Crazy how this Gestapo like gov managed to force uninstall Kaspersky. I paid money and they actually did that? That actually just shows me that that antivirus was too strong against the NSA.

Anyhow I'm a Linux user and a VPN user and a Tor user and an I2P user and a Freenet user.

AND I LOVE LEARNING ABOUT DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS IN RUST.

This government is becoming too totalitarian and should be made an example of. The internet was made to be impossible to take down and so should our thoughts and ideas. Distribute everything from now on.

Is it possible that Truth Social would acquire it before Monday?

All countries in the world, USA just showed it is perfectly fine to steal a foreign companies' asset. Let's do that to all USA companies, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Qualcomn, Intel, all of them. U know how rich you will be if you just got a piece of them? U know you could end homelessness, poverty, balance trade, stabilize your currency, elevate tax revenues, get free education and health care for your citizens, provide great jobs if you just got a piece of USA companies? Now you can! All of them can be Indian, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Kenyan, Egyptian companies. Everyone gets a piece, everyone gets them equally, everyone will benefit and be happy!

I don't get this take. China is constantly stealing US IP. The US simply wanted to cut out the foreign influence, while allowing free speech of the users. That's a simple plan and makes a lot of sense. China doesn't allow any of the big US platforms to influence their people for a similar reason, and it's valid. What you pitch is a very optimistic Communist outlook, which has never panned out anywhere in the world where the experiment was tried.

Spineless democrats are now trying to save TikTok after the bipartisan bill was passed. And the Supreme Court upheld the ban. SMH.

of course he would

The ban is nothing more than an attempt to abridge speech and deny the youth voice in politics. TikTok increasingly has become refuge from censorship occurring on other platforms (see the recent issues). The lawmakers indicated that is the reason for the ban.

If United States was honestly concerned about data protection and privacy, it would devise a federal privacy law that models GDPR. They are trying to pass a federal law now, but it is seriously flawed and they are trying to preempt more user-centric privacy laws of the states.

Finally, such partisan, targeted and unprincipled bans reenforce that EU's approach on issues such as data transfers abroad (see Schrems 1 and Schrems 2) is perfectly valid. EU has a principled regulation, which gets evaluated by free and democratic courts. The outcomes are what they are. Not partisan and discriminatory, as they are here.

>TikTok increasingly has become refuge from censorship occurring on other platforms

do you have a source for this? if anything other platforms are shifting to less editorial control -- see recent announcements by Zucc https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mis...

If TikTok is truly banned on Sunday and no action is taken to stop it, the company’s value could drop significantly—perhaps by as much as 90%.

This raises an even bigger question: Who really owns TikTok? Who is the true decision-maker behind the scenes? Who is so wealthy and powerful that they’re willing to let $100 billion vanish? The answer to that question will be more obvious.

> Who really owns TikTok? Who is the true decision-maker behind the scenes? Who is so wealthy and powerful that they’re willing to let $100 billion vanish?

They're hardly "letting" it happen. What exactly can you do when the US government decides they want to smash your business and take your stuff?

you sell it?

You really believe their value could drop by 90% because of this? 90%!!!

They don’t publish detailed numbers (they’re very secretive about it, and whatever they do share is likely influenced by the looming ban so it not be trusted).

However, estimates suggest that their U.S. revenue is around $10 billion, while their worldwide revenue is approximately $12 billion.

Maybe not by 90% but by a significant amount. Just doing a quick google for the userbase of TT by country and the US is the largest market with ~113M users [1]. What would happen to any company if their largest userbase just vanished overnight?

[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/tiktok-us...

It's less than 7% of their total users. The US is not that big compared to the whole world.

But that may be where most of the revenue comes from

Then why are they serving 93% of their customers, especially when there is low overlap between those users? 90% of the american feed was american tiktoks.

ITT: How many languages Switzerland has.

I can't imagine the ban can't be circumvented with some creative use of VPN, geo spoofing etc. If I were a TikTok fan, I'd launch an Android emulator in a VPS in a censorship free country and install TikTok there.

i don't think the gov is concerned with the 0.01% of people that are both capable of and motivated enough to do this.

even if you did do this, what content would you be watching? all us based creators will be gone.

Let's see how many flunk Literacy....

How does one value a start up asset that according to ByteDance will never ever get access to the TikTok algo powering the app?

It appears at the moment, the only one to bet on who knows what the eff they are talking about is Mark Cuban who wants to pay or buy someone creating a new tiktok clone that uses the Bluesky protocol

The fact that it's going to be in hold because USA has allowed bribes and have a cute name for it "megadonors" explain every problem that Americans complain about that place, why would they higher wages if their billionaires friends said no

It's crazy the Facebook and Instagram are still available for use. They,be done just as much damage.

I personally don't think that it is going to be a big issue. India banned TikTok, but it is still accessibly on the browser via a VPN. And everyone has a VPN installed on their phone these days. What is stopping people from just opening tiktok in their browser on their phone and continuing to browse their old accounts and content?

Inconvenience?

> A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.

You can also include Canada and India in that list as it’s banned in those countries

It is not banned in Canada

There's a lot of hope for the other services but Europe, Australia, Asia are not moving away. A lot of people watch videos from other countries, and if they aren't on those other services I don't think they'll stick.

So many trolls here. They must be really annoyed.

I don't have a list of factors or research in front of me, so let me just state that upfront.

It's widely understood that Meta, X, and plenty of other companies are collecting, and selling massive amounts of data. Meta builds profiles on people that have never even used Facebook, simply by monitoring their activity across the web through Ads, Embeds and Sign-Up w/ Facebook widgets, etc. This data, if I recall, has been sold many times over, and likely stolen, many times over, in data breaches - both disclosed and undisclosed. Which almost assures that China has it already.

Where is the outrage there? The laws, and fines, there? Why not ban that kind of pervasive data collection and digital finger printing, regardless of where it originates, to avoid the potential misuse of that data?

Obviously a company, like ByteDance, running businesses and Apps inside the US, while also being legally bound to helping the CCP - is cause for concern. But clearly we have our concerns right at our front door - and - nothing? Either or government believes access to this kind of data to be a threat, or they don't.

I know that's a gross over simplification, probably misses some key points, and probably falls under the dreaded "whataboutisms"... but it just seems like, its okay of US companies do it, as long as they give that data to OUR government, and losing that data is a just cost of doing business.

I'll take my tinfoil hat off now. :P

This isn't a privacy or data collection matter. What Meta, X or any other company that is not de facto controlled by the CCP does or doesn't do has no bearing on this particular case.

This won't ban anything. It's on the web. Just sideload the app and enjoy.

Remember we’re all in a tech bubble here. 99.9% of TikTok users don’t know what sideloading is.

Or the web

It's hard to overstate how much the coinciding rise of smartphones and growth of the internet has taught people that apps are the internet, if they have any notion of the internet at all.

Its a business. With ad and an e-commerce network to support that content. Without that connection, it will die.

True, but it could easily just shift to mining XMR in the background as users doomscroll and collect money without regulatory burden that way.

Just as an aside, I'm surprised that Instagram has done nothing to facilitate the migration it wants. I've been hitting the same old rate limits while trying to "migrate" by subscribing to creators who have IG accounts as well. It's now got me down to one or two a day. Not only have they not made it easier ("import your export data file here, we'll subscribe you to everyone with the same handle"), they are making it quite hard.

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NBC is delusional, thinking Trump who ran on a law and order platform is going to disregard the law.

The United States, through its influence over Facebook, instagram, and twitter, facilitated the Arab Spring. Of course we don’t want an adversary to have the same influence over our domestic political conversation.

I'd like to see less pervasive chronic use of media, so would hope Canada follows suit, but I don't think banning specific services for political reasons is necessarily a good way to get there. Along with other toxic outlets like gambling, we should be able to make coherent judgements about what belongs and what doesn't based on assessments of well-being indicators that evolve over time. I know it's a fairly conservative take, but it's one I'm happy with, and have a hard time seeing how we're better off with the existence of things like TikTok that provide such an easy way to siphon off human hours in a way that few things other than TV before.

Incidentally, I feel almost controversial for seeing more ads for alcohol and gambling than anything else, and thinking "when did we agree it was a good thing to be more permissive about encouraging objectively addicting risky behavior?".

Can someone explain in unambiguous terms why people are so drawn specifically to TikTok? I have tried TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, and they are all basically the same--algorithmically-driven feeds of short videos. I don't see how banning TikTok is such a big problem, just use one of the other apps.

Nobody is talking about music?

For the last 4 years, TikTok has been my primary music discovery engine. Probably is for a large chunk of users.

What effect will this have on the music industry?

And just yesterday I saw a news where UK had best music revenue ever, and I do not think US is published but first 1/2 of US also had record sales. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/cn858xgng2vo)

And I agree, even for me, music discovery is (was) via TikTok.

I imagine you'll get the same content on YouTube shorts or Facebook reels? I don't like using apps, so I never bothered with Tiktok, but tiktok watermarks are still on most of the short videos I view, content creators are either putting their work on multiple platforms, or someone else is ripping it off and putting it on different platforms.

I’m hoping https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ takes off

wber.org

In a developed country, government would ensure its citizens receive top notch education so that they are able by themselves to understand that using a Chinese owned app is just as bad as using Facebook for instance and so these app would be dead, no one would use them.

Instead when you cut so hard on education that you get millions of flat earth believers, you got to protect them from their own behavior with law. But as far as I know, no law can prevent little Jimmy from putting crayons up his nose.

Blocking TikTok won't just make its user look for better privacy, or at least more independent alternative. They will use something else just as bad or worst.. little red book for instance.

Little red book is truly evil. Every Chinese woman I know uses it. It is truly brain rotting. The relationship advice that it promulgates is every bit as toxic as the stuff on TikTok and instagram

How's it worse for me, personally, to give up PII to Tik Tok as opposed to - well, all the US-owned equivalents.

