting full access everybody elses?
Hopefully enough for us to oust them out of the public sphere. I would be more concerned about the massive mesh of information delivery they have developed straight into many Americans' brains.
One of the more unexpected parts of the Twitter files (part 7, in fact) is it reveals some well developed linkages between the US intelligence services and media companies. If the US is blurring the corporate-government boundaries, the Chinese are certainly much more aggressive in their activities. And all these agencies run extra-legal kidnapping operations.
I'm rare in that although I don't like it corporate spying doesn't really scare me. Corporations can't do very much without breaking the law. My concern is that this information is then passed on to the people who are empowered to come and drag me out of my home. Some of whom aren't even subject to my legal system. It makes more extreme measures like the GDPR seem insufficient.
There is a difference between what people know because it is pushed out to them vs. what someone can deduce by careful research and logic.
Something like Wikileaks/Snowden got the "they're spying on everyone!" part into the public consciousness. The Twitter files is pushing out some slightly different nuances around what the current practice is. Plus the political implications.
People are annoyingly evidence based. There seems to be confusion about whether dictionary-definition fascism is a bad thing and it is important to collect and keep repeating evidence of what is happening as governments agents get involved in running media (or other) companies.
> There is a difference between what people know because it is pushed out to them vs. what someone can deduce by careful research and logic.
Indeed. It's the difference between public knowledge and common knowledge. Matters which are public knowledge may not be common knowledge, if they've been swept under the rug or generally forgotten.
Are you implying zero information has been revealed?
We knew the US intelligence services had tweaked the elections of other countries. We didn't know US intelligence services had tweaked the last election in the US.
Given how close elections are in US, it's not hard to imagine US intelligence services made a difference.
The Snowden leaks were about the government secretly spying on people. These leaks include many topics, but a common theme is the government secretly pressuring companies to censor/punish users for saying anything that they did not approve of. And that approval was erratic, frequently targeting one of the first casualties of authoritarianism - humor. The leaks also tie in with this thread since as the the FBI also "requested" location tracking information on people as well, of course with no warrants or any sort of due process or oversight whatsoever. I look forward to one day reading the 'FBI files' to see how that information was then completely responsibly used.
Another revelation comes from your question itself. If you rely on mainstream media outlets to inform you, you'd either have no idea these 'leaks' exist, or a distorted view of what they contained. The NYTimes ran no less than 4 articles on 8 journalists being temporarily suspended on Twitter, promoting international regulations, laws, and even sanctions over it. But the entirety of these leaks, and the massive amount of content and information contained within? Well that's just not newsworthy contrasted against 8 journalists not being able to post on Twitter!
The media's independence and integrity has decline substantially since Snowden, with seemingly no bottom in sight.
People learning about this for the first time. Snowden/wikileaks weren't even the first ones to share this. It's been well known for decades. It's not a secret. It's well known and well established in many industries.
And why does this happen? Because money. Every single tech darling plays along. Chances are, unless you knew for a fact you weren't participating in this, you were at some level.
Prior to Snowden those people were derided as part of the paranoid tinfoil hat crowd. The only thing known was some vague discussion of Carnivore and Tempest.
1. The same reason they're playing Clash Royale... down time, filling the wait. Do you think they were on their employer-provided phone? Do you think they even have an employer-provided phone?
2. Maybe they also have a social media presence. That would be a different issue, and actually easier to address by the employer.
Where are the people now who were saying in previous threads things like "tick tock is safe, there is no way they abuse their users, invade privacy, or log devices on the users local wifi"?
Who was saying that? I feel like I've read a lot of HN threads on TikTok, and don't feel like I've ever seen anyone here say that, or no visible comments that weren't grayed out.
People defending TikTok are generally questioning the risk of this data being weaponized by the CCP and whether it's even much of a weapon and whether that's worth it to ban them over. Not over whether TikTok voluntarily follows some privacy guidelines -- on that it's generally assumed they're either already vacuuming up all they can, or could turn that on at any time.
The pro-CCP crowd all over Reddit has been saying it for years. The typical arguments are that there is zero evidence and the US is being anti-competitive and discriminatory.
Both things can be true and it doesn't have anything to do with being pro-anything.
The US government has a very long history of simply lying about things when it fits their goals so independently verifiable evidence is what's needed. The German government is still waiting for the promised proof about Huawei backdoors, by the way. This was promised when Trump was president. The US didn't produce any proof whatsoever and leaks even showed that the NSA couldn't find anything even after gaining access to Huawei's systems. The UK also said that the US never produced any evidence for any of the claims.
Now it might still be true that there's things going on but there's a huge difference between saying "We don't have proof but we obviously cannot be sure" and claiming to have proof.
You're welcome to make thoughtful comments on any side of the issue, but please don't post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
ProAm clarified that these were intended as two separate examples, so fair enough. It just rubs me the wrong way when people seem to give credit to Snowden for revealing things which were already known.
Sure, but since we explicitly won't, I feel that a lot of this outrage is just BS. As a US citizen, I'm far more concerned with the US government knowing where I am at all times than China. We could pass a law that forbids the US government to consume any personally identifiable data from social media platforms without a warrant, but we won't.
