US can’t ban TikTok for security reasons while ignoring Temu, other apps, TikTok argues
TikTok's survival in the US may depend on an appeals court ruling this December.
Oh no, now we have to ban them all?? What a shame!
/s
But you can't charge me with murder! That guy committed it too!
selective enforcement of the law is a real issue. One of the reasons Donald Trump will likely never go to jail is the failure to prosecute nixon, reagan (iran contra, iran hostage crisis meddling), and Bush/Cheney(wmd fiasco)
And one of the reasons POC are more likely go to jail (or even gets shot) for something a white man would be let free with only a warning… At least in the “free” land.
I'm surprised so many people think this is a good argument. TikTok is a social media platform. Temu is an online marketplace. The potential to cause disruption within US society is completely different.
Legally it is a very good argument. A law targeting a single company in name or effect is literally unconstitutional. It's called a "Bill of Attainder".
The counter argument is indicting Facebook because they never stopped selling information directly to the CCP.
Cool, let's ban Temu then. Nothing of value will be lost.
In all honesty though, I disagree with banning software, and that includes TikTok. I think it's a terrible platform and I refuse to use it, but I think we need to solve the underlying problem another way, otherwise we're just picking and choosing what speech is allowed in this country. The Constitution doesn't only protect American citizens, it protects everyone.
That said, if we're going to ban one, let's ban them all. These apps haven't provided any tangible value IMO and they've arguably caused a fair amount of harm, so I'm not going to die on a hill defending them.
A US Citizen might be protected by Article 1 Section 9, but courts have adopted a three-part test to determine if a law functions as a bill of attainder:
And unfortunately for the CCP they fail #3 unless the Chinese owners divest and all Chinese centralization for the company gets shut down.
Also, the tiktok ban was passed alongside a bill outlawing sale of data to China, Iran, Russia, etc. So if FB is still selling to China it is also illegal.
Not environmentally...
I thought we like disruption.
It's time to start taxing the acquisition, retention, and selling/trading of personal data.
Actually, that time was 40 years ago.
Google and Microsoft would be scrambling to pay off every single person associated with that before it ever hit the first courtroom floor.
ohhh data collection taxation, I like it. You would think it would be a no-brainer but look at marijuana taxation and the continued resistance to rake in all that public funding. Would make most of the controversy around AI disappear if they tax it's collection.
Better solution.
Data are owned by the generator. Only they can sell it etc...
This also solves the privacy problem of law enforcement agencies applying warrants to phone companies etc. for access to your data, which has been an end-run around 4th Amendment rights for decades.
Exactly. If a company wants to sell my data, they should have to make an explicit agreement with me to do that. If law enforcement wants data from my phone company, they should either produce a warrant or get my permission to release it. And so on.
If a company holds my data, they should be legally accountable for safeguarding it, and liable if it gets in the hands of someone I don't have an agreement with. Banks do that with my money, I don't see why social media companies should have any less expectation here.
And no, burying some form of consent in a TOS isn't sufficient, it needs to be explicit and there needs to be a reasonable expectation that the customer understands the terms.
US tech companies too, you fucking cowards.
Facebook paid kids to install a VPN client on their smartphones so they could intercept AND DECRYPT traffic between competing services (like Snapchat, Amazon, Youtube)
facebook and any other company they acquire (or however they try to rebrand) are not only untrustworthy but active adversaries against common decency and basic privacy
America selectively caring about privacy.
The concern isn’t the input, it’s the potential output. Temu doesn’t have the potential to be used for a large micro-targeted political messaging campaign.
This is arguably more akin to how the US handles TV and radio. There are national security restrictions on foreign ownership.
The US owns and regulates the frequencies TV and radio are broadcast on. The Internet is not the same. If the threat of foreign propaganda is the purpose, why can I download the official RT (Russia Today, government run propaganda outlet) app in the Play Store? If the US is worried about a foreign government spreading propaganda, why are they targeting the popular social media app that could theoretically (but no evidence it's been done yet) be used for propaganda, instead of the actual Russian propaganda app? Hell I can download the south china morning post right from the Play store, straight Chinese propaganda! There are also dozens of Chinese and other foreign adversary run social media platforms, and other apps that could "micro target political messaging campaigns" available. So why did the US Congress single out one single app for punishment?