Good riddance, do the other social networks next!

Agreed! You think HN is different?

Everyone thinks their consumption is more virtuous than everyone else.

HN provides the same basic neophilia.

There's a difference in degree, it's less addictive. HN works a little differently, in that its goal is not primarily to convert attention directly into revenue.

Personally, I still need to be deliberate in limiting my use, so I wouldn't be sad to see it disappear, even though I do find some value in it.

None of us have more than 24 hours in our days. That time is precious. Products that are specifically designed to suck up as much of it as possible must be avoided.

I'm really bored at this point by the political discussions around this. We've heard it all a million times. As far as I'm concerned, that's missing the point.

Because, at the end of the day, and ignoring for a moment the practicality of the notion, the world would just be a better place without them.

Seriously, go read a book. We'd be living in a different world if that scaled.

This will ultimately benefit the current Big Tech incumbents. Tiktok was gaining ground rapidly on advertising money and I wouldn't be surprised if there was lobbying that stifled the competition.

Instead of banning TikTok, we should be trying to compete with them and make a better product that wins customers over. It's sad to see the US becoming more authoritarian and follow China's example.

Good news for everyone. Get off these endless scrolling trash providers

I found this comment by scrolling endlessly.

I mean this won't happen. The TikTok CEO is invited to Trump's inauguration.

The United States is currently in the middle of a cyber cold-war with China.

They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department. Specifically they used the telco hacks to gather geolocation data in order to pinpoint Americans and to spy on phone calls by abusing our legally mandated wiretap capabilities.

Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones.

I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.

The TikTok ban is security theater through and through.

Chinese spy agencies don't have to make an app that millions of American teens use to harvest data on them. American companies have been doing the job for them.

They — just like the FBI, NSA, American police departments and almost every TLA — can just buy the data from a broker, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/nsa-finally-admi...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government...

The brokers don't care. They'll sell to anyone and everyone. And the people they sell to don't care either. They'll process and re-sell it too. And on and on, until it ends up in the hands of every interested party on Earth, i.e. everyone.

So don't worry, the Chinese already have a detailed copy of your daily routine & reading habits. Just love this new world that we've created to make $0.002/click.

EDIT — if it makes you feel any better, the Chinese are doing it too!

https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...

> The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals.

- harvesting data: sure the CCP could buy some data from data brokers; but that data is very limited compared to the data that TikTok itself has on its users

but data harvesting is not the real problem

the big problem is that you have a social network to which millions of your citizens are connected and used daily, which is under the control of a foreign adversary; it's a bit like if CBS was owned by the CCP

100% this. Setting the topic of conversation for millions of Americans is absolutely unacceptable to throw to the hands of foreign powers.

But it’s acceptable to put in the hands of Elon Musk?

No, that's not acceptable either. Elon should never have been allowed to get full control of Twitter/X. But that is a separate battle. And it doesn't make the issue with TikTok being under CCP control any less of a problem (unless you're China and trying to shift the narrative with "what about Elon", and if you are that basically proves the point that you can't have a foreign adversary in a position to be able to heavily, while subtly, influence public opinion through an algorithm.)

> Elon should never have been allowed to get full control of Twitter/X.

We can't just ban everything though. It'd be better to just allow everything.

Honestly X is pretty crazy on the propaganda these days, it's a little scary. The issue with TikTok would be way more subtle or speculative. Anyway if it is "unacceptable", I don't want that to be for the govt to decide. Even if it was being overtly politically manipulative (which is less scary than being subtle I guess) - I'd still support it. I like consuming foreign media, recognizing bias, being exposed to different view points, and thinking critically to make my own decisions. If you don't think the average american can do that, well too bad, we can't just spoon-feed people "approved" content.

From a geopolitics standpoint, the effective question here is “whose guns are the owners of the company worried about?” Elon is a bit of an outlier here because he’s effectively bought the government now, but in theory, if the US government decides to arrest Elon and seize his assets, that’s a big problem for Elon, whereas if China does, that’s a lesser problem for him (yes, Tesla, I know). It’s the same reason the US banned Huawei from US telecoms: the US government can’t threaten Huawei like they can Cisco.

None of this is a normative statement - I’m not saying that this is good or bad, but if you want to know why the US government thinks Elon is better than ByteDance, it’s because they can shoot Elon tomorrow if they decide to, but they can’t shoot Zhang Yiming without causing an international incident.

No making decisions by a committee of individuals doing their best in an open and transparent way is the correct method.

Basically what Twitter was before Elon bought it.

That incessant whataboutism is the only recourse of those who oppose the ban really helps the cause of those who are for it.

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Elon Musk doesn't have a military hostile to the US, nor are his companies controlled by any, so for the purposes of this concern, yes.

When it comes to actual harm done to Americans (particularly via their own data), that harm is continually done by US commercial and government interests.

This law isn't a consumer protection law, nor does it attempt to be.

He does take regular phone calls from Putin, the content of which we're not privy to, and he meets with the Iranian government on the down-low.

I think those alone would be grounds to at least take a close look at his access to Twitter data, his censorship choices and any input he has into the algorithms.

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> the big problem is that you have a social network to which millions of your citizens are connected and used daily, which is under the control of a foreign adversary; it's a bit like if CBS was owned by the CCP

You mean... like the rest of the world countries are. Look, you make a point here, but the only solution here is to completely cut-off the internet and for the government to run a single TV channel akin to Korea.

The US has been tirelessly working to "infiltrate" other countries media and influence them. That was heralded as "bringing freedom". How the times have changed.

> data harvesting is not the real problem

You may not think this but it was one of the two arguments the made to SCOTUS.

Don't we need to have a pretty low opinion of the average american cognitive skill to feel the need to protect them from foreign propaganda for fear it would take a hold on them?

If the general public is that stupid and that this kind of protection is really needed, then it also means that democracy is no longer a viable form of government because the public is also too stupid to vote.

> Don't we need to have a pretty low opinion of the average american cognitive skill to feel the need to protect them from foreign propaganda for fear it would take a hold on them?

No. Influential foreign propaganda is inconspicuous. There’s nothing to be mindful of other than “who benefits if this is widely believed?” and it’s not a low opinion to think most people aren’t mindful of that.

> Don't we need to have a pretty low opinion of the average american cognitive skill to feel the need to protect them from foreign propaganda for fear it would take a hold on them

that's naive. Literally leaving CNN on in your living room 3 days a week will eventually change you opinions. Our minds absorb things we hear repetitively, even if we now they might be half truths or lies.

That still sounds like a pretty low opinion, even if it's more general than only applying to Americans. You're essentially saying that the outcome of an election is determined primarily by who owns the most effective propaganda machines, which is a pretty heavy (valid) critique of the concept of democracy.

Propaganda works. PR works. The global ad industry is worth trillions, not because it doesn't work.

I'm not saying that it doesn't work and I'm not saying that I hold the general public in high esteem. What I say is that holding the general public in low esteem while at the same time holding democratic values sacred is, as Spock would say, illogical.

> What I say is that holding the general public in low esteem while at the same time holding democratic values sacred is, as Spock would say, illogical.

I fully agree. The last year has shaken my confidence in democracy more than any other time in my lifetime. Not because of threats of war or revolution, but because what is the point of elections if the majority is chronically misinformed? Why have a yes/no election if no one knows what the question is?

It's still the best worst system, and i'm still going to vote in 2 years and again in 4, but my faith is low.

> last year has shaken my confidence in democracy

Read the federalist papers. Our obsession with elections has destabilised the balance built into our republic.

This leads to why the US didn't setup a pure democracy. The job of certain long term branches like the senate, supreme court & certain unelected positions is to be able to think long term & say "eat your veggies" without the worry of losing there job because someone else is offering nice European chocolates.

Democratic values are good but not without flaws.

If you acknowledge that all humans have a lot of cognitive biases and information processing weaknesses, acknowledging that these are easily exploitable is not holding people in low esteem. It is taking a realistic stance on how open all of us are to being influenced in ways that we will not notice and barely understand.

Foreign propaganda is much easier to spot. It is the domestic propaganda that was legalized in the 2012 Smith-Mundt Modernization act that concerns me.

> If the general public is that stupid

What is your evidence that propaganda efficacy scales inversely with intelligence?

An interesting parallel, they've studied cult recruitment and intelligent people are not less likely to join one. In fact, often times, the better they are at reasoning, the better they are at convincing themselves something bad is in fact ok.

It's self-evident. Propaganda is defused through rhetorical skills. You know, knowing about the general forms of sophism, all that stuff. Rhetorical skills correlate with intelligence.

> It's self-evident. Propaganda is defused through rhetorical skills

It's far from self evident. There is all kinds of nonsense that is catnip for overthinkers. The reason I paused at that assertion is that a lot of propaganda (and in general, military misdirection) is aimed at deceiving leadership.

Fifty four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.

> Don't we need to have a pretty low opinion of the average american cognitive skill

Well, half the country voted for a convicted felon who _illegally tried to overturn the results of an election_, so yeah, it's pretty low.

> democracy is no longer a viable form of government because the public is also too stupid to vote.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" -- Churchill

It's flawed, but still miles better than what China has. At least there are still some safeguards on Trump, unlike Xi.

> If the general public is that stupid and that this kind of protection is really needed, then it also means that democracy is no longer a viable form of government because the public is also too stupid to vote.

They are, it is, and it never was, for that exact reason.

Do not underestimate your enemy.

That's a convenient fig leaf.

There are 2 separate problems:

   - Lack of US privacy legislation
   - Security-sensitive systems and infrastructure owned by competitor nations

The existance of a different problem is not a justification to avoid progress on the original one.

PS: Curious how many total comments there are on this article. Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.

But neither of those problems are addressed by a TikTok ban. If privacy legislation was enacted and it banned TikTok as a result the conversation would be very different.

