This is another person who fails to understand that 'under direction/control' is a well-known legal term of art with particular definitions and strict judicial scrutiny, and is either ignorantly or willfully misreading the bill.
The question wasn't rhetorical - I'm not necessarily against the bill - I just want to know if it will work? Sure, lock your front door, but it is fair to ask "do we expect this to work if we don't lock the other 5 doors" and "are we dealing with a home owner who has a long history of implementing shallow, ineffective solutions - often for other, less good reasons - and then pretending like the problem is fixed, because they passed the FIXIT law, and look, "fix" is right there in the name, why should we ever look at its effectiveness or possible side effects?"
Details matter. If they divest, new management is put in place from e.g. Oracle or Amazon, and the algorithm is worked on from there without additional feedback or communication with ByteDance, it should be workable. You'd have to do some amount of turnover of employees and leadership, of course.
Definitely, I'm just trying to work through exactly those details of what would happen in my head, (and your post covers a ton of just that!) and what effect they would have on say, those numbers about pro/con engagement re: Gaza. Would the new management have an incentive to change where the thumbs are being placed? Would it change the numbers? Would those number changes cause downstream effects in opinions, or activism? If new management said "we are just gonna keep the same numbers, because we think it's profitable" then.... what? Or choose not to divest, and then just offer it via other channels with the same policies, which will reduce the badness by.... 5%, 20%?
My position is kinda like Cowen's - I think we do not have a good enough model of how this works, and that worries me. I think I'm fine with a limited bill that targets only limited types of things "controlled" by the CCP, but I'm getting "flipping a bunch of levers and switches to fix a bug" feelings from this.
I mean I'd like a better model of how this works and the way we get it is to get our hands on... the model that determines how this works! Of course we should also run actual experiments. But also I can speculate on a bunch of that.
The algorithm is going to have some built-in long-term biases and landmines (e.g. Taiwan, Tibet, etc) but mostly one must assume that it is being reactive and real time fine tuned, and any systematic bias like that is easy to find and then presumably undo. The bias with Israel could have been a snowball effect that happened on its own, but probably was China/ByteDance doing it on purpose because that PoV undermines America's position and prestige and thus helps China (regardless of what is right or true or anti-semitic etc).
On the question of how much it matters, I think it should be obvious it matters. We're talking price, and that price is rising over time, and also a lot of that price is background beliefs and heuristics and associations that get baked in and compounded over time, and also they could save their big plays for when it really matters. I think my answer is 'it matters enough.'
I think if you are worried about overreach in your or Tyler's position, the correct thing to do is figure out what the right bill is that addresses the issue in the most liberty-preserving way possible, rather than to generically say 'more research is needed' and 'model this' and 'beware' and thus suggest doing nothing. This issue has been here for years, and this indeed seems like a bold attempt at a better bill in that sense. What would be better still?
One thing I can think of is to give ByteDance another 'out' if they, for example, open source the algorithm and provide proof they can't access customer information and that the app doesn't track location and so on. But of course, it's moot in practice, because they wouldn't comply.
"thus suggest doing nothing" and I do not. More accurately I am in the "What would be better still?" camp.
I think the core of my worry is this: this is a foreign policy action, and FP is always a slave to domestic demands, which is why the bill seems carefully limited to make domestic interests happy: the "China hawks," "disinfo crowd", "Americans who still want to get tiktok at the website", "American TT competitors" and "whatever company would buy TT if divested" , and importantly do nothing more.
I think you (and others) are looking at this from a game theory foreign policy perspective, and I think that is the right way if you want the most effective action, but you haven't convinced congress of that, because they simply want domestic political capital, they're word associating "China" and "tiktok" and "propaganda bad" and they have crafted a bill that provides the barest minimum of effective action (in a sufficiently simplistic, heavy-handed manner they hope they can't screw up the implementation of) that may indeed move the needle 10 pts closer to "good" - in a way that benefits domestic factions. And because benefitting domestic factions is always the overriding goal, the bill is crafted to do that, I am skeptical that it will be effective enough at "stopping evil CCP propaganda." As you say: "This issue has been here for years" - if fixing the issue were the goal, instead of "earning domestic political capital" then it would be really weird that they come up with the fix now - when domestic factions suddenly bring it up - instead of all those years were it was just a huge problem, but with no votes to win.
If it will have good outcomes, then great, let's take what we can get and pass it. But the gov will absolutely put up a big MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner and promptly do nothing useful on the topic ever again. Unless... because FP serves domestic goals, the only way to get them to align is if there were some sufficiently influential domestic faction(s) laser focused on the high level concept of "demand the best possible foreign policy w.r.t. to China" because I think you're right: "they could save their big plays for when it really matters" and if we declare victory by preventing their small plays only...
