"TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.

"TikTok also reportedly censors content that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive, such as content concerning protests in Hong Kong and China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. This mobile application may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...

Where there's money to be made, no poison is too poisonous for big companies.

The tactics are distasteful: Filing outrageous criminal changes against Meng Wanzhou and the campaign to ban Huawei products as well as this frankly gangster-like hostile takeover of Bytedance's business.

I don't feel sorry for Huawei. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Bytedance on the other hand is only guilty of making a fun product, but in the game being played here fairness to the pawns isn't a priority.

In this nonsensical economy, the pathetic moral arguments made by this article are word vomit. Not relevant to anyone's life. Nobody cares. They should be locked up for abusing our collective brains with this irrelevant crap.

- The Chinese government clearly has its tendrils in TikTok and uses it to push its oppressive censorship policies around the world

- The security implications of giving China a backdoor into a large percentage of American phones is too concerning to ignore

On the other hand:

- Explicitly targeting specific companies feels wrong. If security and censorship are real concerns here, Congress should be passing laws that apply to all companies, not just TikTok

- Even though there are sound reasons to restrict TikTok, this is still a transparently protectionist policy by the Trump admin and fits right into his nationalistic, totalitarian, xenophobic playbook. A broken clock is still right twice a day, I suppose

- Requiring a sale to an American company is the mirror image of China's forced technology transfers for foreign companies. Two wrongs don't make a right

I think the best scenario is for Congress to preempt Trump with laws that protect American security and free speech interests without executive action. That's easier said than done, though.

That being said, Trump's claims that TikTok is a national security threat are more than dubious. Sure, the operation of any foreign company can be interpreted as a security threat to any nation. Who's to say that the latest imported batch of Ramen aren't part of a Japanese plot for a new Pearl Harbor involving explosive Ramen. But the only logical conclusion to this way of thinking is to completely isolate a country from the outside world.

Even with all the flaws that the US government and various US companies have, they're so much better in terms of transparency and regulation than their chinese counterparts.

You might like it here as its a company you don't like but what if the same is done next for Twitter, Telegram, or maybe just foreign companies like e.g. Siemens, Tata, ...

Trump is hollowing out the rule of law and pretends he can do whatever he feels like. It's a mistake to cheer for that even if you agree with some of those decisions.

All I'm reminded of is this famous quote of a German priest ultimately executed by the Nazis:

> First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a socialist.

> Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a trade unionist.

> Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a Jew.

> Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

this is the same logic as many CCP officers in the news section, they block twitter/facebook/etc inside mainland China, but themselves have active twitter/facebook/etc accounts to push CCP's propaganda. they become so good at leveraging the free world's system to cover their own evil actions. For god sake the west is waking up.

I did business there and I know you all well.

NSA also hacked Huawei in 2013.[2]

The US companies should be thankful that EU didn't block them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-c...

This is misleading. On paper sure, but not in reality. The majority of large companies in China will in fact be forced to participate in a joint venture. And sure there is no "law" on the books requiring forced technology transfer, but foreign companies are forced to do it.

China is a not a country that follows the rule of law. Period. The law is whatever the CCP says it is today. There can be no rule of law without an independent judiciary, and the WTO mechanism's you speak of are completely unenforceable.

>broke up many state-owned enterprises

Also misleading. They were technically "broken" up. But they still have have CCP liaison committees, and CCP members running them. The government still assists them with corporate espionage, and provides them with enormous grants and loans. Large companies in China are still state owned enterprises in all but name.

> but the investment environment for foreign companies improved massively in China

It did improve for a few years, but the current administration has managed to reverse nearly all those improvements.

Foreign companies were able to earn large returns in China because China's tariffs went from ~40% to ~3%, restrictions on foreign investment were reduced or eliminated in most sectors, big state-owned enterprises were split up and forced to operate like regular companies that have to earn a profit, IP courts were created, along with many other changes large and small.