Forcing TikTok to divest from mainland Chinese control absolutely solves the second, in TikTok's case.

That there exist other problems is not a justification for inaction on this particular problem.

If you consider TikTok a “Security-sensitive system” that seems to be such a broad category as to be useless. I guess we should stop using any and all Chinese produced software systems then? Which isn’t an unreasonable opinion but again it feels like a different conversation than “ban TikTok”.

You don't consider a massively deployed app, on a majority of mobile devices, via which blackmailable individual profiles can be assembled "security-sensitive"?

I'd absolutely consider Meta to be security sensitive. And Microsoft. And Google. And Netflix.

I'm curious what netflix behavior you imagine would ever be blackmailable?

"You watched Red One, and we'll tell you employer and wife about it unless you ..."

How does this work?

Frequency of datapoints is the main difference between Netflix and TikTok.

If TikTok can infer something about a person, then Netflix can also infer it.

That's like saying that if an LLM can function by being trailed on 10B words, it can work by being trained on 10k words.

> blackmailable individual profiles can be assembled

What does that even mean in this context? Have you used TikTok before?

> What does that even mean in this context?

TikTok's CSAM problem is well documented [1].

Disposable idiots are a necessary asset for any intelligence operation. Kim Jong-nam's assasins, for example, "were told to play harmless tricks on people in the vicinity for a prank TV show" [2].

[1] https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/tiktok-under-fede...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam

Doesn't that imply that TikTok would be deliberately protecting high-profile individuals from CSAM prosecution? That seems like the sort of thing that should have triggered some warm-up scandals before requiring Chinese disinvestment.

It isn't like TikTok are the only part of the internet with a CSAM problem. By default anything that offers file hosting has a CSAM problem. To keep the Chinese away from blackmail material the US would have to ban any form of image hosting served from the Chinese mainland - the CSAM people go to the CSAM, it doesn't proactively seek people out.

> It isn't like TikTok are the only part of the internet with a CSAM problem

Of course not. I was just providing an easy example of what TikTok may have that we don’t want the CCP to.

> TikTok's CSAM problem is well documented [1].

Did you mean for that link to go somewhere different?

Thank you—fixed.

> TikTok's CSAM problem is well documented [1].

Your link doesn't say anything about TikTok?

> Kim Jong-nam's assasins, for example, "were told to play harmless tricks on people in the vicinity for a prank TV show"

What? How is that connected to "blackmailable individual profiles"?

How can they blackmail me? Please explain. You mean like "I see you watch cat videos so now go revolt against your government or I will tell everyone you watch cat videos?", this is the blackmail part?

> How can they blackmail me? Please explain

They may not be able to. But it sure would be helpful to have a list of people in likely financial distress with addresses close to military installations. Such a person may not ask questions if given a job offer from an influencer or whatever to take selfies around town.

> people in likely financial distress with addresses close to military installations

Sure, that's possible, but I think it's a bit of a stretched argument. Can't you target people like that on Facebook with ads? Can't you buy data about these people from U.S. data brokers? Can't you already access this data publicly because people share it openly on social media?

> Can't you target people like that on Facebook with ads? Can't you buy data about these people from U.S. data brokers?

Ads have too low of an SNR--you'll blow your cover before getting anything useful. Buying works, but (a) you'd need to be careful about hiding your intentions and (b) it's never going to be as high fidelity as the direct data stream. (Think of the amount of unique data they got from their copy-paste hijacking alone [1].)

Having the data yourself means you can silently query high-fidelity real-time data on a third of the American population. That's difficult to replicate. Again, if you need a familiar bogeyman, consider what the NSA would ask Meta to do if Instagram weren't banned in China.

[1] https://lifehacker.com/is-tiktok-really-recording-everything...

Except they've just spun up different apps accessing the same data, and also people are flocking to alternatives even more connected to China's Intel apparatus than TikTok allegedly was, because fundamentally a shit ton of Americans don't trust their government. And IMO, they're right not to.

We could shut all of this shit down if we actually wanted to, but that means going after American companies too, which they won't. They want to have the cake and eat it too: outlaw foreign spying on American users without outlawing domestic spying on American users. They want to make it so China can't do exactly what social media et al does in America, to Americans. Americans are not stupid: they are perceiving this. They know they are being manipulated, perhaps by China, perhaps by the U.S., definitely by dozens if not hundreds of private enterprises, likely all fucking three.

On one hand, the American government's priority is the security of America and her citizens, but on the other, we have an entire segment of the economy now utterly dependent on being able to violate citizen's privacy at will and at scale. Surveillance capitalism and foreign surveillance are effectively interoperable. You can't kill one without killing the other.

Edit: And even more on the personal front, for your every day Joe: this is completely stake-less. "Oh China is spying on me!" big fucking deal. The NSA was caught spying on us decades ago, and by all accounts, they still are. Google AdSense probably knows my resting heart rate and rectal measurements that it will use to try and sell me the new flavor of Oreo. We accept as a given that our privacy is basically long gone, not only did that boat leave the pier, it sailed to the mid-Atlantic, sunk, and a bunch of billionaires imploded trying to check out the wreckage in a poorly made submarine. I don't fucking care if China is spying on me too, that's just a fact of my online existence.

People are not flocking to other more Chinese apps. A handful of people are. You're not seeing new signups to Instagram or YouTube because a lot of people who are on TikTok already had accounts on those platforms.

Little Red Book/RedNote is the #1 app on the App Store, followed by Lemon8 at #2. Duolingo reported a 216% increase in parties interested in learning Mandarin[0], people are actively boycotting the likes of Meta/Google[1], and many content creators have set up shop there (albeit with a much smaller following)[2]. It’d be disingenuous to write off these effects.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/15/duolingo-sees-216-spike-in...

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-boycott-faceb...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/over-half-million-tiktok-...

Yes, because it went from like the worst app in the US to a pretty popular one in a short period of time. YouTube has 240 million accounts in the US. Instagram has 170 million. 500k accounts in RedNote is nothing in comparison.

People are protesting because it's cool to do especially when you're a rebellious youngster but I'm pretty convinced it's going to fizzle out. I don't think it's fair to say it's disingenuous to believe as much. Maybe you could say it's "too early" to write it off, to which I'd respond saying it's too early to buy into the belief that it will take over American culture in any way that resembles TikTok.... and, even if it did, that it would not be banned from the US again.

> People are protesting because it's cool to do especially when you're a rebellious youngster but I'm pretty convinced it's going to fizzle out.

Just wait until the Chinese government realizes young American social media users have no problems talking about politics, sex, and drugs on social media.

We'll see how long open platforms with citizens of both countries last.

Yeah, and BeReal beat out TikTok for a couple of months too. Being topical for a moment doesn't mean something has staying power. Learning Mandarin is a pretty big barrier to entry lol. 2x on Duolingo doesn't mean that much, how many were learning it last year?

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Privacy legislation only works because companies have to worry about whistleblowers leaking violations to the media, which would cause them to be fined. China can disappear any whistleblowers and has full control over their media. If CCP compromising TikTok is proven despite this, then it's over for TikTok anyways and fines are irrelevant.

> Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.

Or maybe this story is hugely relevant to a lot more people than your average story? I find it hard to believe china is waging a huge phsyop on HN

The “it cant happen to here” is strong in America. I saw a guy videotaping the palisades fire instead of packing and vacating. People thinks it only happens in the movies but on my time on earth reality is far stranger than fiction

I find it easy to believe. If Russia can run a psyop to sway opinion towards supporting their interests why can’t China? HN is hardly some tiny unknown forum.

HN is absolutely a tiny unknown forum. To my understanding, it has around 5 million or so uniques monthly. By contrast, Instagram has 2 billion registered active users, and it’s only the 4th most popular

Psyop is probably an overly sophisticated term. Garbage-spam is more apropos.

E.g. Fox News comments are that are base-level "Nunh unh!" or argumentless boosting.

It's less about bare privacy and more about the fact that it's a closed loop system.

Meta collects your data and advertisers can indirectly use that data to serve you ads. In addition, government actors can use Meta's advertising tools to spread propaganda.

But TikTok is an all-in-one solution. The government have direct control over the algorithm in addition to having access to all of the data. They don't have to go through a third party intermediary like Meta and aren't only limited by a public advertising API.

I doubt it is about data. It should be about digital heroin and psychological warfare.

Yeah it's simply an incredibly powerful way to influence US youth in ways that are favorable to the CCP.

I don't understand how or why this is hard for people to grasp? It's no different than Radio Free Europe being secretly funded by the CIA, except it's even more powerful.

Radio Free Europe was covertly funded by the CIA into the 1970s, but your comment should say “having been” instead of “being”, because its current funding is not a secret: that comes from the US Agency for Global Media, an openly acknowledged part of the US government.

> American companies have been doing the job for them.

This right here is the answer. People just don’t care about this type of privacy because they assume some American company already has their data. Combine that with us being two generations removed from the Cold War and the average TikTok user doesn’t see any reason why the owner of this specific data being Chinese matters and frankly I’m sympathetic to that argument. If you live in the US, someone like Musk is going to have a greater influence on your life than the Chinese government and I see no reason to trust him any more or less than the Chinese government. So any discussion of this being a matter of national security just rings hollow.

I worry less about the data and more about how a lot of kids, teens, and young adults get their news from TikTok (and social media in general).

That's the real value of TikTok. Having the eyeballs of young people and being able to (subtly or not) influence their perception of the world is valuable in a way that massive amounts of data aren't.

I do also worry about this with Musk, but I also acknowledge that taking away social media ownership from a foreign company is different than taking it away from a US company.

> I worry less about the data and more about how a lot of kids, teens, and young adults get their news from TikTok (and social media in general).

Fox News* is America's most watched television news source. Is this the kind of alternative you are envisioning?

