Good. Please proceed as quickly as possible.
Don’t threaten us with a good time!
They’d rather shut it down cause they dont want to sell it and let an American company see how they use and abuse it to gather information and manipulate behaviors.
They are free to sell to non American companies just fine as long as the new company is not ultimately controlled by the Chinese government.
As if an American company wouldn’t just pick up where they left off… have you seen Meta? The system needs regulation, not a change in ownership to preferred snoopers.
Maybe they are willing to sell and are just saying this to drive up the price.
Or maybe they don’t want a competitor to have access to their secret algorithm, and threaten them globally. This way they lose only one market.
Another possibility is that they will teach users how to use a VPN, and are confident that enough of their users will do it.
Or maybe they think saying they’re willing to shut down will make some of their users lobby against this bill / organise protests / call their representatives. (This probably won’t work.)
Companies are ultimately motivated by money. They will do whatever underhanded trick they can think up to get it.
LMAO, apt name. You do know that facebook, a known disinformation company, is american, right?
Burn them all.
I don’t recall the previous commenter mentioning anything about Facebook. Making a comment that is anti something doesn’t automatically mean they’re pro something else.
Step 1: Feel like getting into a comment section argument
Step 2: Put words in the other guy’s mouth and argue against those
Step 3: Make yourself look like a bit of a tool
Is this the best use of your time?
Yes, and they should be shut down too. though the difference is facebook is a private entity and tiktok is a tool owned and operated by the chinese government.
You’re point?
You’re doing well with living up to your username.
This why I love my username. Cause anyone that has a proper, well thought out retort will provide their proper, well thought out retort.
Jackasses that want to pretend they are still on reddit and have nothing to contribute, however, just love to throw the “hurr hurrr ur usarname r dum cuz u r dum lol me supar smartest” type comments and out themselves.
No, I’m not a point. Oh, you mean your point. Funny how you don’t know that, as an American.
Generally these days someone who uses grammer and spelling as an attack kinda automatically looses the argument.
Especially in the era of autobutcher that thinks you should have typed something different and decides to change it a third of a second before you hit enter.
I’m just gonna leave the false-correction up now, though. Who the fuck cares. Certainly no one with anything actually valuable to contribute.
Minor spelling mistake
Unfortunately I’m in your walls now
The amount of people happy about their government deciding to ban websites and apps is terrifying. They dont give a fuck about your privacy they’re just mad they dont control the algorithm. Now they can have people move to instagram reels where its easier to serve the propaganda the oligarchs prefer
TikTok isn’t just some random, normal app. It’s spyware and a tool for CCP propaganda.
May as well ask why the government would ban Russian anti-virus software.
You wanna talk Chinese spyware, why are they not outright banning Temu? That’s a much better documented case of actually being spyware.
In terms of Tiktok being spyware, they are tracking users in much the same ways that every other big social media company is. Should other nations be worried about Facebook sharing that data with the US govt to produce psyops campaigns against foreign nations?
I’m against any country blocking access to things in the name of “national security” and providing little to no evidence on it. Its been done too many times to trojan horse in other malicious activities that governments want to do.
And facebook isnt? Facebook did experiments on teens to see if theyre easier to manipulate when theyre depressed. They took money to apread fake news to manipulate voters for the presidential election. Yall are so blinded by the china boogeyman its absurd
Is Facebook owned by the government?
Does anyone even use FB anymore besides boomers?
No. The totalitarian technofascist state of China is not the same as the US, nor are their state owned apps comparable to those of privately owned one regardless of how much of a sociopath Zuckerberg is.
Does anyone even use FB anymore besides boomers?
Ok, so boomers are not actually people, facebook’s 3 billion active users don’t exist, and 250 million of those fake people are certainly not from the fake US.
But TikTok…
Amazing how we are talking of Chinese surveillance while the US just renewed another one of its surveillance bills.
So much “I am immune to, and can spot all propaganda” in this thread.
It’s amazing that you must work under the assumption that I’m defending facebook in order for your rambling to have any kind of structure.
No one is defending facebook or FISA or anything else shitty the US has done. I said that claiming Facebook is owned by owned by the government or that the US is totalitarian like the CCP is false and now you guys just can’t accept that fact.
