I dislike TikTok as much as the next guy, but I think there are several issues with this bill:
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It specifically mentions TikTok and ByteDance. While none of the provisions seem to apply exclusively to them, the way they are included would give them no recourse to petition this, the way other companies would be able to (ie, other companies could argue in court that they aren’t controlled by a foreign adversary, but TikTok can’t. The bill literally defines “foreign adversary controlled application” as “TikTok, or …” (g.3.A)). It also gives the appearance that this law is only supposed to apply to them, which isn’t what it says but it might be treated that way anyway.
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It leaves the determination of whether or not a company is “controlled by a foreign adversary” entirely up to the president. He has to explain himself to Congress, but doesn’t need their approval. That seems ripe for exploitation. I think it should require Congress to approve, either in a addition to or instead of the president.
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According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of “covered company”), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that’s included.
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There is a specific exemption for any app that’s for posting reviews (g.2.B). I’m guessing one such company paid a whole lot to just not have this apply to them.
The directed scope of the bill is going to do the same thing to TikTok that legislation did to Juul.
If you target Juul with legal repercussions for all their flavored vapes, then only Juul stops selling flavored pods. Now a million other disposable vape companies fill the void with flavored vapes that are worse for the ecosystem.
Targeting TikTok will just lead to another foreign data-harvesting social media app popping up to fill its place.
It’s not about data harvesting, it’s about targeting users with political ideas. If you watch a video for a certain amount of time then they will continue showing you those types of videos. There’s tons of bad faith political targeting on TikTok just like every other platform. The issue is that it’s difficult to avoid because the platform decides what you look at unlike other platforms.
This is why I’m having trouble understanding why people are confused about the bill’s purpose, especially in the context of the last dozen years or so. Allowing a political rival to maintain control over a platform like this is granting them soft power. Even if I agree that companies like Meta should be more heavily regulated (though not in this manner), I can see why they’ve put a bandaid on the issue given that there’s a non-zero chance that TikTok’s content has been actively in the past few years
3 months later:
Hottest trending new app: TokTic
Insert astounded meme when a shell partner aquires the Brand and now, (pick your)company is now a known CCP co-conspirator.
According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of “covered company”), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that’s included.
I’m glad clauses like this are common. We don’t want some teenager who wants to experiment with creating a “social media” website for his friends to have the full weight of the law immediately fall on their shoulders. People should be free to create website with minimal legal requirements, especially if it’s a small website.
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So when do they plan to do something about those domestic businesses trying to manipulate citizens of America?
While you’re not wrong about double standards, anything that discourages the use of vapid social media platforms is a win in my book. Use whatever backwards logic you like to make it happen so long as it’s effective.
Well this goes into the direction of social media monopoly so I’m not sure
He says, on a social media platform
Lemmy is a message board, not social media. Like fark or something awful. You have no idea who the duck i am. How is that social?
Users create and/or share content, check. Users discuss content, check.
Unless you think something is missing from that definition, Lemmy is social media. It is pseudonymous, but it is still social because of the users.
Since when did that define social media? That’s the same thing as IRC. is IRC social media?
ICQ had message boards where people would chat about the news. Was that social media?
Again, fark is a place where people share content and discuss the news. Is that social media?
Yeah, I suppose those would. I wouldn’t have thought it, but definitionally, it would be! I mean, heck, some of those are listed by Meriam-Webster! Isn’t language neat? You learn something new every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
- Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.[2][5]
- User-generated content[2][5]
- User-created self profiles[2][7]
- Social network formed by connections between profiles,[2][7] such as followers or groups
My tiktok account is also anonymous.
Your Lemmy account can likely be used to identify you, given a big enough data set.
Undoubtedly, especially since I haven’t taken particular steps to obfuscate my identity here.
But as I said in a comment below, I’m more worried about some unhinged nutbag online randomly targeting me than being a person of interest by any nefarious groups or organizations.
No it isn’t.
When you download the app you let them have the following information/data about you:
Purchases, location, contacts, search history, identifiers (!!), diagnostics, financial info, contact info, user content, browsing history, and usage data.
Please tell us how any of that is “anonymous”.
Cool dude, you’ve identified that big corporations data farm.
Random bloke user with a vendetta still doesn’t know who I am, and that’s who I’m more worried about on the personal scale.
Cool dude. Well you said your account is anonymous, and it isn’t. Words mean things.
