Political things aside, it's crazy to see so much of a flip-flop so quickly. Has there been any other behavior like this in the past where a company "shut themselves down" to make a big political statement and then almost immediately undid the shut down?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_Un...
There’s always a chance you don’t come back, and there’s likely to be a loss of marketshare for simply being unavailable for a period and forcing users to trial alternatives.
But, TikTok is not purely commercially focused. A majority of the voting stock of ByteDance is held by the Chinese government, who clearly see non-financial strategic value in controlling it.
Otherwise, they likely could have negotiated a spin out the US operation, whereby they retain most of the equity upside but give majority voting control to a US buyer.
Keen to see this opinion when the Chinese government demands the same from Apple.
'cos we're all equal, no?
I imagine Apple already complies with whatever they need to comply with in order to make the Chinese government happy.
> 'cos we're all equal, no?
No, we absolutely aren't. The Chinese government has ensured for decades now that foreign businesses have only tightly controlled access to the Chinese people while Chinese-owned (i.e., easily controllable by the Chinese government) businesses have advantages not given to outsiders. (And those outsiders need to open up a Chinese subsidiary that is majority-owned by Chinese investors/companies.)
On the other hand, most Western countries have given Chinese companies near-unfettered access to their markets.
If anything, this TikTok ban is actually making things more equal, if only by a tiny bit.
I do t use tiktok and have no skin in the game as an EU resident, but setting a precedent for this kind of behaviour to permit clthe government to simply block anything it wants is basically following in CCPs footsteps, that's certainly not a good thing in my eyes.
or... the nihilistic option:
People know China would engage in information warfare using TikTok in a situation like that, but they foolishly think the CCP is on even moral ground with free democracies so none of this matters, and we've gotta keep the funny musical memes flowing.
For all one's misgivings about the US -- and there are many valid ones! -- before deciding these governments are equal, talk to a Chinese political dissident, if you can find one, since they sometimes disappear.
Wild statement, so lets look at some data.
https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/1337388/classement-pays...
These are a list of the freedom of press in the EU with their corresponding indexes.
Lets compare that to the US : https://rsf.org/en/country/united-states
Index 2024 Score : 66.59
Not looking good for your opinion but lets look at some more that are consumer privacy focused, which was my main point.
https://iapp.org/resources/article/countries-at-a-glance-pri...
IAPP isn't a bad source IMO but hard to evaluate their methods, but lets see.
> Level of understanding about data collection and use
Netherlands : Weak - 14% USA : Weak - 24%
Not great, I could spend time finding more, but the summary is that the EU has regulations that require companies to limit the useage of consumers information and privacy. The EU is consumer privacy focused, wheras the US seems to be Enterprise & Organisation focused, also it's state level enforcements fracture enforcement even further.
Lets look at the US CCPA vs GDPR :
A crucial difference is that GDPR requires individuals to opt-in before businesses can collect data while there is no opt-in condition in CCPA.
That should say it all.
Edit : I forgot to add, outside of Sanctions the EU has no control to simply decide to ban a company when it feels like it.
Am I misreading what your intent?
Regulations are for the companies.. But they're not banned. It's a different model to the US.
To clarify. Companies are not banned.. they're fined (often not enough) until they align..
> regulations are for the companies. But they’re not banned.
So if they don’t follow the regulations they simply keep paying fines indefinitely? Until they run out of money? Until the company goes out of business? We aren’t banning those companies, instead we’ll attempt to bankrupt them if they stay in our markets; unless they do what we say. In other words, extortion?
This tiktok issue was brought under 'national security' with what feels like a "Trust me bro".
NBA, any company that makes anything within China using slavery, the guy/actor/wrestler (the name escapes me right now) who had to learn Chinese to apologize. Take your pick of "precedent".
1bn customers = a lot of money. A company that will kiss the ring will do the right thing by its shareholders and a nasty thing against humanity. I am 200% sure that Apple has given the keys for all users/phones/servers in China to the gov/CCP and nobody complained.
If North Korea had 1bn potential customers, we would be seeing Kim very differently.
We are cattle. It's all a 1984-ish sham.
Historically China has been so large and 'diverse' (not to be confused with DEI) (like India and Russia). It's not "one chinese person is just like anyone else". There are multiple Republics/States/etc. It takes an emperor to keep together an empire. And that usually requires (plenty of) violence.
Communism is built to make people suffer, remove individuality and requires total obedience and personal reformation to be the 'good citizen'. You and me both are EU citizens. We are all different and we respect/accept each other. In China if you disagree, you disappear. They would very much like to do the same to the rest of the world. And one day they will, just not yet. I hope they implode before they do (like all empires).
(apologies for the grim tone)(I suggest "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8)
Houston Rockets GM and James Harden:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harden#Politics
* https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/nbas-apo...
* https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/27787634/james-harden-ap...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/john-cena-very...
The US is not a master piece of freedom. Want to market or own foreign shares? Want to travel to Cuba? Have you gone through the crazy US border control process as a foreigner?
Yes, China is absolutely worse. But the US is not a good example.
> Want to market or own foreign shares?
ADRs work for that, no?
> Want to travel to Cuba? Have you gone through the crazy US border control process as a foreigner?
I agree those things are bad, but they have nothing to do with market access, which is the topic at hand.
Foxconn stops sending Chinese workers to India iPhone factories In addition, equipment shipments are delayed, potentially disrupting next-generation iPhone production in India.
https://restofworld.org/2025/china-foxconn-factoriesfoxconn-...
You really have to be braindead as a COO if you do not have contingency plan to move stuff out of China this year.
Is there any reason you’re skipping the past 40+ years of turmoil in the Middle East purely from the US trying to control oil fields? Because Iran would like a word with, and there’s a hell lot of other countries behind them waiting their turn
The OP was contrasting this with China, that does not allow foreigners access to their markets. As a regular American, quite honestly, I would like a bit of protectionism from the US, as I recently bought a house and had to compete with cash offers from Chinese banks. It's insane to me that we allow foreigners to buy property here, while our own citizens are being increasingly priced out of our own country.
Microsoft operated its own popular social network in China, called MSN Messenger. Tens of millions Chinese users were on that platform for like a decade until the release of mobile based WeChat.
> which the communist party in China has treated for years as a matter of national security
It is a matter of national security, we all saw what happened on twitter shortly before the 6th Jan 2021 attack.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tweets-january-5-2...
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tweets-january-6-2...
That is the exact reason why everyone agreed that TikTok must host all US data and its deployed recommendation algorithm code in the US with 3rd party audit access by an appointed US entity.
The only question here is why should Meta and Google be exempted from the exact same rules if they want to operate their services in China.
They were defeated by the QQ app and shut down in 2014.
https://technode.com/2014/08/29/microsoft-messenger-shut-dow...
Microsoft retained a 50% ownership of MSN China, just check the link you cited. Microsoft also retained the full ownership of the MSN messenger software while MSN China was just in charge of its day to day operation in China.
Also interesting to see that millions of Tesla EVs are being sold in China, hundreds of millions other American cars were sold in the past, but when Chinese EVs try to crack the US market it sudden becomes a national security issue.
Why are you making it sound like China doesn't restrict Tesla for "national security"?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/23/business/tesla-barred-china-s... https://fortune.com/2023/07/26/tesla-cars-barred-china-world... https://www.carscoops.com/2024/01/more-venues-across-china-a... https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-cars-are-banned-in-... https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/china-bans-tesla-drivin...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-29/as-musk-v...
DJI drones have been operated & tested by numerous US agencies for ages, yet it is still a national security threat. how convenient!
Apple is quite a special case since iPhone ecosystem creates many jobs in China. If Apple managed to move jobs to India (or wherever cheap labor is), Chinese government will stop being nice to them.
And even then, right now in China, iCloud service is run by Guizhou cloud, not Apple.
Yeah, and that reason was incompetence, it's not for lack of trying.
2) China absolutely did ban most external social media and forces those that remain to hold data locally.
3) China still has the Great Firewall that everybody forgets about.
4) "He does it too" is the argument a two year old uses and should be accorded the same level of respect.
When you are owned/controlled by an authoritative government you have the responsibility to not get disappeared. Just ask Jack Ma.
The US is simply reciprocating.
This would be like the U.S. forcing Spotify's Swedish headquarters to accept U.S. ownership.
India literally banned TikTok overnight when China killed Indian soldiers in 2020
Living in Australia now with access to Chinese EV's is eyeopening. It's great for the consumer. To the extent you accept EV's as a solution for reducing GHG's, the cheaper prices are making it easier to end our reliance on oil. Americans don't realize what they are missing out on.
Better than Tesla-quality vehicles for half the price.
TikTok ban is not about vengeance on China, it's about violations of own citizens' freedoms.
> aiding in Russia’s conquest of Europe
Russia right now is weaker and has the least potential to conquer anything than literally ever before.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2025/01/15/tiktok-ba...
I was a bit wrong in calling it deeply unpopular across party lines, but it's certainly quite unpopular overall, and deeply unpopular among Democrats.
Here's the actual poll: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/05/support-f...
And for those Westerners who do not, I think it would be useful to ask them why they think a country like China (or Russia, or North Korea) would be better for their interests than the US, even with someone like Trump in power.
Unless you’re suggesting that what the world needs is a single dominant empire? Which would be an odd position to take because history has proven that monopolies are much much worse for abusing power.
Maybe if/when we colonise other planets we can think of the Earth as a single government with countries acting like states (kind of like the EU but with less sovereignty for each state). However that’s only going to happen if we work together and generally cooperation is viewed as counterproductive to empire building. So we come full circle back to my original point.
I can't speak for most Westerners, but I fully believe the United States to be an empire in decline already. Who will take up that mantle once we're fully gone is an interesting question, I think China and India both could make a solid case for themselves.
> And for those Westerners who do not, I think it would be useful to ask them why they think a country like China (or Russia, or North Korea) would be better for their interests than the US
I don't really think about it in terms of "my interests." My ideal incoming superpower would be any superpower that's ready to deal with existential threats to our species like climate change, along with our global social ills like over-reliance on social media and the year over year alienation of everyone from everyone else. If that country comes with me needing to learn Mandarin then that's what has to happen.
I'm highly disillusioned with both the "West" as an idea (which can include any number of countries depending how racist the speaker is feeling at the moment). I still believe in Democracy, representative or otherwise, but I don't see any of those in your "West" anymore. I see a collection of ailing, aged empires full of greedy old men stealing as much money as they can so they and their families can coast out the collapse they have engineered. I contrast this with China, which certainly has problems too, and the CCP gets up to some nonsense, but their ability to exude top-down control also makes them more able to actually solve problems instead of endlessly bickering about them. And with respect to the notions of individual liberty and freedom that I do want to see in the world, it's clear that the West is too focused on maintaining the rights of the individual to do what they so please, and not enough on maintaining the planet upon which they would do it. How free is anyone if we can't leave our homes due to smog or unlivable temperatures/weathers?
Not saying it's an overall improvement. I am saying that the U.S. is on it's way out, and China is the likely incoming global superpower. We can do precious little to change this if we even want to, and I'm not rushing for a fire extinguisher here.
With the exception of the USSR, every superpower’s decline in history has involved a burst of violence. China or India won’t take over if America collapses because America collapsing (versus slow fading over lifetimes) almost guarantees nuclear war resetting the table.
I think people who have seen one up close claim to prefer the other (but thets meaningless) while people who have seen both start to lean toward servitude, unless they are highly religious.
It was literally called Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
Not, All your app are belong to us.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...
+ Public forum or utility
+ Userbase greater than 1% of the adult population
= Majority Ownership of corporate division and management, plus regulatory oversight, must be held within country OR a security partnered country (the easiest criteria for that might be they have an obligation to fight along side 'our' troops in some way).
That way it isn't specific about any given platform or company, and it allows anyone trusted as an ally to comprise the ownership or legal jurisdiction.
US on the other hand now has its social media controlled by oligarchs, not much better maybe.
If I were the EU, I would. We hacked Merkel.
However exact same rules apply to its European competitors like Bolt. Make it entirely unrelated to this situation.
This isn’t correct. The US law only applies to the services provided within the US.
ByteDance could spin out the US userbase while retaining the rest of the userbase. Many US companies already have to do exactly this for their Chinese userbase. Spin it off to a JV with a Chinese partner.
I’m not aware of anyone doing this, but you could even have a content syndication model whereby the global TikTok and the US TikTok share a common pool of content and username reservations so that both services appear global to their users, but with separate companies controlling distribution of their own apps and the recommendation model used to serve content.
> No other country could get away with demanding this.
TikTok is already banned in India. Brasil banned Twitter for a while until they caved to Brasil's demands.
"Entitlement" in the context of nations is irrelevant. Nations exercise power in accordance with their interests.
It doesn't have to be the United States. It just has to be anyone other than Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia.
But this particular situation is not. A Chinese controlled company that operates in the US. If you want access to $CC market you are subject to $CC's rules. Other countries do exactly the same thing (aside from China, GDPR comes to mind) so it's unclear what the basis for your complaint is here.
Yes absolutely. China.
You have to give away 50% of your local subsidiary just to operate there.
And why do you think Google and Facebook don’t even offer their services there?
I'm not sure how generally you meant to speak, but this is no longer true as a general claim.
"As of November 1, 2024, China has removed all restrictions on foreign investment in the manufacturing sector, allowing foreign investors, including Americans, to own up to 100% equity in Chinese manufacturing enterprises."
And investments into various telecommunications related areas are still restricted or outright banned. So foreign founded/owned TV stations like Fox News could never exist in China (for better or for worse).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_list_of_foreign_inv...
Passenger cars were removed in 2021.
However:
> .. (ii) news agencies, (iii) editing, publishing and production of books, newspapers, periodicals, audio-visual products and electronic publications, (iv) all levels of broadcasting stations, television stations, radio and television channel and frequency, radio and television transmission networks and the engagement in the video on demand business of radio and TV, (v) radio and television program production and operation as well as (vi) film production companies, distribution companies, cinema companies and the introduction of films are still prohibited.
So good-luck to any Australians and Brits who want to operate Fox news style networks in China.
There are other telecommunications related areas which are restricted and not prohibited.
Not sure where would TikTok fall into exactly but it’s probably bot manufacturing.
They have a choice to leave the country or follow the rules.
I can’t really feel bad about when it’s the same deal they offer Western companies. Well.. to be fair Google or FB couldn’t even get anywhere close to where TikTok is.
Europe banned Russian propaganda outlet RT a couple of years ago, on security grounds. It's just that US prefers the soft-soft approach. Don't ban them, let them "divest". No. It doesn't work. It should be banned end of story. I guarantee a genuine competitor from the US or an allied country would make an alternative quite soon. Would be so addictive and equally brain rotting? Probably not, so people who enjoyed it before would complain. Fine, let them go join Douyin or other Chinese platform and see for themselves how "freedom of speech"looks like in China.
As for anyone who might come and say "they're not doing anything wrong". They are and you're naive for not seeing it. Every company in China is an arm of the state. As an example see how Bytedance released an ebook reader in the US with an AI assistant that tells you things like "nothing happened in 1989 on Tiananmen square", there is no genocide in Xinjiang, it is inappropriate to question and critique the Chinese communist party, China never attacked anyone,ever but it's perfectly fine to criticise every other single country on earth and it is ready to give you a litany of misdeeds any other country on earth ever did. Except China. Do you think a company like that owning what's essentially a monopoly on news for the young people is good? No it is not, and any sane politician would ban it long time ago. The fact Trump did this move worries me for his other decisions in future .
And every big US platform is just a big siphon for the NSA when it comes to non U.S. persons.
The stupidity and hypocrisy of this ban and unban is hilarious.
It's the tech policy analog of the Iraq War (on the level of stupidity, loss of standing, inevitable consequences etc).
Not saying this ban is equivalent to a decision that killed 1M+ people, lead to ISIS, and created the migrant crisis and more
Your adversary does not care about morals, but will leverage yours in his favour.
There are plenty of corruption and issues in EU, some of which RT may have covered legitimately, but at least we're not intentionally massacring civilians and sending our poor and minorities to die as cannon fodder in an useless invasion. There's a reason why all European neighbours of Russia have or want to join NATO, and that is its imperialistic and aggressive policies.
You should come visit us in Finland or maybe our neighbour Estonia and really see what ordinary people have to say about Russia. Real people, who actually live next to them.
They were following the law. Anything else is just promises by people who are not exactly known for following through with them
Shutting down because the law says it, and to prevent really big penalties, is not making “a big political statement
As far as we know, Tiktok is operated on US servers by Oracle. While it might have been possible to find another cloud provider and move all US data there, I can see them not wanting to do that given that there was no point if the app isn't distributed in the US anymore.
It was a gambit used for net neutrality in 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Slowdown_Day
Nico argued TikTok made the minimum change required by law.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/oracle-prepares-start-shu...
(The latter part is probably because Tiktok's banning was not particulaly divisive within the population as it is in the US.)
Tiktok had a better algorithm (to get hooked) but Instagram eventually caught up (with algo)..
They were telling users who to blame and who to thank because in this specific case, the blame and the thank are pretty clear. The Biden administration approved the ban, and the Trump administration reversed it. Blaming one and thanking the other is also hardly surprising.
There is no question that TikTok is a politically sensitive app and the US/China are very nearly in the funnel to a major war so a lot of the usual niceties are questionable. Previously the US has attempted something that looked a lot like a black-bag kidnapping of a Chinese industrialist [0]. I'd imagine that the TikTok people are acutely sensitive towards how the law is actually going to be interpreted and enforced in practice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA...
Jan 17: Biden administration says it will leave TikTok ban enforcement for Trump [1]
Early Jan 18: Trump says he will 'most likely' give TikTok a 90-day extension to avoid a ban [2]
Late Jan 18: TikTok makes app unavailable for U.S. users ahead of ban [3]
Midday Jan 19: TikTok begins restoring service for U.S. users after Trump comments [4]
They already knew what was going to happen. They also changed the message shortly after disabling it from "We're working to restore service in the U.S. as soon as possible, and we appreciate your support. Please stay tuned." to "We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Stay tuned!" [5]
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-administrat...
[2] https://nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-likely-give-...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-makes-app-unav...
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-says-restoring...
[5] https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/tiktok-sends-notice-to-users...
From (2)(a)(1):
> (A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
>
> (B) Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of such foreign adversary controlled application for users within the land or maritime borders of the United States.
Possession of and providing non-distribution ( / maintenance / update) services to a "Foreign Adversary Controlled Application" are not in any way a part of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". Operative services are specifically and intentionally excluded from the list, to ease the burden of enforcement.
If not, what is your basis for your conclusion?
I think you mean "campaign promise."
No legally significant action has been taken between now and yesterday.
That doesn't mean TikTok would be able to continue operating, but it could mean the parties involved wouldn't have to suffer penalties for their operation up to that point (past the ban date). But maybe it wouldn't work, and a judge/jury would throw the book at them. We just don't know until and unless it goes to court.
If you're arguing that qualified immunity would enable Trump to break the contract if he so chose without consequence, then that is probably true, but I see no reason that would imperil the companies having a rock solid defense against enforcement penalties in the interim period.
Companies => Agree to temporarily facilitate the operation of TikTok until matters are further clarified.
I don't see anything particularly controversial here.
It's like betting on jury nullification but without the benefit of double jeopardy protection. It's unclear if any of the US companies the law is aimed at will risk it.
The courts on the other hand can permanently block laws.
no, the president can pardon individuals convicted of a criminal law, which is not at all what you describe here
So, pardons can very much apply before conviction or even prosecution. They may not pardon someone for something that hasn’t happened, but as long as there in office when the crime is committed that’s more a technical issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burdick_v._United_States
After President Gerald Ford left the White House in 1977, close friends said that the President privately justified his pardon of Richard Nixon by carrying in his wallet a portion of the text of the Burdick decision, which stated that a pardon carries an imputation of guilt and that acceptance carries a confession of guilt.[6] Ford made reference to the Burdick decision in his post-pardon written statement furnished to the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives on October 17, 1974.[7] However, the reference related only to the portion of Burdick that supported the proposition that the Constitution does not limit the pardon power to cases of convicted offenders or even indicted offenders.[7][8]
Is this really the case? Has this specific situation ever been ruled on by the Supreme Court? Burdick v. U.S. doesn't address "pre-pardons" or blanket pardons. Nixon was never prosecuted or tried.
The court ruled they could reject a pardon given before prosecution thus avoiding the need to testify about someone else. It would be a moot point if the pardon was invalid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burdick_v._United_States
But that's not the relevant part of Burdock for this thread.
The relevant part is that an (accepted!) pardon does apply before indictment.
TikTok I think was going for more of a shock factor. Maybe even without talking to Trump they have credited him as restoring it, might seem weird for him to “go back on it”.
Or maybe it’s to put him in good light.
This is the internet.
For example, why would the President have a veto power if he can simply post-facto ignore laws they pass?
No, SCOTUS ruled that the President is not subject to criminal prosecution.
---
On many, many occasions, the courts have ruled executive actions invalid.
On no occasion, have courts assigned criminal liability to a President.
SCOTUS explicitly affirmed that as the rule.
My comment was just re "SCOTUS also affirmed that"
Presidents can’t just ignore a law categorically (although they regularly do, e.g. DACA, DOMA, etc.) On the other hand, presidents can certainly decide not to prosecute a particular entity under a particular law. That’s the heart of the executive power versus the legislative power.
Here, Congress wrote an extremely specific law that applies basically to one company. Which isn’t impermissible. But it’s also not clear to me that Congress can insist on immediate enforcement of that law without crossing effectively usurping the executive power and directing the President to prosecute a specific company at a specific time.
Similarly, one of the reasons the president has a pardon power is because he doesn't have to enforce those federal offenses. E.g. imagine that a president without pardon power instead offers "plea deals"/settlements for a $1 fine or concocts vacuously lenient house arrest enforcement.
The original constitution basically accepts that there is very little you can make a president do, and it instead formalizes what would otherwise be a gray area (it does have plenty about what he can't do). Some of this has changed over time especially as the judicial branch has granted itself more power.
You could obviously create a far more functional system but it would probably be far less stable. The reason you have all these checks and balances, from top to bottom, is that the Founding Fathers were obsessed about the risks imposed by both a tyranny of the majority and a tyranny of the minority. And non-enforcement of something effectively comes down just a continuation of the status quo, making it difficult for any group to [openly at least] impose their will on others.
They even have broad immunity while conducting official acts up to and including breaking the law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024)
“Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), is a landmark decision[1][2] of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court determined that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution presumptively extends to all of a president's "official acts" – with absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate[1][2] such as the pardon, command of the military, execution of laws, or control of the executive branch.”
As to upholding laws passed by Congress--just two days ago, Biden did his last round of student debt forgiveness, bringing the total up to $188 billion.
I’m not trying to “both sides” this. I’m just saying that the standard you’ve articulated for how promptly the president needs to act on a law like this isn't the standard we apply in practice. The government tries to reach deals like this in lieu of enforcement actions all the time.
I understand that there was this law. It's a political statement because of the political message being sent out to the user base. The act of shutting down on its own is not a political statement.
It requires Apple and Google to stop distributing the app on their app stores, and it requires any US-based hosting providers that host TikTok services to stop providing those services.
ByteDance could shut down any US-hosted services and serve from outside the US, and be entirely compliant with the law. The TikTok mobile app might become out of date and stop working (for people who already had it installed on their phones), but www.tiktok.com would continue to work just fine.
And they were forced to use those hosting providers (oracle) by the US. It's not like investing loads to bring all the data over to singapore or so would serve them well either. They'd still lose the US business relatively quickly and with lower chances of turning things around like they might've. Why bother?
The option you describe is another among the several options available.
Unless you're saying that the service shutdown would not have brought Bytedance into legal compliance, which would be a novel assertion.
* Trump gets a free layup to look like the hero for unbanning it
* Trump will think hard and heavy in the future about banning it again, knowing there's a lot of passionate young people that will reconsider voting for him next election if he does
Seems like a smart move to me.
Plus has there ever been a US president that came back after a term away? Usually when a "new" president comes in you figure they'll be running again next time.
This was a political gift to Trump, as the messaging in TikTok's app makes perfectly clear.
If it's not that, it may well be as the original commenter in this thread suggested a stunt to make a point.
the protests had no bearing on the outcome of the bill. most of us didn’t even know they were taking place.
also if you look at the history of the bill, there is no mention of public opinion at all. They shelved the bill due to lack of agreement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2012-01-18
As for your claim they had no effect, that's not what the sources from the time say—on the day of the protests 13 senators announced their opposition, including 5 former co-sponsors:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/01/pipa-support-col...
When you lose five co-sponsors in one day and that day happens to coincide with the internet shutting down, I don't find it very credible to try to claim that there was internal dissent all along.
OnlyFans did something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyFans#Restrictions_on_porno...
The timing and phrasing make it clear that this was planned and negotiated in advance, and the shutdown was just for show in order to be able to post a memo about how "President Trump" saved it. If actual negotiation had to occur, it would not have happened in the twelve hours between midnight and noon on Sunday morning.
The point of the stunt was to persuade large numbers of younger folks that the Ds are the bad guys and Trump in particular is the hero. And it'll work as designed.
A spur of the moment decision would be more like Trump than a lengthy negotiation.
Also, expect to see that Facebook is partnering with TikTok on Monday morning. The head of the bill banning TikTok just invested 100 million in Meta... so I imagine there will be a followup announcement how Trump brokered some deal to Americanize TikTok or something.
Selling them out to the Russians? Well, it worked fine last time, a bunch of minor figures went to jail, but the boss remained untouched.
So why not sell out to the Chinese? Remember, it's only illegal when a Democrat does it.
Well, that makes this interesting. The bill also allowed a 90-day extension if they found a buyer and were in the process of finalizing it.
This may put this cringe ByteDance stunt and Meta/Zuck's pandering to Trump into more perspective. The Hero coming to save the day with a magical 90-day extension. As long as everyone plays their scripted part. On the other hand, it's probably just a funny timed coincidence that will pass in 3 months
[added] The president would have to approve any sale of apps caught in this law
Wait, if this is truly what this outcome was about, this seems.. huge? Can you share more information about that?
Who is currently in charge of the oval office is an irrelevant quality.
Note that the ban was not really on TikTok, but the ownership. TikTok could be owned by many other parties in the world. It just can't be ByteDance or parent/subsidiary which has ties to China.
How does that work? If congress passed a law banning TikTok how can the president just override it for 3 months? What's to stop him from overriding it for the next 4 years?
I've lost interest in this topic unfortunately, but its pretty clear even past all the legalese with the terms defined from what I remember.
But Trump already knows he is above the law, so none of this matters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0q_8zGJGxc
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-10-13/trump-...
What did Trump do to get TikTok back online?
At 17:05 in this video (and I believe discussed once elsewhere but I can't find it/don't want to rewatch it): https://youtu.be/pZkoV5UnPvw
I think this is debated, which is why Apple and Google may not bring back TikTok to the stores... at least that's what I read.
1. In the definition of a "covered company". The bill itself already saus that TikTok is covered; this is only a provision to add other companies to the list.
2. In determining what qualifies as "divestiture" to have the ban lifted. That's described as happening when -
> the President determines, through an interagency process...
"TikTok wrote me a big check and said nice things about me" isn't an interagency process.
Moreover, just in case we've forgotten, *Donald Trump is not currently the president.* He has literally zero power until tomorrow afternoon. He can't grant pardons, he can't lift law enforcement decisions, and he can't write executive orders. The promise of an executive order, even if such an order would be lawful tomorrow (which I can't understand how it would be), is not a legal document that can make something legal today.
For very weak definitions of power. Zuck didn't wait to bend a knee until the inauguration. Because power.
(a) Right of action.—A petition for review challenging this Act or any action, finding, or determination under this Act may be filed only in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
(b) Exclusive jurisdiction.—The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit shall have exclusive jurisdiction over any challenge to this Act or any action, finding, or determination under this Act.
(c) Statute of limitations.—A challenge may only be brought—
(1) in the case of a challenge to this Act, not later than 165 days after the date of the enactment of this Act; and
(2) in the case of a challenge to any action, finding, or determination under this Act, not later than 90 days after the date of such action, finding, or determination.
^ That is where the 90 day stipulation came from.
===
> Moreover, just in case we've forgotten, *Donald Trump is not currently the president.
Right okay, what does one do with that information? It's common practice for Presidents to collaborate with their successors during the handoff period. Both the Biden and the incoming Trump administrations collaborated on the Gaza ceasefire, as way to help gradually transition power.
> Biden says the Equal Rights Amendment is law. What happens next is unclear
> In response to an NPR question about whether the archivist would take any new actions, the National Archives communications staff pointed to a December statement saying that the ERA "cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions."
> “In 2020 and again in 2022, the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice affirmed that the ratification deadline established by Congress for the ERA is valid and enforceable. The OLC concluded that extending or removing the deadline requires new action by Congress or the courts. Court decisions at both the District and Circuit levels have affirmed that the ratification deadlines established by Congress for the ERA are valid. Therefore, the Archivist of the United States cannot legally publish the Equal Rights Amendment. As the leaders of the National Archives, we will abide by these legal precedents and support the constitutional framework in which we operate.
Pointing out that Biden, in contradiction the the US constitution, tried to alter the US constitutions. I don't make the facts, they are what they are.
Biden is just pointing that out, no?
https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2025/nr25-004
> “In 2020 and again in 2022, the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice affirmed that the ratification deadline established by Congress for the ERA is valid and enforceable. The OLC concluded that extending or removing the deadline requires new action by Congress or the courts. Court decisions at both the District and Circuit levels have affirmed that the ratification deadlines established by Congress for the ERA are valid. Therefore, the Archivist of the United States cannot legally publish the Equal Rights Amendment. As the leaders of the National Archives, we will abide by these legal precedents and support the constitutional framework in which we operate.
Don't post fake news.
Now, how exactly did the outgoing administration "try to abolish the constitution"?
No, he couldn't? It's not even clear he'll be able to do anything with an executive order when he is sworn in, but President elects certainly can't.
Would not be legally binding. The President cannot unilaterally bind the U.S., and he is free to make and break statements of intent.
Isn't it enough to see, smell, you have to touch and eat it repeatedly so you can conclude: yes, this is shit. You are now expert in shit eating and the professional opinion is that this is really shit, no mistake is made here!?
The Tik Tok in-app notes for "shutting down" and "we're back" both referenced Trump by name. I doubt they would do that without his explicit consent.
Trump beamed his name and heroics directly into the eyeballs of 50m people before he even took office. That wouldn't have happened without the brief blip going dark.
Odds are good he said he'd pardon them (which is a whole different story) but ensured they'd go dark for a few hours, either by withholding his guarantee or by directly coordinating it with them.
This is Trump. It's always about him. If we haven't learned that we haven't learned anything.
He's not even in power and already everyone's sucking up to him.
The ban was the stick and selling it for a lot of money was the carrot. ByteDance surprised almost everyone in choosing the stick.
shortly after Trump tried to force bytedance to sell its shares during his first term, the Chinese government passed laws to include the recommendation systems used in social media into the export control list. bytedance thus won't be able to sell tiktok without approval from the chinese government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/technology/china-tiktok-e...
the official export control list in Chinese
https://www.most.gov.cn/tztg/202312/W020231221620858841394.p...
it is on the 29th page, with export control number 086501X, item 18.
Seems like the goal pivoted recently - the goal is to keep TikTok Chinese and have them supporting the corrupt regime taking over the US, similar to other foreign adversaries have in the past
Government should stay out of the way, and I don't want to hear about it every ten seconds, on the other hand, I don't want to have to read the news every five minutes to audit what they're doing.
I worked on the bill. Everyone assumed it would hit the ban, get an extension, and then either remain banned or get sold to Elon, Ellison or a Brexiteer.
"It's clear that more time is needed to find an American buyer and not disrupt the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans of so many influencers who have built up a good network of followers" [1]
The deal was divest or ban, not look for "more time to find a buyer". My point is they were never prepared for an actual ban.
[1] https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/1880007290830688609
This is have your cake and eat it too politics. I can pointedly say that Schumer’s office isn’t surprised Bytedance ran out its 180 days.
There's too much effort and uncertainty involved in actually creating a problem and then actually fixing it.
It's much easier and more reliable to create the perception of a problem by promulgating lots of FUD, then engage in performative theatrics to nullify the FUD and proclaim the problem fixed.
If you create an issue, and solve an issue, indifferent of the issue being real, you'll be credited with solving the issue. It's ridiculous at this scale
Well, it would be the same as the distinction between real and imaginary in any other context.
Trump was against Tiktok before he was for it.
He was also against crypto currencies before he released his own.
> Hey, I bought $1,000,000,000 $TRUMP coin, can you ease up on $RegulationImpactingMe?
> Regulations are official actions, so sure I can take a look-see.
Interesting... are you able to expand on this? My understanding is that the $TRUMP coin runs on Solana, which similar to Bitcoin runs on a public ledger and therefore offers limited anonymization (basically none).
Anyone is free to make an "investment," there is no disclosure requirement, and an accusation of bribery (even if one could be made legally against a sitting president, which SCOTUS tells us it cannot) would require a provable quid-pro-quo.
and when transferred in a way that would otherwise require a disclosure to a politician or campaign, the crypto asset and transaction would also require a disclosure
if there are other benefits that the crypto world is superior at, then thanks for describing a use case and value proposition relevant on a geopolitical scale to the largest nations on the planet. a lot of people here cant imagine any because they arent the target audience
Not in a legal sense. In the US, donations to politicians and campaigns are tightly regulated. Foreign entities aren't allowed to donate. Donations have to be reported, are subject to limitations, etc.
In crypto, none of that applies. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can invest essentially unlimited funds into a memecoin. It's not technically a donation because you're buying something, and it's not technically going to Trump, because you're buying from some pseudonymous entity on the blockchain. Nevertheless, the money goes to Trump. It's an ideal venue for laundering bribes.
In contrast, any foreign party can purchase $TRUMP.
Sure, good luck enforcing that. Although crypto isn't anonymous, it is pseudonymous. In any case, you aren't subject to the same taxes as a traditional gift about $20000 and you aren't subject to the same regulation as campaign contributions.
