Virtually any popular social media platform is an intelligence threat "in theory." Personally, I think TikTok has very little redeeming value for viewers or creators and I think its extreme focus on fostering addictive usage preys on some users to their detriment.
However, I also also think trying to shut it down based speculative claims of being an intelligence threat are a bad idea and would set a terrible precedent.
> speculative claims of being an intelligence threat are a bad idea and would set a terrible precedent
I agree with that statement, but one must admit there's some hypocrisy on the part of China, given they have blanket bans on YouTube and Instagram which provide their own competing offerings. If China lifted those bans there could be no claims about TikTok enabling some asymmetric advantage in espionage or propaganda, and if they don't, China can't claim the US is doing anything they aren't already.
China does not ban YouTube or Instagram because they're foreign, They have some very onerous rules about censorship, which I disagree with, but are applied equally to all companies operating in China, including Chinese ones.
A good example is that google is banned but bing is not, and tiktok is also banned in China because they don't follow those laws.
That's the sanitized on-the-surface naive explanation of why China wants to control the social media (and search) landscape. The 'laws' you refer to are that Google was required to take down things that were unfavorable towards the Chinese government. So quite obviously the Chinese government simply doesn't want to be undermined by foreign entities, right?
This isn't too far from the US governments motivation to not have it's political power undermined by a foreign entity, and the propaganda situation is different between a democracy and an autocracy. It's politically impossible (and would be inconsistent) to ask specifically TikTok to remove all political content that could either bolster support from one party, or detract from another, as the US has the tenet of free speech enshrined in constitution. But instead of making up some nonsense law that social media companies must yield to coarse-grained censorship by the government, the US are at least being honest about their intentions.
The only reason they have to ban Tiktok is that it is chinese owned. I think it is important for the world to have access to media and social media outside the influences of either western countries or China as looking at what has happened in Pakistan where Tiktok has allowed for democracy advocates to inform people whereas western social media some advocates have been banned or blocked from western social media like Youtube because of political pressure from western countries. The army chief of Pakistan meets the UK army chief and suddenly an ex pakistan army officer is raided and arrested in London and blocked on youtube.
It appears to be a very powerful influence tool. Ryan McBeth [1] made a video showing how easy it is to serve a message to small target demographics. This seems distinct to how, say, youtube works: serving adds to the targeted demographics and algorithm serving content based on prior.
Tik tok seems to add a content creator being able target your content to an audience. This also seems to be able to be done without the public or any authorities being aware. It looks like a great tool to encourage discord.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB7WzqUq4Nk
how is Murk Zuckerberg any less foreign/hostile to me as an american compared to tiktok owners? Neither of them care about me in any way beyond selling me stuff and making sure I don't talk about the things their masters don't want me to (palestine in US, other stuff in China)
Facebook allowed Russian interests to spread division through sponsored posts for years and even accepted rubles as payment until US sanctions were put into effect.
Unless the head of a corporation can be held criminally responsible, their nationality is irrelevant. The only thing theyre loyal to is money.
- The country with proven mass surveillance of its own citizens.
- Only country caught tapping German Chancellor's Phones.
- Country trying to put Assange in prison for 100+ years.
etc....so much more I could add. This country that does not need to be named is now banning an app on the pretext of intelligence? Poetic.
This is also very anti-capitalist which is slightly more worrying. Many businesses now depend on tiktok. Much of ecommerce growth in the past 2 years has been due to tiktok.
I hope the ban does not happen but if it does, China should ban the production and sale of Tesla's or something similar.
There have been submissions on HN about how TikTok makes $$, but due to the post-Gen-Z majority here, they have absolutely gotten no attention, despite nominally being of interest to hackers:
Really shows how in aggregate, the HN crowd is really becoming more and more part of the “incumbent” these days. It is both ironic (for a startup-focused community), but also expected (has been 20+ years and the original YC startups are the old mega companies building regulatory capture now).
These are general news links. Without going into too many details, I know many ecom brands based in the U.S. & UK that literally depend on sales from TikTok.
Tiktok's content/users is strongly favorably towards Palestine/against Israel. That's all you need to know to understand why they are trying to ban tiktok now.
Yes, and that 'movement' went absolutely nowhere bill-wise. For the longest time in the US, the proponent of a ban was the DJT administration, which saw it as a threat to their election chances.
Suddenly Congress' 500+ members come together like a bipartisan Voltron to draft, vote and pass a bill about Tiktok, matching the speed and urgency of military aid bills for foreign countries? When there is a much more domestically significant border security bill that's been stuck for months, in an election year?
It doesn't add up. Congress can make a case for the military aid, it hasn't made one for TT.
Other US platforms are doing a pretty good job at suppressing Palestinian voices.
