TikTok Might Get Banned Soon This attempt is getting reasonably far rather quickly, passing the House with broad support. Alec Stapp: TikTok bill to remove influence of CCP: - passed unanimously out of committee - GOP leadership says they’ll bring it to the floor for a vote next week
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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)
Do we think a divested TikTok would be free of censorship/propaganda that the CCP approves of? Why?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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)
Because China controls what people can see via TikTok... we need to control what people see via TikTok