The irony of their efforts is that it only proved to show that they could easily begin influencing users which is the key argument being used against them.
I’m still not sure what my feelings on the subject are. I don’t use the app myself, but besides its connection to a company in China and, therefore, the Chinese government, it seems to do the same exact tracking and algorithm manipulating that every other social network does.
I definitely see issues with how it targets young people so aggressively and can have a huge negative impact on their mental health. China can essentially use it as a tool to lower the mental health of our youth and spread misinformation on purpose. The fact that the version available in China emphasizes educational content and limits usage per day shows that they know exactly what they are doing with the international versions.
Ties not just to “a company in China”, but directly to the Chinese government.
For better or worse, and how other US platforms operate, Tik Tok is controlled by a hostile (to the US) nation state.
Keep in mind that China also blocks many US company products/platforms for their own reasons, so this is not at all a surprise.
Question…
I don’t use tiktok. I have a Twitter account. Why is tiktok bad while a privately owned social media platform (twitter) that’s partially financed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar not bad?
For example — last year they sent what a spy balloon over the USA in what a lot of experts believe was a test of US defence systems - weapons used to shoot down the balloon had never been used before outside of top secret test facilities. And that balloon was covered in high tech sensors and almost certainly broadcasting data in real time. There’s no plausible explanation for the incident other than to find out how the US would respond.
Why does China want to know how US defence systems work? A lot of people already think there’s a chance of war between the two super powers. That balloon incident didn’t help things.
And what went viral on TikTok? Claims that the balloon was a actually flying over Canada and never went near US soil. Claims that it was launched by kids in the USA. Where did those claims originate from? Nobody knows, but it seems pretty coincidental. These claims were spread on other social networks too - but they went viral on TikTok alone.
That’s not the only incident, it’s just one of the most recent one that involved TikTok. Others have been far more serious especially in busy international waters south of China.
If Twitter’s financial backing by Saudi Arabia/Qatar is ever a concern, I’m sure the US will act on that as well.
Later Thursday, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said that the balloon not only did not transmit data back to China – it never collected any.
“We’re aware that it had intelligence collection capabilities, but it was our – and it has been our – assessment now that it did not collect while it was transiting the United States,” Ryder said
Link leads to “page unavailable”
Thanks, I had stripped out too much link metadata, it’s working now.
Will it, though?
That’s because the next couple balloons were launched by schools in the US and Canada. There was more than one balloon.
I personally don’t really mind TikTok. But the algorithm is a bit too addictive. The short form 30 second content consumption format is slowly eroding our attention span.
But that’s not the cause for a ban here.
Not to be that guy but is there even any vertical video social media that currently provides what TikTok does as an exact competitor?
Youtube shorts is so horrendous I have it blocked via revanced.
This seems more like an excuse to get rid of competition than spyware allegations. It’s not like CISA has some big report on TikTok software dump. Everything they do is mirrored by Facebook down to the COPPA violations that congress doesn’t seem to care Zuck is abusing.
In what ways is YouTube shorts different from tiktok?
There is a huge lack of quality content compared to tiktok. And it’s algorithm is horrendous.
Despite spending months trying to get YouTube to NOT show me far right, conservative, police loving, religious, or bigoted content, I still see it every once in a while. I’ve reported content, downvoted, selected ‘I’m not interested’ and nothing works.
There was a video from a lawyer about a black woman telling her child it’s ok to take the entire Halloween candy bowl and if legally that’s stealing.
Almost every other comment was some form of “well what do you expect from those people” or “it’s always the one you expect the most” or just straight up slurs. So many racist ‘jokes’ and I spent an hour just reporting comments.
Another video of a person driving through protestors blocking the road. Controversial and frustrating, I understand. But almost every comment was “the protestors deserve it” or “I’d drive through them too” and some real sociopathic shit.
And almost all the ads are horrendous. Literally Joe Rogan brain supplements, trashy weight loss, sketchy ai read ‘science’ on what doctors don’t want to to know. I would rather hear about Raid Shadow Legends.
I’ve found a couple gems in the mix, actual content creators that are funny or interesting. But almost all of them are also on TikTok too so there’s no reason to torture myself scrolling through a post apocalyptic wasteland. And there are so many quality creators on TikTok that aren’t on YouTube.
I believe a big part of it is (from what I’ve heard) TikTok has the best creator fund for paying the people who make videos. So without an outright ban, there’s no reason for them to switch. Really, this would be an absolutely huge win for YouTube/Google. And as much as I distrust TikTok, it would be a loss for creators and viewers. At least imo
CISA’s director literally just testified to congress about China fucking with shit.
Also, I see Instagram reels as a competitor.
Can anyone get me up to speed what claims the bill gave to justify TikTok must be either sold or remove from app stores?
