You'd be wrong.
What value would a concept like the First Amendment have if it were voidable as easily as "we have national security concerns" or "the information on there isn't valuable." Given that those are pretty much the immediate go-to excuses for any autocrats clamp down on speech, such a right would be totally meaningless.
I would argue that in this case the platform itself is expressing speech by ranking, recommending and promoting certain content. A foreign entity has no such first amendment right- we have had restrictions on foreign ownership of news media for decades now.
I think it’s an interesting issue especially now that you have TikTok users who think they’re being treated unfairly moving to a pure Chinese platform RedNote and encountering actual censorship. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-redn....
And now unconfirmed reports that RedNote is considering segregating the new American users from the Chinese users, ironically so Americans couldn’t influence Chinese users - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
Instagram doesn't have the same culture at all and it's not a substitute. TikTok is a like a digital "third space" for communities, and just like the real life equivilents, is slowly disappearing. People without community are easier to control.
No, the First Amendment doesn’t just prevent the government from imprisoning you for speech… that is a ridiculously narrow perspective and really discredits you on the matter.
The First Amendment, as a trivial example, prevents the government from fining you for speech. It prevents the government from threatening to imprison you for speech. It prevents the government from seizing your assets for speech.
FWIW, I’m not arguing that TikTok shouldn’t be banned. I think it’s a propaganda weapon. However it is far from clear that it can be banned under our Constitution. Especially since the mechanics of that ban require coercing American companies and individuals to limit their freedom of expression.
The government has absolutely imprisoned people for speech it doesn’t like. In the Parma case, a citizen put up a parody page satirizing the local police department, he was jailed for several days awaiting trial. And the Supreme Court ruled that the victim was unable to sue the police department for doing so because of qualified immunity: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court.... Parody publications The Onion and The Babylon Bee both filed amicus briefs to the Supreme Court, which are hilarious reads btw. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/2022...
Recently there was also the case of Michael Cohen, where it was found that he was remanded to solitary confinement as retaliation for him refusing to give up his rights to publish a book critical of the sitting us president: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-files-first-amendme... and https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=122506763932389.... This brings up an interesting issue as the administration pointed to an undisclosed nda (assumed to be agreed to as private citizens) was used as an argument for the federal government to intervene as a criminal matter not civil.
I find your argument about forcing the app store providers to remove the TikTok app compelling. I was curious how the Supreme Court handled that issue in its recent opinion on the matter and a quick skim didn’t find any references to app stores. See https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf.
My first thought is that if TikTok is barred from operating in the United States, it may simply be a condition of the store policies to have a legally recognized operating company in the country before your app can be approved for the store. So in this case the government is not directly demanding the store to remove the app, but rather the store itself simply enforcing its own t’s and c’s
Finally, there is plenty of precedent for regulating foreign speech - for example FARA which is very wide reaching. https://www.justice.gov/nsd-fara/frequently-asked-questions
* The Parma ruling was not that the government was allowed to detain him, it is that the police could not be punished for their mistake. The entire thing is predicated on the police having made a mistake, i.e. this case shows they cannot jail you for speech.
* Cohen vs Barr: the courts ruled that the government overstepped, i.e. the First Amendment offered the protection I am claiming it does, and you are wrong
* TikTok ban mechanics: The government will fine app stores and web hosts that serve TikTok. This is a clear violation of First Amendment rights. It is not a condition of the app store ToS's by any weird mechanism like the one you describe.
* We're not talking about preventing foreign speech. We're talking about preventing American companies from serving the websites, applications, and content they wish to serve.
In this case, the fact that the platform is foreign and that the foreign owner is considered hostile to the US carves out an exception.
Source: the FCC specifically prohibits certain ownership of broadcast stations by foreign entities:
“Section 310(a) prohibits a foreign government or its representative from holding any radio license.
Section 310(b)(3) prohibits foreign individuals, governments, and corporations from owning more than twenty percent of the capital stock of a broadcast, common carrier, or aeronautical radio station licensee.”
https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli...
Ultimately, Novak was jailed for his speech no? And cohen was remanded to solitary confinement for his refusal to waive his first amendment rights? If a police department or the federal government decides to overstep in the future what exactly keeps them from doing so? It’s established from these cases that through 1/ qualified immunity and potentially (granted this happened after the case, and rank and file would not qualify…) 2/ presidential immunity for official acts, that any citizen could be detained for speech the reigning administration or local officials do not like, without consequence.
If TikTok is denied its ability to operate in the United States, how can an App Store who operates within the bounds of the law allow it on its platform? I admit this is an interesting issue to consider - unlike the radio spectrum the government doesn’t “own” the internet.
It wouldn’t be too crazy to consider that an App Store would require apps to register using a legal entity in the country that it operates within - you need a way to bill the entity, resolve disputes within that country etc.
I think the more interesting question is denying access to the web site inside the US. There’s no single gatekeeper in that case.
No, it’s really not established. I agree the consequences should have been more severe for both instances, but no, this does not mean the government is allowed to imprison people for their speech.
These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature, increasingly so in the age of LLMs. They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astroturfing the platform and/or manipulating the algorithm (either through paid advertisements or by owning a platform and controlling the algorithm outright). They're places where a small minority of people can become an unstoppable movement that seems to have real support, sucking gullible voters in to join the growing "consensus".
In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent. The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the public in harmful ways?
That's not at all obvious to me. On what grounds, moral or legal, should the US government tell anyone what to publish or promote?
Also for tiktok, the algorithm needs less than an hour to almost fully understand you and it will then push a mix of what you already like and agree with, things that you don't like and absolutely disagree with but in a way that makes it look bad so in the end you also agree with that, and some funny videos to keep you entertained. This way they are maximizing the time you stay in the app to increase their revenue. It polarizes your world view further and further and without people to talk to and discuss, your ideas and beliefs will be turned into religious level thinking, radicalizing you and making it more and more difficult to accept different opinions. If you only consume what you already believe, things will go downhill very quickly. That's the reason people can't talk to each other anymore, the truth in most if not all cases is somewhere in the middle.