That's my answer to "What would be better still?": raise the influence of that faction. And as for specifics of the FP that faction should demand, I think one that was serious about peacefully winning the Ice Cold War so it doesn't become WW3 would approach this very differently. Do we actually want to *win* (with positive benefits for the citizens of both nations) or do we want to take the Most Hesitant Action That Sparkles With All The Girls?
Remember that weird article in Bloomberg a few years back saying they had proof that China was putting tiny physical spy chips on boards? Turns out maybe they were wrong, but I think it provides the perfect analogy for this: those charts you post about 80:1 gaza/israel ratios is sufficient proof - they (and others) originally convinced me (I remember asking Tim Lee about it a few years ago about whether there was proof they had their finger on the scale) that TT was a problem. There's probably a lot more. Find it - let TT keep operating however they want and just expose it, not just "find out" - but run a full Voice of America reverse propaganda on it. Buy ads on TT pointing it out, as a PSA. I *would* be 100% in favor of a "retaliatory tariff" style demand that looked like "you can't ban FB/twitter/etc..." or else we'll ban TT. And again, trumpet this around the world: all those little countries that took Chinese Belt and Road loans are now discovering the fine print, and are not happy. Give them more info about how China was propagandizing to their citizens to inform their future decisions. If there *had been* little spy chips on the boards and we could prove it? Wouldn't making a big deal about that be a real victory that would have crushed those companies, whether you banned them or not? Turns out, they may not have been, but if we are convinced the data that shows the CCP is cheating here is true, then it's just as powerful.
Give the info to American competitors to run on their sites - and key feature: in all the countries other than the US where TT operates, which wouldn't be affected by this bill. You said in a comment below, if you were the CCP: "I would also be careful not to overplay my hand, to avoid exactly what is happening now" but they're already overplayed it - we just aren't using that leverage against them. The problem is "The CCP runs evil propaganda that brainwashes kids around the world and convinces them of bad stuff" and our solution is "we'll ask them to divest, and then ban them in the US - other than the website that we'll leave up, still containing all that evil propaganda." Oh, yes, decisive action in the face of evil. Definitely the actions of a group of legislators who have grasped the dimensions of the problem.
Surely our intelligence agencies can find one credible example of a Chinese-American using TT, getting their info stolen, sent back to CCP HQ and it resulting in harm to their relatives back home. Is there a single marketing exec in the country that couldn't turn that into a far more deadly blow to TT use outside China?
That they (the CCP) did this is a gigantic PR disaster that makes them look horrible to everyone on the planet. We should ruthlessly trumpet that - just we should have about the low quality vaccine they released to distribute to other nations to score PR points - and never stop letting them put their foot on the rake. If the bill ends merely in banning TT in the US - and in a way that is also obviously (to other nations) a demand to give a valuable business asset to us, rather than a principled attack on the actual wrong-doing - but letting it operate on the website and in every other country, without *also* taking up the massive PR cudgel that heavy-handed CCP PR morons handed us and metaphorically beating them about the head with it - that's just laziness. But congress isn't trying to win this, they're just try to win the next election, and the people who would benefit by *really* fixing the harms of communist propaganda aren't threatening to not vote for them if they don't.
I'm skeptical that TikTok being restricted to a website would be a substantial enough barrier. It *is* a trivial inconvenience, which harms their userbase, but 'press button in the top corner to add it to your home page' is easy. A trivial inconvenience would have more effect if it had been introduced early on, I expect they're already well past the point of having a large enough network that it won't have remotely enough effect.
Of course, it would make it harder to get information off the device, which is a benefit. But the arguments for propaganda still apply quite strongly, and there's likely quite a bit of information you can still get then.
As someone who has tried to bring a product to market, the decline in effective reach is pretty large, even if it seems like it shouldn't be, and network effects amplify that.
Would this apply to say a video game, owned 20% by Tencent, who had over 1m active users, and operated a forum for user discussion that uses the same account the users use in game? Not the primary purpose, but seems to fit the description.
I thought only the parent company existing in a state that's a threat is what makes it count? Not that ByteDance is deemed a threat but China is. Tencent is also Chinese.
That is a necessary precondition, which means the President could declare one of them a threat, and start the process of 30 days of debate, etc. But if they tried to do this with Riot Games or GGG the public would presumably know that this was BS and react badly, and also they could be taken to court.
"It has been known for some time that a voter calling their congressperson’s office, or writing a letter to their congressperson, has an oversized impact"
You sort of dig into this, but this is true only precisely because the congressperson knows that it requires high intent and motivation for people to do this. The moment that said congressperson realizes that all the calls are only because *someone made it easy to call*, the effect would have to disappear.