It is social media, just because your talking anonymously doesn’t mean you aren’t interacting socially. Jesus Christ your talking to people. Right now. Your being social media’d. Stop acting like your above it.
forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)
Capitalism abusing citizens? Just fine.
“Communism” abusing citizens? Avengers, assemble!
More of a capitalistic dictatorship
They’re prospective communists. Supposedly they’re going to get there by by 2050, but they just built a new massive luxury tower for their ultra wealthy so…
It’s just like Marx said: “If you do an oppressive oligarchy for 100 years, it magically transforms into communism”
If that were true then the United States would have been communist by now
I think they’re more worried that it’s a foreign corporation going after their citizens and not a domestic corporation.
As soon as the foreign businesses get better at harvesting data than the domestic ones, of course.
I mean, the domestic businesses are the ones who own Congress and are using it to get rid of a competitor.
After the thousands of years of human history I’ve read about, getting rid of competitors seems to have been the primary concern of most of the ruling classes all over the world. Way back to Ur.
Rulers don’t play fair, because power corrupts.
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They are. This just isn’t an example of one.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The House Commerce Committee today voted 50-0 to approve a bill that would force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company or lose access to the US market.
If the bill passes in the House and Senate and is signed into law by President Biden, TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn’t sell.
These applications present a clear national security threat to the United States and necessitate the decisive action we will take today," she said before the vote.
Gallagher also said his bill puts the decision “squarely in the hands of TikTok to sever their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.”
While the bill text could potentially wrap in other apps in the future, it specifically lists the ByteDance-owned TikTok as a “foreign adversary controlled application.”
An app would be allowed to stay in the US market after a divestiture if the president determines that the sale “would result in the relevant covered company no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.”
The original article contains 601 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Even if China has access to my data, that’s way less scary than Zuck, musk, Bezos or any other tech bro.
Sooo… How do Republican’s square being the party of “Small Govt” and then interfering in a private business?
Is it a private business if it’s owned by the Chinese government?
It’s really not though? The Chinese government has a 1% stake in ByteDance. Meanwhile ~60% is foreign investors – believed to be mostly American.
You have a misunderstanding of how China’s government operates. It does not matter how much stake the government holds, companies just cannot say no to the government’s request. Otherwise you will be disappeared. See Alibaba for example.
Remember, China does not have a democracy.
Ooooof, somebody licking the boot of capitalism a little too hard.
That’s literally the same thing the us government is doing here…
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You mean like how US ISPs wiretapped the Internet for the NSA? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
But really, how dare anyone but us do that.
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Then it should be easy to buy out that 1% stake.
I’m not saying it’s a good bill, but reducing interference by foreign governments in US sold products is not against any party’s philosophies.
Foreign policy
They don’t. It’s all bad faith to get what they want - control.
Government is bad except when it comes to brutal subjugation of out-groups I don’t like, while the in-group gets protected and treated with kid gloves by the same.
Unfortunately most of them are the dupes not the protected class they think they are - “they’re hurting the wrong people” summed it up when it was uttered…
Too lazy to look up who said it, but there’s a quote I like that goes something like “conservative seeks to have an in group who the law protects but does not bind, and an outgroup who the law binds but not protects”
U.S. lawmakers can’t force anything on foreign corporations.
If the bill passes in the House and Senate and is signed into law by President Biden, TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn’t sell. It also would lose access to US-based web-hosting services.
ByteDance would be banned from the U.S. market and lose it’s webhosting on U.S. servers.
Also, what’s with the “foreign adversary” status of China?
Actually a court in any country can prevent a company from doing something. When you do business in a country you have to abide by their laws.
That’s right, I totally came off wrong. I meant that U.S. lawmakers can’t force ByteDance to sell TikTok, as the headline implies.
Though possibly US operations could be sold off, whatever that would mean.
Also, what’s with the “foreign adversary” status of China?
China is attacking us by having a bigger economy
Lol yea. They also maintain control over their big corpos and that must be threatening to the 9 corporations in a trench coat that the U.S. calls a government. Still, the world doesn’t need any more adversarial relationships, thank you very much U.S.A.
Unironically, so much of US/China hostility boils down to corporate market share
So NSA backdoors are mandatory but Chinese ones are bad.
I mean, it’s not one or the other. No interference from Congress means we get surveilled by China and the US. Congress can cut that number in half.
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Yes. 🤷
Nobody wants to be spied on by their perceived enemies. Also, how do you expect us to maintain an appropriate level of hypocrisy if we don’t constantly do hypocritical things?
