That factoid is because Muslims are obsessed with the name, and you will find someone named Mohammed in the majority of Muslim families, not immigration. It doesn't take much for the name to enter the top 10 boy names when they become 0.1% of the population.
I do use it occasionally - mostly when Windows has thrown up some issue stopping Steam from working properly.
eg. I need to dismiss a dialog that is invisible over remote play, or it won't finish logging in until I close a "finish setting up your windows install" screen.
Go to the gaming machine and upgrade it to > home or edu version if needed. Enable remote desktop with auth on your network for that machine. As long as Windows is booted and able to be logged in to on the gaming machine you can go on your other machine:
Win+R mstsc.exe and put in the gaming machine's name or IP and follow the instructions, checking all "remember this" boxes (there's 2, three if you count the certificate).
RDP won't let you play games but it is functionally identical to sitting at the machine itself.
I meant to come back and fix this but missed the window. I am unsure if the home/edu/N/P whatever versions of windows 7, 8, 10, and 11 support actually remote controlling the desktop as opposed to merely getting a "video feed" as it were. There's ways to upgrade to pro that are beyond my pay grade to discuss, but i think you can get a clean copy of windows that supports RDP for $130. If your alternative is "having a monitor plugged in 24/7" or "dummy cables but still have to plug a monitor in if something goes wrong with steam link {and it will. -ed.}" or other hacks/hardware, and you're already running windows at least the GPU/gaming side, RDP practically pays for itself even though it's $130 for that feature.
Someone else probably has alternatives (moonlight? bazzite? gopro and a soviet-era robotic arm (it only leaks a bit when it's hot outside.))
Can confirm, Sunshine + Moonlight are a killer combination.
I run a Windows VM on one of my servers for some gaming because I don't run Window's otherwise, and with Sunshine on the VM, I can play with moonlight from my TV, laptop, desktop, phone, ROG Ally (Bazzite), tablet, basically anything that can support Moonlight.
I still don't understand why operating systems can't properly work without a screen.
I have a Linux "home server" and I haven't found a way to boot up a graphical session with everything working (there were bugs in some applications, like menus not showing up, you couldn't change resolution, etc.).
A dummy HDMI plug fixed it, but still. It's 2025, come on.
You can run Windows server headless too, and run individual applications over the RDP protocol, exactly like using an X server on a machine with a screen to run Xeyes on a headless machine.
Anyone have a good tutorial or reference for doing that on a modern windows system? It would be very useful alternative to VM seamless style and allow Linux X11 system as the hypervisor with windows VM.
Well, i buried the lede. you need windows server to do it easily; once you have windows server set up, you need terminal services to be enabled and installed for that server. Then you can set up "single application mode" application. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-serve...
I didn't really need a guide, it's pretty straightforward; we ran firefox on a windows server VM in AWS and watched youtube videos, in 2009, just to prove it could be done. We offered thin client conversions to companies. never had any clients, too early, i guess, and everything went to cellphones instead. When i say we watched youtube videos, i mean on our test computer in front of us there was a firefox icon on the windows desktop local, and double clicking it, after a few seconds, would launch a firefox window, but instead of the firefox icon it would be the mstsc.exe icon, and you were not looking at an executable's output on your screen, you were looking at the output of the executable in the cloud.
anyhow the windows server software takes care of bundling/packaging/deploying of the the little "scripts" that let you have a desktop icon and everything else. I think there's a wizard.
edit: i buried another lede. The video quality of youtube over terminal services in 2009 with our crappy dsl was... "talking head" - or as i like to call it "peak apple quicktime video circa 1996" - approx. 15fps
When I looked into doing it once on a modern system and stopped when window server entered the story. I’ve been hoping there might be a simple solution but that had me stumble upon Parallels RAS which I’ve been considering doing an evaluation of.
My primary battlestation system (not gaming but for business) is 8X4k monitors on a custom Linux system driven by 2 high end GPUs. What I’d ideally like to have is many Win11 pro application windows managed by my X11 windows manager.
so it looks like, in addition to the method i mentioned, you can also virtualize the applications within "App-V" which is like hyper-v for apps (is anyone catching all of this? is this thing on?).
Microsoft made a firecracker or whatever for windows apps and no one told me?
edit: i'm shocked there's not a kitsch-y name for this like "Windowless Office Suite" for on-prem office that's virtualized for app-v... Someone at microsoft should pay me if they use this.
Quick skim seems to suggest the client to that system is Windows only.
I’m hoping for a Linux client which apparently the commercial Parallels RAS provides.
I think MacOS is even more hopeless than Windows for a per window or seamless remote GUI application solution. For Linux I use Xpra which honestly with GPU server and client acceleration can feel like magic. The dream for me would be a Linux based system for display using an X11 window manager to manage remote GUI application windows from all 3 platforms from multiple systems, all GPU accelerated on both ends.
Apple seems to have a particular hatred for the idea of anyone using their OS remotely for whatever reason, though Parsec works quite well for me, though I’ve heard there is a sunshine+moonlight approach that does even better than Parsec …
rdesktop has a "-A" flag for seamless mode which looks like it does what you want. I'm telling you we had that working 16 years ago via AWS - the AWS side was running windows but there wasn't any reason we had to be [running windows] on the client side. I merely mentioned that microsoft apparently didn't rest on their laurels with msts, they now support even more thin client mechanisms.