Exactly right. It would still be impressive if you got a million people to do it, but it wouldn't be a million times as impressive as one call. The more organic, the higher the value.
I'm all for getting rid of social media, particularly TikTok, because of the "poisoning children's minds" argument (attention span, the Algorithm, etc), although I'd prefer it if people chose to quit instead of being forced to. But if the concern is about "national security" and elections in particular, isn't it odd that the 2016 narrative "foreign adversary uses social media to influence elections" repeats in 2024, just with China taking Russia's place as the boogeyman?
Frankly, to me it sounds like USG admitting that TikTok is the only platform they cannot strongarm into placing thumbs on scales in a way that benefits USG (Twitter, YouTube and their ilk are obviously compromised). If that's true, imo the world needs more such entities, not less.
I probably should have added a disclaimer that I'm not an American. To an outsider, CCP propaganda and USG propaganda taste the same.
And because I don't have a dog in the US-China fight, I'm looking at things from a purely personal perspective. Whose spyware is more likely to ruin my life if I'm not careful? Which social (and traditional) media are biased on topics that I find relevant and engage in information suppression?
My point was that we need social media that don't collaborate with any governments, but that's a pipe dream.
If I was the CCP and had the ability, I would use TikTok to spread anxiety, mental illnesses and other socially destabilizing memes among US young people. I certainly wouldn’t stop at suppressing talk about tianenmen square.
TikTok is already banned in China, right? It's kind of weird how obviously asymmetric the situation is.
In some sense I'm against banning TikTok but I find it very hard to have sympathy for them after all the troubles I have had dealing with Chinese censorship and miscellanous-internet-breaking in my tech career. They lost my support after I fielded my 100th "why doesn't your software work right in China" user complaint.
1. Does this require a presidential determination for divestiture even in the case of Tiktok? Should trump win in 2024, such a determination would be unlikely before a divestiture/ban is imposed.
2. Does this apply to WeChat? Given there are 4.2MM Chinese in the US, it's likely that there are more than a million users of Wechat in the US. Seems like a bad thing to ban since it's used primarily for the diaspora to connect with each other and their families and it's not clear if there's an alternative that's not banned in either China or the US.
Neither are sufficiently good reasons to oppose this bill though.
1. Yes, the president has to approve the sale and its terms. Schedule would no doubt be tight. But also, if the 'ban' went into effect for a short period, TikTok could continue to operate in the meantime without being in app stores or being upgraded, I think.
2. I think it would qualify if and only if it was declared a security threat to America. Given how it is used in practice I doubt this would happen under current conditions, but in something closer to an actual war, maybe? But also in that scenario that decision doesn't seem crazy.
I'm curious if you could create a general definition of an adversarial state that includes China but doesn't include states we generally like.
"Spies on us" includes just about every state capable of running an intelligence agency. That includes our allies. It also includes us from the perspective of our allies.
"Politically repressive" seems irrelevant from a foreign policy perspective, and also ropes in a whole lot of other states. Canada froze bank accounts of its dissidents. The list of banned political parties is quite long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_political_parties.
"Has a big military" would include India.
I'm married to a Chinese woman, have visited many times, and I just don't see it. The most anti-American thing I've ever observed is a local party official gloating about the richness of Shandong drinking culture, and that America has nothing comparable. No, I didn't tell him about beer pong. I see far more anti-Chinese sentiment in America, like wanting to ban their apps and restrict Chinese people from buying property.
It seems like people are stuck in the Cold War and think that the country being run by a communist party necessarily implies they must be our adversary. In the 1970's when China was still trying to push global revolution I'd have agreed, but they don't do that now, and haven't for decades.
In general, the full answer is that you should be worried about those countries and apply restrictions to them too. However, governments are often lacking in partial bargaining solutions: it is hard to have a strong deal that "if you spy on our citizens / manipulate them / are bad according to our values, we'll use various methods to make that more costly for you, and we expect you to do this to us too. Since we both want to do some spying on each other just for safety, then we just decide to have the tarrifs or whatnot cancel out to the extent we do the same magnitude/significance of negative actions". Getting a nice bargaining solution like that is challenging for politics.
I also think you underestimate how much anti-American sentiment there is based on interactions I've had with Chinese people. I don't consider that purely representative based on how I met many of them, but I also don't expect most people to casually mention anti-American sentiment in most conversations (just like in America, there isn't that much casual mention, you see it because you join political conversations!)
But even then, China is throwing its weight around more than India or the like. Ala the Great Firewall, forcing companies to censor themselves significantly, or you know a big social media company called TikTok that is accumulating far more information than typical and is a prime tool for information control.
I'd be a lot more skeptical of banning TikTok were there free social media access everywhere, but there isn't.