God I thought we left this dishonest tankie shit behind on Reddit. But nope, here’s the brigade of fanatics up to their old rhetorical bullshit.
mic_drop
If tiktok can be considered owned by the Chinese gov so can facebook https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM theres tons of programs secret and public that shows american tech companies have to obey to the US government demands.
Boomers vote more than anyone else
Facebook owns all the biggest apps, instagram whatsapp, and now threads is getting bigger than twitter. Great lets kill competition because scary china boogeyman all put all the power in the hands of mark zuckerberg, the conservatives that manipulate the platform and pay to manipulate the people on it.
No. The government does not own Facebook. You’re free to make that baseless assertion, but there’s nothing to really say about it other than it’s false on its face and makes you appear unserious.
We’re not talking conspiracy theories, China is not a normal country, it’s literally a totalitarian state in which the government has complete control. Not like hyperbolic “Oh, the US is totalitarian.” but actually totalitarian in the legal and material sense.
PRISM and countless programs arent conspiracies they are facts. The US isnt totalitarian to their citizens but they are to the millions of people who’s countries theyve placed fascists into power to kill and imprison their citizens
So why did the PRISM project exists? If there is freedom to deny the government access why did american companies all get in bed with it? This is also not a conspiracy since Snowden will be jailed if he steps foot in american soil.
If tiktok can be considered owned by the Chinese gov so can facebook https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM theres tons of programs secret and public that shows american tech companies have to obey to the US government demands.
“In 2014, ByteDance established an internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee.[47] The company’s vice president, Zhang Fuping, serves as the company’s CCP Committee Secretary.[48][49]”
This is not a defense of FB or american companies, but rather an indictment of tiktok and an acknowledgement that the degree of CCP involvement in tiktok is not the same as neolib involvement in FB.
It is possible to both be anti-chinese government and also want comprehensive privacy laws in the US. Like, I absolutely buy that the Chinese government has access to tiktok data. I, however, don’t think forcing a sale is the right way to deal with any of this. Comprehensive privacy and data collection laws would go much farther towards making it so it doesn’t really matter who owns what.
👀
Small fediverse lol
For spyware the cyber security community seems pretty meh about it…
EU next please
Don’t use it if you don’t like it, but don’t give this bullshit Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda control of something just because you don’t like it.
It’s just as bad or good as any other algorithm based content app like Facebook or Instagram. If we have a problem with privacy for example then go after that like with gdpr.
We already sanction TV stations because of their propaganda content e.g. Russia Today. I see this as no different.
Then the EU would need some evidence of propaganda.
I think you have it backwards, in that it’s the US that’s trying to stop all the Chinese propaganda coming from that app.
And if TT pull out of the US, it’s pretty telling that their core drive for that thing wasn’t money.
Why would a tech company sell their product to another competitor in such a big landscape like US? It’s quite very much because of money.
Well for one, because if they don’t then they will get precisely 0 money. If it is indeed about the money then we would absolutely expect them to sell no? Otherwise… There’s no money
0 money from us market. They still have a big market outside US. Why would they sabotage it by giving an advantage to a competitor. No money is better than negative money.
If France passes a law requiring Google to sell Google France to a French company, would Google pulling out instead of selling mean their core drive in France wasn’t money?
I don’t think it’s primarily about the algorithm or “Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” but instead about data and company ownership. Currently the US and EU are far closer allies with each other than with china. Services that are owned/controlled by their countries are therefore prioritized, and competing services from non-ally countries are way more scrutinized.
Good, that’ll decrease the amount of stupidity in the platform for the international audiences to enjoy
I’m curious, is there an actual plan to ban TikTok? How do they think they can accomplish that? And just how easy will it be to circumvent the ban?
This is about banning their ability to do business in America, not just trying to ban access to their content on the Internet itself.
