"Your boy started it first. He broke mine's leg!"
"Yeah, a cracked head is not even remotely similar to a broken leg!"
Moral of the story: Broken legs are normal.
From the article, I know that the new headline is more precise. But it's much less informative, I wouldn't have clicked the article under this name.
Where is tactful diplomacy, cooperation and building mutual rapport when dealing with China?
But if just one foreign social network app manages to divert some serious attention of US teenagers from Facebook for the first time in Internet history, THAT of course is a threat to national security.
Seriously...is this a parody?
I'm not sure I'd call that "Everything's fine"
That reminds me of Soviet Union. Government choosing what kind of propaganda citizens should watch.
> He cited questions about why TikTok had “only had a few videos of the Hong Kong protests that have been dominating international headlines for months.”
Does politburo^W democratic government has a right to decide that a privately owned app must show Honkong protest videos? If yes, then what is the minimum quota of Honkong protest videos the app needs to meet? Should other apps, like dating or chess apps, show Honkong protest videos too?
> The company has said U.S. user data is stored in the United States
They should not. The data are better protected from such US senators if stored in China.
> Any platform owned by a company in China which collects massive amounts of data on Americans is a potential serious threat to our country
And what about US companies collecting data on foreign citizens?
> Chinese company may be censoring politically sensitive content
Some might call it moderation.
As for whether the headline says TikTok or ByteDance, the only thing I care about is what readers will complain about least. If we make it say ByteDance, that's correct, but people will accuse us of trying to bury the lede because no one has heard of ByteDance. (Why on earth would we do that? Obvious answer: we must be controlled by the Chinese state, or some other sinister interest. How people come up with this stuff...)
The problem is that if it says TikTok, people will complain about the title being incorrect. I've flipped it the other way for now; let's see what's worse.
I don't envy your work. :)
FWIW, I didn't suspect any foul play... the ByteDance is more accurate but also totally opaque.
M5 Hosting is also known as M5 Computer Security out of San Diego.
These firms are a strange choice for a place like YCombinator to host I think.
It's a small hosting company with good support. It's a nice fit with the spirit of this community. I have no idea what alternate names they have.
In this case, the article title is in my judgment misleading—not hugely so, but enough to be worth changing. We changed it to language from the first paragraph, which is where articles typically say what they're really about. If that's obfuscating, then the article obfuscates itself.
HN sort of reminds me of China -- a dictatorship with zero transparency and a penchant for manipulation.
Edit: Can't forget the spineless bootlickers who are hopelessly devoted to the state! You know you've struck a nerve when the best 'reply' they can offer is a silent downvote.
I hope HN readers have gotten smart enough to notice how when commenters make grandiose claims like this about manipulation, they never provide links. That's because the facts never support the grandiose claim.
Curious to see what the real reason might have been, I skimmed through the last 30 or so titles with Blizzard in them and didn't find one we'd edited in this way, or even at all. Perhaps I missed it. But whatever we did with any such title, it would have been because of the site guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Outrage culture signaling with respect to language is always so fascinating.
If you think the way western media covers things is biased and dishonest (which it sometimes is, I admit), you have no idea how bad it is over there. It is a completely different degree of delusion that cannot even be called "bending the truth", it is straight up aggressive lying and fear-mongering that can barely even be rivaled by Alex Jones and his InfoWars.
> But some of those are edits made by submitters, [...]
Honestly never realized that's a thing, thanks for the tip!
Can I answer any questions you have about us?
We have spent years calibrating how we handle titles and it's one of the most consistent things we do. I know it can be nonintuitive to casual readers at times, but that's because applying that guideline is surprisingly complicated in practice. If it were your job, you'd soon find that as well. Also, people only notice the cases that stand out, which tend to be the edits they dislike and feel we got wrong (which maybe we did). That's a sample bias. Probably less than 5% of title edits even get noticed. Maybe even less than 1%.
We're always happy to answer questions about it, as well as to change titles in response to user feedback, which we do regularly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
It's nonobjective in that the title guidelines carry subjective judgements.
Its' nonconsistent because of the previous problem.
It's unintuitive for the reasons you described above.
I think the reason it sticks in my craw so much is what I'll call the "rake to the face" phenomenon. Much like stepping on a rake in a dark shed and getting whacked in the face, it's usually surprising, usually unexpected, and usually painful (though mentally rather than physically.. "where did that article I read earlier go? No way it got flagged off.. Oh, there it is, they messed with the freaking title again. That was a waste of 5 minutes.")
This is worse when a descriptive title that actually calls out why someone should be interested in the article is reverted to something generic, which IMO, actively makes the site worse in furtherance of The Rules, which is never a good thing.