I agree it is hard to have a neat definition of an adversarial state, but that's because our social setup and laws make it a lot easier (and encourage) a sharper classification. Ideally we'd have fully general bargaining and then the only distinction is how much they're acting out against us (or others, because ideally such a ruling is used to protect smaller nations too, but managing that properly is a challenge).
“ I see far more anti-Chinese sentiment in America, like wanting to ban their apps and restrict Chinese people from buying property.”
China has already banned all social media apps and has much stronger restrictions on foreign property ownership than the US. You need some better examples.
I'm wondering whether this bill would preclude the outcome of: (1) spinning out TikTok w/o the algorithm to American investors, (2) ByteDance licenses the algo back to New TikTok and provides it as a service, (3) New TikTok is basically American owned but CCP still pulls the strings through manipulating the algo, maybe still has backdoor to user data. Not sure if "merely" licensing the algo would be construed as "subject to the control" for purposes of the bill; but if the algo is highly sensitive IP used by other ByteDance applications (e.g., Douyin) then there's reason to believe that they wouldn't outright sell that part of the business. And presumably, without the algo, New TikTok would lose engagement and blow up the biz...
I presume that if they were implementing a de facto black box algorithm issued from ByteDance that would be unacceptable and would not qualify as divestiture, although I can imagine a president (e.g. Trump) deciding to pretend it wasn't happening.
'The algorithm' is key but you could use the version that exists right now and then work from there, plenty of people happy to work on it, ByteDance is not uniquely qualified here. I think TikTok would be fine doing this under (e.g.) Oracle or Amazon.
I think you really failed to engage with the Cowen critique. Look, if they're doing something illegal, the remedy to that should be to prosecute them for doing the illegal thing. They should be be able to defend themselves against that prosecution in court. On what principle do we deny them this opportunity?
Anything that is "illegal" is illegal because a law was made against it, because the action was something we as a society (or our government) didn't like. Whether they are currently doing something illegal is irrelevant - it will be illegal once this bill passes.
The correct question is, are they doing something we should reasonably think is bad? I think Zvi engaged with that question quite a bit.
Only when it comes to Americans. The courts have always been scattered, at best, at granting Constitutional protections to non-citizens living or working in America.
It does undermine our self image as a nation of laws where the government can't grief you because you're unpopular.
The Constitution forbids bills of attainders for this reason. It's not a fair system if the law gets crafted to punish one particular guy that 50% + 1 of the legislature doesn't like.
Also why retroactively applied laws have higher levels of scrutiny applied to them.
How does prosecuting espionage through the courts work generally? say there's a really clear-cut case of Russian hackers stealing classified documents, where it can be easily proved which hacking group did it - they're still *in Russia*, you might not be able to tie their online ID to a specific meatspace ID, and good luck "proving beyond reasonable doubt" that the Kremlin is behind it, even if *obviously* the Kremlin is behind it, the hackers do their hacking 9-5 in Moscow (and more generally organised crime in Russia is tightly linked to the security apparatus of the state).
Similarly, in the TIktok example, the entity who would be accused of spying is the Chinese intelligence agency, so formal prosecution would be purely a political stunt; actually banning the attack vector is significantly more meaningful!
The phrasing of the comparison of Vivek posts ('Here's February 26 and here's March 8') is slightly misleading because the February post is in February 2023 and the March post is in March 2024. Obviously still a significant change but the phrasing seems unfair.
There is a certain kind of journalist (Michael Tracey is an example, also Glenn Greenwald etc.) that is well aware that if the US government was able to censor journalists, they would be the first targets. So of course they're against any form of censorship -- their business model completely depends on no government censorship.
The whole Twitter rules thing showed that, despite the First Amendment, the US government was pressuring the technology companies to censor stuff. So, of course these journalist are nervous, and see non-US media as maybe their only hope when all US media is censored,
(Mind you, given that it appears that government agencies are willing to ignore the US constitution to shut these guys up, there are way worse things that could happen to them)
Now, if these guys were just in favour of the US constitution, rule of law, and freedom of the press I could totally understand that. But, to be in favour of the former and support .. Trump ... that Trump? Is harder to understand.
This is another person who fails to understand that 'under direction/control' is a well-known legal term of art with particular definitions and strict judicial scrutiny, and is either ignorantly or willfully misreading the bill.
Do we think a divested TikTok would be free of censorship/propaganda that the CCP approves of? Why?
Locking your front door doesn't mean your house won't get robbed, but it's insane to take any other security measures before locking your front door.