The app was shutdown a couple of hours ago in the US and this was the message all TikTok users saw when they opened the app.[1]
The same guy who pushed for a ban massively last year, is going to save the app despite the security concerns he and most of our government said they had. If only we knew what happened in that classified briefing that made them vote together across party lines.
> If only we knew what happened in that classified briefing
Most likely, the rationale will be similar to Huawei and Kaspersky.
Not based on actual historical misbehaviour, but rather the amount of power you’re allowing their respective governments to have over US citizens / infrastructure.
There are very few “from first principals” thinkers in the world, especially amongst TikTok’s younger audience. Most people take their beliefs from others, in the same way a llm’s output reflects its training data. If China controls the recommendation system that decides what content people consume, then they can influence the narrative of the country.
China has long banned US social media for likely the same reason.
I understand that people who don't work in intelligence can have a difficult time recognizing risk, and often don't really understand the war other countries don't work the way the US does with the rule of law, but these are very much not baseless allegations. These are not even historical misbehavior. These companies explicitly and intentionally support and perform intelligence actions on behalf of their countries' intelligence services. Facebook and Google absolutely do not.
Kaspersky has been very credibly linked to Russian intelligence:
This is actually a really great example, I wish I had included it in my original post.
Here, in response to a very public failure of our security apparatus, the US Congress passed a draconian law allowing the US government to do the kinds of bad things that Russia and China do routinely. When the public realized this, they made it clear that there is a limit to the power of the government, and that behavior was very quickly stopped. Forever.
The idea that there is a limit to the power of the government, and that the general public can enforce that limit, is what makes America different than China and Russia. That difference is foundational to our Constitution, and I think it is a very good thing.
> When the public realized this, they made it clear that there is a limit to the power of the government, and that behavior was very quickly stopped. Forever.
My memory is hazy on the details and Wikipedia might be wrong, but (1) didn't the lawsuits against the perceived perpetrators (NSA, AT&T, etc) fail and (2) is it also not true, that not only was "Patriot Act" not quickly repealed, the sunset provisions were extended throughout the 2000s and 2010s?
I'm all for the TikTok ban but listening to your last argument a reasonable opponent might notice that:
1. You assume others play dirty by default, even though we never caught them red-handed. Not necessarily unreasonable, but see 2.
2. You assume we play fair even when we are caught red-handed. You rationalize it with "it only goes to show this was the exception and look what happened after". Spoiler alert, nothing happened after, neither the courts nor public opinion shit it down.
You have to admit these two are a little inconsistent to say the least.
I will say the one problem with it from the perspective of young people is they always get the dick.
* Young people suffer the hardest from the housing crisis
* Young people suffer the most in any kind of job market challenges
* Young people have the least say in elections
* Young people now give up the app they use that actually makes them happy and helps to forget about how shit the world has become for them. Also an app that makes some of them real money.
Basically, the youth have no real legislation in their favour while their quality of life continues to degrade. I imagine that gets old.
This is a rant from someone who supports the tiktok ban.. but I'd extend it to all social media.
While this is true from the perspective of voting laws (you can vote after 18 but you don’t need to be 18 to see how f’d ip things are…), it’s also true that the age bracket 18-29 has the lowest participation in elections. I didn’t do the math but I would not be surprised if the last elections turned differently if this bracket increased to percentage levels seen amongst older ages.
Young people (and really any working age people) just really don't have that much time, energy, and (mostly importantly) money to dedicate to impacting election and legislative results. When you're working age you have more imminent things to worry about, but the matter of fact is that it's mostly retired people who think the world is going to s*t whose voices are heard the loudest.
Of course you can say it's a question of priorities and it's "their fault" for not being politically active, but I would argue the system is stacked against young people's political participation.
Also, most places in the US have minimum age limits for elected positions.
What are the demographics that don't vote and how do they compare to your current status (financials, privileges, etc) in life? Be data driven and get back to me.
It’s also true that age 18-29 bracket is less likely to have historically been registered to vote and that they are typically working in precarious positions with less ability to take time off to vote.
If voting registration was automatic, and election day was a holiday, I’d expect the participation across age brackets to be much closer.
I don’t know much about voting in other states, but Texas does have it. In a way. I never had to go anywhere to register to vote. It was a part of my DL application, and it got updated with each change of address. You don’t need the mail voter registration to vote either— just your DL. From my understanding there are some states where it’s still not that easy but many do have this integrated with DL renewals, issues or similar.
I agree that Election Day should be a holiday. There’s a slight issue with Federal Holidays being applying only to federal employees and not necessarily to independent businesses, which can choose to observe it or not… but it’s a start.
Also in Texas, the polls are open for early elections for like two weeks ahead of Election Day. I always take advantage of that. No wait, no hassle, in and out. Most states offer either that or mail-in voting.
> Citation needed - social media seems to be very bad for young people's health, if anything.