Having read through the bill, here’s how it works:
- TikTok/ByteDance is mentioned specifically in the bill, so they have 270 days (iirc) to divest of “adversary country” influence (meaning China, Iran, Russia, N. Korea), meaning they’d have to be sold to a company based in a non-adversary country
- assuming they don’t comply with 1, any app store or ISP would be fined if they continue to preserve access to the app
- users can still use the app, but they have have network access blocked while in the US - so you’d have to use a VPN to use the app
So to circumvent it, basically use a VPN to use the app, and for updates, you’d probably need to side-load on Android or something similar. I don’t know how Apple’s store works well enough to know what options users have to install and update the app after the ban.
That said, there is no provision for making it illegal to use the app, the onus is entirely on companies facilitating access to the app.
Does is specify ISP blocking directly in the bill?? It was my understanding that it would just prevent US based app stores (Apple, Google) from distributing the app in their stores.
I’m not even sure how ISP blocking would work, unless it was to just blackhole DNS queries to tiktok.com. Having attempted to block DNS lookups for TikTok on my own home router via PiHole, I can say that the app either hard codes IP addresses, or resolves DNS over HTTPS independently of the system DNS settings, so I doubt a DNS based ISP block would be feasible.
Here’s the bill (Division H is the relevant part).
I misread “internet hosting service” in the initial section as “Internet service,” so I’m guessing it doesn’t obligate ISPs to block TikTok or any other service.
It does block server hosts from allowing distribution of blocked apps though. So no local mirrors of the app.
Right they define internet hosting service as:
(5) INTERNET HOSTING SERVICE.—The term “internet hosting service” means a service through which storage and computing resources are provided to an individual or organization for the accommodation and maintenance of 1 or more websites or online services, and which may include file hosting, domain name server hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private server hosting.
So this would prevent a US organization like AWS, Oracle, etc from hosting the TikTok user data as long as TikTok is owned or a subsidiary of ByteDance or another “foreign adversary”.
Elsewhere in the text, they exclude “service providers” from restrictions, so it seems like ISPs are not going to block requests to TikTok.
Yup, that’s my read too after a review.
I honestly kinda skimmed that part initially because I was more interested in how it could impact other apps. I don’t particularly care about TikTok, I just wanted to know what other apps could be targeted and what the process for that looks like.
This is a good oppertunity to teach young people about tech
“Controlled by a foreign adversary” is the key phrase. You can read the definition here.
It refers to United States Code title 10 section 4872(d)(2), which says:
Covered nation .— The term “covered nation” means— (A) the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea; (B) the People’s Republic of China; (C) the Russian Federation; and (D) the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I think that language is important when discussing any potential “slippery slope” aspects of this bill. It’s about companies/applications from specific adversary nations. It’s not about just any service that annoys a US politician. The bar here is much higher, and the scope is narrow. While it does identify ByteDance and TikTok by name, it will also apply to other companies from those nations, if they are determined to present a threat to US national security.
I haven’t read the entire bill, but in principle, I think this is a sensible measure. A major communication platform like TikTok makes a very effective propaganda and misinformation tool. Exactly the sort of thing that an adversary nation would use to sway political discourse, influence elections, even undermine a democracy.
Of course, any law can be abused, so paying attention to how this one is applied and enforced will be important, just as with any other.
While true, it also includes any US (or other county) company that is owned at least 20% by someone in one of those adversary countries.
The President can’t just name any country an “adversary country,” but it’s not just companies in those countries either. So something like Epic Games could qualify since TenCent (owned by a Chinese national) owns >20% stake.
However, the law also restricts how a company or product is subject to the rule. Basically, unless they are TikTok or ByteDance (or directly affiliated with either in a legal sense), the President must:
- Publicly notify Congress of the intent to classify them as an adversary company (assuming they meet the rest of the rules) at least 30 days prior to any further action
- Notify the public of the change
Then the company has 90 days to appeal before the statute of limitations is up, and 270 days to comply (i.e. divest from the adversary country).
So the bill is pretty decent in preventing abuse, so I’m more worried about the precedent it’s setting. We generally don’t ban things here in the US, so this is a pretty big step IMO.
This is obviously a negotiation tactic.
If ByteDance doesn’t want to sell their stupid algorithm, they could simply rip it out of TikTok, replace it with a random number generator or any other off-the-shelf recommendation engine, and proceed with the sale.
