What's that saying? The best way to get a promotion is to cause a problem and then fix it?
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?
> 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...
Fiduciary responsibilities make it unlikely that many companies would risk it.
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.
> hereby 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?
> Fiduciary responsibilities make it unlikely that many companies would risk it.
When you are owned/controlled by an authoritative government you have the responsibility to not get disappeared. Just ask Jack Ma.
Which specific owner is the Chinese government?
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Can you imagine any other country making this demand and it being taken seriously? It is negotiation by means of extortion. Why are American tech companies entitled to the profits of an internationally used app?
Well, different standards apply for government than for private companies.
The government is not a company regardless of how many doofuses want to run it like one.
lol perfect
> a company "shut themselves down" to make a big political statement
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
The law didn't require them to shut the service off for those who already had the app installed. It just prevented new updates or downloads. Shutting off the app immediately was just theater and reinstating the app with no changes to the law is just the second act.
The law says that US cloud providers are fined if they continued to provide services to Bytedance.
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.
They shut down and reopened without any changes to the law. They are open now, despite the law being in effect.
They reopened with formal understanding that there will be an executive order tomorrow to suspend the enforcement of the ban. That is a big deal and it's something that they can point to to defend themselves in court should that happen. When President Biden signed the bill, it gave him the ability to extend the deadline by an amount which he declined to do (beyond saying "I'll let Trump admin deal with it"); and soon-to-be President Trump is saying he will do it tomorrow.
It’s federal law, and the president can offer a pardon allowing anyone to ignore federal law for as long as they remain in office.
The courts on the other hand can permanently block laws.
Did they shut down at the last moment necessary or did they shut down during what is likely a peak browsing time in the U.S.? Did they need to include messaging about political figures to notify the user of the reason of the ban?
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.
The law did not require them to suspend the service.
The law requires Oracle who hosts their data companies that provide cdn services to stop working with them. The law did require them to suspend service, but not quite as soon as they did and nothing had changed legally
The law required them to choose from among several options, one of which was suspending the service. The law did not permit maintaining the status quo as an option.
But now they are breaking the law by turning it back on.
Nothing in the law changed since yesterday. This is only theatre.
But bringing the service back again today is not following the law, is it? Trump hasn't taken office yet. Curious if you've now changed your mind.
Someone else pointed out that "the law" is shorthand for "how the police behave" and that has certainly changed because of VP Trump's statements.
It seems like striking fear into the hearts of users to make them realize a ban is really on the table is in their best interest. They want to not be banned, and giving everyone a 48 hour show of users on the platform counting down to the end, then being really upset when they think it's gone is a great demonstration that people want their Tiktok.
* 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.
I like how it is just a given that he is just going to ignore term limits.
They shut down before the law required them to (by a few hours), and now they’re back despite no changes in law or action by the president. Biden had already issued an executive order, nothing changed
That would be my question also. You can't explain the shutdown as following the law if the law didn't change between the time of the shutdown and coming back on. It seems to me like the more accurate assessment here is an anticipation of policy changes, which however fruitful do not reflect any change in law, but perhaps some change in the degree of reassurance that the law won't be enforced.
If it's not that, it may well be as the original commenter in this thread suggested a stunt to make a point.
In 2012 a coordinated action by 100,000 sites (including major platforms like Reddit, Wikipedia and Google) all went dark for 24 hours to protest SOPA, which was successful in killing the bill. Some only changed the color scheme and added a message but others shut down.
> which was successful in killing the bill
the protests had no bearing on the outcome of the bill. most of us didn’t even know they were taking place.
Sorry what?! I was in Australia and even from here it was obvious it was happening. Maybe go back refresh your mind on old HN posts. Sorry not meaning to be rude but the digital protests of the day were very significant. Lots of media coverage and site blackouts and banners and average punters waking up to the interruption. Stacks was going on. You can even watch Internets Own Boy doco where it’s covered.
Uber has used this tactic many times in their early days. It mostly worked because citizens got used to cheap rides and got mad at their government for taking it away.
> 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?
OnlyFans did something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyFans#Restrictions_on_porno...
That wasn’t a political statement. Per your link, it was a belief that that could not continue the credit card payments while staying in compliance with the law.
> flip-flop so quickly
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.
> If actual negotiation had to occur, it would not have happened in the twelve hours
A spur of the moment decision would be more like Trump than a lengthy negotiation.
What’s the evidence of this? It seems highly plausible but do we have any proof besides speculation?
My partner uses TikTok and was greeted with a message today saying that DJT saved the app. That isn't possible because he isn't president yet. It's all very embarrassing.
Oh maybe the very clear messaging in the app and by the inbound administration, who is heavily supported by tech elites. The same people who have been very open about their feelings towards opposition and who and what they support. No one will come out and claim this was the case, but its not like they are trying to hide it either.
Do you need to eat shit to know it is shit?
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!?
If that’s the case this was totally bungled, the app was down for less than 12 hours, overnight during a weekend. If they wanted maximum effect Trump wouldn’t have tweeted until 5pm eastern to give people a chance to come to terms with the shutdown actually happening.
They want to be able to livestream the inauguration tomorrow on Tiktok.
They shut down long enough to get attention but not long enough for people to find another platform
It had to have been a PR move.
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.
Ha ha are you serious? Trump is a fragile-egoed narcissist.
He's not even in power and already everyone's sucking up to him.
like your conspiracy theory, lots of entertainments in it.
The goal was always to get TikTok divested of Chinese ownership, not to ban it.
The ban was the stick and selling it for a lot of money was the carrot. ByteDance surprised almost everyone in choosing the stick.
> The goal was always to get TikTok divested of Chinese ownership, not to ban it.
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
> 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.
Does anyone have a citation for this? Probably higher quality if it's in Chinese even if I have to machine translate it. Because that would be a clear pointer of suspicion.
It's like real life is playing like a shitty TV series. Constant cliff hangers, plot twists that never resolve....
Agree, and the velocity is amazing, it's really hard to keep up with the shenanigans. In my opinion, it will have a negative impact on the economy, education, birth rates etc.
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 think it's obvious that US lawmakers were somehow convinced ByteDance would absolutely divest from TikTok if threatened with an ultimatum. They were never prepared for an actual ban and the resulting fallout. Now that it's obvious they won't divest (which should have been obvious the entire time), they flipped
> US lawmakers were somehow convinced ByteDance would absolutely divest from TikTok if threatened with an ultimatum
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.
Can you point to a lawmaker who has flipped?
Here's what Chuck Schumer said:
"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
> What's that saying? The best way to get a promotion is to cause a problem and then fix it?
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.
What's the difference between the perception of a problem being present and the existence of a problem?
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
> What's the difference between the perception of a problem being present and the existence of a problem?
Well, it would be the same as the distinction between real and imaginary in any other context.
Not exactly the same but ChatGPT's firing and rehiring of Sam Altman seems to be in the same vein
Union strikes may fit that bill.
> it's crazy to see so much of a flip-flop so quickly.
Trump was against Tiktok before he was for it.
He was also against crypto currencies before he released his own.
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Crypto is a very easy way to funnel bribes to the sitting president, who has immunity for actions taken in regards to "official actions".
> 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.
> People aren't allowed to change their minds?
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.
> Political things aside, it's crazy to see so much of a flip-flop so quickly
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.
According to the people I work with, all they care about is kids in cages. They value “tough talk” on immigration above anything else. Being influenced by Russia or China don’t even register.
> all they care about is kids in cages
To clear, they want kids in cages. Did I read that right?
> 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?
A number of internet services (e.g. Wikipedia) shut down temporarily on Jan 18, 2012 as a political statement against SOPA.
Heh; I thought you were talking about trump the first few times I read this.
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.)
> it's crazy to see so much of a flip-flop so quickly
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.
He who can destroy a thing controls that thing. Expect the new administration to have great influence on tiktok policy and content.
Already do and users are noticing. Ads have been introduce in a really obnixious facebook/instagram style and contebt moderation is more facebook/instagrem esq as well. It would surprise no one on the platform if meta has already aquired it, and it just needs to be announced.
100% it's what happened. And the craziest part is that it worked because Biden went along with it. It's easy enough to argue Trump played hardball to negotiate for any divestiture that may occur; because that was his goal all along. The narrative/pundits can spin this easily in his favour.
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.
oh - and his true audience all along: an American oligarch is about to get at least half of TikTok for a steal.
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.
Yeah it's just decent strategy on their part (I hate to say). Even if they don't profit directly off of the TikTok deal they look like absolute bosses for being able to "give" Americans what they wanted all along.
I dont think we know the actual range of motives for shutdown. Oracle may have forced it, for instance.
Epic Games sorta did this to Fortnite, but the reversal wasn't quick
The SOPA and PIPA protests were basically that
> What's that saying? The best way to get a promotion is to cause a problem and then fix it?
In Trump's world, I think you should cause a problem, blame somebody else, and then fix it.
moonshine stopped working also. I guess it was under the same parent org. They all back to working now.
Is it a big political statement to shut down a couple hours before the deadline of shutting down?
The app stores removed the app in accordance with that timeline too.
No. It's a big political statement to include political messaging and plead to political figures when you shut down. Then to praise those political figures afterwards is additional political messaging.
No, many users are sharing the theory that the downtime was to allow meta or google to take over the backend. Content delivery is different on the app now. For example, ads being served during videos not between videos.
There was no deadline, the app stores didn’t need to remove it.
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.
> As of January 19, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act will make it unlaw- ful for companies in the United States to provide services to distribute, maintain, or update the social media platform TikTok
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/TikTok_v...
Please do some research next time before spreading lies.
Thanks. So that was between friday night and today, that means it would also be true that Bytedance could not rely on the autonomous aspects of the US government to not create liability, unless given an explicit assurance.
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.
The Biden administration said it wasn't going to initiate enforcement proceedings in the last 24 hours of their administration.
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.
> Political things aside, it's crazy to see so much of a flip-flop so quickly.
"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)_/¯
Trump going soft on China was predictable.
Trump's biggest backers, Elon Musk, Jeff Yass...etc. all have ties with China.
People need to understand that politicians (dare I say everywhere?..) are just business man with dressing. They simply put up a show for people to win the votes and once they get elected, do whatever they can to make an extra buck. Trump, a convicted felon is certainly no different..
Was it? Apart from Elon’s dependence on China market for Tesla sales, I didn’t think so. Trump has been talking a lot about going hard against adversaries. The TikTok ban is something he supported. And it’s more popular on the right than left.
What am I missing.
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.
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It literally was? Everything that happened in the last 24 hours specifically has nothing to do with any legal requirement or deadline. It was a show.
FWIW, it was at least year in the making, but I will admit that the execution did add a proper show vibe.. as would be expected from a reality show star.
The US presidency fully devolved into a mafia this time around, no more mincing words or operating behind the scenes. Just like a mafia don demands, all fealty should be in public and fully subservient, no half measures.
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.
The US president is not all-powerful. If he was, Trump would not have been forced to hand over power to Biden in 2020.
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.
Trump resisted handing over power after the 2020 election, and to date, he has faced no significant legal consequences for those actions.
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.
> Trump would not have been forced to hand over power
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.
even if someone wishes they were a dictator of the USA doesn’t mean that they are
Courts and Congress are a main check: he appointed 3 Justices, and Clarence Thomas is corrupt + qanon wife, that's 4 of 9. Already when congress has gone against him like with the shutdown he wanted at the end of Biden's term, Musk, the richest man in the world, threatened to primary them, and we'll see much more of that.
Nazi salute Musk also did a $1 million a day lottery system for republican voter registrations with some loopholes and got away with it.
We're pretty fucked.
This is just a publicity stunt to capitalize on his popularity among Gen Z: https://www.newsweek.com/young-people-most-optimisitc-about-.... Trump is simply picking up the ball Biden fumbled.
>Till now, commenting or criticizing someone was fair game, not anymore. Musk and trump have shown they can petty and vindictive.
Tons of people criticize both of them. In fact, both Musk and Trump have publicly criticized each other, and have now made up.
Republicans have learned to weaponize attention far better than Democrats. Negative attention is still attention, and where Democrats shrink from "gaffes" or criticism, Republicans just recognize that public criticism is still a form of attention. Even among each other. Whoever gets the most eyeballs, top stories, and headlines for longest wins this game.
Vicious, vindictive, petty, nonsensical, random, and trolling tactics are all strategically useful in this media landscape.
Republicans have the benefit of not having guilt around saying things that are patently not true while the Democrats are still trying to act within norms.
It is asymmetrical warfare on the truth.
It's a response to the fact that democrats can create widespread misperceptions through their control of traditional media. For example, in 2018, 66% of Democrats believed that "Russia tampered with vote tallies to get Donald Trump elected President." https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/20383-russias-imp.... Hillary Clinton never went out and said quite that. But the barrage of coverage from all angles in the media created the same impression as if she had said that.
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.
Correct, but now there will be not even a semblance of bipartisanship. It's not even enough to be a member of the same party, you must pledge full unwavering loyalty and never criticize the administration or face the consequences of being ostracized, attacked, power revoked, and prosecuted by a weaponized DOJ. The media, both social and legacy, are fully on board now too, the gloves are off.
Also, you can now commit crimes and then pledge loyalty in exchange for a pardon. See Eric Adams.
>you must [...] never criticize the administration or face the consequences of being ostracized, attacked, power revoked, and prosecuted by a weaponized DOJ.
It's not "never". JD Vance published a book criticizing Trump, and still got picked as VP.
> > Musk and trump have shown they can petty and vindictive
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.
Trump said yesterday in his speech that they want a model where the US owns 50% of Tik Tok and has some oversight.
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 don't want to live in blue China, especially when the oversight is the Trump administration.
I wouldn't call required government control a free speech win.
I mean it’s a compromise, usually both sides are unhappy when a compromise is made haha.
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.
> This is pretty much the exact same setup that US companies get in China.
I mean, no? Meta, Google, X, Snap and American social networks in general are banned in China.
It is the setup for all companies which are not banned in China lol
You're very late to the party.
https://oversight.house.gov/the-bidens-influence-peddling-ti...
How is this at all related to what the person was saying? They made no mention of financial corruption. They're explicitly talking about speech and press.
Money, speech, press... The mafia has many avenues of control...
I think it's pretty clear Hunter Biden has been sleazily profiting from the position of his father.
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.
> 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. ;)
additionally, wasn't the "whistleblower" who made many claims about Hunter Biden's laptop found to be blatantly fraudulent? dude was later convicted for making false statements.
IIRC the Romanian and Kazakstan ones were also heavily thrown into doubt.
whole thing reads like whataboutism
That's exactly what it is. The people breathlessly compiling a list of "what abouts" for this type of corruption need to look past their nose. 2 things can be fucked up at the same time, and one of those things being fucked up isn't an excuse for the other thing to continue being fucked up.
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.
Comparing Hunter Bidens sale of his name to the Trump organization as if it's the same is so laughable.
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?
At the risk of "what about"-ing, this list is laughably small compared to the Trump's bribe docket.
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.
This seems to imply that the president elect can make unilateral guarantees contravening US law. That’s a surprising outcome.
Prepare yourself from many more surprises from this lawless regime. The US supreme court has already said he is immune from prosecution.
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.
He’s also the guy that triggered all of this by signing a presidential order to change TikTok ownership during his first run.
Does he have a coherent position on this that these actions support?
Does he have a coherent position on anything?
His main policy seems to be to show the world that he's a big man with big genitalia. And in fairness, he is quite successful at that because much of the world thinks him a gigantic dick.
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.
More power and more flattery, that's it.
To accumulate power for him and the people he likes
No, he does not.
The law gives him some power to grant a 90-day reprieve, iff he makes some 'certifications' to congress w.r.t. progress toward compliance.
That's only before the ban, not after. The ban is already in effect. This is a violation of the law, plain and simple, and the law does not allow for an unbanning after the fact. The 90 extension could have been done before the 19th, but not after.
Simply put, this is law breaking. The President-elect is making promises to break the law day one. This is not surprising.
Look I don’t want to carry any water for him whatsoever, but I think it’s going to be essential to couch criticism in the rule-of-law setting we think should prevail. To that end, the text of the relevant section is:
> 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.
Both liberal and conservative presidents have made choices about whether or not they will enforce particular laws passed by Congress. This is nothing new. It's just getting a lot more media attention than most instances of this have gotten.
(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.
I doubt judges would take your side on this interpretation of the law. Wanna put some money on this bet?
Its a stretch to consider this law breaking. The president either does or does not have authority here, but the only one breaking the law would be ByteDance.
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.
If you are surprised this happens given Jan 6 events you have been living under a rock.
There is a good chance there will be no more fair elections in US.
This was a pretty big talking point during the election, towards the end I didn't go a day without hearing about how Trump will end democracy or how democracy was on the ballot.
What the hell happened? For anyone that honestly believes that, why pack up and go home when Trump wins the election?
What do you mean "What the hell happened?"
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.
America spoke and said they wanted it, what more is there to be said? If there was marching in the streets, it would be torn to shreds by the online grift sphere.
Because it was mostly being astroturfed. Democracy obviously isn't going to end in any way, shape, or fashion under Trump.
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.
> For anyone that honestly believes that, why pack up and go home when Trump wins the election?
You're wondering why people who are pro-democracy are respecting the outcome of the election?
Elon Musk literally held an illegal sweepstakes paying people to vote in Pennsylvania. And given Elon Musk's position in the new government, its clear that his sweepstakes has led to direct benefits from Trump. It was direct quid-pro-quo and no one is doing anything about it.