*Also owned by a foreign national

If you're under 40 years of age Fox is "owned" by a US national who's been a citizen longer than you've been alive.

I am a fairly active consumer of TikTok content. It's a huge app with many many different niches that have their own little communities. Mostly, the algorithm has decided that what I need to see is woodworking videos, car videos, and some dad jokes. But there certainly is a very interesting undercurrent of "information". One really interesting wave was when the TikTok ban passed Congress. Suddenly my feed was filled with absolutely random people saying how bad this is and how it just doesn't make sense, etc. Like if you are an influencer on a platform that just got banned, of course you'll have some feelings about it. But interestingly most people who do regularly show up (the woodworkers, car guys, etc.) who do have big followings pretty much didn't talk about it. Even this week when the ban is about to happen, the popular and established accounts that aren't politics-focused are not talking about it. But now there is a new wave of completely random people talking about "how much is the US government freaking out that we are all moving to Red Note?" And at this point I don't trust that all of them are actual humans, let alone humans who haven't been paid, or if they are AI-generated personas meant to really overtly drive people like me to the new app.

My point isn't that there is some grand conspiracy here, just that if you wanted to have outsized influence on people who are there just for entertainment, you could do it and make it look organic. Inception has to be the target's idea and all that.

In a similar vein I see talking heads of people in their kitchens contemplate world issues. Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, life in China: you can get in-depth opinions on all those issues from a hairdresser in Nebraska or a mechanic in Michigan, and they all will present them well enough. So I think there is something there.

But the clear damn solution is to pass laws that prohibit a bunch of this stuff across the board. The fact that Instagram Reels can do exactly what TikTok is doing but with ties to a different world power makes this ban seem shameless. Ban them all. Or none. Or regulate them like they should be regulated. But don't pretend like this security theater is somehow going to fix anything meaningful.

A sibling of mine who gets a significant portion of their income through their Tiktok following confessed to me recently that they completely understand why they are shutting it down.

Apparently influencers get a lot of unsolicited pressure to take stances on things like Palestine even if they're just a crafting influencer.

Unsolicited pressure from whom and what form does it take?

Other accounts on the app. Mostly comments from my understanding.

i.e. peer pressure that exists absolutely everywhere and is in no way exclusive to TikTok.

They don’t get this kind of pressure on YouTube or IG.

So what are you actually claiming here? Do you think these comments are coming from fake accounts?

There is an undercurrent of opinion on the platform that happens to align with Chinese worldviews that is strong enough to make politically neutral (or at least abstaining) influencers on the platform uncomfortable.

It really feels like you are repeatedly trying to imply something nefarious without actually making any accusations of nefarious behavior. All you have really said here is that some of the people who use the platform don't have the right opinion and therefore it is understandable to ban the app. That seems like an incredibly hypocritical argument to make in defense of the actions of the American government.

I'm not sure how you arrived at that interpretation of my comment but it does seem to be the one you were trying to goad out of me with your responses so you could reply with this.

>I'm not sure how you arrived at that interpretation of my comment but it does seem to be the one you were trying to goad out of me with your responses so you could reply with this.

What a weird comment. I goaded an interpretation out of you? I was just trying to get at why you seemingly think TikTok is different than any other social network and your response was that "There is an undercurrent of opinion on the platform that happens to align with Chinese worldviews". But I guess the bad faith alarm has already been triggered so not much point continuing from here.

After the Holocaust, some wondered "whether there can be poetry after Auschwitz", and here we are being told that condemning genocide -- and being uncomfortable with people who fail to do so -- is a "Chinese worldview".

I just find this line of argument incredibly ironic because it is fundamentally an anti-free speech argument in defense of both the US and Musk while making the defense of the Chinese app with strong censorship a pro-free speech position. That doesn’t necessarily make the argument invalid, but it certainly makes it feel a little disingenuous to the general public.

IMO the same argument holds for both Musk/X and the CCP/TikTok: social media networks upon which the US public has become heavily dependent, should not be under the absolute control of some unaccountable person/entity with a strong personal agenda -- this applies to both Musk and the CCP.

If there was a way to force Musk to sell X or ban it, I would support that 100%. But that's unlikely to ever happen especially now with co-President Musk. But in the meantime, either breaking TT free of CCP control, or banning it, would be at least one battle won.

> social media networks upon which the US public has become heavily dependent, should not be under the absolute control of some unaccountable person/entity with a strong personal agenda -- this applies to both Musk and [...]

...Benjamin Franklin? This country was built on mass media being in the hands of "unaccountable" persons with strong personal agendas. Projecting the right of American citizens to own and control media like this is precisely what the First Amendment is for.

Foreign owned media isn't nearly so cut and dry, but trying to act like the first ammendment doesn't cover Elon Musk just because his politics got you bent out of shape is absurd.

Perhaps the privacy and free speech absolutism that prevail among hacker forum commenters are not the values to run a civilization by.

> If you live in the US, someone like Musk is going to have a greater influence on your life than the Chinese government and I see no reason to trust him any more or less than the Chinese government. So any discussion of this being a matter of national security just rings hollow.

Just because Musk is a f*ing problem for all Americans, doesn't mean that the CCP isn't a problem. Not much you can do about "President" Musk -- so you have to work with what you can control.

The value is in the ability to influence what your enemy sees, and to push whatever narratives are best for you and worst for your enemy. They don’t give a shit about the data.

I am in favor of banning TikTok, but not strictly because they harvest data. I am far more concerned about them manipulating people on a large scale, I think TikTok is an effective tool for manipulating public opinion and I have no doubt that they're actively engaged and consciously engaging America in a form of psychological warfare. We are facing the very real threat of a military conflict with China, I do not want the Chinese government in this position of power.

I frankly don't understand why I keep seeing on social media people like yourselves push the idea that it's okay because other companies are also harvesting the data. It is obviously not about the data. It is about China being in a position to manipulate information flow.

The rationalizations and justifications are more a window into people's thought process than they are actual arguments. This person has decided that TikTok isn't that bad, and you are witnessing how they reverse engineer from that view point back to the argument.

That's why arguing in this sense never works. Someone isn't trying to work something out, they've already decided and are trying to explain the decision to you. That's not the same thing as thinking through something.

People know that it's a propaganda machine. Why deny their voluntary consumption of it?

I mean let's not pretend that an app on the vast majority of peoples phones isn't a non-trivial vector for a zero-day attack.

If there is an invasion of Taiwan, I don't think it would be unthinkable that everyone's phones being broken wouldn't be a major tactical and political advantage of shifting the US's priorities and political will in the short run.

Sure, it burns the asset in the process, but I mean... this has been a priority for an entire century.

i dont think fhats the right attack? the influential use of tiktok sould be sharing propaganda like the US did about the iraq war "we did it and the taiwanese people are excited to be liberated and reunified with china"

along with details about how the US has no defensive alliance with taiwan, and that the US does not need to intervene

I agree; the Tiktok algorithm would be used to subtly shift public opinion rather than something overt that burns their assets

This is a very realistic scenario. It doesn't mean people will suddenly see messages from the CCP on their screens. It could mean that posts that are critical of China are subtly downweighted (not banned, that would be too obvious and problematic) while those favorable towards China would be upweighted.

One thing the CCP is quite good at, from its long experience of always controlling the narrative in China, is this type of social media manipulation.

Ehh... I just disagree, even if I agree that my concern is wildly speculative. The isolationist right already has them covered there. If they can take the island, it's over. The US is not going to mount an invasion to save Taiwan, but will sell them weapons and help defend it.

If they can't take the island quickly, then maybe propaganda helps. I just think neutering or nuking everyone's phones for a few days is enough to genuinely split the attention of the American people. I think it's very safe to say our culture cares much more about it's butter than it's guns right now. We are decadent.

That's every popular app.

Yes, but my point is that TikTok is the most downloaded app in the United States, with apparently about 100 million installs. I'm just looking at reports on various sites.

Edit: other sites put YouTube, and others higher with TikTok at 40% of phones.

Nothing else controlled by the CCP looks like it even comes close to that in America.

But TT is the only widely popular app in the US controlled by the CCP

For anyone reading this who is knowledgeable about this topic, where, specifically, can a regular citizen buy personal data about people from data brokers?

https://www.acxiom.com/customer-data/

https://www.epsilon.com/us/products-and-services/data

It's unlikely you can. They're generally only willing to set up corporate deals to sell data in massive bulk. You could buy a domain name, set up a decently real looking website with a corpo looking email, then go to any broker like https://www.acxiom.com/customer-data/ (not affiliated, first one i found on google) and do the whole corporate dance of signing a contract to get what you want.

it's not just about data harvesting, it's about propaganda as well, and no, you can't "just buy" as much data as tiktok gathers on people, tiktok most likely has some of the richest data gathered from users, because they can get away with it.

> just buy the data from a broker

A surprising (and funny) example of this is how the open-source intelligence community and sites like Bellingcat used purchased or leaked data from private Russian commercial data brokers to identify and track the detailed movements of elite Russian assassination squads inside Russia as well as in various other countries. They learned the exact buildings where they go to work every day as well as who they met with and their home addresses. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-bellingcat-unmas...

Volunteer open-source researchers also used these readily available data sources to identify and publicly out several previously unknown Russian sleeper agents who'd spent years hiding in Western countries while building cover identities and making contacts. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/25/socialite-widow-j...

To your point, if volunteer internet hobbyists can use commercial broker data to identify and track elite Russian assassins and undercover sleeper agents, in Russia and around the world, China having direct access to US Tiktok data, which Tiktok sells to anyone through brokers anyway, doesn't seem like an existential intelligence threat to our national security. Forcing TikTok to divest Chinese ownership would, at most, make Chinese intelligence go through an extra step and pay a little for the data.