AFAIU - but that is a veeeeeery “skimmed” take on the issue, so please check what I wrote before taking it at face value:
There were legitimate concerns about tiktok (hugely popular platform distributed as a “black box”, with very concerning permissions and behaviours, and owned by a foreign actor - tiktok is “unavailable” domestically - that demonstrably uses technology in an extremely dystopian way on their own population), so there was quite a lot of public pressure to “do something about it”, and of course politicians jumped on the opportunity to make a (very) broadly fitting legislation targeting it, coincidentally also having utterly damaging and immensely concerning side-effects for the end users privacy and sovereignty of all applications.
Following that, some of the people got (rightly) concerned about the legislation’s effect on their rights and privacy, but the vast majority just saw that their digital crack cocaine was being attacked, and started whining with arguments of varying relevance. At the end of the day, though, a given platform is irrelevant. What is, is the abilities given to the users, and the possibilities that those create. But now, we have a deeply concerning platform, still being immensely popular and uncontrolled; a totally unfitting legislation with incredibly wild “side effects”; and a growing, misguided popular movement to “save tiktok” that will only make a legitimate attempt at mitigating it much harder. Yay.
Edit: after quite some digging, I found the bill here (PDF) - source.
Edit 2: to answer your question more directly:
Can anyone get me up to speed what claims the bill gave to justify TikTok must be either sold or remove from app stores?
The justification is “America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States”.
Which is IMHO fair. It isn’t like the CCP would let American corporations, let alone government controlled ones, run services in China, let alone psychiatrically alienate their citizens, instigate discord and radicalization, potentially manipulate the public opinion, have the capacity to covertly do psyops, and actively, aggressively collect any and all data.
The potential problem I see (and probably what concerns most of the privacy advocates out there) however, is that while the bill is aiming at tiktok in particular (fine), it also targets any “foreign adversary”. Meaning that, AFAIU (but IANAL), all the US would have to do to completely and entirely nuke an app (or an entire federated platform!) in the US would be to declare any foreign entity (country, state, corporation, person, etc) their “adversary”. Effectively giving them a single “button” to directly nuke any app and services they don’t see fit. No matter how legitimate.
all the US would have to do to completely and entirely nuke an app (or an entire federated platform!) in the US would be to declare any foreign entity (country, state, corporation, person, etc) their “adversary”.
Declaring a foreign country to be adversarial to the U.S. is a huge deal, and I highly doubt they would do so just to ban an app. They would much sooner try to pass an unrelated “special case” legislation, and the success of such a bill would hinge on the persuasiveness of the justification.
I’m fine with the U.S. forcing the sale of TikTok for a different reason, though: internet companies operating in China must be majority-owned and -operated by a Chinese domestic entity, yet the same restriction is not imposed on Chinese investments in U.S. internet companies. Asymmetric markets like this cede a great deal of influence to China, and it just doesn’t sit right with me.
It can often be beneficial to both parties when two countries influence each other, but such influence must be bilateral.
Thanks.
I also had a brief read on the bill you linked and some relavent articles. The bill only cite “national security” yet doesn’t explain what “national security” it causes.
The Bloomberg article states a few reasons, but none satisfied me to justify a ban. For example, reason 1 points out that the algoritm of generating feed is advanced and intoxicating. So they should be punished for a well written and effective algorithms?
Yes, there are and were dumb to harmful contents found on TikTok. However, I think it should be a content moderation issue, not a national security issue. I heard people can find CSAM on Twitter and Discord, harmful and damaging it’s, should it get banned too due to “national security” concerns? It just have a smell of unfair.
Just my two cents.
Disclosure: I don’t use Facebook, Intagram, Twitter, nor TikTok. I do have a Discord account.
They’re not worried about CSAM. They worried about TikTok users being influenced during an election campaign.
And yes, it is a moderation issue. Specifically, the US doesn’t want the current moderation team to be in charge of moderation.
Disclosure: I don’t use Facebook, Intagram, Twitter, nor TikTok
To put it in perspective, about a quarter of the US population uses TikTok. And politics are a major discussion point with the political content you’re exposed to selected by an algorithm that is opaque and constantly changing.
It absolutely can be used to change the result of an election. And China has meddled in elections in the past (not least of all their own elections… but also foreign ones:
“China has been interfering with every single presidential election in Taiwan since 1996, either through military exercises, economic coercion, or cognitive warfare, including disinformation or the spread of conspiracies”
It not uncommon to see misinformatuon to fabricated information appears on many SNS platforms including Facebook and Twitter. It is not unheard of Russia use social media to influence election too via popular platform that is US based. All SNS are subject to the same problem, but only TikTok have more active users thus more far reaching,
but again this is a content moderation problem, not the inherent fault of TikTok itself.Whom should perform content moderation is a business decision. It should not be dictated by law, though they can make moderation standards that companies needs to comply. I think this is a bit unfair to just targeting TikTok only, and should be universal.