The question wasn't rhetorical - I'm not necessarily against the bill - I just want to know if it will work? Sure, lock your front door, but it is fair to ask "do we expect this to work if we don't lock the other 5 doors" and "are we dealing with a home owner who has a long history of implementing shallow, ineffective solutions - often for other, less good reasons - and then pretending like the problem is fixed, because they passed the FIXIT law, and look, "fix" is right there in the name, why should we ever look at its effectiveness or possible side effects?"
Details matter. If they divest, new management is put in place from e.g. Oracle or Amazon, and the algorithm is worked on from there without additional feedback or communication with ByteDance, it should be workable. You'd have to do some amount of turnover of employees and leadership, of course.
Definitely, I'm just trying to work through exactly those details of what would happen in my head, (and your post covers a ton of just that!) and what effect they would have on say, those numbers about pro/con engagement re: Gaza. Would the new management have an incentive to change where the thumbs are being placed? Would it change the numbers? Would those number changes cause downstream effects in opinions, or activism? If new management said "we are just gonna keep the same numbers, because we think it's profitable" then.... what? Or choose not to divest, and then just offer it via other channels with the same policies, which will reduce the badness by.... 5%, 20%?
My position is kinda like Cowen's - I think we do not have a good enough model of how this works, and that worries me. I think I'm fine with a limited bill that targets only limited types of things "controlled" by the CCP, but I'm getting "flipping a bunch of levers and switches to fix a bug" feelings from this.
I mean I'd like a better model of how this works and the way we get it is to get our hands on... the model that determines how this works! Of course we should also run actual experiments. But also I can speculate on a bunch of that.
The algorithm is going to have some built-in long-term biases and landmines (e.g. Taiwan, Tibet, etc) but mostly one must assume that it is being reactive and real time fine tuned, and any systematic bias like that is easy to find and then presumably undo. The bias with Israel could have been a snowball effect that happened on its own, but probably was China/ByteDance doing it on purpose because that PoV undermines America's position and prestige and thus helps China (regardless of what is right or true or anti-semitic etc).
On the question of how much it matters, I think it should be obvious it matters. We're talking price, and that price is rising over time, and also a lot of that price is background beliefs and heuristics and associations that get baked in and compounded over time, and also they could save their big plays for when it really matters. I think my answer is 'it matters enough.'
I think if you are worried about overreach in your or Tyler's position, the correct thing to do is figure out what the right bill is that addresses the issue in the most liberty-preserving way possible, rather than to generically say 'more research is needed' and 'model this' and 'beware' and thus suggest doing nothing. This issue has been here for years, and this indeed seems like a bold attempt at a better bill in that sense. What would be better still?
One thing I can think of is to give ByteDance another 'out' if they, for example, open source the algorithm and provide proof they can't access customer information and that the app doesn't track location and so on. But of course, it's moot in practice, because they wouldn't comply.
"thus suggest doing nothing" and I do not. More accurately I am in the "What would be better still?" camp.
I think the core of my worry is this: this is a foreign policy action, and FP is always a slave to domestic demands, which is why the bill seems carefully limited to make domestic interests happy: the "China hawks," "disinfo crowd", "Americans who still want to get tiktok at the website", "American TT competitors" and "whatever company would buy TT if divested" , and importantly do nothing more.
I think you (and others) are looking at this from a game theory foreign policy perspective, and I think that is the right way if you want the most effective action, but you haven't convinced congress of that, because they simply want domestic political capital, they're word associating "China" and "tiktok" and "propaganda bad" and they have crafted a bill that provides the barest minimum of effective action (in a sufficiently simplistic, heavy-handed manner they hope they can't screw up the implementation of) that may indeed move the needle 10 pts closer to "good" - in a way that benefits domestic factions. And because benefitting domestic factions is always the overriding goal, the bill is crafted to do that, I am skeptical that it will be effective enough at "stopping evil CCP propaganda." As you say: "This issue has been here for years" - if fixing the issue were the goal, instead of "earning domestic political capital" then it would be really weird that they come up with the fix now - when domestic factions suddenly bring it up - instead of all those years were it was just a huge problem, but with no votes to win.
If it will have good outcomes, then great, let's take what we can get and pass it. But the gov will absolutely put up a big MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner and promptly do nothing useful on the topic ever again. Unless... because FP serves domestic goals, the only way to get them to align is if there were some sufficiently influential domestic faction(s) laser focused on the high level concept of "demand the best possible foreign policy w.r.t. to China" because I think you're right: "they could save their big plays for when it really matters" and if we declare victory by preventing their small plays only...
That's my answer to "What would be better still?": raise the influence of that faction. And as for specifics of the FP that faction should demand, I think one that was serious about peacefully winning the Ice Cold War so it doesn't become WW3 would approach this very differently. Do we actually want to *win* (with positive benefits for the citizens of both nations) or do we want to take the Most Hesitant Action That Sparkles With All The Girls?