> and when transferred in a way that would otherwise require a disclosure to a politician or campaign, the crypto asset and transaction would also require a disclosure
That's the beauty of the grift. "Investing in $TRUMP" isn't a transfer to a politician or a campaign: it's a purchase of a memecoin on a public blockchain. It's a way to give money to Trump without meeting the legal definition of "giving money to Trump."
> if there are other benefits that the crypto world is superior at, then thanks for describing a use case and value proposition relevant on a geopolitical scale to the largest nations on the planet. a lot of people here cant imagine any because they arent the target audience
I don't know what you're trying to say here. I think I just explained a pretty use case for crypto as a means to buy political favor. Other benefits of crypto include: (a) purchasing illegal goods, (b) defrauding naive consumers.
and the $DJT stock is already doing this as well
What you’re pointing out is just not a unique aspect of crypto or that interesting in the Trump portfolio of “things vulnerable to being used as kickbacks in a currently legal way”
Sure, but it's a matter of scale. It's difficult to rent a billion dollars worth of hotel rooms.
> and the $DJT stock is already doing this as well
Yep, that's another scam.
> What you’re pointing out is just not a unique aspect of crypto
Yes and no. Crypto offers a uniquely unregulated and perhaps unregulatable means for malfeasance. NASDAQ tickers are tame in comparison.
Fwiw, the moral of the story is not "all crypto is evil" but rather "crypto should be regulated like any other instrument in order to prevent fraud" and perhaps as a corollary "sitting presidents shouldn't be issuing their own meme coin."
Sure they are, but they should explain why they changed their minds. In the case of meme coins like $TRUMP, it's hard to defend crypto as an investment or as a currency, which leaves the obvious reason: it's a scam.
In the case of Trump, I'm sure he was all for crypto as soon as he realized that he personally could make money from it. Same goes for his NFT grift.
He appointed a bunch of corrupt Supreme Court judges, and they upheld an obviously unconstitutional law (bill of attainment). Now, on his first day in office, he gets to be a hero by unilaterally deciding not to enforce the law.
So, moving forward, (1) we should expect increasingly unjust and draconian laws, and (2) as long as you do what Trump asks, you can break whatever federal laws you want.
(Zukerberg, Bezos and Trump have already gotten in line for this.)
Trump has never had any issue he has not been on both sides of. He has no ideology, he does what benefits him in the moment at any given moment.
To clear, they want kids in cages. Did I read that right?
I wish people would understand that Trump has no ideology. Over a span of decades, Trump has been critical of liberals and conservatives, often at the same time. He's praised conservatives and liberals, often at the same time. His political positions are aligned with whatever benefits him the most.
He doesn't care about making life better for the middle class. He doesn't care if immigration restrictions are relaxed or tightened. He doesn't care about whether or not transgender people have access to health care or can or can't serve in the military. He only cares what positions on those issues will benefit him and his friends at any given time. And if tomorrow holding the opposite position will benefit him more, he'll switch, just like that, and somehow convince his base that's what they believe too.
Trump is the one who was championing the idea of a TikTok divestiture or ban, back when he was president the first time. He's only changed his mind on that because opposing the ban is better for him now.
Either because they gave in to the ploy, or because they were unable to close a TikTok deal, the Democrats look incompetent here. And Trump gains favour in the younger demo (that he's already pretty strong in) AND with SMB because he gave TikTok more time.
Anyone doing graft, corruption or just questionable wealth accumulation in the millions or single billions is going to look like small ball for at least the next four years.
In Trump's world, I think you should cause a problem, blame somebody else, and then fix it.
The app stores removed the app in accordance with that timeline too.
The Biden administration said it would be left to the Trump administration to review, they had no reason to shut it down. It’s purely to force Trumps hand a bit.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/TikTok_v...
Please do some research next time before spreading lies.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520...
“It is a stunt, and we see no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days before the Trump Administration takes office on Monday. We have laid out our position clearly and straightforwardly: actions to implement this law will fall to the next administration. So TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them.”
Please do some research next time before accusing people of spreading lies.
I wouldn't say following the law would be purely to force a hand, I would say multiple things can be true at once. They still had liability.
Other government agencies, like the SEC, has been filing court cases all the way till the last minute even though they’ll likely get dropped tomorrow. It is understandable to take a risk averse approach for a company.
It did not, nor did it have the authority to, waive the apps stores requirement under the law to do that. To remove the potential for future enforcement actions (up to 5 years in the future) punishing them for failing to comply with the law. Neither will Trump even once he is president unless and until amongst other things ByteDance signs legally binding documents that they will divest from TikTok within 90 days.
"Rep. Mike Waltz calls out the Biden campaign's TikTok account: 'They should be ashamed'":
* https://www.foxnews.com/video/6346831867112
Waltz chosen as Trump's national security advisor:
* https://www.npr.org/2024/11/11/nx-s1-5187098/trump-national-...
And currently "Trump security adviser doesn't rule out continued Chinese ownership of TikTok":
* https://www.reuters.com/technology/trump-security-adviser-do...
So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A number of internet services (e.g. Wikipedia) shut down temporarily on Jan 18, 2012 as a political statement against SOPA.
Trump as a private citizen, can't issue a statement and automatically over-turn a law.
If someone wants to enforce the law, they still can. It's still on the books, and Supreme Court upheld it.
Till now, commenting or criticizing someone was fair game, not anymore. Musk and trump have shown they can petty and vindictive. So no more commenting in public too. Not sure what this does to the press. Over time people will be trained to think free press is bad too.
Certainly he is petty and vindictive. But there have always been petty and vindictive people in power, and people that were too scared of them to speak their mind. But there have always been those who still dare to criticize people in power.
Given that lack of accountability, is it unreasonable to suggest the stakes will be even higher in 2028? If there were no consequences last time, why wouldn’t there be an even greater effort to challenge the outcome, should the need arise?
This isn’t a binary issue of whether the president is all-powerful or powerless. It’s a spectrum, and since 2020, we’ve objectively moved further toward the "all-powerful" end. The absence of meaningful checks and consequences has set a precedent, making it harder to draw the line in the future.
Can you re-read your sentence and ask yourself if this is a normal thing to say in a working democracy? That this is even on the table means Trump IS a dictator. He was just too dumb to know how to make it work in 2020. From a non American lens, it actually looks like you handed power to a dictator because he won "fair and square" this time. I have trouble believing the US will have another genuine vote in my lifetime.
Tons of people criticize both of them. In fact, both Musk and Trump have publicly criticized each other, and have now made up.
Vicious, vindictive, petty, nonsensical, random, and trolling tactics are all strategically useful in this media landscape.
In another example: how many people know that, after the 2000 election, the Supreme Court found 7-2 that Al Gore's proposed recount strategy was unconstitutional? Nobody knows that Al Gore had employed a strategy of hand-counting ballots only in counties he had won to find more countable votes that would swing disproportionately in his favor.[1] The media completely blacked that out, and everyone now only remembers the 5-4 part of the decision addressing how to fix that constitutional violation. There's more people under the misimpression that Kathleen Harris or Jeb fixed the election in Bush's favor than understand the sneaky maneuvering by Gore that precipitated the whole mess.
[1] E.g. if Gore won a county 2:1, then statistically, every vote rejected by the machine that could be hand counted would be twice as likely to be a Gore vote than a Bush vote. Gore found a loophole in Florida election law that allowed him to use that principle to find more votes in his favor by seeking hand recounts only in two large counties he had won.
- Clinton only won because Ross Perot siphoned votes away.
- Bush didn't win, the Supreme Court handed him the Presidency.
- Obama isn't American.
- Trump was only elected thanks to Russian interference.
- Biden didn't win, the election was stolen.
It's a tactic that gets used because it seems to work, at least in terms of rallying one's own troops.
It is asymmetrical warfare on the truth.
Democrats literally just lost an election because of their tremendous ability to lie to themselves: Biden isn't incapacitated; selecting candidates based on race/gender doesn't compromise on quality; immigration has no drawbacks; etc.
Regarding selecting based on gender compromising or not compromising candidate quality is a vastly more compex question. It is sad that a lot of people have a simple answer to themselves. That immigration has no drawbacks I have not heard anywhere, seems like a position you assign to democrats, not one they hold.
Except Kamala Harris put the correct answer to that question into stark relief. Everyone knew from 2019 that she was a terrible campaigner and manager. But Biden picked her as VP and then Democrats picked her as the nominee because they were able to lie to themselves that she was an accomplished individual rather than someone who had moved up within California uniparty politics because of her race and gender. Selecting people considering race and gender in an effort to “make history” or correct past wrongs is a deeply misguided practice. But I didn’t expect it to blow up in people’s faces quite so quickly and spectacularly.
You only are able to say so because Trump won - with hindsight.
Politicians lie, constantly. All of them. Yes, even the ones you like. Saying Republicans lie and Democrats don't is practically self-propagandizing, convincing oneself of something they'd prefer to be true.
ALL politicians are equal-opportunity liars: if there's an opportunity, they will lie. Sometimes for power, sometimes for money, sometimes because they owe a favor. It's a big club, and we aren't in it.
> ALL politicians are equal-opportunity liars: if there's an opportunity, they will lie. Sometimes for power, sometimes for money, sometimes because they owe a favor. It's a big club, and we aren't in it.
If you genuinely believe this, how do you determine which way to vote?
It's not like you can call a particular set of politicians (country or party) pathological liars and then take seriously election promises from any member of that set.
That's about the best any of us can do.
(Considering where I grew up, "the worst of them" would mainly be Boris Johnson: even if I don't like many of the other better-known UK politicians, they at least seem to say things that reflect their actual value systems, whereas Johnson… https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-qa-what-di...).
Also, you can now commit crimes and then pledge loyalty in exchange for a pardon. See Eric Adams.
It's not "never". JD Vance published a book criticizing Trump, and still got picked as VP.
This is great. Sociologist tells us that any given person can only have 150 friends maximum, same goes with enemies , it will be very long 4 years for whoever sits in the 150 enemies at any given time, but all things considered they aren't people too dissimilar compared to Musk and Trump.
While petty revenge goes on, policy as always gets ignored and problems emerge (inflation, other pandemic etc) and the whole thing will collapse because at the end of the day even a perfect and experienced captain won't be able to steer perfectly a 400M people strong super tanker such as the US, let alone a vindicative one busy lashing out on his enemies aboard.
It will end up like the Evergreen in the Suez canal.
This is pretty much the exact same setup that US companies get in China. This seems like a pretty decent compromise actually. Free speech advocates win because people still get to use the service, but national security folks also get a win because they can monitor its use by a foreign government and shut things down if it’s being used maliciously.
I wouldn't call required government control a free speech win.
There are real concerns that the CCP could use it as a tool to manipulate and spy on the American people. There’s a good reason why Tik Tok is being banned in many countries around the world. Also a good reason why China bans and tightly controls American social media companies in their country.
But if we agree to compromise, we can ideally find a balance where the average American is best served.
Seems to me that this strategy is as best not earnest and at worst only serves those in power.
I do believe that both sides of the political spectrum agree that there is a special threat posed by Chinese involvement in American social media. This TikTok ban was pushed forward by both sides of the aisle and has had support from people in both administrations.
Social media in general is ofc toxic and terrible for all kinds of other reasons, but WRT national security TikTok is so huge now that it’s getting special treatment.
I mean, no? Meta, Google, X, Snap and American social networks in general are banned in China.
https://oversight.house.gov/the-bidens-influence-peddling-ti...
What's missing is Joe Biden's involvement.
If your politics are against Joe Biden, I guess you can just kind of imagine that he must have participated.
IMO, we should find corruption in politicians flat unacceptable, even if -- especially if -- they are on our own "side".
You may want to become concerned when the president can unilaterally contravene laws passed by congress and validated by the Supreme Court.
It seems prudent to say given this seems to the prevailing narrative: this did not happen. The law is still in effect and Tiktok is still banned[0]. The service shutdown that many experienced yesterday was one Tiktok performed voluntarily, presumably in protest of the ban. Tiktok's decision to restore the service was one they could have made at any point after the shutdown, regardless of any statements made by the then-President-Elect.
0: If you don't believe me, uninstall it from your phone and re-download it. ;)
IIRC the Romanian and Kazakstan ones were also heavily thrown into doubt.
whole thing reads like whataboutism
Also, when one of those "what abouts" is verifiably false, as in the case of the guy who made claims about Hunter's laptop, it's completely meaningless. Those people are comparing to something that doesn't even exist.
It's a stupid, losing game that way too many people want to play.
How many pump and dump crypto scams is Joe up to? "Media" company stock sell offs? Hotels he puts government employees in so he can charge their stay?
Neither of these are acceptable, a president and their associates should not be able to personally enrich themselves from the office. I know this disclaimer won't matter to someone who just really wants to argue, but this does absolutely nothing to move the needle for me. Pointing to someone else's corruption to excuse Trump's corruption is just a losing battle, you will never convince me to care about one when the other is just allowed to fly.
For those who haven’t seen it yet, go watch Idiocracy from Mike Judge. It’s a preview of the years to come.
> Come on, scro! Don't be a pussy! Besides, you do a kick-ass job and you get a full pardon.
At least Biden let the process play out before issuing the pardon so the public got to know all the details.
It's a film that was intended as a joke, and uses Eugenics as its premise. Yes, the Internet has made idiots louder, but it has also helped intelligent people become smarter. The next 4 years will be like the last 8, minus the pandemic.
Yes, calls to takeover ally countries and releasing a presidential cryptocurrency really remind me of the last 8 years.
What has happened to Americans??
We still haven’t restored the part of the US federal government that stopped SARSv1 (they operated out of China and other countries with the cooperation of local authorities). Trump disbanded them before SARSv2 (aka COVID-19), so they weren’t around to respond to it.
Also, we’re still funding the biological weapons research programs that almost certainly created COVID (according to documents from multiple departments in the Biden administration).
On top of all that, RFK’s trying to switch everyone to raw milk in the middle of a bird/cow flu pandemic. That creates a new disease transmission vector that’ll probably help it cross to humans.
Factually true about the correlation between higher standard of living and having fewer kids. However, that exact discussion has been used as a dog whistle against other "undesirable" groups in the past. The movie's beginning implies it would be better if we decide who gets to have kids.
Overall a great movie, but I think that part has aged poorly.
Given that the phenomenon is essentially real, what do you think that means?
Is reality problematic?
Look around! I'd say so! :)
Uh, false?
eugenics includes positions like "unfavorable should reproduce less than the favorable"
The future has been clearly telegraphed, and who is going to stop him?
In his own words years ago, he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and his supporters would find excuses for him.
Does he have a coherent position on this that these actions support?
I'm not really joking, because that really does seem to be the underlying philosophy in what he does: it's whatever he thinks makes him the "big man tough guy". Trying to analyse things beyond that just doesn't make much sense.
Now on Taiwan, he's already stated previously that he will _tax_ China if they invade Taiwan. This contradicts long standing US policy of not stating exactly what action the US will take in the event of invasion, and has had the result of pushing up projections of exactly WHEN China will invade Taiwan to be within the next two years, during Trump's presidency.
The only thing that will possibly make this change is as a condition of financial supporter Elon Musk, who needs those NVIDIA cards that come out of Taiwan so he can pursue his religious mission of winning the AI race. And that's only if TSMC manufacturing capabilities can't be dragged out of Taiwan and set up elsewhere in a sufficient timeframe to reduce the impact if China were to invade Taiwan.
What you or I view as "big man tough guy" doesn't necessarily align with what Trump views as "big man tough guy". In Trump's view, "solving" the problem of Taiwan one way or the other, when so many other presidents have "failed" to do so, makes him the big man. Whether he completely screws over American interests in the process – never mind the people of Taiwan – doesn't really enter in the calculation.
There is a good chance there will be no more fair elections in US.
What the hell happened? For anyone that honestly believes that, why pack up and go home when Trump wins the election?
The question is about how we handle the coming elections four years from now, not the previous one. If he's going to be a dictator it will only be possible when he's in power.
By what the hell happened I mean what happened to those claims? Did people not believe then, or are they resigned to the election results meaning we just accept the end of democracy?
If I revolt against the government that is 100% breaking democracy.
If I wait and see what the next admin does, that is maybe 50% (fake numbers) likely to break democracy.
You can think DJT is bad for democracy and also think it is more bad to try to toss out an election he won.
If you're revolting because democracy is already lost, or the loss is imminent, you weren't breaking it.
> You can think DJT is bad for democracy and also think it is more bad to try to toss out an election he won.
Not if you truly believe democracy is doomed with his election. I don't believe that, but if someone does I don't see how waiting for it to happen helps.
Ending democracy is a very serious thing. It shouldn't have been used hollowly by either party, and if it wasn't hollow then people should be standing up to stop it.
We did do whatever we could to stop it. We tried every avenue available.
We tried impeachment twice, but he was protected by his party. The first time they protected him for extorting a bribe from a foreign government. The second time they protected him for inciting an insurrection. We tried the DOJ but he was protected by a federal judge he appointed, and supreme court justices two of which he appointed granted him sweeping immunity from prosecution. We tried to constitutionally disqualify him from running on the basis he incited an insurrection, but again he was protected by judges he appointed. Our last recourse was to run on a pro-democracy candidate during the election but the people rejected her.
So we tried everything. But the election was fair. He won. That's that. We tried everything else, and anyway at this point it's too late without resorting to a violent coup, which supporters of democracy won't do. There are no other pro-democratic avenues left to protect democracy from Trump. Sucks it turned out this way, but at least you can't say you weren't warned.
You mean like the two assassination attempts vs Trump? Which only made Trump's power greater and consolidated more support?
Aggressive actions literally make Trump stronger. That's literally failing to work and we're living in the fallout of that. I'm not sure how to stop Trump but inciting violence seems like the wrong answer to me.
Besides, its the US Military. We all know that its impossible to actually rebel vs the Army. What do you want a rebellion to do? Grab a couple of AR15s while the Army literally brings in tanks?
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Aggression is a failing move. But so was a political campaign that tried to convince people of Trump's dangers. So that's that. Or are you seriously trying to bait people into arguing that more violence was the answer here? Did you literally forget the election already?
What more "marching" do you want? The only escalating point now is violence because all the marching from 2024, 2020 and all other years accomplished nothing. Indeed: even just "marching" in 2020 was apparently "too violent" as Black Lives Matter (a march to protect African American lives) somehow got twisted by Donald Trump and his politics into a "violent" march.
I think it makes sense that people are cautious about the next steps. But what the hell are you wanting people to march for? To deny the election and cause a liberal Jan 6th event? What are you even talking about? Even if people did that, it'd only play to Donald Trump's persecution complex and he'd get more power anyway. And its not like anyone would be marching to force Biden or Kamala back into office, neither candidate is popular enough.
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The actual move is to retreat from Federal level politics and hold firm at the State-level side. If the Federal Government is lost, the focus should be on more local bastions and defenses.
The fact remains: the resistance wants to be peaceful and non-violent. You've taken away the voice of the peaceful ones by labeling them as violent at every turn. So we know marching doesn't work anymore. Its not like the movement is dead, its just resting for now as people figure out what the new plans are. But its clear that a direct assault vs this ideology isn't working.
My point at the start of this thread was that, in my opinion, the level of certainty with which people claimed Trump's election was directly voting for an end to democracy does not align with actions since the election results were in. Either people didn't believe those claims even while saying it, they have since been convinced otherwise, or they rolled over knowing full well that democracy is over within a matter of years.
My point is why is the latter so hard to understand?
There isn't a way to resist directly anymore (especially as both Biden and Kamala are insufficient to serve as the focus of a hypothetical coup). There are other plans in place to have resistance at the State levels, where it will be more obviously beneficial.
Any most of the escalations we can do are once again, counteracted by the simple history that is the assassination attempts. It's clear that the path to violence to stop this madness is closed.
--------
It's not the time for direct confrontation at the federal level on this subject. It's the time to pull back and defend at the State level.
Have you seriously thought about how to stop this in any way in the past few months? Your questions are so shallow it's making me think you only have talking points to share. After an election loss like that (not a landslide, but still an obvious loss), there is no coup potential or other kind of way for the Democrats to even try to hold onto power.
Not quite sure what talking points you think I have to share here, I thought I was laying out a logical flow that doesn't make sense to me.
Circling the wagons at the state level is a good short term approach, though if successful I don't see how it doesn't first run into the unfortunate need for violence.
As a country we have spent the better part of a century moving a large portion of powers to the federal level. States can't just ignore that and do what they want without repercussions. Maybe more importantly, I don't see how a stage could continue to run democratically as part of the union if democracy is destroyed at the federal level, there would just be too much conflict there.
This point. The point I've been quoting specifically.
I've stated why this is an incredibly shallow perspective on repeated occasions. I'm not going to repeat myself.
> As a country we have spent the better part of a century moving a large portion of powers to the federal level.
Tough shit. Democrats lost the Executive, both branches of the Legislative, and the Supreme Court. Democrats have literally nothing in the Federal level anymore. Or have you forgotten how this election has gone?
Its all Republicans here on out at the Federal level. The ONLY plan is to fight at the state level to protect those close to us.
The Federal level has been completely and totally lost. The ONLY plan that makes sense is to build bulwarks at the state level, and if that isn't enough then maybe even at the municipal / city level.
And so the organizations pushing these lies need to move onto the next lies to keep the rage and fear going. Maybe this time around it'll be Trump is secretly controlled by China - must be why he reversed the TikTok ban.
His campaign is large enough that there's probably some guy in it, no more than a degree or two separation away, banging a Chinese spy a la Eric Swalwell. Tie it to Trump, start a new committee of absurdity and away we go.
It'd actually provide some logic to banning TikTok which was just politically absurd when Trump would predictably reverse that, to much fanfare.
Trump is the most willing and equipped to strike a fatal blow to Democracy.
People have already marched against him. Now they rightly fear for their safety.
I get your point here, though if I'm not mistaken they defined the boundary of what any president can be legally held accountable for while in office. It wasn't a blank check or a one-off rule only for Trump.
> People have already marched against him. Now they rightly fear for their safety.
Marching really isn't the answer if democracy truly is at stake, unfortunately. I very much dislike Trump and don't expect him to do well by our country, though I don't personally see enough to think he is actually going to tear down our democracy. Hopefully that's right and we don't get to the point of actually having to defend it.
Genuinely. Because for me, it’s enough for someone to incite an insurrection, and to argue in front of the Supreme Court it should be legal for him to use the military to murder his political opponents. Why does that not read “wannabe dictator” to you?
Because I gotta say, if you’re wrong and he wants to tear down our democracy, the time to defend it was the election. Now we just have to deal with the fallout.
He was president once, and was not able to pull off a successful insurrection, or murder any political opponents. And he probably won't do so this time.
Trump doesn't need go full militant to end democracy. He could literally just cause enough bullshit in the process to where the two choices are either let things continue as he wants them two, or mass civil unrest and economic shutdown, and most people don't have a sense of nationalism to pick the latter. So US dies a death by 1000 cuts.
The only hope is that there are more people like Pence on the Republican side that when duty calls, they do the right thing.
Checks like Congress, a majority of which is terrified to stand up to him even after an attempted coup and comically bad cabinet appointments?
Or the courts, many of whose judges he appointed and shamelessly render verdicts (often on his behalf) without recusing themselves over conflicts of interest?
Or the executive branch, of which he is the head, and can cycle department heads like an episode of The Apprentice?
> He was president once, and was not able to pull off a successful insurrection, or murder any political opponents
The US passed an entire amendment to its constitution to prevent insurrectionists from repeated attempts to take over. The fact that he attempted to do so is already treason. One doesn't have to succeed to be disqualified. Otherwise what's the point of the amendment? Just keep trying until you succeed.
The first time Democrats tried to impeach Trump, Trump argued in front of the Senate that he's allowed to commit crimes, including extorting bribes, as long as he does it for the good of the country. On that basis, the Senate acquitted him. So now the the standard set by Republicans is that even in the case of extortion and bribery, the president should not be removed from office as long as he had a patriotic heart.
Worse than that, the Supreme Court affirmed that the president has sweeping executive immunity, making any prosecution of an impeachment case impossible; the Executive controls all of the information Congress would need to prosecute the impeachment, and as we saw during Impeachment I, Trump is fine to just flout congressional subpoenas. Furthermore with the new doctrine of Presidential Immunity there is no judicial recourse for them to compel production of the documents they would need to prove an impeachment case.
Finally, we further know impeachment is impossible because when they tried it, Trump argued the correct recourse was the courts. But when we tried the courts, Trump argued the correct recourse was impeachment. That cannot be the case in a functioning system.
I do think trump is capable of it, as where others in the past. I just haven't seen enough to think its an legitimate enough threat to have made me warn others that it will happen. I could always be wrong.
And so if someone does make that argument in front of the highest court in the land with the intent to avoid accountability for inciting an insurrection, as Trump did, maybe that person would be a bad person to give immunity from criminal liability because of their outlook on the scope of their own power.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-suggests-hell-us...
The Boy Who Cried Wolf is an excellent tale I regularly read to my children. The moral is one of the utmost importance.
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4398223-trump-t...
And what, exactly, is someone supposed to do about it? Legally. Besides voting, obviously. That ship already sailed.
The president-elect literally floated the idea that his voters wont ever have to vote again if he won.
You're wondering why people who are pro-democracy are respecting the outcome of the election?
Pro-democracy people will want to find ways to strengthen or preserve democracy (or at least limit the damage) in the face of threats to it, not blow it up themselves.
The courts were too slow to stop the sweepstakes and now that Trump is in power, we all know Musk would be pardoned of this crime. So no one is bothering to prosecute.
The election fraud already happened. Now tell me who the hell is going to punish the troublemakers?
I don’t have an answer to your question.
Because the reality is, a good majority people in the USA have a very good life, even the lower class, contrary to what the media may have you believe. So when the majority doesn't show up to vote, its because they think it doesn't matter who is in charge.
These are the people everyone should hold primarily responsible for whatever bad things happen. The MAGA type crowds are always going to exist in one shape or form, and its everyone's responsibility to vote so that the bad side doesn't take power.
Not sure if you are serious, but the problem on both sides of the disagreement is caused by the illusory nature of consciousness, and is exacerbated the fact that our culture does not study that phenomenon despite how incredibly important it is.
This is what people should be arguing over rather than yet another consequence of it.
Simply put, this is law breaking. The President-elect is making promises to break the law day one. This is not surprising.
> With respect to a foreign adversary controlled application, the President may grant a 1-time extension of not more than 90 days with respect to the date on which this subsection would otherwise apply to such application pursuant to paragraph (2), if the President certifies to Congress that, […]
where “would otherwise apply” is pretty clearly not predicated on the preceding section having come into effect or not.
>the President may grant a 1-time extension of not more than 90 days with respect to the date on which this subsection would otherwise apply to such application pursuant to paragraph (2), if the President certifies to Congress that-- (A) a path to executing a qualified divestiture has been identified with respect to such application;
>(B) evidence of significant progress toward executing such qualified divestiture has been produced with respect to such application; and
>(C) there are in place the relevant binding legal agreements to enable execution of such qualified divestiture during the period of such extension.
It seems highly unlikely any of those criteria are being. Trump is not even suggesting it, never mind providing receipts.
(A very common example: many people in the US can walk into a store and buy marijuana without fear of prosecution because the last several presidents -- from both parties -- have chosen not to enforce that particular federal law.)
Certainly the courts can (and sometimes do) get involved, but the only thing that can force the executive branch to act is for the House to impeach the president, and for the Senate to convict. And the House is not going to impeach Trump over this, or pretty much anything.
Scenario one: We get an FDR style leader to fix this stuff after a massive economic collapse and public backlash. (As Biden posited in his farewell address.) This will either lead to court packing or (like last time) the lapdogs on the court will accept their new leashes.
Scenario two: The federal government suffers a partial or complete collapse, and the US ends up being city-states or like the former USSR. (I think this is more likely, and also what Putin wants, assuming he can’t keep Trump under control.)
It’s also possible we’ll continue to have fair elections and the courts will stop abusing their power. This seems the least likely to me.
Under all other scenarios, we’re completely screwed and the current courts will already go along with it.
So you think there's a >50% chance that one of your scenarios will happen? Would you like to put some money on that bet?
Biden wasn't considered to have broken the law when courts threw out his plan to forgive school debt. The president tried something, the courts found the order to be invalid as the rule didn't fit the current laws, and everyone moved on about their business without claiming the president broke the law or implying he should have been charged.
Who's going to look at it? Whichever sycophant ends up being AG?
I could see a world where the lawyers have cooked a progressively more egregious set of legal violations to test the bounds of the new authority granted by the Supreme Court. Up next is probably a mandate that foreign diplomats/us government employees stay at trump properties at exorbitant prices for “security purposes”.
If you're talking about a future administration, we've already seen what happens when Trump leaves office and people try to hold him accountable: absolutely nothing.
People have been saying that about Trump's antics literally his entire life.
1000% yes. Not only is it going to survive, but it will probably beat out all other major fiat currencies over the next 4 years.
If you're comparing against other major fiat currencies that's a pretty easy bet. The only way the dollar loses meaningfully, or fails completely, is if it is no longer the reserve currencies given priority over those other fiat currencies. This has to happen eventually but it seems pretty safe to say it won't happen within four years.
No, Trump can’t legally postpone or give reprieve to TikTok. The time has passed for that.
Once Congress has enacted a statute and the President has signed it into law, the executive branch must enforce it. An executive order cannot override or suspend a duly passed law unless Congress included an explicit waiver or suspension provision in that law. Nothing in the text of this act appears to grant the President such discretion, so there is no straightforward way for the President to “undo” or pause the ban by executive order. The only way to alter or lift the ban would be through new legislation or a valid constitutional challenge in court.
That seems unlikely considering the Supreme Court already rules on the matter.
Also, both the House and the Senate have pending legislation to extend the deadline.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/391 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/103
* Legally the executive is not granted this power.
* But in practice they are because who's going to make them?
The entity responsible for enforcement always has this power. It's why DA races where the platform is essentially law nullification by way of non-enforcement have been happening for some light criminal justice reform that can't get through the legislature.
I think we're all very certain that a thorough investigation into the 2020 election will clear up any concerns about it.
So then presumably this goes back into court, and then what?
There will be no consequences and therefore few limits to his power.
Welcome to the new dictatorship.
I'll post this here for posterity:
He'll find a way to get a 3rd term in power. Maybe he'll claim the constitution means no 2 consecutive terms, maybe he'll just ignore it, start a war, whatever.
But I'd be willing to bet on it. In fact, I just might...
We can play this game all day, so let's just agree Democracy is broken.
Obama was surprisingly tough on immigration. ICE was doing raids at the time, I remember hearing about raids at the industrial chicken farms not far from where I live. Obama was also working heavily with Mexico to stop immigration at Mexico's southern border.
Illegal immigration is going to be an unsolvable problems regardless of party, as long as we have the incentive of welfare programs that make it financially lucrative just to physically be in the country. I'm not arguing to get rid of those programs, but the incentives are there to come illegally and there's just no feasible way to secure such a large border with land, air, and sea travel.
In essence, the executive branch already had a chance to veto the law, but didn’t do so. The signature of the President (whomever that is at the time) seals the fate of the law.
"Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates. Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps developed by ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries — including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and others — will no longer be available for download or updates on the App Store for users in the United States starting January 19, 2025."
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/121596 - "About availability of TikTok and ByteDance Ltd. apps in the United States"
Donald Trump is very unpredictable, but one thing seems to be clear from his behavior. Anything that serves to benefit himself or his family tends to receive his favor. And there are billionaires swirling around him ready to do him favors two of whom are potential buyers for TikTok.
Or what?
(I'm not being flippant. Are there consequences I'm not aware of if he decides not to enforce?)
The thing that is shocking to me about the current TikTok situation is that while Trump may be free to say "I won't enforce this law", he can't write any sort of executive order overturning the law, and I think it's pretty disgusting the media isn't pushing back against this more (except for Kara Swisher, who made this exact point) and saying this isn't possible.
The law is explicit that any company (like Apple, Google or Oracle) that provides services for TikTok would be in violation of the law and subject to large penalties. Nothing Trump says as president can change that without Congress acting. So it is simply baffling to me that these major companies would be willing to put themselves in serious legal jeopardy with just what amounts to a pinky promise and a wink from Trump.
It's President Trump, what are you going to do about it? The man has been regularly breaking the law since 2016 and there is never any political will to stop him.
Trump v. U.S. established it's not illegal when Trump does it.
As any other mixed authoritarian regime, the laws matter somewhat but are also balanced with the intent of the guy on the top.
And I did say authoritarian, not dictatorship, those aren't the same level. There's a lot of shades of black between Norway and China.
Of course lawfare is the tool of the democrats, and not republicans, like you seem to believe.
All those opportunist-narcissist shit-stirrers out there rely on the prudent and consequently slow self fixing mechanisms of societies (beyond the dumb and lazy childish masses vegetate below these figures and so looking up to them) like viruses on the delayed adaptation of the immune system. The host that feed them may easily die this way? Not their problem!! They have their shine and rule moment and they do not have much of miserable and futile life left anyway, f*ck others!
However, now I think it's the same infinite scroll we already had in twitter and reddit -- but instead of text and images, now it's just videos.
At the beginning the content was really dumb and bad, but after some time it became way better. Now my feed is basically cooking recipes, chemistry experiments, interesting physics facts, bits from my favorite comedians, etc. Maybe Youtube learned my tastes, or maybe the content creators learned how to exploit better the platform. Either way I'd say I'm happy with the result now.
I still think some people are getting brainwashed by certain content, but in the same way as they were getting brainwashed in twitter and reddit.
For short videos, it is a continuous stream of video's where a new video is automatically started after the last one. This is what makes shorts so horrible. You are forced to watch a new video every 15s to 1 min. Versus actively deciding yourself how long you look on a particular item. It becomes bad as your brain gets trained to loose interest after 1min.
Both are like using slot machines but on tiktok you win (dopamine hit) more often - or at whatever rate the house wants you to.
I frequently give up on reading a thread midway down the page because it's requiring *too much focus*, and, get this, I might even interrupt my break and just go back to work early instead!