What we need is social media that is not algorithm driven, not optimized to keep you at the device for as long as possible but to show you a multitude of opinions to a topic from different angles, not just the one you have already chosen as your truth. We need to talk again, accept that other people can have different opinions without shouting them down. We need to try to look at things from different perspectives not just our own.
And most importantly, we need to accept that we can't have an opinion about facts. We need to listen to people that actually have professional knowledge about a topic. The guy that used to be a fitness trainer but now has a telegram channel to spread some important truths about climate change actually knows shit about how the world works. They want to make money selling you any truth that works for you.
What I'm saying is that all of these platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in that they exist to predictably change individual behavior with a high degree of precision, through custom tailored information feeds that can be shaped to alter someone's perspectives on the world in the interests of whoever controls the feed.
I don't think it's better for that power to be in the hands of Elon Musk or of Mark Zuckerberg. I think that that power needs to be banned worldwide if democracy is to survive. Democracy hinges on the idea that voters will in general vote in their own interest, and the ability to individually manipulate voters into measurably changing their behavior breaks that assumption.
And note that this is fundamentally different than traditional media sources, which have a harder time shaping someone's entire life and worldview. WaPo can control what someone perceives the WaPo editorial board as believing. Only a social media platform can control their perspective of what their friends think.
It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
What's next? Should we prevent giving air time to people from 'adversarial' countries at all? Or only allow it when accompanied by a sanctioned commentary to 'correct' any unwanted information?
While we're at it, how about 'adversarial' parties within our own country? Why should they be allowed to mislead gullible people?
We've seen how well it worked with Fox News, ONN, Alex Jones...
Spreading misinformation takes nothing more than being persuasive. Being able to pick and choose stuff out of context or even just say anything without a shred of support makes hours of “content” easy.
I'm sorry, but that's a load of baloney on par with "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear".
Second of all: it's obviously false. There are loads of examples - contemporary as well as older - where people actively peddled "incorrect information" to line their own pockets at the expense of the money/health/wellbeing of others. Having the facts does not repair the damage, nor does it prevent future harm.
But, firstly and more importantly, this framing suggests we should allow for misinformation. We absolutely shouldn't. The public debate isn't resilient to malicious actors. That's what makes misinformation so dangerous and what makes this slogan so hollow. It assumes good faith on all parties. There isn't, so stop advocating for solutions that require that.
In more detail: the public debate is meant for an actual exchange of ideas, thereby enlightening the participants. Anyone who is not interested in that, shouldn't participate. In particular, misinformation should be barred from the public debate. - and those spreading it held to account.
Whether it is knowingly claiming that lead is harmless, that smoking has no negative effects on your health, or anything vaguely political of the last dozen or so years: if you're unaware, it's not your fault yet, but you'll need to stop being ignorant. If you're aware that the information you're spreading is wrong: shame on you! You should be barred from participating in (that line of the) public debate.
Ad-funded algorithmic feeds exist to change people's behavior. They're indoctrination machines, ostensibly designed to sell products (which is supposedly a good thing in a capitalist world) but very easily turned to indoctrinating about anything else. I don't believe that indoctrination machines should be allowed to exist. We've proven how malleable people are in the face of these machines, and it's simply too much power to let any one entity hold, regardless of who it is in charge.
Anyone willing to take a good-faith stab at why this couldn't equally well be a description of traditional media too - say - the WaPo?
There's a major difference with the modern social media platforms, which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus. That illusion makes them much more powerful than anything that came before, to the point where they are different in kind, not just in degree.
When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.
The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.
At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.
> couldn't
Hypothetically, almost anything could happen.
> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication. For a brief period we had some social media platforms that made gestures in the direction of free communication. Then the investor capital came rolling in, and they were expected to increase revenue. How do you increase revenue of your free communication platform? You sell the messaging. Call it promotion, advertising, whatever. The only thing of value you have at your disposal are people's eyeball, you're going to sell what they see. You could ask your users to pay for the service... but then 80% of them will flake to a rival service that's still free. If there's a way to marry the profit motive and a truly democratic social media platform then our best and brightest have yet to find it. I suspect it doesn't exist.
The first step to reform would be to persuade legacy media to stop reporting the opinions trending on X/Twitter as "news". Stop reporting it entirely, it's manipulated, at best unverified, rubbish.
This logic applies to all media publications, not just internet platforms in the United States. When people say "anti-democratic" in the US I'm pretty certain they take it to mean "the government interfering in the speech of a private entity", not failing to uphold the principle of "1 tweet, 1 impression".
Every newspaper, television station, blog post, what have you consists of a small minority of people both creating and selling reach in unequal ways. If it is anti-democratic and therefore presumably not tolerated for a small minority to exercise or sell speech, then that's just equivalent to saying no private media enterprise should exist.
Needlessly to say the only person who can make this claim with a straight face is Noam Chomsky because he's been saying that about everyone for 50 years, but this is obviously not a position held by anyone currently trying to ban TikTok
When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.
The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.
At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.
The US Gov has a mandate to preserve and uphold democracy. Shuttering communication is prior restraint - an anti-democratic action.
Platforms have no mandate to preserve and uphold democracy.
In my dream world we’d get something like the rules we had, until fairly recently, restricting max broadcast media audience control in a given market for a single owner, but for Web platforms. Don’t like being limited to five million users or whatever? Then use a standard that puts control over curation and presentation in the hands of the user. Want to control all that, like all these awful platforms do? Then live with the limit.
Each of these platforms is fundamentally a propaganda platform—they're explicitly designed to manipulate people into buying stuff, and that capability is frequently turned to voter manipulation. The US government has decided that while US-based billionaires having access to such influence is fine and dandy, the CCP should not. So tiktok must be sold to a US owner.
If you want peace, you better prepare for war.
It is forbidden to forbid.
The necessary evil.
All that to say, we live in a complicated world, and beautiful ideals are only a direction to keep, never to be reached.