One would need citation for either claim honestly, there's plenty studies around the idea that social media actually doesn't have as much of an impact on mental health as people seem to believe, as well as the other way around. If we get more specific, people who have or are prone to certain psychological conditions do get aggravated by social media, but the same way that's true, it could be for anything else would there not be social media. In the end, what the comment says holds true regardless of how it may affect their long-term mental health
My own claim is more like a dopamine high. Like smoking. Both bad things in the long run, but makes them happu in the moment. Video games probably up there too in their current manifestation.
Anywho, main point is more about giving this already vulnerable demographic more tools to succeed. Especially if, from their perspective, all we keep doing is making their lives worse.
That's like telling a drug addict that it's bad for his/her health. Sure you're staying facts, but they're not going to take it up. Might as well preach to the wind.
From a young one's perspective, it's natural they're going to take it as one more incursion into their lives, else Red Note, an app made for a largely Chinese audience by an unrelated company would not have seen so much uptake over the past few days.
Do we have actual numbers on signups for RedNote though? I feel that if I’ve learned anything in the past ten years of social media, a lot of noise is made by a very small percentage of users (not necessarily even people).
I don't disagree with you that it's probably bad for them, much like smoking. But it makes them FEEL temporarily happy. Much like smoking.
Do you see my point? We're just taking random shit from them without giving anything back. Also, objectively, Meta's platform is just as bad for them as tiktok, so it's obvious to them that it's not being taken away because we actually care about their mental health lol.
I agree that young folks feel the pain more acutely - inflation, education and housing costs hurt the most as they have the least amount of income/savings.
I’m not sure I would elevate TikTok to that degree though - we have some serious issues especially for young men. Not sure that scrolling through TikTok videos is actually fixing any of that- it’s like saying “don’t take away the heroin, it’s the only thing that makes me feel happy”
We're aligned on your second paragraph. It just doesn't change how these demographics *feel*.
Maybe if we're going to cancel tiktok or whatever, offer them some tax credits to cover the cost of registration for a coed sport or other such things that might enable them to be happier. Do more to help them get their first house and get their life going.
Just taking things from this demographic, without giving back, is a surefire way keep them disenfranchised. Even if we're taking something away that is objectively harmful to them (but still keeping instagram around lol).
Thanks for pointing their position out. I work with and have these kids they have a lot to offer. They manage a lot of complexity - thus practicing for the always increasingly complex world.
I know it’s cliche for prev generations to be down on the next. I have seen such an uptick in talking heads blaming them for {something}. e.g. Bill Maher
They have little power! Lacking enough to execute what they are supposedly the cause of. Those who do should wield theirs to improve their education system or whatever deficit they believe the “kids” have instead of blaming.
Deck is stacked against them from birth. The entire system discourages from a young age what you're proposing. So if these kids feel so disenfranchised (and often filled with misinformation) from a young age, it's entirely unreasonable for us to expect them to "step up" in a vacuum.
You need better systems in place from the beginning to help someone become a better person.
It's like asking pigs to rebel buddy. If you want people to energize, you've got to give them more the a pulse. You've gotta at least let them think they've got a chance at the American dream of they energize.
Reality is the American dream is dead for most young people not born with a spoon up their ass. And that seems more and more by design. When you experience this reality your whole life, you carry a level of apathy that "get out and vote" is meaningless to hear.
Lives need to get better from a young age. People need to believe in the American dream again. But the policies set in place over the last 30 years are heavy.
1. Participate in the system
2. Violently overthrow the system
3. Do nothing
Sitting on the internet and whinging about how the deck is stacked against you is choosing option 3.
Fact of the matter is that a lot of people picked option 3 because of whatever reasons they had and now a bunch of oligarchs and criminals are running the joint now.
Voting is the least you can do if actually running for an elected position is not an option.
Just because I think it’s interesting to mention given your perspective about how the youth feel, here is how they’ve changed voting patterns [1]:
In past years, voters under 30 have proved essential on the margins, especially for Democrats, where even minimal shifts in support can decide an election.
It was a group that Vice President Harris had hoped would be part of her winning coalition this year. Instead, she underperformed, and President-elect Trump made gains.
Since 2008, winning Democratic candidates have received at least 60% support from young voters, but Harris did not meet that threshold, getting 54%, according to early exit polls.
Gen Z is interesting. My brother and sister in law are Gen Z (my wife and I are older millennials). My brother in law and his girlfriend are openly Trump supporters (both happen to be non-white). They went to the rallies and stuff. So are a lot of his friends at work in a blue city (tech sales). My sister in law is liberalish, does the pronoun sharing before group meetings for school, but doesn’t feel strongly about the issue compared to virtually all the millenial women I know.
Over the last 16 years Democrats have occupied the White House 75% of the time, so for younger folk Democrats are the establishment and Republicans the underdog.
I think it’s more specific than that. The 2008 surge of young people to democrats was driven by rage at the failures of two institutions: the banks (the Great Recession), and the intelligence apparatus (Iraq war). But those institutions never were reformed, and today the Democratic Party has become the staunchest defenders of the banks and the intelligence apparatus.
