Bipartisan Group of Lawmakers Seek To Ban TikTok From the US (senate.gov) 122
A press release from the office of U.S. Senator Marco Rubio: TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is required by Chinese law to make the app's data available to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). From the FBI Director to FCC Commissioners to cybersecurity experts, everyone has made clear the risk of TikTok being used to spy on Americans. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced bipartisan legislation to ban TikTok from operating in the United States.
The Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act) would protect Americans by blocking and prohibiting all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern. U.S. Representatives Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) introduced companion legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act) would protect Americans by blocking and prohibiting all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern. U.S. Representatives Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) introduced companion legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Vine (Score:2)
TikTok is just a copy of Vine. Vine was a Twitter product. Congress should beg Musk to bring back Vine.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
What did Vine do wrong to not capture the short-scrolly-videos market?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
afaik vine had quite some success among youths ... it simply never went massively viral. having never used vine or tiktok, but having studied the phenomenon a tiny bit, i'd say vine was simply too early, tiktok was lucky in picking up exactly the right time.
it is often not so much about the technology, but about your target population being able, eager and in position to accept it. if you hit that sweet spot you hit the jackpot.
Re: So who's paying for this? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Somebody that doesn't want China to weaponize our morons against us with a social media app.
Yeah we do a good enough job of it ourselves!
Re: (Score:2)
well, the best bet would have been not to specifically educate them to be easily manipulable morons, but ... oh wait, that cuts both ways ...
anyway, it's too late. sit back and enjoy the shitshow.
Re: (Score:2)
or craft rules that govern all online social media companies and then not worry about tik tok or tok tik
Re: (Score:1)
TikTok is just a copy of Vine. Vine was a Twitter product. Congress should beg Musk to bring back Vine.
Musk is way too toxic to start anything new in social media (he'll be lucky if Twitter survives).
I doubt those apps are that hard to write, I'm sure there's already a half-dozen startups waiting on the off-chance that TikTok to gets the boot.
Re: (Score:2)
Reels already exists, from Meta - not exactly a fresh new kid on the block at this point. And maybe not much better than Bytedance is, in some respects, but I guess we'd prefer Big Brother at least be western? ;)
Re: Vine (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)d trust the CCP over Facebook any day
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
thanks chatgpt
Re: Vine (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
the US govt would want that data for reasons that will allow china to blackmail you for their reasons, good luck
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You know... except with their ability to *voluntarily* turn over relevant data to authorities that could use it against you.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
thats great, you just answered ops issue, nothing to see here, move along citizen.
Re: (Score:2)
Musk is way too toxic to start anything new in social media (he'll be lucky if Twitter survives).
I don't know, insanely self destructive implosion, driving off advertisers and users, and firing essential staff is something "new" for social media. I mean up until now it's all been about spending pointless money on unviable side projects. It takes some real skill to suicide in such a creative way.
Re: (Score:2)
He's already floated the idea of bringing it back.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/s... [twitter.com]
Re: (Score:2)
only so he can fire the staff that gets hired.
It's Too Late (Score:2, Insightful)
For all this nonsense. The U.S. has sold out its manufacturing base to China. This is just smoke and mirrors to make the American feel better about selling out. Everything we buy is tallied by the Chinese government, TikTok is the least of our worries.
Re: It's Too Late (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. Just let him die and hire a new guy, it's cheaper.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not as many as you'd like to think.
Yes, including inside the USA.
Re: (Score:3)
And indeed this is to be lamented deeply. Because what will replace it when everything is burned down by the extremists on the left and the right will be hellish indeed. Even if popular sentiment is to let it die and start over, what will replace the vestiges of democracy that we have now will be totalitarian in nature very certainly. The fact that this fact does not scare too many people these days, especially politicians, is very scary.
Re: (Score:3)
The main reason it does not scare me is that I have absolutely no way to avoid it. Yes, it will happen, yes, it will be horrible, yes, I can't do jack shit about it.
I tend to worry about things I can influence. Worrying about things I cannot is a waste of resources.