Of course, they don't HAVE to shutter. They can sell their interest in Tiktok and stay open. They have chosen not to do that thus far, and hence they have chosen to shutter.
It's now an industry, with enough companies with enough employees and, more importantly, enough political and economic power to destroy almost any attempts to push legislation that may actually protect privacy in any real way.
But, honestly, I don't think the TikTok ban has any overlap with privacy concerns. It's pure cold war.
The actual problem is and always has been control over the content being fed to users. It's not an issue of privacy, it's an issue of voter manipulation. It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.
On the one hand that's a very rational position for people who owe their election to algorithmic voter manipulation to take, but that doesn't really make it better ethically.
Which should be a major concerning point. Censoring a powerful media gives more power to the censor than censoring less powerful ones. Now the censor has the power to ensure that only US government and related big tech corporations are allowed to manufacturate consent over the public, with no way of having options of different views. Suddenly the media becomes even more dangerous.
I'm with the SCotUS on this.
https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
The Romanian National Liberal Party (opponents of Georgescu) bought the campaign. Their hashtag was "hijacked" (whatever that means) to boost Georgescu instead.
I do not know how TikTok works. Perhaps it is as simple as Georgescu supporters simply using the paid for hashtag for their own messages.
So, according to this article, the Russians did nothing. The Liberal Party engaged in questionable TikTok interference and Georgescu supporters jumped on the bandwagon.
The Western media falling silent on the issue would indicate that this politico.eu is correct.
(I don't like TikTok and I agree it is damaging, but this is just reasoning I can't get behind)
Like Hollywood, then.
In other words, some of the Westerners’ hypocrisy when it comes to the views they hold on their socio-economic system never ceases to amaze me, especially now, as we’re in the middle of a new translatio imperii phase.
These platforms are much less subject to manufactured consent than the traditional news media, which was controlled by a small number of entities aligned with the elites of the day. Decentralised information transmission is fundamentally better for the people than centralised information transmission controlled by a few gatekeepers who suppress anything not in their interests.
Look at how homogenous in views the baby boomers are relatively to the younger generations, as evidence of how much more effective at manufacturing consent the traditional media are.
Personally I don’t think singling them out is anti democratic, because this platform and Chinese run companies in general have issues unique to them.
TikTok lied under oath about the location of data they claimed was stored in the US. That’s fraud and has concerning privacy and national security implications:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index....
This is why divestiture to an American entity with no ties back to a mainland China owner makes sense - it severs the tie that results in illegal surveillance. It’s not a ban on specific content or even the app - just a ban on the owner.
Another issue - it has also come out that TikTok (not Douyin) employees have to uphold the goals of the CCP as part of their job:
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
And then there’s the basic lack of reciprocity in market access, since all non Chinese social media is banned in China and yet their apps can access consumers outside China.
Manufacturing consent still works via the traditional newspapers. That is where "the (current) truth" originates from. That is what is amplified on social media, including here. It takes years of struggle of independently minded people to argue against mainstream. Often after two years mainstream takes the position of independently minded people and takes the credit.
TikTok is different in that it addresses teenagers. They don't have any political power and will change their opinions in their 20s/30s. The data collection and blackmail arguments are still valid. But they also happen in the West, except that three letter agencies collect compromising material on domestic and foreign politicians.
I mean, really? On social media anti-China sentiment is at an all time high. This Chinese manipulation operation must have really failed.
When values are in conflict, which should win? In the hierarchy of values, where does economic world position stand in terms of national concerns?
In general, I wholehearted support the freedom of speech, and if it were any other case, I would agree with the EFF statement here. However, knowing how the sausages are made, I am reluctantly agreeing with the ban, at least for now.
People underestimate how powerful these tools can be. Based on simple, readily available "anonymous" data, we can already impute your demographics data -- age, gender, family relations, occupation, income, etc -- using a decade-old ML techniques. In some cases, we can detect which stage of your emotional journey you are in and nudge you towards our target state. What surprised me about Cambridge Analytica was its ineffectiveness, at least as reported. There are plenty of teams out there that use these techniques to greatly further their gains, whatever those may be.
In Primakov doctrine, information warfare through sowing discontent and/or eroding psychological well-being is very much real and actualizable. I am not claiming that a foreign government is currently single-handedly controlling TikTok to brainwash the American youth; we do not have conclusive proof of that. However, the fact that such a tool is in a foreign country's arsenal is itself a massive danger to America's national security.
Yes, all they have to do is sign up for the usual services advertisers use.
> [Manufacturing Consent] argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
Tiktok doesn't push government propaganda to the same degree as Meta and Google.
But whoever pushed for this was smart enough to avoid making it about speech ("content-neutral" in legal parlance). It's strictly commerce-based and there's lots of precedent for denying access to the US market based on ownership. For a long time, possibly still to this day, foreign ownership of media outlets (particularly TV stations and newspapers) was heavily restricted. And that's a good analogy for what happened here.
What I hope happens is people wake up to the manipulation of what you see by US companies.
Do you have a source for this claim?
I'm not making a case that that is justified, but I'm interested to know if other people in or outside the US share that perception?
A ban on routers made by a specific foreign company — when the government knows full well the Internet can’t work without them — feels like a more likely scenario. When Huawei equipment bans were in the news, were there similar First Amendment arguments about that, too?
And the government doesn't offer any kind of remedy - you can't pick up your whole social cluster and move to another platform.
tiktok didn't had its 1A rights infringed, but every american that wants to listen to clips of old episodes of friends does.
what if this was YOUR business getting banned?
On the other hand, we have much more relaxed restrictions going the other way. Why not consider “fairness” from that perspective as well?
What if it was a ban, not on printing presses, but on a specific model of printing press, made in China, that happens to have 99% market share.
I want to try to see an analogy with Freenode, Libera, and IRC, but that was self inflicted damage by a private entity rather than by a government mandate.
Tiktok can still exist and keep showing their garbage to Americans, but it can't do so while being owned by a foreign adversary that attacks us almost continuously.