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?
It seems USA is completely blinded by some immaterial force. How can people not see all the blatant lie from Trump and his bootlickers? Why is USA refusing to fight (or at least help allies substantially) against Russia, which commits crimes on the level of Nazi Germany in WWII?
The US activity supported similar atrocities in Palestine, and there was bipartisan support for that.
I don’t have an answer to your question.
>. How can people not see all the blatant lie from Trump and his bootlickers?
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.
It’s of course always possible that you are the blind one. Maybe one day you’ll grow out of it.
> How can people not see all the blatant lie from Trump and his bootlickers?
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.
You're still thinking of him as a president and not as the new monarch of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if he is around for more than one term and incrementally greater and greater authoritarian powers.
Hes no spring chicken so that remains to be seen. I do however worry about who is waiting in the wings to ride on his coat tails.
The surprising part is that people are still surprised. Trump can do whatever he wants and there will be no pushback. We are talking about the guy who launched a meme coin a few days before taking office and made $50B+ overnight.
I think those chickens just haven’t come home to roost yet. His wife launched her coin today. There is no way this isn’t being looked at closely. Impressively quick start to the new shit show.
> There is no way this isn’t being looked at closely.
Who's going to look at it? Whichever sycophant ends up being AG?
He is now immune from prosecution, financial crimes will be pretty low on the list of things that would breach the Supreme Court’s ruling on this matter.
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”.
Closely by whom? Tomorrow, Trump and his sycophants will control the DoJ.
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.
> I think those chickens just haven’t come home to roost yet.
People have been saying that about Trump's antics literally his entire life.
A wide open door to get foreign political donations (see: bribery) in plain sight.
Is the US dollar going to survive this presidency? Honest question. I can easily see a path to replacing it with enough political/VC will.
> Is the US dollar going to survive this presidency? Honest question.
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.
Here’s the law: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
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.
That's not the law that passed. The law that passed is https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815 (lengthy law -- see DIVISION H—PROTECTING AMERICANS FROM FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATIONS ACT), page 62 in the PDF.
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
Thank you for correcting me
The executive branch is responsible for enforcement of laws. He could just choose not to enforce it, no?
I think replies to this will be one of two:
* 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.
Why would Apple or Google want to take the risk? They are not TikTok, they don't stand to lose hundreds of billions of dollars of value.
Surely this is not the first case of a president not enforcing a law.
So then presumably this goes back into court, and then what?
But that's the point isn't it. He's testing the waters.
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...
A little bit difficult to get the president elect who is to be inaugurated today (the 20th) when that same president elect in his own words reasonably believes that the 2020 election was stolen.
I think we're all very certain that a thorough investigation into the 2020 election will clear up any concerns about it.
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Trump can choose to not enforce the law. That is of course illegal, and a high crime, but who is left to stop him?
It's not illegal, nor a high crime. It is in fact established precedent that this is in the purview of presidential power. This is why FBI agents are not raiding every marijuana shop in DC or the states that legalized it: since Obama, every president has chosen to instruct the justice department not to enforce federal law in this matter in those states.
As opposed to the Democrats that refuse to enforce immigration law, or refuse to prosecute all sorts of crime they don't feel like (Except when they have to "Get Trump by all means")?
We can play this game all day, so let's just agree Democracy is broken.
In my city, a great deal of laws are not enforced. Enforcement is a policy at most levels, it seems. The interesting thing, to me, is that there’s no fear of future administrations enforcing, or even Trump pulling a 180 and using the law being broken as leverage.
See my comment above. This is a misunderstanding of how the executive branch works. 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.
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.
You're ignoring established precedent. Look at Obama choosing not to enforce federal bans on marijuana use in states that have legalized it - that is a policy of not enforcing well established federal law that has been reinforced by every subsequent president for the past 12? 16? years now.
> the executive branch MUST enforce it
Or what?
(I'm not being flippant. Are there consequences I'm not aware of if he decides not to enforce?)
Your understanding of the law is incorrect when you say "the executive branch MUST enforce it". Administrations of all political stripes have decided not to enforce parts of particular laws. And this is precisely because "enforcement" means you need to use limited resources to prosecute someone for breaking the law, and the executive branch has always had wide latitude deciding who they prosecute. If Congress decides the president is not faithfully enforcing the laws, their option is impeachment. Well, we all saw how that went the last few times...
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.
>That’s a surprising outcome.
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.
I feel like Americans didn't realize that the country slipped into a mixed authoritarian regime now.
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.
Many many of us did, but were powerless to stop it.
Writing in laws that allow you to selectively take out whoever is convenient at any time is lawmaking 101.
Of course lawfare is the tool of the democrats, and not republicans, like you seem to believe.
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Before 2016, some of the lawsuits succeeded. After 2016, he's pretty much safe from legal ramifications until his death.
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That's not how racism works.
Trying and doing takes a minute for him, fixing it is a long process with consequence on all others mostly.
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!
The president can pardon whomever he wants. It's in the U.S. Constitution.
Do pardons extend to companies? That could be a really unintended consequence of the whole "companies are people" precedent.
It might be surprising, but SCOTUS confirms it
They're just 9 clowns in robes these days
If this stands, it certainly is. It’s a mockery of the whole of the system. Congress better act on overturning it post haste or enforcing it post haste.
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They only have one option for the next two years: Impeach and remove. GOOD LUCK LMAO
Yes, the republican dominated congress and senate are certain to do that. It's very clear this puppy has no bottom.
To be fair, he's already been impeached twice; this wouldn’t be anything new to anybody.
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President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho to the rescue!!
For those who haven’t seen it yet, go watch Idiocracy from Mike Judge. It’s a preview of the years to come.
That's a unfair comparison towards President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Didn't he give up his position in the end towards the more qualified main character of the movie?
After attempting to murder him first. But yes.
Arguably DJT consented to the murder of his VP, before cedeing power once the coup failed. So not too far off.
Or way older and much more eloquent (albeit less digestible) "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. Or even older "The Medium Is the Massage" by Marshall McLuhan.
Money quote from President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho to cement how he and Trump align on values:
> Come on, scro! Don't be a pussy! Besides, you do a kick-ass job and you get a full pardon.
Remind me again who pardoned his own son.
After the precedent around pardons set by his predecessor I'll give him that one.
At least Biden let the process play out before issuing the pardon so the public got to know all the details.
At least Hunter Biden won't be our Ambassador to France.
More like a documentary of the last eight.
The last two felt more like Weekend at Bernie's.
iT's a doCuMentArY!
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.
>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.
Speaking of inscrutable nonsense that antagonizes ally countries: I’m still pissed off about the Canadian lumber tariffs.
My brain struggles to understand how people can see how Trump is operating and think it is "normal".
What has happened to Americans??
Don’t worry, Trump will get us another pandemic.
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.
There is no eugenics in that movie?
I like the movie a lot, but the beginning is a little problematic from a modern viewing iirc. It discusses how the poor and uneducated produce more kids than the higher classes, thus a dumb population after many generations.
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.
>uses Eugenics as its premise
Uh, false?
there's an implied (if tongue-in-cheek) pro-eugenics message, since the premise is rooted in dysgenics being a real problem
Is anyone aware of any opinion poll among US population about banning tiktok? This to me feels like one of the issues with potentially largest disconnect between voters and politicians
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.
28% oppose the ban, and 32% support it. So a majority are either in favor or ambivalent. Two years ago a majority supported it: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/05/support-f...
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.
"Not Sure" != "ambivalent". It's a mistake to lump "Not Sure" and "Opposed" together and declare a majority, as the group as a while does not represent a specific stance. Any attempt at nuance for either side gets bucketed into the largest category.
That group seems like the most interesting question... what sub groups do they fall into.
Anytime there are such large numbers of "undecideds" it's likely they are low-information, and an opportunity for Trump (or any unscrupulous politician, but really, Trump) to lie to them and turn them to whatever side they wish.
Since 170M Americans look at TT, I wonder of how much of it was TT propaganda itself.
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.
The impetus for this is largely from Congress in both parties. Public support often doesn't align with congressional action and it doesn't stop them.
Vote for your congress members.
Guess you were not part of the popular vote
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>drumpf bad
Yep.
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.
I wonder if those numbers would change if people read the same intel reports and knew how far the Chinese spies are up our asses.
You’re overestimating the number of people that care about it. A good chunk of people really don’t care about privacy, data security and potential exposure to propaganda, no matter how much we (engineers who actually care about it) tell them to.
Lots of people do care about the propaganda thing. Like, most normie voters I know definitely don't give a crap about the data privacy stuff, but they haven't forgotten about the cold war and are not bought into this "maybe it's fine if the Chinese government can control what all the kids are seeing" narrative.
But it's a big problem that the framing has often been about the data privacy thing.
Engineer who uses TikTok here, I'll let you know once I become a communist.
I assume most americans today are already under the impression their government spies on them and facebook/google will gladly give anything that is asked for, how does the chinese spying on them make any difference for the average citizen? If I was a regular american and had to choose I'd take the foreign spy 10/10 times. What will the chinese do to the regular american citizen compared to what his own contry could do with this information?
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.
> how does the chinese spying on them make any difference for the average citizen? If I was a regular american and had to choose I'd take the foreign spy 10/10 times
I hope our adversaries believe the same one day!
"under the impression" ???
We have proof. There is no guessing here.
> people read the same intel reports and knew how far the Chinese spies
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.
Well, those who made the decision decided to keep the intel secret, so we'll never know.
You bring up valid point. Did the legislators lie en masse to us about national security to remove a competitive app from the American ecosystem or not. If the national security issues exist, where is the outrage from our elected officials? If not, our government is for sale.
Not for sale as much as adjusting to the new reality of feudalism.
> If the national security issues exist, where is the outrage from our elected officials?
The vast majority of security threats does not cause any public outrage. It is dealt with behind the scenes.
A lot of people hold the view that privacy isn't important unless you have something to hide. They likely wouldn't care about some government on the other side of the world knowing what stupid tiktok videos they watch.
They probably would. But so long as the decisions are made using secret information, how can we know? We can only assume they are lying to us, until they show the proof.
Until they're shared to the public, the wise move is to choose not to believe them.
The problem with a poll is that the general public is likely not privy to all the information that the people in charge have. I think the best thing to do here is just come out with all of it, lay it on the table, and see what the public thinks then. If you have a good reason then show us.
That is exactly what the government has not done all these years. Why be tight-lipped if there is solid evidence and data, its not some issue of nuclear weapons/military-strategy.
I've suspected that they have evidence that China is using the platform for social manipulation, but we're using the same techniques on other countries and possibly domestically and the government doesn't want to make the general public aware of it. Or it could be that they don't have evidence of actual wrongdoing, but feel that the risk is too large to allow it to exist.
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.
People are fickle and will forget about this in a few months.
Days
More people supported the ban than opposed it in multiple polls. You’re leaving out the people who weren’t sure when polled
>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.
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.
The timing and rhetoric from lawmakers make this ban really seem about Israel. Lawmakers and citizens are pretty disconnected on that in general.
You know polls are a rotten way to make policy. Easily manipulated. In fact, Hitches said in "Letters..." that any time you see a poll just realize it's someone trying to change your mind with the bandwagon fallacy - isolating your own opinion as wrong and outside the norm or trying to reinforce the "right" opinion by confirming that you're part of the cool-kid club.
Yes, polls are an imperfect tool. But I think they remain the only tool we have to gauge what decisions coming out of Washington are product of broad popular support vs ones product of intense lobbying from shadowy powers.
Most policies aren't the sort of thing that is going to attract broad popular support (or opposition.) Did you look at the opposition numbers? Who are the "shadowy powers?" Lawmakers say that China is the shadowy partner here doing bad things with Tiktok. I don't necessarily trust the US government on this issue, but I was speaking to a Chinese national last year, they asked me why the US was banning Tiktok. When I said "because China is using it to spy on Americans" they replied "Of course they are!" and laughed.
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.
Counterpoint: shadowy powers of lobbying publish the polls to manufacture consent and put pressure on politicians.
Alternate tools include:
* elections, e.g. flipping control of house to party opposite the president.
Numerous examples of badly and broadly worded polls exist to tell you 87% of the country agrees on XYZ. There isn’t a damn thing up for debate in the United States that 87% of the population agrees on, so that’s your first tip-off. A nuanced question garnering 56% may be more believable, but even then, stay highly skeptical of polls: poll MoE, poll audience selection, poll respondents, and poll questions. Together these all make for a house of cards.
It's not that polls are imperfect, it's that they're often entirely misleading and incorrect. And if the only tool you have to do a job isn't fit for purpose, then that just means that you aren't equipped to do the job properly.
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.
I often wonder what value a survey has if those surveyed have not enough information and facts at hand.
we have lawmakers making reproductive laws who don't know how babies are made. Those making the laws don't have enough information on hand.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/super-awkward-clip-republica...
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it's irrelevant in politics because they are still going to act on their own level of information regardless.
Did they poll AIPAC?
So you are saying Trump went against 87% of lawmakers?
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If you exclude "not sure," it's 52% support banning. Also, the survey was not limited to voters.
Note that a majority/plutority becomes more skewed when aggregating constituencies.
Granted 52% -> 87% is still a big increase, but there you have it.
I think apps like TikTok or YouTube Shorts literally brainwash people. It’s one of the dumbest things ever invented on the Internet, yet incredibly addictive at the same time.
Never had TikTok, but that's exactly what I thought when Youtube introduced Shorts and I found myself spending long sessions in them.
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 me, in reddit (and hacker news), I tend to actually read the actual video, read the comments, sometimes even leave a comment. Much more time spent on an actual item.
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.
I highly recommend turning off the autoplay next video option in YouTube. It will enhance your life.
I'm so tired of the Internet turning into the Internet of Faces. I feel like I see faces plastered all over the Internet now, eager to take only ten minutes to explain one minute of information to me.
Don't download titkok. It's like Shorts but works a lot better.
Both are like using slot machines but on tiktok you win (dopamine hit) more often - or at whatever rate the house wants you to.
Even if it is recipes and chemistry it's the format that's the issue, it still fries your dopamine and lowers your attention span.
Some of it is that for sure. But you could also make the counter argument about long form content. It doesn’t take 20 minutes to explain how to make a cake.
I don't think it's any worse than any other form of media (like reading comments on hacker news instead of reading the article)
This type of comment comes up here a lot, but maybe you should show us what exactly you mean?
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 remember lots of things! Like Nile burning some random thing. Or that British physicist talking to the British shit poster lady.
I think you might have a point..
An interesting difference between physics and metaphysics is that in physics people tend to think fact checking their claims is important.
Can you provide a ranking of entertainment from most “deep” to most shallow please since you seem to be an expert on what entertainment is OK to consume?
That is exactly what TikTok does, they are more popular because their tastes algorithm is even better than Shorts for figuring out what you actually want to watch
its like how 30 years ago when people would numblessly flip through hundreds of cable channels for hours, but with endless tailored content and extra dopamine shots on top from social feedback
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
yeah but cable was limited by channels and by producers. now anyone can make a video and it's possible to tailor that to tiny niches that would have never been served by cable.
It's a slot machine, a scroll is an arm pull. Sometimes you get a brain tickle and you keep on scrolling to get more. I'd bet money that the brain activity is exactly the same.
100% agree on this and go further; it rots their brain. We have to have the societal courage and guts to admit that it is conceptually the same as things like drugs/alcohol/smoking.
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.
Yes, rap music (and video games, and rock music, and comic books, and pinball machines) definitely ruined the world by rotting the childrens’ brains.
It wasn’t the gutting of the educational system, that’s far too simple an explanation.
Your facetious comment is essentially correct. It all comes down to culture and parenting. The 'gutted' education system where I live spends 25k per student, which doesn't matter if kids never read a book.
Do you think rap music has had more of an impact on society or democracy than TikTok or YouTube shorts or just Facebook?
I'd be pulling something out of thin air, but my opinion is that yes so far it has. Facebook and TikTok, and other social media, has served as an amplification mechanism for various things, including rap music.
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.
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Do you think forums like the one you are on right now do not?
We're the product of all the information we consume, but forums like HN aren't custom-tailoring what I'm shown to maximize engagement from me.
Perhaps, but the question was regarding whether this forum brainwashes people.
Do you think there might be some variation in the degree of negative effects a forum like Hacker News has compared to TikTok/YT shorts?
I do, but this is not contrary to my point.
No, because reading is more healthy than mindlessly watching short videos. There is only so much content on the front page, it's not a slot machine you can pull for hours like tiktok.
Give it a few months until somebody rigs an open-source video generation model to generate a "Short" from any frontpage article, and then several "reaction videos" based on the top comments... and maybe a frontend UI that turns the frontpage into an infinite scroll of those Shorts... and bam, HackerReels will be born
Do you truly believe zero brainwashing takes place here?
Out of curiosity, how deeply have you considered the question? And, might that depth not be a function of the norms in the forum?
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I can't believe how ignorant some people could be.
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...
Having some amount of utility doesn't contradict it possibly being used for nefarious purposes by it's owners though. If I intentionally wanted to design an information warfare weapon, I'd make sure to sugarcoat it with interesting/funny/useful content to make it palatable. Just like putting the soldiers inside a giant wooden horse.
Not that I really care enough to ban TikTok, but the value demonstrated here is pretty spurious. You could swap "TikTok" with "socializing", and I'm sure these people would've had similar outcomes.
Socializing is indeed of great value to people; not at all spurious. You're helping prove OP's point.
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.