Re: (Score:2)
It is the nature of democracy to lead to corruption. Eventually the masses will vote for their own guillotines. Bread and circus and all that jazz.
Empires last an average of 250 years, eventually they collapse not from without, but from within. The hubris of modern civilization is this stranger belief that we have achieved the peak. That our current state is perfect and that it must be preserved at all costs.
For all we know, in two thousand years humanity will look back at democracy and laugh, thinking of t
Re: (Score:3)
The US hasn't cut an artery. They've shot themselves in the foot. And then the other foot. and then while limping to a hospital they fell over on the road and had their head run over by a car.
Now there's a bunch of people standing around the headless corpse in the morgue saying "maybe if we ban this one App he'll come back to life!"
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's why tiktok should be banned.
If we banned every medium which allowed people to say stupid things then we shouldn't stop at TikTok. Just turn off the entire internet.
And cable news while we're at it.
And newspapers.
And ban the sale of megaphones, or anything shaped like a cone.
TikTok is not a cause of anything that should be banned, and banning it will achieve absolutely nothing. It won't achieve anything with regards to influence on society, it won't achieve anything with regards to communication, and it won't achieve anything with rega
Too Little, not Too Late (Score:2)
You cut an artery and you're bleeding out. So you're saying you might as well bleed out?
No, he's saying that if you cut an artery and are bleeding out there is no point putting a band-aid over a minor scrape on your knee.
Re: (Score:1)
TikTok is information warfare by a foreign power. We knew this years ago. TikTok should have been banned long ago from the US. The EU would have likely followed suit in their nations. It could have kept China from making a major leap ahead in modern warfare.
But to your point, yes it's disturbing how much power the US government and industries have willingly given China over the years. Using them as a source of cheap shit is one thing, but moving virtually all manufacturing there, including whole entire indu
Re: (Score:2)
Such warfare, all those ADHD meme videos and dancing thirst trap girls.
Re: (Score:2)
are you implying that you dont see the downfall of society happening around you as we speak?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
and yet society is in a much worse place than its ever been
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
just compare the rules china applies to its tiktok vs the export version of tiktok. the truth is out there
Re: (Score:2)
but moving virtually all manufacturing there, including whole entire industries, was unforgiveable.
Nothing is unforgiveable. This was profitable for the super rich and therefore the right thing to do. That's the only concern in a western country. Now it's less profitable for the super rich, and that is the real concern. There is no right or wrong, forgivable or unforgivable, in politics. There is only greed.
It's influence, not spying (Score:2, Interesting)
For all this nonsense. The U.S. has sold out its manufacturing base to China. This is just smoke and mirrors to make the American feel better about selling out. Everything we buy is tallied by the Chinese government, TikTok is the least of our worries.
The problem with TikTok isn't spying, it's influence.
The social media companies have enormous power to influence what people think and how they act. As a simple example, it's well known that people seeing a "Vote!" icon are more likely to go out and vote in an election - making it possible for a social media company to influence an election by encouraging more voting from one side or the other.
That's a simple example, many more ways to influence people have been identified and studied, and it's common pract
Re: (Score:1)
Wut?
Did you not see what Twitter released over the last few days? It confirmed that they don't shadowban, and also that they weren't suppressing any political viewpoints.
It's fine to talk about this kind of thing and hypothesize that some random website does these things. Good on you for that. B
Re: It's influence, not spying (Score:3)
Whether or not you believe it was false beforehand, it's also already come out that they've shadowbanned the elonjet guy who was posting the location of Elon's travels.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what Twitter you mean (Score:3)
I don't know if Musk is actively doing all this, but at the very least he has said he was going to do it.
Looks like I was wrong (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing has come out implying Twitter shadowbans anything. The only thing that was confirmed was what we knew Twitter did already and they've always been public about, that they downrank some posters in search results due to fairly obvious factors.
read that again and think logically.
Re: (Score:3)
This is just smoke and mirrors to make the American feel better about selling out.
sorry, but how do you think elites get populaces to happily comply and nations to prosper? it has been always been smoke and mirrors all the way, in every case, us and china are just two notorious instances.
what i'm quite unsure about is that banning tiktok in the us will actually please the american populace. this might backfire big time!