Sure, they can still buy our information elsewhere, but this is like saying I shouldn't put a lock on my door because thieves can break in through other means. Just check the looting happening in Los Angeles as a result of the reduction in the barriers for theft. Cost matters and if we increase the costs for China's data theft, their ability to steal from us will be reduced.
Why do you think it’s YOU who decides to be the gatekeeper on all that data and no one else?
You see the double standards here? The hypocrisy?
When GDPR was created there was a huge wave of people arguing that Facebook and other similar platforms would withdraw from EU. That did not happen, but if it had it would have been perfectly fine. Instead most American companies decided to create EU specific version of their platforms in order to comply with GDPR.
The next wave of privacy protecting regulations will likely recreate similar reactions. Those companies that want to stay in EU will comply, and those who don't will withdraw and give space to new ones. The trend of moving to national platforms/cloud providers has already started and been going on fairly strong in my country, especially from government organization and defense adjacent companies.
That said, I don't think banning tiktok will have the desired results.
This ban is infringing of IMO fundamental rights of individuals in US to share and use the TikTok app freely. That China is doing similar things to their citizens can't be an excuse.
Yeah I hate TikTok and its effect on society too and good riddance etc but this is a first for something very bad. We have to look at the larger picture.
Facebook and others were in the Chinese market but they got blocked because they would not censor things that the Chinese government wanted censored and would not turn over user information that the government asked for. Chinese social media companies also are subject to those same censorship and user disclosure requirements, and will be banned (or worse) if they do not comply.
Would Facebook be allowed back in if they agreed to the censoring and to turning over user information? As far as I know none of the major American social media companies have been willing to do so, and so we don't know.
That doesn't mean you get to control what Americans can do on their devices.
Boiling the frog...
There is actual harm done to democracy on these platforms. A democracy requires informed voters to function and the platform does the diametric opposite by misinforming them. Any attempt to regulate this or promote or moderate has failed simply because an actual structured funding source is misinformation. The only option to keep democracy standing is to kill it.
I’d expect the EFF to have some well read social or political staff. Apparently they don’t and are quite happy to spout absolutes.
The distinction between this and China's "great firewall" and speech restrictions should be obvious.
Never expected to see the EFF dismiss an argument for user's data privacy as "shaky".
Quite disappointed honestly.
Unfortunately it seems the powers that be are dead set on pursuing destruction of not just specific competitors but, eventually, the entire notion of constructive competition and its win-win outcomes provided the right safety nets.
The EFF routinely sides with big tech companies. See their work on copyrights, patents, etc. Tech figures fund them. See https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine
This implies people outside the US should relate the same way to Meta, X, etc. (Which seems fine to me, just pointing it out)
A "national security risk" is only a problem for the national security apparatus itself—not actual Americans. Kids don't want to die for their government because its failures have already shaped so much of their personal lives. It's evident in their rents, their student/medical bills, and the character of their neighborhoods. It's rather insulting to say shifty Chinamen are tricking them in all this.
Second, the US realizes that it cannot reliably manufacture consent if its citizens are not tuned in to the information sources that it can influence.
It's rather you're overestimating it (no wonder the ineffectiveness of CA was a surprise to you). It's such a low-power tool that it couldn't even be used to avoid its ban.
> In some cases
In some cases you don't need any of the ML techniques to do that. But at any rate, that's an irrelevant scale when it comes to "massive danger"
Clarence Thomas is not actually conservative in the small government sense.
When the mind-reading algorithm provides each user with their own reality to live in, then we are talking about editorializing. And allowing a communist, anti-Western government direct control over that power does not seem reasonable.
inb4 "better than my own government" - great, we agree that social media algorithms are a net negative to all society.
Communications is great. Video is great. Social media algorithms controlled by rage-inducing profit seekers and governments is not great.
When the EFF sounds about as sane as a sovereign citizen…
With friends like these, who needs enemies…
(I would say something even stronger than "extraordinarily difficult", but then I'd be on thinner ice.)
You have the freedom of speech to manipulate and be anti-democratic as long as you are the US government or bound by its control.
But it's not though? They are requiring divestiture from an adversary nation, not because TikTok is somehow inherently “manipulative and anti-democratic”
Nothing about TikTok has to change except who owns the company (unless of course the owners are manipulating the company's operation, in which case divestiture would indeed by quite disruptive).
What’s perplexing to me is leftists love how companies in America can be forced to sell and broken if they are declared monopolies. But if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers suddenly forcing a sale is wrong? It makes me feel even more certain that HN is astroturfed by Chinese bots because who cares
I suspect that people pattern-match this declaration to McCarthyism.
Additionally, the US has been invoking national security for a series of extremely dubious moves recently as well -- e.g. Biden's latest decision to block the sale of US Steel to Nippon on shaky grounds of national security, and his administration's recent policy to introduce export limits on GPUs to all countries except 18 (most US allies, NATO or otherwise, are now unjustly being restricted in how many GPUs they can import). Coupled with the incoming Trump administration's threats of trade war and expansionist designs on Greenland, people -- especially non-Americans, also in countries that have historically been friends of the US -- are very quickly running out of goodwill for the US, and in light of these events naturally the TikTok ban is seen as just another draconian attempt by the US to practise (economic) imperialism.
I despise communism myself, as my country went through 45 years of it. I agree with TikTok being forced to sell, and I'd like to see all social media sites offer more transparency mechanisms to NGOs and government agencies to show how their algorithms really work to have some watchdog be able to check if what we're seeing is heavily manipulated, especially during election years.
Apply reasonable privacy and transparency rules to all social media platforms, regardless of ownership.
I’m not sure the EFF really needs to spell it out at this point.
It's the kind of naivety that gets your lunch money taken at school
I hesitate to reference politics here, but read Nate Silver's writings on what he's termed "the Indigo Blob"[0][1]...
> The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions
When I think back to how things went down during the pandemic, I'm convinced that the "real opinions" that most people held were based on blindly following position of whatever media they were consuming (and that media likely blindly following whatever government messaging).