Citizens have a right to assemble and speak to each other. Foreign corporations don't have a right to own the feeds of huge swaths of the population. Hence the rules around newspaper and TV ownership.
AR-15s can be used for hunting but it doesn’t mean it is always used for good
> I can't believe how ignorant some people could be.
Wow, it goes deeeeeeep.
For the record -- the law for TikTok divestment was not passed on its own, but was instead included in the foreign aid (including Ukraine) package https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/23/tech/congress-tiktok-ban-...
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.
This is a misleading view of history. It is true that it was included in the foreign aid package, but the TikTok ban was also passed in an isolated bill in an overwhelming bipartisan manner beforehand.
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.
Correct. I advocated for both these bills. The TikTok ban carried Ukraine.
Now post the lobbying money received by lawmakers, as well as their history of trades of Meta stock.
Top recipients of campaign donations from Meta:
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/recipients?id=D0000335...
Congress members invested in Meta:
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/members-invested?id=D0...
And? The history of media companies operating in the US to have US citizens owners is likely much longer than you've been alive, just ask Murdoch about is US citizenship.
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.
>so one has to take this into account when considering ‘bipartisan support’ of the thing.
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.
How does the ruling affect the 1st amendment rights of US citizens? It entirely affects foreign business owners.
Accountable for sure, but it's less clear who was in favour and who was against the bill compared to if it wasn't bundled together.
Standalone vote in the house was pretty supportive and bipartisan too https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202486.
Congress has a limited amount of time and attention unfortunately, so omnibus bills are very common. That doesn’t invalidate the contained legislature.
I don’t agree with the widespread usage of such “tricks”, but I do understand the harsh reality and limitations of representative democracy.
Thanks for this. It’s the first I’ve heard of it.
The standalone vote for it was overwhelmingly in favor of a ban. See other comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42762082
Yes it was included in a foreign aid package to make it more palatable to Congress. Advocates of the bill on this site are not bringing that up because they support the bill.
> but was instead included in the foreign aid (including Ukraine) package
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 think the sheeple can, sadly. Govt has been so thoroughly captured by corporate interests that I think the fall of America will happen before the govt starts governing for the people
While it’s back in the US, it seems to be a separate version from the rest of the world. My account is European and I can no longer log in within the US without a VPN out of the country. My GFs account is American and she can login but has lost access to some accounts and the ability to watch livestreams which my version of the app still has. I wonder if the 13 hour “outage” was for a larger scale data migration for a separate US version
> I wonder if the 13 hour “outage” was for a larger scale data migration for a separate US version
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.
I also can not see livestreams. It says "Unstable Network Connection". And I have 2 separate "air gapped" phones and TT accounts - no shared details and both behave the same.
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.
Today morning, lives are back, link sharing (downloads) are working. Have not seen shops yet in 2 minutes of scrolling
Glad lives are back, I was actually inspecting the traffic using my PiHole from when my GF's US tiktok was browsing and when my European account was attempting to connect. Both of them his a CDN within the US but after that it looks like we had traffic going to different versions. Her's was routing to a tiktokv.us while mine was sending traffic to tiktokv. I'm not sure if this has been in place before or if I'm just realizing now but I believe a split-brain scenario is pretty likely.
Maybe it’s intentional, maybe it’s just the technical reality, it’s a bit early to call. We on a tech site ought to know what a shitshow split brain scenarios can be.
If so, all the more reason to distrust and ban this product. They’ve clearly not been honest with the public.
Completely unrelated but here’s the Wikipedia for an interesting book called The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo...
(1962) is shockingy relevant. I have to read more dystopian sci fi from that era just to keep up with current event
"Trouble Every Day", a song by Frank Zappa released in 1966, that's just as relevant nearly 60 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFNkacckLBU
(but not in a way relevant to the TikTok topic)
Similarly, you might be interested in the Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation: https://vimeo.com/191817381
+1 to Adam Curtis. Binged everything he's ever made last year.
Have you read it, and if so, do you recommend it?
The people pretending that the TikTok law is a speech issue are ignoring that no one was requiring TikTok to change their content at all. The law was written to allow for 0 impact on users if the CCP-connected parent company simply divested.
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.
Many American civil liberties organizations think that the the ban is a free speech issue:
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.
I don't know if it's a free speech issue but legally speaking it's definitely not a first amendment issue because the law targets foreign corporations and the Constitution doesn't apply to foreign entities
But there are American users making and viewing content on that platform.
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
> the Constitution doesn't apply to foreign entities
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.
And we have a long history of restricting foreign media ownership
So if a particular book were published by a French company, the government could ban it from being sold in the US? I’m sure that’s not true.
The constitution applies to American users and to non-Americans on American soil. It's not like the cops can execute you for being here on a tourist visa.
But wouldn't you be infringing the rights of the US users if you ban the platform they want to message other US users over? Isn't that indirectly infringing their free speech? Or does the first amendment not protect stuff like this?
You may wish to read FIRE and other organizations amicus brief where they lay out exactly why they think the ban is a free speech issue, legally speaking: https://www.thefire.org/sites/default/files/2024/12/Amici-Ti...
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The ACLU hasn't been a credible defender of free speech in some time. (FIRE and EFF still credible.)
I started having issues when they supported Citizens United
This issue is not about freedom of speech to any of the players. Its geopolitics. The ACLU and the EFF care about the precedent it sets.
Shocking news: different players have different motivations.
> Laws that does not explicitly curtail free speech but effectively still does
You can say the same thing about an antitrust law that forces Alphabet to sell Youtube.
If antitrust laws did not exist then making them would need a constitutional amendment
Well they’re clearly wrong.
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.
SCOTUS, as they've done in many recent cases, is artfully skirting the substance of the issue.
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.
I don't think that is clear at all. Refer to their amicus brief where they explain their reasoning in detail: https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/brief-amici-curiae-wr... The gist of it, which you missed, is that they think the ban violates Americans first amendment rights.
Yeah, I can't believe all these people are talking "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" so literally.
Haven't these people heard of Wickard v. Filburn?
ACLU is a biased organization and only supports the bill of rights when it suits their political alignment.
And what is their political alignment in this case (and in general)? Considering that banning tiktok got voted with bipartisan support.
Unfortunately so. It didn't use to be that way - the ACLU used to be so principled that they would defend literal Nazis' rights. But they've fallen a long way since then.
For those unaware of ACLU's change over the last 10 or so years, here is an example:
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...
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>> Many American civil liberties organizations think that the the ban is a free speech issue:
> 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).
This is silly. The EFF and ACLU do amazing and important work every day.
The 1st Amendment doesn't apply to Chinese companies operating in the US.
I keep seeing this type of comment here, like a sell is the obvious thing to do. Why? Selling / divesting TikTok US under these circumstances would surely not fetch the best price. In addition they would immediately create a global competitor that have the same product. Why would ByteDance the company or its investors want that?
Not to mention, why would they trust the US to pay tens of billions of dollars after this rigmarole? The incoming head of state doesn't exactly have a great track record of seeing through on promises to pay and is threatening tariffs against all and sundry.
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.
> Not to mention, why would they trust the US to pay tens of billions of dollars after this rigmarole?
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.
> Not to mention, why would they trust the US to pay tens of billions of dollars
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.
Well yeah, of course Tiktok isn't going to get the best price now that it has tried and failed to play chicken against the US government.
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 is Tiktok US no longer worth $10 billion or so?
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.
In practice, US social networks usually promote content that is aligned with US cultural values and geopolitical interests. Whether this is because the government is actively leaning on them or just because being run by Americans colors them with those values, I don’t know. But the fact is, it’s not a coincidence that TikTok is the main place pro-Palestinian content was allowed to go viral, and it’s likely that changing owners would change the content on TikTok even if the law doesn’t actually require it to do so.
> Whether this is because the government is actively leaning on them or just because being run by Americans colors them with those values, I don’t know
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.
Here's a source that confirms: https://newrepublic.com/post/181327/mitt-romney-congress-ban...
I'm not defending them here, but the laws in China prevent a sale, so technically they have a duty to uphold China's laws first before upholding their fiduciary responsibility. Same with any American company and following American laws.
> the laws in China prevent a sale
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.
They’re confusing the US TikTok subsidiary with ByteDance parent organization. They were only required to sell the subsidiary.
Ironically this would be enforcing the very same law that exists in China, where all companies have to be majority Chinese owned.
Does this mean they would be obligated to censor tank man content in the US at the CCP's request?
When I worked for an American subsidiary of a Chinese company (Video Games) we were only required to honor censorship requests for Chinese users.
They’re majority owned by non Chinese investors. I don’t see how china law would have any say.
Google "Golden Share CCP ByteDance". CCP has direct influence over how ByteDance is run.
lol no.
Chinese laws are whatever Xi says they are, so that's where Trump negotiating a deal for himself / his rich buddies comes into play..
This is correct. His power is effectively absolute. Any time his eye focuses on an issue, the issue is resolved to his specification or heads roll and another puppet is appointed to resolve it so.
I think that's a major part of the concern. Their first duty is to the Chinese Communist Party. Historically all sources of information in communism have to serve the goals of the party above all else, and this is tightly controlled.
The CCP doesn’t run a communist nation.
I do not understand this line of argument. On the one hand there is a political decision to ban-or-annex a foreign company, on the other hand the reaction should not be political and in general political implications should not be discussed?
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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?
Bytedance is privately held. With a 20% stake by founders and employees. Divesting according to the bill terms would have them giving away portion of their most precious IP that is the fyp recommendation system. Any reasonable company would refuse to totally divest and create a competitor just because a government said so. Also TikTok makes money for advertizing to the entire world not just the US.
It's not "give away" when they get to charge the market price for it. They presumably also wouldn't inherently even have to split up the company, rather than e.g. do an IPO for the entire global enterprise.
The valuation and acquisition process of the US branch of TikTok would take more than 8 months as outlined by the language of the bill. So it's already forcing them to receive chump change for it. Besides I don't think any company's strategic decisions like this should be solicited by a government. That goes against the free enterprise.
A forced sale will not get near the price as a deal you can walk away from. Two very different markets we are talking about.
Except now they get to remain the owners and they don’t have to sell at fire sale prices, so it turned out to be the best possible outcome for their shareholders.
I’m not arguing it’s a restriction on TikTok’s speech or bytedance’s speech.
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.
No court in the land will agree with your interpretation. The first amendment protects speech, but it doesn't grant you the right to publish that speech wherever you want. If it did then Facebook couldn't ban people from its platform, for example.
The first amendment enjoins the government from actions. Private companies are welcome to ban or regulate their own venues as they see fit.
The Supreme Court with its unanimous decision made it very very clear it’s not about freedom of speech, but about foreign adversary having access to data profile of 180 million US citizens. And believe in lawmakers argument of foreign adversary propaganda to those citizens.
Why do people on hacker news keep drudging up freedom of speech ad nauseum??
I wouldn't be surprised if the freedom of speech nonsense is an influence campaign by the PLA.
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
It's really about how the US gov is concerned that an app installed on half of all US cell phones is controlled by a company that is not 100 percent beholden to the US gov and stock market regulation, by a company that doesn't have to instantly respond to pressure from the Executive branch, could possibly refuse to instantly comply from pressure from US intelligence agencies, could refuse to comply with search requests from US law enforcement, and extensive lobbying from Facebook to cripple a competitor that Facebook ignored until it was too late.
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.
Did you read the opinion? It did its analysis as requiring some level of scrutiny because of the free speech implications under intermediate (and in Sofomayor’s concurrence strict) scrutiny. It held the national security concern outweighed the free speech concern but it absolutely did not say it was relevant in the analysis.
Because they read random crap on X they thought sounded smart and are now simply regurgitating it with no further thought or consideration.
And “free speech absolutism (for me, not for you or anyone else)” is the current right-wing cause celebre.
Show me where it is an infringement of your 1st amendment right to a private platform? You’re free to criticize the government however you see fit, but you’re not guaranteed the right to a microphone and stage that isn’t yours. There are plenty of other communication channels you can use to express yourself. Your 1st amendment rights are not being infringed by being denied access to TikTok, just as the far right isn’t having their 1st amendment rights being infringed by being denied to use BlueSky as their platform.
> You’re free to criticize the government however you see fit, but you’re not guaranteed the right to a microphone and stage that isn’t yours.
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.)
Look, my point is that the first amendment is in play here and it’s not ridiculous to suggest a free speech analysis is required to hold the law as constitutional or not, which is what the court did and what reasonable people can agree or disagree around to what extent that speech should or shouldn’t be protected. (I personally think, as I stated that the free speech harm is a stronger case from the users who have now been restrained in their ability to use the platform and software distributors who are now restrained from distributing specific software than it is as applied to TikTok where the legislation is content neutral and so the free speech analysis is less relevant.) I’m not even claiming that this law should be found unconstitutional, just that there are free speech issues to adjudicate and the less obvious ones are probably more relevant than the one people are citing where the restraint is content neutral.
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.)
There isn't this much fuss about the foreign ownership of physical and broadcast media laws.
Is the difference really about whether you can post on the platform or not?
I think that’s a huge difference, yes. And about what apps my phone is able to download, and what servers it is able to access.
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.
> Telling me where I can publish a video?
This is like arguing graffiti laws are censorship.
Graffiti laws are also evaluated under heightened scrutiny due to free speech implications. A law having an impact on free speech does not mean it never holds, but it must be analyzed in that context. Here’s an example: https://southerncalifornialawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
I get that you believe that's what's happening, but I can't imagine any US court agreeing with you.
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.
> 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?
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.
Whether you think it’s ridiculous or not, restrictions on distribution of software being a violation of US free speech rights has been an established part of US case law for around three decades now: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
>"If you don't like it then find another society. "
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.
The government isn’t banning TikTok, the law only requires a change in ownership. The current owners are choosing to performatively shut down in an attempt to bully their way through that requirement
The US need not restrict any of your speech. You’re not directly communicating with any of TikTok’s users when you post to it, TikTok is. In the Internet age, even apparent one-way communication is handshakes upon handshakes. Consider this: You’re free to send whatever messages you want to ByteDance. They’re just not allowed to reply (or have anyone reply on their behalf). The app is a useless binary blob if it can’t set up a TLS connection.
> 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.
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...
> 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
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.
> Secondly it might encourage other countries to also force TikTok to sell.
Wouldn't that be a no-op if they already did so?
Interesting position. I wonder if another country could just force Musk to divest himself of Twitter in the same way. Could solve a lot of headaches that way. Maybe the EU could force the issue.
Depends on the political power of the entity and it's existing laws.
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.
Possibly they could force him to divest from whatever legal entity Twitter operates under in that country, or force Twitter to stop operating in that country, but they would have no authority over the US corporation.
The post I'm replying to is arguing that fiduciary duty would force the sale, not a law. The banning just... sets a chain of events in motion.
It won't. It would be fantastic if the EU banned Meta or X. Instead they're suddenly scared of continuing to fine them for their endless illegal data harvesting and gatekeeping to cozy up to Trump.
Rep Mike Gallagher, the sponsor of the bill, published this op-ed making it sound like a speech issue: https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-g...
Personally, I am more concerned about people pretend it is not.
Fifuciary duty to shareholders is one of the most pernicious forces against progress there is.
The short term "number go up" mentality is breeds is a cancer.
That's somewhat of a myth that lets these companies off easy, there's no ruling that says you have to maximize profit at all costs, or at all to an extent. The sole motivator is greed.
The former does not imply the latter. Look at Bezos, he spent years re-investing in Amazon to provide long-term financial benefits to his shareholders. Pressure for short-term gains comes from shareholders on Wall St, it’s not a fundamental property of shareholders.
It's a complete myth used by the greedy to justify corporate greed. The only way someone would ever be succesfully prosecuted for this is if they'd clearly intentionally crash the company. Go do a search, you won't find a single other prosecution.
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.
"Shut down in the US" not shut down everywhere, if I'm not mistaken. It also doesn't seem like an obvious violation of their fiduciary duty. The eventual growth in all other jurisdictions could easily be claimed to be worth more than the sale price, and it could also be argued that selling to US holders would harm the platform internationally.
>"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"
I am shedding tears for those poor shareholders.
This does not make sense, it is like saying that requiring bezos to sell his newspapers is not a free speech issue (I might or might not support such action as I am not a free speech absolutist)
You should talk to the ACLU. Get them straighten out.
https://action.aclu.org/send-message/tell-congress-no-tiktok... https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/banning-tiktok-i...
"You may speak if..."
Is a freedom of speech issue.
This is a shakedown and violation of property rights.
What would happen if Brazil says they would ban X if Elon Musk didn't divest from it?
X would be blocked in Brazil.
Now, expect Musk and his billions to push lobbying weight around to ensure Brazil paid dearly for it.
International politics is a treacherous game.
What does this have to do with X, Brazil, or Musk?
Because seems insane to think that only because U.S says that Bytedance need to be divest or be banned, that any company will prefer to divest... And if the company doesn't do it, it's because of "hidden reasons"
We are talking about a single country.
everything… the world does not revolve solely around USA. the EU should ban all US social media companies too unless they are sold to one of EU countries, that makes sense, right?
Another free speech interpretation: the right to assemble. I cannot assemble with the group of people I once was with TikTok gone
There's no government restrictions preventing you from assembling elsewhere.
Your interpretation would make shutting down any place where people assembled unconstitutional which was clearly never the intent.
Of course you can. Nothing stops the same group of people from congregating on Discord, Rumble, or even in real life.
