Utterly ridiculous to allow TikTok to continue to operate in the current geopolitical climate. China is a surveillance autocracy and has been engaged in adversarial conduct against the West for years - including extensive psyops.
Shut it down, yesterday. Build a local clone so that people can get their fix or whatever. China sure as shit doesn’t allow its citizens to cough up their personal information for algorithmic consumption to Twitter et al.
sigh can we not have targeted-by-nationality bans and instead have .. rules?
If Tiktok the app is performing surveillance, ban surveillance by apps. All of them. Or make it technically impossible to escape its little sandbox, and let people have their entertainment.
So I'm an American who uses TikTok for entertainment.
I don't think it's utterly ridiculous to allow TikTok to continue. Even hearing these threats that China is possibly surveilling me - what do they get that other social media apps like Instagram get from me? From the FBI it sounds like the national security threat is that China may use it alter my feed to influence me or take over the control of my Apple phone? Has Apple warned users that TikTok will take control of their phone?
As far as I'm concerned, I'm just watching short 60 second videos and could not care less if China has my birthdate.
I mean the US is just as guilty of that, with e.g. Facebook and companies using it manipulating global politics; see for example Cambridge Analytica and the list of elections they influenced [0] through nasty means. There's also the Snowden revelations that revealed the US security services have free access to social media; if you want surveillance, that's the one. And let's not even start about the psyops that the US has been doing for decades, pushing the narrative that they are the saviours of the world and all that through media and Pentagon-approved movies.
“Build a local clone” — the obvious answer is that both Instagram and Snapchat already have; and that nobody wants to switch. If only the US blocked TikTok, that’d just mean there’d still be a TikTok that every other western country has access to except the US, full of content interesting to Westerners. People with Android devices would just sideload it, and use VPNs to access it if necessary.
The less-obvious answer: TikTok is the local clone, in a sense. It’s a separate app from the Chinese Douyin app.
Personally, I’d suggest copying China’s own strategy here: tell ByteDance that if they want to operate in the US, it has to be through a contract with a non-owned US company staffed by US citizens. Essentially making TikTok into an American company that just happens to license some Chinese software IP.
I don't think it's that ridiculous. The default should be not to ban entertainment, and it's not so clearcut whether the danger outweighs the benefits much more than for many other legal forms of entertainment.
"engaged in adversarial conduct against the West for years - including extensive psyops."
And the US has an extensive and well-documented record of doing exactly this to other nations (and far, far worse). If we start a new Cold War every between every two nations that try to undermine each other we'll quickly run out of trading partners, which isn't going to work out too well for a preeminent trading nation (or it's people).
> China is a surveillance autocracy and has been engaged in adversarial conduct against the West for years - including extensive psyops.
CIA and its satellites have been doing that for decades, and on top of that it has a habit of kidnapping, jailing and torturing other countries' citizens. Even the episode of 'rendition flights' could totally delegitimize any complaint from the US, leave aside its cooperative satellites.
Projecting problems and criticism to outside, imagined or concocted enemies and veering the attention away from the plague inside their own society are things which prevent the Western public from addressing the enemy in their midst. That behavior pattern is why the West has been tumbling downhill for the last 40 years.
Have you been on TikTok? All I see on it are large breasted women, NASA stuff and dog rescues.
I do wonder if there’s any lobbying going on from Facebook or Google to help bolster their Reels and Shorts products, both of which seem to be garbage and miss the point of TikTok (the two way interaction).
A recent tiktok trend hitting my city and others seems to be calling in/airdropping/swatting/posting active shooter threats at local schools. So far, this has shut down my kid's school several times this year.
TikTok gets to be the vector for this new scale of virality, America loses future economic competitiveness. Who is the winner in this scenario?
that's interesting. Reminds me of other social media sites where there used to be bomb threats and such. TikTok is clearly kind of the wild west of the internet right now. It still has human moderation which people deliberately game and so far the leadership has evaded public scrutiny.