Money. The problem isn't propaganda. The problem is money. The problem is tik Tok is or is on the course to be more popular than our American social media platforms. The problem is American firms are being outcompeted in the marketplace, and the government is stepping in to protect the American data mining market. The problem is young people are trading their data for tik toks, instead of giving that data over to be sold to us advertising networks in exchange for YouTube shorts and Instagram stories. If the problem was propaganda, the US would go after propaganda. If the problem is just a Chinese company offers a better product than US companies, then there's no reason to draft nuanced legislation that goes after all potential foreign influence vectors, you just ban the one app that is hurting the share price of your donors.
They care about companies they have less control over and a foreign adversary has more control over invading privacy, for reasons unrelated to seeing privacy as a good in itself.
It's because this isn't about privacy at all, it's about a popular social media platform being outside the control of domestic intelligence agencies. The US is unable to control the narrative on TikTok the way they do on American social media, which allowed pro-palestinian sentiment to spread there unhindered. It had a huge effect on the politics of the younger generation (IMO a positive one) by showing them news and first hand accounts they wouldn't have seen otherwise.
Edit: And yes, China is able to control the narrative on TikTok and that is a potential problem, but so far they've had a fairly hands-off approach to US TikTok aside from basic language censorship. I figure the way China sees it is that an unmoderated free-for-all will do more to sow divisions in the US than a carefully controlled (and therefore obvious) pro-China narrative ever could.
The concern isn’t that these companies have microtargeting data. The concern is about what these companies could use that data for.
An off-brand t-shirt site would be a fairly ineffective vehicle for political propaganda. Tik Tok would be great at that.
*tiktok IS great for that.
Isn't the primary critique of TikTok the number of American leftists and progressives posting on it?
Seems like the propaganda is coming from inside the house.
That’s definitely the critique coming from America’s right.
That said, both America’s left and right wing politicians seem to agree that it’s dangerous to have a mass media recommendation algorithm in the hands of a foreign adversary.
If they want to promote content favorable a Chinese political objective, they can use micro targeting data do that with extreme precision - if they wanted to.
It doesn’t matter who created the content or where it was created. What matters is the message of the content and who it’s being directed to.
TikTok is correct. Ban them all.
While i dislike tiktok as much as the next one, please do temu first. Temu might actually be the downfall of our planet that is already falling down the stairs pretty hard.
I knew someone who got caught up in their pyramid marketing scheme. The prizes were some low quality shit. The watch they won got badly scratched and the wristband's pin fell off the same day from regular use. It was pretty funny watching it disintegrate in real time.
They're right, we should regulate or ban then too.
Technically, the second partof that bill bans sending user data to China for all companies, so it's foreseeabke that they get fined into the dirt if nothing else.
I hope the Facebook multi-billion dollar fines act as precedent.
it’s foreseeabke that they get fined into the dirt if nothing else.
Or they just route the sale of traffic through a domestic data broker and buy "analysis" on the Chinese side of the legal fence. There are so many badly policed and underregulated aspects of the data business that this shit never amounts to more than publicity stunts.
American trade with China only ever increases year-to-year, despite all the noise about a Trade War. Chinese based drop-shipping schemes only ever eat into our domestic market share, because American incomes are falling into line with the global average and that's the kind of trade good international middle class workers can afford. And all this shit is getting blended together - Indian and Chinese businesses outsource to Indochina and Malaysia and Indonesia where labor is cheaper. Everything gets routed and flagged through Singapore anyway, so the real origin of a good is obscured by the time it lands on your doorstep. And nobody in the business of making money wants to pay a politician to do anything about this in practice.
Nobody is getting fined, much less into-the-dirt.
So ban them too
I generally think that TikTok sucks but do agree with this argument. It’s silly to say that domestic companies can be evil but foreign ones no.
That's not a silly argument if your argument is about national security. For the exact same reason, China blocks almost all western apps. It gives a potential route for whatever nation is considered hostile to influence your population, and TikTok has actually activated this influence at least once directly. They tried to activate their users to protest congress from passing laws restricting them.