I don't think that would ever happen on a neverending infinite scroll of hyperengaging video.
Videos cram so much stimulation over such a short period of time
Text you still have to read
Hypothesis: video is more addiction, regardless of content
Because at least for physics and chemistry, those are topics where, in my experience, you need deep, sustained engagement to make any personal progress on them.
Sure, you can probably learn a few fun facts through TikTok but really what's the point?
There are only 24 hours in a day. The hours you spend doomscrolling through - in the best case - fun facts about physics and chemistry are hours you spend not doing anything of value, like learning about actual physics or chemistry.
I get that you don't need to be doing something super productive all the time, what I'm saying is that I think you're fooling yourself if you believe that TikTok and co. are anything more than the shallowest form of entertainment available.
I think you might have a point..
its very telling how, while youtube (classic) also has these same ingredients, the ux of looking through a menu is far less addicting than the slot machine mechanism from swiping up
Then again, we lost that battle with misogynistic, language-rotting, and violent rap music because we were too worried about being called racists, so there might not be hope we'll do better this time around.
It wasn’t the gutting of the educational system, that’s far too simple an explanation.
But at this point, we also have a separate category of things that pretty much on their own are having a negative effect on society. That would be things like TikTok (including Instagram Reels, and Youtube Shorts).
The fact that they're not trying to come up with a new UI paradigm, or discovery mechanism is very telling. They keep focusing on semi-random swipe-directed discovery, and that tells me they're not interested in making the best content available to you as the interested-consumer. They want you wasting time and generating N-counts of redundant ad views/impressions/things before finding that one thing you wanted or might find interesting.
Youtube is probably the best at at-least trying to not force you to swipe (when watching normal videos). But even there, we can see how much people complain about "The Feed" or "The Algorithm". With all of Google's money and effort, they couldn't (or chose not to) find a better way at matching viewers with good content.
Out of curiosity, how deeply have you considered the question? And, might that depth not be a function of the norms in the forum?
It is so easy to find reports and evidence of how Tiktok could be of great value to people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/dining/tiktok-ban-cooking...
https://www.today.com/popculture/books/what-is-booktok-meani...
And OP didn't even mention all the small businesses that took off due to TikTok giving them an avenue. This notion that people have to dismiss TikTok as merely mindless dopamine is really just wilful ignorance.
Wow, it goes deeeeeeep.
Edit: found one from Pew. "The share of Americans who support the U.S. government banning TikTok now stands at 32%." Sept 05, 2024. In contrast, 87% US lawmakers voted for the law that caused this.
Support has declined and opposition has increased. I don't think there's much of a disconnect here though, since it doesn't seem there are many people with strong opinions counter to what Congress chose to do.
That group seems like the most interesting question... what sub groups do they fall into.
The amount of propaganda on TT is rather huge, though I won't say any different than US media, just more of it these days oriented to how 'good' China is.
If tomorrow China becomes a global beacon of high-quality and affordable healthcare, maybe US will actually feel some pressure to fix its issues.
Vote for your congress members.
But that's why it isn't a direct democracy. Sometimes government needs to do things that are not popular.
But of course this is always going to be an opportunity for a populist to take advantage of the disconnect. Sometimes, as in this case, that is damaging. But of course it's well within the rights of politicians to play that game.
If you're diaspora and other smaller interest groups for sure, but the general citizen probably wouldn't care at an individual level. I'd argue that the NSA revelations and how everything just got worse and worse since then killed any chance of the public caring about this kind of stuff.
I hope our adversaries believe the same one day!
We have proof. There is no guessing here.
But it's a big problem that the framing has often been about the data privacy thing.
But I think older people do care now about the potential for hostile foreign propaganda affecting our politics, and I think the younger folks who (reasonably!) care more now about losing their favorite entertainment app will grow up and understand the propaganda problem when they're older. That is, I don't think it's a generational thing, I think it's an age thing. And politics is driven by people over the age of 30.
The vast majority of security threats does not cause any public outrage. It is dealt with behind the scenes.
People do, and after Snowden revelation, they wonder why they should care.
The population was forced to accept the fact that they are constantly spied on 10 years ago.
Decisions have consequences.
Whatever it is, this has gone off the rails and the public is going to need a real explanation if they decide to move forward with the ban.
The relevant poll would be one right after the ban was enacted on bipartisan support. It's far too politicized now meaning that a huge percentage of people will simply support/reject it purely based off of "their candidate" being for/against it.
This holds for both sides of the debate.
I think there are probably some people who are pushing this for self-interested reasons (American social media apps) but also I think the stated reason for the ban is probably the truthful motivation, and I'm ambivalent about trusting the US government and US corporations not to spy on me, but I tend to trust the US government when they say they are trying to stop China from spying on me. And if zero people spying on me is not an option, well, fewer people would probably be an improvement.
Right. If the Chinese government is not using TikTok to spy on citizens of their adversaries -- or, more likely, influence citizens of their adversaries -- then the Chinese government is full of incompetent fools. And I think it's safe to say that the Chinese government is not full of incompetent fools.
If the only tool we have for measuring Washington's behavior against public opinion is one that doesn't accurately reflect public opinion, then that means that we just don't have a reliable way to measure Washington's behavior against public opinion.
Can you point to the source of your argument? Furthermore -- can you point out how this particular poll is one of the misleading and incorrect ones?
So given all of that, I think the burden of proof is properly the other way around. Why do you think this particular poll is reliable?
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/super-awkward-clip-republica...
Note that a majority/plutority becomes more skewed when aggregating constituencies.
Granted 52% -> 87% is still a big increase, but there you have it.
It is not clear if it would have passed if not that procedural trick... So one has to take this into account when considering 'bipartisan support' of the thing.
90% of Republicans in the House voted for the TikTok ban alone. 73% of Democrats.
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202486
It is very clear that it would have passed without that procedural trick, because it already did.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/recipients?id=D0000335...
Congress members invested in Meta:
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/members-invested?id=D0...
You're highlighting a completely different problem that's longstanding and happening regardless if we're talking about enemy states. Be nice if we could solve the Musk/Zuck issues, but I don't suspect we will as we worship the altar of money.
You do realise that, should US allies apply this principle themselves, US companies will suffer? Most UK media is foreign owned at this point. As is our water supply, transport and energy
And Elon’s rampant disrespect and general behaviour are inviting that day.
Let's see how long that lasts.
As for the rest, what is the relevance?
US money influences our politics through shadowy think tanks and pushes it to the right. US-owned water utilities take on loans, use them to pay dividends and drive themselves into bankruptcy.
Being a US ally doesn’t buy us better treatment from US billionaires, they are still predatory vultures.
I do not. I can hold a person accountable to their vote on this legislation. Their vote on this legislation caused the Supreme Court to release an opinion that affects every citizens 1st amendment rights. Now if they released a statement at the time condemning this while also talking about the importance of the aid they might have some leeway.
I don't know why these kinds of shenanigans are still possible. It makes a complete joke of politics and legislation (and by extension: law).
I know I'm shouting at clouds here, and I know the reason is: the sheeple don't care enough to change this thing for the better. But I still feel the need to point it out.
I don’t agree with the widespread usage of such “tricks”, but I do understand the harsh reality and limitations of representative democracy.
First I've seen this theory and it makes a ton of sense in light of the new discrepancies between what US and non-US accounts can see and search for.
There are lots of conspiracy theories online. However, I think it is just that the process of bringing the stack back up may be difficult. They also have a huge shopping network, that has also been down, and there are emails/communications to shops saying they are working on fixing it. Also, when I take a link from TikTok and post it in a downloader app, it no longer works since the URL is broken.
Maybe some microservices did not come back up (outage), or maybe they were knowingly compromised as part of the extension deal. While I can see that Lives can not be censored, I do not know the reason for shopping to be disabled, so I suspect it is an outage.
[ Actually shopping is also "live", so maybe that's why ]
We will probably find out over the coming days.
(but not in a way relevant to the TikTok topic)
Their preference to shut down instead of receiving tens of billions of dollars would be a clear violation of a company’s fiduciary duty to shareholders for any normal company. But ByteDance’s allegiance isn’t to their shareholders.
https://action.aclu.org/send-message/tell-congress-no-tiktok...
https://www.thefire.org/news/fire-scotus-tiktok-ban-violates...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/eff-statement-us-supre...
It seems to me that they aren't "pretending" they honestly believe the issue is about free speech. Laws that does not explicitly curtail free speech but effectively still does just that can certainly be created.
The physical equivalent would be if China was hosting a TED-talk-like conference where anyone can come and hold a presentation, and after certain kinds of talks became popular congress would tell them that they are no longer allowed to let Americans in, neither to hold presentations nor to listen to them.
Technically that doesn't violate the constitution, but it's not difficult to argue that it does violate the spirit of the constitution
Those Americans can host the exact same content on youtube or any of the many other video hosting sites.
This is not a free speech issue, it is a megaphone issue.
So if the alternative places where such speech could be hosted were extremely limited, expensive or very difficult to use then the law banning a platform could create an unreasonable burden.
Of course, plenty of comparable alternatives do exist.
>>>> It would be harder for me to learn piano if my teacher was convicted of murder.
>>> Nonsense. You can easily find another piano teacher.
>> Right, just like people who use TikTok can easily find another short form video platform.
> That's a terrible analogy.
Nonsense. If TikTok was convicted and shut down because of rampant financial fraud, your First Amendment rights would be similarly unaffected.
TikTok was told to close because they refused to bring their corporate ownership in line with requirements set out in US Code passed by Congress. The content of any video was never at issue.
I think if that were the situation then yes the first amendment would be in issue. But I don't think anyone is saying that this is happening here. As I understand it this has nothing to do with what anyone is saying on TikTok and there are no social or protest movements gaining ground on TikTok that the government is trying to suppress. The only issue here is the foreign ownership and how that ownership is used. I don't think anyone is saying the government is doing this to silence any TikTok users
At some point, it becomes State Propaganda masquerading as grassroots activists.
Control over content can influence and distort public discourse and understanding. This is also against the spirit of free expression envisioned in the constitution and instead injecting an intentionally divisive voice.
Sort of true. Sometimes the constitution just says "persons", which has generally been interpreted to anyone.
But it's not material, because the 1st amendment is a restriction on congress. That's why it starts with "Congress shall make no law...". The argument isn't about if TikTok has rights, it's about if congress is authorized to take this action. They're inter-mixed a bit because if TikTok does have the rights they claim, then congress automatically isn't authorized, but they are separate.
There were some people on here saying that national security is just a pretense and the government is actually doing this because they dislike some of the content being posted on TikTok. I don't know if that's the case but if it were then I would concede there is a first amendment issue. But absent that I think it's safe to say that this case doesn't raise the first amendment.
I still think it does, but it's Apple and Google's right to propagate the app, not TikTok's right to be on the app store. And since neither Apple nor Google are party to the lawsuit, nobody really has standing to take that particular line of argument.
And it's also important that divesting was an option instead. In your analogy, they couldn't ban the books outright, but could demand they be published somewhere else.
The First Amendment case would be much clearer if this was actually about banning access to TikTok (it's not: TikTok self-blocked US users, Amazon/Oracle shut off servers, and app stores stopped distributing to US users). TikTok could choose to operate their service (like many other Chinese companies) using only non-US infra and without relying on American companies to distribute their app; indeed, the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, hosted entirely from Chinese servers, continued to work just fine.
This case is also a reminder of why the iOS App Store is so bad for rights: at least on Android, you could sideload a 'banned' app; Google can comply with the law and US users can still download TikTok. On iOS, you don't have that option.
It is a big sign that we live in a police state that the courts are willing to be politicized to the point that they are willing to ignore this obvious trampling upon the human rights of both the app publisher and the app’s users.
Also, iOS users can go buy a tablet or phone that can sideload. Also, tiktok.com is a thing that works on everything.
This isn't about censoring content, it's about preventing ByteDance from collecting personal data from 170M Americans that Chinese law requires them to hand over to their government.
Furthermore, the 1A is a restriction on the government and isn’t related to whether or not someone is a citizen.
There are lots of things congress is prohibited from doing under the constitution, including against foreign entities. Congress can’t ban a foreign religion operating in the US, for example.
You’re quoting the Declaration of Independence.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8...
> Also, tiktok.com is a thing that works on everything.
Sounds like you're arguing against yourself. TikTok hasn't actually been banned.
Forced corporate divestiture is a thing, for example Merck.
Corporations are considered "legal persons" for the purpose of applying the law to them in a convenient and organized way, but in real life, corporations are just organizational models employed by human beings for the purpose of coordinating their activities.
The restrictions applicable to what the government is allowed to do to "people" as defined in the constitution apply regardless of what organizational models those people are using to coordinate their activities. Ultimately, everything in society reduces to people, and the government is not entitled to use reified abstractions to escape the constraints on its authority.
And this ruling had little to do with any of that -- the first amendment challenge was that the ban imposed content-based burdens on the speech of the users of TikTok, and the court ruled that it did not. So the ban therefore survived the challenge under intermediate scrutiny.
The domestic vs. foreign ownership element of the ruling only pertained to the evaluation of whether there was a compelling government interest in enacting the ban, not whether the government was exempt from first amendment scrutiny at all.
That Constitution also includes numerous clauses granting Congress the authority to regulate international commerce (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3). TikTok is a foreign commercial enterprise. We have restricted foreign products and services since the Boston Tea Party.
Of course there is. It’s obvious that a huge chunk of the momentum behind the TikTok ban stems from a desire to suppress anti-Israel content.
The actual purpose of a law or system is the actual outcome of it and not what it's dressed up to say its purpose is. A law that says "we don't allow mosques unless they're owned by people not descended from countries on a terrorism watch list" is still an infringement of the freedom of religion. We don't have to pretend there's good faith here.
This is at best vacuously true. Since China is the most powerful adversary of the US, you'd say that literally anyone else is more under the thumb of the US government than they are.
Like with tik tok, the ban itself isn't a speech issue because there's nothing bytedance can change about it's communication to not be banned, it's an ownership problem.
Yes. Foreign-ownership rules have been a thing in America for almost a century [1].
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli...
Clearly it's not.
Yes, the government can make laws that effect speech platforms just like we can make them pay taxes.
Shocking news: different players have different motivations.
You can say the same thing about an antitrust law that forces Alphabet to sell Youtube.
Go read the SC unanimous judgment. It’s very clear and lays out exactly why they’re wrong.
In fact they do a lot more than that because they state off the bat that there isn’t even a first amendment question (a Chinese corporation doesn’t have first amendment rights in the U.S.), but they go beyond, assume the first amendment does apply, and still explain why that isn’t valid.
How is this ban actually enforced? By fining American companies for serving specific content. That is the First Amendment issue. SCOTUS simply asserting that it's not in order to make their ruling convenient does not actually make it so.
Is that also free speech? Again, it's just the law and how it is enforced.
"Foreign governments saying things" also existed at the same time the 1st Amendment was written, and there were no carveouts from 1st Amendment in light of that.
In any case: If SCOTUS during its early cases on copyright law (or copyright on the Internet) simply asserted "this has nothing to do with the 1st Amendment," they'd also be wrong. That would be a clear avoidance tactic not to wrangle with the substantive issue. In reality, the big cases on copyright are riddled with 1st Amendment questions, considerations, and constraints.
No, it fines American companies for providing services to a certain foreign-owned company.
If this isn't permissible, then sanctions can't be a thing and OFAC can't do its job. (Whether or not that would be a good thing is a separate issue.)
A SCOTUS that simply asserted these questions do not exist would also be laughable.
One very recent entry on this discourse:
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/knight-institute-and-foun...
The law indeed needed to be carefully written to "skirt" any first amendment violations, and SCOTUS unanimously agreed it had done so successfully.
Universal City Studios v Corley
Haven't these people heard of Wickard v. Filburn?
How can the first amendment be interpreted so broadly that large multinational corporations financially supporting politicians is considered free speech, yet so narrowly that social media isn't part of the media?
As for social media - it's an advertising platform. The algorithm is deciding what you see based on what sells ads. Who is exercising free speech there? Tiktok and Meta are exercising corporate speech in the name of profit making. They have no right to host such a platform, and the government certainly has the right to regulate it if they do have one.
The government can't compel Meta, Tiktok or individual users to say X, Y, or Z, they can declare the ads-based algorithmic-content business model illegal or subject it to strict regulation - especially when its in the furtherance of free speech, like preventing Facebook from deplatforming people for having the wrong opinions that advertisers don't like.
You do realize that Rupert Murdoch was forced to become a US citizen because of the same laws that are in question about US media ownership.
Social media is 100% the media. Social media has freedom of speech. Businesses don't have freedom of ownership, including media business. Kinda fucky, but this is very long standing law.
In cases from "Roe vs Wade" to "Masterpiece Cakeshop" and "Hobby Lobby" the ACLU came out against things supported by the religious right. And although the ACLU regularly supports the free speech rights of swastika-tattoed nazis - Republicans don't see that as supporting their side, because no reasonable person wants to think people with swastika tattoos are on their side.
You seem to be confused between principally defending everyone having the same rights vs defending everything anyone can do.
The ACLU defends Nazi’s rights because they believe Nazis should have the same rights as everyone else irrespective of who they are.
That doesn’t mean they defend every possible action that can be considered a civil liberty.
Eliminating traffic laws would make individuals more free in a literal sense, but those rules also make it so people can get from place to place quickly and safely. The liberty interpretation is that what people actually want is to travel, not to drive however they like. So you trade a freedom most people don't miss to enable another.
Vaccine mandates are a great example of this contention where under normal circumstances nobody cares about having to get vaccinated but they do care about not getting polio. Covid was strange in that the number of people opposed was significantly larger than I think anyone expected.
It always seemed to me that the US was fuzzy when the very clear text of the Constitution rubbed up against the realities of a complex State. For example,
- the 1st Amendment doesnt say the speech can be overridden by a compelling national security interest, which is the argument here. But the US has security services, and legitimately there are cases where to allow speech does harm. But if you are going to be honest, shouldnt there be an amendment giving the State an override of 1A?
- 2A is infamous, of course, and for the love of $deity lets not discuss it here, but why does "not abridged" get overriden by bans in, say, machine guns, which have been on the books since the Chicago gangster era? Either you abridge or not. Or at least be honest about it .
- Some speakers in the covid era made a very strong appeal to personal bodily autonomy when it came to vaccine mandates. Ok, let's follow that. Does it not then also follow that a woman cannot be forced to carry a baby to term? That would seem logical, but the connection is not made. Conversely there is no "commonweal" override written into the Constitution and we are left with random SCOTUS decisions over the last 240 years.
The courts have various categories for how important something needs to be to allow certain levels of unconstitutionality, eg suppose I have "legally" built the nuclear device featured in a recent kurgesatz video with enough kiloton to start by itself a nuclear winter kill every person on the planet... I seriously suspect SCOTUS will be ok with the state taking the ignition keys away from me
No it isn't. The argument here is that it isn't a restriction on speech at all.
An amendment process that in practice is impossible to exercise is just as good as having no amendment process at all.
No, and no one is saying they can. The law says American companies can't do business with a certain foreign-owned company.
It is beyond settled in law that this is something that the US government can do.
Sure, the government can do that, and when doing so infringes on Americans’ speech or access to information, it introduces First Amendment questions that must be addressed.
“The government says CNN can’t post stories from BBC” isn’t immediately resolved by “it’s a foreign company.”
But this doesn't do that. Everything that Americans could post or watch on TikTok, they're still allowed to post or watch anywhere else.
Is the government allowed to shut down Harvard because the same classes can be taken at ASU?
Neo-Nazis are a subset of Nazis though, no?
In the context of "literal Nazis" the ACLU had argued for the rights of - like the German American Bund, which contained actual members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, not exactly.
I would very much agree this is the case. But it's not how a lot of people think
Tolerance is a social contract of leaving alone others whose ways differ from your own so long as they do the same for you.
One must not tolerate those that call for violence and subjugation of differing groups, which is almost the exact opposite meaning your comment seems to be implying in my reading of it, instead calling for wholly unfiltered speech by whosoever should deem to speak.
Racists and similar hatemongers calling for others to tolerate them while they are screaming for those they disparage to be caste down and out cannot be tolerated in any reasonable forum.
As such, any reasonable forum must ban some facets of free speech.
That we disallow this power for governments is a reasonable limit on the powers of the elected to rule, lest those powers be abused.
Thank you!
In September 2021, the ACLU wrote a New York Times op-ed defending vaccine requirements, arguing they actually advance civil liberties by protecting the most vulnerable and allowing more people to safely participate in public life. David Cole and Daniel Mach, the authors, wrote that individual liberty isn't absolute when it puts others at risk.
Surely, one can be pro vaccine mandates. But I would not expect a civil liberties organization to hold this position.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/opinion/covid-vaccine-man...
Requiring inoculation/vaccination, shut downs, masks, and quarantines was generally considered a legitimate use of state power to prevent the spread of deadly diseases and not an infringement of civil liberties.
Actually this goes back to even before the US was founded. George Washington imposed mandatory smallpox inoculation on his army during the revolution. This probably contributed significantly to his victory because both the British army and native tribes that had sided with the British were heavily weakened by smallpox but Washington's was not due to that inoculation requirement.
There may have been isolated examples in the past, but the degree was not the same.
I am personally happy with vaccine requirements, but IMO the ACLU should have been defending the people who weren't.
That’s a clear curtailment of their civil liberties. And assuming they’re in a rural area may not harm anyone else either.
This is an obviously extreme example but the point still stands. Any civil liberties organization cannot focus absolutely narrowly on that question in every situation but has to apply a broader approach.
>but the point still stands
On what, exactly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
All individual rights are balanced with the rights of other individuals/society. You can be given the choice to vaccinate or be forcefully quarantined. This has occurred many times in the US and the right of the state to do this has been upheld.
While corona was weak we will eventually seem some dangerous bullshit spread and the anti-vax dipshits are going figure out exactly what their rights entail as they are being drug from their house at gunpoint with the express will of the majority of the population.
It is unambiguously unconstitutional to prevent everyone from traveling, even for quarantine purposes. It must be evaluated on an individual basis subject to judicial review to establish that the individual presents a clear and present danger, and only for a very limited duration. No different than restrictions on speech.
This is the reason no State anywhere, regardless of who was in power, instituted hard lockdowns during COVID. This is known to be settled law to such an extent that attempting to prevent the population from traveling without clearing the strict scrutiny standard would be met with an instant Federal court injunction, likely coupled with a withering public statement questioning the competence of the State’s Attorney General. There was no upside in taking that risk.
The idea that you can forcibly quarantine someone solely because you don’t like their choices is wishcasting, not based on credible Constitutional foundations.
Edit: Maybe they didn't.
Interestingly, the myriad freedom of travel cases happened so long ago and were so decisively settled as a strong right that everyone has kind of forgotten about them because there is little interesting left to decide. Not as controversial as questions around the meaning of speech. But I think the last significant questions were addressed around the Second World War.
A broad, sweeping quarantine in relation to COVID would have been so unpopular that you can see why they went about it in a "softer" way, but sometimes the government can't have its cake and eat it too.
Those vaccine mandates were broadly ruled illegal, even in light of the quarantine power. These sorts of civil liberties are complicated, and the ACLU found themselves on the wrong side of this one.
If someone actually went to court over this, I would hope/expect that the NRA would send some lawyers. The ACLU isn't that into the second amendment and has never been. However, nobody has gone to court over this. They did go to court over vaccine mandates.
By the way, the only grounds the government would have to stand on here are radiation-related. It is broadly legal to use explosives on your own property unless you're too close to someone else's property. It is also broadly legal to build your own weapons.
There is "freedom to" and "Freedom from" lots of people not getting vaccinated affects people's freedom from getting infected.
> Honestly these "civil liberties" orgs have lost the plot a long time ago, or are just at "useful idiot" mode
Exactly. When I read "many American civil liberties organizations think," my first thought was "they think a lot of things, that doesn't mean what they think is true or a good idea."
Additionally: they're all essentially lawyers arguing one side of the case. Just listening to them is not going to lead to the correct outcomes (e.g. if courts only listened to prosecutors only, tons of innocent people would go to jail; if they only listened to defense attorneys, tons of guilty people would go free).
I think “trying to pretend” is just one of those thought terminating cliches to pretend that you have a winning argument.
Anybody with that kind of financing readily available is throwing it at AI and not another social network, no matter how useful it might be for domestic propaganda.
Don’t need trust when you have the second most powerful state entity backing you. Corporate America has a complete jammed full history of its interests getting screwed over by foreign entities only for the US government to step in either with military force or some coercive measure resulting in a corrective action. Im sure China is well aware of this playbook and are probably apt to copy it too.
Why would the US government be involved in paying tens of billions ?
The idea is that ByteDance would sell it to Meta, X, etc and would be a private transaction.
Just like happens in China and in many other countries.
The CCP would not miss out on taking advantage of the situation and demanding trade concessions for agreeing to sell. US government would absolutely be involved in raising the necessary finance, as banks won't be bending over backwards to lend Musk money for another speculative venture.
Congress doesn't appear to care if TikTok survives or not. TikTok bans are not news.
* If ByteDance divests their US TikTok operations, they create a new competitor that could potentially out-compete them in other (non-US, non-Chinese) markets.
* Whatever amount of money they get for this divestiture would be much lower than what the business is worth to ByteDance (when your options are sell or shut down, potential buyers will not feel the need to bid high).
* ByteDance's US TikTok operations are certainly of non-financial value to the Chinese government. That value is likely orders of magnitude higher than their financial value to ByteDance. Selling that user base is probably not preferable to shutting down. Influence campaigns are certainly easier to run on a platform you own, but certainly those campaigns are already running on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Why add another platform that they can't control where they have to run influence campaigns?
They should have seen a law like this being passed coming years ago. That is more than enough time to divest.
Too late now for them, I guess. They can take the financial hit for being so bad faith.
Why wouldn't American investors still want to buy it?
My guess is that American investors would want to buy it, but want the algorithm, but ByteDance is not willing to sell the algorithm out of fear that sharing it would degrade its competitive position outside the US.
Look up Mitt Romney’s comments where he plainly says they need to ban TikTok because they can’t control the narrative on Israel-Palestine. Narrative being his word.
First I've heard of this.
The conflicting legal obligations remind me of the Microsoft "safe harbour" case, which is becoming a lot more relevant and still isn't really adequately resolved.
Ironically this would be enforcing the very same law that exists in China, where all companies have to be majority Chinese owned.
Subtler manipulation still works great, and the opacity of algorithmic content recommendation makes that an ideal instrument. Nobody outside ByteDance knows to what extent the CCP is putting its thumb on that scale already, but they certainly have the power to.
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/an-update-on-recent-conten...
A different account operated by the same user was banned for something relating to an image of bin Laden in a different video. I've been unable to locate that video. I haven't found any reference stating that she praised him. She described her use of that image as satirical, and TikTok itself seems to recognize that (but stands by that ban):
> *While we recognize that this video may have been intended as satire, our policies on this front are currently strict.
In any case, the video in question is the Uighur one. TikTok quickly stated that one was a "human moderation error" and reversed it. My point is irrespective of whether their rules were morally correct or correctly applied, though--whatever those merits, they clearly drew more attention to the topic by censoring here, not less. So it's not surprising they don't apply blunt Chinese-style censorship outside China, since it's counterproductive without Chinese-style control of all major media.
One day test prep schools are illegal and immediately shut down. Tech CEOs suddenly became pariahs and started getting carted off to re-education camps. Etc.
You never know what could happen to an executive, company, or sector.
So functionally maybe a little like Albertson's is the only legal party, but if you prefer your region can have a subsidiary of Albertson's like Safeway or Shaw's.
If you read Marx, communism isn't possible to achieve until after capitalism has run its course, so the way things are in China ATM are perfectly at harmony with that.
It's like saying the Pope isn't Christian. It's really a hidden statement about gatekeeping.
To give an example for comparison, a lot of people want to say socialism is about workers controlling the means of production. But that doesn't come close to covering all of the things that were called socialism that existed before someone proposed that definition.
With communism it's similar but at least I'm not aware of any one jingle that people are pushing as the one true definition.
But there are definitely lots of people who want to say they understand Marx better than everyone else and the Soviet Union doesn't count as communist because of x. China doesn't count as communist because of y. Etc etc. it's a way to preserve an identity as a communist without having to admit there are any downsides.
For what it's worth I'd argue that capitalism is even less well defined and I've heard it used to describe every economic system that's ever existed including all communist countries.
That’s not what I did, and I’m not a communist. I’m specifically talking about China because people use the label, deeply incorrectly, to portray them as a threatening other, as though they work in a super different way to us and threaten our way of life.
> But there are definitely lots of people who want to say they understand Marx better than everyone else and the Soviet Union doesn't count as communist because of x. China doesn't count as communist because of y. Etc etc.
Im no scholar, but I’m pretty damn certain you can’t have a strong free market, alongside the consequent wealthy capitalists, under communism. Words have meanings, and that’s not what anyone or their mother would think of as communism.
Edit: I think the distinction is important because the US has a tendency to label things communist before it goes to war with them, whether cold or hot.
See, names are meaningless.
This is not strictly true - when a company leaves a huge market, it is imprudent to leave behind a well-resourced competitor in place. If I were a ByteDance shareholder, I'd hate if it spun off TikTok America LLC, and then having TikTok America compete against ByteDance in Europe and the Rest of the world on an equal technological footing, but perhaps even deeper pockets from American markets.
And if anything, if tiktok US is sold it will be way below its actual value, so there are many reasons to resist this apart from the political ones. And I assume they expect they will come to a concession in the first place.
Would you argue for Tesla or Apple to sell to China? Do you think Musk would divest his China business? The parallels are almost identical
1. Tesla cars collect a huge amount of data.
2. Tesla is already banned from being driven by government officials.
3. Tesla has the best self driving algorithm
4. Chinese cars are already banned in the US
5. China is Tesla's second largest market
6. Tesla is the 3rd largest EV company in China
Would you be surprised if Elon decided to exist China instead of "receiving tens of billions of dollars" from China?
"Free enterprise" is a fantasy. We don't have that, pretty much never had. And I think that's a good thing. Free enterprise/free markets tend to monopolize and prey on workers and consumers.
This has been a possibility for a lot longer than 8 months. Trump was talking about it during his first term more than four years ago. You can take the time to line up buyers even if you don't end up having to sell, but if you have the time and then don't use it, whose fault is that?
> Besides I don't think any company's strategic decisions like this should be solicited by a government. That goes against the free enterprise.
Of course it's not free enterprise. It's a government regulation.
If the US passes a law that says US companies aren't allowed to do business with Russia, that's not free enterprise either. Should those laws be unconstitutional? Maybe, but not any less than this one.
It’s a restriction on my speech. Telling me where I can publish a video? Telling me what apps I can download? Telling my software vendor what software they’re allowed to let me get? Telling internet providers what servers they’re allowed to let my device access?
The law doesn’t fine TikTok. The law fines the people who let me download an application I’ve chosen to use. At $5,000 per instance.
It’s not about TikTok’s rights being violated. It’s about mine, and yours.
Why do people on hacker news keep drudging up freedom of speech ad nauseum??
It is just such a ridiculous argument but if you repeat nonsense enough times, people start repeating it back as if it is real.
We never had to deal with this before because the WW2 generation was obviously not stupid enough to let the KGB publish children's books and Saturday morning cartoons inside the US and have a KGB influence campaign that says to ban the books/cartoons would be a free speech issue.
Obviously a non-starter. What you see with Tiktok is how completely infiltrated and corrupted things are in the US in 2025.
The unrestricted war from China started a long time ago and the IMO the US has already lost.
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." ― Sun Tzu
As is "everybody is installing Red Note." The people who think this is true are the people who use tiktok.
It's not a free speech issue.
Given that the infra for serving US tiktok customers is in the United States(inside of Oracle Cloud), I am curious if Tiktok/bytedance responds to US law enforcement requests.
You have it backwards. The US gov is concerned that an app installed on half of all US cell phones is controlled by a company that is 100 percent beholden to the Chinese gov.
“ At the same time, a law targeting a foreign adversary’s control over a communications platform is in many ways different in kind from the regulations of non-expressive activity that we have subjected to First Amendment scrutiny”
And the opinion talks about foreign adversary, those exact words, at least 30 times. It mentioned freedom of speech twice
And “free speech absolutism (for me, not for you or anyone else)” is the current right-wing cause celebre.
So if I wanted to hold a speech how corrupt the government is and then the government passed a law that a PA supplier isn't allowed to sell me a Microphone or speakers, that wouldn't infringe my first amendment right because I don't have a right to a microphone or a stage? (Im not American so I don't have any first amendment rights anyways but for arguments sake.)
It's the PA supplier would be in a better position to argue that their rights are being violated. Especially if a single customer was targeted because of their political views / protected characteristics etc.
The problem with the TikTok scenario is that no specific group is being targeted for restraint. And the government does have the right to regulate trade. E.g. there are embargoed countries, export controls, etc. The fact that you can't sell raw milk across state lines is different from a hypothetical restriction on selling raw milk to, say, people named Todd.
Your comment however draws a weird parallel later on though but first let’s take a moment here:
> Your 1st amendment rights are not being infringed by being denied access to TikTok
That is what the court found but it opens some interesting questions that really do have impacts.
I would bet that you would find a law that says op-eds can only be published in an approved list of venues to be clearly wrong, yet it is equally just determining venue and not content.
As would a law which banned foreign ownership of venues while also introducing a regulatory scheme for domestic ownership stakes of sensitive industries and defined news and commentary as a nationally security sensitive industry. (Which this law essentially does for certain types of apps.)
So at some point a law can be “content neutral” and about access to venue not content but I bet almost any reasonable person would agree it’s an unreasonable restraint.
Now for a situation you draw the above as a parallel with but is very different:
> just as the far right isn’t having their 1st amendment rights being infringed by being denied to use BlueSky as their platform.
Bluesky can do whatever they want but if the government were to get involved in defining regulations around which users could use BlueSky… yes absolutely I would expect it to be thrown out on first amendment grounds and expect it’s a significantly stronger case than any of the examples above.