Find their lowest paid summer intern from the university computer science department, tell him to write some sort of recommendation algorithm and he has two weeks to do it, then whatever he comes up with make it live and that’s all the new owner gets.
I doubt the recommendation algorithm is particularly special, the userbase is the more important thing IMO. However, any purchaser would need to implement something decent if they want to maintain that userbase.
Obv without the algorithm TikTok loses some value. However it loses less value than if they just pull the plug.
It’s like Twitter. Yeah, it lost a bunch of value when Musk gutted it, but it’s still relevant today. So if someone less hostile to the core userbase buys it, I don’t think some growing pains from a change in algorithm would kill it.
This seems to be a pattern. Govts flex over tech companies, techs blackout a country instead of complying, repeat.
That happens when the government doesn’t create the technology LIKE IN COUNTLESS CIVILIZATION SIMULATORS
Bytedance announces to software developers: “Start your engines!”
Oh no! Anyway…
It’s going to be to their advantage to claim that they’re shutting down, even if they actually want that $50B buyout. If they say they’re going to sell, they’re going to lose what little leverage they have left. The public that wants TikTok will get TikTok, and the public is going to stop pestering politicians about it.
The public that wants TikTok will get TikTok, and the public is going to stop pestering politicians about it.
Has their user base mobilized at all? Maybe it’s just because I don’t use TikTok but I haven’t really heard much from their users about the ban. Which has been kind of unexpected.
Apparently TikTok sent out push notifications telling users to call their representatives. Minors were being provided instructions with their representatives’ phone numbers and contact info, but didn’t even know who they were calling and were asking basic questions like “What is Congress?”
Kind of shows the amount of power TikTok has over American youth.
And facebook tells its users to vote. Encouraging people to make their voices heard and engage in the democratic process is a good thing.
An enemy state giving kids a script of nonsense to harass politicians with is absolutely not a good thing.
Rival is better than enemy, but yes. We’re as friendly with China as we are enemies. It’s complicated, but I don’t want the simple version to be the narrative.
They’re not a rival. They’re a hostile power.
We are both dependent on each other because that’s how the global economy works, but we are not friends and there is no possible path to friendship unless one of our countries has an extremely bloody revolution and completely changes our mechanism of government.
Our core ideologies are not compatible.
“Vote to participate in democracy! Here’s some local voting resources”
vs
“Vote to protect our interests! Tell your representative that they are killing free speech if they don’t listen to me”
I’d say absolutely, if Cambridge Analytica wasn’t a thing. I’d honestly rather have people not vote than be motivated to go vote because they think the liberal communists are putting fluoride in water to make frogs gay.
It’s somehow always the organizations and individuals who are trying to manipulate people that seem to care the most about people’s voices being heard in politics. Churches, social media, daytime TV, that crazy uncle you don’t like to talk to at family gatherings…
Hey some of us are the crazy cousin saying you should vote while also advocating pissing on the floor when your job tries to deny bathroom rights.
I’d prefer to have you as my cousin instead of the one I have who hates brown people and believes Trump won the 2020 election.
Only if ya can deal with ranting about how modern cars suck due to overuse of electronics and half crazed rants about guns and how we should bring back neighborhood militias.
I love how they demonstrated they aren’t influencing people by sending out a mass message telling people what to do. It doesn’t get any more comical than that.
Malign influence. Telling people to participate in democracy isn’t a bad thing.
Yes but telling an army of thirteen year olds doing dance videos to call representatives is worthless, if anything it hurts TikToks argument since it proves they’re doing the influencing of Americans that the government wants them not doing
So you’ve never used TikTok. Good to know.
You missed the entire point. They declared 1) We are not doing anything of that sort, then: 2) they did exactly things of that sort. Like exactly. It’s like a slap stick comedy show.
You just haven’t been paying attention.
I read it as a bluff too.
They’re between a rock and a hard place, their best position is to play hardball and rile up their users.
Yeah, it means nothing to us to leave. We’re losing money!
If that were really the case why are they in the US at all? Because they know they can make money and their market position is strong.
Because China is trying to influence the US and they need to be in the US market for that
Yeah I watched this dude show me a video of a device that opens jars and now I am thinking about becoming a spy for the Chinese government.