----
That aside.. If I could float a feature request that doesn't require any rule changes? Put a [*] or some other signifier next to titles that have been modified, and have it grey out over time (kinda like how comments get lighter and lighter as their score falls) and eventually disappear. Per your own search example, title changes are rare enough that there likely wouldn't be many on the front page, and it would give people like me who lose track of renamed articles a place or two to look.
But in a world where everyone is a bad guy, hypocrisy can be forgiven, since it keeps other bad guys in check despite its self-serving intent. Hypocrisy, whether European, Russian, American or Chinese, keeps the peace.
For anyone else: https://thediplomat.com/2016/09/bhutans-dark-secret-the-lhot...
>"It’s the first company to be headquartered in China, designed in China, but popular in the US," said Greylock investor Josh Elman. "Finally we’re seeing talented people who live in that ecosystem in that world and actually transcend it and build products in the US."
One cofounder worked full time at SAP in SF bay area for several years before and after musical.ly was founded. The other says on his LinkedIn that he was working in Santa Monica for several years on either side of the founding. They lived, worked, and founded the company in CA.
>Primary Office 16/F, No. 127 Guodao Road, Yangpu District, Shanghai China
musical.ly appears to have always had its head office in Shanghai until the acquisition. The fact that it also had significant operations in California doesn't make it a US company. Only those operations are subject to US law and would have to be divested due to disapproval by CFIUS.
"Musical.ly Inc. was founded by longtime friends Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang in Shanghai, China."
If it's a Chinese company, why is TikTok saying that China has zero jurisdiction over the app?
Besides that, the US can require that Bytedance peel off TikTok / Musical.ly. If Bytedance wants access to the US market with that app, it will have to play by US rules. That works similar to how China blocked the Qualcomm - NXP acquisition. Neither Qualcomm nor NXP are Chinese companies. If the combined entity wanted access to China they had to obey China's position on that acquisition. And given China's extreme behavior on restricting US Internet companies from their market, this is more than fair game.
ByteDance is trying very hard to run TikTok and Douyin (抖音, the Chinese version) as separate companies that happen to share the same code but not data. For one, this is because they're well aware that Western governments are suspicious of foreign companies having access to their citizens' data. Secondly, having Chinese and international users on a shared platform also makes it more difficult to maintain the narrative mandated by the Chinese government, as each cross-border interaction is a potential hole in the Great Firewall.
After the lack of data separation effectively killed Grindr, they can only hope that they've done enough and won't suffer the same fate.
Except that the US always complained about this behavior from the Chinese government, but now it wants to adopt it as normal. It looks like the Chinese way of doing things is winning...
If Bytedance wants access to the US market with that app, it will simply relocate servers outside of USA. That's it.
He makes the point that US consumers become subject to Chinese censorship policies when using the platform while China outright bans or heavily restricts American companies from operating (eg google search, Facebook).
FCC is actively pursuing removal of Huawei and ZTE equipment under a threat to national security.
Probably in reference to this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/business/dealbook/huawei-...
Business is business.
They kept mentioning infinite scroll, and that everyone was supposed to be thinking about how to incorporate that into product.
After zuck discussed TikTok directly recently, I’m not surprised google and fb lobbyists would press for this investigation.
One question I have, is the real-time interests of millions of 16-24 yo Americans reported back to the Chinese government a national security concern?
They beat SnapChat, FB and Instagram on experience.
Censorship is something serious to consider, but these are mainly kids making music videos. They aren't using it to organize campaigns.
I think that's a dangerously naive interpretation of the platform (or any platform really), particularly when it involves children and young adult minds.
If I had a teenage daughter, I'd feel much more comfortable with her using the Chinese tik-tok than whatever tabloid-level trash Snapchat is pushing these days. Some of these American media companies have just gotten weird
* Songs glorifying violence
* Songs about drugs
* (Partial) nudity
* Songs "belonging" to controversial groups and movements.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/tiktok-has-mountain-view-off...
The US controls its domestic market - just as China controls their domestic market - and when it comes to going back and reviewing the TikTok / Musical.ly combination it can dictate terms across the app stores which are all US controlled.
The US can say: we're going to ban your combined entity from all global app stores by forcing Google and Apple to comply with our position on that merged entity (TikTok + Musical.ly).
Google and Apple resist? Say hello to national security based sanctions. They will immediately comply, no more questions asked.
The US can instantly, globally kill TikTok, for all intents and purposes. TikTok would disappear from most global app store availability within a week, from Canada to Australia. It would probably only exist in China.
It's unfair? Tell Qualcomm - NXP that. That was blocked solely out of spite by China. This is an economic conflict with China. When China lets US Internet companies have proper, full access to their market maybe the US will relent and start playing 'fair.'
These ridiculous double standards from China are not free trade, and we should stop pretending it is.
It seems like the Chinese could be successful in duplicating SV even in a non democratic context.