But for Gen Z folks, that stuff is ancient history, isn't it? Even the oldest members (using 1997 as a starting point, but some definitions use 2000) were too young to protest or serve in Iraq[1]. By the time the youngest Gen Z folks were starting school in the mid-2010s, the US stock market and unemployment rate had reached pre-recession levels too.
[1] I mean when people cared about Iraq, 2003 to circa 2008. We still have troops there, but I don't think most of America is even aware of that.
Both of those institutions were, in fact, heavily reformed.
What you actually mean is that there was little personal legal accountability for past actions, which I don't disagree with. The legal and political frameworks they operate under has changed quite a bit though.
I'm pretty sure that only a small minority of Americans, let alone those in the 18-29 age group, can name their senators and representative and anyone on the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, most Americans instead seem to imagine this country as an autocracy in which they get to vote for a new ruler every four years.
Probably the most impactful to your own life vote you can cast is the local municipal one. And that has such poor turnout among the youth it is crazy. Even in places where they mail you a ballot automatically and you have two weeks to vote at polls. People just don’t care to be engaged.
I've been fascinated by the shift towards Trump by 18-29 voters in this past election, and I think this is a good explanation that I haven't heard before. Yeah, and Bush 43 was so long ago that his popular image has turned from kind of a villainous "worst president ever" to a favorably remembered elder statesman according to some polls.
Note that it was a shift for Trump, still not a majority voting for him. Exit polls that I've seen still indicated an 11-point lead for Harris[1], but that's much more narrow than the 24-point lead that Biden had in 2020[2]. Anyway, I've been fascinated by this because it kind of broke my mental model imagining that the Republican party would eventually be marginalized as its voters died of old age. I definitely thought Trump was going to lose this age group in 2024 by the widest margin ever.
Racism and mysogeny is still very much alive among the youth and quite a lot of the US lacks any diversity to combat those notions. Or if they do have diversity on paper it might still be somewhat segregated where these communities might be neighbors but don’t overlap in activities. Less a melting pot, more a punchbowl filled with different fruits bumping into eachother.
The problem may not even be that China can control these narratives as much, but just that they (US as in the government/state institution) can't in the first place. Eg there had been complains about pro-palestine narratives dominating tictoc, even if there was no actual evidence this was manipulated (and I doubt it was). This is why i think that this is a case where the interests of the american people may not necessarily align with the "national" interests of wanting to ban tictoc (while the other cases are more about basic infrastructure or access to that), though i think eventually it will not matter much (if tictoc stays the grip for the US part of it by the US government is probably gonna be firmer).
This also can explain bytedance's approach of support and reassurance towards the incoming administration. I bet they care more about their company and not having to choose between two loss scenarios than about politics/international relations, just like most of big corporations in the world.
> This is why i think that this is a case where the interests of the american people may not necessarily align with the "national" interests of wanting to ban tictoc
Your home country at least has some incentive to work towards your interest. No matter how evil they are because they have to pay the consequences of these actions. Even in autocratic China, for example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.
On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
> Your home country at least has some incentive to work towards your interest
It's the opposite: if they can block any alternative to the "hive mind" they can easily pursue any interest they like and make you believe that they align with your interests. And if you keep having doubts, they can easily label you as a dissident or a foreign agent, because no one will take your side, mostly for lack of tools and platforms to expose fabricated evidence.
> It's the opposite: if they can block any alternative to the "hive mind" they can easily pursue any interest they like and make you believe that they align with your interests.
It is definitely not the opposite. You have very recent cases where Russia has been caught financing US right-wing hate-speech "influencers" to spread extremist talking points fed by Russia's propaganda effort. Their purpose is to sow divisiveness and turn Americans on each other.
> You have very recent cases where Russia has been caught financing US right-wing hate-speech "influencers"
So what?
You also have the same kind of "influcence" from the US, on a total different level though, given the disproportion of available budgets between the two.
OTOH that wasn't my assumption, I simply said that single minded propaganda will harm free people more than those who are not free.
Russia or not Russia (it is honestly ridiculous to compare Russia to the USA at this point of history).
> In 2016 Russia was caught actively trying to spark a race war in the US.
And you don't know what the US has done exactly because they do not allow platforms to speak about it, the "fact checking" was simply state censorship disguised as "war on fake news".
No one can seriously believe that Russia can outsmart US intelligence or outmaneuver them, unless you don't really think that the US are collapsing and are no longer the more powerful country in the World, with the more powerful military, with the more powerful and pervasive intelligence.
Which is frankly not credible.
But there are still people out there that with a straight face will tell you that the US elections have been rigged by Russia (or at least they tried).
Which would put the US behind even some small country like Luxembourg or The Vatican.
If you can't or refuse to understand the danger of having totalitarian regimes destabilize your country, including calls for extreme violence against minorities, then no wonder you're trying to argue there is nothing wrong with having the likes of Russia and China screw you over.
This is a nice narrative, but has not been consistent with how counter-disinformation has been applied in the contemporary US. It matters less what you say than who is making you say this. For example the founders of Tenet Media were indicted for allegedly conspiring with Russia. Those featured on the channel, such as Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, received millions of dollars from Russia sources for spreading narratives that happened to align exactly with Russian propaganda. This should have raised major red flags as their videos typically received modest viewership (in the order of 10k). The DOJ had every opportunity to indict them as well. However, because it's unlikely that it could be proven that they were knowingly conspiring with Russia, so they were free to go.