This is why the whole situation exists, IMO if there was a reason to believe China is trying to influence united states citizens, then this wouldn’t even be a discussion. There are probably houses is Chinese companies that operate in the US, why is tik tok signaled out? Because there’s probably a reason they’re being singled out. It might be nothing, but I’m inclined to think that the people who signed the bill know more than what they’re letting on for national security reasons.
Look at any security analysis done on it and you’ll see the insane amount of information it collects from every single user is absolutely stunning. They definitely use their influence and knowledge of individuals to drive opinion of those who use their platform.
There are probably hundreds of Chinese companies that operate in the US, why is tik tok signaled out?
Because it’s an enormous company with a lot of influence on people. If they actually influence people in that way, I don’t know but they could quite easily.
Personally I don’t care about TikTok.
But they can’t continue to make money this way. It will be seen as control. So they’re stuck creating a competitor or just writing off the US market.
Yeah I think they’re angling for a reversal, if not they’ll sell and probably take some massive non voting share of the venture along with a bunch of billionaires.
They won’t sell lol, like why would they? If they truly are owned by the Chinese government why would they sell it to an American company?
The public [who] wants TikTok will get TikTok
In my family and peer group, the people who want to use tiktok and the people who could get and use a VPN to access a side-loaded tiktok app, has no intersect group. It’s just a bridge too far for all of them.
I’ll push them onto the fediverse yet.
Worst part about Lemmy being a tech heavy space is that so many users spout shit like “They’re not banning it, just deplatforming it” like yes, dipshit, that’s effectively a ban for something like 99% of people. You think 100,000,000 people are gonna fucking sideload the app? Love this place but it can be a bubble sometimes.
Deplatforming is equivalent to banning in basically every instance. The public town square doesn’t exist in the digital world we all operate in. Change my mind.
Situations like this are a good opportunity to increase the rate of tech literacy in a broader population or to promote decentralized solutions, but unfortunately that’s a pipe dream.
Fediverse TikTok = TikToot?
Why though? Why would they give up their trade secrets? They have a global market.
They could sell the user accounts and content and let another company clip that into their own recommendation algo.
I’ve been a part of a few tech acquisitions that have worked this way. They keep their secret sauce but hand over the community.
The question is if anyone would buy it without the algorithm and the other stuff worth money. Users by themselves aren’t very useful if everyone leaves after a day.
It would come down to price. I’m sure someone would pay for the content, accounts, and brand. But what dollar amount are we talking about when the algo isn’t on the table.
Yeah that’s certainly possible. I just don’t think it will go the way people are thinking.
When you’re forced to participate in capitalism, your only option is to play the game. I agree, this is mostly just a bluff.
TikTok’s daily active users in the U.S. is also just about 5% of ByteDance’s DAUs worldwide, said one of the sources.
So much drama in the US over this but it’s apparently merely a money-losing afterthought for its owner.
It’s almost like making money is not the primary purpose of this website 🤔
Or … maybe the US isn’t the only country in the world?
Lmao yeah OK 👍. Name any other country.
I have a Geography degree lmao, but also, you’re an asshole. I don’t even know what you’re trying to accomplish with this comment.
he’s being sarcastic (im pretty sure)
Your sensing of humour is failing.
Didn’t seem like a joke to me, just seemed dismissive and rude. 🤷🏻♂️ People on this site frequently pull this 🤓oh yeah name a whatever🤓 shit unironically, so unless Lemmy gets a culture makeover I’m going to assume people are being assholes.
All that talking and you still ain’t even named one other country besides united states. The whole world is united States.
Fwiw I’m not American.
It’s not worth anything, your argument was that the US being such a small percentage of tiktoks userbase meant that the American market is only worthwhile to TikTok as a spying tool. Which does not make any sense.
I’m saying that tiktok has other markets in other countries, and the US only represents a small part of their global reach, so of course tiktok would only be a small percentage of their userbase.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if ByteDance sells TikTok for $5 to a US Citizen who frequently visits China for lavish vacations, and that US Citizen decide to keep all the algorithms the same.
If China has an ulterior motive with TIkTok, can’t they just find a US Citizen to carry out their ulterior motive?