The claim wasn't that they did so for the Chinese government. But Facebook, for example, did so, for its own purposes. This is just as bad. We can't really have journalism being threatened, regardless of whether it's threatened by China, or supposedly-loyal US companies.
> Facebook, for example, did so, for its own purposes. This is just as bad
It’s in a totally different league. Domestic corporation spying for commercial purposes versus a militaristic dictatorship with a track record of extrajudicial harassment.
Facebook perhaps, but it's hard to see the differences between China and the US in terms of spying/wiretapping/harassment.
If we really wanted to avoid China spying on our citizens, we'd implement broad and strong encryption across our network - but we fight that (as a country) because it would weaken our own surveillance.
We could absolutely choose to deescalate in this field, we just don't.
A book i can highly recommend is "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Professor Shoshana Zuboff from the Harvard Business School. TLDR "commercial purposes" include selling data in bulk to government agencies, which could not seize such data without a warrant and judicial oversight, thus allowing them to circumvent the very protection mechanisms that are in place to prevent extrajudical harassment in favor of creating a state of mass surveillance.
> book i can highly recommend is "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Professor Shoshana Zuboff from the Harvard Business School
Great book. The 4th Amendment workarounds she describes should absolutely be outlawed. But I want to cite this very civil discourse we're having about this problem, and the paths to remedy it, in contrast to anything in China.
Surveillance Capitalism is not only about the 4th Amendment, (even if i did focus that aspect in my comment) shifting power centers may make corporations a bigger threat for civil rights than government agencies, as behavioral futures markets and mass manipulation undermine the very ideals of a liberal democratic republic and the core concept of how our society is governed. I can't compress Zuboffs book into a few sentences. Glad you know about it.
I like to joke that in the EU personal data belongs to the person it is about, in china all data belongs to the government, and in the USA data belongs to the corporations that gather it. If i could choose the global system for human society, i would not choose surveillance communism, but i would also not choose surveillance capitalism. I want no state of mass surveillance, no matter if it is operated by the government or by corporations, it is a terrible idea either way.
We disagree on whether surveillance by american corporations is "a different league" or "just as bad" as surveillance by chinese corporations. Let's first agree the societal systems are obviously different and that free speech and the ability to reform are parts where these systems differ. But I do not consider surveillance capitalism less worse due to the ability of democracy to reform democratically, because surveillance capitalism undermines that very ability. I do however agree that it is good we can have this discourse without worrying about our social score. Please like and subscribe ;-)
Sorry, I was unclear. What I meant was, I was not claiming that Facebook acted on behalf of the Chinese government. So I was conceding that part of the point.
Is the threat of a foreign adversary spying on US citizens the same as the US Government spying on its citizens? I'm in the camp that a foreign adversary is a more dangerous situation.
I would hardly call FT state propaganda in any circumstance. To me true state propaganda is where the state has editorial authority over the dissemination of stories - in the west that still relatively rare.
But absolutely independent of whether FT are propaganda - it does not matter in any way to this story whether they are a 'protected class'. The outrage is that TikTok employees abused their user data in the pursuit of an agenda against targeted individuals.
We really really need to shut this down as a national security issue. If they took it off Apple and Google Play stores it would reduce usage immediately by at least 80-90% along with having apple/android send out blocks like they can for malware (which it is). It's hard to believe Biden didn't continue Trump's attempt to shut it down.
Twitter, FB and Google have been banned in China, so banning US companies isn’t a new concept. Whether Europe join that is up to European countries. They haven’t shared your opinions so far. Maybe they value the relationship with the US? Especially after seeing Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine
Not true, American companies like Google are still the de facto monopolies in Europe.
You might also check out how China is draining Russian economy - instead of focusing on making an appearance of doing so. But yeah, this is one aspect where I do agree. I’m really happy to see USA being the good guys again.
They are still operating illegally in the EU. Hard to say whether law enforcement will start to (seriously) wake up, whether denial will make the EU and the US come to an agreement, or whether the US will stop treating non-citizens like a police state (haha, fat chance).
A Chinese company operates in the US, obeys local laws while doing the same sketchy things that home-grown companies do all the time and it's a 'national security issue'.
US companies operating in the EU are expected to follow local laws and ... this is unfair because the US is pursuing its own narrow internal interests in Ukraine, like it always does, and Europeans are supposed to be grateful?
>There is precedence of American companies not allowed to operate in China.
Not true. They can operate, they just need to obey the law. Same way other companies need to obey American laws to operate in US, eg enforcing copyright or providing Lawful Interception mechanisms.
Trade is mutual. No way in hell it’s mutual right now wrt how social media and other businesses from America operate in China. It’s fair and square to boot TikTok.
I absolutely get your point, but the solution feels incredibly heavy handed, especially as 99.99999%+ of the users are unlikely to ever warrant tracking.
Surely a better solution would be briefing journalists not to install pretty much anything on their phones that they don't actually need.
Edit: for clarity, I guess I'm saying that if there's ever a point when a country/company tracking you is likely to warrant problems, perhaps you need to consider how it could happen and how you could avoid it.