I have seen other destructive trends happen on TikTok too. I don't know if it is good the things people do to get more followers. The minimum age is 13. It seems like TikTok has a lot of unmoderated content, dangerous trends, and the path to gaining a lot of followers, seems morally grey too.
I can see how TikTok can shape society. Look at how college athletes can earn money on it and promote themselves. Imagine if universities began to recruit athletes with higher TikTok earnings potential and then modify the sport to appeal to that market more. Yes, I am being vague deliberately. It's probably worth asking what effects TikTok has on people.
TikTok as-is presents a massive attack surface for (d|m)information and worse. And the version available in the US is highly addictive with numerous bubble creating feedback loops. The amount of engagement and time spent on the app is incredible.
The creators know this and provide an alternate version called Douyin used domestically which optimizes for educational content and has additional rules/safeguards
I don't want to harp on which country has which political motive, but it's pretty cut and dry to see that the service owners export something very different than what is presented domestically.
> The creators know this and provide an alternate version called Douyin used domestically which optimizes for educational content and has additional rules/safeguards
... Douyin is edited like that out of the goodness of Bytedance's hearts to reduce addiction or is it regulatory pressure?
Reading the article:
> Douyin, much like TikTok, is particularly popular with young audiences, and so China's top regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, has urged it to "create a good cyberspace environment for the healthy development of young people".
> Last month, under-18s in China were banned from playing video games during the week, and their play was restricted to just one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays.
It seems awfully like the China's version of the FTC decided that this ain't cool anymore, and Bytedance saw the hammer of legislation coming so they made changes..
The easiest answer here, is get the US government to not ban TikTok, but make it a rule that under-18s cannot access these applications, content must be educational, and limit screen time by banning these apps during school times, maybe only allowed for 2 hrs on the weekend etc.
However, I do remember hearing a lot that China is a facist dictatorship when these rules were made. I wonder if the same will be said for the US if they decide to make such rules.
Compelling news story, but is there a less-tabloid source? In my cursory Googling, I haven't been able to find anything. Murdoch-owned media is pretty low in my trustworthiness/objectivity rankings.
TikTok is only a part of a much larger problem that US was not ready to deal with.
Sure, TikTok having “coarse location” permissions seems like a very bad idea, give the fact it’s Chinese owned app. This is the obvious one and I personally absolutely cannot understand how this is allowed to happen. (And there is more… Russian owned family tracking apps for example)
But the larger and harder problem to solve is social media and their involvement in targeted advertising, potentially having a significant impact on election results. This applies equally to all platforms. Where do we draw the line? Should amount of money determine who gets elected? How do we know the money even comes from the parties and not from other governments? Or a new problem we have- should the richest person be able to own very influential social media?
This is no longer a democracy.
I can't imagine their reaction when they discover that so many IP cameras/NVR/DVR have been and still are being used as surveillance devices, and in some cases they have been hacked to either phone home (China?) video feeds, or as botnet hosts.
There are a couple of things we have to be careful of in these discussions: one is that the US has strong motivations for (economic) protectionism. We should be focussing on evidence of wrongdoing, not innuendo.
The second is how the accusations are being made. Too much of it reeks of borderline racism and there seems to be an uptick in outright racism against Chinese people. Remember, it is acts of the Chinese government at issue here not the acts of people who have no ties to the Chinese government.
I think economic protectionism is generally bad, but might be a reasonable response to similar moves on the part of other nations. I think this should not be conflated with the national security arguments (which aren't totally invalid, but may be overhyped to achieve a policy goal.)
I don't think it's racism for the most part, but I do agree that some people seem to have some incredibly strong feelings about China without great justification. I wonder how much of it is caused by the US's anticommunist history.
Maybe it's right to dislike China for ideological reasons. But even if that is the case, isn't banning Tiktok hypocritical? If you dislike China because they censor information coming from other countries, don't follow the will of their citizens, and regulate speech, it appears to me that urging an executive agency to ban Tiktok is doing those same things in the US.