Seeing a Israeli lobby group mention TikTok in November last year correlates well with the sudden heightened interest in shutting Tiktok down and replacing it with a pseudo Tiktok.
The organic support amoung teens for Palestine is a national security threat.
Are you trying to say this is good or bad? Reddit's worldnews community seems to have a significant number of Israeli supporters, to the point where fake news.
Reddit is pretty easy to game, a small organised group can push things to the front page with ease, pressure or elect pro-Israel mods, admins and use the anti-Semitism or pro-Hamas card.
Israels professional misinformation arm works well on those platforms but for some reason has not been as effective on TikTok evident by how big the pro-Palestine plight is amoung US teens.
This is because IDF soldiers have been posting extremely disturbing content and it has spread very quickly. A lot of the evidence from the ICJ ruling came from soldiers’ own posts.
Israeli leadership has recently met with TikTok and ads have been put up looking for Hebrew-speaking moderators. A guess would be that it’s _not_ to censor pro-Palestinian activists as much as it is to regulate Israeli content that might “give a bad look”.
During COVID there was the whole ivermectin thing.
It turns out ivermectin actually really does statistically improve COVID outcomes, but only in places where it is common for people to have parasitic infections.
So there is a truth, but there is also a greater more true truth. It might be true that TikTok was drumming up support for Israel and that's "why" it was banned. On the other hand, the genocide that is definitely happening in Gaza is (rightly) de-legitimizing to the ruling party in Washington and threatens to demoralize their voters, opening up the US to a candidate who has been very clear about ending democracy and constitutional rule.
So while it could be that china supports Gaza in a meaningful way (which I very much doubt given their own genocides), it could also be that China is attempting to further agitate political divides and cause chaos. I find it much more believable that China is promoting those stories to hurt the US than to help Gaza.
>it could also be that China is attempting to further agitate political divides
One thing that always seems to be a given, and never challenged (in this narrative) is that China is "boosting" pro-palestine content. However, it seems to me that TikTok is working neutrally, "as designed", and that pro-palestine content is actually popular among TikTok's demographic. China isn't boosting pro-palestine content anymore than they do Love is Blind.
I say this because Meta has been accused by the Human Rights Watch[1] of censoring palestine content, and banning TikTok here has subtle big brother vibes here. ByteDance may not "get with the program" and that spells trouble for American soft-power. It's interesting to frame American censorship this way; it's not that America is "censoring" anything, it's that $COUNTRY is "boosting" $CONTENT.
I think TikTok is the only big social media platform that's not banning (or soft banning) pro-Palestine content. The content is all likelihood is organic and the bans basically result in TikTok being the platform that contains most of the pro-Palestine content.
The question isn't why the action would hurt the US, the question is what is the motivating ideology behind the action.
I am open to believing it's to provoke engagement and therefore profit which makes TikTok no better than American social media and an agent that profits from the suffering of Gazans.
I am open to believing it's to try to further drive dissatisfaction with our government that is wrongly supporting Israel (likely for realpolitik reasons that can't be openly discussed, which still don't justify our support of genocide).
I am not at all open to believing it's because China has any empathy for Gazan citizens or belief that genocide is wrong. The "One Israel" policy robs Gazans of statehood. Lack of statehood is a key ingredient to genocide. China has the One China policy explicitly to rob Taiwanese of statehood and therefore make them vulnerable to genocide and/or justify their colonization efforts (as seen in tibet, xinjiang, and hong kong).
It very well might be that the US government wants to be able to force their support for genocide and see TikTok as an agent of resistance. That is the small truth. The big truth is that TikTok is a credible threat to American security, a threat China sees as so big that they enacted a ban on foreign social media within their borders with a major and society effecting piece of engineering.
The point is that TikTok is like a gun, it is a gun in our enemies hands. It is a gun in the hands of an enemy that is building an army to be used against us. It is a gun in the hands of an entity that has repeatedly and openly said they are willing to do the same thing Israel is doing to Gaza, to Taiwan.
I strongly do not believe that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
That makes sense, Trump in particular had the foresight a few years back in an attempt to enforce a ban, it only got enough through to be banned from government devices and networks. Trump in particular knew that a few years later, Palestine favored users would absolutely seeth in preparation to this news, but not before, strictly because of this. Years in the making, Trump really telegraphed those people.
It's never that your unsubstantiated claims are wrong, its that you can never, ever, ever, be wrong, isn't that right?
What's even hilarious is that those who push this ban are the same people who sanctioned everyone and their dog with the Ukraine war and caused the dollar to lose its foreign exchange currency status. Now they think that by banning TikTok, the content they dont like will go away. Because other networks or proxies dont exist...
However, I also also think trying to shut it down based speculative claims of being an intelligence threat are a bad idea and would set a terrible precedent.