> because it's unlikely that it could be proven that they were knowingly conspiring with Russia
it's called innocent until prove guilty for a reason, it's the system working as intended.
And the US have exploited it too and are still doing it.
As an example, read the transcript of Victoria Nuland conversation about the future of Ukraine during the time President was someone NATO disliked for not being anti Russian enough.
Nuland: OK. He's now gotten both Serry and [UN Secretary General] Ban Ki-moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday. So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, *Fuck the EU*.
Did Nuland pay for saying it? Of course not. On the contrary, she was awesomely compensated for her work.
Why should one be surprised that the US Department of State is involved in geopolitics?
Your example further reinforces my point that content matters less than who is saying this content. You quoted a phone call that was very likely to be have intercepted by Russian intelligence and quickly disseminated on Russian-owned media, yet you're freely posting this on an American website.
> Why should one be surprised that the US Department of State is involved in geopolitics?
It is absolutely not!
It is surprising to me that people believe the USA are victims and not the greatest instigators of geopolitical unrest of the past 80 years (at least).
> You quoted a phone call that was very likely to be have intercepted by Russian intelligence
Nahhh
The Russian intelligence simply put it in the open, but who actually intercepted Nuland is unknown.
The point is we perfectly know that the USA are waging wars to also punish Europe, but it cannot be said, because platforms are all from the US and follow US directives.
That's why people also followed in love with tik tok, it was a breath of fresh air, finally few things that we all know are true (Nuland transcription just prove it) could finally be said (again: never used the platform, that's what people I know have said to me and I know a lot of regular people, white collars, regular jobs, kids and all the rest. They simply understand that American social networks and American propaganda have become so unbelievably false that it's baffling)
> yet you're freely posting this on an American website.
Am I?
Have you noticed my name is a generated random string?
> it's called innocent until prove guilty for a reason, it's the system working as intended.
That principle applies to laws, in order to minimize the chance of abuse when investigating criminal and civil charges.
This is not the same. This is about national security, and specifically enforcing national security policies. You do not need presumption of innocence to determine if you should embargo a country, expell a diplomat, and ban a suspicious supplier from your critical infrastructure.
Being conservative, marrying, raising children and being nationalistic does not align with Russian propaganda.
Similarly, all so called "far-right" parties that are supposedly financed by Russia in the EU ultimately are in favor of national interests.
Similarly, Ukrainian nationalists are in favor of Ukrainian interests.
If it came to a war between Russia and the EU, who would fight? Not the chicken hawks of the Green Party, but the "Deplorables" who vote "far-right".
The entire Russian influence narrative was concocted by the Neocons who had moved from the Bush era Republicans to the Democrat party. Now everyone realizes that perhaps China and Russia had financed culturally left organizations all along, which is entirely in line with the historic behavior of the Soviet Union. So everyone abandons ship now and pledges allegiance to Trump.
Regarding the division to the US population: That is in the interests of the established two parties, so no one looks too closely what is actually happening.
Yes! exactly. Post JFK and MLK assassination, there is no need to physically kill a physical being or movement. You just need to do character assassination of the person/idea. And with the fast moving nature of internet disinformation, once you kill the person's reputation that person is effectively neutered.
Post trump win people in elite circles started to realize and actually discuss (to my amazement) that maybe they should not have played all those games to derail Bernie Sanders. TikTok served as an interesting counterweight to the national narrative on many topics. What does not directly affect China negatively may also pose a threat to the US and that seemed to bubble to the top on TikTok from time to time.
Is it because he his a collaborator of the CCP or because the accusation against China where just a ruse to move the attention away from the Dem losing the elections on their own incompetence? (I am in no way a Trump supporter, but honestly the Dems did everything in their power tho lose the elections)
This is 100% what it is. The establishment types are upset that they can’t just lean on a handful of major media organizations anymore to maintain a uniform narrative (e.g. Iraq having WMDs).
You are trusting your “freedom of speech” to an entity controlled by a government which blocks US companies from penetrating the great firewall? Try googling tank man in China…you can’t because google is blocked and tank man is prohibited content.
> The establishment types are upset that they can’t just lean on a handful of major media organizations to maintain a uniform narrative (e.g. Iraq having WMDs).
This is obviously false.
Go check TikTok to see what shows up in searches for Tiananmen square or Uighur genocide, or even anyone of the many small catastrophes that go against the CCP's narrative.
You're claiming that consuming propaganda from a totalitarian regime that actively engages against your security, stability, and best interests is somehow better than consuming hypothetical propaganda from your own democratically elected government. Make it make sense.
Americans have no reason to care what happened in Tiananmen Square. That’s Chinese domestic politics. But whether Iraq actually had WMDs does affect Americans, as the people who financed that war based on the failures of the U.S. government.
Foreign propaganda is much less dangerous than domestic propaganda because domestic propaganda is more likely to relate to issues that actually matter to citizens.