I genuinely don't see much harm in Tiktok but plenty of people on HN seem to hate it just because it's from China and that doesn't seem like a valid reason to me.
There's no racism to be found - why do people conflate issues with the way the Chinese _government_ chooses to operate with the Chinese _people_ themselves?
The Chinese government technically owns TikTok - No doubt in my mind profile/algorithm data is being sent overseas for processing and manipulation by the Chinese government.
The Chinese government uses strategies that span _decades/centuries_ to influence countries. They can do that because they don't have to rip and replace governments/officials on regular election cycles - that's the way their government works and why some people consider Democracy to not be a great government structure - a separate tangent to go down.
The Chinese government creates/purchases a social media app that happens to attract easily influenced children/teenagers/adults, cater content directly for them to keep them on the platform for as long as possible, with the _very real_ potential for the Chinese government to influence people through algorithm manipulation, which app users don't even realize.
Don't get me wrong, it's equally as harmful when Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat does it - it's just that China studied this formula and has likely adapted it to be used as a form of cultural/government warfare against enemy countries - without even putting boots on their soil.
Distract as many minds as possible, feed them information that tells them the US/Canada/Europe isn't as "free as people say", deliberately promote key cultural "wedge" issues to emotionally enrage/depress people and eventually you have a population in 50-100 years that welcomes the Chinese government into their country because there is no cohesive American identity anymore able to stand against aggressive foreign influence/interference.
I'm not saying this is the sole purpose and goal of TikTok, and I'm not saying it's the _sole_ thing China is doing to "take over America!" - but it's a multi-faceted approach to foreign interference that nobody seems to even consider or think about. See - Belt and Road initiatives, foreign spies in high political positions influencing US politics, committing corporate espionage to steal trade secrets and technologies...
Yes, I'm also sure the USA does all of these things - personally, I'd rather have the USA doing these things instead of China, since I have more of a chance of influencing what the US is doing with our data rather than a country on the opposite side of the globe operating without recourse to western law.
1) How is TikTok worse than other social media apps? Both in terms of privacy and "the algorithm".
2) What another country's government does with my data is far less important to me than what my government is doing with my data. Am I wrong for thinking that?
Exactly. The scariest part to me is that an unelected, partisan, US intelligence agency literally moderates the content on social media through their own purpose-made moderation portals[1], than anything China is doing.
How does watching fail videos and memes radicalize people and make them politically polarized? Would it not be obvious to TikTokers that they are being manipulated in some way, even subtly? If I want to control narratives and shape opinion, TV is how I would do it. Fox News is basically a propaganda machine, and isn't questioned, because, hey, 'merica.
Oh so our current owners are concerned that they might lose control of the culture to some new foreign owners? If I believed that the US security state was there to protect the American people I might be more concerned, as it stands this is just a changing of the guard for who will be our technocratic authoritarian overlords, and I can't be plotzed to care.
Thinking this change of "technocratic authoritarian overlords" is as much of a non-event as you seem to or that the Chinese level of control over the citzenry is equivalent to that of the USA is a crazy level of naivety that I can't even begin to unpack
The Chinese government is hilariously bad at foreign propaganda. Seriously, just look at any of their official media channels. The US has a million times more experience in this business - it has Hollywood, it funds thousands of "non-governmental organizations" all over the world, it knows how to advertise.
The people who are worried that 15-second videos on TikTok are somehow part of a long-term plan by the Chinese government to subtly change Americans' opinions are giving the Chinese government far too much credit.
"When we look at all of these wide-ranging apps that are connected to Chinese firms, it's actually almost nonsensical to ban just one when we see platforms in areas like precision agriculture, communications, gaming, all connected to Chinese firms," she says. "So what's really important is to develop more robust data privacy regulations in the United States to protect users.
