And what is the evidence for it being a Chinese spying platform? Is it owned by a Chinese company? Is there any hard evidence? Why is it so controversial?
the US government doesn’t like how little control they have of the information flowing over there
This is the best answer.
AIPAC wants it gone because Gen Z can’t easily be manipulated into thinking Israel is a peace-loving democracy surrounded by savage terrorists.
Tiktok is owned by a Chinese company, so all of the data harvesting that’s perfectly fine for Facebook and Twitter to do suddenly became a problem for the US government.
It’s not about the data harvesting, please stop repeating this falsehood.
It’s about how China is controlling the algorithm for polical goals. From pushing its claim over Taiwan to interfering with global elections by showing(or hiding) speicifc content to sway peoples choices.
So what is considered perfectly fine for Facebook and Twitter to do, got it
What if I think Facebook and Twitter should be shit canned too?
They all suck, yeah. I think banning individual social media services is not the solution. The solution is to create meaningful laws that hold any company, Chinese or American, accountable for data privacy and misinformation/election interference violations.
Funny you say that, because Chinese apps like tiktok can’t ever be compliant with GDPR, and American ones are fully reliant on an executive order where Biden pinky swore to not use the Cloud Act against GDPR.
Unless you live in California, they kinda do.
That wouldn’t solve the problem because the Chinese government is not bound by US law in China.
They are while doing business in the USA
Yes, which doesn’t solve the problem because the problem is in China. The Chinese government can demand any information that ByteDance possesses. Under Chinese law, they are bound to comply and bound to deny that they were even asked under threat of extremely harsh punishment.
It’s like having siblings. It’s okay if I call my siblings buttheads, but you’re not allowed to because you’re not family.
I mean, that’s exactly what Facebook and YouTube and Twitter do as well just over different things like radicalizing people towards Maga and whatnot.
Facebook and You tube haven’t been pushing Maga content, they’re just allowing it to exist. The feed itself isn’t set to give it to everyone or hide left-wing content for a default user.
Twitter is a different story, and should probably also get banned at this point. Elon is absolutely using it to push his own rhetoric.
It’s also about the data access by the chinese gov, as you can read here: https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html
(not the harvesting, but the access to the harvested data.)
Seems like the most honest answer so far. The U.S. doesn’t trust the CCP with its citizens’ data. No surprise there.
Please read my reply to the comment, it’s not about data ownership, it’s about weaponizing algorithms.
Just like meta and xhitter are doing.
Companies weaponizing algorithms for profit is different than governments weaponizing algorithms for all sorts of far worse reasons.
If you can’t see that, you’re a bloody idiot.
You don’t think meta and xhitter are weaponizing algorithms for Republicans? They might not be the whole government, but they are now in power after coordinating their hate filled messaging and misinformation.
Meta, no. Twitter, yes.
Twitter should be banned as well at this point. They have absolutely weaponized it, but not for government purposes, it’s for Daddy Elon’s purposes.
Meta is just allowing the hate content, they aren’t prioritizing it to all users or something. My feed certainly doesn’t contain any of it.
Except FB and Twitter sell their data to the highest bidder. If China wanted American’s data, they can just buy it.
Good point. Seems like another issue of concern. As usual, the issue seems to be data privacy laws overall.
It is, but the relevance to the discussion is that China getting american’s data isn’t the reason for the ban. Nor is China influencing Americans because they tend to derank politically spicy videos. If China was controlling the algo to make the US look bad, videos tagged BLM wouldn’t have been deranked.
It depends on the manner in which said “politically spicy videos” are being censored. If it’s being done in a manner that promotes Chinese narratives while demoting American narratives, that’s an entirely legitimate concern for the U.S. and I don’t really see why not demoting BLM videos is not in the CCP’s interest; videos that make America seem racist seems entirely in the interest of an Anti-American country.
I also don’t see why hiring former American intelligence operatives demonstrates a pro-American stance, as their motivations for doing so could be to learn about American intelligence-gathering methods while promoting Chinese interests.
If it’s being done in a manner that promotes Chinese narratives while demoting American narratives
Spicy in this case means protests, police misbehavior, stuff the US wouldn’t want amplified. The big waves of censorship came in 2020 and 2022. You can search news articles from the time with lots of people wondering why they’re no longer getting that content in their FYPs and content creators getting <1/10th of the views. FB and reddit do the same thing.