This is like saying that closing all churches of a religion is not a big deal as the people can perfectly pray by themselves. (Also since they can pray in their head why not making that religion's prayers illegal to speak aloud)
If you used to assemble at a public park, and the city closes the park entirely to turn it into something else, does that violate your right to assemble too?
If the specific intent was to make it difficult to assemble, then yes.
depends. Was it the de facto town square?
I'm not buying this drivel - the company stands to make way more than one rushed and limited buyout would garner.
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.
That would be if they were American, even if they were not Chinese, not every country puts shareholders capitalism above everything else a company is suppose to decide upon.
But those running corporations are fiduciaries - the have a legal and ethical obligation to their shareholders. If those shareholders want to not maximize profits and have other objectives, then that's totally fine and then the managements obligations are to those aims of the shareholders.
As per US law....
> pretending that the TikTok law is a speech issue
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.
(1) Doesn't match the situation at all, because the law didn't require the paper to shutdown - it required a foreign company to divest so that it is US-owned, and the paper could continue operations as normal.
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/
All your examples miss the part about the company being a foreign government's psy-ops vehicle.
As many have pointed out it is not only titok's free that is in question, but rather the free speech of its users.
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)
Which of these examples includes the parts about foreign control? This is the primary issue as far I was aware. The chinese state does not have first amendment protections because they are not american citizens.
Recent and related:
TikTok goes dark in the US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753396 - Jan 2025 (2187 comments)
I guess we know now why TikTok voluntarily went dark.
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.
In a sane world Congress would be furious at the executive overreach.
I don't remember the last time either party called out their colleagues for questionable use of executive orders, but to do so would require principles, and we haven't seen those in decades either.
It would only take 38% of Republicans in the Senate to vote with Democrats to remove Trump from office to get him out of politics for good.
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?
No, there’s a LOT of MAGAts on HN.
It's the pathology of fetishizing contrarianism.
"I am contrarian because daddy Thiel said it's smart" without a hint of irony
Dehumanizing people by calling them "maggots" or other such vermin isn't a good look considering history of the 20th century.
I downvoted your comment because you're wrong. The constitution defines treason pretty clearly, you're not going to get a treason conviction without the US being in a legally and officially declared war with China. There has never been a treason conviction for any act committed after WW2, the last time the US was officially in a declared war. The Rosenberg's selling nuke secrets, the Walkers who decrypted Navy communications for the Soviets, those guys who went over to the Taliban or ISIS... all highly illegal but NONE of it was treason.
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.
Colloquially "treason" fits many of trump's actions, and the comment did hedge and mention "high crimes and misdemeanors" which trump has certainly been guilty of before (but I'm not convinced he is here)
Despite my own feelings on the ban, this kind of royal court politics is the worst potential outcome. Disregarding a law that was passed by a bipartisan majority, signed into law by the president and ruled on by the supreme courts feels like the start of a very dangerous path. Not to mention the prosecutorial discretion may be creating massive liability that the new administration could use to extract favors from some of our largest tech companies.
>Disregarding a law that was passed by a bipartisan majority, signed into law by the president and ruled on by the supreme courts feels like the start of a very dangerous path
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.
> 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.
Executive orders have historically been a way to get things done when the law is ambiguous. It has not, as far as I know, been used to try to directly contradict existing law that has been upheld by the judiciary branch. I don't even know how that would be legal - if it were then it upends literally the entire basis of our government.
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.
I think this is different. I generally feel like executive orders are 1) used to take some kind of affirmative step that the dysfunction in congress is blocking 2) have some level of defensible legal theory. This feels like the opposite. My understanding of the 90 day extension is that it's supposed to be there to allow a deal to close, but there is no evidence I've seen of a deal being worked on so the legal theory seems to be really flimsy. Disregarding a law, while not unprecedented, is not a great sign given some of the incoming administration statements on a ton of other topics.
The number of executive orders has decreased every president since Bill Clinton.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1125024/us-presidents-ex...
It depends on what happens after the litigation over it. It will be a revolutionary departure if the law continues to not be enforced, after the courts demand it be, if they do.
Couldn't agree more. Each incoming administration since Bush has only expanded executive power, despite decrying its usage in the admin they replaced. This is a very predictable outcome even when looking ahead from 20 years ago, and its easy to see where things will stand in another 20 years.
The current norm that comes to mind is Biden trying to cancel student debt, to which the SC said no.
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 should be a lesson: most prosecution and enforcement is discretionary.
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.
Let me introduce you to Andrew Jackson
The executive branch has the power to decide whether or not to enforce a law. For example, see weed laws not being enforced.
The law has a provision permitting the President to grant 90 day exceptions. Trump has indicated he'll sign one tomorrow. This isn't going around the law, it's just the law as written. We can debate whether the law was good or bad, but this is an outcome the law directly supports.
> law has a provision permitting the President to grant 90 day exceptions
“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...
The president can grant one 90-day exception, if certain conditions are met. Those conditions have not been met.
It's a potentially successful power grab because the law isn't widely supported by the populace. Trivial to say "those eggheads can pass what they like, I will protect you from them"
My read says the law itself is a presidential power, doesn't have to be pushed unless the President wants it
There is no way the President can commit that these services will not accrue massive fines throughout his non-enforcement period.
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."
Still not quite right, not in a modern state. Law has always been sovereign power, and in the modern period the entire state is the sovereign (think Leviathan.) It is strange that Americans seem to think these are personal powers.
That's not what the law says. What gave you that impression?
The law gives the President discretion to decide what apps to ban essentially. It didn't specifically target TikTok.
So Biden decided to ban it and Trump decided to unban it. It's all perfectly within the law.
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> The executive branch hasn’t enforced immigration laws for decades
Then who is deporting all the people listed in this table [1]?
[1] https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2019/table3...
That would likely be a breach of separation of powers. Relevant reading: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43708
The executive branch tends to have power of discretion in what to enforce and how.
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>I don't understand why this is not the primary takeaway.
Because this takeaway is wrong.
Yeah, Trump himself signed the executive order to ban TikTok.
> Disregarding a law that was passed by a bipartisan majority, signed into law by the president and ruled on by the supreme courts feels like the start of a very dangerous path
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".
IMHO this is the reason things should be laws not weird tradition and conventions if they really matter, (same reason that the fault of things like SCOTUS upturning Roe v Wade is in Congress for never making it a law instead of just a precedent
> feels like the start of a very dangerous path.
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.
>feels like the start of a very dangerous path
Start?
I'm old enough to remember how things used to be and it sure wasn't perfect, but JFC is it bad now.
really? cos I feel old, but as far back as I remember usa's vaunted democratic institutions have been a sideshow while the wealthy favour global militarist domination over the needs of ordinary american people.
when did you decide that things went bad?
Oh yeah, the good old segregation times.
That’s how all dictatorships work.
Everything is illegal.
You live by the KING.
The actual bad precedent set here is that the US executive branch has the authority to censor the media.
That is incorrect in this case. The "censoring" was done by the legislative branch, congress.
The "uncensoring" is done by the executive branch.
It's both. It gives the President the authority to designate an app as controlled by a foreign adversary, forcing it to be banned or sold. It also names TikTok in particular. I didn't know about the second part until I read the original text* just now, since every summary missed that, but I'm not happy about that part either.
* https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
> The "uncensoring" is done by the executive branch.
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.
That’s actually the exact opposite of what has happened.
Yes, and what's even worse to me is Trump's explicit motivation for supporting TikTok now. Like there are some interesting philosophical, moral, and maybe legal arguments against the TikTok ban but what he's seized on is simply that TikTok was a useful tool (as far as he's been told) for gaining votes. Keeping it around just benefits him politically and personally, so that's it.
You know what, that’s is actually correct.
Practically necessarily trumps concerns of fictitious and imaginary constructs
Mechanistically, the law applies to the app, not the service. It's not clear to me that serving videos to users that already have the app is a violation of the law.
It also applies to their cloud providers
Yeah, a.1.B, (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.
Is distributing content an "update"?
We are watching the norm be created that ‘what apps we are allowed to use’ is something that is in the personal gift of Donald Trump.
That is a very weird precedent for us to be setting.
The law specifically gives the president a 90 day extension.
The executive order will just be baldly illegal, and what happens in the litigation on it is the next battle.
TikTok is, as we speak, breaking US law.
No there's an actual provision in the law that allows the President to delay enforcement one-time for 90 days: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521... . This was an explicit provision of the bill.
The provision requires the president to tell congress that a deal is in the works. Either the executive order makes no such claim and is unlawful, or there really is a deal in the works, or the president is unlawfully making an untrue claim.
There is likely to be no punishment for either of those unlawful outcomes, but they are still unlawful.
I won't argue against the idea that Trump is on a dangerous political path based around patronage and personal favors, but the law does grant him the authority to give TikTok a 90 day extension. If TikTok has not sold by then and he fails to enforce the law, that's a bigger problem.
> Disregarding a law that was passed by a bipartisan majority
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.
Only four more years of this stuff to go. In other news Trump coin has plummeted by a few billion as Melania launched her own meme coin with a ~4bn market cap.
> Disregarding a law that was passed by a bipartisan majority
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.
And yet the law is the law. There's no premise that says the manner in which a law is passed determines its enforceability.
Also nothing saying that it will be enforced at all as long as the bribes are deposited on time.
Sorry but this argument does not make sense, AFAIK this extension is lawful and explicitly permitted by the same law, so the law was followed any way.
Or are you saying that the public perception of the law should itself be the law?
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How do you figure? The explicit domain of enforcement is the executive branch, so if the new guy coming in says something akin to "They've made their decision, let them enforce it" that's somewhat by design even if you may not agree with it.
The system was designed with these checks and balances in mind explicitly.
> if the new guy coming in says something akin to "They've made their decision, let them enforce it" that's somewhat by design even if you may not agree with it
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.
And in this case they'll just accrue (massive) fines.
The ultimate consequence of that interpretation would mean that the executive does whatever it wants since all enforcement of court rulings or laws fall to the executive.
Yes, this is how government works if the judicial + legislative branches have no enforcement power. That is not at all how this government works however. I suggest taking an American civics course if you want to learn more.
Prosecutorial discretion is not a "check and balance" it is a cost cutting approach that allows worse laws to last longer
Yeah, I think that's bad. Some level of prosecutorial discretion is obviously needed but furthering a state of affairs where laws are meaningless depending on if you have the favor of the executive is dangerous. The checks and balances in the passing of the law make sense but there should be a strong norm towards actually enforcing things and pushing the legislative branch to change the law if there is something wrong with it or the judiciary to rule on if it is actually legal.
Congress looking towards an enforcement while the President trying to make a deal. It is going to be interesting how this plays out.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-johnson-2-...
I wonder how Mr. Johnson is proposing to do his enforcement, seeing as how the executive is the branch of government charged with enforcing the laws.
Congress could impeach. In a sane world, if the executive continually ignores Congress, then that's what would happen.
In a sane world. This particular person has been impeached and acquitted twice over, though, so I'm not sure we're there anymore.
Completely lose the zoomer voting base in the near to mid future?
Exactly. We could have had a discussion about whether a executive order can override house of representatives had such order be issued by Trump post inauguration yet overriding it prior to that should be the bigger deal here.
It's unfortunately not news that a Trump presidency doesn't respect the mores of the office.
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
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There's anecdotal evidence that something funky is going on in the background. More so than usual.
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.
What accounts?
This is just the beginning. Not sure America will survive another 4+ years of this clown.
“America won’t survive this presidency! If you don’t vote in this election you won’t get the chance to vote again!”
Been hearing that shit since I started paying close attention to presidential races with the first run of Bush in 2000.
I quite dislike the hysterical rhetoric too. That being said, I get why people ascribe it to Donald Trump. I will never forget turning on the TV on Janurary 6th to see the President of the United States inciting a riot on government property that had already killed multiple people.
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.
Man, the current democratic party just does not know how to solve problems in a way that people appreciate.
Absurd that the Republicans are somehow going to swoop in and "Save the day" on an issue they themselves championed.
Looking this up, is this [1] the bill? Cuz it turns out this bill was sponsored by a Republican and passed during a Republican controlled House in 2023, by a supermajority 352 - 65.
People always blame Democrats for things that Republicans do.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
It also passed a Democrat controlled Senate and was signed by a Democrat president, who then elected to not even attempt to enforce the law today, his one day to do so. Either of those could have blocked it. It's at the very least bipartisan and the talk at the time of passage was that the Dems could deliver on Rep promises. Neither side seems to want to be the ones holding the unpopular bag.
And upheld by the the supreme Court in a unanimous decision
You are correct. Our entire government looks like a clown show over this. National security issues that we couldn’t see banned it and now it’s still here. I better see some members of the legislature fight this misappropriation of power that was upheld by the Supreme Court. If a president can come in and hand wave away a law just passed and implemented(by a huge majority mind you), then the rule of law is gone. I hope that Cook and Pichai stand firm and not let these apps back into the store until the government fixes this shit show through the proper channels. Those who flip flop their votes should have their reasons spread across traditional and online media. If our entire government will flip flop on an issue so quickly after the Supreme Court suppressed the 1A a little further, I feel the corpo state has taken us another step towards the cyberpunk dystopia that I prefer to cosplay in my games not reality.
> who then elected to not even attempt to enforce the law today, his one day to do so
I don't think the US president is exempt from the tendency to avoid hard work on their last day on the job.
AIPAC made sure it had bipartisan support.
There is always someone in the thread who wants to blame the Jews. Two in this one.
When the "real problems" are TikTok access and who can enter in which public bathroom you know everyone loses, panem et circenses
I’m not certain, but I think there might also be some other issues people talk about.
Oh yeah "immigration". Can't wait for the immigration discourse in 10 years time, when people all over the world, rich and poor, christian, muslim and jew, white and black, are being displaced because they're homes are literally uninhabitable because the frequency of out of control weather events has gone up.
Will you allow "climate refugees" into your neighbourhood? Will you be a climate refugee yourself?
But TikTik is an important forum for the people of the world to solve our thorny issues! In the days before social media, our world was a mess. Today we are awash in sage, well-reasoned discourse: a new Age of Enlightenment! What fools we'd be to tinker with this valuable information ecosystem. /s
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The incentive structures inherent in modern politics encourages all politicians to alternately champion or repudiate unworkable solutions to problems that themselves are likely exaggerated or fabricated from whole cloth.
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.
This just seems trivially obviously not true to me.
I mean, it seems obviously true to me, which is why I posited it here. Do you have a counter-argument you'd like to offer in response?
> Man, the current democratic party just does not know how to solve problems in a way that people appreciate.
What would have been a solution to the problem that people would have appreciated?
A privacy law, for starters.
Where are you finding 60 Senators for that?
As if that would even have any effect in that situation. No amount of audits and rules would prevent TikTok from collecting data and manipulating the public opinion.
How does that prevent China from using TikTok to inject malware?
How exactly does that prevent an adversary from spreading propaganda? And what makes you think privacy laws would prevent foreign spies from spying?
Publish the algorithm. Allow users to choose which algorithm they want to use.
What does this even mean?
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.
Facebook?
DEM looks bad now bc they just lost power. DEM did not solve it earlier bc an unpopular party can't do hard/unpopular things. GOP may have a shot, if they will be as popular as they looked in November. End of day it's about popularity and power.
The outgoing Biden administration actually stated that they wouldn’t enforce the ban for just one day, choosing to leave implementation of the law to the incoming Trump administration.
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...
Trump was banging the drum regarding banning TikTok, then changes his tune in the 11th hour, and will now use this to come out as the hero and savior. Not to mention how many republicans supported this.
I gotta hand it to him it’s kind of genius
But also scary how much people are willing to swallow
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
The bill was cosponsored by 54, 32 of them were Republicans. I think the primary author was a Republican.
My 12 year old daughter was cranky this morning about Tik Tok being banned, then walked in ecstatic it was working again. I’m like “I wonder if Trump fixed Tik Tok,” and sure enough. She gave me a high five. My 6 year old son is already MAGA because the boys in his class love Trump.
Like inflation, this was a problem Trump created and now he’s getting credit for fixing it.
It's probably not a good idea to let a 12 year old use tiktok.
She watches videos about ancient Egypt, her friends lip syncing to songs, and knitting. The content on Tik Tok is way better than the trash on network TV or Hollywood movies.
I consider the Chinese oversight a plus. It’s much more sensitive to Asian values for the most part.
Better tell every parent in America
do you not remember being 12?
12 year olds having mood swings because their digital crack was banned for half a day. God help us all.
I don't have a 12 year old (yet) but my 8 year old has mood swings when they're too cold, too hot, have a headache, the tv remote doesn't work, their tablet runs out of time, their tablet runs out of battery, when they're hungry, thirsty, and/or tired (the preceding is non-inclusive, sometimes they have a mood swing for no perceptible reason).
Kids are people. People have feelings.
Pretty sure I had a meltdown when my parents took away a copy of Lord of The Rings I was reading for the 4th time that week instead of doing my homework. Kids freak out about all kinds of stuff. Maybe it's more that 12 year olds are kids and not whatever bugbear you're worried about this week.
That's the relatively harmless bit! You left off "[banned for half a day], then being indoctrinated into supporting an anti-democratic despot for the rest of their lives".
Yeah, as a 12 yr old, I would've reacted completely calmly to Counterstrike being banned, or ICQ being banned, or MySpace being banned, or, worst of all, my access to lingerie models from clothing catalogues being destroyed...
Take this as an opportunity to teach them about why they shouldn't trust politicians. Make sure you tell them about Trump being the original supporter of the ban https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/900019185/trump-signs-executi...