TLDR:
It has nothing to do with "national security concerns", it's just they are great competition, and the US is lagging behind, so banning it would mean having a chance to catchup
Hence why they tried to lure them to move to their US based servers, so they could peek at the source code ;) ;)
Because US firms are lagging behind, some stagnating and are greedy, therefore no competitors is allowed to do better until they wake up
TikTok is hitting a much broader slice of the US population, and getting a much broader slice of political opinions. And it's connecting all these people and all these opinions. You can find communists and nazi's on TikTok, building communities, and getting their voice out.
The administration hates TikTok because it is potentially destabilizing. The FBI's concern is not that it's foreign influence, but that it's allowing internal movements to gain traction. Just as the FBI suppressed internal movements throughout the 20th century they want to suppress this new medium that may threaten the status quo.
Now I don't want to see the US fall into chaos, but neither do I want to see a world where political change is stifled, which is what the FBI wants to do here.
According to Wikipedia, the prescription for destabilizing America is: "Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
Can you actually find nazis on Tiktok? I believe they have a pretty clear policy against hate in general which they apply just as liberally as for example facebook and youtube does.
Besides the obvious concerns about tracking/spying, TikTok has great potential as a propaganda tool to gain subtle influence over America's youth. For example, its algorithm could be tweaked to elevate content that is favourable to the Chinese Communist Party.
[+] [-] darkteflon|3 years ago|reply
Shut it down, yesterday. Build a local clone so that people can get their fix or whatever. China sure as shit doesn’t allow its citizens to cough up their personal information for algorithmic consumption to Twitter et al.
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
If Tiktok the app is performing surveillance, ban surveillance by apps. All of them. Or make it technically impossible to escape its little sandbox, and let people have their entertainment.
[+] [-] clashmoore|3 years ago|reply
I don't think it's utterly ridiculous to allow TikTok to continue. Even hearing these threats that China is possibly surveilling me - what do they get that other social media apps like Instagram get from me? From the FBI it sounds like the national security threat is that China may use it alter my feed to influence me or take over the control of my Apple phone? Has Apple warned users that TikTok will take control of their phone?
As far as I'm concerned, I'm just watching short 60 second videos and could not care less if China has my birthdate.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Elections
[+] [-] derefr|3 years ago|reply
The less-obvious answer: TikTok is the local clone, in a sense. It’s a separate app from the Chinese Douyin app.
Personally, I’d suggest copying China’s own strategy here: tell ByteDance that if they want to operate in the US, it has to be through a contract with a non-owned US company staffed by US citizens. Essentially making TikTok into an American company that just happens to license some Chinese software IP.
[+] [-] Tenoke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] standardUser|3 years ago|reply
And the US has an extensive and well-documented record of doing exactly this to other nations (and far, far worse). If we start a new Cold War every between every two nations that try to undermine each other we'll quickly run out of trading partners, which isn't going to work out too well for a preeminent trading nation (or it's people).
[+] [-] weego|3 years ago|reply
The problem here being this time they can't insert themselves into the surveillance pipeline.
They're not better or worse (unless you're fine with your own Govt surveilling you but not another state), just not the status quo.
[+] [-] unity1001|3 years ago|reply
CIA and its satellites have been doing that for decades, and on top of that it has a habit of kidnapping, jailing and torturing other countries' citizens. Even the episode of 'rendition flights' could totally delegitimize any complaint from the US, leave aside its cooperative satellites.
Projecting problems and criticism to outside, imagined or concocted enemies and veering the attention away from the plague inside their own society are things which prevent the Western public from addressing the enemy in their midst. That behavior pattern is why the West has been tumbling downhill for the last 40 years.
[+] [-] soup10|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drcross|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OnlyMortal|3 years ago|reply
Source: My job was to prevent that.
I’ve no doubt we do the same to the US.
[+] [-] SighMagi|3 years ago|reply
I do wonder if there’s any lobbying going on from Facebook or Google to help bolster their Reels and Shorts products, both of which seem to be garbage and miss the point of TikTok (the two way interaction).