Actual scientists posting actual statistics?[2] No-one wanted to see the data on who was - and wasn't - at significant risk from Covid.
At one point back then, one of my closest friends bluntly told me in a group chat that I was "a sociopath", despite him knowing that out of the two of us, I'm the one with the science PhD + published papers, and (at least science-wise) he's the layman.
Hey ho, he and I eventually made up...
[0] https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blo... [1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/how-the-indigo-blob-runs-a-bluf... [2] https://medium.com/wintoncentre/what-have-been-the-fatal-ris...
Because worthwhile barriers to gerrymandering are difficult and complex to construct. Effective barriers would need to be overseen and updated by capable, uncompromised people.
Instead, it is easier for Gov to yield to its political handlers. There are lots of reasons for this; I think those reasons can be grouped together under one human failing:
No One Anywhere Wants To Clean Their Own HouseSounds no different to Fox News and CNN to me.
Anyway Russian interference doesn't usually involve the Kremlin giving money to voters directly (unless you are a citizen of Moldova), but through people in the country willing to sell themselves to Russia. Like "Bogdan Peșchir" in the article who donated €1 million to Tiktok users who promoted Georgescu.
In parallel there were other campaigns in the ultranationalist's favour, paid for with crypto.
He's also linked to a former secret service figure¹ who betrayed NATO to the KGB in the '60s, so he's either a FSB trojan, an useful idiot, or both.
The problem is regular people do not fully understand this narrative manipulation mechanism. Not even the infuencers involved in the campaign, or the company that ran it realized who they were promoting until it was too late.
The EU should use this incident to at least fine Tiktok into oblivion, but they're obviously sleeping at the wheel. The Biden Administration, as weak as it has been, has made the correct decision yet again: ban the Chinese propaganda blowhorn.
I say this because I feel the reply to my top post was unnecessarily aggressive. I have friends in Europe and respect their independence. I don't know why an opinion on a purely US matter brought anger from an EU resident.
My best guess is the feeling I sometimes have that Europeans believe Americans keep scheming to subjugate them, when in fact Americans hardly ever think about Europe. Also, when Americans do think about Europe, it's in a positive way as Europeans share many of our values.
The big corporations, with government support, that does try to profit from Europe are the same that do it to American citizens in the US, so we're kind of in the same fight against them.
My point is that TikTok going dark is a real problem for the US, to solve the issue so heavy handedly is troublesome path to tread. For international relations I am not sure this is for the greater good.
https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/whitepaper/202112/04/cont...
https://news.cgtn.com/news/whitepaper/China+Democracy+That+W...
In the case of any foreign ownership of mass media, it is trivial to weaponize that platform to wage asymmetric war against a political adversary by driving division in between the population through lies, half truths, and selected context. That’s why the US has laws to ban foreign ownership of broadcast media outlets.
You even gave the example of Alex Jones, he was silenced by the mainstream social media sites.
Yes, fake and misleading news is easier to spread than issuing corrections or fact checking, but that doesn't mean that we should pretend they don't exist, because it's NOT working.
EDIT: Mind you, I'm not advocating for what Twitter has essentially become, but hiding away these people is also not working very clearly based on how well things are going.
Though I do agree, it's an insanely slippery slope: where do you draw the line.
That pretty accurately describes Twitter and Facebook these days. TikTok, not so much, which you would know if you had used the platform. (Or, you have used the platform, and you prefer rage-inducing crap, so it continues serving that to you)
The proponents of the ban keep mentioning some kind of nefarious "communist" propaganda, and some kind of nefarious privacy data access, but I've yet to see someone show concrete examples of what that would look like.
My TikTok feed contains a ton of funny cat videos, Europeans shitting on clueless American tourists, OF models hawking themselves, the ubiquitous dance videos, people making caricature cringe videos, and a bunch of viral meme videos. And a lady drinking Costco peach juice.
Where's the propaganda? Not in my feed, that's for sure.
Where's the rage-inducing bait? Not in my feed, that's for sure.
What privacy data can the nefarious CCP access about me? That I like cat videos and memes?
Things like this is exactly why we don't trust US media and data management. This is only just enough close to the truth so it doesn't sound absolutely absurd but still is so far from it.
And even talking about lethal aid, some European countries loved to play the numbers (hi Estonia).
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...
A lot of climate change inaction propaganda for example comes from these platforms and is aligned with the new US presidency and Musk agenda, which is a bigger national security threat than anything in China-US relations or the Ukraine events.
China, North Korea and Iran is supporting Russia in this, the US can choose what they want to do. Repeating 2014 seems like a bad idea.
Are we afraid to list the topology of our values? A framework for comparing which values are actually superior? That's all I asked for.
Personally I think if China found the right narrative to pinpoint destroy Apple & Tesla, or moved too quickly to capture Taiwanese industry, then the US would seriously contemplate war.
> When values are in conflict, which should win? In the hierarchy of values, where does economic world position stand in terms of national concerns?
The answer is simple: when economic world position is in conflict with the value of freedom of speech, then freedom of speech wins.
If you disagree you can go amend the Constitution accordingly.
We were speaking on the value of speech. What values should prompt us to send youths to die abroad? What does the constitution say about the hierarchy of values here? I'm just asking for a framework for determining which values are superior under conflict.
That's an easy way to toss aside a very damaging attack on the public and freedom, with power unlike anything humanity has seen. I'm not sure what "any positive value is greater than zero" means, other than a mathematical tautology, but I certainly don't accept that social media is a net positive.
> Journalistic integrity and trust in institutions has been sold off for shareholder value.
Your reasoning is circular. You both conclude and use as your premise that they've been sold off.
Sadly, after generations of (mostly) not being sold off, of standing up for freedom and professional journalism, in the last couple of months many of the institutions have capitulated.
Part of the cause is you (and people like you): Serious journalism was a threat to the far right, so they did what they always do: Use a campaign of constant repitition and demonization. They do it also to immigrants, trans people, liberals, Democrats, and individuals they see as threats (including any leading Democrats). Part of that campaign is getting everyone repeating it on social media.