It’s a much weaker and almost irrelevant case when directed at a non-governmental organization in which some folks are using “free speech” as an argument over what entities which are not enjoined from almost any actions may do with their own venues. But yeah, if it was the government telling BlueSky who to ban? You bet that’s got first amendment implications and I’d expect a court to review it under strict scrutiny. (And I wouldn’t expect it to survive.)
That's a poor analogy, because allowlists and blocklists are not the same thing and do not have the same effects. The government only allowing a list of certain approved media outlets would be an obvious 1A infringement. The government blocking certain media outlets is not.
Is the difference really about whether you can post on the platform or not?
Another huge difference is broadcasting is about usage of a shared resource and has always had regulations on who is allowed to do what. They don’t ban RT from setting up their own venue or printing a newspaper. RT and other outlets are able to operate in the US and people are able to chose to watch them.
This is like arguing graffiti laws are censorship.
Graffiti bans are unquestionably constitutional. Graffiti laws that regulate the content are not.
Telling people where they can speak is precedented, legal and necessary. Telling people what they can say is against the principles of free speech; the government doing so is illegal.
The law (and the US constitution) does not guarantee any particular platform for your speech. It just guarantees that you can speak, and courts have interpreted that to mean that you need to have some reasonable platform, and that laws can't put an unreasonable burden on your ability to speak on some platform.
As an aside:
> Telling internet providers what servers they’re allowed to let my device access?
The law does not target internet providers at all. They are not required to block traffic to *.tiktok.com or any of their IP addresses.
You are being ridiculous now. None of those are forms of speech.
And restrictions on your ability to perform certain actions is literally what being in a society is about. If you don't like it then find another society. Just like you can find another ISP, place to publish your video or platform to use apps you want to use.
The foreign-controlled part in particular implicates Congress's obvious and explicit power to regulate international trade, and it seems obvious to me that there would be something less than strict scrutiny applied to alleged violations of the 1A when that Congressional power is in play.
(I also agree that this is a different case, I only point to Bernstein because it is a clear part of case law which states that software distribution is and can be a free speech issue and restraints on it would be expected to be evaluated with some level of scrutiny.)
They concluded that these regulations were okay at those levels of scrutiny, but it is not absurd or ridiculous to analyze these as forms of speech, and indeed, our courts do so.
That said, just because there is a conflict with freedom of speech doesn’t prevent all government regulation, it just means the laws involved must pass an elevated level of scrutiny. That applies here, for multiple reasons, and with multiple parties.
Not that the case is relevant because restrictions on the availability of products is well established under the law. I can’t just buy nuclear weapons for example.
Isn't use of any non-violent means to advocate one's belief to change the society is the whole point of the democracy? Your point is rather very totalitarian.
This is incompatible with living in a society.
I also see why people are interpreting my comment to mean that because it’s a restriction on my speech it’s not constitutional because that’s how people usually act on the Internet. But I don’t and didn’t. What I said was it was a restriction on my speech and I believe that’s more of interesting case than the restriction on TikTok’s speech. The ramification of that is that the courts would adjudicate the free speech restriction at an appropriate scrutiny level and determine whether that restriction is allowable. As we all know, some restrictions are allowable and constitutional. Others aren’t.
It’s not unreasonable, wild, or strange to point out that there’s a restriction on speech here, and to point out that conflict needed to be resolved to determine constitutionality.
Most are handled at the district level, if the court felt there was no legal issue at play, they would have denied cert. Their opinion did end up being per curiam which suggests the court feels clearly about the case, but does not suggest they never felt there was an issue worth arguing.
I don't agree that it is, though. The restriction is on where you cannot put your speech[0], not on the speech itself. If there was nowhere that you could put your speech (or if the available avenues became much much much smaller in reach), then I would say that your speech is being restricted.
But that's not the case here. You can publish that same speech on YouTube, Facebook, Threads, Instagram, Twitter, and a host of others where you can reach more or less the same audience you can reach on TikTok.
You also mention elsewhere about not being permitted to download a particular app onto your phone (and/or that a service provider isn't allowed to provide it to you). That just isn't a free-speech issue at all. And besides, if you have an Android phone, you absolutely still can install the TikTok app on the phone, because Android allows sideloading. If you have an iPhone and can't sideload, then your beef is with Apple, not with the US government. Beyond that, www.tiktok.com still works just fine, and will still work fine even if/when it ends up hosted on infra owned by non-US companies.
[0] Note that I did not say it is a restriction on where you can put your speech; it is a specific restriction on where you cannot, which I think is an important distinction.
It is not. A company would be (financially) punished if it didn't follow regulations. DiDi was an example. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/23/investing/didi-us-delisti...
This is only true if you assume the US is the only market that matters. But TikTok is very much an international phenomenon, and selling would likely harm the company far more than a couple billion. Firstly it would give another company everything they need to run a global competitor to TikTok, including software, infrastructure and userbase. Secondly it might encourage other countries to also force TikTok to sell.
Giving in here would be the beginning of the end of TikTok and could well be argued to be a violation of the company's fiduciary duty to shareholders. It would be the ultimate version of chasing short-term gains by selling the long-term future.
Wouldn't that be a no-op if they already did so?
In your example, Musk could stop the app in the EU, much like TT is/was doing.
With this said, is the EU law written like the long standing US laws that give the TT law the power it has? If they have to enact new laws that would conflict with its member states wishes/dealings with other nations, expect it go to nowhere.
The short term "number go up" mentality is breeds is a cancer.
I really hope this changes your mindset. The number go up mentality is purely a result of avarice from those enacting it, it has 0 to do with any laws, it's all personal greed.
I am shedding tears for those poor shareholders.
Is a freedom of speech issue.
https://action.aclu.org/send-message/tell-congress-no-tiktok... https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/banning-tiktok-i...
Now, expect Musk and his billions to push lobbying weight around to ensure Brazil paid dearly for it.
International politics is a treacherous game.
We are talking about a single country.
TikTok has the power to sway any election how they want. The data available to them about what reels sways what people in what direction is immense. The only question is if they are doing it.
In 20 years I expect either democracy to vanish, or algorithmic social media to be widely banned, or control over algorithmic social media to be viewed more like control over nuclear weapons...
Your interpretation would make shutting down any place where people assembled unconstitutional which was clearly never the intent.
Your argument is a false dichotomy, and it's made in bad faith. You argue that they should have taken a 10B pay day, meanwhile they are alive today and arguable worth over 100B.
A lot of folks here are saying that the TT ban had nothing to do with free speech. A couple of indirect rhetorical questions that might be relevant to help illuminate opinions about TT:
1. If there were a single newspaper (in the pre-internet era) that developed and printed a lot of reporting with a particular political outlook and was the home of many columnists known for being the premier thinkers with that outlook, and a law were passed that had nothing to do with the content but had the effect of shutting down that paper, and only that paper, would this be a speech issue?
2. If a political rally were assembling to petition for redress of their grievances, and a law were passed that told them they could say what they wanted but the rally was only allowed to occur in a specific field 30 miles outside the city and 3 miles from the nearest paved road, would this be a speech issue?
3. Given that deadtree-books-in-physical-libraries are not the primary point of reference for most people anymore, if you wanted to block access to certain kinds of information and/or make a statement about doing so, what action would you take in the 21st century to do the equivalent of a book burning? And would this be a speech issue?
There are obvious and easy things you can point out about how the TT law is different from each of those three scenarios, don't @ me about that. But it seems to me that most people who are serious (or, publicly serious, which is a little different) about supporting the TT ban give reasons for it that would be inconsistent with their answers to one or more of those three questions.
That's a pretty substantial difference.
(2) Also doesn't match the situation, there is no requirement that TikTok restrict the reach or audience of their content in any way AFAIK.
(3) The situation is more akin to "foreign government owns the local library, and can decide based on the identity of the person walking in which books the person is allowed to see and check out" - seems obviously problematic at least /if they do that/
As an analogy you could imagine that all the people in the cases above are neonazi pedos and you might conclude that they do not deserve free speech, but the point of the parent is that in all of those cases the free speech of the people was being infringed upon (the question is whether that is justified or not)
Wonder which companies will be assured by TikTok's assurances there will be no consequences for helping them break the law.
I just hope this causes congress to dig their heels in again. Almost can't believe what I'm seeing.
Defying the literal law on a matter of national security certainly qualifies as treason, or at least a vague "high crime and misdemeanor."
Now that he's done his job for the Republicans (delivered a red wave), is there any benefit to keeping a kleptocratic monster in power?
Should Congress just remove him from office and let JD Vance be president?
Edit: Not sure why being downvoted. China bots?
"I am contrarian because daddy Thiel said it's smart" without a hint of irony
But… this is a MAGAt:
https://bsky.app/profile/patriottakes.bsky.social/post/3lg75...
Furthermore your comment is poorly thought out. Impeaching Trump would be very bad for the popularity of Republican senators, anybody should be aware of that regardless of how you personally feel about the people involved.
TikTok goes dark in the US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753396 - Jan 2025 (2187 comments)
I don't understand why this is not the primary takeaway. Regardless of the specifics of this issue, it is objectively a huge power grab for a president to vow to not enforce a law that had bipartisan approval of both the legislative and judiciary branches.
Isn't that the road we've been walking down for a while now with the proliferation of executive orders?
I'm not a fan of this outcome either, but it doesn't strike me as a revolutionary departure from current norms.
We're essentially saying the president is a dictator - which I know is what the current president wants, but I sure hope the rest of the country doesn't.
Isn't this the case with the federal government not enforcing its own marijuana sale, possession, and use laws for at least a decade now (in states that have legalized or decriminalized it), across several presidents from both parties? I don't think it's ambiguous what's supposed to happen legally when it comes to Schedule I controlled substances.
It is also important to recognize that Trump isn't just talking about invoking the 90 day extension. He is promising companies they won't be held responsible for the fines they should be accruing for violating the law before he even takes office.
Putting that aside, the legal theory here—where an exception is there for this purpose and we’re quibbling about its application—is nowhere close to “flimsy” when it comes to constraints on executive prosecutorial discretion.
The text of the law isn't totally unambiguous, but I still think it's quite clear that the conditions where a 90 day extension could be granted aren't being met, so we'll have to agree to disagree on how flimsy it is.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1125024/us-presidents-ex...
(Assuming that all terms are the full 4 years long, which happens to be the case for all of the presidents being discussed in this thread)
It's nothing new in that it's something that should have been decided by Congress, not the executive. But I think it's new for the executive to ignore the SC like that. Any counter examples?
This isn't a power grab. That already happened when the Supreme Court invented out of thin air the idea of presidential immunity. There was no basis for that.
Supreme Court justices are political operatives and the conservative supermajority has gone on a spree of overturning precedent and inventing law on a scale not seen since Marbury v Madison.
“Historical tradition” as a legal doctrine is completely invented. “Major Questions Doctrine” is a massive power grab over the other two branches. Presidential immunity is simply the “unitary executive” doctrine, also completely invented.
We already have a dictator.
“A 1-time extension of not more than 90 days,” § 2(A)(3) [1].
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-17758/pdf/COMPS-17...
(A) a path to executing a qualified divestiture has been identified with respect to such application; (B) evidence of significant progress toward executing such qualified divestiture has been produced with respect to such application; and (C) there are in place the relevant binding legal agree- ments to enable execution of such qualified divestiture during the period of such extension
Zero clue how that would play out in the courts, but it wouldn't resolve in anything resembling a timely manner.
But so what? His administration, and he himself, lied about a bunch of stuff during his previous term, and what happened? Nothing. Never tried, never convicted (he was impeached, but so what?)
We do not have a mechanism for dealing with a president or administration that is willing to just lie. Even if the SCOTUS were to determine that the administration did in fact lie about certifying those things, so what? Nothing will happen.
Of course we do. We’ll just fine Apple, Google and Oracle tens of billions of dollars if they don’t cut ties with Bytedance. The law can be patient.
I advocated for this bill. My personal guess is the tech companies bend at the knee and then pay for a new train system in New York or whatever.
More worryingly he stated in his Truth social post that he’s seeking 50% ownership. That doesn’t meet the definition of divestiture in this bill, since China would still effectively steer operations, including content recommendations.
The conditions have not been met, but he will lie and state that to his satisfaction, they have. Nothing will happen to challenge that except some noise from a couple of Democratic senators.
What happens 90 days later is anyone's guess.
It's not a loophole, it's a clear power granted--with strict limits--within the scope of a short bill.
That's not a loophole. It was intentionally designed the way it's been written to be used the way Trump is using it--to give the President leverage and the ability to save face for Beijing.
I'm saying that it is.
It doesn't. That's Trump being Trump.
> doesn’t “certify” mean more than just “claim”?
Not to my knowledge.
That being said, the law is enforceable today and Biden said he won’t enforce it.
Nope, it merely requires that the president certifies that it is in place, and that's something entirely different given who the president will be.
And actually your read is wrong: the President does have an obligation to enforce laws, it's just in practice there are all sorts of ways one can effectively bury this obligation under claims of different prioritization. They are not really allowed to come out and just say: "I am choosing not to enforce this law because I disagree with it."
This is only true as far as other people are ready to keep the president in check. I only have the surface knowledge of US politics, but from the outside, it seems like the American institutions that were supposed to balance the executive power are all being quite successfully sabotaged.
One of the things that makes it more difficult to enforce those obligations is people's mistaken belief that those obligations do not exist.
So when people say those obligations don't exist, they should be told they are wrong.
The Executive Branch (President, White House) has a responsibility to execute the law as legislated by the Legislative Branch (Congress) and judged by the Judicial Branch (Supreme Court) if applicable.
Trump is citing House Resolution 8038[1], Division D, Section 2, subsection A, paragraph 3[2] which states (emphasis mine):
>(3) EXTENSION.—With respect to a foreign adversary controlled application, the President may grant a 1-time extension of not more than 90 days with respect to the date on which this subsection would otherwise apply to such application pursuant to paragraph (2), if the President certifies to Congress that—
>(A) a path to executing a qualified divestiture has been identified with respect to such application;
>(B) evidence of significant progress toward executing such qualified divestiture has been produced with respect to such application; and
>(C) there are in place the relevant binding legal agreements to enable execution of such qualified divestiture during the period of such extension.
In plain English, this means Trump once he is President will have authority to order a one-time up-to 90-day extension to enforcing the ban if TikTok can present evidence that they are in the process of selling to an American entity.
If TikTok cannot present the evidence or they still do not complete a sale within the 90-day extension, the ban will apply and must be enforced by the President.
As the law in question was passed by Congress and signed into law by the President (Biden), the President (Biden and Trump) cannot overrule or otherwise refuse the law with an Executive Order. The President must enforce and act within the powers vested in him by the law.
It is questionable if Trump's claim of not penalizing violators of the law prior to an approved 90-day extension is legal; the law allows no such powers to the President.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8038...
[2]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8038...
The president has the power to pardon, which could be interpreted in that way.
I'm no legal scholar, but I think offering the pardon up front with the intention of circumventing the law would itself have been a crime up until the recent July supreme court ruling that now appears to make it perfectly legal: absolute immunity for all official acts including pardons.
In fact, there has never[1] been an impeached President in American history.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_impeachment_trial_in_t...
>To impeach an official, the House of Representatives must pass articles of impeachment, which formally accuse the President of misbehavior. Once the House votes to impeach, the Senate must hold a trial to decide if the President should be removed from office.
So no, Trump (nor Clinton nor Johnson for that matter) was/were not impeached. They were all acquitted of the charges presented and even foregoing that the Senate ultimately lacked the political will to impeach them.
They were all tried for impeachment but they were not "impeached". To be impeached means they were found guilty of the charges (article(s) of impeachment) levied. It's like calling someone acquitted of murder a murderer, that's not how this works at all.
"On January 13, Donald Trump became the third President in American history to be impeached and the first President to be impeached twice."
Again, I cite:
>To be impeached, a President or other federal official must have committed one of the violations described by the Constitution as “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” But history shows that if a President is to be impeached, the biggest factor may be political will — whether members of a President’s own party are willing to turn against him, and whether enough members of Congress believe that trying to remove the President is worth the risk of losing popular support.
>To impeach an official, the House of Representatives must pass articles of impeachment, which formally accuse the President of misbehavior. Once the House votes to impeach, the Senate must hold a trial to decide if the President should be removed from office.
Further, citing Clause 6 of Article 1 from the Constitution[1] (emphasis mine):
>The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.
A President (or former President) is only "impeached" if he is found guilty by the Senate of the charge(s) levied against him by the House. To date that has never occured, all impeachment trials against a President to date have concluded in acquittals.
Factually, there has never been an impeached President in American history.
The use of the term "impeached" to mean a President tried for impeachment is confusing and misleading, perhaps deliberately so given the individuals concerned in all the impeachment trials.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...
"The most recent was the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump."
"What does impeachment mean?
Impeachment means charging a public official with misconduct. Like in the justice system, charges alone do not lead to consequences. Instead, there is a trial, during which the official is convicted or acquitted."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impeachment_investigat...
While there have been demands for the impeachment of most presidents, only three — Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1999 and Donald Trump in 2019— have actually been impeached. A second impeachment of Donald Trump was adopted, making him the first US President to be impeached twice.
I reiterate that "impeached" means to be convicted of charges levied in (an) article(s) of impeachment.
Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1[1] of the Constitution (also cited in your links) states (emphasis mine):
>[The President] shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
For there to even be a question of a presidential pardon applying to impeachments that necessitated such a clause, being impeached implies being convicted. The Justice Department considers pardons without convictions as "highly unusual"[2].
I thus reiterate: There has never been an impeached President to date, and the use of the term "impeached" to mean a President merely tried for impeachment is very misleading. Again, you don't call someone merely tried for (let alone acquitted of) murder a murderer.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
[2]: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/frequently-asked-questions
What are you even trying to argue or prove? The library of congress states that he was impeached.
https://guides.loc.gov/federal-impeachment/donald-trump
President Donald Trump is the only United States federal official to have been impeached twice.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-impeachment-vote-capitol-si...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/majority-of-house-memb...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55656385
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-poised-impea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_impeachment_of_Donald_Tr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald_T...
That the term as-used by most people is misleading.
There is zero chance he can satisfy A, B, and C tomorrow. Zero.
Then again, reality can be weird sometimes. Never say never until the fat lady sings.
The only real check against the president/executive branch is the legislative branch having the power to impeach the president and get them replaced, or by legislatively dismantling or changing the internal rules of a department. They lose their jobs, but aren't liable for anything or breaking any laws I know of. Just the same as states can boot out judges or prosecutors if they don't like how they operate, and police departments can fire officers if they don't like how they operate. At no point did cops or prosecutors or judges break the law by not enforcing the law, they merely piss off the state that is funding them and now losing additional money due to lack of enforcement and prosecution, and I don't know how the president or executive branch is any different.
US Constitution Section 2 Article 3: "[The President]... shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed..."
Your argument reminds me of the clip where the guy who had his license revoked for DUI is surprised when the car starts anyway. Just because a law says a thing, a person still has to action something. If the boss says don't do it, you don't do it. Don't rightly matter if the law says you should.
Can you cite an example? If you're talking about the Biden admin, here is what the AG said:
"I do not think it the best use of the Department’s limited resources to pursue prosecutions of those who are complying with the laws in states that have legalized and are effectively regulating marijuana..."
I.e. exactly what I said is defensible in certain scenarios – and indeed must be defended, potentially in court. It is not POTUS simply saying "I won't do it."
And I don't think Garland's longer, winding way of saying what he said doesn't reduce to "I won't do it".
The enforcement of the law is not at the president's discretion. That would make Congress powerless. Congress is not powerless.
Don't think so!
No, it does not.
The extension is discretionary, the liability is not. (And the liability specifically accrues to the operators of the app stores and hosting companies.)
So Biden decided to ban it and Trump decided to unban it. It's all perfectly within the law.
Wrong.
§ 2(G)(3)(A)(i) and (ii) name Bytedance and TikTok [1].
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-17758/pdf/COMPS-17...
There are some paperwork qualifiers that for certain have not been met (the not-yet president almost certainly could not have briefed Congress as president 30 days prior) -- but they seem trivial to satisfy, and it would be pointless to initiate enforcement actions for an event nobody intends to follow through on
Wrong.
That § lets the President designate other entities. That’s why we wrote “any of” at the top—Bytedance, TikTok or any of the things the President may designate.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521... Ctrl+F "(3) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION"
Of all the shittyness of this bill, least of which giving the president pretty much unchecked power to ban foreign social media, the fact that it named a specific entity is to me just bad form. Law shouldn't ever include "fuck you in particular" even if the effect of the law when applied will be that.
Then who is deporting all the people listed in this table [1]?
[1] https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2019/table3...
The executive branch tends to have power of discretion in what to enforce and how.
No, it doesn’t. Plenty of lawsuits are around laws not being adequately enforced (and courts forcing such enforcement).
PAFACA was written (I didn’t name it) to command the operators of app stores and hosting companies. They’re the ones accruing liability. The President can ignore the law, but Apple and Google will accrue liabilities until the statute of limitations starts voiding them.
No.
One, our country has a rich tradition of third parties suing to compel the enforcement of laws. Two, we also have a rich tradition of successive presidents enforcing laws their predecessors didn't.
And as for the next president, well, he would just have to tell byte dance what his price is to allow them to operate.
Courts can compel the app stores to de-list. The President doesn’t need to personally enforce every law in the land.
Because this takeaway is wrong.
The very dangerous path started a long time ago, or at least that's how it feels from abroad. "He can't" followed by "He wouldn't" then "He did".
I'm baffled people keep saying this. You're miles down the dangerous path - you've almost reached the end of it. This is nothing new.
Start?
when did you decide that things went bad?
SC decision that presidents are above the law.
Violent assault on the Capitol.
Journalism imploding.
I'm looking for a year.
I think the SC decision was last year, whereas the capitol riot was 4 yrs ago.
sorry, I don't know a date for 'journalism imploding', but I'm guessing you mean 2016?
so you think the WMD lies were before things turned bad?
Nothing has been this bad.
But perhaps I’m wrong. Could you point out how today is the same as before?
what's worse? I mean, I'll readily admit that the sideshow has got more ridiculous, but the main game is the same.
Would you say the sideshow itself is being undermined at this point?
maybe we need to undermine it? if the institutions of 'democracy' that tower over us are not working we might need to build some from the ground up that do.
Everything is illegal.
You live by the KING.
The "uncensoring" is done by the executive branch.
* https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
Interestingly, the executive branch is still under Joe Biden at the moment.
TikTok content has changed in tone and tenor since President-Elect trump's policy reversal. Looks like he'll have ByteDance working for him like he did Russian fake news during his last regime.
Practically necessarily trumps concerns of fictitious and imaginary constructs
Is distributing content an "update"?
That is a very weird precedent for us to be setting.
TikTok is, as we speak, breaking US law.
There is likely to be no punishment for either of those unlawful outcomes, but they are still unlawful.
I wonder if there was actually a bipartisan majority in favor of getting rid of TikTok?
Yes, the bill passed by a bipartisan majority, but TikTok was not the only thing in that bill. Previous attempts to advance a standalone TikTok bill had failed to get majority support.
This time it got attached to a bill that provided $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, $26 billion in aid for Israel, and $1 billion of additional humanitarian assistance for food, medical supplies, and clean water for Gaza. There was also $8 billion for security in Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific.
A lot of Congress considered that aid (or parts of it) to be critical, and it had taken a lot of time to get there. I bet as a result of that a lot of Congress members would vote "yes" even if they disagreed with the TikTok part.
When Biden signed it he spoke about the importance of all the aid provisions and didn't mention TikTok at all.
It was a rider tacked onto a must-pass bill. There’s nothing about the manner it was passed that makes it special or particularly blessed. This was classic congressional sausage-making.
Or are you saying that the public perception of the law should itself be the law?
But also at the end of the day the executive branch has sole power to enforce it or not, and if the president doesn’t want to enforce it there’s really nothing Congress or the courts can do about it other than impeaching him, which realistically won’t happen. The two parties have captured the system of three-way checks and balances, and a cult of personality has captured the party with trifecta power. That’s the game, folks. We live in an autocracy now.
The system was designed with these checks and balances in mind explicitly.
It’s absolutely not. Which is why non-enforcement doesn’t release liability; if you break a law that the President declines to enforce, people can sue the government to force enforcement today and the next President can enforce tomorrow.
I mean, with some of the decisions by SCOTUS in the last few years we should really be at the point of "This government works?"
A handful of very prominent creators critical of the US (or other) governments have had their accounts just disappear. The algorithm is also showing decidedly different type of content.
Been hearing that shit since I started paying close attention to presidential races with the first run of Bush in 2000.
This is going to be a pretty miserable administration and I expect a complete reprieve of the "stop the steal" bitching and moaning that we sat through the first time around.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-johnson-2-...
The president can pardon people for breaking federal law and can stop the enforcement of federal law[1] so as president elect it makes sense that he can effectively neuter any federal law short of congress deciding he has gone to far and impeaching and removing him.
[1]i.e. federal agencies no longer prosecute personal marijuana use by executive order
Absurd that the Republicans are somehow going to swoop in and "Save the day" on an issue they themselves championed.
People always blame Democrats for things that Republicans do.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
I don't think the US president is exempt from the tendency to avoid hard work on their last day on the job.
AIPAC is funded by Israel, and by it's own description AIPAC is an organisation made up of pro-Israel zionists. Oh, and the "I" in AIPAC stands for "Israel".
Nice try hiding your hatred.
a reply on this comment even accuse the commenter of being Hasbara
HN is the world-upside down. a lot of people here really should just stick to tech
Will you allow "climate refugees" into your neighbourhood? Will you be a climate refugee yourself?
TikTok and only TikTok an 'important tool'? Not unless you are somehow invested in it, or if you consciously make it one.
The fact that young generations want to share details of their lives is fine and TBH who cares, but platform to do so basically doesn't matter. If it would be banned 10 others would fill the gap on the market in days. If its really an 'important tool'.
The focus on US instability in the US feeds make sense to me though, people want to be able to have a say and encourage action in their local areas.
The parties are just brands competing against each other to appeal to different segments of the same market, offering essentially the same product in different packaging. Getting your competitor to adopt a market position that you've already prepared a response to is a neat trick.
This is par for the course, and I don't understand why anyone would expect anything different.
What would have been a solution to the problem that people would have appreciated?
What? Doesn't the opinion itself literally say that the threat of "covert manipulation of the content" was one of the government's justification? Never mind the millions of times that Chinese control over the content people view has been brought up as a rationale both inside of Congress and outside? Haven't these been beaten to death already?
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/01/17/speaking-with-and-in-fa...
There is no "algorithm": the policies of a service like Tiktok are spread throughout its entirety. The only meaningful way to "release the algorithm" would be to release the whole source code.
Furthermore, releasing the source code wouldn't help, since regular people aren't able to understand what it means; and there is no way to verify that the released source code corresponds to what is actually being run.
It would be great if there was some way to verify that a service you're using matches some published code, but we don't have that.
Releasing the code does help. Joe can't open up his car and fix the engine control code, but the local repair shop can and they can also understand it and raise to a journalist "huh this manufacturer pushed a new version that'll make it stop driving if you service it at the workshop of a competitor" or whatever the car equivalent of this tiktok algorithm concern would be
The second problem you mention, I fully agree with: verifying whatever they publish. Client source code, you barely even need because it'll just be a front end for what the servers decide to show you. Verifying that what they say the server code is, is really what the server runs, that's the hard bit. But claiming to be open could be a start; something we can find discrepancies in and push for further openness
Whether this will solve the national security concerns and help with the youth mental health crisis that's often linked to social media, that's all way beyond my expertise and I have no opinion on the matter. Just that, in general, not everyone needs to understand everything in the world for it to be useful to publish
Efforts to save TikTok have been bipartisan (“Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said he spoke with Biden on Thursday to advocate for extending the deadline to ban TikTok.”) and efforts to enforce the ban have also been bipartisan (“Democrats had tried on Wednesday to pass legislation that would have extended the deadline, but Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas blocked it. Cotton, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that TikTok has had ample time to find a buyer.”)
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/biden-wont-enforce-tik...
Edit: wanted to elaborate but wasn't sure how to put it best. Then two comments down there is exactly what I'm looking for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759761 So many people (in absolute numbers at least, maybe not in relative numbers) seem to just eat it up like kids eat candy
If someone banned youtube or HN, I'd be upset, but I wouldn't be depressed and suicidal over it like some of these people were publicly
Like inflation, this was a problem Trump created and now he’s getting credit for fixing it.
I consider the Chinese oversight a plus. It’s much more sensitive to Asian values for the most part.
If it had values your 12yo wouldn’t be on it as Douyin has an age restriction of 18+, and prenatal consent if 13-17. Under 13 is prohibited. It also has time restriction of 40 minutes per day for 13-14yo and only accessible between 6am till 10pm. Not only that content is highly censored and restricted.
But keep living in a bubble that TikTok is totally fine.
I don't think that means what you think it does.
Kids are people. People have feelings.
Good parenting consistently is hard, very hard and sometimes basically impossible, but the difference between parents who at least try hard to raise kids well and those who sort of gave up on their kids is striking (tiktok and other digital stuff is a good yardstick of overall state of this, when I see kids of other folks using it and clearly addicted I am losing all respect for those folks as parents, and its always a big bag of various failures and neglect coming along). Its heartbreaking to experience, especially the powerlessness.
We had kids in our 20s and my daughter has been glued to her iPad since she was 2. Her grades are better than mine were at her age, she has artistic hobbies (makes jewelry, paints). She’s maybe a tidge slower than I was on reading, but that might be pandemic.
Note that Tik Tok is different than “social media” in that it doesn’t really allow for the gossip and backbiting within enclosed groups that typifies say Facebook. The most emotionally upsetting thing for her seems to be normal girl-girl social conflict, especially through her iMessage group chat.
Life without good or at least normal social skills is pretty miserable in many aspects, almost can't be fixed once adult, and has much larger impact on what I call 'life success' than career can ever have.
It doesn't mean the kid is also using the iPad at home for hours on end. Or consuming anything other than Bluey / Paw Patrol / Sing 2...
Going to a restaurant when I was a young kid was considered a treat and special occasion, and if I misbehaved, I was out of there immediately. I quickly learned to sit in my chair, eat my food, and not be disruptive.
I think people in general these days act with a higher sense of entitlement, and that translates to parents believing that it's fine for them to go to restaurants because they want to, ignoring whether or not it's appropriate for their children, somehow also believing that they "deserve a break" and their kids' disruptive behaviors in public aren't their problem. But no, screw that: if your children won't behave at restaurants, don't bring them along. If you can't find a sitter, then you don't get to go either. (If you can't afford a sitter, then you probably can't afford going out to a restaurant either.)
> ...to give them the TV time at the restaurant...
I would have less of a problem with this if the kid was using headphones (I know, risky for their ears at a young age if they also have control of the volume), or if the tablet could be kept quiet enough so I can't hear it at my nearby table. But that's rarely the case.
But hey, sure, if you can give your kid TV time at a restaurant without me having to listen to it, I guess that's fine. I think that's a poor substitute for actually teaching kids how to behave in public, but I'm not that kid's parent, and that's just my opinion.
But it remains the first time in her life that a politician listened to a concern she had, and acted on it promptly to fix the problem.
Listen to radio or news programs while kids are around?
If your kids asked about these things would you not try to explain?
There isn’t too much teens really feel on a day-to-day basis with politics and this is one of them. I’m not a Trump fan at all but his ability to spin things like this and the stimulus checks will need to be studied.
Aside from that his popularity -- and ability to lie shamelessly and have enough people ignore it and vote for him -- is wrapped up in the entity "Trump". His play book is age old.
I agree that current evidence points towards the best parenting being where nobody lets their 12-year-old on Tiktok, but there's more to it than simply not letting them no matter the circumstances
The TikTok ban may stem from legitimate geopolitical concerns, but I feel like we're focusing on the much smaller iceberg in our path.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I think this overlooks one key detail. The focal points of the new online world -- "influencers" -- rely on TikTok for the lion's share of their income. Taking away a fun toy might not radicalize someone but taking away their livelihood might.
And even if these users are a tiny fraction of a percent, they wield outsized influence (obviously). They are the new media. Risking losing these people, many of whom have been largely apolitical, seems like a huge tactical error in retrospect, and one that Trump would predictably take advantage of if given the chance.
Absurd that when Trump initially proposed this it was considered a stupid and racist idea. Now they’re for it.
https://www.forcepoint.com/sites/default/files/resources/fil...
It is a totally legitimate question if attacks like this are baked into an app (unless these kinds of permissions are now the default, in which case I am behind the curve).
The question asked was not about scanning, and a reasonable person would not answer it as if it had.
Listen, I'm not American nor on TikTok. I couldn't care less, I just wanted to point out that this is not the best example for weird questions from that whole ordeal.
“Republicans are the party with mostly white male congresspeople” implies that the other party isn’t.
Y'all need some real alternatives to the status quo. I'd suggest exploring actually leftist ideals, but would have to be outside the current two-party system, because Democrats already proven they won't do it, as they pushed Bernie aside for a person no one seemed to like.
https://newrepublic.com/post/181327/mitt-romney-congress-ban...
When all you know are those two options, then yeah, they look like two very different options.
But once you explored the other ideologies and political ideas out there in the rest of the world, you'll see they both end up being pretty much "center-but-slightly-right", one is slightly more conservative than the other, but otherwise they're pretty much the same poison.
Loads of examples; Vox (Spain), AfD (Germany) and whatever National Front (France) is called nowadays, all take harder stances and are pretty honest about their want for centralization of authority (for example), for better or worse. Golden Dawn (Greece) is probably a even stronger ultra-nationalist example, but they basically have no support after getting banned.
Although I will say that is seems almost futile to compare left/right between countries, we all have somewhat different understandings of it...
> how do they avoid the civil unrest the US is seeing
What civil unrest? I'd say things seem surprisingly calm and the population almost pacified. We're starting to see some smaller embers of something starting, but compared to how things could be considering the circumstances, it seems pretty idle.