[+] [-] p0pcult|3 years ago|reply
TikTok gets to be the vector for this new scale of virality, America loses future economic competitiveness. Who is the winner in this scenario?
https://www.spieltimes.com/news/what-is-tiktoks-active-shoot... https://www.thedailybeast.com/tiktok-shooting-challenge-seen... https://wpde.com/news/local/rcsd-at-blythewood-high-school-a...
[+] [-] zug_zug|3 years ago|reply
Is there a belief that China was slower at removing these videos that an American firm would be? Because that's the substantive question.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] onetimeusename|3 years ago|reply
I have seen other destructive trends happen on TikTok too. I don't know if it is good the things people do to get more followers. The minimum age is 13. It seems like TikTok has a lot of unmoderated content, dangerous trends, and the path to gaining a lot of followers, seems morally grey too.
I can see how TikTok can shape society. Look at how college athletes can earn money on it and promote themselves. Imagine if universities began to recruit athletes with higher TikTok earnings potential and then modify the sport to appeal to that market more. Yes, I am being vague deliberately. It's probably worth asking what effects TikTok has on people.
[+] [-] karp773|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deeblering4|3 years ago|reply
The creators know this and provide an alternate version called Douyin used domestically which optimizes for educational content and has additional rules/safeguards
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934
I don't want to harp on which country has which political motive, but it's pretty cut and dry to see that the service owners export something very different than what is presented domestically.
[+] [-] erklik|3 years ago|reply
... Douyin is edited like that out of the goodness of Bytedance's hearts to reduce addiction or is it regulatory pressure?
Reading the article:
> Douyin, much like TikTok, is particularly popular with young audiences, and so China's top regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, has urged it to "create a good cyberspace environment for the healthy development of young people".
> Last month, under-18s in China were banned from playing video games during the week, and their play was restricted to just one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays.
It seems awfully like the China's version of the FTC decided that this ain't cool anymore, and Bytedance saw the hammer of legislation coming so they made changes..
The easiest answer here, is get the US government to not ban TikTok, but make it a rule that under-18s cannot access these applications, content must be educational, and limit screen time by banning these apps during school times, maybe only allowed for 2 hrs on the weekend etc.
However, I do remember hearing a lot that China is a facist dictatorship when these rules were made. I wonder if the same will be said for the US if they decide to make such rules.
[+] [-] p0pcult|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 404mm|3 years ago|reply
Sure, TikTok having “coarse location” permissions seems like a very bad idea, give the fact it’s Chinese owned app. This is the obvious one and I personally absolutely cannot understand how this is allowed to happen. (And there is more… Russian owned family tracking apps for example)
But the larger and harder problem to solve is social media and their involvement in targeted advertising, potentially having a significant impact on election results. This applies equally to all platforms. Where do we draw the line? Should amount of money determine who gets elected? How do we know the money even comes from the parties and not from other governments? Or a new problem we have- should the richest person be able to own very influential social media? This is no longer a democracy.
[+] [-] judge2020|3 years ago|reply
I'm sure Canada would say that this isn't important..
[+] [-] squarefoot|3 years ago|reply
https://hacked.camera/
http://www.insecam.org/en/
[+] [-] II2II|3 years ago|reply
The second is how the accusations are being made. Too much of it reeks of borderline racism and there seems to be an uptick in outright racism against Chinese people. Remember, it is acts of the Chinese government at issue here not the acts of people who have no ties to the Chinese government.
[+] [-] computerfriend|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewdgreen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 63|3 years ago|reply
Maybe it's right to dislike China for ideological reasons. But even if that is the case, isn't banning Tiktok hypocritical? If you dislike China because they censor information coming from other countries, don't follow the will of their citizens, and regulate speech, it appears to me that urging an executive agency to ban Tiktok is doing those same things in the US.