Today it is just a way for me to burn 15 minutes, but I see plenty of potential and make the concerns of censorship and ownership valid concerns.
It's still super easy to skip by them.
Not to say that TikTok doesn't have any revenue at all, they have ads.
Why was it shuttered? It seemed like such a short-sighted move. Vine had such cachet and was fun to use & create on it. RIP
I suspect (b) can be explained primarily through ignorance.
Facebook probably had a dream of becoming a global political influence broker and sell mandate to the highest bidder but I think the people who control the guys with the guns are not especially thrilled to play this game.
And likewise, those US companies have also drawn similar regulatory attention.
I absolutely do not understand why there is so much hate for Chinese people, Chinese companies, or the Chinese government. Literally everything has flaws, and Western Europe and USA have plenty of them.
If you are not willing to say "China does xyz but actually also my country does something similar to xyz too, and it's definitely bad"...
...then at the very least, please do not act as if your statements about Chinese nationals are 100% true for every individual. Humans are humans, they differ in meaningful ways but they also deserve dignity and respect.
Another example: trademarks allow superior brands to win over time. The enforcement of trademarks is "the government getting involved".
Nobody would care if TikTok were Taiwanese or South Korean.
To be clear, I don't like the idea of foreign state controlled major social platforms opaque to US oversight. I'm commenting specifically on the argument that TikTok silences Hong Kong supporters.
Not necessarily, the algorithm shows you things you are interested in. I see China, Golden Retrievers and various songs I like. You see Trump because your eyeballs got locked on the screen. So you will see more Trump.
There are a few US companies that might, but Google isn't going to be it. Social sharing isn't in Google's blood, and they've never succeeded before with their $1,000,000,000+ spent on attempts.
Youtube has done a lot of stupid things lately that really do feel like it is an external political agenda being forced on them, not an internal one being forced by misguided placation of shareholders.
Shoe's now on the other foot.
America et al also don’t like certain things being published on social media and try stop it from existing on those platforms too.
Their censorship algorithm must be broken.
No, you're subject to corporate censorship policies. Let's not pretend that individual platforms regulating content is the same as government censorship. Please show me how their policies are related to "the American governments stance on human sexuality".
Also, doesn't Canada have a few laws on the books regarding how people are allowed to address other people, specifically, LGBTQ people?
The theoretical point is true enough, that American content restrictions would generally wind up being exported abroad. The key difference is, however, that we do not actually have Chinese-style content restrictions.
Facebook removed LGBT pages because the American government forced them? Do you have a link?
Google and Facebook not being in China is not necessarily a bad thing. Both the companies are massively popular in India but make no profits off Indians yet. On other than their popularity has made Indians value these companies a lot as employers and every third Google/Facebook engineer in Mountain View is an Indian person. Google or Facebooks adventures in India (and China) if at all are nothing but a huge subsidy being delivered to these upcoming markets at the expense of American consumers.
Say China opens up its markets for Google and Facebook like tomorrow would you be fine with that ? Both Google and Facebook are then going to borrow money from american to build massive data center networks in China spending billions of dollars which may or may not be recovered in near future.
Xenophobia and divergence from free market principles in USA have made other countries better potential successors to Silicon Valley. In near future we will see more and more companies coming up from China. What USA has done with Tiktok is essentially a child like tantrum to scare other investors and chinese companies but very likely US government will end up with an egg on its face.
Initially Lasso only supported registering with a Facebook account, defaulting to exposing your real name to the world. TikTok let you browse anonymously and register with just a phone number or email account, letting users protect their identities much easier. Lasso now allows you to register with an Instagram account.
Lasso has much worse video quality-- seemingly SD vs HD, presumably to save bandwidth, but it makes videos much less appealing since they're noticeably blurrier. This may be because Lasso decided to show me Spanish videos for no apparent reason (or maybe that's where their users are?), and most Spanish-speaking countries have predominantly Android phones which have worse video quality.
The infinite scrolling feels worse because videos fade in from black instead of displaying their first frame while scrolling into view. The feed isn't actually infinite, but refuses to load past a certain point. You can't swipe right from the feed to view a user's profile.
Regarding censorship, I'm not convinced ByteDance's Chinese style "ban anything contentious" censorship is actually a downside for most teen users. Instagram has _very_ loose censorship policies, which easily allow the feed to become very sexualized. I expect this makes younger users feel less comfortable posting publicly-- Instagram is where the bikini models and their followers hang out!-- while TikTok's more carefully curated space feels age-appropriate. That may all be network effects, though, with social networks as always being colonized first by the young.
Yes. They are kids today, but they might be a Senator, CEO, or President tomorrow.
Or they might grow up to be an average person, but with a sensitive job and a Chinese intelligence officer needs background on someone to flip them.
They don't need sensational information, just insight on how their target can be influenced.