Now we have few reliable sources of news left.
It means that traditional media is a one way information valve and social media is not. Built into the information medium is the inability to know what people think. It's at most a reflection of what a small number of people think.
>Part of the cause is you
Incorrect. I do not participate in the creation of traditional media or social media. I cannot be part of the problem of trust being eroded away. That responsibility rests solely on the shoulders of those guiding discourse.
We are part of society. The outcomes are our responsibility and within our power - why do you think so many spend so much to manipulate public opinion? Even just posting here will spread narratives and influence others.
But with that, I don't agree that it's a fact, maybe the FCC regulates what you broadcast on radio and TV, but if you don't take federal funding, the government doesn't really have a pull in what is created or prompted AFAIK. Journalists in the press pool may trade subservience for access but that's about it.
Maybe there shouldn’t be and all of those things should be free from government interference, but the status quo is that plenty of speech is regulated.
Exactly.
It seems the only way to sidestep this growing problem is to create a profit free platform, and view it almost as a utility but is openly owned and controlled by "the people."
The vTaiwan and g0v ("gov zero") projects are relevant starter examples for a newer type of distributed governance:
https://www.stearthinktank.com/post/deconstructing-binary-ci...
One of the reforms was going from citizen soldiers who must provide their own gear to government provided weaponry and armor. Despite on its face being more egalitarian this resulted instead in consolidation of personal power and lead to more stratification. Quartermasters became kingmakers, just like how coups were lead by quartermasters in the Napoleonic era as they controlled food and provided payment.
There must always be an owner and don't trust "the people" to be anything more than a populist's device to assign legitimacy to their supporters and other dissenters.
That's a false dichotomy, especially in the example of vTaiwan, since it was a creation that operated in parallel with an already existing government.
Basically, the platform itself didn't have any direct political power because at the end of the day it was "just an app" or series of apps.
However, even without official power, its low barrier to public consensus building (that you call populism) enabled an efficient and highly organized form of government critique and accountability. This created a near realtime public awareness of the real world intricacies of problem X, Y, or Z that did not exist previously, and put pressure on the politicians in power to take these conclusions/demands somewhat seriously. It also literally helped them do their jobs better, and was far more responsive and precise than traditional electoral implementations.
That clarifies things!
What about the speech of "the enemy from within" who is "more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these other countries"?
(And to be clear: I think TikTok is awful and should be banned, but I want much, much clearer arguments than this as to why it is able to be banned under our Constitution)
It allows US POTUS to force American companies not to serve content that POTUS says is 1) under foreign control and 2) a national security concern.
Note that (1) can be satisfied by POTUS simply saying the company is under the influence of foreign entities.
I.e., there is nothing in the law or the ruling that prevents POTUS from saying “Bluesky is under China’s influence” and banning it.
Right, and it doesn't permit infringement of First Amendment rights.
I read it every day and hadn't noticed. Can you give examples, beyond having heard of the Presidential Endorsement saga?
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/04/nx-s1-5248299/cartoonist-quit...
Here are comments from many leading journalists at the Washington Post, many of whom have left. For example recently:
Jennifer Rubin resigned: "The Washington Post's billionaire owner and enlisted management" "betrayed their audiences' loyalty and sabotaged journalism's sacred mission - defending, protecting and advancing democracy. ... They have undercut the values central to ... all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. .... Jeff Bezos ... accommodate[s] and enable[s] the most acute threat to American democracy - Donald Trump ..." [1]
Ann Telnaes resigned [2]: She "tells NPR she always accepts editing but had never previously been told she couldn't address a specific topic ..." [3]
Management blocked Telnaes' cartoon criticizing Trump and billionaire media and tech execs bowing to Trump; an article, approved by editors, on Managing Editor Matea Gold leaving [4]; and more.
Bezos, owner of one of the country's most important media institutions, has openly supported Trump and donated to him, while blocking content critical of him.
That's all of the top of my head. We can always waste time by denying everything and bog down any discussion, but American democracy - that your ancestors bled and sacrificed to build - is burning and you are sitting in your chair playing with picayune arguments. You'd better act now.
[1] https://contrarian.substack.com/p/i-have-resigned-from-the-w...
[2] https://anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-quitting-the-washin...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2025/01/15/nx-s1-5258221/washington-post...
[4] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/09/nx-s1-5222807/washington-post...
You understand that not everyone here is American, right?
> playing with picayune arguments
Am I? Could you give an example?
The rest seems to be rehashing the editorial cartoon, the endorsement debacle, and some internal newspaper politics.
This won't solve the issue with propaganda that still manages to be compelling in the court of public opinion, but it will at least level the playing field rather than having such topics inescapably amplified for "engagement" and whatnot. There's definitely a mechanic of people realizing specific social media apps make them feel bad, but as of right now it is extremely hard to switch to an alternative due to the anticompetitive bundling of client presentation software (including "the algorithm") with hosted services (intrinsic Metcalfe's law attractors).
And even if you could do it somehow, that is in direct conflict with the other main complaint people have about social media apps ("selling your data"). FB had an API that they opened up to some degree, then Cambridge Analytica happened.
From the technical perspective, for things where your view is limited to friends that is straightforward to do on the client. Global discovery using metadata can be done using deterministic searching which condenses the view of the database enough that the client can then rank those results however it'd like. And global discovery from a pure firehose is likely even within the reach of a modern personal computer.
As far as apps taking a copy of data, the first obvious control is that its only apps you choose which have access to your data. And for the general problem, that is the point of privacy legislation - which was taken as a given by the comment I was responding to.
Duverger's law makes campaigns devolve into undermining and destroying the competition, with the two parties hosting primaries to see which of them can "turn the wheel" the hardest before the general election where they claim "don't worry I won't crash the car!" despite their prior incentives.