Basically, they have the ability to influence users, and they also have the will to do so as they've already shown. In what world eould they not be a national security threat? It's also really hard for me to accept this argument from a Chinese company when China has the great firewall to "protect" it'd citizens from outside influence.
You can argue that it is not to benefit the citizens and rather just the state, which is fair. You can't reasonably argue that the state has nothing to fear.
Laws don't exist to protect the state, they exist to protect the people.
Also, what another country decides to do shouldn't really impact what we decide to do. If China blocks our apps, fine, their loss I guess. But if we start blocking their apps in retribution, that doesn't make us any better than them. We should be fighting disinformation with information. This means better education and transparent government-funded research and information. But when the US government is secretive and frequently caught spreading its own disinformation, it makes it hard for me to agree to block other countries doing the same.
TikTok should be allowed to offer its services here, but US companies shouldn't be obligated to host them on their services, and the government should publicize the negative information it has about them so journalists can help the public digest it.
The argument isn't that they're "evil", it's that they could be used as tools by strategic rivals.
Tiktok is probably used 10 times as much though (users x time on the app) and Temu isn't spreading messages in quite the same way. Comparing apples and gerbils, whataboutism, etc.
If social media companies exist to collect massive troves of personal info from users--and they do--then there is a valid national security concern over social media controlled by an adversary. This is distinct from the individual privacy concerns towards domestically-controlled social media.
Like Temu?
You mean like facebook and twitter.
No, they love those, since that data goes to the US government instead of to the CCP
that data goes to the US government instead of to the CCP
Going to blow people's minds when they find out Temu data also goes to the US government and Facebook data also goes to the CCP.
This shit is just a commodity. It's auctioned off at the bid rate. The NSA doesn't just lay claim to this data, it buys it. And these Big Data companies are only handing it over because of the absurd margins NSA (and MI5 and the rest of the Five Eyes) directors are willing to pay.
Your data isn't any safer because the parent company is owned by a foreign plutocrat. This is a big club and you ain't in it.
Cambridge analytics
This is a good point actually. That's almost like trying to ban Naruto because it's Japanese, but not banning Dragonball Z. We'l see where this goes. If they would enforce these law equally it wouldn't be as much of a concern. Overall, whether they ban TikTok or not, if as a user you don't like a said platform, just don't use it.
Yes and no. Without endorsing them, the arguments for banning Tik Tok are subtler than Chinese = security risk. The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S. When you look at the history of how even relatively benign data from sources not controlled by foreign adversaries has been used for intelligence gathering, e.g. Strava runs disclosing the locations of classified military installations, these fears make a certain amount of sense.
Temu, et al., on the other hand are shopping apps that don't really lend themselves to influence campaigns in the same way (though, if they are sucking up data like all the other apps, I wouldn't be surprised if folks in the U.S. security apparatus are concerned about those as well.
Ultimately, I think the argument fails because it assumes an obligation for Congress to solve every tangentially related ill all at once where no such obligation exists.
They desperately need to do something about car software before China starts being really relevant here in EVs too.
I absolutely support massively restricting what anyone can gather, not just China, (and the same for social media/ad networks/retailers), but it's fundamentally not the same threat as data vacuums controlled by an enemy state.
Extremely well said, thank you.
The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S.
Tbh, I'm troubled by my own government doing that to us.
Is tiktok saying that all Chinese apps that steal our data are also stealing our data because they were designed to steal our data?!
I am SHOCKED.
TikTok literally got people to commit check fraud
TilTok likely got my car stolen (Hyundai vulnerability trended on TikTok)
That's Hyundai/Kia's fault though. For whatever reason, they cheaped out and didn't include an immobilizer in 2011-2022 models (meaning the cars don't actually verify that there's a key in it, so you can just remove the key hole and turn the ignition with a screwdriver or USB cable or whatever to start it).
Before TikTok, this would have just spread on different platforms...
I'm not defending TikTok though.
yes i know a kia owner with a similar story
That's like saying YouTube or Facebook I forget which one, got people to eat tide pods. Information spreads on all platforms whether good or bad.