I wish we would go after foreign investment, ownership, and political meddling as much as tiktok
I would be more afraid of being spied on by the government of the country I live in than by a government from a foreign country. Who do you think is more capable of doing something to you?
You have a choice to not use tiktok, in this day and age you don’t really have a choice to not use a phone…
Both are bad but fuck Xi and the CCP 🖕
Yes, governmental surveillance is always bad. But let’s not pretend being surveilled by NSA is as bad as being surveilled by the authoritarian government of China.
Sure bro, it’s the CCP out to oppress Americans and arrest and assassinate reformers and journalists, because they hate our freedom!
it’s worse. it’s worse because they have the power to arrest me, freeze my assets, or do a hundred other terrible things. the chinese can… uh… find out my sense of humor is immature i think.
The fundamental fear of TikTok isn’t censorship. It’s fear of a media outlet that expresses views sympathetic to the Chinese government.
If Americans are exposed to these views, there is a horrifying possibility that they my agree with them. And if Americans agree with the Chinese government, it’s just a matter of time before America crumbles from within.
the second paragraph, that’s satire, right?
It’s what American politicians actually believe
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The former is more pressing than the latter.
High school nerds pay attention. This is how you can make some money and have an excuse to talk to the hot girls…by installing a vpn on their phones so they can still have their tik tok.
Get one popular girls phone set up and every girl in the school will be hitting you up within a week.
They won’t want TikTok once the chumps who follow them stop using it. They’ll have to do something other than dancing for strangers to bolster their self-esteem.
And the cycle of infantalizing women continues…
Everything will keep going as planned /s
Lemmy does draw a certain crowd unfortunately.
That’s mainly the internet, not just Lemmy
And why do you assume everyone including hot girls & popular girls aren’t already capable of installing their own VPNs? Unless of course you mean the high school nerd is going to pay for our VPN service, then come on over!
aren’t already capable
Anyone who can read and follow directions is capable
Most people can’t install a VPN, including hot or cold girls
This shit is like saying most people can’t connect to wifi. It’s not exactly rocket science.
It’s more like most people are unwilling to find or read directions. Most people can do most things nowadays. They’re just unwilling to try.
Most people can’t install a VPN,
My guy, do YOU know how to set up a VPN?
I’m sure some do. I haven’t talked to many high school girls lately.
If this goes through and this happened when I was in school…that’d be a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’d probably never even think of it then. I’d probably luck into it by telling the rest of the nerd table at lunch, jock overheard, sell him my services, and then word of mouth from there.
That happening now…probably be the inspiration for the gen Z’s “American Pie”. Or “Superbad”.
Are you kidding? There isn’t a phone owning high schooler that doesn’t know how to vpn past their high school’s nanny software. You’re out of touch.
Highschooler here, everyone already uses vpn’s to bypass the school firewall to view blocked sites and stuff while on school wifi.
The kids are gonna be alright
The free market economy for you
The only social platform that doesn’t try to actively censor Pro-Palestinian voices. What a coincidence that it’s suddenly a security risk.
Big ups to Rathbone https://www.tiktok.com/@rathbonemakesmusic/video/7289906736847129902
Ya, the site being abused by Iran, China and Russia isn’t a problem. Nope not at all
Suddenly? It’s been labeled Chinese spyware since day one.
And Twitter, Instagram and others are American spyware. The timing is very interesting since TikTok was the only platform not censoring Palestinians into oblivion especially at the start of the Genocide. Even now you can see a drastic difference in recommended content between TikTok and American based platforms. Which is a major reason that the youth reacts a lot different than boomers.
Full control of social media must be held. Free speech btw
others are American spyware
The M.O. of American business has always been clear: The internet exists to enrich the already-powerful. All Internet systems must be considered a possible vector for mission-critical business communication. As such, EVERY message sent over the internet must be viewable by those who might benefit from seeing it. Every phone call must be interceptable and traceable. Every new business idea must be known. Every new competitor must be stifled or bought out. Every piece of information which could be used to coerce or force compliance / silence must be gathered. If there is insufficient leverage then leverage must be manufactured.
Yes this sounds like paranoid hyperbole. but it explains pretty much everything.The classic “Freedom of speech except for platforms that say mean things about us”.
At least China is open about their censorship
NSA can’t harvest user data from tiktok because it’s Chinese based, so they force them to split and sell to American subcompany that is obliged by law to give them access to their server. Everything else is political bullshit, like the Chinese gouvernement can “weaponize it’s app” ?? They can’t turn teenager into terrorist hating their country just like that, tiktok can only influence so much.