Re: (Score:2)
It's mainly collapsing due to the extreme stupidity of their leadership and their "zero Covid" engineered disaster.
Re: (Score:2)
“Here is a man, a great patriot, whose generation defeated fascism and communism, cowering before Mexico, a country whose economy is less than one-tenth the size of our own.”
IT's a start.... (Score:3)
Getting rid of these two alone would be a HUGE start to making the US and the world in general a much nicer place.
Re: (Score:1)
USA!! USA!!
Re: (Score:2)
Why would they? Those are American!
Re: (Score:2)
Because in general, we had a more polite and tolerant society for speech than we have today.
The wing nuts at either end of the spectrum didn't get the amplification that they get today that drowns out the majority of folks....
Social media gives extremes a highly disproportionate sway over society.
Re: (Score:1)
People will still communicate, just some other way (and whatever sites replace Facebook could theoretically be even more unfriendly than Facebook, as unlikely as that seems). If we want to prevent international communication, persuasion, commerce, etc then we need to ban the internet itself.
Nuke all sites from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Re: IT's a start.... (Score:2)
Much as I despise US tech giants and avoid them like the plague (remember Cambridge Analytica?), I don't see banning as an option.
The current proposal doesn't seem specifically targeted at one service, but has a broad scope for services from any country they don't like. Dragnet much?
Cos, you know, who's next on the ban list? Mastodon? Telegram? Any competition from abroad that threatens the status quo, that aspires to break the US monopoly?
Is this like banning books? (Score:1)
Isn't this simply censorship?
Re: (Score:3)
Even if you don't like Communism, banning its influence is a form of censorship. Definitely not the first time the US has done something like this, but this does not uphold the spirit of free speech - whether by the company or by the people who choose to use it.
At this point, singling out TikTok is just weird. It's not like they make security camera systems, make networking equipment that handle Internet traffic, manufacture motherboards for phones and laptops that contain cameras, or anything else that o
Re:Is this like banning books? (Score:5, Funny)
No, it is preventing undo influence by an enemy state on US citizens. The Chinese govt can and does use this to sway the populace....they control what gets shown and promoted...all to drive Chinese interests and/or sow discord internally in the US.
This is trying to disrupt a Chinese psy-ops operation on a nationwide level.
Re: (Score:2)
they control what gets shown and promoted...all to drive Chinese interests and/or sow discord internally in the US.
Dance videos and butter boards aren't sowing dissent anywhere, bud.
Re:Is this like banning books? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you have evidence that the Chinese government are controlling what gets shown and promoted on US tiktok? Or are you just making that up?
Note that if you keep calling a country an enemy state, and acting accordingly, then that will eventually come true, as you paint the other country into a corner, and there will be a war, and it will have been your fault.
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't new.
Re: Is this like banning books? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes.
Re: (Score:2)
lol, China "Communism" - Marx would die in open rebellion to overthrow it.
I have nothing against communism, my ancestors pretty much created it, but what they have/had in Russia, China, North Korea, etc. is hardly Marx's dream. Dictatorships are not what Marx intended. My ancestors were Mennonites, and God was their central belief... most Communists reject God, so, um ouch? I'm terrible at religion, personally, but the irony makes me laugh.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a charged word that means a lot different than whoever coined the word. As a general ideology, communism, socialism, and capitalism could all work fine alone or together but they all have terrible consequences by the people who implement them. Mostly because the root issue isn't politics but having a society with people that are selfish rather purely altruistic. And that's not something that well-intentioned people can ever control or fix, and the malevolent people will always find a way to get invol
Re: (Score:2)
No different than keeping porn, alcohol and cigarettes away from kids.
Kudos (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I read the summary and couldn't help but think back to this Red Dwarf gem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Lawmakers may be useless, but at least they are linguistic geniuses.
Oh no (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
What will my sister-in-law, the one-woman unpaid misinformation troll farm, do all day now!?