Remember that weird article in Bloomberg a few years back saying they had proof that China was putting tiny physical spy chips on boards? Turns out maybe they were wrong, but I think it provides the perfect analogy for this: those charts you post about 80:1 gaza/israel ratios is sufficient proof - they (and others) originally convinced me (I remember asking Tim Lee about it a few years ago about whether there was proof they had their finger on the scale) that TT was a problem. There's probably a lot more. Find it - let TT keep operating however they want and just expose it, not just "find out" - but run a full Voice of America reverse propaganda on it. Buy ads on TT pointing it out, as a PSA. I *would* be 100% in favor of a "retaliatory tariff" style demand that looked like "you can't ban FB/twitter/etc..." or else we'll ban TT. And again, trumpet this around the world: all those little countries that took Chinese Belt and Road loans are now discovering the fine print, and are not happy. Give them more info about how China was propagandizing to their citizens to inform their future decisions. If there *had been* little spy chips on the boards and we could prove it? Wouldn't making a big deal about that be a real victory that would have crushed those companies, whether you banned them or not? Turns out, they may not have been, but if we are convinced the data that shows the CCP is cheating here is true, then it's just as powerful.
Give the info to American competitors to run on their sites - and key feature: in all the countries other than the US where TT operates, which wouldn't be affected by this bill. You said in a comment below, if you were the CCP: "I would also be careful not to overplay my hand, to avoid exactly what is happening now" but they're already overplayed it - we just aren't using that leverage against them. The problem is "The CCP runs evil propaganda that brainwashes kids around the world and convinces them of bad stuff" and our solution is "we'll ask them to divest, and then ban them in the US - other than the website that we'll leave up, still containing all that evil propaganda." Oh, yes, decisive action in the face of evil. Definitely the actions of a group of legislators who have grasped the dimensions of the problem.
Surely our intelligence agencies can find one credible example of a Chinese-American using TT, getting their info stolen, sent back to CCP HQ and it resulting in harm to their relatives back home. Is there a single marketing exec in the country that couldn't turn that into a far more deadly blow to TT use outside China?
That they (the CCP) did this is a gigantic PR disaster that makes them look horrible to everyone on the planet. We should ruthlessly trumpet that - just we should have about the low quality vaccine they released to distribute to other nations to score PR points - and never stop letting them put their foot on the rake. If the bill ends merely in banning TT in the US - and in a way that is also obviously (to other nations) a demand to give a valuable business asset to us, rather than a principled attack on the actual wrong-doing - but letting it operate on the website and in every other country, without *also* taking up the massive PR cudgel that heavy-handed CCP PR morons handed us and metaphorically beating them about the head with it - that's just laziness. But congress isn't trying to win this, they're just try to win the next election, and the people who would benefit by *really* fixing the harms of communist propaganda aren't threatening to not vote for them if they don't.
I've created a market about the website being banned within the US: https://manifold.markets/nsokolsky/will-i-be-able-to-open-tiktokcom-fr
Good summary post :)
I'm skeptical that TikTok being restricted to a website would be a substantial enough barrier. It *is* a trivial inconvenience, which harms their userbase, but 'press button in the top corner to add it to your home page' is easy. A trivial inconvenience would have more effect if it had been introduced early on, I expect they're already well past the point of having a large enough network that it won't have remotely enough effect.
Of course, it would make it harder to get information off the device, which is a benefit. But the arguments for propaganda still apply quite strongly, and there's likely quite a bit of information you can still get then.
As someone who has tried to bring a product to market, the decline in effective reach is pretty large, even if it seems like it shouldn't be, and network effects amplify that.
Would this apply to say a video game, owned 20% by Tencent, who had over 1m active users, and operated a forum for user discussion that uses the same account the users use in game? Not the primary purpose, but seems to fit the description.
It would have to be deemed a threat to the national security of the United States. In which case... maybe?
I have a feeling we are talking about Grinding Gear Games, and in fact, Tencent owns 50% of them.
I think this would be easily solved by GGG simply deleting its forums. Which they would obviously instantly do, rather than be banned in the US.
I thought only the parent company existing in a state that's a threat is what makes it count? Not that ByteDance is deemed a threat but China is. Tencent is also Chinese.
They own 50% of Grinding Gear Games
100% of Riot Games
51% of Fatshark
Likely many many others.
That is a necessary precondition, which means the President could declare one of them a threat, and start the process of 30 days of debate, etc. But if they tried to do this with Riot Games or GGG the public would presumably know that this was BS and react badly, and also they could be taken to court.