Anyone putting any trust into Reddit is fooling themselves. Its not only political subs, other subs are also astroturfed, they are just more subtle about it. There are plenty of examples from places everything like /r/buyitforlife(where you discover the lies after you get burned), to bigger subs like /r/technology(which push certain agendas devoid of facts). You'd have to go sub by sub and piece out the blatant lies, or you could walk away from the platform understanding that the design is fundamentally flawed and was designed for an era of the internet that no longer exists.
Do you care what a cattle or a sheep thinks? Some may, but the majority don't give it a shit.
I think the hard answer is - the Dems need to actually do things that dissatisfy people like me if they want to actually win the masses - working class, blue collar, etc voter back.
Currently they are focussed on everything other than class. Identity politics. Race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, etc. None of this is particularly threatening to people like me and is a moral good, but it should be secondary to actually helping the poor regardless of how they identify.
Left wing parties elsewhere push for more redistributive policies than the Dems ever dream of here. Instead they do hand-outs to constituencies that aren't in dire need, and already vote Dem anyway. Student loan forgiveness, EV tax credits, etc.
Meanwhile in UK & EU, even the vaguely upper end of middle class pay marginal tax rates that would make $1M/year US earners cry. This is where the revenue comes for the depth & breadth of their social programs.
Should the US go that far? Absolutely not. It would stifle innovation, growth, and what makes the US far more successful than our rich peers. But Dems need to break free of the thinking that if we just tax a few billionaires, all our problems will be solved.
This is an interesting list that 100% reflects what Republicans in my state ran on and Democrats only mentioned them when on defense (except immigration, which they clearly took point on before trump torpedoed the bipartisan effort to work on it)
> EV tax credits
These were absolutely needed to kickstart the EV market, just like oil subsidies were needed to keep the American economy moving so people and goods could get from place to place.
Also to be fair they’ve been in power globally for some time and so are seen as the status quo party, and largely ran as such. People are feeling economically squeezed and therefore voting incumbents out.
That's interesting, because it feels like "the right" (in my experience and whatever left and right mean these days) wouldn't recognise or consider catering to anything above the two basic levels (and to be honest, the 'brutal truth' part of my own personality tells me that anything above those two basic levels is 'cream').
People who worry about the price of groceries or basic car repairs to keep their older car on the road don’t want to hear how privileged they are due to their race (they might not be a minority but they aren’t rich) / how they are destroying the planet (they aren’t flying 10x year) / that kids who took out loans for expensive private college deserve free money (they didn’t even go to college or went to state school) / how democracy is at stake / etc.
“panem et circenses“, Juvenal 100AD
As a former Google employee, during my employment I found plenty of internal blog posts from the China team at that time about this arrangement. It was amazing to me that a lot of these internal blogs simply weren't deleted because people forgot about it and storage was so cheap.
This presumes an assumption. I don't consider the banning as a lever for ensuring US controls Tiktok as bad behavior. America has a vested interest in snooping on and having direct control over popular mediums of communication. Giving Chinese ownership access to the methods used (like the physical devices, et al), is a security issue. It's a cold war game that seems a little sophisticated for this day and age (somehow). The lack of understanding explains a lot of these wandering conversation about tangents.
So this is the sort of statement that needs to be whacked a couple of times with a rolled-up newspaper.
The US government does not have a vested interest in doing things expressly prohibited to it by its own constitution.
China is an authoritarian dictatorship. Their government does not see anything wrong with violating the rights of their citizens, so they won't be fazed if we do it too: threatening to restrict access to social media in the US is not going to get them to stop doing it in China. If we follow through with our threat, not only will we be doubling up on the problem of illegitimate political restriction on public discourse, we'll also be behaving in a way that is far more improper and unacceptable for the US than it is for China, because we do not hold constitutional republics to the same standards of rule of law and respect for individual rights that we expect from authoritarian regimes.
The Chinese government kicks out foreign social media because they want to censor a laundry list of topics and have near-direct control over discourse.
If we assume poor intent, the US wants to kick out TikTok in order to prop up the market share of US/Western-owned social media companies.
But if we assume better intent, the US wants to kick out TikTok in order to deny the Chinese government the ability to run unfettered political/social influence campaigns on US citizens. (Instead they'll have to play cat-and-mouse games on Western-owned platforms.)
Even if both intentions are there, I think this is much better justification than what the Chinese government does.
While the action may be similar, intent matters.
Or, more simply: no, intent does not matter -- you are responsible for the damage that proceeds from your purposeful actions regardless of what ideas were in your head at the time. Ends are not sufficient to justify means.
The analogy only works if the US response to banning US social media was to do something similar like banning Russian social media that had no impact on China.
As for whether the ban is legitimate or not, The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that it is. We’ve banned foreign governments from owning television stations for decades.
It's not quite correct to say that the Supreme Court ruled that the ban is legitimate. It narrowly ruled that the immediate first amendment challenge wasn't sufficient to invalidate the law under intermediate scrutiny. The only thing they were evaluating was whether the impact of the ban was biased toward any particular content, which it isn't.
They didn't rule on the overall constitutionality of the act, whether its first section amounts to a bill of attainder, whether the forced divestiture would amount to a fifth amendment taking, whether it violated the broader freedom of the press under the first amendment, or anything else. Those questions might well be evaluated later.
The petitioners made those challenges as well. 3 lower courts denied them, and SCOTUS chose not to overturns the law based on those challenges, thus upholding the constitutionality of the law.
Based on your the argument, because SCOTUS didn't rule on the constitutionality of the ban with respect to the 2nd amendment, they didn't actually declare that it was legitimate.
So yes technically you are correct, but SCOTUS certainly choose not to declare the law illegitimate, which is the most legitimating thing they are ever going to do.
>So, by your way of thinking, if there was a chance that pooping on the floor myself might discourage my dog's bad behavior, I should go right ahead?
It's just a bad analogy. Come up with a better one.
No, I think the way of thinking is that it's irrelevant whether or not China (the dog) does it. If you want to deny the Chinese government the ability to use a Chinese-owned social media platform in a certain way, then you ban it. This isn't a tit-for-tat situation at all; the US is doing something it believes is beneficial for itself; it's not simply pooping on the floor which would serve no benefit.
The overall point is that your analogy doesn't fit the current circumstances, so stop using it to argue against the TikTok ban.
I am not willing to give the US government discretionary authority over what software I have access to in order to advance its geopolitical ambitions in relation to China.
How you see his position as different from ours is an astounding result driven by American imperialist propaganda.
None of these entities are on your side. Highlighting a false dichotomy does nothing.
You're welcome.
I don't think I've seen anything like it in a long time. I also don't think an American company would ever do that as it seems "unprofessional." Ironically, it probably got them huge bonus points so they know what they're doing.
Chinese nationals know how to deal with Party officials because necessary to get ahead in China, not because it's some racial trait.
Have you been paying attention the last few weeks?
NVIDIA: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-policy/ "As the first Trump Administration demonstrated, America wins through innovation, competition and by sharing our technologies with the world — not by retreating behind a wall of government overreach."
Companies aren't stupid. They know that in order to be successful in today's world, you have to personally fellate Trump. Thanks to the American voters for bringing us this reality.
Whats the realistic alternative? Standing up to Trump? The president who has explicitly said he will retaliate against firms and individuals who oppose him.
The same president who was re-elected even though everyone knew this was coming?
If this bothers you, and you want to address it, focus on identifying the real root cause and work toward changing that.
And if you genuinely believe firms would act differently, make the case. But let’s be honest—how many rational people would stand up to someone who:
- Faces no accountability, - Has the Supreme Court and legislature backing him, - Is in power for a second term, - Commands an incredibly effective political machine (Fox-GOP), - has die-hard voters behind him?
Trump proposed the TikTok ban and even tried to enforce it via executive action during his first term. He also said he would put Zuckerberg in prison and attacked big tech companies for almost a decade at this point. The reason Silicon Valley is aligning themselves with Trump’s administration is for strategic reasons. If there are any ideological reasons I doubt these would stand the test of pendulum shifts.
Republican speaker Johnson also still wants to enforce the ban and only considers Trump’s interference as a delay to have TikTok sold to a US entity (which the bill explicitly allows as an alternative): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-johnson-2-...
This line in particular sums up the cynical stance of these billionaires:
> We are non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.
They simply don't care about society as a whole, they want their businesses to thrive, no matter what.
I think they should have tried to adapt, they decided to focus their efforts on putting the genie back in the bottle.
Technological progress has made us more affluent and better off. My father grew up in Europe and his family couldn’t even afford shoes for him or education past the third grade. I am wholly uninterested in anti-tech politics or a politics of stagnancy as seems popular in Europe. Democrats need to stop looking to Europe for inspiration and become the party of abundance, redistribution, and human capital investment. How can we make everyone better off, rather than focusing our energies on finding the next bogeyman to blame.
The ban was and remains deeply bipartisan.
(P.S. Given your deep involvement in the bill and the sheer amount of comments you make on this site trying to convince readers that it's both popular and necessary, I think you should absolutely disclose your position on the bill. I'm a transit and modeshare advocate and I do not discuss specific bills I have helped author and sponsor online without disclaimers.)
You've got things reversed. The ban is what the Republicans wanted and the Ukraine support was bundled in to take advantage of that. They wanted the Tiktok ban so much they allowed the Ukraine funding (as part of the larger funding bill).
No. Heads up, he wins; tails up, blame Biden.
Trump is doing what the law permits, granting a 1-time extension of not more than 90 days. In the meantime, he’ll find a way to remove the national security threat.
> why did it need to be combined in a foreign aid package to Ukraine rather than stand on its own?
This is how all bills are passed. I also advocated for the Ukraine bill; that was the weaker (and far more partisan, though not entirely so) of the two.
> I do not discuss specific bills I have helped author and sponsor online without disclaimers
Cool. I do not. (I’ll disclose my involvement if I need to add gravitas or if there’s a conflict. But it’s not a conflict to be arguing for a thing I advocated for, or vice versa. I’m not professionally in politics, after all.)
The gay marriage bill was at Israel’s bidding?
I worked on the TikTok bill. I really don’t care about Israel. While it’s tempting to see everything through the lens of your pet issue, it’s myopic to believe everything is motivated by a single cause, particularly a foreign-policy line.
No. It was national security risks that have been amply disclosed. The Cuban Missile Crisis was still a crisis even if the Soviets didn’t launch.
This has been publicly litigated well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xTxAilSF0
Tiktok ban bill was due to it being more pro palestinian. It's no coincidence that most congress members get funded by Israeli lobbyist group.
Not sure who "we" are, but they're wrong.
It's not a war I have strong views nor knowledge about. I've never visited either place and while I respect people who have strong views on both sides of the debate, my pet war over the last few years has been Ukraine. (Though even there I'm aware enough not to paint everything through the lens of Russian meddling.)
Nope, just worked on it as a private citizen. (Don't have an account with any Meta service.)
In an ideal world, we'd regulate social media. I've tried and failed advocating for privacy legislation--the people who are passionate about privacy in America, unofortunately, also tend towards political nihilism, which makes the cause a political nonstarter. I'm also concerned about Chinese influence over American society, and care about Taiwan's security, so TikTok sort of aligned between my views on privacy, teen mental health and national security.
Wasn't it Republicans that initiated what would eventually lead to the ban of TikTok? Maybe I remember incorrectly.
> How can we make everyone better off
Wasn't it a really long time ago that was the goal in the US? It seems capitalism leads to a very different goal than "redistribute so everyone is better off"
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/900019185/trump-signs-executi...
How much time? Because the way free speech absolutists talk about these ideas always seem to imply that we are mere moments from a country like Germany collapsing into authoritarianism. What evidence do we have that the US's level of free speech is truly better than a country like Germany which does specifically restrict the speech of Nazis?
The internet has created a global town square where the loudest voices are the ones that catch people’s attention, regardless of the veracity of their claims. There is no truth any more, only the cult of personality.
Tomorrow the US installs a racist, rapist, treasonous kleptocrat as president because the majority of people are unable to think objectively and swallow his promises at face value, despite every indication that life will be immeasurably worse if you’re not a billionaire oligarch.
Populations being persuaded into harbouring extremely bad ideas is a thing.
A lot of people see the culture shift and start posting less or leave, and then the ratio gets worse and worse. Freedom from government restriction of speech is a good thing, but I disagree that this new era calls for throwing out norms of discussion platforms curating their communities' cultures.
I fully acknowledge there are valid, interesting philosophical reasons to host a site like Twitter or 8chan where "if it's legal it's allowed", but on net I think the benefits do not outweigh the costs.
*(Even many 4chan boards are less obnoxious. In part due to its linear format.)
Trump is a criminal? The Dems are wrong. Trump brings up trans issues during elections? The Dems are wrong. Trump lies constantly? Somehow, the Dems are still wrong.
Let’s be fair: we can only blame the Dems. Because how do you blame a force of nature like Trump? Bring up any substantiative discussion, and you get identity politics and gotchas.
Facts don't matter, because "everyone has their own facts.", even when they dont.
People arent really discussing reality. They're fighting for their teams. But the least thing we can agree, is that the Dems had to have made some mistakes, since they didnt stop it. They didn't win. So the Dems are wrong.
Trump won. So Trump is right. Even if he isnt.
Because we can agree, the dems are wrong.
The reality distortion field that the world builds around Trump and against democrats is literally insane. I unironically believe the source is an IRL SCP object (they have to exist otherwise no explanation for no cornucopia on the fruit of the loom logo) - and trump lucked out into being in possession of one or being that object!
Biden said it best: The USA has gone through the greatest economic recovery story NEVER TOLD. Democrats do great policy work and NEVER get credit for it.
Obama was a great president, Biden was a great president, Carter was among our very best of presidents, and NONE of them get the damn respect they deserve.
Trump, yet again, on day 1 gets an insanely good economy, an insanely good geopolitical situation, etc. Why? Because of those no good horrible marxist dummicrats!
Trump voters tomorrow will magically gain 100,000$ in their bank account, an extra house, 1$ gas, eggs, and groceries, and 500 more guns. And the day trump walks out in 2028 (if that happens) and a democrat comes in, they will instantiate become papurs again.
Not between corporate influence and no corporate influence.
> I have no issue with American companies trying to change American policies.
For me that's a naive stance that ignores the problem of corporate influence on politics.
Apart from that, how is US corporate influence necessarily better than foreign corporate influence? Neither care about the US general public. Some US companies knowingly harm their own citizens (Philip Morris, Exxon, Purdue, etc.)
One can argue the problem with TikTook is that it's controlled by the government of an adversary nation (from the viewpoint of the US), but it's not just the fact that the company resides in a foreign country.
I clarified someone else’s statement, like a busybody, because their position deserves to be supported or supplanted based on its own merits.
The choice they set up was an ingroup vs outgroup choice. You are discussing fair systems.
There’s a common ground between both these positions, and I would have liked to see that conversation occur.
For what it’s worth, I can sympathize with a desire to support in groups, however fair systems are the practical way to achieve that.
> The choice they set up was an ingroup vs outgroup choice.
What I wanted to point out is that it really is a false choice because it assumes that US companies have the interest of the general public in mind.
Not equating the two questions.
And then there’s the fact that the conditions for an extension aren’t met as written in the law. There’s no way he can certify to Congress that the conditions are met, which is why he’s trying to use an executive order. But that’s illegal.
This was literally nothing but a political play intended to give Trump a boost.
> We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office.
Additionally, an extract from TikTok's later statement [1]:
> In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.
What the fuck? That's some incredible bootlicking by TikTok. They've done a great job making Biden seem like the bad guy for banning TikTok, while Trump saves the day by rescuing them. This is especially ironic considering Trump was the one who wanted to introduce the ban in the first place until he gained 15M followers on the platform.
[1] https://xcancel.com/TikTokPolicy/status/1881030712188346459
July 7, 2020 - Secretary of State Mike Pompeo considers banning TikTok: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53319955
July 31, 2020 - Donald Trump wants to ban TikTok and will not allow ByteDance to sell the platform to an American tech company: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/31/tech/tiktok-trump-bytedan...
August 3, 2020 - Donald Trump backpedals and allows ByteDance to sell the platform to an American tech company: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/03/tiktok-ro...
August 6, 2020 - Donald Trump declares a national emergency based on the information TikTok collects: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...
No, the problem is people like you who try to convince others that Democrats and Republicans are the same, when some child-level reasoning is all that's necessary to disprove this tired bit of rhetoric.
I will give you excellent odds we're going to immediately see a definite difference between presidencies here.
Given the past four years have seen things like shutting down labor strikes, support foreign wars, expanding arctic drilling at record pace, increased police budgets, erosion of women's rights, erosion of lgbtq rights, and a steady increase in corporate power... I think the difference we'll see is in degree, not in direction.
Neither party is offering anything different.
> Biden removed anti lgbtq discrimination rules
It also affirmed that they felt they could supersede state law to protect caregivers (doctors, etc) who provide care against the law in their state (gender affirming care). They declined to exercise that authority and explicitly said they would not.
They also said they would consider provider discrimination only on a case by case basis (which they are not funded to do, and leaves poorer people more likely to suffer discrimination).
They added language stating "nothing in this rule imposes a requirement that covered entities provide gender affirming care".
They specifically struck the following language: "a providers belief that gender transition or other gender affirming care can never be beneficial for such individuals is not sufficient basis for a judgement that a health service is not clinically appropriate." Basically giving doctors the explicit right to say "I don't believe in gender affirming care and will not provide it".
Yes, you are right Biden did nothing to protect LGBTQ folks, but he did also take action to harm them.
I hear exactly what you are saying, clear as day.
For example, consider a male convict who desires to be incarcerated in the female prison estate. Is it really civil rights discrimination to deny him this? If so, how?
Most importantly, what about the civil rights of the female prisoners he would be incarcerated with, if this were permitted?
If I was under constant threat of rape or murder, I would do anything to get to a situation that I thought might be less dangerous.
It's true that this means all similar US-based things should be banned as well, but banning them isn't a matter of suppressing the speech and letting TikTok continue isn't a victory for free speech. It's just a victory for a gross sort of psychological pollution.
It feels silly with this coloring of TikTok as the evil when meta, Google and a dozen other American companies are doing the same, just less successfully because they let advertisers and corporate interests buy priority in the algorithm which literally just boils down to “you likely like the same stuff as people who like the same stuff as you”.
And that could include writing the regulations in such a way that ByteDance couldn't possibly comply, because of their ties to China. At least we would clean up our own home too in the process.
I can't take that argument seriously, sorry.
Should you care about what your own government does with your data? Absolutely, 100%, no doubt, big ticket issue, fly the banners as visibly as possible. But more than an adversary? Not even close.
"Adversary" is assuming your conclusion. My own government has plenty of incentives to attack my business (I've got plenty of competitors who would support them in doing so), far more so than the government of China.
How do you define this? That's the problem. We should define it somehow, but instead we have a law written specifically for TikTok, making demands because we said so. A proper law is a law for everyone. A law for one company is foolish, wrong, and un-American. Its replacement was already gaining traction before the ban even hit. Without a proper law this is just a hydra waiting to sprout more heads.
Ban them all...
You're arguing crack should be legal because cigarettes are
If TikTok is doing propaganda by subtly promoting some reels over others -- who would know? Why would they not be doing it and how can anyone know they are not already doing it?
Not anything blatant of course. Blatant stuff does not change peoples opinions anyway. Just subtly bump some reels that has been proven to shift a demography in a certain direction.
TikTok has all the data it needs to work with the minds of people and also all the ability. And China has the motiviation..
Of course Google and Meta might promote other goals in their algorithms, but the chances of a leak of that happening is definitely higher in current American companies
well, this is awkward..
I'd sooner blame viciously profiteering corporations and blatant disregard for democratic values among a significant fraction of American politicians.
The catalyst for the ban was Israel/Palestine. You must consider this - TikTok did not adequately censor pro-Palestine content. This was confirmed as a major problem for Israel by the CEO of the ADL.
When an app gets banned because it is not inline with the US military industrial complex you must consider the spirit of free speech laws.
What material effects are those?
If you wanted to push, say, white supremacy, to a trans mountain bike riding sci fi fan -- I am sure the content that will do that job is out there. Not with 100% certainty but enough to control a population. The question about controlling the population is only about picking the right reels to show to whom in what order.
If you control the algorithmic firehose and control who sees what, you basically control the minds of the population.
Not by explicit propaganda. Only by nudging and bumping content.
People can make conscious decisions to not want their worldview defined by traditional sources, whether it is Fox News or The Daily Show or whatever. But with TikTok everyone gets something different and who knows how it is geared or rigged.
I'm sure it exists in TikTok too, but at least the algorithm keeps those freaks far away from me.
Can you establish somehow how a TikTok ban would help this situation?
Or... regulated? I'd be all for privacy regulations and data handling regulations that would affect the algorithms of everyone but as long as the law is targeting TikTok only and not also FB, Insta, Twitter, etc, the idea that this ban is about "the overall harmful effects of the algorithmic firehose" is a total red herring.
Ultimately though I don't think regulations about privacy and data handling are sufficient. To go just one level deeper, a large proportion of the data in question should not even be collected, regardless of how it's handled or who it's shared with. But many of the problems are even deeper, and have to do with things like how big companies are allowed to get and how much venture capital is allowed to destroy things that work by funding things that don't.
They don't. https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...
Every magazin with a title "bigfoot found!" reveals another "mermaids discovered" magazine, and below that a "tony blair is a reptilian, proof inside", and if people want to stay there and consume all the magazines, why not? In the end, there's more quality content there, than on discovery channels (ancient aliens, mermaids, etc.)
not even joking:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11274284/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1643266/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1816585/
...
I could absolutely see that being the case. Trump and the Republican Party now have a solid thumb on US-based social media via Musk/Zuck, which makes lack of control of foreign social media more of a pressuring issue than it had been before. It looks bad if the popular discourse taking place on uncontrolled media differs wildly from that on its controlled counterparts.
TikTok has been uniquely subject to political pressure over the last half decade. They didn’t buddy up with Larry Ellison because Oracle has the best servers.
Censorship is outdated. With the amount of data and reach TikTok has they have something more akin to mind control.
Principle being the same as traditional politisized media, but the effectiveness of TikTok is just on another level. You see "people like you" sharing what they honestly believe for good reasons. Only thing TikTok did was decide to show that clip, and not the other clip of a person like you saying the opposite thing, also hearthfeltly and for good reasons...
The way most of our biggest companies and wealthiest are just lining up to do Trump's bidding is what I would expect from unstable 3rd world countries but never from the US (I know cause I came from one).
Who is even saying this is not true? The United States government is more aware than maybe anyone else that influencing human opinion and action is a statistical problem once you have enough scale.
Just look at the history of the USIA [1] and its successor the USICA.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Information_Agen...
https://www.state.gov/about-us-bureau-of-global-public-affai...
When anti-populists treat the public with naked contempt and divorce government policy from the preferences of the people, they're demolishing load-bearing pillars of the order that's allowed the West to prosper.
What do you think happens when people realize that "democracy" is a sham in the sense that their preferences don't translate into the rules they follow in daily life?
Realistically we do not have a single group running in the US with the intention of delivering on the people’s preferences or with an intent to deliver a government that functions more democratically. Both are increasingly authoritarian in the name of populism.
Of course. The masses never exercise political power directly. As you point out, it's disaffected factions of the elite that claim and wield the moral authority of the masses to defeat other elites. It's been this way since the Optimates and Populares persecuted each other in a centuries-long spiral of escalating stupidity culminating in political upheavel.
Nevertheless, disaffected elites can't swing the club of popular opinion against other elites with any effect unless there is some non-zero dot-product alignment between their governance and popular opinion. In exchange for at least partially enacting popular policy, upstart elites get a tool for deposing other elites. The people win in the end.
Fantastic book: https://www.amazon.com/Political-Order-Decay-Industrial-Glob...
(Yes, Fukuyama was wrong about the end of history. He's atoned for it and more.)
Growing up, it's always been said that no one is above the law, even the president. People would point to Nixon as an example, that even he was forced into submission by his party and SCOTUS.
Well now SCOTUS has determined POTUS is actually above the law, and I don't think it's a coincidence that not long after, someone like Luigi manifests out of the population.
The contract has always been, we have a rule of law, and all people are subject to it no matter their station. That's over. Maybe it always has been but SCOTUS put it in writing. JFK said it before, but if certain people make it so that they cannot be held accountable by the law, people will find other ways to bring accountability. People of history perceived to be invincible at the height of their power, tend to meet untimely ends at the hands of their people.
Otherwise, if democracy is good and votes should matter and at the same time voters are a mob subject to manipulation... democracy is what? A system of government by whoever can do better propaganda? Why would that be good for anyone except those who do propaganda?
So yeah, I think many people are claiming that is not true.
One question I would ask if people are just a mob, who is actually pushing the buttons? Owners of media, political leaders, are also humans, no? They have the same weaknesses, at least in principle.
If you accept some people are different (those who command and control propaganda) then we must conclude that not all people are vulnerable to it, so maybe it's a spectrum. But still democracy sounds like a bad idea, as a majority are probably on the low end of the spectrum, and the majority rules.
Both are true. We are individual agents and a mob.
Democracy, as we all know, is the worst political system except for all the others. At scale people on average behave about average and make decisions perfectly aligned with their systemic incentives and available information.
You (and me) are not immune to propaganda.
Strong recommend watching/readingupon Manufacturing Consent and Chomsky’s life work in general.
Honestly it would be about time we stop repeating this Churchill's quote as if it's one of the ten commandments. The man wasn't certainly a god and humans are often mistaken.
The actual meaning of democracy is the "power of the people". Nowhere that implies a western-like electoral system.
I'd argue in your average western democracy the people have very little power, with lots of symbolic processes to reinforce the illusion.
Correct. “we” used to do it simply by killing the leaders that were disliked. Elections are a bit friendlier than that :)
You might enjoy this Zizek video on the border between the west and the balkans: https://youtu.be/bwDrHqNZ9lo . I think he captures the sentiment well.
> I'd argue in your average western democracy the people have very little power, with lots of symbolic processes to reinforce the illusion.
This was Chomsky’s whole point in Manufacturing Consent.
A study[0] came to the conclusion that the US is in fact closer to an oligarchy, and I'd extend that to most other so-called democratic countries. The interests of a few always trump the interests of the many.
In this context, that Churchill's quote seems out of place and mostly serves the purpose of shutting down the discussion.
And thanks, I very much enjoy that Zizek video.
On the metric of "people power", do you think people in the east have it any better?
In Russia? Worse in terms of popular participation in the decisional process, but it still works because the majority of people believe (rightly or not) that their interests are protected by Putin. So for all they care, as long as Putin does his job right, it is for all purposes a democracy in its true meaning. Much unlike us, where most of the electorate feels that governments work against their interests and the quality of life stagnates or worsens, life conditions in Russia have improved greatly since the fall of the USSR.
In China? I'd say they have it better than us. Anyone can join the CPC/government and work their way up the decisional apparatus based on an actually meritocratic process, anyone can participate in administrative decisions through consultations. It's what they call "whole-process people's democracy". Do some research on this if you haven't, you'll find out that Chinese people are much more involved in the decisional process at all its stages than we are.
I'll tell you the truth, I sincerely believe that the only true marker of democracy is for the conditions of the people to keep improving constantly, even for the poorest. That is the realization of the power of the people, the only way in which their interests are actively pursued.
Everything else is just fluff that we added on top to make the term better fit us and exclude our adversaries. Democracy can be direct, representative, authoritarian, it doesn't matter so much to me as long as it makes our lives better.
I find this hard to believe. Isn't Western society/democracy ostensibly setup to allow meritocratic advancement as well? Yet I think it's fairly well-established at this point it very much does not work that way in reality. So what is it about Chinese government/society that makes them impervious to the same factors that make meritocratic systems so difficult in the West? Greed, nepotism, and hunger for power to name but a few.
Another interesting thing is that for their poverty alleviation project, when an official is assigned to a province they have specific targets to achieve. As long as they don't achieve the targets, the official can't be promoted or transferred[0]. Meaning if they ever want to get a better job or earn more they have to actually reduce poverty.
Was Chomsky ever an expert? Maybe, I wouldn't know because I haven't read what he built his legacy upon. But that he wrote so poorly on two topics he has little experience with does him no favors.
Chomsky is a Linguistics Professor, he has no formal training in media or political theory. So yes, he is not an expert, and funnily enough he's the kind of leftist who straight up admits he is biased and selectively picks facts to support this arguments.
My entire life anything I hear from him has been misinformed and anything I hear about him is "Chomsky disproven". I have to imagine whatever he was known for happened before I was born - which I've never been exposed to. Granted I've never sought it out either.
To me he feels like an academic Kardashian: Famous for being famous, and it's not really clear how it started.
I think that is a pretty hardline interpretation, but there's another way of thinking about it:
democracy has worked pretty well up to now and there hasn't been a better replacement.
That doesn't mean it will continue being a good solution as technology and society change.
Yea neo-feudalism seems to be all the rage these days.
Democracy is not a given, people with power want more power and less checks - historically that’s what things converged to typically.
The ancient Greeks had ideas about the κύκλος (cycles) of government: Plato's cycle went [aristocracy > timocracy oligarchy > democracy > tyranny]; Polybius' cycle was [ochlocracy -> monarchy -> tyranny -> aristocracy -> oligarchy -> democracy -> ochlocracy] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory
Disagree. Democracy can basically be mob rule and still be “good” if mob rule is better than alternatives like “divine right of kings,” “rule by military despot” and so on.
> Otherwise, if democracy is good and votes should matter and at the same time voters are a mob subject to manipulation... democracy is what? A system of government by whoever can do better propaganda? Why would that be good for anyone except those who do propaganda?
Yes. And you are already waking up to that in your next question.
> One question I would ask if people are just a mob, who is actually pushing the buttons? Owners of media, political leaders, are also humans, no? They have the same weaknesses, at least in principle.
> If you accept some people are different (those who command and control propaganda) then we must conclude that not all people are vulnerable to it
Why would those who do propaganda not be susceptible to disinformation, or the Dunning-Kruger or Gell-mann Amnesia effects? Every person is susceptible to disinformation. The difference is that those in power can disseminate disinformation at scale.
> so maybe it's a spectrum. But still democracy sounds like a bad idea, as a majority are probably on the low end of the spectrum, and the majority rules.
Hence "tyranny of democracy". Many places in the First world are now experiencing this, where 'green' programs and and social progress are being dismantled en masse because of a slight majority. Worst of it is, long term these decisions will carry a massive financial burden. The LA fires with $250 billion+ in damages are a herald of that.
Which would be in question if they could all be under various states of “influence”…
At the very least the median credibility would be roughly zero.
"The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.[1] It is also known as the window of discourse. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
and
You don’t need to convince me that is a possibility.
"Manipulation Playbook: The 20 Indicators of Reality Control"
Read more about the period and you will see that the Democratic cities of yore, Athens first and foremost, often swinged towards taking bad decisions, and that a whole corporation of "sophists" manipulated public opinion without shame (read e.g. Gorgias).
The great progress that enabled the restoration, extention and stabilisation of Democracy in the modern era has been indirect, representative democracy and base, written bill of rights/constitutions that aren't asily modified, requiring majorities of 2/3rds or more and constraint what can be voted on.
That was Socrates, not Plato.
Socrates was allowed to choose his own punishment too, so he wasn't exactly condemned to death right away. He also had the opportunity to escape prison. He chose not to.
TikTok has the opportunity to divest. They chose not to.
It's a chance to showcase how we're "more free" or literally just as restrictive
It’s one thing to allow the CCP to say whatever it wants, it’s something else to allow them the ability to manipulate of what other people can say. Allowing such a highly restricted platform seems like it hurts free speech more than it helps.
Maybe you disagree with the viewpoint or message, but it seems awfully paternal for such wide spread censorship.
This is why we can't trust only the US to provide us our social media and even if we don't like who is offering it.
Tiktok was and still is banned in China by the way.
Creators are still free to use YouTube as a platform to discuss sensitive topics with a very large audience without paying per viewer, unlike say advertising or standing at a street corner talking to passersby. As such YouTube is still supporting the discussion and distribution of said content.
When as has been demonstrated their algorithm ignores the number of upvotes in favor of massively promoting viewpoints it cares about, that’s also vast suppression of opposing viewpoints but in a way o get creators to quietly comply rather than try and push the boundaries.
- Workers in state sectors can be banned from traveling out of China https://www.scmp.com/news/article/3265503/chinas-expanding-t.... Also, non 1st tier city citizens can have a hard time getting passports, essentially a ban of travelling
- banned from using trains or airline if they are on the social credit score ban
- banned from moving money out of China for more than $50k a year
- banned from accessing foreign websites. VPN is technically illegal, and using it can get you into trouble
- banned from accessing porn
- banned from using a long list of restricted words on social media, from Winnie the Pooh, to "support Xinjiang people"
- banned from using TikTok
- banned from protesting against lost wages from state enterprises
- banned from group protesting
the list goes on and on and on
> https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/24/shadowbanning-...
This is why it’s good to have a social media company free of US control.
So much freedom!!!!
Do you hear yourself? Are you insane?
I mean, nothing really. You could say the same about Israel and Palestine, or Saudi Arabia and Iran, or China and Hong Kong. Human rights abuses are perfectly acceptable in today's society, as long as they're out of sight and out of mind. He who controls visibility into human suffering controls the way people perceive his control. Hasbara, in Israeli vernacular.
> Also why do we do this:
Because Zionist lobbying exerts disproportionate control over both the US tech industry and the legislative apparatus regulating it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
You're not going to drive a wedge between people by repeating the Israel stance, though. If you tried to expose China's same abuses for working slave labor to death or suicide, you'd be suppressed in exactly the same way America suppresses your anti-Israel content. From a national security perspective, TikTok's existence is about whether another country can impose their own double-standard on top of America's own populist opinion. Today it's the war in Gaza, but tomorrow it will be about suppressing democracy in Taiwan for the "betterment of global peace" et. al. You can't deny China's plans to use TikTok for war with a straight face - by many accounts it's already started.
And Fox News is also a foreign-owned straight unimpeded funnel used to subvert democracy, which sows division and conflict in our society.
It's done orders of magnitude more harm to it than TikTok ever has.
When are we banning it?