I genuinely don't see much harm in Tiktok but plenty of people on HN seem to hate it just because it's from China and that doesn't seem like a valid reason to me.
[+] [-] scohesc|3 years ago|reply
The Chinese government technically owns TikTok - No doubt in my mind profile/algorithm data is being sent overseas for processing and manipulation by the Chinese government.
The Chinese government uses strategies that span _decades/centuries_ to influence countries. They can do that because they don't have to rip and replace governments/officials on regular election cycles - that's the way their government works and why some people consider Democracy to not be a great government structure - a separate tangent to go down.
The Chinese government creates/purchases a social media app that happens to attract easily influenced children/teenagers/adults, cater content directly for them to keep them on the platform for as long as possible, with the _very real_ potential for the Chinese government to influence people through algorithm manipulation, which app users don't even realize.
Don't get me wrong, it's equally as harmful when Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat does it - it's just that China studied this formula and has likely adapted it to be used as a form of cultural/government warfare against enemy countries - without even putting boots on their soil.
Distract as many minds as possible, feed them information that tells them the US/Canada/Europe isn't as "free as people say", deliberately promote key cultural "wedge" issues to emotionally enrage/depress people and eventually you have a population in 50-100 years that welcomes the Chinese government into their country because there is no cohesive American identity anymore able to stand against aggressive foreign influence/interference.
I'm not saying this is the sole purpose and goal of TikTok, and I'm not saying it's the _sole_ thing China is doing to "take over America!" - but it's a multi-faceted approach to foreign interference that nobody seems to even consider or think about. See - Belt and Road initiatives, foreign spies in high political positions influencing US politics, committing corporate espionage to steal trade secrets and technologies...
Yes, I'm also sure the USA does all of these things - personally, I'd rather have the USA doing these things instead of China, since I have more of a chance of influencing what the US is doing with our data rather than a country on the opposite side of the globe operating without recourse to western law.
[+] [-] aeze|3 years ago|reply
1) How is TikTok worse than other social media apps? Both in terms of privacy and "the algorithm".
2) What another country's government does with my data is far less important to me than what my government is doing with my data. Am I wrong for thinking that?
[+] [-] tenpies|3 years ago|reply
---
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23129270-fb-portal
[+] [-] spacemadness|3 years ago|reply
1) Do you believe social media algorithms can have large negative outcomes concerning human social behavior?
2) Does the entity controlling those algorithms then matter assuming 1 is true?
[+] [-] gravitate|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UberFly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewclunn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yur3i__|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DiogenesKynikos|3 years ago|reply
The people who are worried that 15-second videos on TikTok are somehow part of a long-term plan by the Chinese government to subtly change Americans' opinions are giving the Chinese government far too much credit.
[+] [-] kube-system|3 years ago|reply
Now, it likely wasn’t planned out this way, but the benefits to manipulation now are obvious.
[+] [-] Kukumber|3 years ago|reply
TLDR:
It has nothing to do with "national security concerns", it's just they are great competition, and the US is lagging behind, so banning it would mean having a chance to catchup
Hence why they tried to lure them to move to their US based servers, so they could peek at the source code ;) ;)
Because US firms are lagging behind, some stagnating and are greedy, therefore no competitors is allowed to do better until they wake up
The plan is clear, another confession of defeat
[+] [-] nivenkos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1995moz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ok123456|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] advisedwang|3 years ago|reply
The administration hates TikTok because it is potentially destabilizing. The FBI's concern is not that it's foreign influence, but that it's allowing internal movements to gain traction. Just as the FBI suppressed internal movements throughout the 20th century they want to suppress this new medium that may threaten the status quo.
Now I don't want to see the US fall into chaos, but neither do I want to see a world where political change is stifled, which is what the FBI wants to do here.
[+] [-] p0pcult|3 years ago|reply
According to Wikipedia, the prescription for destabilizing America is: "Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
[+] [-] rosmax_1337|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reason077|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] night-rider|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RadixDLT|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] computerfriend|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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