If politicians were really worried about foreign adversaries aggregating comprehensive data profiles on everyone, just addressing China's access to TikTok is a side show distraction. Why didn't they pass legislation banning all major social media services from selling or sharing certain kinds of data and requiring the anonymization of other kinds of data to prevent anyone aggregating composite profiles across multiple social platforms or data brokers? That would actually reduce the threat profile somewhat.

Obviously, they aren't doing that because the FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, INS, IRS, Homeland Security and their Five Eyes international partners are aggressively buying data broker info on all US residents at massive scale every day and aggregating it into comprehensive profiles - all with no warrants, probable cause or oversight. The US Constitution doesn't apply because it's just private commercial data, not government data. Any such law would have to explicitly carve out exceptions allowing US and allied intelligence agencies to continue doing this. Alternatively, they could put such use under the secret FISA intelligence court. US intelligence has thoroughly co-opted FISA oversight but jumping through the FISA hoop is extra work and filling out the paperwork to be rubber-stamped is annoying. They much prefer remaining completely unregulated and unsupervised like they are now, collecting everything on everyone all the time without limit. They've certainly already automated collecting all the data they want from every broker.

So yeah... let's very publicly make a big show of slapping just China and only about TikTok - and loudly proclaim we really did something to protect citizen privacy and reduce our national data aggregation attack surface. This is the intelligence community cleverly offering a fig leaf of plausible deniability to politicians who can now claim they "did something", while leaving the US intelligence community free to pillage every last shred of citizen privacy in secret.

This sounds super cool where can I get/buy this data? Would be a fun dataset to mess around with

Any idea why it is unidirectional? If the data is openly available why can't the Russians track US/Ukrainian agents the same way?

As far as I understand, many of those brokers are specific to Russia, and get their data specifically from Russian sources which Ukrainians are unlikely to be involved with.

Russian officials / employees are easier to bribe, so there are brokers selling access to car ownership / license plate records, cell phone location records and call logs, passport records etc.

There's a good Bellingcat article on this at https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-...

Interesting any idea why the FSB/GRU make their agents operate using their real identities as opposed to using a cover?

Or did Tom Clancy lie and they are so incompetent they can't even use OSINT tools lol

It's not like the spies were routinely careless or didn't do the obvious things a spy should do. They did travel under cover identities but those covers were linked to mobile phone and other data in foreign countries. That left a trail that could be followed to identify real personal data when they intersected back in Russia. They also used public posts on Russian social media. I guess OO7 didn't know a single group photo from some department secretary's retirement party can undo years of spy craft. And just swapping out a SIM when you get back home in Russia doesn't change the phone's ESN.

I'm not an expert though. There's a lot of detailed info on OSINT sources and methods online. The bottom line is it's extremely difficult to put the data genie back in the bottle. The stuff seeps out everywhere and searching aggregated databases from multiple sources and time periods uncovers any connection. It only requires a single slip-up happening one time. This just reinforces that a regular citizen in a Western democracy who's not a spy trained to operate under cover with a nation-state providing authentic false identities, is screwed in terms of maintaining their own privacy.

Idk the math isn't mathing. In the US drugs are moved using graffiti or word of mouth or dead drops because dealers are operating under the assumption all digital devices are monitored. If they use phones at all burners are discarded not sim swapped

Is the FSB/GRU more incompetent than my local fentanyl dealer? new identity, plastic surgery, contacts to protect iris scanning, no digital comms except in house tech, avoiding legal entrypoints seem to be the very basic in today's age especially for a hit

Tom Clancy lied that's a few hours of my life I'll never get back lol

> ESN

In Soviet Russia, you don't get an ESN.

The correct term to use here is IMEI, ESN is CDMA-specific (and hence mostly US-specific) as far as I understand.

Thanks for reminding me. Now that you mention it, I think that IMEI is probably used most places now (including the US where I am). ESN is probably just an antiquated term that's out-of-date but which is still stuck in my head. Anyway, I just meant the device's hard coded globally unique identifier.

Again, how does this change any of the realities of TikTok? "Leave them alone because other abuses exist" is not an argument.

this is a rabbit hole I can jump down with a good cup of tea tonight thanks bud

Not just about data harvesting though.

But what is the point of all this data? People don’t live forever or have unlimited exploitable LTV, so there is a very narrow window of time for where this data is useful for a given population. Is the goal to just use it to influence elections?

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It’s this - anyone saying otherwise simply does not know, or is pushing some kind of an agenda. I fully believe some people in the US government buy the whole “security” angle, but it’s very obviously bogus. So is the idea of selling it - china is very protective of chinese user data, there’s no way they are going to trust an american investor to play by their rules, even if a serious price was offered, which it hasn’t been. this entire thing feels like theater, honestly.

TikTok is being banned because of the algorithm, not user data. Though that’s a nice side benefit.

That’s theater too - at least without acknowledging the clear harm that american algorithm does as well. The logic simply doesn’t add up, unfortunately - I am for banning all social media apps.

Like foreign adversaries can already run influence campaigns on american media platforms, often, the american ones will even cooperate with it. It’s just theater. They dont need tiktok to do whatever people are saying the reason is.

It’s not theater. Just calling something security theater isn’t an argument and the fact that Congress passed bipartisan legislation to ban it after internal security briefings should at least cause you to question your assumption.

The other key point you are missing is that we can ban one app and then ban/regulate others later. You don’t have to do it all at once even if all organizations were engaging in the same behavior.

Even more - the process and legislation required to just ban/regulate Meta or other American tech companies for example is more difficult not just because of the actual legal apparatus required to make it happen, but because of economic considerations and jobs and such too. Further, no doubt the CIA, NSA, and FBI all but have offices at Meta headquarters. They might be engaging in activity or influence campaigns we don’t like - but that’s for us to figure out, not some other country.

TikTok is just some random company that doesn’t matter outside of engaging in activities we don’t like and we choose to allow it to do business in the United States as we see fit.

As casually as we can decide to allow it to do business in the United States so too can we revoke that permission. We do this all the time. We recently stopped Nippon Steel from buying US Steel. TikTok isn’t anything special.

It's not theater.

It's about having an adversarial entity -- one with whom the US could be at war with one day -- have control over a social media network that is highly pervasive in US society. It's not about harvesting the data. It's about having the ability to subtly manipulate public opinion through control of the algorithm that determines what comes up on people's feeds.

Yes, foreign adversaries can run TV ads like anyone else, or have their people on social media to try to sway the conversation (there's even a name for these people in China - "wumao"). I'm sure there's some people working for the CCP on this thread. But control of the network is a whole other level of influence -- orders of magnitude greater.

This same adversarial entity can run in the same fashion on american platforms and the data landscape quite easily. Theater.

It's one of those things. If you asked most Hacker News readers how they feel about the authoritarian government of a single party state literally controlling the algorithm that determines everything you see, most would swear up and down that they would never stand for it.

But yet what happens in practice is people line up to defend it. I can only guess most of the people defending it are active users and aren't aware of how distorted their perception of the world is by the content they see there.

There's some defending it in general, but it's also just a really tough precedent to allow when it could, so easily, be used to shut down any other service they want by just waving the magic "national security" flag.

It's possible to believe TikTok is bad and that the pathway the US just proved out to banning it in the US has shown that no US court will seriously question the "security reasons" fig leaf. Telegram and Signal are both used by plenty of people the US could easily paint as "security threats" and it's unclear there's any defense to a ban that they could mount at this point.

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I am of 100% of the same opinion as you. I have told people for years about the cyber warfare going on and that we're losing it, and they just don't seem to care and want that serotonin hit and ignore the rest. I also want curbs on other social media, but TikTok and the war of China against the US on the internet is in a league of its own. The CCP are no doubt funneling the data to their servers, and no doubt have plans for further damaging our youths' minds through brain rot of tiktok diverting them from far more productive activities. There's a reason CCP has strong curbs on similar apps regarding young people in their nation.

> Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.

Is there any evidence of this? FWIW, I saw plenty of tiktoks talking about the China hack

Yeah i shared with relatives by taking a screenshot of a tiktok to show them the news

It's completely irrelevant whether they have done it or not. The only thing that matters is the fact that they can do it.

We're not going let you have nukes just because you haven't nuked anybody yet.

Also the idea that a country that has built the most extensive digital surveillance apparatus in the world will somehow avoid the temptation to use TikTok to monitor people abroad..

It's beyond naive.

There is no evidence. This is just blind speculation. 95% of the population just doesn't care about telecom cybersecurity.

I agree the evidence is weak, and circumstantial, but it is not true that there none. Quick overview of some of it (which includes critique of it):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok

We just don't care. We know the all the American TLAs are on our phones, so what's a few more Chinese ones? It's a problem for Washington war wonks to freak out about, not teens in Omaha.

Those teens in Omaha will eventually become voting adults in Omaha and then will eventually come into positions of leadership in both the public and private sector. I can guarantee that 0% would appreciate being blackmailed or unknowingly used as pawns in spycraft. Teens in Omaha may not understand the full scope of what it means.

Can you definitively point to something TikTok collects that can be used for blackmail that isn't collected by any other social media app?

No, they all collect the same level of blackmailable stuff. They shouldn't ban TikTok, they should ban all data collection and get rid of the third party doctrine altogether. But China is sort of an active adversary to the US right now so banning it is a heavy handed method that will probably mostly work to prevent mass indoctrination from a rival and also prop up ailing US social media companies. The US govt wants mass indoctrination and blackmail material on people, it just doesn't want China to have it.

Please give an example of something that someone would be ashamed of or blackmailed by that goes through their TikTok?

Literally there are countless things. Firstly, the app is pinging TikTok servers all day so as you move throughout the world, your IP is changing and betraying your location. Your location reveals your social graph and movement patterns, whom you associate with, and where you spend the night.

People watch all sorts of content on TikTok including sexual/sensual content. While they are watching alone in their rooms, all their usage patterns are recorded in intimate details and they reveal all their sexual proclivities. That is quite easy fodder for blackmail.