> Americans have no reason to care what happened in Tiananmen Square.
It's not about what you care or don't care. It's about using China's social media service to discuss the very topics that China wants to censor. Again, go to TikTok or whatever alternative service provided by China and try to refer to the Tiananmen massacre or Uighur genocide. See what your paragons of free speech treat that.
Some weapons are "NOBUS" (nobody but us). Imho you nailed it. When in Facebook and Twitter the content was manipulated, the US government did not complain, as they were (again, imho) manipulating the content (e.g. Hunter Biden laptop)(don't involve me in the politics, I don't have a care in the world on the subject, I merely find this very Stasi-ist that unnamed, faceless, unelected people lurking in the shadows, wearing black uniforms and black hoods, control what civilians are 'allowed' to watch).
Since TikTok became massive, US gov & agencies lost that oligopoly/monopoly and now China (or any other country for that matter) could define the narrative, form and destroy opinions.
Simple Porter's Five Forces model of analysis. People despised censorship (I will not debate whether this 'content moderation' and/or 'censorship' was good or bad). The "New Entrants" took over. And since it is clear that TikTok cannot be defeated in the foreseeable future, and it cannot be purchased, then it must die.
Therefore, this power to influence younger generations should be restricted to US government and US big tech Corporation. They know what is best for them.
And China propaganda is so powerful that US propaganda cannot counter this, even within US borders, following rules chosen by their own country, US propaganda is losing.
What makes Chinese propaganda so powerful, even in the form of silly 30 seconds dancing? Or perhaps the real problem is not this? But the existance of a single non western source of consent manufacturing?
Strange take. Some kind of philosophical purity says that we should allow foreign adversaries to influence domestic audiences because we should be able to counter that influence with out own?
It’s like saying you should allow someone to punch you because you “should” be able to punch yourself harder.
Consider how this spat looks from the perspective of a European.
The US controls Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, Reddit, Snapchat, Whatsapp.
Owner of Twitter has office space in the white house, and is calling for the overthrow of elected European governments and deliberately spreading misinformation.
Then the US sees one non-american-owned social media network and decides it's got to be banned.
Perhaps those Europeans should consider whether they want foreigners influencing domestic audiences?
The mistake here is seeing the US action as a universal moral statement and therefore hypocritical.
The US action was simply pragmatic. There is no claim of universality or morality.
I very much agree other countries should also look at US hegemony through a pragmatic lens: is this a net harm? It’s kind of funny that you raise it as a gotcha.
So, letting divergent opinions from other countries and from different entities is like being punched? You know that most world uses social media from foreign entities, right? Curious how until few years ago, when there were no relevant competitors outside US, the dominant discourse was that only tyranical countries would do this.
> What makes Chinese propaganda so powerful, even in the form of silly 30 seconds dancing?
TikTok is as much about silly 30 seconds dancing as Twitter was about posting 144 character messages or a prime time news program is about 2 minute clips with a voiceover.
The way you fail to even frame the problem suggests you either are oblivious about the problem or you're doing your best to avoid discussing it.
Because it will not happen. And cannot be enforced.
No, im not arguing this because US already uses more propaganda than China. I was asking why americans are so afraid that chinese propaganda will be so more powerful than the Inês that they already have.
How? US propaganda, propaganda from big techs from US oligopolies will continue unchallenged and strenghtned, as they blocked a source that they apparently do not control.
The West does not have to tolerate the intolerant. When China opens its Internet to the world like it always should have, they can continue to play their little CCP “China good, Collective West bad” game in the West.
To really be fair, we should lock our Internet from China for 30 years and let the Chinese people have the full wide un-CCP-censored Western consent Internet you’re talking about. We can start with old favorite topics like T-square, Winnie the Pooh, that COVID doctor the CCP suppressed and then martyred.
Then we can sit down and have a frank discussion on what the terms of Internet use should be.
Until then, China should be grateful their State enterprises were allowed in at all.
But to answer your question, US propaganda isn’t countering because it just doesn’t exist. We have a free press. It can criticize the government, and does it every single day. The U.S. doesn’t do military parades, and its self marketing sucks because it’s not an imperative, unlike China.
Furthermore, China clearly thinks propaganda and intense censorship is the way to go. What else can explain the efforts to A. Block Winnie the Pooh B. Block the sale of TikTok? Profit clearly isn’t the motive now, which is very suspicious of such a large ostensibly for profit company.
The fact that the consideration to sell it to Trump/Musk in particular is floating around points to the political value of TikTok in the first place. Bribe the incoming admin, extract some favor in return, I.E. back down on Taiwan or relieve semiconductor tariffs.
Sure, US propaganda do not exist. Not in Hollywood. Not in games. Not in social media and news sources. Makes one wonder then how people got so propagandized.
Why do you trust that an app based in China would actually comply with American rules? Facebook voluntarily disclosed that misinformation was spread on their platform. They cooperated with the DOJ to connect this misinformation campaign to thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian nationals. Would you expect the same cooperation from TikTok?