Saudi Arabia killed an American journalist, dismembered him, and dissolved him in a vat of acid and yet we're still on our knees with their robe over our heads because yeah we need our economic relationship. The same will go with China.
> Saudi Arabia killed an American journalist, dismembered him, and dissolved him in a vat of acid and yet we're still on our knees with their robe over our heads because yeah we need our economic relationship.
Not that it should matter, but in the interest of accuracy he was a Saudi journalist who wrote for (among others) an American media company, not an American journalist.
Unless they broke out the bone saws for someone else besides Jamal Khashoggi.
> China, which didn’t invade anyone in half a decade, militaristic? Let me guess, you’re American?
Nobody's claiming America isn't militaristic. But it's not a dictatorship. And it's acting in its self interest. China blocks every foreign social media app. Whataboutism doesn't make rhetorical sense here.
I think you mean that you saw Trump's solution as more effective. It wasn't more nuanced.
Trump's solution involved a one off payoff for a supporter (Oracle), whereas the current admin is at least trying to develop a policy framework and solve the problem with less corruption and arbitrary use of power. The latter is much more work but - to bring it back to the issue - is more nuanced.
I can't think of a faster way to kill the app or any app than to sell it to Oracle.
Seriously give it to Oracle and 20 minutes. When you have to spend 3 minutes waiting for the next TikTok to load people will find alternatives real quick.
What about it? Does it specify that all Chinese mobile apps need to be distributed by the major mobile companies? I don't see how it's related. Please elaborate.
If you mean ‘what about freedom of speech’ - ie the moral value rather than the US law - tiktok’s not being banned for speech but for stealing user data.
I truly wish Trump would have been able to actually ban TikTok (or at least force a sale).
The recent twitter files show that the bond between Government and social media companies is a little too close... but it would be foolish to suggest that the lesser of the two evils here is China.
It is actually insane that we let China do whatever they want here while US companies are effectively prevented from gaining a foothold in China.
> It is actually insane that we let China do whatever they want here while US companies are effectively prevented from gaining a foothold in China.
I wish people, at least of this site, would stop with this argument. US and European companies in China simply have to follow the same rules Chinese companies have to. It's admirable that they then go ahead and just don't do business there but they're not being prevented from operating there under the same rules as any Chinese company. A German car company cannot sell cars in the US without backup cameras even though that's completely fine in Germany. If someone from Iran wants to do business in the US, it's not legal to discriminate based on religion even though that might be fine in Iran.
Maybe it's time to overhaul the laws altogether. Just make the data collection itself illegal for everyone and be done with it. Then companies from all around the globe can decide whether they want to operate in a market or not and completely banning companies that openly don't follow the law is not really controversial.
If the ban happens because they're collecting data and the collection itself is illegal, I'm all for it. Banning companies on the basis that they're doing the exact same thing as everyone else simply because they're from another nation is problematic.
> simply have to follow the same rules Chinese companies have to
I don’t think it’s simple at all. That might be how it works on paper but I’ll ask you this. Do you think a US or European equivalent would ever be allowed to gain a comparable market share? Or would they find many convenient barriers while a Chinese clone, backed by the government, was being built?
I just don’t see a world where Chinese and US companies are on equal footing in the eyes of the CCP as long as they just “simply follow the rules.”
I think you're talking about two different things here. I never argued that they are on the same footing. That's true for every country on this planet.
My main point here was that Facebook and Google are allowed to operate in China if they follow the law of the land. I've already said that not operating there is arguably admirable but the point is that they're definitely allowed to operate there if they follow the law of the land. And the laws for them are no different than they are for Chinese companies.
Apple and Microsoft are doing absolutely fine in China. Apple's mobile market share there is bigger than it is in Europe. So yes, they already _are_ allowed to gain a comparable market share. As for regular social media; LinkedIn is also doing just fine and always has.
Teslas were the #1 electric cars sold for the last time frame I could find.
There are various areas where foreign companies are big or even dominate the Chinese market.
Sure. Though, the footing is so unequal that it effectively prevents US companies from gaining a foothold. Maybe that is a little broad but it certainly leans towards the rule vs the exception.
>And the laws for them are no different than they are for Chinese companies.
Before or after they start operating? How difficult is that compared to entering the US or European market?
>Apple and Microsoft are doing absolutely fine in China. Apple's mobile market share there is bigger than it is in Europe. So yes, they already _are_ allowed to gain a comparable market share.
The Government of China is literally trying to stop Apple and Microsoft's dominance as we speak.
They're making some BS "CCP compliant" version that _only_ allows you to do job searching but it is certainly not LinkedIn as we know it.
Sure. On paper, once you jump through the regulatory hoops you're allowed to exist there... but the difference between the environments (and the bias foreign companies endure) is such that I stand by my original comment.
Frankly it is not what they can do but the USA side cannot do in China. If the world is all under china it is “fine”. But given it is still not or not yet, let it like this is just give up and be slaved.
After seeing twitterfiles I'm less convinced the US authorities are interested in preserving privacy and instead believe they have nefarious agendas to make sure that American users remain engaged in platforms where they retain surveillance and censorship abilities.