No. The bill is quite specific about that.
Yeah same with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, fox news, CNN, News max, Msnbc and every single other media outlet by that logic. Apparently any company not owned Merica is propaganda too.
Looks like they’re saying it’s running at a loss and is valued at $50b, so that Musk would end up buying it off their hands.
If they want Musks attention they should have valued it at $69b
This means absolutely nothing.
How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US. They have shopping, I’ll bet the US buys the most.
China already has livestream shopping, it’s still relatively novel in the US. Bytedance has to compete with other local competitors in China, hating a nice external source of revenue in the US fuelling these Chinese battle is a huge boon.
I know the article says loss making app, but I bet a lot of money goes back to R&D creating the loss. They pay massive sums to get merchants to sell on their app for example.
This means absolutely nothing. How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US.
To quote the article again, “The U.S. accounted for about 25% of TikTok overall revenues last year, said a separate source with direct knowledge.” Honestly, I think that makes the case for shutting it down even stronger. TikTok isn’t in some growth-at-all-costs phase in the US. It’s likely near its peak potential userbase. If they haven’t been able to make it profitable by now, that doesn’t bode well for it ever becoming significantly profitable. Absent the legal issues, they think it’s still worth at least trying, but as it stands, it’s just a lot of money in and, just as quickly, out, with nothing to show for it at the end of the day.
5% of customers driving 25% of revenue is a market you want to invest in.
Amazon wasn’t profitable for how many years? It’s the exact same play. Take a loss to create something artificially desirable, strangle the competition and lock up your walled garden, then crank the prices.
I’ve talked with merchants TikTok Shop recruited, TikTok was paying them a ton to sell there, eating their processing fees, their shipping costs, and paying for massive discounts to customers so they could juice their metrics.
They’re starting to crank up their fees this spring and summer.
Same with advertising, advertisers want to go to TikTok, but I’m sure most of the actual spend is happening outside the app on influencers. TikTok wants that pie too.
Taking a loss means nothing in this context
You’re assuming its a profit-focused endeavor rather than a propaganda arm of the Chinese government.
Bro, Facebook facilitated a genocide, and this is who we want to buy TikTok? What action was taken against fb?
“US coRpOrAtiOn goOd!”
Not US corporation good, just US corporation = US controlled. This isn’t a morality play, it’s a national security play.
I think it’s a privately-owned, profit-focused endeavor that is nevertheless beholden to the Chinese government and which the government wants to take as much advantage of as possible. Deep down, I’m certain that their sole goal is to make as much money for themselves as they possibly can. If they also need to exfiltrate some data and send it to the CCP, that’s just a necessary business expense.
If TikTok’s purpose is to spread Chinese propaganda, can’t they just find a US Citizen that can run the website for them?
“Yeah, it’s my personal website where I exercise my 1st Amendment rights, also it has 100 million daily users and I happen to agree with China on a lot of things.” If a US Citizen were to say this, there would be nothing illegal about it I think?
Well China is refusing to divest, i.e. sell it to a US owner so clearly that’s not an option for them. If it was about the money they would have.
We are talking about the same country right? The US committed the fucking Tuskegee experiments, MK ultra, and more recently Gitmo as a whole. If some dumbfuck wants to be a Chinese puppet I wouldnt put it past the feds to off em, shame they commited suicide by shooting themself in the back of the head twelve times with a shotgun.
Okay, but I’m more interested in intra-legal reasons this couldn’t be done.
I’m sure they could find 2, 3, or 3000 US Citizens who are willing to sell out to China, and then TikTok would be owned by US Citizens, but would still be doing what China wants.
Also, hard to quantify how much of the popularity of tiktok is driven by US content globally, versus locally. You lose all that UGC is you cut out US
“Livestream shopping” is that like QVC or something?
Tombstone-Well.Bye.gif
So be it. The vaccuum it will leave will get filled by another platform.
The whole point of this bill is for mark zuckerberg’s lobbying money to finally get people to use Reels
Reels and YouTube shorts both suck, the algorithms push the most asinine content, or stuff I saw on tiktok MONTHS ago.
They didn’t lobby this bill. Google, oracle, did
This the goal of this bill.