The sudden cries that China took advantage of the West are just completely out of touch with reality.

If it fails by government policy, that's an awful outcome for tech and the future. We need to encourage new markets, not end them. Tech is ending old markets as it is, if we're not encouraging new ones we're going to end up with increasing unemployment.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-bytedance/china-ord...

It might be the first US mobile app however I will grant you that.

That's not at all what they said. According to the ECJ, they should have had temporary immunity just for the purpose of taking up their seats as MEPs even though they were on trial for a generic crime. That ruling doesn't have any judgement regarding the legality of separatism, and also wouldn't free them of prison time if found guilty by the Spanish court.

Same goes for Huawei or any company/product. You are allowed if you don't break the law. I don't care the origin, I care about the rule of [contestable] law over unilateral action. I may disagree with many laws, but I respect the process much more.

If the only source for something was TASS or the CGTN and you couldn't find any other source, it would be treated as false until proof of the contrary.

The burden of proof is on the person claiming something to provide a credible source. The CIA is not a good source for things that conflict with US interests.

To bad there's far less money in federation---it's "moatlessness" ruins the business proposition---so I don't know who will pay for this lobbying.

The patriarch of a neighboring family does not welcome members of your family into their home, so why should your family welcome them into yours? On the other hand, that the patriarch practices domestic violence is another matter; you don't mirror that.

Is this what's happening right now? Is there political speech being conducted on tiktok that the president doesn't like? Can the same speech be found on other platforms (eg. twitter)?

Let's assume you block all applications that are suspected of relations with CCP (no proof, no trial) this won't stop CCP just buying this data from shady american (or foreign) companies so it would be smart to fix the root of the problem(data collection and brainwashing)

Or at least they didn't, until this happened.

They would care about Tencent or Alibaba, but ByteDance isn't big or important enough for the party to care.

These are collectives of politicians, who have a huge number of difficult problems to solve and limited means of solving them. They have conflicting, national, local and, yes, some personal demands. A mass of conflicting ideology, with varying levels of diligence, ethics and greed.

Expecting absolute morals is expecting the impossible.

Compared to virtually any government in history, and most governments today, the EU is far, far from corrupt. Yes there is corruption. But no government has no corruption.

And it's certainly not helpful, or thruthful, to use silly rhetoric like 'The ship sailed long ago on the EU being anything but corrupt'.

That is a lie, and I can only hope you are adult enough to admit it is one.

The US had a phone company at the national level until regulatory bodies made a market.

Operating a social network app is not a protected form of free speech.

A Freudian typo to be sure, and sadly too representative of those pushing government software/content restrictions.

These two things could not exist simultaneously without an explicit guarantee of legal protection from the government for online publishers of user content. Without that guarantee of protection it's doubtful that any platform could have grown as large as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Google without taking a completely hands-off approach to user content (i.e. as a "common carrier"). The threat of litigation would have forced them to pre-emptively moderate all content just like print media and television.

In the 1990s Congress decided that it's okay for the internet to operate on different legal rules from the rest of society. They decided that internet companies can make editorial choices about their content freely without being legally held responsible for those choices, and the Supreme Court upheld that decision. Online speech is now the domain of Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. and they have free reign over their virtual kingdoms without regard for any other legal system.

When US intelligence has credible proof of something and want to be trusted, they go to reputable media or outright publishes it.

This is not a universally accepted truth. You made a claim and didn't back it up. It's not that hard. Honestly, I'm not even trying to defend RFA but it's irritating to see people make claims without substantiating them and then trying to argue about it afterwards.

Look up Five Eyes.

We know there is geopolitical maneuvering by different countries to improve their standing on the world stage, politically and/or economically, and that includes how they engage on business and technology. The great firewall was not for nothing. Same with fights over 5G or who can operate where, data privacy laws, etc.