She already doesn’t trust politicians, and knew that. We think he changed his mind because he was flattered by the girls lip syncing to his funny quips.
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.
I'm sorry, your SIX year old is MAGA? I mean maybe this is an America thing, but my 6 year old knows literally nothing about any politician. How are 6 year olds even aware of Trump?
Knowing nothing about politics is on par for being MAGA.
Do you never drive through a neighborhood with signs all over the yards?
Listen to radio or news programs while kids are around?
If your kids asked about these things would you not try to explain?
The presidential election is a public spectacle in America, with children’s TV networks getting into it: https://www.nickelodeonparents.com/nickelodeon-kids-pick-the....
The funny clown man who looks weird, dances weird, and speaks weird? Of course six year olds know about him!
Cult of personality
Trump isn't just a politician, he's a showman. He had a TV series for years. He has effectively hijacked US media to ensure that there is constant news about him.
Looks like you’re getting downvoted, but this exactly matches my kids’ HS friends who said “now I finally get MAGA - let’s make America like it was before the Tik Tok ban!”
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.
I doubt a study would be helpful for anyone else, except that he had a good read on when his chances of winning were best back before 2016.
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.
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I'm hearing social media limits described like a prisoner's dilemma: it only is good parenting if both defect. If your parents don't give you tiktok because it's healthier but most of the class does, you'll have a much harder time being part of the group. I got to be part of many things in different schools by being on MSN (~2012), Facebook groups (~2014, even met my life partner there due to being in the same interest group), and WhatsApp (2018). I don't use formerly-known-as-Facebook products anymore today and MSN doesn't even exist now, but in a social group you don't have a fully individual choice of platform
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
You can't write comments like this here. Calling people's parenting into question is a bright line.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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It seems like an oversight to me that all the discussion about political impact leading up to this has focused on consumers. Statements like "Gen Z likes TikTok, so banning it risks alienating them", "Gen Z will forgot about TikTok and move on to the next thing in due time", etc.
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 the Republicans are somehow going to swoop in and "Save the day" on an issue they themselves championed.
Absurd that when Trump initially proposed this it was considered a stupid and racist idea. Now they’re for it.
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Mr. Chew, does TikTok access the home wifi network?
That confused question was asked by representative Richard Hudson, R-NC.
And? Attacking the internal network from the public Internet using a browser as a proxy:
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).
Not necessarily a bad question. Could be interpreted as "does this app actively scan for other devices in the home network?".
Mitch McConnell is 83.
Chuck Grassley, who is technically 4th in the line of succession behind the Vice President and Speaker of the House, is 91 years old
"The Democratic party is the party of octogenarians" does not imply "Mitch McConnell is not 83" lmao.
Yes, instead of the dynamic vigor of the youthful Donald J Trump (77)
The greatest lie current politicians in the US managed to get the public to believe in, is that this somehow is a "left vs right" or "democrats vs republicans" issue, when in reality the both sides/parties are more similar than they are different.
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.
It is impossible to deny that DJT appears to be far younger than he really is, and at the very least, his energy and character are much more striking as youthful than any of the Democrat leadership (Biden, Pelosi, the other geriatrics). There's a reason we have dozens of quotable moments from Trump and like three max from Biden.
Plenty of chatter about this topic on HN reflect the same viewpoint as the octogenarians in Congress. Outlaw something on allegations and not evidence or trial, when said allegations apply to local alternatives as well.
I’m just happy TikTok is back. It’s a big loss for Reddit
Am I missing something? How? The users would've went to Meta or Google I assume
People only have so many hours in the day to consume content.
The less people get sucked into the toxic Reddit bubble, the better.
Reddit is a lost cause. They totally got the election wrong and the day afterwards they broke their mind trying to justify the loss with whatever conspiracy theory they could come up with. Combine that with overzealous mods and you'll eventually end up in a situation where the majority of people left are just bots. Bots talking to other bots.
What do they, or any elite gain/lose by gaining/losing the appreciation of ordinary people.
Do you care what a cattle or a sheep thinks? Some may, but the majority don't give it a shit.
They do still need our votes. But they forgot that, so they lost. I voted for democrats but they got what they deserved.
What exactly do you think Democrats should have done that they didn't do?
I would like to ask Chinese president Xi Jinping when will Google and Facebook be available in China and all the rest of the Western social apps. Can I get any clarity and assurance? Thanks.
Well fifteen years ago Google was available in China. And at that time, while the masses simply used Baidu, among the educated it was well known that Google delivered better results. And that was because Google capitulated to the censors. The government had a direct hotline into the Chinese offices of Google and could demand the search engine immediately ban certain keywords or results. At that time Baidu's censorship was quite a bit more heavy-handed than Google's. It was Google that grew tired of this arrangement and decided to quit. They first moved the operations to Hong Kong, and then later the Chinese government decided to block the Hong Kong version of Google.
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.
A quick google suggests that in 2008, Google's search market share in China was ~45%. That's pretty significant.
Zuckerberg already tried in 2015, went on a tour, gave obsequious speeches, spoke in Mandarin and asked Xi to give his unborn child an honorary Chinese name. Refused on both occasions.
Guy really doesn’t have a spine
Reminds me of the ultimatum I gave my dog last week: I told him that if he didn't stop pooping on the floor, I would punish him by pooping on the floor myself.
I think that’s a bad metaphor, though I don’t particularly know what you’re trying to say.
I think they're trying to say that you don't respond to bad behavior (China banning apps) with your own bad behavior (US banning apps). If America is opposed to the way China handles social media then we shouldn't seek to emulate them
My dog is a dog. He doesn't see anything wrong with pooping on the floor, so he won't be fazed if I do it too: threatening to poop on my own floor is not going to get him to stop doing it. If I follow through with my threat, not only will I be doubling up on the problem of poop on the floor, I'll also be behaving in a way that is far more improper and unacceptable for a me than it is for my dog, because we do not hold human beings to the same standards of behavior and hygiene that we expect from dogs.
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.
Did you know that foreign companies are banned from owning more than 25% ownership of a tv and radio broadcast licenses in the US? I'm sure you've spent much effort looking into and trying to repeal those laws too.
China isn't your dog. What if you invited your neighbour over, and they pooped on your floor, repeatedly. And then they said you're not allowed into their house.
If all of that happened, I still don't think I'd be motivated to poop on my own floor.
Just as soon as they allow the Chinese government censors to control what is and is not available on the platform.
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.
The propaganda works well indeed. People taking sides is perhaps the saddest part of this story since the politics can be well understood with just a little review of history. You put it well in saying that none of the two are on your side. Wake up, sheeple; stand for principles, not one or the other government.
When Google and Facebook agree to also base their servers in China and follow Chinese censorship law.
You're welcome.
Could you potentially see an issue with both countries disconnecting their economies and communication networks? As we do this, I worry a war gets easier to start.
The straight up "shout out" in the pop-up, I almost couldn't believe my eyes.
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.
They're Chinese. They know how to handle a shakedown by Party officials: it needs both bribes and flattery.
Damn, this is the simplest, most accurate breakdown on what’s actually happening that I’ve come across. The incoming administration is pretty transparent in the bend toward corruption, and these folks know exactly how to manage that as a business challenge.
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You could say that, but if it turns out to be working in the US...
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> 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."
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.
"Sucking up" implies there’s a meaningful choice—that firms or individuals can realistically be expected to show courage now. But voters chose this, knowingly. Blaming firms for bowing to public will misdiagnoses the issue and wastes emotional energy fighting a false battle.
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?
This all reminds German companies about a 100 years ago, so much.
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> after the democratic party decided that their winning strategy would be to villainize tech and emerging west coast values.
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-...
With other words, while Silicon Valley founders said and pushed that they actually have ethics, morality and "good for the world" ideas, it wasn't actually true and money+extreme capitalism won in the end.
It’s amazing, really. No matter what, the Dems are always wrong.
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.
Ah, the propaganda GUI element. I distinctly remember covering it in my HCI class. Right between 'How to Design Intuitive Interfaces' and 'How to Influence Favorability Ratings with Popups.'
not only has tiktok done this before, uber & lyft & doordash did it in california in the lead up to elections
I have no issue with American companies trying to change American policies.
You have no issues with corporate influence on US politics?
Corporations and their wealthy owners have an outsized influence on policies to the near total exclusion of everyday people. Not sure what future you're envisioning here but you might want to consider where you fall in the pecking order before bending the knee to blatant oligarchy.
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holy crap… wow!!!
This is the prologue to a potentially dark time in American history
world* history
I agree they know what they are doing by manipulating or perhaps secretly enriching Trump. He posted on Truth social that he is seeking 50% US ownership. That’s very odd. Why not 51% so that there is US based voting control? Or full divesture from China as the law requires?
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.
They didn’t need to turn off in the first place. The Biden administration had already said they wouldn’t impose any fines.
This was literally nothing but a political play intended to give Trump a boost.
The Biden administration signed the thing into law. Of course they need to comply. And people are acting as if somehow TikTok decided to self-ban and have now un-banned. No, it's only those with the app already installed that are able to continue to use it. It's still blocked on the app stores, and will presumably stay that way until tomorrow.
Then why did they sign the law?
When have you ever seen anything like it in the past ?
The relevant part of the pop-up:
> 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
Biden could have easily deferred the penalty phase by 30-90 days. He did not, even after the blowback this past week.
How? The law as written only gives the president the authority to give one 90-day extension, only if certain conditions have been met. And those conditions have not been met.
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Please don't put words in my mouth, I did not comment on who bears the most responsibility for the ban. It is undeniable that Trump laid the groundwork for it though:
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...
I mean, the promise to boosting Trump in the popup is probably literally what got them the promise of an executive order, possibly with the suggestion that if they wanted to stay on Trump's good side they'd best ensure their algorithm was Trump-friendly in future.
Of course, everything he does is quid pro quo. Now he has a sword of damocles he can hang over their head to ensure he can get anything he wants in the future.
Besides, China doesn't mind propping Trump as they correctly see him as a simpleton who is going to delay USA development by a decade.
It’s like America is rapidly turning into 90’s Russia and people are cheering for it.
I'm wondering if it's just the facade has been removed.
Biden was right about the oligarchs characterization.
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> The problem is most readers still think theres a discernable difference between the parties.
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.
> The problem is most readers still think theres a discernable difference between the parties.
I will give you excellent odds we're going to immediately see a definite difference between presidencies here.
Are you familiar with Malcolm X's speech about the fox and the wolf?
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.
I love how the US government had exempted US government accounts from the ban.. Lmaooo
After the ban, Pornhub displayed a message asking people to contact their state representatives. I reckon it's a self-interest thing.
> Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses
“panem et circenses“, Juvenal 100AD
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This whole theater from the start was designed to flex just how much influence China has on the U.S.
No matter what happens now, china was the real winner here.
It's odd to me that people seem to be mostly viewing this as a free speech/democracy issue. To me it's more like if newspapers were printed with toxic ink or something. The negatives of TikTok have nothing to do with the speech expressed by the "creators" on the platform, but rather with the overall harmful effects of the algorithmic firehose.
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.
> The negatives of ~Tiktok~short form videos have nothing to do with …
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”.
You really can't tell the difference between Americans doing it and a foreign nation doing it?
Of course we can. But the hypocrisy shows how the government doesn't actually care about the health of citizens or society. If they did, they would start with regulations on algorithmic feeds as a first principal, then ban companies that don't comply.
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.
to me, america is a foreign nation. so no, I do not see any great difference, and yet I'm caught up in this censorship of the internet.
America IS a foreign nation doing it.
It's not like the American companies have their users best interest at heart either! They're literally bound by law to prioritize their shareholders interests.
Well you should be far more wary of what your government will do with such data than a foreign one continents away but i don't think that's the difference you were looing for.
I agree. I'm not saying TikTok is much different than others. I'm saying when we see TikTok banned we shouldn't feel like "Oh no, not that!", we should feel like "Well, it's a start, but let's do more in that direction."
"gross sort of psychological pollution"
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.
> It feels silly with this coloring of TikTok as the evil when meta, Google and a dozen other American companies are doing the same
Ban them all...
You're arguing crack should be legal because cigarettes are
The odds [edit: ^W^W^W^Wchances] are just lower that Google and Meta would rig the algorithm to subtly color peoples opinion in favor of China and Russia.
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
> the odds are just lower
well, this is awkward..
“Intentionally trying to destabilize the country and trying to sell you things are literally identical issues.”
As if America needs foreign influence to destabilize...
I'd sooner blame viciously profiteering corporations and blatant disregard for democratic values among a significant fraction of American politicians.
>It's odd to me that people seem to be mostly viewing this as a free speech/democracy issue.
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.
>the overall harmful effects of the algorithmic firehose
What material effects are those?
There is by now "free speech" being published for every single combination of personal interests, demographic, and personal opinion and personality traits.
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.
As a left-ish person, TikTok is genuinely the only place I feel safe from braindead hate. EVERY OTHER platform I've interacted with has a fuckton of hate.
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?
A diminished attention span. Assuming that's still considered a harmful effect.
> It's true that this means all similar US-based things should be banned as well
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.
I'm not saying the ban is about that, but it does accomplish something in that direction, and we need more bans that are explicitly about that.
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.
It's not about the algorithmic feed, it's about allowing your #1 adversarial state to have control over that algorithms parameters. They don't let Twitter, Google, or Meta operate in China.
Where's the smoking gun for these privacy issues? Why hasn't the FBI or anyone else investigated and discovered these issues, if they exist?
The US has very little privacy law.
This isn't about privacy; it's about who gets to promote what ideas to Americans. Do you think that a post about Tienanmen Square, about Uyghur persecution, or about Taiwanese independence, will get nearly as far on a Chinese controlled media platform?
They don't. https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...
Because the Chinese Communist Part is not stupid enough to just exploit their leverage over sovereign nations for shits and giggles. You don't need a smoking gun to understand how corporations in China operate. They operate with the blessing of the CCP, and regardless of whether they've ever done anything, the scale of what they could do if they wanted to would be some spectacular lessons in modern propaganda.
This is simply more of the same fearmongering we’ve heard before. Not an answer to their question.
To me it's more like a newsstand selling only aliens magazines, bigfoot books and sexy (but not yet porn) magazines.
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/
...
One way the free speech angle might make sense is that TikTok (and other foreign-run social media) normally aren’t as susceptible to domestic pressure to throttle, shadowban, etc certain types of content (like airing of some politician’s dirty laundry).
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 (and other foreign-run social media) normally aren’t as susceptible to domestic pressure
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.
At least for the time being, traditional media outlets don't seem to have a problem airing US politicians' dirty laundry.
You talk about censorship but if things are happening it will be a lot more subtle than that; more about what you show than what you hide. Peoples opinions are already shifted a lot by what reels they watch. By controlling what people see you control what people think; at least many enough.
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 whole way Tiktok went black and the number of times it has mentioned President Trump in a positive note - to me - reinforces the idea that Tiktok is just a propaganda tool (in this case, for Trump). I would not be surprised if the whole act of going dark last night was because Trump told them that's how it needed to go so he could be a hero by Monday.
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).
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By saying China's using Tik Tok to subvert "democracy," aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda? 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. Rather than tackle the narratives substantively, they'd argue about who gets to manipulate the mob. It's just wild to me. If that's your view of the electorate, then the whole "democracy" thing is just a cover for elite power. Honestly, maybe there's some truth to that, but it sure flies in the face of the sanctity of voting and "democracy."
> voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda
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...
And today's Bureau of Global Public Affairs[1]. Which "engages media to shape the global narrative on American foreign policy and values [and] communicates U.S. foreign policy objectives to the American public." Of course, it's difficult to pierce the veil and determine exactly how they go about doing this. Narratives are propaganda.
https://www.state.gov/about-us-bureau-of-global-public-affai...
I think anyone who says democracy is good and the will of the people should be respected is implicitly saying that is not true. Implicitly saying voters are individual agents and not a mob.
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.
> I think anyone who says democracy is good and the will of the people should be respected is implicitly saying that is not true. Implicitly saying voters are individual agents and not a mob.
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.
> I think anyone who says democracy is good and the will of the people should be respected is implicitly saying that is not true. Implicitly saying voters are individual agents and not a mob.
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.
> I think anyone who says democracy is good and the will of the people should be respected is implicitly saying that is not true. Implicitly saying voters are individual agents and not a mob.
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.
I think Democracy is critically important. However, the main reason I believe this is because Democracy allows for the transfer of power without violence. That's THE value prop.
You are so close to breaking through..
> 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.
There are hundreds of HN users commenting here as if their opinions have meaning and value.
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.
Just because you share an opinion does not mean that opinion has not been shaped, directed or influenced.
"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 pose this as a mathematical question but stop far short of it's full extent
Chase Hughes:
"Manipulation Playbook: The 20 Indicators of Reality Control"
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The word populist has ended up with a confused set of meanings (intentionally). What we have now is a war between different groups of elites, both sides co-opting populist ideals and language, and blaming the people for the other side’s efforts to destroy democracy.
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.
"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?"
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.
Exactly. They murder the elites.
Yes. This is well known since Antiquity when the Athenian Democracy voted to condemn Plato to death.
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.
> ...when the Athenian Democracy voted to condemn Plato to death.
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.
Sorry for the Socrates/Plato mix-up.
TikTok has the opportunity to divest. They chose not to.
Qhat you doesn't make much sense, starting with your claim Plato was sentenced to death by Athenian democracy, which there is no evidence of that I know of.