Health and financial information can often easily be gleaned from people's watch history. If you know people are struggling with their mental or physical health, or are having financial troubles, these are all things that can be used as leverage for blackmail, persuasion, and deceit.

the fact that a person is closeted gay, or that location data revealed exactly when they were with a mistress

Does TikTok have private messages? Any platform with "private" messages can collect blackmail. Tucker Carlson was fired over two texts (or emails, I do not recall).

They may be blackmailed for watching forbidden topics like Russia friendly channels. Or explicit material if TikTok has it.

They may be blackmailed if they are in the wrong social network if TikTok has such a thing.

Why is it okay that it's collected by any?

And furthermore, why is it okay that it's collected AND owned by a company based in a country not subject to the rule of law?

"Facebook does it too" isn't a reason not to be worried about TikTok.

> And furthermore, why is it okay that it's collected AND owned by a company based in a country not subject to the rule of law?

Because I, as an adult, decided that I am ok with sharing my personal data within their app in exchange for getting to use the app.

As long as I am not sharing personal data of other people (who haven’t consented to it like I did) or some government/work/etc info that I have no right to share, I am not sure how this is anyone else’s business.

P.S. I would somewhat get your argument if it wasn’t TikTok but something that could theoretically affect the country’s infrastructure or safety (e.g., tax preparation software or a money-managing app or an MFA app for secure logins). But all personal data on me that TikTok has is purely my own, has nothing critical at all (all it knows is what i watch and do within the app), and has zero effect on anyone or anything else.

> As long as I am not sharing personal data of other people (who haven’t consented to it like I did)

The ruling mentions that users are in fact doing this.

> (Draft National Security Agreement noting that TikTok collects [...] and device and network data (including device contacts and calendars)). If, for example, a user allows TikTok access to the user’s phone contact list to connect with others on the platform, TikTok can access “any data stored in the user’s contact list,” including names, contact information, contact photos, job titles, and notes. 2 id., at 659.

I also don't believe that most adults using this app really know how much data TikTok collects. It isn't just "what i watch and do within the app". A fuller quote from the above that doesn't just focus on data involving other people is

> The platform collects extensive personal information from and about its users. See H. R. Rep., at 3 (Public reporting has suggested that TikTok’s “data collection practices extend to age, phone number, precise location, internet address, device used, phone contacts, social network connections, the content of private messages sent through the application, and videos watched.”); 1 App. 241 (Draft National Security Agreement noting that TikTok collects user data, user content, behavioral data (including “keystroke patterns and rhythms”), and device and network data (including device contacts and calenders)).

I also don't particularly believe that the US has to allow espionage just because the government spying got the individuals being spied on to agree to it.

And why have we forgotten about kids?

The law in question doesn't forbid you, or any other adult, or even any child for that matter, from knowingly installing the app. It forbids companies from assisting in wide scale espionage. You can still install the app if you want, the US companies just can't help operate the espionage app.

That's where scale changes kind.

I'd have no problem either, if TikTok were only collecting data on you.

I wouldn't have much of a problem, if TikTok were collecting data on x0,000s of people.

To me, it rises to the level of security-sensitive when information is collected on enough people that there's a high likelihood of people in future sensitive positions (military, government, legal) having had their information collected historically.

One can't put the genie back in the bottle when a competitor government can see a new president elected... and pull up a profile of what they swiped from 10-40.

That scenario impacts not just you (the future president), but everyone you have power or influence over.

And given the Chinese government's documented willingness to coerce people in foreign countries (i.e. the "not police" police stations), betting they won't use that power seems shortsighted...

> I, as an adult, decided that I am ok with sharing my personal data within their app in exchange for getting to use the app

You, as an adult, may also choose to drunk drive. The country is bigger than single people. Security threats are collective.

Fundamentally flawed analogy.

If we go further along with your analogy, then the government would make Jack Daniels (picked a random liquor brand, nothing against JD specifically) illegal, while still allowing consumption of all other liquors.

In reality, instead, the government didn’t make Jack Daniels illegal at all, but instead made drunk driving illegal.

Also, I am not sure how your argument about the scale or collectiveness of security threats makes any sense. You can swap “drunk driving” in your argument with literally any other crime (like “murder”), and it would make the same (little) amount of sense.

Hopefully we'll ban those too. The first step is always the hardest, so you should always look for the easiest path (which in this case is banning a foreign government from controlling a social media app).

Teens don't understand the full scope of what anything means: that's practically the definition of teenager.

Oh we care. I care way, way less about an American company with my data over the CCP.

I've heard it put that, if you're not a government official, having your own government spy on you could be more consequential than a foreign one.

Lots of people think this way and, to be honest, it speaks more to the inability of the thinker to consider the realities of the US's current relationship with China. A good thought experiment is whether you think the people of Crimea or Donetsk would prefer having the Ukrainian government spy on them instead of the Russian government and whether this preference changed in 2014 or 2022.

It's easy to have a gut reaction that your own government has a greater impact on your life than a foreign one, but that does not reflect the reality that 1) the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens; 2) the Chinese government has; and 3) the US and China are going to war one day, and China might win.

If you're part of one of the subgroups that the American government has historically mistreated then it absolutely makes sense to be more afraid of your own government.

>A good thought experiment is whether you think the people of Crimea or Donetsk would prefer having the Ukrainian government spy on them instead of the Russian government and whether this preference changed in 2014 or 2022.

we're not in that situation, but i would expect the people of crimea and donetsk would prefer that nobody surveilled them.

but in a practical sense, surveilliance of people in donetsk and crimea by china would be less immediately threatening to their life, because china is not conducting military action in those places.

>1) the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens

i don't understand how anyone can seriously make this claim, and i really don't understand why potential danger isn't a consideration.

potential danger is simply danger. privacy rights are established in recognition that a threat is itself harmful.

and abuse is not unreal. america has had a larger incarcerated population than any other country for my entire lifetime. both absolute size and per capita.

in america, political movements are consistently dismantled by counterintelligence. political action is met with violence and arrest.

perhaps few people are outright murdered, but it's not necessary to murder the powerless. outside of america proper, american power is much more lethal.

every concern and contradiction that threatens the present situation - environment, infrastructure, housing, healthcare, labor, war - is maintained by suppression of political organizing, enabled by surveillance.

the administration incoming next week has promised a massive project of deportation. it has promised retaliation against journalists. it is apparently motivated to criminalize the existence of transgender people. none of these threats are reduced by american surveillance of american people.

>2) the Chinese government has [abused its power]

sure. but this is a problem primarily for chinese people, and americans are not subjects of chinese power.

american surveillance of american people does not reduce any threat of chinese power.

why isn't the american legislature addressing the problems of american people subject to american power?

>3) the US and China are going to war one day.

i don't expect this. there's too much to lose on both sides. it would be a disaster and a tragedy.

true or not, it's certain that american citizens would benefit, and america itself would improve, if arbitrary surveillance on the present scale was impossible.

> 1) the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens; 2) the Chinese government has

And before someone hops in with Kent State, Tuskegee trials, et al., let's set the comparison bar at order-of x00,000 to x0,000,000 citizens killed by the government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Death_to...

> the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens

To the extent this is maybe remotely arguably defensible, it is only so because the US has historically defined internal subjects who it wished to abuse most intently as non-citizens (or even legal non-persons), including chattel slavery of much of the Black population until the Civil War, and the largely genocidal American Indian wars up through 1924. But even in those cases you still have to ignore a lot of abuse in the period after nominal citizenship was granted (for Black Americans, especially, but very much not exclusively, in the first century after abolition of slavery).

That your examples are a century old proves the point about the US govt. being benign.

Why?

This is like saying that you don't care about free speech because you don't have anything to say right now. It's no where close to being a justification.

So, should we also ban Chinese companies Alibaba, Baidu, Haier, Lenovo, Tencent, and ZTE from operating in the United States? Why just TikTok (Who is ironically also banned in China)?

And should Israeli companies, like those associated with NSO Group, face similar scrutiny after reports of their tools being used to hack U.S. State Department employee phones?

Yes

On unfair trade practices and ethical violations, yes. Ban them all. Nothing of value will be lost.

Let's build the greatest great Firewall ever built!

> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones

Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.

I can think that China is up to no good with my data and still be mad at my own Govt for doing the exact same thing. The outrage is not that TikTok is banned, it's that Zuckerburg is doing the exact same harms to America that China is alleged to be doing, but only 1 app is banned. Hence people flocking to Rednote rather than using Reels.

There is no legal way to ban FB -- nor would there be any way to ban TT if it were not owned and controlled by a foreign power.

There's at least three separate reasons that justify banning TikTok. If Trump bails them out, it's a complete betrayal of his base and the country at large.

1. Competitive balance. China does not allow US social media companies. If we allow theirs, our industry is essentially fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

2. China controls the algorithm for determining who sees what. This gives them tremendous ability to influence public opinion, and consequently public elections. That cannot be allowed to stand as long as China is hostile to the US.

3. China gets extremely detailed data about the interests and proclivities of millions of Americans, including military personnel and elected officials. This data is not otherwise publicly available and can be used for blackmail and other manipulation. Which is completely unacceptable when we have no mechanism to punish them from doing this short of global nuclear war.

Even ignoring the enormous threat to national sovereignty, TikTok has no redeeming qualities. It's an addiction machine that profits off people wasting away in front a screen. That alone is not a reason to ban it, but it sure does make the case stronger.

Banning TikTok is a clear-cut positive for the American people. Every American adult should be in support.

All of your points except 1. are true of American social media companies. 2., in particular, is widely documented: the Facebook mood manipulation fiasco, Cambridge Analytica, Musk's personal tweaking of the Twitter trending hashtags, and YouTube's heavy-handed censorship of legitimate medical advice during Covid are just a few of the higher profile instances of this.