Perhaps not, but the influence of a nebulous "algorithm" controlling what comes up next certainly can reinforce a message or way of life that line up with China's cultural norms
Your argument veers unreasonably so into nationalism; there's no reason they shouldn't instead start investing money in Europe, or one of the dozens of other countries that could use US funds well in Asia.
Complaining that American companies can't invest in China is strange, given that until fairly recently, the flow of investment was almost 100% in that direction. It's only in the last few years that Chinese companies have begun investing significantly in American companies.
As for "operat[ing] in China," American companies have a massive presence in China. Where are you getting the idea that American (or foreign) companies can't operate in China? It's the most important market for all sorts of Western companies. The restrictions on tech companies, specifically, have to do with political censorship. Companies that censor have access.
Or are you claiming that foreign investment into local companies hurts local companies? If so, please justify our past three decades of policy towards Asia, Africa, South America, and the post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Foreign investment into those countries owns a lot of key businesses and infrastructure, but for some reason, very few firms originating in those countries have significant investments in the US.
If openness to foreign investment is a good thing, why do you care about making it quid-pro-quo? If it's a bad thing, why do we push so hard for it?
There are a few instances where that's true (there are also a few instances where Chinese companies are not allowed to acquire U.S. companies or operate in the U.S.) but you said "I would support a wholesale ban on Chinese acquisitions of American companies". So again are you insinuating that at this moment, no American companies are allowed to acquire Chinese companies or operate in China?
Company - Sales in China - Share in China
Apple $44.8 billion 19.6%
Intel $14.8 billion 23.6%
Qualcomm $14.6 billion 65.4%
Boeing $11.9 billion 12.8%
Micron $10.4 billion 51.1%
Broadcom $9.4 billion 53.7%
1. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trade-war-watch-these-are-...
To avoid said double standards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Foreign_Investm...
If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points more thoughtfully when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
They see a fun app, they play with it. If they're even aware of censorship issues or geopolitical power games, that seems very distant from some app that amuses them for a few minutes a day.
Everyone knows the stuff they buy is manufactured in China, and the old timers holding weird grudges from the 1970s are long gone.
There is no economic incentive for anyone to bring this up at any time during any transaction.
I've found sites that do "made in america" generally, but ideally I'd like a site that allows something like "sort by distance to manufacturer" - I'd like to preferentially support businesses proportionally to how geographically local they are.
Would also be interested in sites that have some sort of curated directory of companies that have good labor relations, quality controls, environmental impact, etc.
Unless other nations began to intrude on their daily life people don't care what those nations do so they may as well not exist. Part of why China has been in the minds of (some) Americans lately is its becoming obvious they are trying to apply their censorious nature to US citizens on US soil, sometimes using US companies.
And, yeah, I'm well aware that the US does similar things to other countries. And some people in other countries on this site complain about that too. It doesn't mean they're just grinding some political axe though.
Do you think people in Hong Kong and Taiwan feel like nations are "all but obsolete"? South/North Korea? Tibet? Crimea? This idea of nations being obsolete feels like a fairly privileged position.
It's long been my opinion that you simply cannot destroy the west without mutually assured destruction, so nukes are out. You can't invade and subsequently operate because Americans will never acquiesce to foreign rule, and we are individually armed.
The only way to undo the US/west is to have it undo itself. Seed dissent and promote divisions and hatred among its people. Maybe I was shielded from this as a kid, but it seems these divisions are hatred are sharply on the rise as of late, and it's not outside the realm of possibility this is due to foreign influence via social networks.
I myself had no idea they were Chinese, despite working in the space. I wouldn’t expect any average teen to know they are Chinese either
(B) How would the average consumer know it's Chinese? They totally rebranded it from their mainland product and in fact the social network itself is totally isolated, so you can't even find Chinese people on it.
TikTok is a better app than Vine was. It has far more features (visual effects, etc) and does a good job of making them easy to use. This all translates into better growth and retention.
TikTok was also very well marketed. Lots of slick online ads that went straight to their target demographic. I'm not sure if Vine ever knew quite what it wanted to be.
Your comment seems to conflate all of that criticism with “hate for Chinese people,” which seems unfair and disingenuous since I and presumably many people opposed to the CCCP feel that way because of the fate of all the people currently in China’s borders and subjugated by the regime.
But I would really like to understand why there is a double standard in the minds of "my fellow Westerners".
Boeing, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, Halliburton, Lockheed, and the whole Washington aparatus in general have been (in)directly responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people in the Middle East, yet I am still happy to use Instagram and Whatsapp and Youtube.