It might come off as a "weak analogy" because it sounds weak to you ... to make the point that there are valid grounds (the epidemic of obesity & diabetes) for Xenophobic Asians to think addictive Coke / McDonald's are part of some sinister plot by the Americans to impoverish them. And that line of reasoning is ludicrous, or "weak" as you put it because it is (unless we are Xenophobic ourselves, then it isn't)!
If you desire a strong analogy, do Hollywood, YouTube, Netflix etc, which are banned by the other side citing similar reasons to TikTok, I am sure. But the other side is totally authoritarian and we aren't, right?
Aspirationally yes. In practice US can't even rid itself of civil forfeiture or federal weed laws despite consistent majority against them. We can't get rid of overbearing housing regulations despite it destroying our youth. Hell the democratic party presidential candidate wasn't even chosen in a primary, just installed in without a public vote to ensure viability, handing a default.
We do have a giant problem with the policymaking community being very narrow, but the only way to solve it is by having communication platforms that aren't being influenced by that same community.
When I say narrow, I mean narrow. The toppling of the Guatemalan liberal democracy and subsequent replacement by a dictator was performed at the behest of a handful of people who wanted to and did retire to a sinecure at United Fruit, and without the full knowledge of the president.
And somehow a majority votes for the candidate that puts an oligarch in power of an 'unofficial' position/department. It was clearly vote for people with a lot of money.
Something about The government you elect is the government you deserve.?
"Vote for people with a lot of money" describes both parties for I don't even know how long. It's obscenely disingenuous to pretend that's new. Both parties have been bankrolled by corporate interests for longer than I've been alive for.
The Elon thing is way more brazen, yes. I also think many people would rather have than instead of two dozen faceless lobbyists sitting behind superPACs, at least you can point to the guy when he pushes for policy. If it was the norm that companies were completely public about showing up to influence politics that might make a better world, really.
Not a fan of the whole thing mind you, but if it's going to go down, I'm not sure this is actually worse.
Both parties have been bankrolled by corporate interests for longer than I've been alive for.
Sure, but this is quite a different scale. Apparently the net worth of Trumps (official) cabinet, so excluding Musk, is 7 billion. For comparison, the net worth of Biden's cabinet was 118 million dollar.
(Sorry for the Dutch source, searching the numbers gives English sources as well.)
The Elon thing is way more brazen, yes. I also think many people would rather have than instead of two dozen faceless lobbyists sitting behind superPACs,
The super PACs will continue to exist as well. I am pretty sure this will give some of the PACs only more influence/power.
at least you can point to the guy when he pushes for policy
In the same way you can point to the guy when he tries to interrupts peaceful transition?
Which brings me back me to my original point, the majority of Americans voted for a crook (interrupting peaceful transition amongst other things) and oligarchs. We'll see where it ends.
The votes are following the propaganda, and Trump won the public opinion war. Democrats have been slow to learn this lesson and get their messaging and public relations under control.
If only we trusted in people to make their own decisions, but that's crazy talk.
Its widely known at this point that TikTok is a Chinese owned business and that the CCP has a history if forcibly influencing companies to do their bidding. If people still want to use TikTok I don't see what the real problem is.
> If only we trusted in people to make their own decisions, but that's crazy talk.
You're talking about people who say Haitians are eating pets and having the CCP dictate what content you consume is preferable than not having the CCP dictate what content you consume. Make it make sense.
Yes, plenty of people say crazy things. So what? If we want to uphold free speech we have to take the good with the bad. If we don't, Congress can cross the aisle and write a new amendment.
I don't want the CCP, or any government, dictating what I see. Thankfully they really can't. They can dictate what is online on various sites and apps, but they can't dictate what I consume. I've never used TikTok personally, the CCP hasn't dictated anything to me at least on that front because I can choose what I look at.
The fact that we allow advertisement is a choice. Some countries choose to forbid advertisement for cigarettes, for example.
And yes, there is big difference between the US advertisement industry, which is at least in principle regulated by the US legal/government system and thus, US citizens, vs. the essentially unregulated propaganda-machine that is Tik Tok.
This is not to say that a ban is the only option here. But I am not convinced that other control options are effective, or less of a danger.
> This is not to say that a ban is the only option here. But I am not convinced that other control options are effective, or less of a danger.
We're definitely in agreement here, there are other options and all have their pros and cons.
The major risk I see with the TikTok ban is that it wasn't actually a TikTok ban, it gave the president new powers to unilaterally ban services in certain situations.
As far as TikTok goes the ban may be more effective. At a minimum I wish the law was specific to them though, and I can't support it simply for the new executive powers created.
It's widely known by Hacker News audience. A quick poll of 16 to 22 year old nephews, nieces and their friends around me is met with blank, completely uncaring faces.
(Not saying one way or another about banning the app, but discussion should start from a realistic assessment)
If it isn't well known that's a great reason for the government to focus on making that clear. Banning the app really doesn't help anyone long term, and giving the president even more power is always a risky game.
It's the same with the US, haven't you seen how some topics were encouraged with the Biden administration and supported by our Californian "neutral" friends in LLMs and medias ? and suddenly there is Trump, and they all start to switch sides ?
It's the direct effect of political pressure.
You nicer you behave to the government, the more carrots you get.