"It has been known for some time that a voter calling their congressperson’s office, or writing a letter to their congressperson, has an oversized impact"
You sort of dig into this, but this is true only precisely because the congressperson knows that it requires high intent and motivation for people to do this. The moment that said congressperson realizes that all the calls are only because *someone made it easy to call*, the effect would have to disappear.
Exactly right. It would still be impressive if you got a million people to do it, but it wouldn't be a million times as impressive as one call. The more organic, the higher the value.
I'm all for getting rid of social media, particularly TikTok, because of the "poisoning children's minds" argument (attention span, the Algorithm, etc), although I'd prefer it if people chose to quit instead of being forced to. But if the concern is about "national security" and elections in particular, isn't it odd that the 2016 narrative "foreign adversary uses social media to influence elections" repeats in 2024, just with China taking Russia's place as the boogeyman?
Frankly, to me it sounds like USG admitting that TikTok is the only platform they cannot strongarm into placing thumbs on scales in a way that benefits USG (Twitter, YouTube and their ilk are obviously compromised). If that's true, imo the world needs more such entities, not less.
So to be clear, we instead need social media that benefits the CCP? Insane argument
I probably should have added a disclaimer that I'm not an American. To an outsider, CCP propaganda and USG propaganda taste the same.
And because I don't have a dog in the US-China fight, I'm looking at things from a purely personal perspective. Whose spyware is more likely to ruin my life if I'm not careful? Which social (and traditional) media are biased on topics that I find relevant and engage in information suppression?
My point was that we need social media that don't collaborate with any governments, but that's a pipe dream.
If I was the CCP and had the ability, I would use TikTok to spread anxiety, mental illnesses and other socially destabilizing memes among US young people. I certainly wouldn’t stop at suppressing talk about tianenmen square.
I would use it to my advantage, but I would also be careful not to overplay my hand, to avoid exactly what is happening now. Play the long game.
TikTok is already banned in China, right? It's kind of weird how obviously asymmetric the situation is.
In some sense I'm against banning TikTok but I find it very hard to have sympathy for them after all the troubles I have had dealing with Chinese censorship and miscellanous-internet-breaking in my tech career. They lost my support after I fielded my 100th "why doesn't your software work right in China" user complaint.
Two important questions:
1. Does this require a presidential determination for divestiture even in the case of Tiktok? Should trump win in 2024, such a determination would be unlikely before a divestiture/ban is imposed.
2. Does this apply to WeChat? Given there are 4.2MM Chinese in the US, it's likely that there are more than a million users of Wechat in the US. Seems like a bad thing to ban since it's used primarily for the diaspora to connect with each other and their families and it's not clear if there's an alternative that's not banned in either China or the US.
Neither are sufficiently good reasons to oppose this bill though.
1. Yes, the president has to approve the sale and its terms. Schedule would no doubt be tight. But also, if the 'ban' went into effect for a short period, TikTok could continue to operate in the meantime without being in app stores or being upgraded, I think.
2. I think it would qualify if and only if it was declared a security threat to America. Given how it is used in practice I doubt this would happen under current conditions, but in something closer to an actual war, maybe? But also in that scenario that decision doesn't seem crazy.
I'm curious if you could create a general definition of an adversarial state that includes China but doesn't include states we generally like.
"Spies on us" includes just about every state capable of running an intelligence agency. That includes our allies. It also includes us from the perspective of our allies.
"Politically repressive" seems irrelevant from a foreign policy perspective, and also ropes in a whole lot of other states. Canada froze bank accounts of its dissidents. The list of banned political parties is quite long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_political_parties.
"Has a big military" would include India.
I'm married to a Chinese woman, have visited many times, and I just don't see it. The most anti-American thing I've ever observed is a local party official gloating about the richness of Shandong drinking culture, and that America has nothing comparable. No, I didn't tell him about beer pong. I see far more anti-Chinese sentiment in America, like wanting to ban their apps and restrict Chinese people from buying property.
It seems like people are stuck in the Cold War and think that the country being run by a communist party necessarily implies they must be our adversary. In the 1970's when China was still trying to push global revolution I'd have agreed, but they don't do that now, and haven't for decades.
In general, the full answer is that you should be worried about those countries and apply restrictions to them too. However, governments are often lacking in partial bargaining solutions: it is hard to have a strong deal that "if you spy on our citizens / manipulate them / are bad according to our values, we'll use various methods to make that more costly for you, and we expect you to do this to us too. Since we both want to do some spying on each other just for safety, then we just decide to have the tarrifs or whatnot cancel out to the extent we do the same magnitude/significance of negative actions". Getting a nice bargaining solution like that is challenging for politics.
I also think you underestimate how much anti-American sentiment there is based on interactions I've had with Chinese people. I don't consider that purely representative based on how I met many of them, but I also don't expect most people to casually mention anti-American sentiment in most conversations (just like in America, there isn't that much casual mention, you see it because you join political conversations!)