Similarly I will use TikTok concurrently while understanding that the Chinese government has locked 1 million Uighurs in a concentration camp. Surely, not every Chinese citizen voted for this idea. So we shouldn't make assumptions about what "Chinese people" are like
> please do not act as if your statements about Chinese nationals
I think it's misleading to bring up the Chinese people in this way: the "hate," if it can even be called that, is for the Chinese government and the CCP. The real or imagined influence of the CCP over Chinese companies is causing the latter to be viewed with greater suspicion.
The Chinese people/Chinese nationals as a group aren't being viewed as antagonists (though unfortunate abbreviations like using "the Chinese" for "the Chinese government" do confuse things sometimes). If anything, I'd bet most people who are critical of the CPP, etc. would see the Chinese people sympathetically as closer to victims than anything else.
You may only hate the government, but you should be aware that many of those who seem to be on your side criticising the CPC do in fact hate everything Chinese. They think that not only the government, but all Chinese people are untrustworthy; that all Chinese companies are mere fronts for the government that should not be allowed to operate abroad; that Chinese people should be banned from Twitter/Facebook/Wikipedia/GitHub because they're brainwashed anyway and their viewpoints therefore invalid; and that their livelihoods don't matter because they stole American jobs.
I don't think a majority thinks like that, but these viewpoints are certainly present on HN. (Not as strong in this thread, but enough to be noticable in general.) So when someone complains about hate for China, don't think they mean your opinions, but be aware that the complaint is quite justified.
If TikTok is banned by the US because of the actions of the Chinese government, then we are no better than the Chinese government who have banned countless "American" apps, as if apps should even have a nationality in the first place.
I've come to expect falsehoods on the internet for political or commercial gain -- but I find the recent trend of using propaganda to spark hatred, outrage, and panic, to be particularly disturbing.
Why is it a good thing? Or even okay? Isn't it a slippery slope?
Besides, Hollywood movies should have enough propaganda in them already.
Did any outrage machine last as long as e.g. Apple's substantial market share in China? Which one's short term is evident.
There are some things such as porn that is censored in many areas.
Twitter has even begun censoring political speech from public figures: "Twitter will now hide — but not remove — harmful tweets from public figures" (https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/27/18761132/twitter-donald-t...)
Foreign adversaries must be loving the divide America has at the moment with our 2 party system. They are also trying to divide us by race, economic class, and create a divide with the police.
Do you think that the US Department of State, or the foreign ministries of any other country of note don't do this sort of thing?
Better than implies they are doing the same thing as the West but are more effective.
What Russia and China are doing is child’s play compared to what corporate mass media can do.
I'm not at all convinced there is any large scale love for YouTube as far as US policy goes.
I haven’t checked the top sites in US list recently, but I imagine even for places that have sites on top of apps, losing App Store access will destroy a large part of the user base. Off the top of head, Google, the surviving portal sites, could survive. But even portal sites like Yahoo likely get enough traffic from apps that they’d be hit hard. Same with Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest. Maybe LinkedIn would go largely unscathed.
So, if I want access to EU market I can avoid GDPR and other European regulations so long as I keep my server out of Europe?
That's not true. I have not found a specific date, but the Shanghai office did not exist at the time musical.ly was founded. I have not found any references to the Shanghai office from before late 2015.
Not being able to find any reference on the English-speaking part of the web doesn’t mean it couldn’t have existed.
All we have to go on is the word of insiders who work for the various ministries, and all of these insiders have their own agenda. They certainly aren't opening up their organizations to outside verification of their claims!
Also, consider the context in which these negotiations take place. When NK negotiates with the US, this is the most important diplomatic conversation they have going. They are obviously going to put a lot of effort into it - as the outcome may be existential to them.
When the US negotiates with NK, it's just one of five dozen plates it is spinning at any one time. Whatever the outcome is, it's not going to be an existential crisis for the US. It's unlikely to be the most important diplomatic conversation it's going to have, and the Department of State, and the CIA will prioritize its resources accordingly.
They were surprised you could do that...
There is even an old soviet joke about this.
An American tells a Russian that the United States is so free he can stand in front of the White House and yell, “To hell with Ronald Reagan.” The Russian replies, “That’s nothing. I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell, ‘To hell with Ronald Reagan,’ too.”
Also, we are allowed to post photos with breasts (and much more) on our social network Vkontakte.
Now try to acquire a popular social media app in USA.
They could do the shared source thing, where select people are allowed to see the source after signing NDA's and stuff.
Whether any of this makes any difference, as far as US law goes, I don't know.
1. https://www.businessinsider.de/what-is-musically-2016-5
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-musically/china...
Good ol'Louis knew things were messed up and he tried to rectify things. But it was too late.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...
When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
...
In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
...
Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. “Without them, I’m fucked.”
Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate’s Web site as a prank. He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”
Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, “radical self-reliance,” which he takes to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” (Among survivalists, or “preppers,” as some call themselves, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, stands for “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid.”) Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
...