If we used plurality voting for the inputs to a decision problem that follows the classic tragedy of the commons, we'd see a similar result. If instead of just {+1, +0, +0, ...} without repeats, we instead voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, ...} cooperation (or at least constructive competitive frameworks) would at least be at parity with destructive and potentially mutually destructive competition.
No algorithm is going to fix this, it's human nature. Negative campaigning has been a constant of elections since elections were invented. At best you can tamp down on the aggressive engagement feedback loops. We should probably do that, but it's good to stay realistic about outcomes.
Other voting systems do promote less negativity, among many other benefits such as giving us real choice and a true multiparty system.
I think it's more likely that it's able to pass muster when the threat is a foreign state. The US may be more limited in what it can do with it's own entities (I don't know for sure) and would probably receive far more push back from the courts if they tried heavy handed measures before going through the proper legislation regulation (as states are doing) or the FBI route(if it were in their realm of bad). The threat that is more concerning than US owned and operated companies getting US citizens to vote for their prefered US president, is a foreign state slowly radicalizing US citizens(without their knowledge it's happening) against themselves (the US), more than voter manipulation.
True, but that's not the point.
> Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.
Sorry, that might've been true for old media, but social media is way more insidious.
He’s not a small government conservative, lol.
Gorsuch saying "I am not considering Scenario X" does not actually mean his opinion precludes it. His opinion, as written, allows it.
Real names don’t do much to prevent online assholery.
It insists on sending me push notifications of the most bizarre conspiracy theories, even after I muted the accounts. Super frustrating when all you want is basically an electronic business card catalog.
2) This isn’t a solution to vitriol, it’s a solution to inorganic amplification
Of course that’s not foolproof and there are millions of bot accounts by facebooks own admission. But at the scale of billions of active users across the globe I’m not sure what approach could be 100%
(2014) https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/09/28/35...
Copying someone else's work and presenting it as your own is not protected speech, it is fraud. If you want to still consider this speech, someone is using it to actively and intentionally harm others.
If you're so intent on free speech, how would you feel if someone followed you around screaming profanities and abuse? Are you engaging in harmful and immoral censorship by calling the cops to remove this person? Are you suppressing his right to free speech by taking out a restraining order?
This doesn't even take into account the endless lobbying by Disney to pervert copyright law into what it is today.
Is chemotherapy not unhealthy now because of cancer, or is it unhealthy but that’s OK because of cancer?
some != all
therefore, it is not a real-name only network.
I'm not asking for Facebook to become a confirmed real-name only network. I am not asking for anyone to be compelled to supply a confirmed real-name only network.
I am saying: I wish that one existed and caught on with consumers.
2) I'm not discussing the practicality of it
I find absolutely ridiculous every social media / free speech discussion if platform does not have proof of identity. while you and I may have right to free speech the bots etc do not. hence, there is no free speech without proof of identity imo
You haven't proven the identity of "bdangubic" to us yet here you are exercising your right to free speech.
Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.
We know both China and the US are nation states with global ambitions so it would be logical for both to use digital platforms to surveil and perform social engineering.
We also have had whistleblowers on both sides that have come forward and said this is a common practice. We also know based on simple game theory it is in the interest of any nation state to do so not just the US or China
But even on a site like HN that presents itself as rational and factual the sentiment is the US does not do any surveillance or social engineering.
And for the life of me I just don't understand why maybe nationalism? Or the aforementioned social engineering being so effective? But it is so cool to see
A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
The impression I have of the sentiment on this site is closer to the opposite.
I guess you are trying to muddy the water here by invoking the names of people who are known for their resistance to a certain kind of American misbehaviour. That behaviour is not really the same as the kind of wide-ranging and complete media restrictions we are talking about, but it sounds kind of similar so this is a good way for you to do some whataboutism with extra steps.
If you think that American media is controlled in the same way at the same scale and intensity as Chinese media please provide your arguments for that view explicitly.
For example, US social media companies were vital in kicking off the Arab spring. How different would such movements be if they only had access to a media monoculture controlled by their respective regimes?
Despite any personal romanticism towards violent revolution you may have, that is not something that societies actually want against democracies. Even against authoritarian regimes, society often goes from bad to worse (see Iran, Lebanon). You want violent revolution against actual oppressive regimes, not democracies where you can change the society with a vote, but even then, you want it led by pro-democratic factions.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Long-term_aftermat...
Suppose that there was an issue that most citizens would normally feel very strongly about, but which benefits the state: war immediately comes to mind. There should be protests and (non-violent of course) civil unrest against wars the public feels to be unjust or immoral. Such demonstrations could easily be lulled in the right media environment, which is why alternative channels are important. I can easily imagine a future where TikTok is the premier dissonant chord against the drumming of war.
I'm not going to hide by biases here, I rather do romanticize popular anti-war movements.
That's how it's supposed to work in the US. For example, "hate speech" isn't actually one of the things the government is allowed to prohibit under the First Amendment.
But then the government passed a whole bunch of laws they don't actually enforce, and then instead of actually enforcing them, they started threatening to enforce them if platforms didn't start censoring the stuff the government wanted them to, i.e. "take that stuff down or we'll charge you with the antitrust violations you're already committing".
This is basically an end-run around the constitution for free speech in the same way as parallel construction is for illegal searches and the courts should put a stop to it, but they haven't yet and it's not clear if or when they will, so it's still a problem.
> It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa.
I had a chuckle at the naivety of this statement. Even HN shadow-bans posts here that are perceived as anti-US or pro-Russia / pro-Israel (I am not talking about off-topic political posts, which are against HN rules, but on political threads on Russia - Ukraine and Israel - Palestine conflicts that were allowed by the mods). HN algorithms also give undue preference to western media sources. It is the same with StackExchange (on politics and skeptics SE, for e.g.) where even factual posts countering US propaganda on Russia-Ukraine war or Israel-Palestine conflict is highly discouraged with downvotes or deletion. When complaints were raised about biased moderation, one SE mod even publicly commented that they are under heavy pressure to "moderate" the content on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Let's also not forget that RT . com is now banned on most US social media networks like FB and Youtube. And during COVID pandemic, we saw how the US government strong-armed the social media platform to prevent the spread dubious and unverified news on the disease, its treatment and the vaccines (which was the right thing to do).