But even then, China is throwing its weight around more than India or the like. Ala the Great Firewall, forcing companies to censor themselves significantly, or you know a big social media company called TikTok that is accumulating far more information than typical and is a prime tool for information control.
I'd be a lot more skeptical of banning TikTok were there free social media access everywhere, but there isn't.
I agree it is hard to have a neat definition of an adversarial state, but that's because our social setup and laws make it a lot easier (and encourage) a sharper classification. Ideally we'd have fully general bargaining and then the only distinction is how much they're acting out against us (or others, because ideally such a ruling is used to protect smaller nations too, but managing that properly is a challenge).
“ I see far more anti-Chinese sentiment in America, like wanting to ban their apps and restrict Chinese people from buying property.”
China has already banned all social media apps and has much stronger restrictions on foreign property ownership than the US. You need some better examples.
I'm wondering whether this bill would preclude the outcome of: (1) spinning out TikTok w/o the algorithm to American investors, (2) ByteDance licenses the algo back to New TikTok and provides it as a service, (3) New TikTok is basically American owned but CCP still pulls the strings through manipulating the algo, maybe still has backdoor to user data. Not sure if "merely" licensing the algo would be construed as "subject to the control" for purposes of the bill; but if the algo is highly sensitive IP used by other ByteDance applications (e.g., Douyin) then there's reason to believe that they wouldn't outright sell that part of the business. And presumably, without the algo, New TikTok would lose engagement and blow up the biz...
I presume that if they were implementing a de facto black box algorithm issued from ByteDance that would be unacceptable and would not qualify as divestiture, although I can imagine a president (e.g. Trump) deciding to pretend it wasn't happening.
'The algorithm' is key but you could use the version that exists right now and then work from there, plenty of people happy to work on it, ByteDance is not uniquely qualified here. I think TikTok would be fine doing this under (e.g.) Oracle or Amazon.
I think you really failed to engage with the Cowen critique. Look, if they're doing something illegal, the remedy to that should be to prosecute them for doing the illegal thing. They should be be able to defend themselves against that prosecution in court. On what principle do we deny them this opportunity?
Anything that is "illegal" is illegal because a law was made against it, because the action was something we as a society (or our government) didn't like. Whether they are currently doing something illegal is irrelevant - it will be illegal once this bill passes.
The correct question is, are they doing something we should reasonably think is bad? I think Zvi engaged with that question quite a bit.
So are they going to get a chance to defend themselves?
Don't the Bill of Rights limit the types of behavior that Congress can criminalize?
Only when it comes to Americans. The courts have always been scattered, at best, at granting Constitutional protections to non-citizens living or working in America.
It does undermine our self image as a nation of laws where the government can't grief you because you're unpopular.
The Constitution forbids bills of attainders for this reason. It's not a fair system if the law gets crafted to punish one particular guy that 50% + 1 of the legislature doesn't like.
Also why retroactively applied laws have higher levels of scrutiny applied to them.
How does prosecuting espionage through the courts work generally? say there's a really clear-cut case of Russian hackers stealing classified documents, where it can be easily proved which hacking group did it - they're still *in Russia*, you might not be able to tie their online ID to a specific meatspace ID, and good luck "proving beyond reasonable doubt" that the Kremlin is behind it, even if *obviously* the Kremlin is behind it, the hackers do their hacking 9-5 in Moscow (and more generally organised crime in Russia is tightly linked to the security apparatus of the state).
Similarly, in the TIktok example, the entity who would be accused of spying is the Chinese intelligence agency, so formal prosecution would be purely a political stunt; actually banning the attack vector is significantly more meaningful!
The phrasing of the comparison of Vivek posts ('Here's February 26 and here's March 8') is slightly misleading because the February post is in February 2023 and the March post is in March 2024. Obviously still a significant change but the phrasing seems unfair.
There is a certain kind of journalist (Michael Tracey is an example, also Glenn Greenwald etc.) that is well aware that if the US government was able to censor journalists, they would be the first targets. So of course they're against any form of censorship -- their business model completely depends on no government censorship.
The whole Twitter rules thing showed that, despite the First Amendment, the US government was pressuring the technology companies to censor stuff. So, of course these journalist are nervous, and see non-US media as maybe their only hope when all US media is censored,
(Mind you, given that it appears that government agencies are willing to ignore the US constitution to shut these guys up, there are way worse things that could happen to them)
Now, if these guys were just in favour of the US constitution, rule of law, and freedom of the press I could totally understand that. But, to be in favour of the former and support .. Trump ... that Trump? Is harder to understand.
Because China controls what people can see via TikTok... we need to control what people see via TikTok