Why would they care if people were pissed off when they can afford not to care? Especially with enough Chinese and Saudi blood money that they could blow their noses with tissues made of hundred-dollar bills? They're above your problems, they're above everyone else's.
EDIT: Not to mention whoever built the bunker knows where it is. "Ownership" isn't going to be a real thing in the circumstances where a bunker is necessary.
They're taking a fully US-centric approach, treating abortion as a political topic - see https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted... . You can't advocate for abortion in Canadian ads. Which is insane, considering abortion is fully legal here. Going down that list, it's "things that are controversial in America". It's absurd to apply the same policy globally.
Not really. Canada prohibits hate speech and discrimination against LGBTQ people. The whole "using the wrong pronouns is now a criminal offense" meme was made up by someone looking for something to be offended about/sell books about how PC culture is ruining everything.[1]
People can be sued for discriminating on the basis of gender identity or expression. Repeatedly using the wrong pronoun can be used as evidence of that, but probably has to fit into a larger pattern of behavior. And that's the kind of thing you could credibly sue an employer or business for in the US as well.
1. https://factcheck.afp.com/no-canadians-cannot-be-jailed-or-f...
Which in a large part with preference tailored to US
It's a distinction without a difference. They don't have any redress, or ability to influence either US corporations, or the US government, much like how Americans have no ability to influence the CPC.
Google and Apple have publicly stood up against the US government, and the US doesn't (publicly and legally, at least) meddle with companies to anywhere near the same extent as China.
When I support Google, I support Google alone, but when I support Tencent, it feels a little like I'm supporting the Chinese government, too.
Again, no one is condemning the Chinese people here.
You can believe in geographical borders while also having foreign relations.
I really think YouTube like a lot of tech companies will often just take the path of least resistance and say:
"Well that's a lot of DCMA complaints ... just ban'm if our magic script says to, whatever."
It seems like maybe favoritism to another big company, but maybe is just more a reflection of a crappy process and a tech company habit of just letting some magic formula decide and avoiding any extra time / resource consuming process.
Not to say I don't think it doesn't happen as far as some corporate to corporate pressure goes, but it's hard to know.
Even child porn isn't an easy subject. Everyone can agree that liking 12 year olds sexually is pedophilia and images about that are child porn. But when we are taking about 16 year olds it's muddier since we are taking about child porn outside of pedophilia.
And that's just (north western) Europe who are culturally very similar to the US.
It's not muddier. The issue isn't the nature of the people viewing the content, but the ability of the victim to consent to the creation of the content. There's no muddiness involved here - sexual exploitation of minors for the production of media is not ok.
For 12 year olds it's much easier with the "we don't support pedophilia" argument (which has wide support)
In the latter case, is child pornography probably indicative of a crime? Absolutely. But banning the images and their dissemination is clearly an infringement of free speech. In the former, banning hate speech is also clearly an infringement of free speech. If someone's actions result in violence or death then punish them after, and divorced from the issue of speech; do not place prior restraint on speech.
You do not necessarily need content censorship to keep CCP ideas out of the West. You can keep them out by means of economic policies. And I feel like Western countries are not doing a good enough job at this, whereas the PRC government has been extremely efficient at blocking foreign entities.
> [citation needed]
The "non-US culture" framing of the GP and GGP is ignorant and wrong, but what they say is certainly true with regards to the party and government:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...
> Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they have been told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society.... The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/world/asia/china-student-...
> ...students are increasingly playing a key role by monitoring how teachers view Mr. Xi, the party and ideas like democracy. In exchange, they are promised rewards like scholarships, higher grades and advancement within prestigious Communist Party groups.
> Ankang University in northwest China said in an online notice that student informers should formally report professors who spread superstition, cults and pornography, “promote Western political values,” and criticize the party’s tenets. School administrators, the notice says, should respond to each complaint within three working days.
The person you were originally replying to's comment.
> You may only hate the government...
Hate is actually not a very good word to describe the situation, IMHO. I only used it because the GP did, but I quoted and questioned the choice. If I had to describe it, I would say it's moral disapproval coupled with a recognition of incompatible goals that requires some kind of response.
> You may only hate the government, but you should be aware that many of those who seem to be on your side criticising the CPC do in fact hate everything Chinese.
I find that a bit hard to square with the support of Chinese things by the same group, like the Tiananmen Square and Hong Kong protests (for instance). I don't doubt that there exist people who are racist against Chinese people, but I think the overlap with HN is small, and definitely small enough that it's a derail to bring up on a vague prompt like in the parent of this subthread.
I can only guess, but it could be explained by mentally categorizing Uyghurs, Hong Kongers and even Tiananmen protesters as "not Chinese." I don't think it's so much racism as a binary "us vs. them" classification system that expresses itself as the opinion that "the Chinese" should be punished for oppressing <some group> by implementing <some policy>, where <some policy> is not specific to oppressors and would also affect <some group>. I'm sure it's often just said in the heat of the moment and not to be taken literally, but it still poisons the discourse.