EDIT:
political content you’re exposed to selected by an algorithm that is opaque and constantly changing
Isn’t TikTok opened access to its algorithm for reviewing?
Actually it is not solely a content moderation problem. While some dumb and physically harmful content should be subject to moderation, speeches should be protected. Isn’t American all about the word “Freedom”? It should be free to speak what they believe, right?
However, the recommendation algorithms might need some regulations that categorize content and have relevant display policies. For example, political content, user generated and advertisement, should be distributed equally for all views (i.e. a user will see content for all candidates for roughly same amount of time). The “addictive” thing shouldn’t be regulated as that the point of the algorithm: maximize user engagement. However, there could be a rating system similar to game ratings that affect who at what age can use which platform. Otherwise, it should be free for one to addict to something, as long as it doesn’t cause a physical harm to himself and others.
I have a question. How would it be moderated and by whom? In an age where the warthunder forums literally have a leak of classified info like monthly, and the US is increasingly losing the cyber security war because people can’t do simple things like not plug random usb’s they found on the side of the road into their work computers, I don’t really understand why it’s hard to believe tik tok is a threat to national security.
The permissions it asks for on your phone are kind of a red flag. Specifically access to the camera and microphone. Mostly because with it being controlled by the CCP (as most successful Chinese Businesses are), it is absolutely trivial for them to gather information “anonymously” about their users, de-anonymize it, and then target those users with anything and everything including pro CCP propaganda. That alone is reason enough for me to understand why federal employees aren’t allowed to use tik tok on any federal device (work phones and computers for instance).
I don’t necessarily think forcing them to sell to another entity will fix the problems with tik tok. I think this bill is intended to be a “solution” to placate people. Mostly because it doesn’t seem like it’s been written by people who understand the technology. But I also wouldn’t say that tik tok is harmless or blameless.
Why does tik tok need to gather information about what banking apps I use? What healthcare apps I use? Why does it need my GPS location? Why can it collect this data without my consent? Why and how does it collect information on people even if they don’t use tik tok? Have never used tik tok?
On top of that Tik Tok got caught spying on reporters with the intent to track down their sources. That’s terrifying.
https://www.welivesecurity.com/2023/03/24/what-tiktok-knows-you-should-know-tiktok/
the US is increasingly losing the cyber security war because people can’t do simple things like not plug random usb’s they found on the side of the road into their work computers
I’m not surprised at this when Americans refuse to ware a simple medical mask during COVID.
How would it be moderated and by whom?
That would be easier to answer if we had a list of companies that can afford to buy it (that’s a short list) and also willing to buy it (an even shorter list).
I don’t necessarily think forcing them to sell to another entity will fix the problems
Sure - it obviously depends who buys it. Elon Musk, for example, would probably be a bad steward.
But what about Alphabet? That might not be so bad. As a fan of YouTube, I’d love to see the “shorts” feature killed off and all that content moved to a separate service where I can go the rest of my life without ever seeing a short repeating video.
Whoever buys it, it the US can force TikTok to be sold once, they can do it again if the buyer proves to also be problematic.
The invasion of privacy is bad regardless of who does it though. This bill isn’t about protecting consumer privacy. It’s about sticking it to the CCP. Alphabet should also be considered a company that needlessly invades the privacy of it’s users and laws should be made to protect those users. Just because tik tok is worse doesn’t mean any company doing this isn’t bad.
I’ll also say that YouTube shorts views pay more than tik tok views for established creators, by a significant margin. I would rather creators I enjoy get paid decently. Not that YouTube doesn’t have a lot of problems and anti-creator policies of its own. But $.04 per 1K views is a lot worse than $18.00 per 1K views.
I don’t get why China has anything to do with it. Isn’t it out of Singapore?
The parent company of TikTok is ByteDance which is a company based in China. But TikTok as a company isn’t based in China.
From its Wiki:
Its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, is owned by founders and Chinese investors (20%), other global investors (60%), and employees (20%). TikTok Ltd owns four entities that are based respectively in the United States, Australia (which also runs the New Zealand business), United Kingdom (also owns subsidiaries in the European Union), and Singapore (owns operations in Southeast Asia and India).
TikTok says that since 2020, the US based CEO is responsible for making important decisions. However, multiple reports claim that there is little functional separation between TikTok and its Beijing-based executives and software developers. TikTok has been noted for downplaying its connection with ByteDance and for eschewing questions about its relationship with the Chinese government.
This shit is annoying, I like Tiktok