> On 4 September 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens were permitted to own US television stations.
Speaking of hostile foreigners, a prominent South African was just giving the crowd a few Nazi salutes at the inauguration. Is that also benign? At what exact point do we start observing that the enemies to democracy are inside the house?
Particular people are problematic. But you can only judge that by actions, not by their country of birth.
Which is what makes this foreign manipulation rhetoric and ban rubbish. It refuses to identify what the bad actions it's trying to protect us from are, it's just a lazy, prejudiced rubric that gives the most egregious ones a free pass, because they have the right color stripes on their pin.
It was subtle before with stuff like Gerrymandering that the layman would never notice. But it's so blatant now that the democratic process is compromised.
Where exactly is the commenter implying this?
No political process on Earth, democratic or otherwise, has ever met this standard.
Is this not what we have all been saying about Trump? Or are you saying that is OK because his moves have been made within the framework of a democratic system?
But the mechanism we are using is one and the same - this is essentially the launch of a “Great Firewall of America”, just enforced a bit differently.
This is a histrionic response. America can still be more free and democratic than China while also enforcing a ban on their businesses.
This ban is the definition of a slippery slope - this ban may be in your interests, but eventually one will not. What then?
Also don't forget - TikTok has remediation options where they continue to operate in America as an American business instead. They are the ones that refused that and chose censorship. America just forced the choice between eating the cake and having it.
Edit: Correct, it is not. The part that is censorship on China's behalf is the enforcement of the Great Firewall and enaction of laws prohibiting citizens from owning or consuming foreign news or entertainment. China's ban on foreign apps could just as well be explained by a desire for better domestic software markets - the same cannot be said for the Firewall.
Edit 2: Yes, secession would settle this. China has proven that they cannot be trusted to disseminate information through a state-owned apparatus. If the owner continues to be a government entity, then continuing to let them do "business" is like letting the Trojans wheel in their horse so the citizens can marvel at it.
So if you accept to cede control we will leave you alone. Blackmail, in other words, exactly like China does it.
https://www.instagram.com/ajplus/reel/C0SHLYlSynD/
Some others that aren't graphic:
https://www.instagram.com/middleeasteye/reel/C6RA3X0v1-y/
https://www.instagram.com/middleeastmonitor/reel/C4qXD7nvCLV...
https://www.instagram.com/katiecouric/p/CyW65klxgjA/
I'm not very familiar with Instagram, you'll have to tell me if those posts have been moderated to oblivion.
As far as this ban goes, there is in fact a less emphasized angle that explains the strong bipartisan support for this ban (related to Gaza): https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
On this basis alone, American consumer protections should have banned TikTok from the start. There is no tangible outcome where state-owned social media is given a holistic directive, especially not when China is the owner. I pity you for not keeping up with modern geopolitical tensions, but this is just the beginning of the "censorship" if you're reliant on China to voice your opinion. They had their chance to demonstrate detente, but they chose to fight instead.
But I also understand that an outright ban of a social media platform is an authoritarian practice, and a bad sign for the future of this country. It is an easy way out, but at the cost of introducing a mechanism by which more censorship can take place.
To me, this ban indicates that the US is willing to ban any platform that does not cave into its demands for content “moderation” (if you will) - just like China has been doing for a while now.
We are not “better” than them anymore, and the sooner we realize this, the better of a chance we have of reversing this process.
Also, you probably don’t realize this, but censorship and moderation are many times two sides of the same coin - depending on the incentives and factors at play.
Given that this is what they do day in and day out and that the successful ones are by all metrics very good at it, it seems totally reasonable to assume that one could trivially be turned from manipulating people into buying stuff to manipulating people to voting a certain way or holding certain opinions.
One person one vote is the guiding principle of democracy and, yes, it assumes that no person is able to actively hijack someone else's vote for their own gain. We have systems in place to prevent voter fraud, and I think that we should have systems in place to prevent systematic individual targeting of individuals for algorithmic manipulation as well.
What we don't need is a law that specifically targets foreign companies doing it. Our homegrown manipulators are just as dangerous in their own ways.
I disagree with this interpretation. It's creating a sort of false dichotomy -- voters can still be individual agents AND ALSO they can be manipulated by propaganda. And the key is that propaganda doesn't have to be wildly successful in order to impact a democratic process. It just has to convince enough people to sway an election. That is, and always has been, one of the trade-offs of democracy. That's why we say "democracy needs an informed electorate to survive" -- because an informed individual is less likely to be easily manipulated.
But to substantively respond: NO. This is exceptionally naive. Democracy assumes shared fates and aligned incentives among (both voting and communicating) participants. A foreign adversary mainlining their interests into half the population of the US absolutely violates this assumption.
This is the best system we have found to establish the impermanence of the elite class. Because this is the real beauty of what we in the west call democracy: not the absence of an elite class, for there is no such system, but it's impermanence.
And while that is all well and good within a country, the argument is that it would be unwise to allow a foreign hostile power a seat at our propaganda game. Especially one which does not reciprocate this permission.
I guess more than anything I'm just surprised that it's the "threat to democracy" crowd that would be taking such a cynical view of democracy. They're admitting that Trump's propaganda was just better than theirs. Which is, in some ways, hilarious.
This idea goes back to the founding of the nation. It's the very reason we have an electoral college.
Sure, but then why is electioneering banned by polling places? Or why is voter intimidation illegal? You have the draw the line somewhere.
> are implicitly admitting that they don't trust their population to think critically.
A democracy that is NOT a direct democracy is already admitting this. This is exactly the reason we have proxies in a representative democracy.
Because those things are not just speech - they're implicit or explicit physical threats.
America runs most of the world's social media platforms and expects other countries to be happy with that, but then panics the moment another country dares to offer them the same thing? I don't know which scenario is worse, the one where this is just an excuse for an America First trade war or the one where the US genuinely believes that controlling a social platform means you control the countries that use it.
I think it’s less about admitting this and more about the impracticality of having citizens vote on issues daily.
I think that is the case though. I will come off as arrogant and my lack of vocabulary might make it sound less elaborate, but a huge chunk of the population is not able or willing to so. This is why every time a country is facing a crysis, the populist politicians gain in popularity. People are already stressed out by their jobs, paying the bills, rising cost of living, so who wants to spend time and effort to research the causes of this, evaluate which proposed solution seems most realistic, what the tradeoffs are, compared to the dude who tells them that the problem is very simple and that he has the solution that is equally simple. It's the immigrants stealing the jobs, or the heat pumps forced upon them, or solar cells.
And it doesn't even need foreign social media to come to that.
You should invest a minute thinking about the problem. Pay attention to your own opinion: people are capable of reasoning and forming their own opinions. Focus on that. Now, consider that propaganda feeds false and deceiving information to the public. In some cases, the decision-maker is only exposed to propaganda. Even if that decision-maker is the most rational of actors, what kind of decisions can he do if they are only exposed to false and deceiving information?
There are plenty of reasons why libel and slander are punishable by law. Why do you think they are?
Also note: nobody is cracking down on libel and slander on social media because we consider internet publishers "common carriers" when infarct the should be held accountable for the things they promote.
The "common carrier" status of services which hold editorial control over the content that's pushed and promoted is highly dubious.
Reminds me of a quote from 1984: "In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it." [0]
Any belief supported by lies and falsehoods cannot be described as truth. It's something else.
Zoom out to the cosmos and think about the truth available to different observers. This same principle holds across the board. You have to reconcile with each observer, and until you do truth is subjective.
I just have trouble stating that my objective truth is also someone else's objective truth. What if my information is "the Bible." You can split hairs with these people until you die of old age and they can technically be wrong but their truth can work for them.
Just like we have all kinds of wild unintuitive math proofs that are very enlightening once they are communicated to all observers. Newtonian physics are true until they aren't, the same as those Bible "truths."
Given the infinite probabilities of the universe I have trouble declaring a set of objective truths that are immutable and try to give people a pass on what they hold as true. Can anything be known? We settle on some truths that work for us in the little time we have.
The problem is that people aren't ideal rational agents. Our collective reasoning tends to be heavily biased by the environment, and that there are actors who abuse this (by injecting ideas that indirectly help their agendas) for their personal gains. And in China's case, they want to undermine freedoms, including freedom of speech.
We can consider ourselves as "rational, critical thinkers" all we want, but we aren't as there are myriads of ways we're gullible in one way or another. Plenty of examples in our history books.
Still, I think that free speech is still more important, as it's the only way for a society to recover. With freedom of speech, an antidote (for a lack of better term) can eventually be found and injected into the public discourse, without it the future looks bleak.
The way I see it, we need to encourage improvement of education on social sciences, human psychology, game theory and so on, encourage critical thinking but forewarn of all possible fallacies, and hope that it will be enough and that the inevitable counter-reaction won't prevail and undermine the effort.
The very goal of this attack on the freedom of speech is to make people lean towards the easiest and "naturally occurring" pseudo-solution to make those bots shut up. Then abuse the same censorship mechanisms to control the discourse.
Sadly, I don't know how to solve this. Censoring speech is a non-solution. Building web of trusts will inevitably create even stronger information bubbles (making it easier to divide and conquer - we're seeing this happening).
If TikTok is harmful to democracy, Fox News is more than an order of magnitude worse. A large portion of the electorate watches its insanity like a full-time job.
Most enemies of democracy, when measured by impact are 'domestic' and 'western', not some Chinese boogieman.
Malicious agents have no nationality, race or some single origin. All they share is the mindset and some values, willing to abuse the system for personal gains or flawed misbeliefs (for a lack of better word - beliefs that are known to contradict our collective scientific understanding of the world).
I’m constantly amazed by how easily even smart people will retreat into whataboutism, and this is the most polite way I’ve ever seen to call them on it.
I wanted to say that I believe it doesn’t matter who does something, only what they’re doing. So the same standards should be applied uniformly, irregardless of the actors’ identity.
Ideally, by no means entity X doing something we consider negative should absolve or justify entity Y’s negative (similarly or different) actions.
Personally I'm inclined to be more blunt and impatient. Whataboutism is intellectually lazy in the best case, in the worst case it means the interlocuter is manipulative or just actually operating at the emotional level of a 5 year old. Good people just don't like bad behaviour.. they won't wait around to find out which team committed the bad behaviour, and they won't refuse to fix 1 evil until another 2nd evil is addressed first, etc. Also relevant here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow
I think you mean Rupert Murdoch. He was born in Australia but naturalized as an American citizen, due to restrictions on foreign control of broadcast media.
If TikTok moved to control by an American citizen born in China, then that would comply with the PAFACA. If the people already controlling TikTok naturalized as American citizens then that would also comply (though that's obviously not going to happen).
Restrictions on foreign control of the highest-reach media are nothing new. The PAFACA simply updates them to reflect new viewing habits. "Foreign" continues to be defined by citizenship, not birthplace.
Throughout history, big business and the mega-rich have regularly backed coups and authoritarians, compared to their democratic alternatives. It's a much better system for them than one where each person gets one vote, because there's a lot more of us than there are of them[1].
As for sworn enemies of democracy, I think the guy who launched a coup, as part of a broader conspiracy to steal the election when he lost would be towards the top of the list.
---
[1] When times get tough, in a democracy, it becomes difficult for them to justify why they get to take three quarters of the pie, while the rest of us fight over scraps.
Because people are not capable of being informed on every topic in the world.
Especially in a world that is increasingly more complex and nuanced.
And this ignorance has been demonstrated to be exploitable in order to tear apart societies.
If you can believe that lead pipes contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire… well, let’s just say the Internet is a series of tubes.
The concerns about TikTok merely as a propaganda platform are naïve and almost quaint when considering what might actually be happening.
A conventional U.S. corporation's motive is to generate profits. Efforts stemming from that motive have not always been in the public interest, and such cases are worthy of regulatory attention, but they typically do not present national security risks. In odd cases where pursuing profits could create national security risks, Congress has sometimes intervened, such as when Nvidia was banned from selling certain processors to certain countries.
A geopolitical entity is not a profit-motivated corporation, so the risk model is different, with national security factors being more salient.
Having the choice of two options at the ballot box, and social media meaning many people now form political opinions from anonymous accounts online does not fill me with confidence.
Facebook and Twitter have in the past banned networks of account for inauthentic behavior. In other words: individuals (and you can probably narrows this to residents or citizens) are allowed to speak their mind and try to convince others of whatever they believe, but it has to be them, they cannot use bots, multiple accounts etc. It's not an easy thing to filter, of course. But pretend that it was, would you agree with that approach?
It would be less of a problem if US platforms were allowed into China to influence the Chinese too.
>People who advocate for censoring foreign sources of influence are implicitly admitting that they don't trust their population to think critically.
Tbf, America did spend decades tearing down education to help support that conclusion.
And before you say, “but they’re not doing that”, remember that we’re discussing how this theoretically could be a bad thing.
I take the view that the reason freedom of speech is important at all, is that people can be convinced to act in certain ways by speech — if it couldn't lead to action, no dictator would fear it.
We, all of us, take things on trust. We have to. It's not like anyone, let alone everyone, has the capacity — time or skill — to personally verify every claim we encounter.
Everywhere in the world handles this issue differently: the USA is free-speech-maximalism; the UK has rules about what you can say in elections[0] (and in normal ads), was famously a jurisdiction of choice for people who wanted to sue others for libel[1], and has very low campaign spending limits[2]; Germany has laws banning parties that are a threat to the constitution[3].
I doubt there is any perfect solution here, I think all only last for as long as the people themselves are vigilant.
[0] https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/voting-and-elections/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel_tourism
[2] https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/party-spending-and-pr...
…yes? Is that even slightly controversial? If it wasn’t the case, why would propaganda even exist?
Human nature proves to fall quite short of that ideal, though.
And TikTok has immense data available about what series of reels sway what subpopulation in what direction. Only question is of they make use of it.
My opinion is that if they wanted to sway an election anywhere in the world they definitely could.
Yes, it is. Always has been.
> threats to "democracy" that simultaneously take such a cynical view of the democratic process
> then the whole "democracy" thing is just a cover for elite power
You'd have to have fallen hook, line, and sinker with America's propaganda to actually believe that democracy is NOT a cover for retaining control over a population.
The US has been playing this game in other countries for a while now, to keep a check on who comes to power and who does not (always using support for democracy as an excuse). Gautemala, the arab spring, bangladesh - these are just some of the examples. And it's become very blatant of late.
The algorithm is not a person to have free speech, my issue is with the algorithm, I am OK with the village drunk to post his faked documents but I am not O with state actors falsifing documents then same state owned actors abusing the algorithm to spread that false stuff. So no free spech for bot farms and algorithms, they are not people (yet)
Part of the reason Western democracies are failing is we forgot that pure democracy doesn’t work. The founders described this amply in the Federalist Papers. Democracy tends towards tearing itself apart with partisanship and mob rule.
It’s why successful republics have mechanisms to cool off public sentiment, letting time tax emotions to reveal actual thoughts underneath (see: the Swiss versus Californian referendum models); bodies to protect minorities from the majority (independent courts); et cetera.
Well, we don't know what was said in the classified meetings, but yes, we know that propaganda works.
In the end, "democracy" is about power and control, just like any other form of government, and the TikTok ban is just another power-play, however it may be justified publicly. Not that I'm overly sorry to see it banned, by the way :)
If you want to view it that way, sure. But I could also just say you and I are both sacks of blood filled flesh.
> Rather than tackle the narratives substantively,
Meta (et al) are just AS guilty as TikTok. The difference is substantial and subtle - the US government could conceivably sanction a US-based entity to the point of them not existing. A chinese based one doesnt have to play by the rules. Fine them? No problem, their gov has an immeasurable amount of money. The only option is to simply not let them play at all.
I invite you to consider the possibility that this is true. That at the population level, propaganda actually works. This would support the fact that it's been a key tool used by regimes (including ours) since before the printing press was invented.
I don't really know for certain whether this is accurate, but it's hard for me to look around the world at global politics and determine that it isn't.
> voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda
It only works if the voters are well informed, educated, and generally competent. Otherwise it’s just a manipulation game where someone can lie and lie and lie and be elected president. And at that late stage phase of democracy, who gets to manipulate these people better is who holds power.
On a side note, the same holds for market economy. Markets only work if consumers are informed, educated, and generally competent.
i.e. “You crazy, translating the bible to the plebs? What happens if stupid people get to choose for themselves?”
To me, this looks a lot like people voting against their own interests. I think that when people vote against their own interests, it's usually because they don't understand what they're voting for, i.e. it's an education issue. And it's not surprising that other people would be perplexed and frustrated by this.
But maybe I've just been misled by the wrong propaganda. I guess we'll find out.
Examples could be democrats control over Biden's health messaging or republicans repeating the message that the democrats are stealing the elections or democrat's messaging about if their side loses it's the end of democracy or republicans messaging about immigration, crime etc. Generally engaging at a shallow level with the goal of influencing people's emotions.
I don't think this is a 40-2000 years phenomena. It's certainly become a lot worse since Trump ran for president the first time. I remember turning on TV in my hotel room during a visit to the US maybe 8 years ago and switching between CNN and Fox, each of these channels were basically about endless bashing of the opposite side. I wouldn't call the content anything other than brainwashing and propaganda. CNN didn't use to be like that. With social media since every user gets their own view we don't even know what the "hidden hand" is pushing. It's much worse and a lot more dangerous.
And CNN has ALWAYS been a propaganda wing, they just didn't have a serious competitor during the era when both parties were controlled by the same group. (Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama)
I think it's definitely the case that the group of voters in 1789 was much smaller and more homogeneous than it is today.
I also think the nature of propaganda has changed a little as well. Today, messages can be delivered cheaply to everyone, everywhere, from anywhere, nearly instantaneously. There is far less of a propagation delay, and far less of a natural check on the rate and volume of propaganda.
Propaganda's job is to influence those people who think they're acting from a position of moral authority but lack the education, or critical thinking skills, or access to information, to be able to see through the manipulation.
I'm not sure what's the answer but I am sure this is not what the proponents of free speech had in mind.
Yes, exactly.
A symbiotic view of life: we have never been individuals https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235518850_A_Symbiot...
I have it on personal experience that DARPA seems to be enthusiastically funding more digital twin and collective intelligence projects than ever. Simulated virtual publics are going to become more common in both war and politics. Collectives are going to be the driving force of the coming century, and the sooner the American public evolves beyond fetishizing the individual, the better.
Although some choose or have to squawk loudly about it, the sanctity of “democracy” is not universally or even widely accepted.
To extend the Winston Churchill quote, it’s mostly a charade but it’s the best one we have (in my opinion).
That is true, yet it's not incompatible with democracy. In the US Horace Mann established the foundational link between education and democracy. It's why civics and other forms of intellectual self-defence are essential.
The problem with social media (and BigTech lazy "convenient" non-thought) is not that it's a propaganda conduit as much as that it's antithetical to critical thinking. It's more complex than simply the content, it's the form too.
Did you already forgot about the episode about Haitians eating everyone's pets? Based on that episode alone, what's you observation?
> I sometimes cannot believe it's those who so loudly cry about threats to "democracy" that simultaneously take such a cynical view of the democratic process.
You should take a minute to think about the underlying issue.
Propaganda is a massive threat against democracy and freedom in general. If a bad actor invests enough resources pushing lies and false promises that manages to convince enough people to vote on their agent, do you expect to be represented and see your best interests defended by your elected representatives?
Also, you should pay attention to the actual problem. Propaganda isn't something that affects the left end of the bell curve. Propaganda determines which information you have access to. You make your decisions based on the information you have, regardless of being facts or fiction. If you are faced with a relentless barrage of bullshit, how can you make an educated decision or even guess on what's the best outcome? You cannot. The one that controls the information you can access will also control to a great degree your decision process. That's the power of disinformation and propaganda, and the risk that China's control of TikTok poses to the US in particular but the free world in general.
Yep. Same thing as the people arguing to reverse the Citizens United ruling. Lots of lip service is paid to "democracy" by people who have no faith in the electorate to actually exercise democratic sovereignty.
You're dealing with 64% of the voting population, who inherently lean one way or the other so a small nudge can be the difference between one side or the other winning.
e.g. Candidate swapping might bring votes from minority groups or Women.
Imagine a scenario when even 5% more people voted, suddenly the margins are much wider and the results hold stronger validity.
If those people are eligible to vote but choose not to, than that is their vote. It's not appropriate to second-guess people who abstain any more than it is to second-guess the ballots of those who do vote. There's only a problem if people who want to vote, and are eligible to, are being prevented from doing so.
If you're trying to engineer the process to contrive specific outcomes, that itself is anti-democratic.
If the goal is to cause harm to the population (ala fentanyl distribution) rather than just to make as much money as possible, I’d say parents are right to be correspondingly more concerned.
Problem is reality is so complex and usually all sides of a topic are right at the same time, in some way.
For any viewpoint A, there will be reels made by people in any demographic group who cares deeply about it for excellent and solid reasons. The same will be the case for anti-A.
Both of them will be convincing and TikTok can just choose which one of them to subtly nudge.
Like we've been saying since the founding of the country? yeah
"The body of people ... do not possess the discernment and stability necessary for systematic government. To deny that they are frequently led into the grossest errors by misinformation and passion, would be a flattery which their own good sense must despise." -Hamilton
The founders did not think that electoral college was a good idea, senators should be appointed and not elected, and only a few citizens should be able to vote generally, because they were feeling mean. They did so because they thought these things and the act of voting itself were simply instruments to produce good government. They rejected a democracy, and favored a republic, for this reason.
That has nothing to do with China.
And the app collects every click, every face photo, all contacts, every keypress on external links, everything. The full social graph, shaping the trends of the younger generation.
Of course it also works on politics, especially if people don't trust "traditional" media, but arbitrary publishers (there's room for a guiding which is more trustworthy)
History over and over has shown that a public can be led into their own demise, including brutal war.
How much active influence China takes I don't know (and I never used tiktok) but we are certainly in a time of massive disinformation and denial of facts. Globally.
YOU are subject to propaganda. Yes, you.
In unrelated news, anyone see that NYT interview with Yarvin yesterday?
And has there ever been an example for that or is it just a hypothetical scenario?
The genius in strategies enemies are using are leveraging the exact same levers already being leveraged against be populous: free speech as a roadway for propaganda, misinformation/disinformation, and widespread social manipulation.
There was a time when it was more difficult to scale these sorts of strategies so there may have been an illusion of agency. Also, a hundred years ago issues were a bit less complicated/nuanced so your voters could probably wrangle ideas intelligently more independently.
I also suspect the corporate undermining of the general population for their own wealth grab has weakened the country as a whole, including the voter base. We want to undermine education at every turn and stability of your average citizen so they can be more easily manipulated. That comes at a cost because once we’re in that position, whose to say youll (the US elite) will be the ones with the reigns? By weakening the population for your own gain, you open up foreign adversaries to do the same and they’re doing just that.
We should focus on improving general education and the populations overall stability/livelihood. That has to do with pushing back on some of the power grab the ultra wealthy have taken, at the populations expense. These are of course just my unsubstantiated opinions.
Yes, that is correct.
For more than a century now the advertising industry has perfected mass psychological manipulation that aims to separate the masses from their dollar. These tactics as pioneered by the likes of Edward Bernays were plucked straight from the propaganda rule books, which has been successfully used for at least a century before that. We know that both propaganda and advertising are highly effective at influencing how people think and which products they consume. It's a small step then to extrapolate those techniques to get vast amounts of people to think and act however one wants. All it requires is sufficient interest, a relatively minor amount of resources, and using the same tools that millions of people already give their undivided attention to, which were designed to be as addictive as possible. We've already seen how this can work in the Cambridge Analytica exposé, which is surely considered legacy tech by now.
I'm honestly surprised that people are in desbelief that this can and does happen. These are not some wildly speculative conspiracy theories. People are easily influenceable. When tools that can be used to spread disinformation and gaslight people into believing any version of reality are widely available to anyone, it would be surprising if they were _not_ used for this purpose.
> If that's your view of the electorate, then the whole "democracy" thing is just a cover for elite power.
Always has been. It's just that now that we've perfected the tools used to sway public opinion, and made them available to anyone, including our enemies, the effects are much more palpable.
I hope Zuckerberg and friends, and everyone who's worked on these platforms, some of which frequent this very forum, realize that they've contributed to the breakdown of civilization. It's past time for these people to stop selling us snake oil promises of a connected world, and start being accountable for their actions.
yeah. They don't necessarily want nor care to inform of the truth. they want that sort of manipulation as much as any other billionaire. Heck there's a good amount of people who simply want to be told what to do so they don't have to worry about the big stuff.
There's a reason many almost always choose convinience over anything else when working in practice.
https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/a-standing-ovatio...
"I was told that China had Salt Typhoon on my phone. I have always loved Salt Typhoon, it's a good thing. I talked to Elon, he'll fix it by merging TikTok with X paid in X shares. Let's focus now on making America great again."
Exhibit 1. https://www.capitoltrades.com/issuers/431610?page=2
Markeayne Mullin’s net worth was ~$50 million a few years ago. $50k is 1/1000th of that networth also…
That’s not to say congress shouldn’t be banned from trading stocks like every other profession that might potentially have insider info. They absolutely should.
That fact that it was a drop in the bucket for them makes it that much more outrageous, not less. It would have cost virtually nothing for them to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and yet they didn't. And why should they? There was no consequence. They are taunting us.
If you or I trade off anything close to insider information, we'd be in jail and lose most of our (ostensibly much more limited) assets.
I disagree. I get the point that you’re making. That they could have more easily NOT done it. But I would be a lot more ensconced if these people were putting up 50% of their net worth on these bets.
And again, I fully agree that they shouldn’t be able to trade individual stocks. In my past I was a dev at a private wealth management company. While working there I was completely barred from trading individual stocks because it’s possible that I could have come across nonpublic info in the company because they would do internal audits for some entities. It made sense. Congress is an even bigger deal because they literally write the rules of companies that can affect stock prices. I was barred because I could have passively found nonpublic info, but they can actively cause the situations that cause price movement.
Mullin's net worth is 20-75 million. So up to 0.25% of his net worth if we use the low estimate is a Meta acquisition? Who cares?
You do realize these people have friends and family.
> Who cares?
Insider trading deprives _all other_ legitimate participants of the market. That the trade is small relative to this individual net worth is meaningless. That is value that should have been captured by someone else taking a genuine risk. It's a thumb on the scale of the market and it is morally repugnant.
The definition of insider trading does not take into consideration "levels."
> This is a freakishly small amount of stock.
That he personally purchased. I don't know what private and public entities he may have shared the information with or what other purchases traded on his information.
> At these levels he would own a lot more META if he just bought QQQ (META is 3.3% of composition) with a fraction of his net worth
At the level of an individual game a card counter is mathematically not a huge problem. They're just shifting the odds by 1 or 2% in their favor. I wonder why casinos bother to kick them out? They'd stand to win a lot more if they just flopped everything on roulette anyways.
I think you're letting the imputed scope interfere with your evaluation and mistaking net worth for liquid assets.
- Markwayne Mullin (R Oklahoma) purchased $15-$50k Meta stock on 01/02/2024 [0]
A nice list: https://www.capitoltrades.com/issuers/431610
[0] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/3-politician...
You may believe no member of congress should own equity in any company, but that's a separate issue
https://www.tiktok.com/@iancarrollshow/video/734642717587849...
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4jA_k8Pn12 (in case of censorship)
https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/mike-gallagh...
Looks like Steven Mnuchin, David Friedman and Yossi Cohen were also involved. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), said that "we really have a TikTok problem", since it's acting to alchemize the left-right political divide into a young-old one.
The video says that pro-Palestine content is some of the most censored content there is, but despite that, a large number of TikTok users are supporting Palestine and questioning Israel's authority to continue hostilities. It suggests that silencing these objections to the Israel-Palestine conflict by preventing their discussion and spread is one of the primary motives for banning TikTok.
I'm deeply disappointed in members of the Democratic Party who voted for the TikTok ban, whose actions call into question the integrity of their party and its priorities. I'm not as surprised by the actions of the Republican Party, which historically has sided with the establishment (Meta and other social networks under US jurisdiction), but openly voting for censorship in the face of calls to protect free speech from Donald Trump and Elon Musk is suspect.
And I'm profoundly troubled by antisemitism and how whataboutism is clouding journalistic integrity. With derogatory comments about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and wokeism becoming more prevalent, we should be mindful of the slippery slope from oppressed to oppressor. This is why we must always call out injustice in all forms, even when it's inconvenient to do so, or risk sacrificing our principles and eventually our freedoms.
I'm reminded of the Paradox of Intolerance, that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance:
[0] https://www.joinautopilot.com/
[1] https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/pennsylvania-l...
They are certainly not all the same. If you don't distinguish them, you cut down the people actually fighting on the front lines. It's friendly fire. They are shot in the back.
Either way it's clearly not going in the right direction when you have a guy selling cans of fucking beans from the oval office and launching crypto rug pulls
Maybe this will be the hill he dies on. I can't bring myself to believe that he'll be allowed to literally become the day 1 dictator he that he promised he would.
By now -- people have used their free speech to make reels for every possibly viewpoint convincing any possible demography about anything. The trail of reels needed to convert a mountain biker to a racist, or a Lego builder to an LBTQ ally, is out there. Making the free speech isn't the issue in 2025.
The question is: Who sees what, and whose opinions are shifted in what direction.
The big social networks controls the algorithms. Controlling who sees what is the new "speak", where you directly influence peoples minds simply by showing the right reels at the right moments.
We have always had propaganda and media leaning in different directions. But people would know they are looking at Fox News or The Daily Show or Pravda. With TikTo... you find that people's opinion change very gradually and without perception over the course of half a year. Never seeing "TikTok" -- only seeing "people like you" (which can be a function of time, and evolve) sharing their heartfelt opinions.
Not anything blatant of course. Blatant stuff does not change peoples opinions anyway. Just subtly bump some reels that has been proven to shift a demography in a certain direction.
TikTok has the means to do it -- all the data about what reels cause what effect on what demographic, if they just wanted to.
If TikTok is doing propaganda by subtly promoting some reels over others -- who would know? Why would they not be doing it and how can anyone know they are not already doing it?
I am not saying this is definitely happening. But any discussion that isn't treating all the social networks as weapons of mass propaganda that CAN be used is awfully naive.
And focusing on the "speech" thing seems so misplaced. It's all about who is heard and seen, and that is today all about power and algorithms.
> Not anything blatant of course. Blatant stuff does not change peoples opinions anyway. Just subtly bump some reels that has been proven to shift a demography in a certain direction.
> TikTok has the means to do it -- all the data about what reels cause what effect on what demographic, if they just wanted to.
> If TikTok is doing propaganda by subtly promoting some reels over others -- who would know? Why would they not be doing it and how can anyone know they are not already doing it?
> I am not saying this is definitely happening. But any discussion that isn't treating all the social networks as weapons of mass propaganda that CAN be used is awfully naive.
Sure. But that's something that applies to every social network. Do you think e.g. Instagram doesn't subtly adjust which videos it shows you? They openly acknowledge that they limit the spread of videos that they consider "hate speech", and of course which videos they classify as hate speech is a politically dependent question. Or maybe you think Zuckerberg's interests are more aligned with what's good for you personally than the CCP's?
Like with your examples of Fox News or The Daily Show or Pravda, if I can see all the networks then I at least can compare and consider. Closing my eyes to one of them makes me worse off, especially when it's the only one that's not run by a handful of very similar people with very similar interests.
My point was that the free speech discourse around this is naive. The "speech" in question is providing ammunition for the owners of the algorithms, who are doing the most important expression through how those algorithms are tuned.
My point was that social media should be discussed more like nuclear weapons are discussed.
It makes strategically sense for US to not have Chinese nuclear weapons/social media deployed on its soil/in the heads of its citizens; regardless of whether US nuclear weapons/social media is morally superior.
Maybe. Or maybe the algorithmic nudges are small (because if they're any bigger they get noticed and become counterproductive), and most of the real signal gets through. Maybe the actual speech matters more.
> It makes strategically sense for US to not have Chinese nuclear weapons/social media deployed on its soil/in the heads of its citizens; regardless of whether US nuclear weapons/social media is morally superior.
At first-order yes. But I think the US has a lot more to lose from a worldwide atomisation of social media. If this kind of thing is normalised then the EU etc. practically have to kick out US social media and we'll end up with everyone having their own great firewall, and that will hurt the US more than it hurts China.
I can maybe understand ByteDance breaking the rules on a promise from the president elect that it will be alright.
I would, however, never expect Apple or Google to take that liability (while not getting much out of it).
edit: It seems that the TikTok app has indeed not been reinstated in the stores yet.
Plus our european politicians are weak and largely clueless, we will fold in front of China and let them roll over our automotive industry. There is war at our doorstep and enemy who repeatedly claimed he will wipe out half of our population, yet our reaction is next to 0, both immediate and long term.
It passed in the House 352-65, and in the Senate 79-18, both in April 2024.
People love being on the in circle of something "naughty".
Just staggering incompetence.
I am opposed to the ban fwiw, but being able to overrule it is a pretty big power grab for the president
I may very well have horribly misunderstood the situation, but I though Congress here only allowed the president to decide.
The TikTok one doesn't have input from the president, its all apps of a certain size owned by a country we dont like. Hence, Marvel Snap got banned too in the crossfire
It sucks so hard how the Dems keep expanding the powers of the Pres right before handing it to Trump
Is it back on the stores or not? Because if not, nothing about the ban has changed, it's only that TikTok undid the decision that THEY took to shut down.
If Apple/Google don't change their minds, TikTok won't be able to get any new US users, and won't be able to distribute updates to current US users. To continue using it in the current state, US users will have to keep the same phone and TikTok will have to continue supporting whatever last version(s) they're on indefinitely. (Modulo the few that might jump through VPN and app store locale setting hoops.)
And I don't see how Apple/Google could change their minds: the ban bill comes with a 5 year statute of limitations, so regardless of how convincing the Trump administration is in their promise not to enforce the law, the next administration inaugurated in January 2029 would still be able to impose the penalties on Apple/Google for 4 years of non-compliance. Those penalties would be cripplingly massive even for the world's largest companies (I'm reading an estimate of $850B [0]).