OTOH, it's not clear exactly what's at stake when there's a dispute over control of tiktok. Are the worlds governments competing over data sources they could tap to make weaponizable models of societal function? Are they just competing for ownership of emerging markets to help their economies? Does all this amount to a pissing match between the worlds elites? Or are ideological differences sufficient to cause wildly different outcomes for humanity, especially the little folks, depending on who gets the upper hand?

The short list is China, Iran, Russia, N Korea, Venezuela, Cuba. There are others, but these seem to get the most attention.

Remember the Axis of Evil?

Any acquisition involving foreign commerce is subject to the approval of the CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States). Following is an explanation taken from a recent Congressional Research Service report [1] (page 5).

"These regulations created an essentially voluntary system of notification by the parties to an acquisition [...]. Despite the voluntary nature of the notification, firms largely comply with the provision, because the regulations stipulate that foreign acquisitions that are governed by the Exon-Florio review process that do not notify the committee remain subject indefinitely to divestment or other appropriate actions by the President. The regulations make it clear that the President alone determines 'whether a transaction threatens national security.'"

When ByteDance acquired TikTok, they chose not to undergo that review. This was their legal right. However, that made their acquisition liable to be retroactively disallowed by the President.

[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33312.pdf

Of course, we're now deep into my opinions :)

It's unclear to me what you're suggesting.

I love FT and I subscribe to the paper but I see more anti-trump sentiment than an actual argument there.

This could be fixed in many , many ways - like not allowing political ads, or not allowing targeted political ads, or labeling clearly what is paid political propaganda or the exteme solution , limited electoral budget (why should the guy with more money is more equal then the rest?? it is are torical question I know constitution in US allows this )

When someone calls on the "free world", it has mostly become a US patriotism dog whistle to me without any deeper meaning.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country

I wouldn’t want to live under a system that can make drastic changes on a whim. The USA is a very multicultural place with many different people with different priorities. We need to find common ground before certain types of things change. This is good even if frustrating at times.

That might become a problem, or be a problem in places... but it's not the problem.

The primary problems (IMO) are:

(1) Influence of multinational interest. Regulation could literally half FB's EU revenue without being very radical, for example.

(2) Lack of polity. The EU parliament is a clown house and becoming worse. There is no political public discourse around it. It doesn't have power. Voters use it for experimental/protest voting. Political parties use it as a proving ground for nationally oriented politicians, and for jobs. The whole thing is dysfunctional.

(3) EU politics plays almost no role in national politics.. parliaments or governments. There's no public discourse here either.

(4) The "executive" is totally closed doors. Legislation is a part of governance, but not all of it.

(5) They don't really know what to do, and they're timid.

Blaming insufficient power, in politics, is a copout most of the time. It absolves everyone. This should be a political faux pax. Use the powers you have more effectively. Maybe then you can have more power.

More like 33%.

But just the other day, there was a huge post with lots of uproar about how Google was flagging apps like mastodon for having no content standards regarding hate speech.

> "being put in jail because you say publicly that tibet should be free"

and if merely pointing that fact out is getting me downvoted, that's the problem of the people who are doing that.

Every country enforces their laws. If a US company violated gdpr, I would expect them to be fined and banned from the EU.

I'm not generally in favor of taking corporate personhood to logical extremes, but I'm kind of OK with companies having values and being able promote those values. Being able to promote some speech over others is part of that.

The First Amendment applies to the government because the government is a privileged party. Its role in society is dislike that of any private citizen or enterprise, and the restrictions we place on it reflect that uniqueness. It only makes sense to extend the First Amendment to other parties that have a unique role.

Which we do, e.g. Common Carrier restrictions on the movement of goods, and a variety of special requirements on telecommunications companies. If we want to say that social media platforms have become a core aspect of modern democracy and need to be regulated as such, there's an argument to be made. But applying it to private businesses in general is overreach in my opinion.