> it's a derail to bring up on a vague prompt like in the parent of this subthread.
Agreed, but since the thread was already derailed I decided to respond anyway.
That could be in some cases, though what you're describing sounds more like a government leaders/enforcers vs. liberals/oppressed minorities classification (which also leaves a big gray area). The people sympathize and feel allied to the latter group, so the "us" includes a lot of Chinese people, so it's not so much Chinese vs not-Chinese.
I think I've seen similar comments, but I usually interpreted it as a mess of lazy or imprecise language, because often the complaints could only apply to a narrow group even though the person is using some broad term like "China" or "Chinese."
If someone punches you (bans your apps, bans your companies from operating and acquiring companies in their country) and you then punch them back (ban their companies from acquiring companies in your country) you are not the same as them.
The order matters and they started it.
There is no need to harm the second child-- you have to deal solely with the person who threw the first punch in a legal, rational, and fair way.
It's totally okay for both America and China to ban whatever foreign stuff they want, though, and both of them have very good reasons to do so.
What makes you think there isn't? There's outrage about that kind of thing all the time.
> If TikTok is banned by the US because of the actions of the Chinese government
Where in the article does it say that TikTok could be banned in the US?
> If TikTok is banned by the US because of the actions of the Chinese government, then we are no better than the Chinese government who have banned countless "American" apps, as if apps should even have a nationality in the first place.
Honestly, I believe you're kinda confused and looking at things too shallowly. Sort of like insisting we condemn someone who killed defending a child from murder the same as we'd condemn someone who committed murder, because they both killed a human being. Identical actions can be rightly judged very differently based on circumstances. The PRC bans American apps because (among other things) its authoritarian ruling oligarchy fears that Western ideas like constitutional democracy and human rights could threaten their power, if taken up by the Chinese people. If the US bans Chinese apps (or disinformation outlets like Russia Today), it will likely be because it values those same ideas and fears losing them.
"Twitter has even begun censoring political speech from public figures"
vs
"The FBI will require Twitter to censor political speech from public figures"
I think those two scenarios are eons apart.
>advocates that democracy is a threat to society, or that political re-education camps are not an issue
Now it is even more confusing.
There's a pretty good meme about differences between European and American media take on censorship [0].
It's now locked behind an Imgur login due to being NSFW (over a single nipple), but the basic premise is that US media would censor a nipple away, leaving the person recognizable, while European media didn't take issue with the nipple, but instead censored her face to protect her identity.
Which is a pretty good example of how different cultures prioritize things differently. Scale that up to the reality of the tech space being dominated by US companies, and suddenly US cultural norms largely became established as global norms [1].
Before the Internet, US soldiers stationed in other countries had a very similar effect: They also brought their culture with them, which often was considered way more exotic than anything local. Decades later nobody even much cares or notices how US influenced much of our culture has become in Western Europe.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2f8xmd/nsfw_the_dif...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-29/the-cleaners-...
But these things do not exist in a vacuum.
Ask anybody working on the tech and legal ends of the adult industry and you will hear quite horrific stories about having to jump through so many hoops just for finding a payment provider.
For a while, these used to be www dominating issues, and how they were dealt with in the US, often ended up being the de-facto global standard.
A very recent and relevant example for this is footage out of the Syrian Civil War on platforms like Twitter and YouTube.
Over these past years, whole swats of videos have disappeared on the basis of being tagged as "terrorist propaganda" [0]
In a very similar vein how "Napalm Girl" ended up getting censored as child pornography [1].
By now even Reddit has learned to "selectively forget", as all undeleting/uncensoring sites that used to work, have stopped working.
Just because it's not some US government agency playing the censor, but rather the US government pressuring US companies into self-censorship, doesn't make this kind of censorship any less real in its overall impact.
[0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/youtube-ai-deletes-war-cr...
EDIT: Sources in-text since i'm already being downvoted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_...
All American social media censors their users, most people just arent producing that type of content.
Social media platforms censor more than that. Try posting a picture of a nipple on Facebook.
I agree. But watch what happens when you post something bad about an influential person on an American app. The feds pay attention to you more and lean harder on you. The end outcome is the same.
>Ban foreign content
How can we live in a world where it's ok for any government to decide what you can and can't see
I fear not everyone realizes that on an intuitive level. People see a bunch of vocal Chinese nationalists repeating government propaganda and get the impression that this is representative of the average Chinese person, leading them to demand that Chinese users be banned from social media, or Chinese students have their visas denied, or whatever measure would solve the issue at hand while simultaneously excluding the Chinese part of "us."
It's maybe a question of defaults, where the knowledge that something is Chinese leads to the suspicion that it must be bad, unless some redeeming quality (such as being anti-government) can be found.