As far as I can tell, the only events that could end this are (1) TikTok finding and agreeing to sell to a US buyer or (2) Congress overturning the ban.
It's odd that people are talking as though the saga is over now...
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/19/24347325/tiktok-service-p...
But in all seriousness, there's 3 branches of government and 2 of spoken. Trump's voice should be moot. Hopefully he's put in his place by our institutions and shamed for attempting to subvert the system of checks and balances described by our constitution.
I want you to know that the name of the app is '小红书' (小 little 红 red 书 book), and the name of the propaganda tool is '红宝书' (红 red 宝 treasure 书 book).
I don't think there is such a "name after" thing. There are a lot of mixed reviews on Cultual Revolution, a "name after" would bring a lot of risks during the growth of the app.
The english translations are similar enough that I assumed a connection.
>yeah, let's just ignore that. Dance videos on tiktok are more important than security
That's so f-in absurd. I can't even wrap my head around why anyone would literally protest against the ban. I just hope that germany, or rather europe, will have such a ban, too, and that it get enforced properly.
GOP in the US has constantly been fear mongering about social media bias, but what they really mean is they want their own ideas / bias and nobody else.
This is what the American people wanted.
There's a quote I can't find right now that goes something along the lines of "If you let somebody define the terms of your reality, you've made a sorcerer out of them, unless you catch the bastard real quick".
Trump to a T.
Four quotes that capture the essence of not letting others define your reality or exert control over your perception:
1. “He who defines the terms wins the argument.” - various thinkers.
2. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
3. “Until lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” - Chinua Achebe
4. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
And opposed by a Democratic party which was very much controlled (to a fault) by its machine.
That's roughly where the similarities end though. I think they'd have strongly diverged on key points such as a man's duty to his country in war, presidential pardons, and right in the *****.
The Caesars of Rome often played these public games to make themselves look magnanimous, while at the same time consolidating power and control.
Julius Caesar's rise to power is one example.
You get those on youtube as well, for every combination of large power, I'm not sure why that its own should be a red flag.
If a significant number of users were to join another foreign-owned platform with similar issues, it is likely that such platform would be banned as well, if it is not already banned under FACAA.
TikTok is an issue in large part due to its popularity.
It's only propaganda because it's "them".
How is it typical of Western countries, and how is it hypocrisy? US companies already do strange things to comply with China's requirements of them, for example.
Ed: to be clear, the original title specifically mentioned an executive order.
Russian Prime Minister Medvedev comes to President Putin and nervously tells him to abolish these time zones.
- Why, Putin asks him?
- Ah, I can't find myself with these times:
- I fly to another city, call home and everyone is asleep,
- I last woke you up at 4 in the morning, but I thought it was only evening,
- I call Angela Merkel to congratulate her on her birthday and she tells me she had it yesterday,
- I wish the Chinese President a happy New Year, and he says it will be tomorrow.
- Well, these are just minor awkwardness, Putin answered him
- Do you remember when that Polish plane crashed with the president? I called them to express my condolences, but the plane hadn't taken off yet !!
It's about the global monopoly on tech products that the US has, which is obviously threatened by Chinese competitors. You saw the exact same thing with Huawei.
Well that's exactly what happened. Except it's just a pretense that it's about security or privacy, which is a very easy thing to do.
No. This whole ”it’s just protectionism” doesn’t hold water for one second. Huawei has been banned in other places as well, and no other companies in the telecom were simultaneously banned. It’s just not good policy to build critical infrastructure using hardware from a Chinese company.
All those ideals of democracy I learned about growing up in the US - checks and balances, the rule of law, land of opportunity. It's all become a massive joke.
That does leave companies like Oracle, who TikTok uses to host their content, in a weird position where they could be fined by future administrations for continuing to provide them service now.
However, the law does give the president the ability to give them a one-time 90 day stay of execution. So, theoretically, they could repeal the law in the next 3 months.
Sure, if that message is dishonest or manipulative, that's dangerous, but TikTok telling their US users that they're going to lose access to TikTok if they don't "do something" seems like a pretty reasonable use of free speech.
But at the same time, I don't like that companies have the clout to influence politics to the degree they do. But they have far more (and IMO often better) levers they can pull than what TikTok has done here, and I think those levers (campaign contributions, for one) are much more dangerous to democracy than stuff like this.
(For the record, I am loosely in favor of a TikTok divestiture or ban, though not for the reasons touted by the US government.)
Losing electricity or phone service for a day is going to make people more angry at the utility or phone company, regardless of why the shutdown has happened.
And if a utility threatened to shut down service instead of complying with a new government regulation, you can bet the government would immediately jail anyone involved in that decision.
Facebook and Instagram, via Mark Zuckerberg, and X/Twitter via Elon Musk, are already in Trump's camp and are helping him.
This law gives Trump leverage over TikTok - their access to the US market will likely depend on serving Trump's interests. Like X and Meta (and other SV companies) operating in other countries, they will comply with local oppression. It's incredible that the Democrats keep handing victory after victory to their opponents.
(Trump also is gaining extreme influence over professional news media, including Fox News and the WSJ, of course, but also ABC News, possibly CBS News, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, the LA Times, and many more. It may be time to stop the lazy criticism of the NY Times and start taking them seriously; they could be the only island left in the storm, and will be subject to extreme attacks.)
It's good to be precise with terminology and facts, especially in legal matters.
I'm not privy to the specific words that were exchanged, so it's hard to be precise. But I imagine it was some form of Trump saying "by tomorrow, I will give you a 90-day extension. I have a gentleman's agreement with the current government that if you do not stop your services in the 24 hours between now and my inauguration, you won't face any issues, so please carry on and we will clean this mess up later".
If you want a private citizen analogy, it's similar to someone saying they won't press charges despite a third-party being in flagrant illegal behavior. In this case, it's the US government saying they won't press charges. Both Biden and Trump have said as much, if my understanding of the case is correct, and one can assume they have discussed this with the appropriate branches of government.
If someone challenges his interpretation of the 3 requirements in court, then presumably he'd have to explain why he believed that to be the case[1], but he does not have to prove this certainty ex ante in order for the 90-day extension to be valid.
--------
[1]: IANAL but whether he can successfully prove it or not is also ultimately irrelevant given the SCOTUS recent interpretation of presidential power. If he's found "guilty" of making a bad interpretation of the certainty of the 3 requirements, what is really going to be his punishment? There's really nothing you can do against a sitting president with regards to the exercise of their executive power...
“there are in place the relevant binding legal agreements to enable execution of such qualified divestiture during the period of such extension."
This is a binary thing. No such legal agreement seems to exist. You also ignored the other parts of my comment about him missing the deadline in the law to apply the extension.
Johnson himself said they will enforce the law. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-johnson-2-...
The definition of certify is literally "attest or confirm in a formal statement"
Besides, there's no process through which Congress would question or investigate whether the president really can or cannot certify whatever he claims about this matter.
It's only for 90 days though, unless Trump decides to completely ignore his duty to enforce the law (a distinct possibility).
We found a compromise. TikTok will remain, all of its national security risks will remain. Also, the law that tramples free speech is upheld by the court, but will be blantently ignored and unenforced.
Everybody loses. This outcome is worse than anyone could have conceived.
The outcome is *exactly* as anyone with a modicum of sense expected.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"—often paraphrased (sensibly!) as "deserve neither and *will lose both*." As you say: we've lost both—who could have predicted that? Yeah; well.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
There's nothing really novel about the instant situation. It's a classic, on repeat.
I don't care about the First Amendment specifically. The US constitution is not magical divinely inspired scripture. I care about the underlying principles of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of association, regardless of how well or poorly those are reflected by a specific written law.
This is the problem.
We can't be certain that a foreign actor couldn't destabilize our faith in our government by pushing pro-palestinian content.
A small push on a platform can snowball since creators take the stances that don't get them cancelled or want to mimic the popular opinion
Does that count as pro-Palestinian?
Reddit is both anti-Israel and anti-Palestine depending on the sub. News channels will be one or the other depending on the slant and there's plenty on both sides. Most of instagram is people from both sides shouting at each other about how the other gets more representation/are more evil. Same with facebook. I don't use Twitter or any Twitter clones, but I assume Mastodon has a Palestinian slant while Twitter probably has a slight Israeli slant (shitposting aside). Even on HackerNews you'll see both stances often. I guess 4chan would have my stance, since they hate Israel because antisemitism but also hate Arabs.
Do people just make shit up like this for a laugh? I really don't get it, yet see it so often espoused.
Reddit shows pro-palestinian/anti-israel propaganda in the front page on a daily basis.
Also, the fact that Israel's invasion of Palestinian territories was an anti-Biden propaganda point that was boosted pretty hard doesn't exactly prove that the likes of China aren't pushing propaganda to destabilize the US. There was clearly a coordinated effort to force-fed the idea that Biden was pro-genocide and a warmonger, and Trump was the only possible candidate to push peace in Ukraine and Palestine.
Genuine question from a non-American: does the 1st amendment only apply to US citizens?
Citizens in the US are implicitly allowed to do whatever they like, subject to laws that the government enacts. The constitution describes those areas where the government is allowed to pass laws. All other areas are off limits to the government, and left for the people to do as they like. To emphasize the point, the amendments specify certain areas that the government is extra-especially-not-allowed to create any laws about, like speech.
The extent to which this is observed today is quite dubious. There are lots of laws that the US government passes which have little to do with anything the constitution allows them to do - but they kinda hand-wave around that and gesture toward something, like the "commerce clause" or whatnot as justification.
But in theory - for any law passed - it is unconstitutional unless you can say exactly where in the constitution it is explicitly allowed.
* Having written all that, I will add that "government" above means the US Federal government, not all the other ones. State, local, have a lot of latitude to make whatever laws they want, unless a federal law specifically prohibits it.
This is not entirely correct. In general many elements of the Constitution are incorporated and apply at all levels of government. It even outranks state constitutions where the two conflict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
The major difference is the Tenth Amendment, which sets the states apart by specifying that any powers not "delegated to" the federal government are reserved exclusively for the states. (In practice courts have found many "implied powers" that are not explicitly enumerated).
Federal laws are distinct from the Constitution.
The Constitution, its Amendments, and decisions of the Supreme Court are not 'federal laws'.
---
However TikTok US here is a domestic organization operating domestically merely controlled by a foreign organization operating abroad, which complicates matters. It has rights.
A later amendment is held to have "incorporated" this prohibition against the state governments as well, though that amendment doesn't actually specify anything in particular. ("No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.")
It is frequently argued that some act of the government violates the free speech rights of foreigners living abroad, which is to say that whatever it was the government did fell into the class of behaviors prohibited by the first amendment. People tend to find that argument weird; I don't know what its batting average is.
Summing up, nothing extends rights to foreigners, but since the first amendment is a prohibition on the government rather than a grant of rights to certain protected people, foreigners arguably enjoy equal protection.
TL:DR: no, it doesn't even apply to US citizen, only to US government.
PS: "tyranny of the majority" for some is a definition fascism, i disagree, to me it isn't even proto-fascism, it lack a weird mythos about internal enemies and a few other mythos. It's closer bonapartism, or cesarism at worst. To be clear i think it is a precondition to have fascism (I.E as long as your case law/consitution is enforced for everybody the same way, you aren't a fascist state).
Yes, it's being suppressed. Criminalization is just one of the many coercive ways to censor something, but states have many tools in the box...
s/criminalized/supressed/ and message still holds true. You can still say the exact same things on a different forum.
Yes, the government censoring Tiktok's source code on Github would be a freedom of speech violation, but that's not what this is about, is it? See also: Tornado Cash. Publishing code facilitating money laundering is fine (you'll find the code still on Github!); running said code to facilitate money laundering isn't.
Or to go with an even more extreme example: Writing code for a self-aiming and firing gun is speech [1], running said code on a gun in your driveway isn't.
The fact that we are still debating such basics of the First Amendment here is baffling. This is almost as trivial as the other well-known limitations in my view (shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater etc.)
[1] At least at the moment, and as far as I know; I think we might see this type of speech being restricted in the same way that some facts about the construction of nuclear weapons are "innate state secrets".
American companies (Google and Apple primarily) have been told by the government that they cannot distribute binaries running certain code to Americans. That seems like the real 1st amendment issue to me and I was quite surprised to learn that ByteDance only claimed that their own 1st amendment rights were being infringed on (which personally I find to be flimsier).
EDIT: Tornado cash was taken down from GitHub though, so you don't have a point here
> American companies (Google and Apple primarily) have been told by the government that they cannot distribute binaries running certain code to Americans.
Yes, in the same way that American companies and individuals are routinely prohibited by the government from distributing other binaries to Americans, most notably anything that circumvents DRMs as regulated by the DMCA.
I really don't think the people that drafted the First Amendment had apps in mind when they thought of "speech", and would probably consider them something more like machinery (a printing press, a radio (not a radio station!) etc.) Interpreting Tiktok as a type of newspaper (which are widely protected even in democracies without an equivalent to the First Amendment) is much less of a leap of faith compared to considering an iOS executable speech.
So I would also argue that restricting DRM bypassing software is a violation of the 1st amendment and, more importantly, that it's a bad thing to restrict.
We'll never know what they would have thought, but I'll add that actual plans for machinery are definitely speech. We certainly do restrict these plans, with ITAR most notably, and I think it's reasonable to draw that line somewhere.
Note that I never said banning TikTok was as bad idea, just that it restricted speech by way of limiting distribution (which oddly looks unconsidered in the supreme court case), which it absolutely does. I'm uncomfortable with this level of power being granted to the government, but given that TikTok is obviously a spying/malware delivery tool by a foreign borderline hostile government I think it's probably warranted.
I think not being somewhat disturbed by the United States government restricting distribution of an application is a bit weird TBH. That's a huge power to have and can definitely be abused, especially if it's made easier to do so in the future.
Or does it just apply to the brainrotting addiction machine that shoves 800 videos a minute at teenagers?
One only need to look at the Harris campaign to see that the political class in the us is fundamentally innumerate as well as incapable of making a cost benefit analysis.
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306#t...
The only presidential administration that produced a non-deficit budget was Bill Clinton's second term (~97-00).
Probably because Ross Perot mostly self-funded a third party campaign centered around the national debt and had received 8% of the vote (and 19% in the previous election).
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
People quote it in the wrong context.
I personally picked 40% because I couldn't image a change of this sort being consistent with today's political reality.
That said, the fine print of that prediction can be interpreted that the ban is "in effect" even if it not enforced and has no legal liability. I doubt all the predictors were hanging their hat on that fine print when they predicted, though.
I'm also a little unclear on which liberties are essential, versus those that are merely nice to have. We all give up the liberty of driving on the wrong side of the road, and nobody seems to mind.
But when you ban something 9 figures of people happily use, with some small chunk of that even being people making a living off of it, people will care about that because it directly and visibly affects them.
Are the congressmen so incompetent that they didn't see this coming? This backfired horribly for them in multiple ways... unless this was somehow part of a master plan my simple mind can't comprehend?
Did it somehow not backfire and I'm just being led to believe so?
The elite have always known the value of media and propaganda. TikTok could easily sway electorate decision making in the same way as Meta, X, and YouTube. The US oligarchs have no control over a sizable social media platform. The data security and privacy concerns are theater. The very same logic we use for TikTok applies to our own apps and social media. The only distinction is the false premise they have our interests in mind.
Are congressmen this incompetent? Yes. Are they bought by adversaries? Yes. Are they just humans who are as equally manipulated as you? Yes.
Did Trump get more money? Yes. Plan success.
Because, and I hate to say it, they're our snooping government agencies. I'd rather it be them that have access to all my data than the CCP apparatus.
Foreign governments not so much.
The issue is a foreign government having access to that data, to installed software on millions of phones, and foreign control of the primary information source for tens of millions of Americans.
If person A says "X implies Y", then person B points out that X would also imply obvious nonsense Z, it doesn't mean that B is saying Y and Z are the same, or even that Y isn't true. They're just pointing out that X is too general to possibly be true.
This essential liberty was freedom from being killed. Pretty fucking essential.
We give up that right in exchange for the permanent safety that a government is supposed to grant. Life is presumably more fundamental than money, but if it's the only truly essential liberty, there is a lot of room to give up others.
Homeowners have some power. But if the government really needs to (modern example includes building a new railway), They can elect to forcibly pay you and seize it (eminent domain).
>We all give up the liberty of driving on the wrong side of the road, and nobody seems to mind.
Auto transportation was never a right to begin with. As inconvenient as it is, you are free to walk wherever you want without trespassing. Even across a road. But there's a line when you start to simply endanger others by say, walking on a road at 5 mph.
You can legally the same content anywhere else, and Tik Tok would not be under fire if it were not owned by one of a handful of countries.
You sure about that one? (https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...)
Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content, and implicitly the fact that if a Chinese company owns it, the US has no control over it. Opinion making in the US is always implicitly enforced, not explicitly.
There's a great bit of an old interview with Noam Chomsky talking to an American reporter in which the reporter asks Chomsky: "You think I'm lying to you, pushing a US agenda?" and he responds: "No I think you're perfectly honest, but if you held any other beliefs than you do you wouldn't be sitting in that chair talking to me"
this is the platform version of that concept.
The content wasn’t not outlawed; the platform was not outlawed.
Some aspect of the platform’s ownership has been outlawedd. That’s pretty different.
Please address the actual argument, namely that in the US, when you hand platforms to people like Zuckerberg, you don't need to do any actual censoring because American business leaders change their political opinions in line with the sitting administration the way other people change T-Shirts. That is the point of the sale, anybody who is not utterly gullible can see it from a mile away.
On a Chinese owned TikTok Americans get information presented to them, whether intentionally or authentically, that the US powers that be do not like. There is no other security argument, data was already managed by Oracle in the US, the app was technically separated from its Chinese equivalent Douyin.
>Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content
I’m struggling to see why you say I didn’t.
> you don't need to do any actual censoring because American business leaders change their political opinions in line with the sitting administration
I think this is blatantly not true. Instagram, reddit, and others host a TON of anti-current-administration content.
Now, I’d like to discuss your assertion that there is no other security argument with a series of questions. I do not believe even a casual observer can uniformly answer “no” to the following;
Do you think it is likely that CCP has access to the data obtained by Tik Tok on US phones?
Do you think the US government warnings and security audit results were based on real concerns and findings?
Do you think it is a national security risk for millions of Americans to run CCP controlled code on their phones?
Do you think CCP is able to control the Tik Tok recommendation algorithms to promote their interests, possibly at the expense of American interests?
The only one I wouldn't uniformly answer "no" to is the last one as there's no real evidence for the first two and that one is at least in principle possible but what's important is that private American citizens running entertainment apps on their personal phones isn't a "national security issue".
Running TikTok on government phones in Langley probably is so banning an app like this from government devices is fair enough, but the interest of any individual American is that they have free access to services, domestic or foreign, even if it's literal propaganda because they're the ones who are supposed to make that judgement. Hell even if it's Red Star OS from North Korea and they want to run it on their personal computer, they should be able to.
American interest isn't a synonym for interest of the state department, because if that's the case you're living in a security state (ironically like China) and not a free country.
> Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content
Perhaps I should have quoted it so that it was clear.
The TikTok ban would've been far less problematic if they had created legislation for all companies that curtailed data trading and increased user privacy. But that was never the goal.
1. Banning media based on alleged (or real) foreign interference is a very thin line
2. Banning and "unbanning" media based on vague accusations can be exploited for self-serving economical or political interests, which long-term hurts any kind of credibility of media as a whole. And, like it or not: we depend on media. We're not living in self-sufficient communes, at least most of us don't.
3. What made TikTok an issue in the first place: foreign interference (see 1) and problematic content, the policy causes for this probably include insufficient moderation and lack of court accountability. Then there's the question of algorithmic bias: I think this is not a simple question, e.g. is Instagram Reels technically the same or if not, what are the most important differences between their recommendation algorithms?
censorship, and similar constraints on free speech, just hide the problems of society so you are unable to act on possible threats as a policymaker.
Is it possible that TikTok solved their problem by purchasing $6 billion worth of Trump’s meme coin?
He came out against a ban on TikTok long ago (after initially being in support) and made it clear he'd work to reverse it the second the ban bill started gaining momentum.
Yep
Famously, soldiers wanted to use strava in secret military bases: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
Maybe we should have some sort of General Data Protection Regulation law instead of hand-wringing about social media.
I can't imagine a world where it would be illegal for two parties to agree to sell the location data that one of them generates.
If I agree to let FantasyCorp sell my location data, and then they follow through with our agreement and actually sell it, then there's no problem here that I can see.
I'd be astonished if I learned that soldiers on duty were totally free to do as they please the expense of operational security simply because that's what people in their broad demographic category are accustomed to.
I'd be equally astonished if I found that military recruitment was based on enlisting cross-sectional samples of demographic categories, without regard for the capacities and attitudes of the specific individuals seeking to join. I know for a fact that people are rejected for enlistment for all sorts of reasons.
And I'm sure that the military can find ways of enabling deployed personnel to use the internet without sacrificing security or oversight -- for example by requiring them to use secured military-issue computers and smartphones, or by having an inspection or vetting process for hardware and software when soldiers want to use their own devices.
I hope you also acknowledge the absurdity of suggesting that the government should apply essentially the same restrictions to the whole of society that the military couldn't apply within its own sphere of control.
Of this we are in 100% agreement. It’s totally doable, but I am observing that today it is not a solved problem in the US military.
> I hope you also acknowledge the absurdity of suggesting that the government should apply essentially the same restrictions to the whole of society that the military couldn't apply within its own sphere of control.
I’m a little confused about the wording of this but I am reading this as saying that the military should be able to apply its own standards that are stricter than what civilians are accustomed to. I agree, and it does. But I’m suggesting that it doesn’t happen in a vacuum and that enforcement is never perfect. A blanket ban on personal devices (I’m positive this has been tried before) would both be unpopular and difficult to enforce. It would be a mistake to discount the cost of poor morale. And it would be a mistake to ignore the outsized effect that poor morale has on middle management — the ones who are responsible for enforcing said rules.
I hope it’s clear that my commentary is entirely descriptive and not prescriptive. Full disclosure: I’m former US military enlisted and also currently working in a space adjacent to improving operational security.
Or in HNism, you're "Why don't they just..." without considering the reasons those solutions might be more challenging than they first appear.
I suggest you read parent comment about balance and tradeoffs inherent in forward deployment again.
Could you point out the straw man in question? I feel like everything I posted above is a direct response to arguments I gleaned from your previous comment, and certainly didn't intentionally attribute any argument to you that I didn't think you were actually making.
> I suggest you read parent comment about balance and tradeoffs inherent in forward deployment again.
I've reread it a couple of times, and I'm afraid I'm not seeing any hidden propositions in it that I missed the first time around. Could you be more explicit about what you're getting at?
My comment about finding ways to enable internet access in a more controlled way was specifically targeting your argument about the security vs. morale tradeoff, and my point about the absurdity of trying to make that tradeoff for society as a whole in a scenario where you imply the military can't make it for its own operations still seems to apply here.
>> I'd be astonished if I learned that soldiers on duty were totally free to do as they please the expense of operational security
The post you were replying to didn't suggest anything about total freedom. You're exaggerating their words to make your argument easier.
>> I'd be equally astonished if I found that military recruitment was based on enlisting cross-sectional samples of demographic categories
Given initial enlistment age ranges between 17 and 30/40 [0], you get cohorts from specific generations.
Kids who are 17 now were born ~2008, which is just starting to be kids with smartphones and mobile devices their entire lives.
No cross-sectioning required: just upper and lower age limits.
>> And I'm sure that the military can find ways of enabling deployed personnel to use the internet without sacrificing security or oversight
I'm going to assume you're honestly ignorant of military networks and field device management at scale.
The military runs segregated networks. Secure networks require approved devices; those devices are extremely locked down. There are often also public internet networks for MWR reasons. Unmanaged devices can be used on those networks. Furthermore, in most non-naval deployments, terrestrial cellular data networks are also accessible.
>> for example by requiring them to use secured military-issue computers and smartphones, or by having an inspection or vetting process for hardware and software when soldiers want to use their own devices.
Military IT is already overloaded managing the vast number of secure devices and networks, so having them manage consumer devices in any way is a non-starter.
For scale context, the DoD PKI includes ~4 million active CAC cards. [1]
Unmanaged consumer devices + CAC are also often used for less-privileged interaction with the military (e.g. HR functions).
> My comment about finding ways to enable internet access in a more controlled way was specifically targeting your argument about the security vs. morale tradeoff
And the responses that you're getting are that these are non-trivial problems for real-world reasons.
Furthermore, you seem to have a lack of understanding about how much it sucks to be stuck in a forward base, and how important maintaining morale is to command authority and force effectiveness.
PS: Also, look at user names. I'm not the author of the original comment you replied to.
It's not easy to put a McDonald's in the middle of the desert.
I'm not sure what to make of the argument that the military is unable to find any alternative to consumer smartphones without even RMM implemented as a means of providing for troop morale, therefore the government should regulate social media for the entirety of society as a means to ensure the security of military maneuvers. This just sounds nuts to me.
>> Why are soldiers allowed to bring GPS-enable consumer smartphones along with them on top-secret deployments in the first place?
That was your original question.
It wasn't 'Should we ban TikTok to enhance military security?'
When people answered your original question with relevant points, you reached back to banning TikTok.
It sounded like you just didn't understand why soldiers are allowed to bring GPS-enable consumer smartphones along with them on deployments.
https://news.usni.org/category/fleet-tracker
The more valuable signal from app data would likely be op tempo and what phase of a deployment / mission a ship is in.
Aside from inferred reasons for changes in patterns of behavior, one going emcon and suddenly dropping all users off an app means something.
Also, modern satellites are great, but even carrier battle groups are really small in the Pacific.
That's not really a new problem. The problem is as old as time, even before the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_lips_sink_ships
When I was deployed in 2011 we didn't carry cell phones because:
1. Jammers will render your antenna unusable or potentially damage your device.
2. The country that controls the infrastructure now has the inside scoop on who you are, what you're doing, and where you are. Even if they country is an ally, it only takes a few individuals to start mass exfiltration.
TikTok was turning into infrastructure for social dialogue except that it had a new capability compared to the cell phones of 2011: it could be manipulated at scale, and quickly with the combination of algorithms and outrage culture.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expos...
And now about how the sitting president can profit from brokering it
If social media owned by foreign companies is a national security threat, then wouldn't that essentially make FB, X, YouTube a threat to like every other nation? Why not throw wikipedia in too? So now any nation can legitimately see any other source or collector of information as a national security threat and ban it at will? Taken to the logical conclusion, every nation should be enveloped by its own digital borders.
To me, it's the popular sentiment alone, for example people feeling sad and upset TikTok's gone and feeling happy that it's back, that's preventing this dismal future, otherwise governments would block apps on a whim. And this I'd say is a win.
Additionally, why have we all forgotten that China does not allow any of our social media companies within their borders?
If we’re in the business of free trade, there’s no reason to let them operate a social media company in the US until they’ve opened their market to us.
This is the maximally stupid outcome, so I suppose we should have seen it coming. I guess the conclusion is going to involve Trump taking an ownership stake in TikTok, possibly by swapping it for $TRUMP cryptocurrency or Truth Social shares something.
We can blame the state of New York for this, who convicted Trump of falsifying business records and then handed him a sentence of .. nothing.
Nothing yet: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czr72m57e1jo
Don’t worry, I’m sure there will be some kind of ‘emergency’ this time.
There was no ‘instant revolution’ on Jan 6th. Near as I can tell, if that capital police officer hadn’t shot the woman climbing the barricade…
But then I watched it live on CSPAN, so I got to see it for myself instead of being able to be told afterwards that I didn’t see what I saw.
The klept will not spare the billionaires. There’s a reason Meta’s entire public posture has changed since Nov 6, there’s a reason the WaPo didn’t publish an endorsement. This isn’t a class thing - Trump is not a billionaire defending his fellow billionaires, he’s a mob boss in charge of the state.
And maybe we should have a law that punishes politicians for paying money to cover up affairs. But we don't have that. Trump's prosecution was, instead, a triple bank shot combining three different vaguely written laws in a combination that makes the Double Irish with Dutch Sandwich look straightforward.[1]
As CNN's head legal analyst Elie Honig explained: "The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-...
[EDIT to respond a bit to the now-expanded parent, which was only a single sentence when I replied]: I do totally agree that the hush money prosecution was a bit of a stretch, and wouldn't have happened if Trump wasn't famous. You're just wrong about it applying to a time when he wasn't running for office.
Now, it'd be better if he simply got prosecuted for the initial crime. Absolutely agree there. But I'm not sure that "I can avoid prosecution for campaign misdeeds by committing them and then waiting to pay people back until after the campaign" would be a great precedent.
The judge summarized the case for the jury as follows:
> The allegations reflect in substance, that Donald Trump falsified business records to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election. Specifically, it is alleged that Donald Trump made or caused false business records to hide the true nature of payments made to Michael Cohen, by characterizing them as payment for legal services rendered pursuant to a retainer agreement. The People allege that in fact, the payments were intended to reimburse Michael Cohen for money he paid to Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, in the weeks before the presidential election to prevent her from publicly revealing details about a past sexual encounter with Donald Trump.
That summary implies that paying off Stormy Daniels "to prevent her from publicly revealing details" about the affair was the unlawful act. But under what law? And why wasn't he just charged with that law directly?
Basically, the crime alleged was violating a NY election law saying that you can't try to influence an election through "unlawful means". They provided a sampling of said unlawful means: violating federal campaign contribution limits, falsifying other business records, and violating state tax laws about how the reimbursement to Cohen was handled. The jurors didn't have to unanimously agree about which of those things they think he actually did.
The reasons to not charge him for those separately would seem to be respectively: 1. that's the feds job, 2. statute of limitations expired for the non-felony falsifications during his presidency when he couldn't be charged with anything, and 3. Cohen directly committed the tax crime so all Trump's guilty of is conspiracy to commit a really niche bit of tax misrepresentation that didn't actually cost anything.
The unambiguous bit is that he definitely falsified business records, and so the squabble is over whether he's guilty of a misdemeanor or a felony. It was apparently persuasive to the jury that he did the felony version.
That just gets you back to the temporal problem we started with. As you say, the only "unambiguous bit" from the jury's implicit fact-finding "is that he definitely falsified business records." But he did that after he won the election. How can you influence an election through unlawful conduct that happened after the election was resolved?
Insofar as the case was framed as election manipulation, you need some conduct prior to the election. Which is why, as you observe, the prosecutor had to add a third layer of uncharged alleged crimes:
> Basically, the crime alleged was violating a NY election law saying that you can't try to influence an election through "unlawful means". They provided a sampling of said unlawful means... The jurors didn't have to unanimously agree about which of those things they think he actually did.
Putting aside that each of the predicate crimes is deeply flawed (e.g. federal prosecutors investigated and declined to bring the campaign finance charge), you can't rest your triple-layer cake felony theory on a base of uncharged predicate crimes and tell the jury they don't have to agree as to the predicate crimes: https://www.justsecurity.org/96654/trump-unanimous-verdict. This is exactly the sort of thing judges are supposed to keep from being submitted to the jury.
It's personally embarrassing that lawyers at my former firm helped architect this travesty. If this harebrained legal theory had been used to convict a sex trafficker or murderer, lawyers at that firm would be falling over themselves to represent the defendant on appeal pro bono.
I'm not sure how so many people misunderstand the difference between "free speech" and "app controlled by hostile foreign government".
The people speaking on TikTok have not lost their right to free speech, they still are free to use a multitude of other channels that amplify their speech. No speech was blocked, only the app controlled by a hostile foreign government was blocked, and there are no provisions in a any legal framework that says we can't stop a hostile foreign government from controlling what people in this country see.
Where the fights isn't over selling opium to the us masses, but about who gets the profits from the sales.
I might not share your views but it is important to defend this side of the debate to get the full picture.
It’s easy to reduce TikTok to its negatives and forget that ton of people do get value from it. Obviously for content makers but even for watchers, entertainment and sense of community do have values.
I'm not sure why people seem to have more narrowly defined their idea of freedom of speech to be "the freedom to shout futilely into the void," when it's a two-way street. The government telling booksellers they can't sell a book to people isn't just a violation of the author's rights, but the right of other people to seek and acquire that book. (Hence the clauses in the amendment about anssociation and abridgment of press.)
The whole situation is very Fahrenheit 451. Which is kind of ironic, since Bradbury would have probably hated TikTok and assumed it would be the television-flavored precipice leading to books being destroyed.
Captain Beatty would be proud of all of the would-be firemen itching to torch everything they don't like, oblivious to the simple corollary that someone else doesn't like what they like.
I mean, yeah, I would be slightly annoyed to lose ${social network}, but in truth, my life would be hardly impacted.
If you sent letters to people via a middleman who decided which of those to forward onwards, you’d see that as censorship. I appreciate that that’s an over-simplified example - it’s meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. But control of the algorithm effectively regulates free speech, IMO.
Also (for clarity) the fact that China happens to be involved is not relevant to my point!
This law does not trample free speech. Your view of what free speech means as it pertains to U.S. law is wrong.
So Trump & his circle win !
This is an absurd framing. Free speech cannot implicate national security. If a social media platform controlled by a foreign government can manipulate the people so easily then you have a much larger and ignored problem.
> all of its national security risks
Which are zero. What you actually experience a risk from is the shabby way Google, Microsoft and Apple have put their platforms together. Designed to earn them money while utterly destroying your privacy.
> This outcome is worse
You're already in trouble. This outcome is a symptom of a much larger problem. The conversation around this is completely detached from reality.
To me, the whole banning of TT is political theater aimed to divide the US while existing tech oligarchs consolidate power and money.
Just look at the message TT broadcasted. Blatant pandering of incoming administration.
"Manipulation Playbook: The 20 Indicators of Reality Control"
If you're wondering how Russia slipped from a flawed democracy into an aurocracy, it was because Yeltsin fixed the 1996 election, by holding an axe over the head of the press. He made it very clear that anybody who wants to keep their broadcast licenses will need to shill for him.