I don’t really see why not demoting BLM videos is not in the CCP’s interest; videos that make America seem racist seems entirely in the interest of an Anti-American country.
Amplifying the videos that show America’s response to antiracist movements would make America look like the racist country it is. Demoting them conceals that.
I also don’t see why hiring former American intelligence operatives demonstrates a pro-American stance, as their motivations for doing so could be to learn about American intelligence-gathering methods while promoting Chinese interests.
CIA agents living in America who disseminate intelligence-gathering methods while promoting Chinese interests get charged with treason.
They were hired to help identify and amplify US state department narratives, same reason CNN and Fox hires them.
Amplifying the videos that show America’s response to antiracist movements would make America look like the racist country it is. Demoting them conceals that.
No, that doesn’t make sense. Amplifying shows of division in a country promotes the view that said country is flawed and weak, in this case along racial lines. China has plenty to gain by showing that.
And America is no less racist than China, btw. I would argue far less so.
They were hired to help identify and amplify US state department narratives, same reason CNN and Fox hires them.
That seems entirely speculative. There are plenty of other reasons to hire them. Can you provide evidence for your claim?
Hard to believe this post is in good faith. This ban has been discussed at least for like 4 years now
A motivation that hasn’t been mentioned yet:
Every successful attempt so far by the US government to control what Americans may and may not access on the internet has been rooted in pre-existing legal restrictions on the content, or on access to it. It’s just been things like piracy, CSAM, drug trafficking and the like - things that are illegal in and of themselves, so banning sites that are involved with them has just been a response to thecrxisting illegality.
This is the first time that the US government has succeeded in banning a site without pointing to violations of any existing laws, but simply because they’ve decided to do so.
That’s a significant precedent, and to would-be tyrants, an extremely useful one.
This happens all the time. Almost every country has laws about foreign ownership of media and telecom. Here in Canada, Americans cannot come in and just buy up all the media companies. The consortium that bought my cell provider included a wealthy Egyptian national who was forced to divest before the sale could be finalized.
China was forced to divest from Grindr in the US like five years ago for the exact same reasons.
The only thing that’s really weird here is that China is refusing to do so and would rather burn it to the ground than sell it. That’s at least in part because having all that information - including granular tracking data - on 50% of the US population is an insanely powerful intelligence tool.
That’s not a motivation, but rather an (admittedly astute) comment on the legal context. Appreciated nonetheless.
Establishing that precedent just in and of itself would most certainly be more than enough motivation for anyone with a desire to manipulate or limit public discourse and access to the authority by which future bans can and will be implemented.
Appealing to an out of touch, jingoistic voting base and cracking down on a social media platform where “the youths” are exposed to “woke commie socialist propaganda”. Also, yes it is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance.
Your link provided me with more proper information than your biased quick take, so thanks for that, I guess.
By the way, there’s also a Wikipedia article about TikTok with a whole paragraph about privacy and security concerns. Along with references. None of it is refuted. TikTok / ByteDance themselves tell who owns the platform. And they seem to be very clear themselves in that they log your interactions, location, mobile carrier, information about your phone, your biometric face features and so on and so on.
Thanks. I’m getting the sense that, while ByteDance doesn’t collect any more information than Meta or Instagram, it’s info is suspected to be accessible by the CCP, which may be used for anti-US programs/policies, etc.
This is the most accurate conclusion so far. The US government considers it a national security threat. There are lots of things it’s “okay” for your own government to do but not a foreign government :)
Which makes perfect sense. I don’t think this would be a thing if ByteDance was a British or Canadian company either. The issue is it’s Chinese, and China is an enemy of the U.S. right now.
Though, the US, British or Canadian government doesn’t collect that much info on their citizens and citizens of other countries in large databases. They have laws that limit the amount of government surveillance. We can argue if they’re strict enough etc, but at least they exist. Which isn’t really the case for China. So it’s fair to treat them differently. And by the way other countries also sometimes cut down on what’s allowed to transfer to the USA in a similar way, since for example the NSA is free to collect lots of data on foreigners. And legislation is just different. But that’s been usually for other services. Cutting down on social media altogether (instead of just have them pay a hefty fine) is a relatively new thing.