Because I mixed them up, as Plato is the one who wrote down Socrates' teachings and his story...
The one condemned to death was Socrates. Kind of weird for that to be the detail you get wrong…
I agree with everything you're saying, but I also can't fully square up that the equivalent American apps aren't allowed in China. This is about freedom of speech on app built by a country that has no freedom of speech. I realize this point is orthogonal, but is still an important element of the decision.
> also can't fully square up that the equivalent American apps aren't allowed in China
It's a chance to showcase how we're "more free" or literally just as restrictive
If stooping down to their level is the move we make, then we should immediately stop acting as if we are more “free” or democratic than China. You can’t have it both ways.
This is an incredible point. Instead of using this crisis to pressure Beijing to crack open the China market to US companies or even just get some concessions, Trump just folded to look like a champ.
Ad-funded social media platforms make money by measurably altering people's opinions and behavior. It's literally their only job—everything else is in service to that goal.
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.
> aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
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.
The advantage of democracy is that the propaganda game gets played every few years and current elites can lose. Under a system of freedom of speech, there is very little stopping a decently (but not massively) funded rag-tag group of competent individuals from running a more efficient propaganda campaign than the powers-that-be (think of Dominic Cummings' Leave campaign in the UK for the perfect example).
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.
This is a thoughtful reply. But, if it's just propaganda games played by the elites, I suppose another way to ensure informed outcomes might be literacy tests. Or property ownership.
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.
If I were the CCP this is perhaps the cleverest talking point I could have possibly come up with, propping up TikTok while simultaneously condemning democracy.
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.
> a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
This idea goes back to the founding of the nation. It's the very reason we have an electoral college.
And the reason we didn't have universal suffrage.
Bingo. I never understood why "foreign influence" was supposed to be a bad thing. Free speech is grounded in the idea that people are capable of reasoning and forming their own opinions. If we truly trust in that, the source of the influence - foreign or domestic - shouldn’t matter. People who advocate for censoring foreign sources of influence are implicitly admitting that they don't trust their population to think critically.
> Free speech is grounded in the idea that people are capable of reasoning and forming their own opinions. If we truly trust in that, the source of the influence - foreign or domestic - shouldn’t matter.
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.
> implicitly admitting that they don't trust their population to think critically
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.
> I never understood why "foreign influence" was supposed to be a bad thing. Free speech is grounded in the idea that people are capable of reasoning and forming their own opinions.
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?
> people are capable of reasoning and forming their own opinions
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.
> I never understood why "foreign influence" was supposed to be a bad thing
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.
Easy: reach the future electorate when they’re pre-teens and feed them influences that eschew critical thinking as a core value.
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.
Does everyone think critically and rationally? If not how many don't (especially during key election periods) and can this group cast an oversized influence on election results or public opinion?
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.
Exactly. To the degree elections are not rooted in a competition of ideas and individual agency, but rather are downstream of elite power and influence, then there are other more direct means of controlling populations, all of which tend to be a lot bloodier. All of this strikes me as a really dangerous path.
> I never understood why "foreign influence" was supposed to be a bad thing.
It would be less of a problem if US platforms were allowed into China to influence the Chinese too.
Read some books. 1984 would be a good start.
plenty of dangers, but considering what people actually do and care about on TikTok, I wouldn't really compare this to Facebook.
>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.
You could ban every non-ethnically Chinese channel to push Chinese superiority. That would be bad, right?
And before you say, “but they’re not doing that”, remember that we’re discussing how this theoretically could be a bad thing.
> aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
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...
> …aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
…yes? Is that even slightly controversial? If it wasn’t the case, why would propaganda even exist?
Theres an implication that The Internet meant we have a commons connecting the world that no one country can completely restrict. But a commons too important to all modern societies to blanket ban. In theory we should be less susceptible to propoganda than ever since we can see multiple viewpoints and interpretations in minutes. As opposed to being beholden to maybe 3-4 mainstream news programs on television.
Human nature proves to fall quite short of that ideal, though.
> aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
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.
Why is illegal to put false stuff on products label, like food or medicine? Where is the free speech to lie and manipulate the user? With your point of view the EACH user should somehow find the skills to analyze and review each product each time they user or trust some other persons word.
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)
> aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda
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.
You act as if individuals and a mob are mutually exclusive. Who do you think makes up a mob?
> By saying China's using Tik Tok to subvert "democracy," aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
Well, we don't know what was said in the classified meetings, but yes, we know that propaganda works.
Excuse my European ignorance, but in what way is a system a "democracy" where one person can overrule actual democratic structures? The power centralized into one person is unheard of in what I would call "democracies".
I do find people's faith in Democracy, as opposed to Authoritarianism, somewhat exasperating. Two candidates, pre-selected by the powers that be to lead the nation, compete in inane televised debates, wave flags and make promises that everyone knows they are going to break. This everyone debates hotly, and then lines up to register one bit of Holy Democratic Choice, to be averaged with a hundred million similar bits to determine, by a margin of a few percent, the one and only legitimate Government of the People, by the People, for the People. My Ass.
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 :)
Until very recently, "Democracy" was a dirty way to describe a government. It was in the same class of failed government models as tyranny, the rule of the mindless mob.
> aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
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.
> aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
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
This is the fundamental problem with American democracy and democracies all over the world.
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.
Sort of?
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.
Maybe not, but it strikes me as a really dangerous path. If we don't believe the electorate acts from a position of moral authority, but rather are downstream of elite power and influence, then there are other more direct ways of controlling populations. And they tend to be a lot more bloody.
It was always like that.
Yep, it basically amounts to agreeing 100% with the Chinese justification for their great firewall, which is that a free internet is subversive to their national interest and to their citizens. But Americans will argue that it's somewhat different, since when they do it it's not dystopian or something
> aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
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.
By resorting to walled gardens that by definition have to provide a filtered experience via algorithms rather than raw experience of older internet forums and image boards, haven't many of these voters already made that choice of being wanting to be manipulated?
> Honestly, maybe there's some truth to that, but it sure flies in the face of the sanctity of voting and "democracy."
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).
At least someone has to (currently) manipulate the voters into voting a specific way, instead of just ‘voting for them’, or threatening them at gunpoint.
> voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
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.
The US gov has just made the case for banning US owned social networks around the world, because they truly believe that social networks is a way for a foreign agents to interfere in local politics.
This is misleading. Most of the places that might want to ban US social networks were already doing so.
> By saying China's using Tik Tok to subvert "democracy," aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
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.
> By saying China's using Tik Tok to subvert "democracy," aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
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.
I'd argue that Democracy cannot be exercised by the electorate when > 36% of the voting population did not vote (90m / 245m https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-1...).
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 TikTok was only targeted at voters then I think there would be less of a concern. My issue is more with what it shows to children. Science and law recognize that children aren't yet fully individual agents and are more susceptible to propaganda than most adults. Thus legislators and courts have been more willing to restrict commercial speech targeting children.
If that is truly your primary concern, you should be more worried about Instagram. TikTok is much better in that regard. It has parental controls, a restricted mode, screen time limits, etc.
I feel this is way too optimistic about the typical adult. Adults are most definitely affected by propaganda.
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.
Your comment made me realize that politicians stopped "think of the children" along with the rise of social media. Before the rise of big tech they would routinely slam their fist on the podium demanding that we think of the children.
> aren't we really saying voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda?
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.
>voters are not individual agents but rather a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda
That has nothing to do with China.
Yes. But we're talking about children too - not just adult voters.
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.
We do have laws around elections like the equal time rule. Should we remove that too?
Of course propaganda works. That's why companies spent tons of money on ads.
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.
Of course voters are subject to propaganda.
YOU are subject to propaganda. Yes, you.
The existence of democratic sociopolitical structures does not preclude the existence of targeted mass propaganda, or the weaknesses of the human psyche. Nor vice versa.
Why do you think The Rule of Law exists? Large groups of angry people often make bad decisions with long term consequences. We have known this forever.
The winner of the election is often the party that spent more money on political advertising, so I'm sure this is a well known phenomenon.
I enjoy seeing HN independently rederive much of NRX thought via this situation.
In unrelated news, anyone see that NYT interview with Yarvin yesterday?
The one where Curtis made a fool of himself and his poor understanding of history?
> China's using Tik Tok to subvert "democracy"
And has there ever been an example for that or is it just a hypothetical scenario?
No one can possibly know. They just have all the power to do it very efficiently, without anyone noticing.
That’s sort of the ironic bit. IMHO it’s been this way for awhile, but because it was pretty much as you described (“the elite”) with the reigns we pushed the argument that voters were individual agents.
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.
This sounds like an emotional appeal rather than anything based on science and fact.
That's the entire reason for representative democracy over direct democracy
I'm not sure it is- even if you think the electorate are educated and competent, it still makes sense to delegate the specific decisions to a smaller set of individuals who are given the time and resources to get into the detail. It just scales better.
"a mob subject to manipulation by propaganda"
Yes, that is correct.
Why is that so hard to believe?
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.
Really? It is the most base fact that people can be manipulated by the ideas of others. Creatures trying to convince other creatures of one thing over another is just part of being a living animal. But the idea that people want to control who says what is wild to you? It flies in the face of the sanctity of "democracy"? Don't you think that's a bit of a hyperbole?
> If that's your view of the electorate, then the whole "democracy" thing is just a cover for elite power.
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.
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Just google Salt Typhoon, (I'll wait), and then tell me you want the TikTok app on 102M+ US citizens devices.
I see nothing Israel hasn’t done yet we give them billions of dollars in aid.
If China had America by the balls half as bad as Israel does, we'd be watching Biden and Trump take turns kissing Xi Jinping's feet on live television right now. It's besides the point and doesn't contribute to better foreign policy choices, just gives justification to the wrong ones.
On the phones of Trump and Vance, according to Wikipedia. Let's compose a Trump tweet on the issue:
"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."
You're saying that this Chinese app has a US government mandated back door that the Chinese could use?
Some 4D chess there, not sure who is playing whom at this point
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The commentary is quite obviously there. Don’t confuse your lack of understanding with a lack of content.
“Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX), the author of the bill to ban TikTok, owns hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Meta, one of TikTok's chief rivals. Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) bought up to $50,000 worth of Meta stock last January before voting to ban TikTok in April."
Exhibit 1. https://www.capitoltrades.com/issuers/431610?page=2
Couldn’t find recent info but back in 2014, Michael McCaul’s net worth was in the hundreds of millions. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in meta stock doesn’t seem like much for someone worth 1000 times that amount over a decade ago…
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.
> Hundreds of thousands of dollars in meta stock doesn’t seem like much for someone worth 1000 times that amount over a decade ago…
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.
“That fact that it was a drop in the bucket for them makes it that much more outrageous, not less”
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.
And in fact, currently 2.5% of the sp500 is meta. So if these guys just have 100% of their net worth in the sp500, they’d have more META than these two transactions.
McCaul's net worth is estimated $294 million. His positions are a rounding error. That he owns so little Meta is impressive.
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?
> His net worth was estimated at $294 million, up from $74 million the previous year. In 2004, the same publication estimated his net worth at $12 million. His wealth increase was due to large monetary transfers from his wife's family.
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.
But it's not insider trading at this level, that's the whole point. This is a freakishly small amount of stock. 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
Another:
- 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...
A lot of people have some Meta shares. It's a widely owned stock.
You may believe no member of congress should own equity in any company, but that's a separate issue
I think it's the 'bought shares', then voted to ban a competitor that may be the issue.
But you could also make money on Meta tanking if you had prior knowledge.
Surely they are doing this to preserve free speech and for the security of hard-working freedom-loving god-fearing americans, and not for their own selfish interests.
I think they are doing it so the CCP doesn't have direct propaganda line into the home of most Americans. imagine how easy it would be to tip the algorithm scales to show, for example, stolen election conspiracy videos.
that’s like 300 shares at most.
What does the absolute number of shares tell you?
It's still mind-boggling to me that those in Congress can be shareholders.
Here's a video from March 14, 2024 on how Mike Gallagher (R-WI), who sponsored the H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, accepted his largest campaign contributions from Palantir, Google, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC):
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:
To be fair they're all inside trading and most of them are corrupt. Time to wake up America
Suppose I wake up and discover that all congresspeople are insider trading. What do I do next?
That kind of comment has the opposite effect, it keeps people asleep with lazy (and corrupt) misinformation. Whenever people say 'they are all the same', they help cover for the actual bad behavior - it's now hidden among all the other behavior and not worth examining or pursuing, and rationalized.
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.
they aren't all corrupt. and for those that are insider trading, few are beating the market.
Anyway, how many TRUMP coins did this cost them?
It's so awesome to see the executive branch, in a move for clout, decide to ignore a law passed by bipartisan action in Congress, almost by dictorial fiat.
Don't forget that it was also unanimously upheld by the supreme court!
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.
m8 the only hill he'll die on is one of gold. The stooges have officially fallen in line in all of the places that matter: Congress, state houses, and federal courts.
Clearly US lawmakers were convinced they could easily force ByteDance to divest by issuing an ultimatum. They were never prepared to actually see a ban of TikTok
So the person who’s not currently president saved a service turning off that didn’t need to be turned off… sounds like marketing more than anything.
Everyone using the bipartisan consensus after classified briefings as evidence why the ban is a good idea is too young to remember 2003.
“The word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” — George Carlin
I feel like the free speech enthusiasts are missing some imagination and failing to see the situation we are in post-algorithms.
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.
> 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.
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.
I am not sure why you think I think Instagram etc. are innocent. For all I care all social media could be shut down.
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.
I think it's funny that it's going online because the new President told people to just ignore the law. Interestingly, he is a convicted criminal so it kinda makes sense he would just tell folk to ignore the law. And even more interestingly, the back the blue/law and order type folks will be thinking this is a great move.
Is TikTok currently available in the US App Store and PlayStore?
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.
Not only that but will American advertisers take the risk of allowing their ads to continue showing to American audiences, or for us based payment processors handle in app payments
Embarrassing.
Entertaining. But then, I'm European far away from this orange man.
Nobody is far enough, not with that actual power. Everything is connected and ripple effects travel far.
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's entertaining in the US too.
Yeah you say that, but I just saw Elonia Musk stirring the pot by calling for MEGA “Make Europe Great Again”, so it seems he’s trying to spread his cancerous views into your political systems now too.
The average Maga got the attention span of a braindamaged goldfish so obviously this is long forgotten.
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Seems I spoke too soon about the US taking a good decision for once when it comes to cyber and civil security. Well... I wonder what muskov will come up with now that twitter is still at large inaccessible in China but tiktok is welcome in the US.
TikTok is still blocked in China.
Douyin is the Chinese TikTok equivalent. China isn't opposed to the concept of short form video, they just want to segregate Chinese users into their own app
Sounds like a great PR success.
People love being on the in circle of something "naughty".
Did the US president just told a private company to go ahead and break the law?
That is so embarrassing for the Democrats. Trump comes out that he wants to ban it, Biden finally does on like, the last week of his presidency, just so Trump can come in and save it. Now the millions of people who make their living on TikTok and everyone else who simply likes the app are now thanking Trump for bringing back the app he wanted to ban in the first place.
Just staggering incompetence.
Least surprising outcome of 2025.
Truth be told, I did expect Trump to suck up to Putin first...
USA politics is pretty much a joke or reality tv these days so anything can happen. Not a presidential crypto rug pull though, tHaT wIlL nEvEr HaPeN.
Does anyone know what the actual bill that got signed was. All I can find is a bill that was passed by the house but stuck in the senate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...
It passed in the House 352-65, and in the Senate 79-18, both in April 2024.
That didn't take long. Can we now roll back the bill that gave presidents the authority to unilaterally ban a service in the first place?
The president didn't ban it. Congress did, and the Supreme Court upheld their right to.
I am opposed to the ban fwiw, but being able to overrule it is a pretty big power grab for the president
Didn't the law passed by Congress give the president the power to deem a service owned in part by foreign entities as a national security threat?
I may very well have horribly misunderstood the situation, but I though Congress here only allowed the president to decide.
It’s still unavailable in the Apple App Store.
Trump should launch a Tiktok clone on Truth Social in 90 days when the reprieve expires. I'm surprised there wasn't a new platform ready to pounce on new users. Absolutely nuts that one of the biggest refugee destinations is literally named after a Mao-era propaganda tool.
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.
Chinese here, sorry for my poor English.
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.
Thank you for clarifying!
The english translations are similar enough that I assumed a connection.
He for sure pitched this, but his team does not have the skills to create this.
Correct me if I'm wrong but TikTok was never forced to shut down for US users, it was just going to be removed from the stores and unable to be updated.
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.
Yes, this is correct -- TikTok's own "shutdown" was never required by law. I'm not in the US so I can't check for myself, but from googling it still seems to be removed from both the Apple and Google stores.
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...
Gotta turn it off long enough for people to notice, but not long enough for people to find another platform.
>supreme court says that tiktok might be a threat to national security
>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.
National security is a load of crap. How can you still believe anything they say when the entire security establishment literally bold-faced lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction to justify a completely unnecessary war?
Right out of the KGB and FSB playbook: feed them so much lies from all directions they stop trusting anything at all.
Curious to see if this ends up increasing the userbase and TikTok's foothold in American culture.
Is it too conspiracy-theorist to notice that the timeline for this matches the $TRUMP grift that added significant $billions to our new president’s net worth?
Somebody invested $6 billion in Trump’s meme coin. There should be an investigation.
Nobody cares any more. We’re a long way from making Carter sell his farm. We’re a long way from the integrity of Nixon. We’re a long way from the fidelity of Clinton.