It's how a drunken autocrat with an 8% approval rating, credited for both hyperinflation and mass unemployment, who launched a coup (that killed a few hundred people and caused a constitutional crisis) ended up getting re-elected.
And then at the eleventh hour, after firing his cabinet, again, he declares Putin his successor and resigns over a $10,000 bribery scandal.
Huh? Trump singlehandedly bringing TikTok back for tens of millions of malleable voters. Sounds like a pretty huge victory for him!
Get used to it.
Expect a lot more “big wins” in the coming weeks- where he solves problems to massive fanfare that never existed or that he created- with empty “solutions” that also didn’t really happen or take no effort.
I do however, also believe that good leaders are people with their own principles and ideas- and are willing to do what is right even if it isn't popular, when necessary. However, a huge percentage of our political leaders on both the left and right seem to have a 'dark triad' personality with narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy- and no ideals besides getting more power and admiration, that switch everything they claim to stand for on a dime like a kid trying on play outfits. I'd like to see people notice and not accept that type of 'leadership.'
It's the same reason you see certain introverted personality types overselected for in backend engineering teams: only a certain type of person enjoys working on something that is inscrutable to most people even users of the service they help support.
===
> I do however, also believe that good leaders are people with their own principles and ideas- and are willing to do what is right even if it isn't popular, when necessary.
It's a slippery slope from this to oligopolistic rule. Obviously the US democracy is not direct and there's an understanding that politicians balance their principles against popularity but I also think the US is of a mood that Congress is run by disconnected elites right now. Now is the time to err to populism.
I would say we've certainly had politicians and leaders without 'dark triad' personalities, but the most sincere ones in my lifetime were often also the least successful.
I don't think standing up for your ideals is incompatible with democracy, if you make it clear from the outset what your ideals are, and that you intend to stand by them.
However, I do think people with real ideals and vision do become inspiring leaders, and we could really use that right now. I'll admit this mostly happens at a cultural level, and probably works best outside of a political office- MLK for example.
Appearing wealthy is especially attractive with narcissism since it is the most banal, obvious, and universally understood signal of success and greatness- but the money itself isn't the goal, and having wealth in secret - as may be necessary if it is under the table - without adding to the appearance of being wealthy would be uninteresting.
I thought Joe Biden signed the law?
Biden didn't stop it because he also supported the ban as well, which is even worse.
So TikTok would have been totally banned if either Biden or Harris won the election.
Maybe I just need to talk about it, but I'd like to think I learned something that might help someone else.
Honest question- whatever you like about whatever this politician says, do you believe it's sincere? If not, do you feel like your views and ideals deserve representation from people that sincerely share them and would actually make some person sacrifices to make them happen?
It's absolutely crazy to me that people like you assume if you question anything on 'their side' you must be 'on the other side' - as if all of human perspectives reduced to a single bit of information. I mean, if they really were even on their own side they'd be more critical of it.
What irks me is the cheap virtue signalling by the laptop class which has been told to hate him since 2016. They had no opinion of the man - who is a literal Hitler and who was 70 years old in 2016 - before that. I despise such fakery.
They didn't dislike him before 2016 because he was one of them, he went to their parties, donated their favorite people lots of money, and did TV interviews repeating all of their talking points.
Trump is absolutely nothing like Hitler- Hitler was a completely sincere true believer in his cause, solidified his views clearly before he had any fame or power and stuck to them consistently, and was himself willing to die for the cause of blaming all problems on people different than him. Trump switches stories and allegiances like an 8 year old girl trying on princess outfits until one 'clicks' and gets attention- and doesn't care if the one he ends up with is left right or center- he tried them all.
Both your "cheap virtue signalling by the laptop class" and Trump have an identical underlying strategy and postmodern world view that things like integrity, principles, and ideals are for suckers, and the only thing that matters is constructing a narrative that gives you the most power and attention right now: e.g. fakery.
Both are even using the same basic absurd narrative that some evil outgroup that deserves to be dehumanized is causing all of your problems, and supporting authoritarianism with them in power will solve it- just different outgroups but both chosen strategically by the same process.
There hasn't been any president during my lifetime that didn't have narcissistic personality traits and strategies, but I am not 100% sure all of them definitely had full blown NPD, I'm not a psychiatrist. It's a disability than harms the person affected more than anyone else- people with it are very alone as they make no real friendships or connections with people, and are not capable of improving their life through self reflection and self criticism. They can be very successful but won't ever enjoy it- they will still just be terrified and anxious about their facade collapsing. It is a disorder where fakery is the very core of every action.
No actual deal is necessary here. It's obvious to everyone involved what the deal is: TikTok ensures that its content is friendly to Trump, TikTok stays unbanned.
You said TikTok content stays friendly to trump. Isn’t that exactly what I said?: Some deal was cut.
https://action.aclu.org/send-message/tell-congress-no-tiktok... https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/banning-tiktok-i...
Increasingly not, but still sometimes yes.
I guess you've been too busy to pay attention to Jack Smith's Florida cases, and to the January 6 committee's hearings and findings.
And no, I didn’t follow those cases, because I had closely followed all the accusations of tax evasion, receiving payments from Russia, etc., during the prior four years and those has amounted to nothing. As they say, “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well you can’t fool me again.”
It is apparently not a crime to meet with a Russian spy in your house, and to have a discussion about exchanging relaxed foreign relations for dirt on your political opponent. It's also not a crime for the campaign to share campaign data with a Russian FSB agent as the FSB carried out a psyops campaign against American citizens for which they are now indicted. Totally legal to lie about those activities to the FBI and Congress as well. Completely legal to use the fruits of the FSB hacking campaign to your political advantage, and it's also legal to publicly call for the FSB to continue hacking your opponent.
There just aren't laws against these activities and no one can actually prosecute them (if you break the law to become president and win, you just replace the people who would prosecute you with loyalists, so you can't get prosecuted for breaking the law while campaigning unless you lose), so everything Trump did with Russia in 2016 is now acceptable political activity.
It's now normalized that a candidate for president should, no, must lean on foreign governments to circumvent domestic campaign laws to gain as much leverage over their opponent as possible. For example, the 2028 Democratic candidate could make a deal with North Korea to hack the Trump campaign (he's already said he's running again) in exchange for relaxed sanctions, and that would be fine according to the norms of our time.
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5078962-trump-s...
Trump did business in New York City for decades, and the Stormy Daniels payoff was the best prosecutors could come up with.
Can you talk about the Tiananmen Square massacre on TikTok and show the few videos of people who were disappeared?
Are they accessible in the country that owns TikTok?
How can you complain about the CCP banning foreign social media and censoring when you have your own government willing to do the same thing -- in the name of Protecting the Democracy?
It's not about privacy or data or whatever the facade is. The crime that we are committing is none other than allowing ourselves to be fed information that could threaten the United States. So, therefore, even according to the SCOTUS, if Congress plasters the magical words "national security" in their laws, then the Constitution takes a backseat and we too can be like China/Russia/Iran. Will we start banning VPNs next--which circumvent our new found love for censorship? I'd not be surprised.
Yes, see www.tiktok.com/channel/tiananmen-square . Or read https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/tiktok-us-ban-congress... . Or just go search for it.
> The Tiananmen Square Tank Man is an iconic image that emerged from the protests and subsequent military crackdown that occurred in Beijing, China, in 1989. The protests, primarily led by students demanding political reforms and greater freedoms, took place in Tiananmen Square, a prominent public space in the heart of the city.
I'm not a TikTok user, it was down earlier but clicking now I see the famous tank man video, an article about Chinese censorship of AI, etc. Do you get something different?
Sounds like they're operating within the law
"The Act permits the President to grant a one-time extension of no more than 90 days with respect to the prohibitions’ 270-day effective date if the President makes certain certifications to Congress regarding progress toward a qualified divestiture."
Sounds like he needs to work with Congress on at least a basic level for this to be within the law, not just make his own decision and declare all is good. And there is the small detail that he is not President, at least not today.
Having that along with a republican majority in both the congress and the senate this isn't going to be difficult for Trump to fulfill the requirements of the law.
As long as there is a fig leaf/smokescreen, and TikTok makes the right noises and contributions, they’ll be fine.
If anything, Keeping them technically in violation of the law is the leverage the administration will want to keep so they can squeeze TikTok whenever they want.
However, with regards to the absurd justification. The president (still Biden) hasn't granted any extensions, nor is the president even able to grant an extension without
> certif[ing] to Congress that-
> "(A) a path to executing a qualified divestiture has been identified with respect to such application;
> "(B) evidence of significant progress toward executing such qualified divestiture has been produced with respect to such application; and
> "(C) there are in place the relevant binding legal agreements to enable execution of such qualified divestiture during the period of such extension.
There is no evidence that Trump will be able to lawfully do any of those, and he has to do all, after he becomes president again.
> There is no evidence that Trump will be able to lawfully do any of those once he becomes president,
He can buy or be gifted a partial ownership stake?
Minority or even majority ownership change isn’t enough as long as the CCP still has control.
But yet morons will be like "trump saved tiktok!!!"
Biden admin wasn’t going to enforce ban but TT soft shutdown yesterday with message pandering to incoming admin (broadcasted to hundred millions of users).
High suspicion of political theater.
I wish ppl would see through this and realize this is yet another distraction to divide us via culture war.
Fear disseminated by politicians and social media (pick whatever we are supposed to be afraid of this week.) Paired with an addictive desire to be relieved and distracted from this fear, in part from the same politicians/social media.
Have you been paying attention since covid? It's just terminal now.
These are literally just promises from Trump that these companies are relying on, not an actual change to the law, just a promise that he won't enforce it against them? Sounds like an utterly insane business decision that they'll regret as soon as they fall out with him. Each to their own I suppose.
> The app was still unavailable for download from Apple’s and Google’s app stores.
I guess I wonder if that's going to change specifically. They strike me as the two companies that would be most insane to take Trump at his word here.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/900019185/trump-signs-executi...
Occam's Razor suggests this was due to both a matter of national security from the perspective of the intelligence community and pressure from US companies who have struggled to outcompete TikTok. Basically an "everybody wins" move for the powers that be.[1]
China understandably didn't want to lose its influence, and ByteDance didn't want to give up this incredibly valuable asset, so they said "We'll call your bluff and fight you on the basis of the freedom of speech".
The US government then moved to get a law signed that carves out a very specific way to force ByteDance's hand. I'm sure there were lots of lawyers involved and maybe some back channel with the SCOTUS to make sure this was done in a constitutional manner so that it would survive a suit from TikTok which was all but guaranteed.[2]
That plan worked, so now ByteDance/TikTok/CCP are again forced to sell, except they come to this round of negotiations in a much worse position than they were originally. This makes it better for the many, many buyers that have come out of the woodwork and made public and private bids for the asset.
But these buyers don't want the actual value of TikTok to drop to zero, so they must also be pressuring president-elect Trump to reinstate the app so that it can continue to be used by Americans and therefore remain valuable, so that when they actually get their money's worth when it inevitably changes hands.
Trump isn't restoring TikTok so that it can continue to operate as in the "status quo ante bellum negotii". He's restoring it so that {insert buyer} can claim the spoils in a few weeks.
---
[1]: We can debate whether "everybody wins" includes the US population, but I think they do, because Chinese influence over US culture is strictly worse than US influence over US culture, seeing as incentives are by definition irreconcilable and therefore always worse if under control of the CCP.
[2]: It stands to reason that all of the US government and the top echelons of business and finance is operating in concert here to drive the outcome they want, which is to remove the influence of the CCP over young American minds and to benefit from forcing the asset to be controlled by a US entity.
It has nothing to do with free speech. The US was always going to wind up owning TikTok and influencing speech on the platform. The key issue was price, which is affected by leverage. The strict top-down, centralized control ideals behind CCP/ByteDance/TikTok (they're all the same) were once again outdone by the aforementioned "powers that be".
I appreciate the analysis even if I disagree with it.
<< many buyers that have come out of the woodwork and made public and private bids for the asset.
It is mildly funny given that China is not selling it. It was defacto made a real geopolitical issue with 170m US users as pawns. They may well be buyers, but China is not in a position of weakness here. If anything, the past 48h showed that users can simply say 'fuck it' out of spite.
In short, from game theory perspective, even if they decided to sell, they can now extract heavy concessions. Yeah, US won so hard on this one.
As I may have mentioned in another post, individual players may have gained some ground, but that is it. US lost a lot in this exchange alone.
Well, did they? So far it is not that clear.
<< They have a precedent now to ban apps from hostile power.
Is that a good thing? If so, why?
<< They gained even more respect from countries
Heh, you honestly may want to reconsider this statement. It is not respect, when China openly effectively says 'nah' to sale and shutters the app instead..
<< Chinese government took this takedown with a whimper
Huh? Dude... where did you see a whimper. Allow me to revisit events.
1. Congress passes a law effectively banning TikTok 2. TikTok sues over free speech and loses appeal with SCOTUS 3. Rather than selling, it shuts down the app 4. Users go everywhere, but ( apparently ) US apps 5. Incoming administration gives assurances it won't actually enforce anything for now
I accept there are ways of looking at things, but this is something else.
Everyone already knew TikTok was valuable. This isn't new information. They have no concessions to extract here.
Users haven't said anything out of spite. Some people signing up for some other services was not what drove Trump to announce this executive action.
To me, there is a strong appearance of quid pro quo between ByteDance and Trump. In that case, there doesn't need to be a sale. Trump likely will require a simulation of restructuring which enables him to declare ByteDance in compliance, and the whole things goes away.
Quick reminder: TikTok is available for most of the planet (except China), so a US ban does not make the actual value of TikTok to drop to zero.
It makes a sell-off very unlikely, but I doubt it's going to happen no matter what.
It's quite puzzling why ByteDance didn't bring up the idea of making a TikTok US in the same way TikTok CN (a.k.a. Douyin) works.
I'm not sure I follow as I didn't say Trump will require anything and I don't know what "meaningful" means in this sentence.
> What’s important is what TikTok can do for him, not anything related to national security or ownership concerns.
You're neglecting what the _sale_ of TikTok can do for him, which is to curry an immense amount of favor with Big Tech, Wall Street and the intelligence community, and possibly one or several unnamed players in this negotiation.
I thought you said that Trump would require TikTok to be sold. Did I misread? I was asking why you think Trump will require anything meaningful of TikTok. More specifically, why do you think Trump would require TikTok to sell?
> You're neglecting what the _sale_ of TikTok can do for him, which is to curry an immense amount of favor with Big Tech, Wall Street and the intelligence community, and possibly one or several unnamed players in this negotiation.
Is that any more valuable than the things which TikTok can give him?
1) Cash (purchase Trump's meme coin, stock grant, etc.)
2) Prominence on TikTok
The Trump administration (back in 2020) were the ones that set this in motion.
"Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok"
August 6, 2020
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...
So while there is some irony with Trump having previously supported the ban, the practical reality is that he and Susquehanna and the Republicans all are winning big on this one, from a political/financial lens.
Either way it feels like there are games being played, and the country is watching because tik tok is so heavily used by so many people
> "The law banning TikTok [...] allows the president to grant a 90-day extension before the ban is enforced, provided certain criteria are met."
> The law banning TikTok, which was scheduled to go into effect Sunday, allows the president to grant a 90-day extension before the ban is enforced, provided certain criteria are met.
and
> After the Supreme Court greenlit the law on Friday, the Biden administration issued a statement saying it would not enforce the ban, leaving that responsibility to Trump.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1138556168486...
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tiktok-ban-b...
It's not just Trump though. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats are taking the China threat seriously enough. The CCP must be destroyed.
Republicans will see this as a political stunt that glorifies Donald Trump
Democrats will see this as a political stunt that glorifies Donald Trump.
China will see this as proof they have some control over the US citizenry.
Some thoughts from Donald Trump: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1138556168486...
Isn't ByteDance already owned 60% by international (mostly American) investors?
https://usds.tiktok.com/who-owns-tiktoks-parent-company-byte...
But again, I don't really care about the nationality of the elites.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tiktok-ban-b...
> The ByteDance unit that sold golden shares to China's government holds the licenses of Toutiao and Douyin to operate under local law.
So those shares don't mean much as far as TikTok's operations are concerned.
Presumably other wealthy friends stand to win. Steve Mnuchin wanted to buy it.
It is still a Law.
TikTok is still banned, the Supreme Court upheld it.
https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/banning-tiktok-i... https://action.aclu.org/send-message/tell-congress-no-tiktok...
TikTok is coming back online after Trump pledged to restore it https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/19/tech/tiktok-ban/index.htm...
The law does not ban TikTok.. it requires divestment from a foreign adversary..
Said foreign adversary refuses to divest, thus the company is shutting itself down
Now they know to make own OS
AFAI-remember years ago Trump was "fired" out of presidency before end of mandate, AND banned in biggest social networks.
Now he is playing president before officially entering a mandate, AND around that those same social networks bosses are cringeing - just in case?
That's two things, one that the exact boundaries of period of the mandate doesn't seem to matter, and second, the social-media BS-dancing thing..
so who's in charge ?
The series of Trump indictments all fizzling out, because judges didn't want to indict an on coming president.
And on this particular matter, Supreme Court 'unsigned' opinion felt confused even though it is termed unanimous.
At places it seemed to complain of the paucity of time/scope to consider all parts of the matter more seriously, and at the end even expressed ambivalence about what is going to happen next even.
Frankly bit of shoddy-ness/confused signalling from Judiciary and Supreme Court.
Perhaps it would have been better to just delay the matter by issuing an interim extension and reconsider the issue taking into account the views of the new administration.
This was no urgent matter that a few days delay would have mattered.
And then people in this thread apparently unironically don't see why banning foreign propaganda is a bad thing lol
It's quite fascinating to see a nation's televised descent into absurd cronyism and corruption like this. You've got the prez-elect singlehandedly overturning laws that have just been passed a mere 24 hours ago, making shitcoin scams and getting rich off it, aligning all the psychotic techbros into his corner because they fear what kind of insane bullshit he's gonna pull off on them...
This is grotesque. Israel is massively influencing US foreign and domestic policy via AIPAC and other lobby groups. AIPAC pays US politicians significant amounts of money, practically buys them. And they are not even registered as foreign entities, something JFK wanted to enforce before he was assassinated.
So who is really manipulating US policy.
And this is the exact group that put pressure on US universities to suppress free speech and on US policy makers to sent Israel weapons worth billions to kill thousands of Palestinian civilians.
Now start your downvotes.
In the mean time, if I wanted 30 seconds clips of cat videos I’m sure I could use a VPN. Let’s ban it. Teach people censorship is utter BS like every Chinese person knows by now. Sadly my attention span is slightly longer than 30s so I’m not even gonna bother
- A COINTELPRO-inspired diversion undermines the cause: during demonstrations, individuals wishing to speak must wait in line, while women, minorities, and other groups are prioritized.
- This method becomes widespread in media narratives over the next 15 years, fueling focus on these topics and deepening societal divisions while bankers slip under the radar.
- Initially driven by billionaires, the movement is soon co-opted by financial firms, corporations, and government entities.
- Ultimately, Trump is reinstated, while Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, and, to some extent, Altman align with Thiel and Musk, reversing their previous stances with a dramatic 180° shift.
The oligarchy endures.
The restrict act was written really strangely, and I assume Oracle required some assurance from someone to not just delete Bytedance's accounts and resources.
The fine to each company (Apple, Google, Oracle, TikTok) was in the order of around $5bn each if they kept the lights on, so I would be hesitant to keep it running too without something in writing.
No EO from Trump will change that.
"Biden Signs a Bill That Could Ban TikTok. Now Comes the Hard Part." https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/technology/bytedance-tikt...
"Biden signed a bill to force a sale of TikTok or ban it. What’s next?" https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/24/biden-signs-tiktok-...
"Biden signs a bill that could ban TikTok — after the 2024 election" https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/congress-biden-bil...
And to prove how much of a stunt this was from TikTok, they turned their services back on less than 24 hours later even though nothing had changed.
If there comes a day in the future where the header of every major website starts says "Long Live Donald Trump", we will all be worse off for it.
I've been extremely surprised how eagerly people have accepted this as a new normal. I can't imagine it's in the long term interest of billionaires to be labeled as oligarchs by half the country.
Let's see what the zoomers and millenials will say for next elections
Never mind that it was him who initially trued to ban it.
Nevertheless a positive development.
And, you forgot to add, do not allow expression of thoughts that are not culturally accepted in US.
Aside from the technical features and algorithmic superiority, the community on TikTok is completely different. Have you seen the comment sections on the apps you mention? TikTok has created a beautiful community, and it’s a community that cannot be reached on the other two apps, regardless of their feature set.
I know which of the two I'd pick, but yeah, I guess you can say they might also restructure out of the CCP's control, which I think is unlikely because China then just gets paid $0.
Another alternative would be for lawmakers in this new congress to change the law they just passed but given the Republican majority is very narrow and there is plenty of support for the ban across the isle, I find it hard to believe they will be able to do so. But sure, that's also a possible scenario.
You are assuming a lot in that one sentence seemingly without realizing it.
I also don't really see the Democratic party making any proper steps to do well in 2026. Maybe they won't have to do anything but let's see.
It's simply unbelievable to me that a sophisticated community like HN is against a ban in the context of all of the meddling our biggest rival, China, has done in our country to our direct disadvantage. Russia and China's main M.O. has been to divide us; to sow discontent. And they've been pretty successful. Who knows if Trump would have been elected without the Russian election interference. Trump has been a divisive figure who has reveled in destroying social order and he has done so successfully; the amount of hate and distrust for one's opposing political party is at an all-time high in the US, and it shows. This is to say that China and Russia have already been very successful in their attempts. In China Xi likes to say that "The East is rising, the West is falling". This is completely his M.O. and part of his plan.
And now Trump, aware of all of this, is attempting to bring Tiktok back. Knowing everything he knows about it's use and potential future use of a propaganda machine. And knowing full-well that this is good for the East, and bad for domestic civil peace of mind and social order. And in the most Trumpian way possible, he doesn't care. And he's doing it for the most selfish reason possible--to feed his hero complex. Full. Fucking. Stop. This is such a glaring advertisement that he will do whatever he can to put his interests and reputation first over our country's and it's absolutely sickening.
And the fact that there is actual debate and discussion around this issue on HN is just such a shocker. Again, this community should know better about how dangerous propaganda is, amplified by the fact that it's propaganda from our most rapacious, unethical and conniving enemy. An enemy that is planning wars of conquest, who's starving and torturing parts of its population. You want that enemy deciding what your kid spends an hour a day watching on their phone, while you're not paying attention? Yeah, good luck with that.
https://networkcontagion.us/reports/the-ccps-digital-charm-o...
you articulated it perfectly
the issue is not that tiktok harvests user data, not free speech, not that China is refuses to let US counterparts operate in China - the issue is, TikTok is an insidious propaganda machine that influences our your people, and entire generation, to abandon their values and replace them with views favorable to the CCP
daily, hourly, and each minute young people interact with TikTok, they're influenced by a foreign adversary.
it's telling them Ukraine is the actual aggressor, that Putin is "based", that China is a paradise, that the West is falling, that China has a valid claim on all the maritime disputes, among other things that are non-truths
i owe the rise of antisemitism among young people to TikTok. young people who otherwise do not hold a negative opinion towards Israel suddenly became anti-Israel and hold hatred towards Jews
i have experienced the above first-hand. my account doesn't interact with any current affairs, yet I am bombarded with anti-Israel narratives. there are thousands - yes, thousands - of antisemitic comments and replies under each video. and young people read them and think it's normal - that it's normal to think this way and say such things at loud
i reported hundreds of such comments. all my reports, according to TikTok, did not violate their "community standards". instead, my replies to those comments were removed for violating their "community standards"
(to the people who'll say it's not true, i have data to back it up, and i can send a link to a huggingface repo that contains the dataset)
it is clear pro-CCP and CCP-aligned views are promoted while others are supressed.
i live in a country with tensions with China, and my TikTok FYP page is flooded with pro-CCP narratives and narratives that suggest my country is weak and hopeless
TikTok is a national security issue. it's not enough the TikTok divests from China. it must be banned for the sake of the next century.
I agree all of these other arguments that people are fixating on are complete red herrings. The 'fairness' of letting them operate their companies here and not letting us operate there—totally non consequential argument and a red herring. The free speech thing is a blatant red herring and the Supreme Court agreed in a unanimous decision. If America is the sinking ship, then these arguments are the deck chairs.
Totally agree on the antisemitism points—the way that the platform is manipulating it's algorithm to shape opinions is very nefarious in that it's subtle and becomes difficult to prove directly. But researchers look deeper and deeper, they've been able to find evidentiary smoking guns. I would posit that there are many clues hiding in plain sight that have not been looked into yet.
Anyways, I would have expected a lot more discussion around the points that you and I bring up (points of actual consequence) rather than what I'm currently seeing on HN.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/23/israel...
The UN is controlled by the CCP:
The Guardian is notorious for being biased against Israel, along with other news organizations like the New York Times and even the BBC.
The UN and other organizations like Amnesty International are openly biased against Israel.
there are good people working in those organizations. and i genuinely believe people who work there want to do good in the world.
but there's no denying that those organizations they work for are compromised.
But you simply cannot be taken seriously when you claim that openly pro-Israel establishments like the NYT and BBC are biased against Israel - it's just utterly ludicrous, and demonstrably false.
You're not seriously blaming TikTok for anti-Israel sentiment?! Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the genocide being carried out by the apartheid state of Israel?
why are you so obsessed with the State of Israel? and i thought i was a superfan of Israel
do you seriously believe Israel is behind the TikTok ban (as you claimed in your other comment)?
and do you seriously believe there are Hasbara in HN? most people in HN are anti-Israel
Because my government has suffered from Israeli interference, and because my government is supporting the apartheid state of Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people - providing weapons, financial aid, political aid and manufacturing consent for genocide.
Because Israel is carrying out a modern day holocaust, all while constantly lying and fabricating evidence. Because I've seen/heard/read with my own eyes and ears the insane horrors the IDF is inflicting on the Palestinian people - just such incredible, unfathomable evil. I can never unsee what I've seen.
Because Zionists and their Hasbara lackeys spread hatred, racism and Islamophobia, and have smeared opponents with false claims of antisemitism.
> do you seriously believe there are Hasbara in HN?
Yes, there are all over all forms of social media [0] [1]. It would be stretching credulity to believe they weren't active here.
> most people in HN are anti-Israel
Haha, laughably false! This is the same kind of tired deflection that Hasbara use all the time.
[0] https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-art-of-deception-how-i... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-2369589...
> this community should know better about how dangerous propaganda is
Bear in mind that a large part of this community is employed by the same companies that built the tools used to spread propaganda and disinformation. It wouldn't be in their interest to disclose that they're part of the problem, so it's easier to ignore that the problem even exists.
This word is incongruent with your use of this word:
>enemy
Especially in light of the fact that you consistently fail to identify which identity is doing this:
>An enemy that is planning wars of conquest, who's starving and torturing parts of its population.
Pop-quiz: which nations have been consistently at war since March, 2003? Which nations have established 1,000 torture dungeons around the globe? Which nations have portions of their populations, by design, living in desperate poverty, feeding a for-profit prison-industrial complex, every single day, with fresh meat?
The ability to identify propaganda is not as important as the ability to identify duplicity. One cannot have the former without the latter.
> And the fact that there is actual debate and discussion around this issue on HN is just such a shocker.
Thats what makes HN special, the community questions, discusses and debates. It doesnt just jump to an emotional response as it seems like you have done. If you cant engage in a debate or discussion around something you dont agree with, the HN is not the place to be.
The post was so shockingly hyperbolic I'm surprised they didn't mention the Chinese were also sapping and impurifying our precious bodily fluids.
What should I even say? It was a borderline schizo sinophobic diatribe asserted without evidence.
Earnestly though, you can always take your post, toss it into a llm and ask it to make it sound kind or helpful. Or give it the HN comment guidelines and ask it if your comment runs afoul or ways to make it more helpful. It’s up to you to find a way to add meaningfully to the discourse or just be prepared to be downvoted. Assume good faith is the best way to start.
“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”
The stuff playing out on right now was science fiction when 1984 was written.
This whole charade has had me laughing since yesterday.
The Caesars of Rome often played these public games to make themselves look magnanimous, while at the same time consolidating power and control.
It just gets brought up so often that because he was anti Soviet, he must be anti communist, which wasn't the case.
(Americans love to flatten all left parties into "communist", ignoring the rich history of ideological differences and occasionally violent purges)
Huge fan of Orwell myself.
Homage is a complicated book to place because it's been interpreted so baby different ways across eras. But it's hard to imagine someone going and fighting for POUM and praising them post facto would ultimately be anti communist across all flavors of communism.
He would say later, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...)
If we assume good intent, what OP was getting at is that we had that form of governance, it failed, we then slowly marched towards democracy, and now it looks like a backslide.
I stopped reading all political, U.S., and even world news the day after the election. Zero. Dropped reddit politics. I don't know who are Trump's cabinet picks. I assume Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock will be on the cabinet, but I don't know and don't care.
On Nov 7 when I saw that not only did Trump win, but he won decisively, and I saw this is what the country wants, I decided that since I can't get rid of Trump's bullshit, I actually have full power to keep that bullshit from entering my personal reality. Whatever daily outrage and anger I would have felt since Nov 7, I don't have. My mind is relatively clear, and --surprise, surprise-- my life is unaffected.
I plan to keep this up for 4 years. I assume at some point, I'll go to get a flu shot and be told vaccines are illegal. And if I notice suddenly a bunch of ads for iodine pills, I'll withdraw as much cash I can and get canned food and water and gasoline. I'll deal with it then.
And in 2 years and 4 years I will go to the voting booth. But I'm powerless until then, except for what I allow into my life.
> And in 2 years and 4 years I will go to the voting booth. But I'm powerless until then
What's really depressing is that I'm already happy with my representation in congress, and they'll probably win again comfortably in 2026 and 2028, but they're powerless too.
My whole life I've believed that "it's important to be informed." I now challenge that. I mean: yes, obviously before the next election I will read up on the candidates and propositions. But apart from that, me being informed has zero effect on the world.
That might be a good model for generally striking an appropriate balance: be informed about new major legislation (or executive orders, court decisions, etc.) when they happen, but skip all the day-to-day drama about who said what on the House or Senate floor, or in an interview, or on X in between such things. I've seen it suggested many times that the Wikipedia current events portal is all that one should look at, and it would probably accomplish this.
My friend's house (and entire town) burned down, so I'm following that news. But even 2 minutes of reading Trump + Republicans saying the fires happened because the LAPD chief is a gay woman, and I had enough for the month.
I also feel the concern over who is President is largely overrated. It’s as perverse as deeply worrying about who the next CEO of one’s employer will be — even they aren’t that concerned!
Frankly, we should be more concerned about school board and sheriff elections but society is too broken for that to happen or be meaningful.
People act like they know Congressional/Presidental candidates as well as their own relatives yet they cant even name the local office candidates.
Who is 'our' referring to?
Alphabet and Apple? Then its their app store.
TikTok has never been open source.
Tiktok views with #freepalestine tags eclipsed #istandwithisrael by nearly 200 to 1 (videos with pro-Israel views got low single digit millions while videos with pro-Palestine views got nearly 200 times that) and THIS is a better explanation for the panic and why essentially lobbying for the ban of TikTok using China isn't a conspiracy theory (especially since it was discussed by a few US media outlets) and that this really in an attempt to keep young people exposed to an uncensored and unfiltered platform which inevitably causes them to grow more sympathetic with Palestine.
It's censorship disguised as a national security threat for a totally unrelated motivator and once again, I'm disappointed more HN users especially those that have been on this website far longer than me were able to connect with all their wisdom they exude in other areas.
The risk here is China having the ability to sway and manipulate opinions of young minds in US over years by controlling what information they see on a daily basis. That is an extraordinary power which should not be underestimated.
The way it does this is to not show you more of what you have already seen, it is to identify what gets you worked up, and to exploit that by showing you progressively more and more extreme content. It highlights more provocative comments to you that are more likely to make you post an emotional response and engage in a long intense debate that causes more clicks and posts, and feeds more of your emotion back into 'the algorithm'. This is a dangerous spiral which can easily turn somebody who might have a weak opinion on something, into a mouth frothing raged keyboard warrior.
This is very powerful and dangerous, and it is purposely designed like this.
Allowing the Chinese government to have this power over young US minds? Thats what this is all about.
TikTok could be using blind algorithms as you hint at, but they could also bump content they wanted to.
I am convinced that if China put their best minds to it they could use TikTok to sway any election the way they wanted.
The data available to them about what reels swayed what people in what direction is immense.
I think people who know about Israel's involvement in the ban don't mention it here on HN, because many Hasbara are here with the same tired lies, deflection, hatred, racism, and accusations of antisemitism.
BUT, Trump wants Gen Z to like him and that’s all there is to it. So he’s just going to come in on a white horse and “Save TikTok” — handing President Xi a gift on a silver platter. Because he doesn’t actually give a fuck about anything besides being popular.
and by that you are including the massive majority of republican legislators who also sit on intel committees also voted for it with resounding vigor?
If Biden or Harris won the election, TikTok would have been completely banned with zero intervention at all as you have seen with how it went and Biden whilst still being president would have done nothing and it took Trump to stop it.
Seriously the Democrats made themselves look very bad with this situation.
He expressed his changed opinion in 2024. Was it because he met with Jeff Yass who holds 7% of ByteDance (which owns TikTok) and is a major Republican donor? Who knows.
But what is clear is that this is again morphing into a talking point against the Democrats even though all of this started with Trump initially.
Trump is not a president yet.
The TikTok ban was upheld by the Supreme Court only days ago. If Americans don’t want this law, they should elect a different Congress.
That is my point. The Democrats made themselves look very bad with this situation and Biden did nothing and supported the bill anyway and just signed it.
In fact he replaced Trump's original EO with a worse one which includes still supporting the TikTok ban and Biden signed that last year which made it so that if the Democrats won the election, then TikTok would have been still completely banned with no reversal whatsoever.
In effect, those who voted for Biden or Harris also were voting for a TikTok ban, which that is beyond hilarious as everyone saw that he didn't halt the ban.