The important distinction is the whole “hostile foreign government” thing.

None of the stated reasons for the TikTok ban matter except this one: a country who is openly hostile towards us can control what our citizens see. That alone is enough to ban it. War with china is not some far flung fantasy, it’s something both sides have been actively preparing for for a long while.

I would wager that in a modern war scenario, your ability to bend the public support of your enemy’s war effort is going to be a huge factor in the outcome. I don’t really need to explain why; it’s self-evident.

If relations with china were better, the ban would not make sense. If this was a French social network or something, a ban would not make sense. But China is a hostile nation that explicitly aims to oppose the US. It’s not worth letting them walk all over us just out of “fairness.” I don’t want to be fair to China in a future conflict, I want to win.

The real criticism we should be making, is about how relations with china got this bad in the first place. Could there have been more diplomatic treatment? Better trade deals? Agreements on IP ownership? Etc etc… that’s a discussion that would make more sense to have. But given the current relationship between the countries, the TikTok ban is literally the bare minimum we should be doing. I expect a lot more things like this to follow.

> If Trump bails them out, it's a complete betrayal of his base and the country at large.

There is no wall. The Trump "tax cuts" raised taxes on most Americans and cut them for the 1%. Trump has not faced any consequences for betrayal in the past, why would he now?

In fact, TikTok helps promote the lack of awareness of all the above. If anything he'll want to keep it in place, to keep the public misinformed.

I think the fallout from this is many Americans like myself don’t see China as our enemy. Based on the recent RedNote phenomenon, Chinese citizens don’t see it that way either.

Maybe the uniparty in the USA should make it a priority to improve the life of everyday Americans and not Zuck and Elon. Young people don’t care who the establishment is warring with because they know the establishment doesn’t represent them, they represent themselves.

Try posting a Winnie the Pooh meme on RedNote.

Ooooh!

At least they have healthcare!

> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening

This. It's this. Don't waste your time thinking past this answer, you already nailed it.

> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.

I would say both at the same time

Everyone outside of the US already knows the American three letter agencies and their allies like the Mossad can access, hack or destroy all their networks if push comes to shove. Most network services all over the world are run on infrastructure owned by a handful of American companies with deep defense and government ties - AWS, Google, MS.

As other powers arise, they will naturally want equivalence. The American government may decide that is not in their interest to make this easy - but I'd suggest as Hacker News community, we retain the ability to see beyond propaganda and balance contrary viewpoint.In this case (or the case on Nippon steel),how does one differentiate between "security" considerations and potentially a straightforward cash grab attempt by rich American investors?

> They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department.

Please cite your sources. After decades of watching American propaganda, we know all too well that it is trivial to make up shit from thin air and have a large segment of the population eat it up.

I'm tempted to say: what's the point if you've preemptively disregarded it as made up "American propaganda."

But here you go anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon

Yes, what is the point if the cites you have are all based on speculation and vague allegations by US officials? Do you actually have credible evidence that a group affiliated with the Chinese government hacked American ISPs? If not, don't bother.

CISA does. Much of it has been made public.

Google it yourself, if you're actually interested. It's fascinating.

What makes you think I haven't googled it already? Yes, the US CISA agency claims it. But no evidence has been presented.

Even if there were some kind of evidence, the US doesn't actually have a track record on being honest with anything like that.

https://archive.ph/20241007181947/https://www.wsj.com/politi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/us/politics/china-hack-tr...

NYT would of course never back erroneous allegations by US officials on geopolitical matters like these.

What satisfiable criteria would you like in a source?

Read the sources carefully. It all boils down to "US officials says so". It's different from the Podesta hack as forensic evidence were published linking Russian hackers to the attack.

The Podesta "hack" was a spear phishing link, no? With the emails then published by Wikileaks?

What forensic evidence was published?

Afaicr, it was attributed on the basis of methods. Gmail didn't publicly disclose any internal logging.

And the email chain of custody is unreliable, so post-leak analysis has the can't-spot-a-perfect-forgery problem.

Fancy Bear and their software was analyzed by FireEye and Secureworks. You can judge for yourself whether you find the evidence persuasive:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/apt... https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-targe...

No such evidence has been published implicating the Chinese government.

I'm not sure about "all our major telco's, but there is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

> On January 12, 2010, Google revealed on its weblog that it had been the victim of a cyber attack. The company said the attack occurred in mid-December and originated from China. Google stated that more than 20 other companies had been attacked; other sources have since cited that more than 34 organizations were targeted.

> I'm not sure...

I am. Google Salt Typhoon.

The interesting thing is that, using these tactics, the supreme court has made the legal case for every other country to ban US owned social networks! My opinion is that the US government has made another stupid move.

> The United States is currently in the middle of a cyber cold-war with China.

The United States Government is. I'm a United States citizen. Importantly, they're not fighting for me or my stability, they're fighting for the stability of oligarchs. They will gladly destabilize me and my life in service of the ruling class.

Appeals to nationalism only work on nationalists. I'd need a good reason to be a nationalist. The very few listed reasons are some vague reference to freedom as if just saying that makes it true.

Get back to me when it's "China is threatening your guaranteed housing!" or "China is going to roll back the statutory work holiday laws in the US!" or "China is attacking the information systems used for our guaranteed child care program!"

It's really simple: if you want people to love and defend the US and what it purportedly stands for, then give them concrete reasons to do so. Improve their quality of life.

Until then, leave me the hell out of the fearmongering about China. I'm much more fearful of the systemic policies of the US making me homeless than some nation state's cyberopium ruining my mind or protecting information systems that were intentionally left insecure in service of profit and the intelligence apparatus.

> They hacked all of our major telco's

Can I see the evidence?

Yes, whether you understand it or not is a different question.

Search for Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon.

>I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.

Exactly. Everyone is having fun bidding adieu to their Chinese spys. And I think they're losing sight of the fact that there's abundant reporting on harrassing expats and dissidents internationally, pressuring countries to comply with their extradition requests, to say nothing of jailing human rights lawyers and democratic activists and detaining foreigners who enter China based on their online footprint.

Most of the time I bring this up I get incredulous denials that any of this happens (I then politely point such folks to Human Rights Watch reporting on the topic), or I just hear a lot of whataboutism that doesn't even pretend to defend Tiktok.

Do you have links to the Human Rights Watch reporting that you reference?

Here's one from October of last year:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/09/japan-chinese-authoritie...

And here's their overall 2025 page on China which details, among other things, harassment of critics based out of Italy, detention of U.S. based artist, and even harrassment of protestors in San Fransisco.

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/china

I think their suppression of criticism on Uighur forced labor has also encompassed harassment of extended support networks people from the region as well, but that's just off the top of my head and not necessarily on that page.

Not a link to the Human Rights Watch report; however, at oral argument this was stated by the US government (https://www.oyez.org/cases/2024/24-656 @ 1:58:32):

Elizabeth B. Prelogar: And the one final point on this is that ByteDance was not a trusted partner here. It wasn't a company that the United States could simply expect to comply with any requirements in good faith.

And there was actual factual evidence to show that even during a period of time when the company was representing that it had walled off the U.S. data and it was protected, there was a well-publicized incident where ByteDance and China surveilled U.S. journalists using their location data --this is the protected U.S. data --in order to try to figure out who was leaking information from the company to those journalists.

> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones

This paternalistic framing is the disconnect between you and those opposed to the ban. The idea that it's TikTok insidiously worming its way onto American phones like a virus. In reality, people download the app and use it because they like it. This ban will, in effect, prevent people from accessing an information service they prefer. You must acknowledge this and argue why that is a worthy loss of autonomy if you want to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it.

If it helps, reframe the ban as one on a website rather than an app. They're interchangeable in this context, but I've observed "app" to be somewhat thought-terminating to some people.

For the record - I would totally support a ban on social media services that collect over some minimal threshold of user data for any purposes. This would alleviate fears of spying and targeted manipulation by foreign powers through their own platforms (TikTok) and campaigns staged on domestic social media. But just banning a platform because it's Chinese-owned? That's emblematic of a team-sports motivation. "Americans can only be exposed to our propaganda, not theirs!" How about robust protections against all propaganda? That's a requirement for a functional democracy.

Sure, but why can't my teenager smoke cigarettes?

The point of my response is: sometimes you have to be paternalistic, and the federal government doesn't need to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it because those people don't matter. They meaningfully defended the ban to the courts.

I don't think we really disagree in general. I specifically said that I would favor a broader ban. Just that if you're going to be paternalistic you need a good reason. In the case of smoking, "it's literal poison" is a pretty good reason to ban it (which we haven't done, lol).

My point is that I don't think "access to this information services will stoke negative sentiment towards the US government" is a good reason to ban access to said service in a liberal democracy. It would be a good reason to ban the service in an autocracy of some sort, but standards for individual freedoms are higher (though not infinitely high) here. At least, they ought to be higher. That's where the disagreement comes from: I do not care that access to TikTok threatens the US Government. I care about US citizens generally. The interests of these two parties are increasingly disconnected, a sign of a decaying democracy.

Your argument sounds like it's straight out of a CCP playbook.

Ah yes, CCP, the glorious protectors of autonomy and independent thought.

Parent sort-of has a point. Pro-autonomy messaging could be promoted cynically overseas in order to stoke negative sentiment towards policy that would hurt the CCP's interests. Never assume honesty when it comes to messaging.

About as much as the USSR were protectors of minority rights, but that didn't prevent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

Tbh I think this has a lot more to do with sympathy for Palestinians and the last year of protests on college campuses.

Besides, who cares if China is listening to us through the app. China and I have no beef with one another. China feeds me and clothes me and builds most of the stuff in my life and I give China my money. It's a good relationship! Much better than my relationship with this state, tbh.

> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.