Please ban them, I beg of you, please...
Temu isn't a social media network that has been known to boost specific narratives with their algorithm. The U.S. isn't saying that China can't sell and market to the American audience, just that they'll need a supervisor if they want to mess with media.
Yeah, better ban them all, don't see why not
I understand blocking TikTok, and China already blocks US social media sites. I don't really understand blocking a shopping app, though. TikTok are grasping at straws.
Wouldn't this set a dangerous precedent? If the government blocks a shopping app, what else will they block in the future? It's a slippery slope to government censorship. China may do the same thing and block US stores, which would hurt the US economy.
Shopping apps aren't really needed, I mean people could use the websites instead. So banning them wouldn't do any harm. Apps takes too much space & data anyways, which is not needed to function.
China bans stuffs all the time for no reason and makes laws that makes it difficult for a foreign business stay in China.
China’s Anti-Espionage Law Raises Foreign Business Risk
A lot of companies are preparing to leave or left China already for like India or Vietnam. It's a slow transition, but it's happening.
Apple's iPhone factory shift has left a ghost town behind in China
Why Companies Are Exiting China And What Leaders Can Do About It
I mean. Why not?
Fisher said that Americans have a "fundamental interest" in working with the publisher or editor of their choice
Bruh. Did you really just throw away all of your Section 230 protections?
Game on, motherfucker.
It’s called a desperate gambit for survival.
What about Lenovo, Aliexpress, Xiaomi, Didi (It's famous in latam), BYD, NIO?
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit....
Didi (Chinese Uber) is very popular in Australia too.
I think it should depend on the software and what's being collected & shared, also where it's hosted.
While Lenovo has have some securities risk & concerns in the past. You can circumvented a lot by installing a fresh copy of windows or Linux. They don't really havest data or track you like TikTok does. There is no algorithm, no influence on politics or feeding propaganda.
I think TikTok would be okay, if Android had a better sandbox environment (like GrapheneOS), but google also wants your data..
Lenovo definitely deserves to be banned after that shit they pulled with the malicious root certificates.
Now do Facebook and Amazon
Fine then, ban all the Chinese spy apps
I'd rather they just ban spy apps in general...but that's a "dream a little dream, it's never gonna happen" type of thing.
And all the CIA ones.
And then block all cookies and tracking.
And all the CIA ones.
Let's hear some of those app names, you seem to have a few ready to fire off on a whim.
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
I bet you they can actually
Good call. Let's ban them both.
The part that actually describes how the ban would work is at least one hyperlink away from the article.
If ByteDance doesn't sell TikTok, app stores in the US would have to drop the app, and Internet hosting services would be prohibited from providing services that enable distribution of TikTok in the US. Companies that violate the prohibition would have to pay civil penalties.
(5) INTERNET HOSTING SERVICE.—The term “internet hosting service” means a service through which storage and computing resources are provided to an individual or organization for the accommodation and maintenance of 1 or more websites or online services, and which may include file hosting, domain name server hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private server hosting.
You can't spy on our citizens, that's our (and our corporations') job!
Signed, the US Government
Ban them too.
This thread has made me realize that while I was watching the hearings on it purely for comedy aspect, there were actually people out there being like, "Yeah that makes sense."
Love it when the government takes away our stuff. Please, take away more of our stuff. Love me that security theater.
If you don't like the app, just don't use it. Nationalism is a hell of a drug.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with data security and everything to do with other social media companies lobbying to eliminate a competitor, using anti-China sentiment and fear-mongering as a justification. It's all about the money.
Bet.
They're gonna ban anything that reveals the genocidal reality of zionism.
RT, AJ, TikTok, every honest/uncensorable app/news...
RT
Russia and Israel are deeply in bed together. RT has been as cagey about Israeli malfeasance as any NY/DC based publication.
AJ
Americans aren't going to ban the Qatari Paper of Record, even if it does occasionally get one of its Palestinian journalists fed into an Israeli meat grinder. The Qataris lobby our Congress almost as hard as the Israelis do.
TikTok
China Bad. Ban it.
I don't think you've commented in this thread enough.
/s