I have realised that as a non-westerner (Indian), the political space for me online is continuously shrinking and increasingly suffocating because I refuse to subscribe to the western political black-and-white world view. This is readily apparent when you look at how Americans are shaping these platforms into echo-chambers - Bluesky and Reddit is for American left- content while 9gag and Twitter / X is for the American right- , and whether you want it or not, both of these shove American political content on you.
Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.
I can't say it's not at all
But I can say it's far beyond CPC's capability, Americans like talking abt CPC like it's some kind of secret darkness powerful villain in Gotham City, no, it's not that good.
If CPC executed any order to a company operated in US by Americans, there'll be clear and strong evidence about it, CPC is not good at hiding schemes, if you didn't see such evidence, it means there's no such thing, at least for now
I've talked abt how CPC doing propaganda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42429769
the biggest problem for western competition (insta & co) is the dramatically "better" (more addictive) algorithm. But trump and Co happily use tiktok to grab power, see the most recent Romanian elections.
I would add that if you know the CCP you would be extremely surprised if they did not take such an opportunity for information warfare.
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, they can access a wide range of national and international media that is quite diverse. It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.
What you need is not just diversity but independence. You can find all kinds of views on social media, but if there are only a handful of social media sites and the government can lean on the sites themselves to suppress things they don't like, that's not independence.
> It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.
It's obviously not optimal for the only alternative to be the CCP. What you would really like is to have no major platforms at all and instead have thousands of federated independent smaller services hosted in every country in the world. Which was basically the web and email/usenet until Google took 90% search market share and then devastated the former by downranking smaller sites and the latter got displaced by non-federated walled garden social media that actively suppresses third party client interoperability.
So now you practically need the resources of a state to put up a viable rival to that stuff, and maybe the problem you need to solve is that.
The "wide range of national and international media" you can access is shrinking rather quickly.
They've also threatened to pass new laws that the targets wouldn't like if the targets don't "voluntarily" do things the law isn't allowed to make them do.
But TikTok was used heavily for the past year and half to glorify terrorist violence and spread misinformation. Well... it's been used to spread misinformation for longer. But all my TikTok addicted friends are happily justifying murder of Jews, applauding the assassination of an insurance CEO, and spreading other crazy bullshit. It really is disruptive to these people - they aren't smart enough to distill truth from the barrage of bullshit, and they are easily manipulated.
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/history/goodbye-to-all-that-wh...
They're not saying people do not have the freedom to speak anonymously, they're saying that computer programs, by virtue of not being a person, do not have freedom of speech under the Constitution.
Obviously you can argue that you have First Amendment protections to write programs that then speak for you, which is essentially where the argument should happen. I think a very reasonable concession is: you can write programs that speak for you, so long as they do not masquerade as another person (real or fake). I.e.: you can write a program that speaks as you, or you can write a program that speaks as a program.
The point is that would have no bearing at all on whether or not you would have the right to free speech if you were a person who chose not to reveal your identity.
but “people” do not have right to free speech, PEOPLE do. if as you said most interactions on the internet are bots they are not covered by the bill of rights :) identity-proofing would take care of that…
(GP and I disagree on whether every platform should require it)
Unfortunately very common these days; people who say this probably hope that they won't ever be asked to provide receipts.
All the usual trigger topics like Tiananmen and Tibet are suppressed on Tiktok at the behest of the CCP.
This same thing has happened to me over the years - I read an article and then it becomes relevant in some future discussion. I find the article (which is hard to find, because I'm searching by what the author[s] wanted me to think, not the actual article content) and read it again, only to find out that, upon a more critical reading, it doesn't say what I thought it said at all! Or the conclusion is much weaker than I had originally thought.
It's pretty amazing to see, though. Weak evidence used to support very strong American propaganda about seemingly weak Chinese propaganda. The goal posts inevitably get moved too - oh we have strong evidence of it, but we might tip off the Chinese! Like, huh? What does it matter if they're tipped off if you're going to force the sale?
I also don't think TikTok was ever a national security threat, at least not any more than any other social media platform. What are (were?) all the DoD recruiters and other military influencer accounts on TikTok like Nikko Ortiz (a counter intelligence agent from '18-'23) doing on TikTok? It was wild to see how during certain recruitment pushes, my FYP would be like a direct view into a platoon headquarters. (And yes, before anyone responds, US military social media policies like being aware of adversaries using social media predates the popularization of TikTok, no need to speculate about them not knowing that TT was a threat, especially not after the first ban attempt during the Trump administration)
Maybe start with the not at all controversial position that China is effectively an authoritarian dictatorship who is well known to use censorship and public manipulation as one of its key levers of control and then ask if you have any evidence whatsoever that for some reason they wouldn’t include TikTok in that mix?
The way actual professionals in the field look at this problem is through a lens of:
1. Do they have the capabily to take this specific action? (A resounding yes)
2. Do they have the intent to take this action? I mean this is where you would look at literally all of the other instances where they did choose censorship over free expression and also come to a resounding yes.
3. Do they have the opportunity to take this action? Which is also a clear yes as defined by their own national security laws and other methods of control over what TikTok does.
Thats how people have come to the conclusion that it’s a legitimate threat even in the absence of some smoking gun where people wrote everything down and then conveniently leaked it for you.
At some point you have to be able to make decisions in the absence of perfect information and this is specifically how threat modelling works just to provide some context because some of the comments here are incredibly low quality.
We must also ask whether circumstantial evidence or reasonable assumptions alone should be enough to force a company to divest its assets.
Another thing they did not take into account is the presence of social engineering botnets that can be used by both sides (if record labels have them I'm sure anyone rlse can too)
And so knowing this you are going to need some kind of framework in order to make decisions off in the absence of perfect information.
The one I outlined above is the same one that was used in this case and is really at the foundation of everything to do with threat modelling, this isn’t some kooky thing I just made up.