From [0]: "YouTube is facing criticism after a new artificial intelligence program monitoring "extremist" content began flagging and removing masses of videos and blocking channels that document war crimes in the Middle East."
From [1]: "Facebook said it has to restrict nudity for cultural reasons."
I'm not saying this isn't important. I'm not even ruling out some sort of indirect and informal government role. (Government policy and culture are intertwined!) But they fall far far short of supporting the false equivalency drawn in this thread ans elsewhere between western companies removing content due to TOS violations, etc. on the one hand, and content being removed literally, and undisputedly (as far as I've seen) in response to direct commands by the Chinese government.
The eighteenth-century ideal of free speech in a public forum has now become de-facto mediated by private companies acting in their own interest. Some may believe in free speech more rigorously than others (say Reddit, as compared to Facebook). The fact that the government cannot censor speech matters less and less nowadays, given how much speech now passes through private companies' control.
This statement is misleading. Some public internet forums owned by large corporations are mediated by companies acting in their own interest. Nobody is required to use those forums and many alternative forums exist, other individuals or firms are also able to create their own online public forums subject to whatever speech standards they consider ideal.
> The fact that the government cannot censor speech matters less and less nowadays, given how much speech now passes through private companies' controls
This is not true. The fact that government cannot censor speech is as critically important today as it ever was. It doesn't matter that a lot of speech passes through private companies because that is a free choice made by individuals who voluntarily push their speech through those companies and are free to take their speech elsewhere if they desire. Additionally, censorship or moderation is sometimes a desirable feature of a social media product because unbridled free-speech is sometimes abused in a way that is antithetical to the user experience and thus to business prerogatives.
But sure, there are practical angles in the US where, for example, if we could shift the popular focus to Free software, We could regain society's Freedom of Speech. Perhaps you're focused on the technicalities because you're trying to work towards that - but talk constructively rather than dismissively. It helps nobody to push a stubborn idea that there is some strict distinction between USG and the S&P 500. Whether the political bureaucracy controls corporations or corporations control bureaucracy, it's all government.
And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.
The study and control of group behavior is real. The network of educated and privileged elite is real. The power of the media run by these elite perhaps surpasses that of the justice department. The media can start wars.
They're not public squares though, they're privately owned webservers, they don't become nationalized just because they're popular. That's like saying the dive-bar in your local town is the de-facto town-square because everyone meets there after work. Those individuals made the free choice to interact in a privately owned establishment thus they are subject to the rules of that establishment, if they don't like the rules they are free to go to another establishment with more favorable rules.
> A clique of companies is now in the position of censoring the vast majority of interpersonal speech, period.
100% false. They are within their rights to refuse to rebroadcast content you upload to the servers they own, but they cannot prevent you from rebroadcasting your content anywhere else.
> We could regain society's Freedom of Speech
Freedom of speech existed before Facebook and Twitter, so your suggestion that their business practices have caused free speech to go away is incorrect.
> So perhaps you're focused on the technicality because you want to work towards that - and please do! But state it constructively rather than dismissively. It helps nobody to perpetuate a stubborn idea that there is some kind of strict distinction between USG and the S&P 500
This is pretty hilarious. You're suggesting I self-censor the "technical" truth in favor of your editorialized version of the truth because "it helps nobody to perpetuate a stubborn idea that there is some kind of strict distinction between USG and the S&P 500"... even though there is a very obvious "strict distinction" between the government using the threat of force to censor speech vs a private company operating a platform they own and pay for.
> Whether the political bureaucracy controls corporations or corporations control bureaucracy, it's all government.
So are you saying you want to ban corporate lobbying or that we should nationalize large influential corporations so that we can ensure they function in service of the people instead of share holders?
The combination of your low effort dismissal and attacks on my intellectual honesty makes me think this conversation is not worth the effort. Have a nice day.
There is a huge distinction. Facebook doesn't have a military to enforce their policies. They might be the defacto town square but it's only convenience and network effects which make that true. If there was enough dissatisfaction with the way they are running things then they could be gone tomorrow. That's not comparable to kind of censorship that, for example, the CCP imposes.
You're merely restating this assumed division in terms of a specific. Facebook has much less business need to deploy the military than say Exxon or United Fruit, but they still have the ability.
> only convenience and network effects which make that true.
Sure, but how does that make it any less real? The ability to move between states does not invalidate gripes about your current state government. Witness the volume of user complaints. If leaving were a continually-visited fictionless choice, they would have simply left.
> That's not comparable to [the] kind of censorship
They are of different magnitudes, but they're certainly comparable. I'd much rather be subject to Facebook's censorship regime that CCPs. But they're both censorship regimes - if we don't want the former to grow closer to the latter, then it behooves us to compare them.