This is what the American people wanted.
Trump and team may be the biggest public relations masterminds of all time. They realize that the populous is fickle and easily won over with obvious stunts. Define the villains and play the hero. It keeps working for him over and over and over. Truly incredible.
It is easy to confuse a mastermind with somebody who is simply willing to break the law.
> Define the villains and play the hero.
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.
> 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".
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
WWE President
I really hate Trump, but the guy is a media (read: not political) genius. I doubt there will ever be someone like him in the Republican, or any party again.
Calling him a genius isn’t quite accurate. He’s not a genius anything. But he does have orbiters who know what they’re doing. He’s mostly just a puppet.
A little over 100 years ago the massively popular party enemy #1 T.R. was running roughshod over the republican convention.
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But Trump started the ban.
That shoutout has the vibe of some Banana Republic corruption…
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.
From China's perspective, I wonder if there's a workaround to sell 50% of TikTok to a US public company, and then through a few intermediaries purchase a large enough holding in _that_ company to give them a board seat or two.
I believe that they are required to have no more than 20% ownership by "foreign adversaries"
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.
Julius Caesar's rise to power is one example.
So Tiktok is the slave that got the thumbs up?
sources?
Are they going to do this daily from now on? Turn off turn on, turn off turn on…
meh. i always thought the real reason for the ban was EVERYONE in the states who has had to deal with ByteDance walks away from the experience thinking they've been dicked. Or at least everyone I've talked with. In my own experience, we signed a deal with US/TikTok and started spending money on things to uphold our part of the bargain. Then ByteDance steps in and says "no. we're canceling this contract," and we point out, "uh... hey bevis... we just spent money on your behalf," and their response is "sucks to be you." The case has been in California courts for about 5 years. We may get our money back before TikTok/US goes out of business.
Ha, I guess Trump is the pro business president after all since he's so transparently open for business himself. At least as of now it seems Bytedance outsmarted the detractors.
Enjoy your CCP dripfeed while it lasts. This crap is going byebye.
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The TikTok ban is worse for national security. It's trading in an imagined threat for a real threat. Though Xiaohongshu is having a cute little cultural exchange between Chinese people and Americans, there's so much more Chinese propaganda on that platform. I got recommended a few videos talking about Chinese/American wargames and how Americans were done for due to ultrasonic missiles and naval capabilities. You never see anything like that on TikTok. And the only reason Americans are exploring that platform is because of the TikTok ban.
> I got recommended a few videos talking about Chinese/American wargames and how Americans were done for due to ultrasonic missiles and naval capabilities.
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.
"But what about!?!?"
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.
There are probably x10 America's propaganda on every social media sites, counting right-wing conservative politics alone.
exactly. This is typical western hypocrisy.
It's only propaganda because it's "them".
On today, the 19th, Trump isn't president yet and can't issue executive orders.
Ed: to be clear, the original title specifically mentioned an executive order.
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Timezones are always the doom of programmers.
It's not yet the 20th anywhere in North America.
I live in Virginia.
I suspect the U.S. will end up getting its way and TikTok will be divested of foreign ownership by the time this all shakes out.
Trumo also had thr option to kill Huawai and didnt. He stopped the sanctions just before the company bankrupted.
Now they know to make own OS
Keeping this up and we might need to start introducing version management tools to the U.S. government.
this is on the edge of becoming a shitshow...
The US has already jumped head first into the shit can.
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.
Well it needed people to enforce those things and it needed people to vote. Both those things didn’t happen.
Wait till you see US troops on the ground in Ukraine working hand in hand with russians, killing Ukrainians because Zelensky refused Trump "just give up" deal.
Where does this leave US federal privacy regulations? What can an app do with the data of US users?
That was never the issue, if it was, the US would simply force certain privacy legislation upon companies, like the EU did.
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.
Even if you think this is about protectionism rather than state sponsored espionage (I don't think many would agree with you) your comment makes little sense. Because if you wanted to enforce that kind of protectionism you would still do it under the guise of privacy or security. Meaning you would simply impose such laws that would make it impossible for TikTok to operate, while at the same time being good for privacy.
The only thing I would have respected Trump for was the TikTok ban and now I don't have any. Trump loves fake news and brain rot, I was naive to think he would keep TikTok banned.
Executive orders cannot supersede or go against the law. The courts would quite rightly shut him down.
Yes, but the president is the head of the executive branch, which includes the DoJ. He can simply instruct them not to prosecute.
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.
Through this law, Trump will consolidate control over social media.
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.)
So to put it bluntly, sweet talking a president-elect can overturn a Supreme Court decision? Interesting political culture.
Hardly. A delay on the ban isn't tantamount to undoing the Supreme Court's decision.
It's good to be precise with terminology and facts, especially in legal matters.
explain how he (a private citizen) can give a 90 day extension on a deadline that is passed with criteria that can not be certified and had to have been already given to congress? Please be precise with terminology and facts in these legal matters.
This operation seems a bargain for buying Tiktok, nothing more. The main contradiction is preventing competition and being a monopoly. The government is trying to prevent more competition and create more confort zones for monopolies. They don't care about free speech. Finally, they are part of this business.
Large corporations blackmailing countries seems to be becoming more common. There was probably some of it going on throughout history (oil companies?, pharma?) but recently we've seen AT&T, Pornhub, TikTok, Google, Meta and others threaten to or actually stop services in areas that try to regulate them. There has been no legal reaction to this so far, rather companies "voluntarily" leave. Might we see large corporations seized in the future for blackmail?
Private companies are not obligated to offer services, and in the US the government cannot compel private companies to do so (except rare circumstances). "We will stop offering services if X does not happen" is not coercive, it's an ultimatum. Companies should not be expected to operate in a market hostile to them.
What about privatized utilities then? What prevents e.g. electricity or phone companies from shutting down when they don't like some rules? It's a little more nuanced than "all or nothing".
In cases like AT&T where they provide telecommunications infrastructure for much of the country, threatening a shutdown is coercive.
Maybe it's time we have a global government that can have more power than global corporations?
I'm torn on this, though, because it's not really the companies blackmailing the countries. It's the companies telling their users, "hey, your country is doing this, and if you don't want them to do this, make some political noise".
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.)
Have we reached the point where we use gatorade to water our crops yet?
Worse. We have plastics in our blood from drinking gatorade.
The TikTok debate has always been about the balance between national security and free speech.
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.
- "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.
Not free speech. Amplification of speech and to an extent freedom of association. Speech is not being criminalized -- you can say the exact same things on a different forum. And the entity being constrained is a foreign actor [edit] with likely state security apparatus ties.
The liberty in that example being raising enough taxes to properly fund our government so people can just go about their lives.
There's a metaculus prediction of whether TikTok will be lawfully banned on 1/20, and they were 99.9% confident it would be in effect. (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/31247/tiktok-ban-in-effe...)
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've never understood that quote. Is it ok to give up essential liberty to gain a large, permanent safety? If so, how large and how permanent does it have to be to qualify?
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.
The free speech argument is ridiculous to me. The content wasn’t at issue; the ownership of the platform was.
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.
I just took the liberty to delete TikTok and remove it from my life regardless if it comes back.
That quote was about making the state stronger and able to demand more from citizends.
I think that potential EU legislation can and should take this as a cautionary tale.
Except that no one voted to give up this liberty nor purchase this "safety". The oligarchs determined that they wanted to purchase power and "elected" to take our liberty.
That quote has to do with taxation.
Different outcome if Harris wins the election though.
Is it possible that TikTok solved their problem by purchasing $6 billion worth of Trump’s meme coin?
Soldiers were already sharing videos of aircraft carriers on Rednote which hasn't gone through the whole shenanigans of paying Larry Ellison to host it on Oracle Cloud and so on. The national security risk is the US military apparently not being able to convince its own soldiers to be thoughtful about cybersecurity.
This is why Blackberry used to sell phones without cameras and microphone switches, and enterprise-centric OS images. Crazy that regular iOS/Android phones leaking data 24/7 to a million 'partners' are freely allowed at military locations. Pictures and video uploaded to social media include EXIF data with geolocation!
How does it matter where those videos were shared? Material is either classified or unclassified, it doesn't matter if the WarThunder forums (for example) are moderated by US nationals or not.
Plus these apps track you everywhere so the Chinese have your GPS and you're on the aircraft carrier. No need for fancy satellites they can just have that data and track the military and other government employees 24/7. I guarantee you no American company can track Chinese military or Chinese employees 24/7 wherever they're at this is a one-way deal it's not good for the US.
> The national security risk is the US military apparently not being able to convince its own soldiers to be thoughtful about cybersecurity.
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.
By that measure they should ban the war thunder forum before tiktok
It's hopeless to expect every member of the military to be thoughtful about cybersecurity. If they'll openly share nuclear secrets & base protocols publicly, anything is fair game.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expos...
This isn’t the only risk. There is also the problem of radicalising people. This has been a big problem in Europe.
> The TikTok debate has always been about the balance between national security and free speech
And now about how the sitting president can profit from brokering it
There's something in this argument about national security, that if taken to its logical conclusion, would result in a world most people would consider upside-down:
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.
This isn't about free speech. Tiktok's statement actually provides all of the necessary context. China pays influencers. The tiktok ban is not about what you are allowed to say, but who is allowed to pay you to say it. This is a very different question.
Can someone please explain how the law tramples free speech? Isn’t it completely legal to shut down a stadium or arena?
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.
It's an absolute win for the content creators who relied on TikTok for their livelihoods and the small businesses who relied on it for marketing. And for Gen Z, for whom content creation is one of the few viable ways to earn a good income now that tech grad hiring has completely collapsed.
It’s kind-of not. A ban would have given them all the opportunity to go wherever their audience went. The demand for their content wouldn’t simply disappear, it’d just be displaced to some other platform. And said other platform would almost certainly be less capricious and better for creators than TikTok.
> This outcome is worse than anyone could have conceived.
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.
I think people are not quite ready for the level of klept we’re about to see.
>Also, the law that tramples free speech
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.
Everybody loses? The fact that TikTok remains available to millions of users is a significant benefit, especially for those who rely on it for creative expression, community building, and small-business promotion.
I would say yes, everybody. TikTok is very bad for our society. It has had profound negative effects on people's ability to pay attention to things. I don't know that I'd say the solution is legalistic in nature, but the continued existence of that platform is a cancer on humanity.
He means net loss to the status quo in reference to the entire fiasco. I had TikTok before… I still have TikTok… what rights were trampled in the process of bringing about zero change to me using tiktok?
That's true. Unfortunately, it is also highly addictive, esp. for kids and teens.
Here, have my upvote.
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.
It's interesting how most commenters seem to forget about TikTok users. Every interest is taken into account, China, USA, intelligence services, TikTok "competition". Users somehow never enter the picture for most people in any other way than as gullible idiots getting exploited by the aforementioned parties.
This seems not to be an opinion that other people hold, but I never saw social media as “free speech” given that some third party can decides which parts of what you say get promoted.
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!
… the law that tramples free speech is upheld by the court
This law does not trample free speech. Your view of what free speech means as it pertains to U.S. law is wrong.
This is not an outcome. The legal process is but still well underway. In the United States, we abide by the rule of law.[1] That's really what separates us from China.
No there's going to be some obvious winners. Trump is going to force a 50% sale to a US based JV. That JV will be run by / benefit some of his biggest goons.
So Trump & his circle win !
What also bothers me is there's a simple solution to all this. Just pass comprehensive consumer data protection laws and regulations all companies operating in the US are required to follow. But you don't see anyone proposing that for some reason...
I just don’t get how free speech translates as accessibility to post on a commercial platform.
This is exactly what all Europeans watching US politics expected. No more, no less.
> balance between national security and free speech.
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.
Everyone lives and dies by the KING now.
It was never about that balance. It was always about populism.
“National security” is such a bs term for US govt to avoid transparency. It comes from the post 9/11 era of FISA courts, PATRIOT act to justify wide net domestic surveillance and wiretapping.
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.
I agree. This is a forced consolidation that will only strengthen American tech oligarchs and the new administration. It's also coup on the culture of the younger generations similar to what happened to Twitter.
"TikTok CEO attending Trump inauguration" - https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5089151-tiktok-ceo-don...
Chase Hughes:
"Manipulation Playbook: The 20 Indicators of Reality Control"
The answer is to not use TikTok.
It's worse than that. The platform is now beholden to the president for its survival.
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.
>Everybody loses.
Huh? Trump singlehandedly bringing TikTok back for tens of millions of malleable voters. Sounds like a pretty huge victory for him!
This 4 years gonna be good. Trump #1 was amateur time, this time they come prepared to bring havoc.
Plus Trump got all major social media in his pocket.
Trump wins, everyone loses.
Get used to it.
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What outcome are you talking about comrade? Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
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He’s now publicly a huge hero for saving TikTok and everyone forgot he was the one that wanted it banned in the first place. Fabricating new problems so he can solve them “heroically” is the basic MO of any narcissist or authoritarian despot- and is worth a lot more to him than any under the table cash.
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.
If you think money is what is on the table here you lack imagination. It's the "Trump knob" in TikTok's ranking algorithm that is the real thing of value here.
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.
Every government lawyer in the country was investigating Trump since 2015 and the best they could find was he paid off a pornstar. You can’t accuse someone of being on the take for nearly a decade without eventually putting up or shutting up.
Free speech?
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?
If I want to run what someone else has determined as "malware" on my computer, as far as I'm concerned, I should have the absolute right to do it. Same for spyware. Why? Because I don't want the government to make the determination for what is right or wrong for me on my own property. If the US government wants to block apps on their property, then they can go ahead and do that. But the moment it extends to my own property, it's quite ridiculous to think people are going to bend over backwards and comply with what's good for you. Especially in the context of some vague national security threat, why am I supposed to be subversive to the CIA?
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.
> Can you talk about the Tiananmen Square massacre on TikTok and show the few videos of people who were disappeared?
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 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"
Sounds like they're operating within the law
From the ruling:
"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.
The law never required that they shut down, so in a tautological sense they are.
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.
Isn't selective enforcement in general within any law in the United States? There are plenty of laws that get broken all the time and it's up to police & prosecutors/AGs to decide which cases they actually want to enforce.
He has to kinda gesture towards in-progress plans to comply with the law to grant that exception, but that's not a huge hurdle.
This satisfies my curiosity about why TikTok didn't try to push app users to the website, which is not so easy to ban. They were always hoping to cozy up to Trump by offering him the opportunity to "save" TikTok.
It's only for 90 days though, unless Trump decides to completely ignore his duty to enforce the law (a distinct possibility).
Couldn't the web version still pretty essily be enforceable via ISPs, etc.
My reading of the law does not require ISPs to block customers from accessing TikTok. US-based CDNs would be unable to provide hosting, but that just makes it less efficient, not inaccessible.
That's very sad news.
Anyone that didn't see this coming is so naive- Trump only cares about optics. Look at the message when opening tiktok "Thanks to President Trump"... there is no way he didn't say "look, you HAVE TO PUT MY NAME OUT THERE or you are being banned".
But yet morons will be like "trump saved tiktok!!!"
TT playing both the public and politicians for their gain. Well played.
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.
So America really is for sale, and there are no exceptions.
Trump is definitely for sale.
"It’s a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship."
That hit's different from Chinese company. lol
Words don't mean anything, they are just tools to win PR battles.
Couldn't agree more
Oh man. So much fuzz over a site that shares video snippets. Is it just me? I feel like I am witnessing some kind of end of US society.
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.
>I feel like I am witnessing some kind of end of US society.
Have you been paying attention since covid? It's just terminal now.
Between this and the Gaza ceasefire the outgoing administration is laying up political wins for Trump before he even takes office. An embarrassment for an administration that has completely failed to play the political game properly for years. And Biden was such a savvy operator before.
The US-shilling in this thread is unbelievable. It’s almost as if half of these people have never heard of who Snowden was and don’t believe the US has ever spied on foreign nationals :headslap;
> 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
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.
It’s not an insane business decision, but the easiest way to garner support for your preferred candidate. Anyone who is 24/7 on TikTok (there are a lot of them) will now say how Trump saved the app. And kinda, technically, they’re not wrong (if you ignore the history).
Sure, but Trump will have the threat to enforce this law hanging over any of these companies for his entire term. That’s a terrible position to put yourself in. I just can’t believe any of these companies are stupid enough to trust him.
The language surrounding this which basically heaps praise on Trump makes it seem like it was a condition he gave, that he must be given clear unambiguous credit, so he can go around saying he saved it, even though he was the one who signed an executive order in 2020 to ban it[0]. Anything to manipulate the American people’s perception of him. It feels like we’re living in Russia or North Korea with the stuff that goes on these days. Truly scary watching an oligarchy take shape realtime.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/900019185/trump-signs-executi...
My read is that the US government originally wanted to try to force TikTok to restructure its relationship with China so it wouldn't be under control of the party, either by leaving the country or more likely selling to a US-friendly owner. This was the argument when Trump toyed with the idea during his first mandate.
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.
I had to scroll past too many "free speech" takes to finally get to this well-thought analysis of the saga.
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".
<< 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.
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.
US came out way ahead here. They gain full control of TikTok. They have a precedent now to ban apps from hostile power. They gained even more respect from countries that hate China/russia/iran, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India, etc. they now project power over countries that were trying to play both sides of US and China, such as Singapore, Malaysia. And of course, Chinese government took this takedown with a whimper, signaling it is really powerless against US
The extension is for 90 days. If they don't sell, they are worth very little after those three months elapse. It's a life line and a fire sale.