If the Chinese government believed that why do they ban so many US apps in their country?
Cmon that’s not that difficult to understand: The same reason usa bans Chinese app. China, just as usa, has mass surveillance system and want to get every single data, they can’t do that with apps owned by usa based companies.
The world police is scared about the competition lmao, “only us should violate worldwide privacy!”
My prediction is coming true: https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/10ofony/anything_to_protect_the_youth/
I watched that commercial - I guess banning TikTok is gonna work, huh?
For the commercial yeah, real life is more of a no.
What’s more likely to work is something else will appear and distract the gnat-like attention span of our status-obsessed species, and we can go back to tik tok being the sound your you hear at night when you visit your boomer relatives and try to sleep in the guest bedroom.
Ah yes, a classic USA move: if a foreign company is successful, they’ll do anything to stop it. If any other country does the same against an american company, that’s unreasonable protectionism and that country needs to be sanctioned.
I’m surprised that people are surprised that a country would favor it’s own businesses versus foreign ones.
I’m also unsure of which countries act differently from this.
I’m not surprised but I’m still outraged at the amount of hypocrisy they are pulling off out of this one.
And if foreign politics won’t take care of it call the CIA and tell it they’re hiding oil under the presidents house.
Ah yes, the US, where no foreign company is allowed to be successful.
Such unsuccessful or banned foreign companies include Samsung, LG, Sony, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Aldi, Shell, Siemens…
It can still be successful elsewhere. It’s clearly about data sharing.
I think here the point is that the US government seems to be not bothered by Meta’s data collection which by the way has already been used by Cambridge Analytica to swing elections in favour of one of the opponents and most likely used on countless more occasions but it is now super worried about Tiktok.
If they do this they should apply the same measures against Meta and other companies but they don’t. Which is disturbing.
As I recall they got Zuckerberg on stand and did their best “rabble rablle rabble” at him, with a few decent questions mixed in, then nothing.
Facebook / Meta was forced to pay 5 Billion USD in an FTC fine over how they used data.
Yes, you have pointed out the subtext that was there all along and pretended like it’s some new argument.
It is about the data sharing. The US doesn’t like companies sharing data with countries that it views as its geopolitical rivals. Big surprise, am I right?
Seriously. Don’t cover your eyes and pretend you can’t see why the government treats US companies different than companies that are directly in the hands of adversaries. They might not care if Meta uses it to profit off of us, but they certainly do care if China will use it to achieve an advantage over us, militarily or otherwise.
It’s clearly about data sharing.
Oh sure, it’s got nothing to do with TikTok being increasingly more utilized than Google for searches, launching their own music streaming platform competing with Apple Music and YouTube Music, and being more popular than Meta apps.
It’s about all that pesky data collection… from the sandboxed app… that collects significantly less data than a single browsing section using a Microsoft operating system or interacting with Facebook’s social cookie without even being aware of it…
I dunno what hill you’re trying to die on here. A stupid dancing app that provides a data collection platform by a foreign surveillance state is a plot on the Orville. Nobody is concerned with it competing with Google, Apple orYouTube. It’s so off-base. Google sucks anyway. If people are searching on TikTok it’s because it’s giving better results for them than Google. It’s about who is collecting the data.
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No, I think it sets a bad precedent. I don’t think TikTok should be allowed in the US (if the US decides it doesn’t want it as they’re seeming to). Taking the property is going to cause a bunch of what you mentioned.
I can’t order Jimmy John’s on my work computer anymore. Why? Because tiktok is blocked on our work network. What does tiktok have to do with Jimmy John’s? Well I would have thought nothing expect it won’t let you set your delivery option unless it’s allowed to send data to analytics.tiktok.com.
Why is a God damn sandwich shop sending my location to tiktok? No idea, but it’s definitely not just the video app that’s the problem.
Well if it’s such a useful tool, it will do just fine in China, right? No biggie.
My comment wasn’t about TikTok’s quality, so I don’t really care if it’s a useful tool or not. I’m talking about the hypocrisy of USA’s external policies when it comes to protectionism. Replace TikTok with any other product in the same context and I’d be commenting the exact same thing, word for word.
Isn’t this in some way the same as how China bans a number of foreign companies from operating? I don’t think doing the exact same thing is entirely fair but when others aren’t playing by the same rules, it’s a lot less black and white.