Open up a Facebook account. Don't worry, no one is against misinformation, providing that is it comes from an American platform.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Work for Fox News
Do they really pay someone for that? (Score:2)
Is there some guy or even committee that gets paid to come up with spiffy acronyms for these things? Or does that involve moving a metric ton of creativity powder through some noses?
Re: (Score:2)
This is the USA! We don't use no stinking metric units here! We use tried and true imperial tons of creativity powder!
Re: (Score:2)
You know GPT was a secret congressional tool sponsored by DARPA before it was released to the public.
Facebook (Score:2)
I never ever user Tik Tok, nor I plan do use it in the foreseeable future. Still, I think Facebook if more evil and more dangerous for the society.
I don't get it (Score:3)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
I get that the Chinese government could spy on its users, but I don't get why they'd particularly care about what dance videos people watch.
I'm not saying that I all-the-way believe it...but the theory I've heard floating around is that Chinese Tiktok showcases more helpful or aspirational things, like "how to perform CPR" or "look at this awesome science experiment" or things of that nature. Individually, sure, it probably isn't single-handedly encouraging any one person to do something, but in aggregate, when videos go viral based on STEM things, it incentivizes those things.
By contrast, American Tiktok showcases not only dances (while fun, ultimately unhelpful), but more dangerous challenges that have caused actual-harm. There was that one about putting a quarter on electrical prongs and plugging the cord in, then there was the one where people did that high voltage artwork with a magnetron, plus a zillion more. More insidiously, Tiktok amplifies more poliarized political posts; the far-left and far-right help to amplify the perceived divide between 'us' and 'them', making it that much easier for things to destabilize.
It's not that China is interested in [user] watching [video], though there's at least some possibility that such data would be of interested for celebrities or politicians (view one too many of the wrong kind of pr0n and the viewing history suddenly becomes useful), but to have the upcoming generation of Chinese teens be focused on STEM and the upcoming generation of American teens focused on entertainment is helpful as a long game. ...not saying I believe it, but I'm just laying the case out for your consideration.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure I'd buy that either. IMHO, the kids who go into STEM are the ones who are intrinsically nerdy anyway (myself included) and find dance videos boring.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not really a platform that only hosts dance videos. It is also a platform that people use to disseminate political views.
Bad idea (Score:1)
As much as I agree with the idea that tiktoc is harmful and shouldn't be used, I'm 100% against the government taking this action against it.
What they SHOULD do, instead, is work together on an education campaign which shows parents why children shouldn't be given access to tiktoc, or indeed kept off smart phones and tablets almost entirely. This would have a knock on effect of healing some of the toxicity that exists between the various political tribes, as well, so win/win.
US apparently desires war with China (Score:2)
It's bound to flare up at some point or other.
By defining someone as your adversary, they will become your adversary, whether that was the prior reality or not.
Re: (Score:2)
By what moral principle... (Score:2)
Does the government acquire the newly-invented right to ban people in the USA from telling the Chinese government they really like disco-ball filter overlays and lip-syncing to Taylor Swift?
Clearly just posturing. Not how US law works. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
isn't banning an app a form of censorship? (Score:2)
Isn't it illegal for the government to censor free expression?
Re: (Score:2)
Showing users videos is free speech. Collecting their cell phone locations and sending these to a foreign spy agency is not speech and can be regulated by different rules. If tiktok gives up these permissions, they should be allowed to stay.
Re: (Score:2)
Sending user data to a "company" is speech. What tiktok collects is user data -- not a state secret. Unless they prove that what tiktok sends to China is *ILLEGAL*,, as in "it's a state secret", they have no right to ban their operation.
Problem is not TikTok per se, but the content (Score:2)
The content is no different than a drug. Facebook, instagram and youtube content should be regulated similarly, as a drug.
Somewhat gave that acronym a lot of thought (Score:2)
I'd bet that more time was spent on coming up with that than was spent on the content of the legislation.
acronyms (Score:2)
the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act = Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act
IT probably took 10 staffers several weeks to come up with that acronym. Impressive, but still...
If not free then regulate? (Score:2)
I'm curious why a bunch of neoliberals and consertatives aren't letting the free market handle this. Isn't that what the free market is supposed to be good for?