It’s also fair to treat them differently on account of them not being unfriendly to the U.S. Regardless, I agree data privacy laws need to be improved across the board.
It would be incorrect to call china an “enemy” of the US,…they are more:
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an adversary on several topics (such as regional territories, relations with Russia on the Ukraine conflict)
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a partner on others (such as trade)
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Two reasons, both related to being owned by a Chinese company.
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It’s mining data for the Chinese company.
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The Chinese company can make their algorithm present whatever they want. So they can play up criticism of the US and downplay criticism of China.
The degree of separation between the communist government and private companies is uncertain, so yeah.
Finally, someone who seems to be providing an answer based on objective fact rather than their own political perspective.
I’m getting the sense that the issue is simply that ByteDance is a Chinese company and their data farming is suspected of being accessible to the CCP, which may effectively be a means of spying on American citizens and as misinformation tactics. Not really any different the other way around, of course, but at least that makes sense as a rationale for banning it in the U.S.
There are problems with the law as well. The main one is that Tik Tok buys a whole lot of data about Americans and their browser history etc from data brokers. So they don’t necessarily need the app to gather information. Comparisons of the Tik Tok app vs it’s counterpart in China exist and they paint a pretty significant picture of the differences and similarities that explain how it could be used to push a narrative or propaganda. Barring that though two things can be true. It can be true that Tik Tok is a danger to national security, and also be lobbied against by American Tech companies.
What we’re seeing is that this law was the result of several things and doesn’t just have one singular aim. Anyone who says it’s just about one singular thing just doesn’t want to admit the validity of the other arguments because it ruins how they feel about the federal government, Tik Tok, China, Trump, Biden etc.
Moreover while there’s no proof it HAS been done, inserting some new bit of code in a Chinese owned app could perform security breaches inside the user’s phones. I’m not even sure they’d be interested in MY info, but they sure would like to have access to my company’s network complete with VPN.
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It’s because it pissed off the wrong people. The initial push to ban tiktok was by Trump and republicans after TTers organized a mass RSVP of one of Trump’s events and he spent a lot of money on extra staff and ended up performing in an empty stadium.
That failed and Trump was mocked. 4 years later, it was used to counter zionist propaganda, and that got the democrats on board. Here’s Blinken admitting as much.
Additionally, Insta is TT’s biggest competitor, and FB, which owns Insta, lobbys to the tune of 20M/year.
In Congress, during a private session, intelligence on their spying was presented.
That and the unanimous SCOTUS decision really say something as to what our government knows.
They want them to force to sell it to a US company, so the US interests can be forced onto the algorithm…
Because Facebook can’t compete fairly so they’re using regulatory capture to kill it.
Technically the Chinese government could also use it to spy on Americans and that’s a problem because they’d be taking Er Jerbs - 'Muricans should spy on 'Muricans.
China blocks much of the internet its citizens can access in order to preserve its ideological grip on their country. I share concerns about data privacy in the U.S., but I would definitely be more concerned about a foreign government (especially an enemy of the U.S.) having access to our private data than our own government or even our own corporations.
Corporations don’t have residency in specific countries. They are subject to the laws of all the countries they do business in. It is quite fair to be more concerned about China than other jurisdictions but… don’t underestimate the greed of corporations. Meta itself has been specifically entangled in election interference before via Cambridge Analytica.
Yeah, I don’t trust corporations to do the right thing either, but at least their motivations are based on greed, not nationalistic concerns.
So that Trump can swoop in and “save” it.
After seeing the video the ceo posted, as well as the messages from when tiktok got banned and then unbanned, I’m starting to think this is the reason
It’s about narrative control. Cia has tools to promote/restrict content with x and facebook. (read twitterfiles). They don’t have it for tiktok.
And on the flip side it is very dangerous to give Chinese intelligence direct access to propagandize to Americans. Look at how successful Iranian intel was on getting people on Reddit to back The Houthi Militia.
All social media apps generate enough data about their users to engineer effective disinformation campaigns, influence elections and sway public opinion.
The US would prefer that China has to ask Russia to do that, rather than having direct access.
It also helps the china hawks in the US government who want war by contributing to the perception of China as implacably malicious.
TikTok became one of the only places you could see and hear what was actually happening in Gaza.