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.
> But these buyers don't want the actual value of TikTok to drop to zero
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.
Great analysis! This comment should be the top post
What makes you think Trump will require anything meaningful of TikTok? What’s important is what TikTok can do for him, not anything related to national security or ownership concerns.
> What makes you think Trump will require anything meaningful of TikTok?
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.
For those saying there’s no executive order yet or that Trump is not president yet, the point is that they received confirmation that there will be an executive order, meaning they can rely on a 90 day extension of non-enforcement.
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.
[meta] why is this the only comment I can't vote on?
The issue is Trump doesn’t have legal authority to issue an executive order delaying the ban, executive orders “execute” the law, delaying would be the opposite of the law, a law that was held up 9–0 as constitutional by the Supreme Court face palm
There is some precedent for doing this. State-level cannabis legalization rests on non-enforcement at the federal level, at which it remains scheduled.
He can just buy a sufficient stake to count as a "divestiture" under the law.
I was dumbfounded too, but NBC explains in this same article:
> "The law banning TikTok [...] allows the president to grant a 90-day extension before the ban is enforced, provided certain criteria are met."
Yes he does. Form the article:
> 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.
This isn't about politics, just noting the facts and the hypocrisy...
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...
Trump wants 50% US ownership in a joint venture for Tiktok. Shouldn't be a problem since 60% of bytedance ownership is already non-China (probably a lot of it already US investors - General Atlantic/SIG)
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1138556168486...
The ownership of the company is irrelevant, it's who has control of the algorithm and where the data flows. If Tiktok US licenses the algorithm from China (which seems likely) then none of the national security issues are addressed.
Doesn’t matter what he thinks. Executive cannot override legislative action.
The Supreme Court can always say that it can.
The law always allowed for divesting to US owners. It didn't specify who.
Executive Order
All this and it was only 40% Chinese-owned???
You seem to think percentage of ownership works the same way in China as in the West. That’s an understandable mistake
With the algorithm 100% Chinese-operated
Chinese government has a golden shares deal with Bytedance granting their 1% ownership the ability to nominate a board seat.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tiktok-ban-b...
That 1% golden share is in Douyin, the Chinese subsidiary of ByteDance, not ByteDance or Tiktok.
Sad
Dang. Comments seem to be accumulating on this thread faster than they can be moderated. I'm not trying to call anyone names, but there seem to be A LOT of different political opinions and more than a few conspiracy theories. But who knows... maybe the conspiracy theorists are right... Just wanted to say thanks to the community for not being as flamey as one might expect for a comments section on the internet.
The CCP has a propaganda and spying tool in the hands of 170M Americans. Yet the new Administration is more interested in playing politics than taking necessary steps to secure us against our primary adversary.
It's not just Trump though. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats are taking the China threat seriously enough. The CCP must be destroyed.
We've been saying for quite some time that large multi-national companies have more power than entire democracies. I guess now we have proof.
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.
Tiktok has been working for the last 40 minutes for me after going dark last night.
Some thoughts from Donald Trump: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1138556168486...
Incredible.
Isn't ByteDance already owned 60% by international (mostly American) investors?
https://usds.tiktok.com/who-owns-tiktoks-parent-company-byte...
You need to drill deeper to figure out who really holds the money bag. Not to say I know anything, but this page doesn't really say much.
But again, I don't really care about the nationality of the elites.
Have a look at the golden shares part of that, 1% gets you a lot.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tiktok-ban-b...
what about all the american apps that have no service in china
Interested. What about them?
I think the criticism is that China can buy a seat at our table through flattery, and likely other favours , but we can’t? So we’re potentially corrupted / compromised, and they aren’t.
Another opportunistic nothing burger victory and reason for further tech billionaire fealty. Sigh.
Do you mean the ban, or the removal of the ban? I'm confused. Because I'm pretty sure the ban is at least in part supported by Zuck, and that's why he gave $300M+ to elect a vegetable in 2020, and that's why Meta is spending more than ever on lobbying: https://readsludge.com/2024/04/23/meta-shatters-lobbying-rec...
Dr. T's reversal was at least partly due to the influence of David Yass, who owns a chunk of ByteDance and saved the TruthSocial IPO, making Trump's holding actually worth something. So he owes Yass bigly.
Presumably other wealthy friends stand to win. Steve Mnuchin wanted to buy it.
I don't believe in conspiracy theories, I tend to believe most can be boiled down to power and/or stupidity. Which is what I see going on here, but if I were to attach a conspiracy theory to it- this was always the plan and now a portion of the voter base has been flipped. Well played by the Thiel, Musk, Zuck circle jerk.
Trump just issued a personal statement. Not even as president.
It is still a Law.
TikTok is still banned, the Supreme Court upheld it.
Trump's proposed executive order just gives TikTok more time "so that a deal could be made." Honestly I don't understand how TikTok is able to restore service now before the executive order or even the inaugaration has occured.
There was no legal requirement they block service at all, only that other companies stop doing business with them (i.e. App Stores stop distributing, etc.)
Pretty sure Oracle had to turn off the servers. I feel like Oracle is now not complying with the law. Apple and Google appear to be as of writing this.
This. It is not back in stores.
It’s back so couldn’t have been that hard.
Foreign countries are already banned from owning TV stations in the United States so this is certainly not a speech issue. I dont think its clear that Trump can really save TikTok without passing a law through congress though.
Alright. Hundreds or thousands of Chinese trackers on every military base in the world. Perfect.
The US military independently banned Tiktok on all personnel devices half a decade ago.
How do they enforce the ban?
That's good. So it should be banned on military bases, why not elsewhere?
I'm not clear how Trump's assurances mean much in the face of a law passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. I guess we're already in an autocracy controlled by a person not even formally in power yet?
Strange to see the ACLU and Trump having common cause.
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 ACLU tends to take pretty hard line civil liberty positions, including defending hateful folks if their civil liberties are impinged. They’re not strictly a progressive organization.
They don't really hold hard-line positions anymore. The ACLU would no longer defend the speech of a neo-nazi, for example.
Classic "Bootleggers and Baptists" situation [0], where both parties are in favor for self-serving reasons.
What does the ACLU not understand..
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
Not worth it going back to TT. Will just stay on RedNote
Just a quick reminder: Tik Tok (a service by a Chinese company) is still blocked in China.
But what about national security?? LMAO, political populism for the manipulable idiots.
when the state if the nation is so bad that you have homeless everywhere, healthcare, housing and education are something you have to fight for, prisons are a business, suddenly another perspective seems more alluring, a modern Nordic socialism? putting a brake to unhinged late stage capitalism? or on the darker side, a promise of better conditions in 'some ways'...this is no national security risk, people are getting simply fed up with appalling state of the nation.
The whole thing is starting to look like a circus.
excuse my ignorance..
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 ?
[flagged]
As I expected China wins no matter what
This was basically a 12 year old's plan for making Trump seem like a "champion" - and it somehow seems to be working, even in this comment section (assuming half the comments aren't just bots which I wouldn't discount personally).
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...
> „China's using Tik Tok to subvert "democracy,"
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.
How does an executive order just pause a law passed by Congress? Does Trump think he really has that kind of authority?
>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.
Recent weeks frankly not a good show by US Judiciary.
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.
We're watching the downfall live on stream. They were wrong, the revolution will not be televised is right, the fascist uprising happened in your social media instead.
People seem to misunderstand this metaphor. It’s not about what type of tech the revolution is broadcasted on, it’s about the fact that you’ll be sitting there watching the revolution from the comfort of wherever you are. You will not be doing anything to actually be apart of the revolution, making the revolution more for your entertainment than your detriment/benefit.
It's not really a revolution, moreso a slow downfall into mediocrity, irrationalism and hatred, wrapped in stars and stripes.
As long as this is the only place the fascist upraising happens… better than being forced out of your job, making all other political parties illegal, being beaten by mobs patrolling the streets while the police looks the other way, canceling elections ad vitam eternam on national security grounds, I mean stuff that proper fascists used to do back in the days.
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
There was no executive order. Turning off Tiktok yesterday was a highly successful political stunt.
Everyone got played by what is effectively joint CCP/Trump propaganda and they’re cheering about it. Bleak, bleak, bleak.
Especially given that Trump initiated the push to ban TikTok in the first place.
spin working overtime
Bingo, bango, boingo. Just another way to help manipulate people into thinking Trump saved the day, once again. TikTok played the propaganda just right.
It's funny to imagine how, very deeply ironically, it turned out to be a national security risk after all.
- The Occupy Wall Street movement.
- 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.
There is, it's a few days old, and it's a non-enforcement from the Biden administration, according to the man himself and his staffers, he intends to let it be the next administration's problem. Whatever the next administration does when it takes power is yet to be seen.
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.
That wasn't an executive order, as far as I'm aware it was just a statement. It had no legal value, which was why TikTok asked for more assurance.
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.
The title was changed, it used to be "Trump's executive order..." something.
"Biden just signed a potential TikTok ban into law. Here’s what happens next" https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/tech/congress-tiktok-ban-what...
"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...
So not an executive order, but signing a bill that passed with a veto proof majority, and then saying he won't enforce it.
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.
Whether you support trump or not, the level of patronage that corporations seem to think is needed is disturbing. I've never seen companies stoking a presidents ego so publicly.
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.
This is Trump playing chess. ByteDance, Greenland, The Gulf of Mexico, Panama Canal- All this, and he's not even President yet. It's all part of a bigger picture and a bigger plan with sizable levers. Some love this, others find it terrifying.
Utterly pathetic like that whole "new" country and it's government.
Well Dem and Biden already sealed their fate as the party that ban Bytedance universe (TikTok + Capcut), while Dear Leader Trump restored the services :).
Let's see what the zoomers and millenials will say for next elections
Amazing stunt: The establishment tried to limit freedom of speech and Trump saved the day. Probably a pre-agreed sequence of events.
Never mind that it was him who initially trued to ban it.
Nevertheless a positive development.
There was never a freedom of speech argument here, unless maybe you are china. There are endless similar platforms available to individuals to express themselves on. Ones that aren't owned and controlled by China... America's biggest technological rival.
<< Ones that aren't owned and controlled by China... America's biggest technological rival.
And, you forgot to add, do not allow expression of thoughts that are not culturally accepted in US.
There are people who think similar platforms exist and people who have used TikTok, unfortunately.
You think TikTok is beneficial or even neutral?
I think China is not a role model for freedoms, no one should follow their steps. Censorship is not going to solve your problems and you won’t become China in terms of industry by by banning apps. You will become China sans industry.
Simply, yes.
Yes, simply because there are mass number of people making a living there. Be a realist
This is such a fallacious, misdirecting argument. The speech itself was not targeted by the ban. It was the ownership. If the speech stayed the same then regulators would have been happy.
I don't think that's an accurate read. Everyone was playing chicken and the US won. TikTok will be up for sale again, except this time with way less leverage in negotiating a sale.
... I can't even. How did US win? OP effectively nailed all the facets in which it is overall the worst of all worlds. Few individual political players have won, but it certainly was not US or us.
This is a disgusting betrayal of America and a violation of our process, given Congress passed a law and it was then unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court. Unless Trump can show that Bytedance met the three conditions that permit an extension, this will backfire and alienate a portion of his base.
It’s a cult of personality. By definition it’s him they support and who informs their thinking. He can’t alienate his supporters, because they don’t have any framework to fall back on.
After they pumped $20B into Trump’s meme coin.
Nothing is real anymore.
While jerking off Trump. We all know what's happening behind closed doors.
So laws don't matter now. That's a great trend to start on day 1.
Trump has clearly neutered both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. Welcome to a unitary government, with one god-emperor and no checks nor balances. It's going to be a wild two (few?) years.
Correction: it appears there is a 90-day presidential delay written into the law, so we're not quite at god-emperor status yet...
If what you’re saying is true, why would there be a term limit at all?
Hence "few". Two if there are real elections in 2026, and the dems retake a majority. "few" if there aren't, or they don't -- in that case maybe 3-4 if term limits hold, or "who knows?" if as you say term limits don't apply, or Trump manages to put someone in place after him.
I'm curious to know how all of those pearl clutchers who got super mad about Twitter removing dick pics of Hunter Biden are doing.
The level of naiveté in this discussion is absolutely astonishing to me. People are seeming to forget that dysfunctional states (totalitarian, facist, the like) all are sprung from one common thread: control of the mind through propaganda. We already have evidence that the CCP or otherwise is manipulating Tiktok's algorithm to influence American minds [1]. This was one study, by one relatively small and underpowered organization. That's to say, there's probably a lot that we've yet to unearth about how the algorithm is manipulated; or how the CCP is planning to manipulate it to further their agenda at the expense of an American one.
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...
>propaganda
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.
THANK YOU!
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.
Yes! Thank you for helping me affirm internally that I'm not crazy.
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.
The Guardian and many other newspapers appear to be controlled by the CCP as well:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/23/israel...
The UN is controlled by the CCP:
> young people who otherwise do not hold a negative opinion towards Israel suddenly became anti-Israel
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?
Hear, hear.
> 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.
People seem to discount the way they are influenced by the media they are served. I’m seeing a lot of comments about “free agency” and how “people make up their own minds” rather than 1 to 1 believing what they read. This argument just ignores human nature. We evolved to catch onto ideas, good and bad, and be able to rationalize them in ways that often ignore the true outside state of the world. In this light we should strongly critique those who are the purveyors of information. Although I have many criticisms of even those who are serving information domestically, the idea that we’re going to trust a malicious foreign actor with molding the shape of our minds is just nonsensical.
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Go post your useless unsubstantive comments on Reddit. HN is not the place for you.
Feels like they published this statement a day early as Trump is not yet president. Whoops.
What statement? This entire article recognizes that Trump is not president yet.
My comment was originally in another thread that was a statement from Tiktok on Twitter. It looks like this thread was merged with another one so my comment might not make sense now.
Big 1984 energy coming from this story.
“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.”
Human society is collapsing.
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.
Sadly, Orwell was not hugely imaginative, he was just aware of things that happened in the Soviet Union.
So human society has been collapsing since Roman times?
Distractions as usual for the minions.
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It blows my mind how easily people are swayed and how ByteDance is playing everyone like a fiddle. I need to walk into the ocean because this life ain't for me.
After being a non-stop news and politics junkie the last 15+ years, I've gone beyond cold turkey.
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.
I'm debating trying to do this. I've seen it recommended by other people who I think are smart. Honestly, I tuned out most of the 2010s after being a political news junkie in the 2000s, and it was probably good for me. I couldn't sleep or concentrate on work for a couple days after this election.
> 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.
I’ve not followed the news for about 7 years now. A niche benefit of WFH is that I don’t have to accidentally hear coworkers talking about it either.
Is there any way to still read all the political and world news while keeping your self from over-entertaining or internalizing it?
Good for you.
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.
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"Eschew flamebait."
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>It's our app store.
Who is 'our' referring to?
Alphabet and Apple? Then its their app store.
TikTok has never been open source.
The security concerns about TikTok has merit but I'm surprised given the reputation of HN, nobody is connecting the dots to lobbying from Israel as a legitimate reason. In fact in all the past few threads about TikTok ban there is almost no mention of it. There have been numerous strides to push China as the sole reason but there is almost no real risk other than China knowing what you are into to show you more of the same content exactly how social medias are designed to work in America.
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.
> there is almost no real risk other than China knowing what you are into to show you more of the same content
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.
I think many people are aware that Israel is the real reason behind the ban - the don't want the world to see how truly grotesque the apartheid state of Israel really is. I mean, some of what's happened is so utterly vile I'm not sure I'd have believed it if I hadn't seen/read/heard in on social media with my own eyes - especially when the MSM is so incredibly, overtly pro-Israel.
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.
All of this is really simple. Reasonable people know the CCP having full control of public opinion by having ultimate control of the algorithm that literally sets public opinion of everyone under 30… is problematic. When you consider that in a year or so they’re going to invade Taiwan and no doubt simultaneously get all of Gen Z and Alpha on their side with propaganda, this is horrible for anyone who doesn’t love dictatorships.
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.
Congratulations to Trump to standing up for freedom and against all 9 Supreme Court justices that refused to enforce the First Amendment. People should be free to speak as much as they want on TikTok even though it's mostly useless chatter. In the Koramatsu decision of 1943, legalizing concentration camps for Japanese-Americans, there were 3 dissenting justices. I wish we had some this time.
Masterful PR move by Trump. Two ways to win, no way to lose: he gets control of the narrative there (if not TikTok itself, via one of his cronies), and he shows how totalitarian the "democrats" are.
> and he shows how totalitarian the "democrats" are.
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?
Yes, they too would like to show how totalitarian the "democrats" are. Jokes aside, the buck stops with the guy who signs the bill into law. Too bad the guy signing the bill didn't even understand what he was signing this time due to his profound dementia.
So once again it took the incoming president-elect Trump and for Biden to lose to intervene and reverse this ban and give an extension to TikTok.
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.
The ban had bi-partisan support. Trump was initially for the ban and then changed his mind. On Aug. 6, 2020, Trump signed Executive Order 13942, which sought to ban TikTok in response to national security concerns. Courts struck it down.
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 literally originated it back then.
Trump is not a president yet.
Trump singed an EO that was reversed. Only one president showed interest in a law. Only one president whipped votes for that law. Only one president signed the law.
You realize that is even worse for the Democrats? So why didn't Biden stop it? He had plenty of time to do so and he did not and signed it.