There's another line of reasoning that "First Amendment" is a stand-in for the societal value of freedom of speech. While it doesn't legally apply, we invoke it to mean that freedom of speech is the first-est of amendments, i.e. is the freedom that we rank more highly than any others. This still gets into the same paradox though. A company shouldn't be forced to equally support all viewpoints because then it's not a freedom, but we can certainly express dissatisfaction that a private party is acting in a way counter to the values of our society.

This is not correct as a blanket statement. The constitution defines the powers of all three branches of government, not just congress. It also puts some restrictions on states and has some general prohibitions that don't just apply to government (for example, it defines treason). No other amendment in the Bill of Rights has "congress shall make no law" in it; they all just say certain things are prohibited or required, period. And subsequent amendments, such as the Fourteenth, place restrictions on States. Parts of the constitution are specifications for congress specifically. But not all of it.

The reason individuals and businesses can refuse to allow speech they don't like in their homes or places of business, or on their websites, is that that is part of their right to free speech--the right to control speech on their own property.

Try walking into a restaurant and wailing on about Trump.

In 'Western Democracies' we also value private spaces and the ability for private groups to make their own rules.

Freedom of expression does not apply to YouTube in the 'Liberal Democratic' sense.

1) Private businesses can make rules for the content they want to have up.

2) In public you can do mostly as you please. Nobody can take down your website unless you're doing something specifically illegal.

3) If we want to ban other countries stuff because they are totalitarians, we can do that.

Primarily, you are arguing for compelling corporation to expend effort and expense to carry content deemed objectionable by officers of that company, and I'm not sure you've thought that through. You might think politically-[whatever] voices are being silenced--absent evidence--but if the US government decides to violate hundreds of years of established norms and force websites to cease censoring content, it won't be just content you favor that explodes. And if the US government can force Facebook and Twitter to carry content they don't like, then what legal standard separates them from Hacker News, for example?

People who dislike the limits of these platforms have a variety of other venues on the internet to choose from, but what they are not at all entitled to is the automatic amplification of their voice by these large but private platforms.

The remedy is to break up the big forums, not to take away the rights of their owners.

During the cold war all sorts of things were justified because they made sense from the perspective of US (governmental) interests. The Vietnam war, the Mujahideen, the toppling of free and democratic governments. In a "realist" framework, the ends justify the means. The "ends" and "means" here are considered from the point of view of the statesman.

When the world is viewed as a chessboard between competing nations, human beings outside the decision making centers suffer - we are reduced to being expendable resources, collateral damage, in the pursuit of "national" interests.

And Stalin repeatedly instructed revolutionary communists to stand down in order to avoid provoking Western powers (e.g, in Greece, Italy, France, Yugoslavia, and even China). The USSR provided little to no assistance to revolutionaries in Central and South America, believing that socialism needed to develop there naturally.

Calling the EP "clown house" is also insulting and calling the EU bureaucracy outright incompetent is tabloid style simplification and I'm not sure what else I can compare it to.

Yes, it is easy to say: "they are not strong leaders", but they can't be strong leaders, but how they could be when they are dependent and have limited mandate?

So what if the government partners with all the large tech companies to have them voluntarily enforce restrictions on speech? Oh, you're free to say whatever you want, just not online. Or on the airwaves. Or in public parks, which were recently put in control of a private management company too. You are free to stand in your bedroom and talk to the wall. Just don't talk loud enough that your corporate landlord kicks you out for a noise violation.

I am not sure if I am attacking a straw man here, but it sure sounds like you claim that buying one way flight ticket is very difficult compared to getting rid of FAAMG in your life?

I understand there are other complications involved in moving abroad that just the flight ticket, but I still think that the big global corps are much more difficult to get rid of than my government. Including the fact that they very much keep communication with my friends at least as much hostage as my government if I decide to move away.

Is there actually something in the Federalist Papers talking about free market competition? I'm not aware they considered this at all.

Human rights, however, are natural rights.