No, it's just information asymmetry shaping public opinion. The US lets its dirty laundry air out. US whistleblowers, press, and historians dig up every shitty thing the US has ever done and US citizens are free to discuss it, sing about it, turn it into movies and viral memes, etc. China doesn't allow this. No one in China is going to become famous by calling for justice for those killed by Mao or exposing MSS-installed backdoors in Chinese telecoms. That kind of talk is quelled immediately. The result is that public discourse trends more anti-American than anti-China.

Senator I'm Singaporean.

People are now using Rednote, so what’s new?

How can you call Americans naive when over and over again for the past 2 decades there have been non-stop news stories about how the US Gov spends insane amounts of effort ensuring the technology Americans use is not fully secure? Maybe you should understand that the public can actually recognize Machiavellianism.

edit: before you downvote me, how many of you remember:

- Bullrun

- PRISM

- Dual EC DRBG and the Juniper backdoors, that too also were exploited by secondary adversaries

- FBI urging Apple to install a backdoor for the govt after the San Bernardino shootings

- the government only recently mandating that partnered zero-day vendors must not sell their wares to other clients who would then target them against Americans

- Vault7

- XKeyscore

- STELLARWIND

- MUSCULAR

etc.?

Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone. Regardless of which apps I choose to rot my brain with, neither the US nor Chinese government should have any say in it, period.

If a red line is not drawn, websites will be next, then VPNs, then books. And then the Great Firewall of America will be complete.

I agree, you should be able to install whatever the fuck you want.

Google and Apple shouldn't be helping China get you to do that, by hosting and advertising it in their app store though*. Oracle shouldn't be helping China spy on Americans by hosting their services.

This isn't a law against you installing things on your phone. You're still free to install whatever you want on your phone.

*And if there is a valid first amendment claim here, it would probably be Google and Apple claiming that they have the right to advertise and convey TikTok to their users, despite it being an espionage tool for a hostile foreign government. Oddly enough they didn't assert that claim or challenge the law.

For most people the Venn diagram of things that are possible to install on your phone and things on the app store is a single circle.

That's not a problem in my mind.

I'd agree that forbidding individuals from installing it would be an overreach, because it would be a more restrictive step then is reasonably necessary to eliminate the legitimate government interest of counter espionage.

I don't think that the governments actions here are more restrictive than necessary for that. The fact that they make some legitimate actions more difficult is completely acceptable (inevitable even).

For most people the Venn Diagram of cars they can acquire, and road legal cars, is a single circle. The government mandating all cars, even those driven solely on private property, be road legal would be an absurd overreach. At the same time they have no obligation to make it easy to acquire non road legal cars just because their legitimate regulations have happened to make that difficult.

The problem is that the rhetoric around this law from its promoters is that of an app ban, not a business sanction. And indeed, the app is being banned from Apple and Google's app stores despite it being free to download and use.

The government currently lacks the ability to yank a binary from computing devices en masse, but the technology to do so is already mostly in place. (See Apple’s notarization escapades in the EU, for example. And I think Microsoft is working in a similar direction: https://secret.club/2021/06/28/windows11-tpms.html) I have a sickening feeling that this is only step one, and that the government will eventually mandate the ability to control and curate all software running on desktop and mobile devices within the country for “security” reasons. National security goons are salivating at the prospect, to say nothing of US corporations that are getting clobbered by foreign competitors.

I believe Google Play does actually have the ability to remove apps if it wants to, intended for malware.

If the government were to mandate that they use that feature, or Apple use that feature, especially to prevent future side-loaded installs, I'd be much more sympathetic to the overreach arguments. But that's not what they did. Rather this is a narrow law that prevents these companies from assisting in wide scale espionage. The fact that they could do some other bad thing doesn't mean the thing they did is bad.

The courts use phrases like "narrowly tailored to achieve the governments legitimate interest" to describe the balancing test here...

I think a democratic nation is well within its rights to restrict its citizens access of certain systems.

There is no such thing as unlimited liberty, especially with regards to systems under control of hostile nations such as China and Russia. Would you be comfortable allowing mass release of unrestricted Hamas / ISIS, Russian propaganda content to North American teenagers? National security is a real thing and geopolitics always play a critical role in people's lives.

One could perhaps argue that we must educate our citizens better, however I think rather than being naive, it's better to implement realistic regulations (within _democratic_ means of course) to contain the threats.

> Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone.

Like every other right, your freedom ends where other peoples freedom begins. You can install whatever you'd like on your phone... unless it prevents others from exercising their rights. That's how we all get to stay free from the "might makes right" crowd.

Joining your phone to a botnet belonging to a hostile foreign power might very well prevent others from enjoying the very rights you're trying to preserve.

You have a point about avoiding the slippery slope though. I do hope that the deciders are taking that risk seriously.

Nobody has thus far provided any evidence of a “botnet.”

Sometimes we aren't the boss and we don't get to see the evidence. That doesn't mean there isn't any.

Can you think of any reason a government engaged in cyberwarfare might want to ensure there was informational asymmetry? I sure can.

"We have evidence but it's secret". Hey, we've seen this one before, it's a classic!

At this point, the credibility of the trust-me-bro evidence can fall anywhere on the scale between "Iraqi WMDs" to "Imminent invasion of Ukraine", and there is just no way to know.

There are mountains of evidence that Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon are the CCP, and it's already been publicly illustrated that the CCP controls Tiktok. You have to have a cyber security background to understand the attribution, but a ton of it is TLP green (public). If that's something you care about just Google it.

That said, it's not your job to understand it.

We both, presumably, voted. That was our input to the process. We don't get to be consulted about every decision thereafter.

The people we voted for were briefed in private by SME's who know more about nation state attribution than we likely ever will and had access to sources they can't reveal to us. They then made this decision.

That said, if you don't trust the people elected (of either party since this was bipartisan), don't trust the experts, can't agree on the facts, and don't even agree on what constitutes a reliable source there's no point in having a conversation.

At that point you're beyond the utility of conversation as you no longer share a common frame of reference with your fellow man. There can be no argument in good faith with someone who is completely faithless.

I'm curious what you would actually accept as a reliable source? Is there any means by which you could be shown sufficient evidence? What have you put in the place the rest us keep a relatively common framework for 'reliable source'? Tiktok, maybe?

OK. Has the government indicated that there is classified evidence?

Yes. It was even submitted to the court here ex-parte (without letting TikTok see it), though the court apparently declined to consider it.

What exactly it says... obviously we don't know.

To me, the 'profiles on the next generation of leaders, throughout their formative years' argument is stronger than the botnet one.

I don't particularly trust Google or Apple to firewall a malicious and determined nation-state actor (0 days being 0 days), but it seems lower probability than the technically trivial data collection.

Websites and books are already being banned in the US. Ask anyone who can no longer access PornHub or who has seen books being removed from libraries.

But it's not about what you install, or even what you say. It's what you're told and shown. The US and China want control over that, for obvious reasons.

Meta has been 'curating' - censoring - content for years. TikTok is no different. X isn't even trying to pretend any more.

The cultural noise, cat videos, and 'free' debate - such as they are - are wrappers for political payloads designed to influence your beliefs, your opinions, and your behaviours, not just while consuming, but while voting.

A library choosing not to carry a book isn't a ban. The government making it ILLEGAL for anyone to distribute the book would be a ban. As far as I know that is not happening anywhere in the US with some extremely narrow exceptions like CSAM.

If TikTok turned out to be State sponsored spyware, would you reconsider?

I support your slippery slope argument. I wonder where your red line is relative to "state sponsored spyware" and "typical advertising ID tracking" or "cool new app from company influenced by an adversarial super power".

All spyware should be illegal. A law to reign in the ubiquitous data collection on everyone's computing devices would be great. Maybe start by requiring all data collection to be opt-in and for a specific purpose. Make it illegal to deny functionality that doesn't strictly require the requested data. "Paying with your privacy" shouldn't be a thing. Crush every data broker.

This law is different to that, it's all about specific actors, not about behavior and actions. A "people we don't like" list. CNN could be on a similar list soon. All constitutional of course - the law will specifically mention how this is all for national security. And no one's speech is being suppressed, the journalists can always write for a different news channel.

You can still install the app on your phone. Tik Tok just can't do business in the US any more.

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> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones

Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.

It's not hard to see the pattern: any Chinese tech champion that does as well as, or better than American companies will find itself in legal peril. Huawei didn't get in trouble after hacking Nortel, but they got sanctioned much later, when their 5G base equipment was well-received by the markets. TikTok had the best ML-based recommendation systems when it burst in the scene, Google and Meta still haven't quite caught up yet.

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This outcome is worse than I could have ever conceived:

1) People have valid concerns about TikTok. TikTok will remain, and those concerns will remain.

2) People have valid concerns about free speech. The law that tramples free speech stands and is upheld by the court.

3) People have valid concerns about unfair and unequal enforcement of laws. The law will be blatantly and openly ignored for political reasons.

Literally everyone loses. What a clown show.

Yeah this is why I don't like the "tit for tat - they banned facebook, insta, etc." argument.

We're supposed to be better than them, but we stoop to their level.

The next Supreme Court decision will be them deciding if disagreeing with the TikTok decision is sufficient grounds for being censored.

Public disagreement with the TikTok decision could lead to legislative pressure, which would add support to the pressure campaigns of Chinese lobbyists and diplomats, or of other organizations that are funded or donated to by Chinese people or people of Chinese descent. This could either result in new legislation being passed that nullifies the ban, or pressure the Executive into failing to enforce the ban.

Either of those outcomes would, in effect, allow the user data of Americans to be accessed by the government of China. Disagreement with the TikTok ban would in and of itself aid America's adversaries.

Besides, disagreement with it implies that America unduly restricts speech, when we're supposed to hate China because China unduly restricts speech. That's a clear case of creating a false equivalence in order to foment discord, which again is material support to China's goal to monitor American's communications and corrupt the minds of America's children.