As an aside, I remember watching 'The Wave' years ago (I think there's a new version on netflix?) and being fascinated by it. It gave a brief glimpse into the cultural fear of what happened in Germany happening again.

The fact that they would have no choice if they were subject to China's jurisdiction. You can't choose to do something you're being forced to do, therefore if you do it, it wasn't your choice.

And I agree, the internet monopoly is a huge issue. The internet should become widely available to all. I would say as a utility, but that then points out the fact that I have one giant power company that could also, censor me and cut me off from my only main source of power... hmmm...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't forbidding them from censoring user content orthogonal to this?

Keep in mind, making an accusation not totally supported by evidence is not defamation. In the US, it falls on the defamed to both prove that the accusation is false and prove that the accuser knew it was false. Not that they had doubts or uncertainty, but that they knowingly lied. Making an ultimately incorrect acusation based on incomplete evidence isn't legally negligent.

> To get concrete, there is evidence that Kyle Rittenhouse murdered someone. He's been charged with first-degree intentional homicide, this is Wisconsin's equivalent of Murder.

These claims were coming out prior to him being charged and prior to any credible sources reporting details of the story. There was an organized attempt to get ahead of the narrative and paint a particular picture of the events. The fact that it's actually rather difficult to find the details of the 'victims' and their criminal histories is one indicator of that. The below cited debate on the wiki entry is another. And that is without diving into the twitter discourse where it's possible to find every level of bad faith "debate"

> There is evidence that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist. He travelled across state lines to disrupt and intimidate people at a protest for racial justice. While he may not be a card carrying neo-nazi, that's evidence.

He worked in Kenosha as a lifeguard, and was there cleaning up the neighborhood [0]unarmed earlier in the day. Saying his presence there is evidence is like saying that my fingerprints inside my own home are evidence of whatever crime may have happened there.

> There is evidence that Kyle Rittenhouse is a terrorist. He (presumably) unlawfully used violence and intimidation against civilians for political purposes. He's listed on wikipedia's list of right-wing terrorists in the US[0].

This "evidence" came into existence after the claims were already circulating. [1]The original entry was Kenosha Riots, and there is ongoing organized action to alter the title and information to change the narrative. None of the sources listed existed at the time that the defamatory claims were made.

> Coming to incorrect conclusions after good faith investigation isn't negligent.

There was no investigation, so there cannot have been good faith in the investigation. The individuals claiming he 'crossed state lines with an illegal AR-15' are making multiple false claims at once. He didn't cross state lines to participate, he was already there. He didn't cross with the AR-15, it was given to him by a WI state resident. Even the possession of the weapon itself may not have been illegal as the state statutes leave wiggle room that has yet to be explored.

The ultimate point is that the people who initiated many of these claims are journalists and news publications who should have made a good faith effort to produce accurate reports. They failed miserably to do so, and their reports still carry significant inaccuracies. Some of these reports featured video clips that were edited to better support the narrative. None of these reports, at least that I've been able to find, show all of the video evidence that is public thus far.

> Just to be clear, you are saying that it is reasonable for a person to call someone else a pedophile without any evidence, but calling someone who shot and killed someone else, on video, a murderer, is negligent? Am I getting that right?

Not exactly. I'm saying that Elon Musk is one individual who has no following because of his 'investigative journalism' credentials. He's just a dude who is rather well known for being 'out there'. On the other hand, people absolutely do follow CNN & & & as a 'credible' source for such reporting.

[0] https://nypost.com/2020/08/26/suspected-kenosha-gunman-kyle-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kenosha_protests#Requeste...

You can't use CNN because a twitter user called someone a white supremacist after CNN correctly reported on events and someone else says something inflammatory. Either you can go after CNN for the reporting it does, or you can go after random twitter users for inflammatory stuff, but understand that you already said that that was okay when you claimed musk was "different".

And just a note, Lin Wood did not win a case against CNN. The Sandmann case was settled out of court. Please don't defame CNN like that.