Yeah, I totally expect a 14 y.o. girl who joins TikTok to check trendy dance move to be aware of dangers of CCP propaganda.
What percentage of population understands that propaganda can be subtle? Sneak some ragebait here and there to make it look like situation is worse than it is, exaggerate, radicalize people...
America is handing this opportunity on a platter by practically outlawing child independence.
A kid should be out exploring on their own, shooting squirrels, riding their bike to the next town, bailing hay for cash at the farm at the edge of town. I didn't become a staunch supporter of most American classical liberal principles because an app told me to, it's because it's how I lived when I grew up. If you shut me in or chained me to a parent all day, well maybe you grow up with whatever tiktok tells you since you see it as the only way to stretch your legs.
Well, it sounds like you may have grown up in the country. Personally i think it's a bad idea for children to have guns in densely populated cities, searching for small animals to kill in the one park within "dangerous but still walking" distance. Regardless of what you believe or how you grew up, it's simply impossible to replicate that kind of freedom and safety for a large majority of American children.
Our cities are run by cars, children are notoriously bad at sensing them. I'm sure there's things that could be done but nothing, nothing can give a kid in Brooklyn the opportunity to "bail hay at the farm on the edge of town".
The big city equivalent is closer to a bus pass, $5 for a hot dog, and see you at dusk. The danger of dodging cars arguably is less than being locked in with TikTok. Maybe kids hawk chicharones in the city instead of bailing hay, obviously it won't be a direct translation.
Well they can believe that if they want, it won't hurt anyone. For better or worse, free speech means anyone can say what they want and free thought in general means people can happily be wrong about a fact that seems very easy to check.
> a Chinese company, yes, but backed by some of the major investment funds in the west, the Chinese own 20%, Chinese government is under 1%.
ByteDance not only blocked the sale of TikTok to a US company but also TikTok unilaterally decided to shut down operations in the US to strongarm the US government to prevent it's sale.
If the CCP actually had no control over TikTok and at most they only held a residual non-controlling position, then how do you explain the scorched earth strategy that is only aligned with the CCP's strategy and throws all other shareholders under the bus?
The Chinese government has a majority of the voting stock.
More importantly, the company based in China, and the engineers working on it's recommendation system are based in China, and both are subject to the laws of China.
From a national security perspective, it's controlled by the Chinese government.
> There is quite a bit of naivete regarding how the Chinese government controls Chinese companies.
I happen to know how China works, have you got some example to present?
> It is very different from the US.
Actually, not really.
Can Facebook keep alive their "fact checking" program, now that Trump is president and not Biden, whose administration ordered it, probably more against Trump himself, than any other adversary of the USA?
Are Vanguard and BlackRock free to invest in whatever company they want?
For example: why are Vanguard and BlackRock backing Unicredit to buy Commerzbank, one of the few European banks not owned or heavily funded by American funds?
A Chinese company cannot take the CCP to court and win. There is no separation of powers in China. There is no constitutional protection held on place by a group outside the ruling party.
China has a faux free capitalist society. Chinese companies are the way they are because the government lets them be that way, not because they have the right to be that way.
That sounds like a reasonable argument to create an age limit for social media.
It also sounds like an argument for parents to step in - every child is different and a parent should be doing the parenting rather than Congress and the White House.
Sure, I'm not arguing that propaganda is ineffective. I'm arguing that people should at least have access to the facts and be allowed to make their own decisions. In this case the important facts are simply that TikTok is a Chinese app and the CCP almost certainly influences them.
When it comes to children that is a different story, but the debate should be whether we enforce an age limit on social media. There is at least precedent (for better or worse) for an age limit on things we think children aren't ready or able to consume.
In the long run it's better that both China and US have deep tentacles wrapped around each other. The more culture and dependencies merge and intertwine the more cooperation looks attractive over war.
The cost of free speech, including commercial or propaganda, is people get manipulated by it. Some including myself argue is you end up with even more nefarious control when censored, rather than having the option of which if any propaganda apps you want to consume.
There are some controls like certain pornography, but if these exist they should apply uniformly, not based on whether we like the person publishing it.
China can't directly influence US policy, and they mostly don't have any interest in doing so outside how it influences our trade relations. Sure, it's bad if they're doing that. But Musk, Zuckerberg, and the rest of the ultra-wealthy are directly creating US policy, both by serving in unelected advisory positions and by outright buying US politicians. Just like China, they are not working for America's interests, they are working for their own interests. They are removing hard-won safeguards for their employees, their customers, and Americans in general; and they are removing accountability for themselves so they can exercise that power over the people who live in the US with impunity.
US billionaires are far more dangerous to US residents than China is, and this law gives them even more influence than they already had by removing the only significant competitor that was not owned by a US billionaire. If this law had impacted all social media equally, I would be a huge advocate. But as it is, it's just another handout to the US's richest and most influential people. It's a bad law, and will make life worse for the people who live in the US.
You are basically saying American adults are impressionable children hence cannot be trusted to participate in elections held by US electoral institutions.
And you are basically saying that despite decades of focused high-stakes research into the matter, propaganda doesn't work at all on the masses, and that algorithmic manipulation of people is simply impossible? How could anyone take that idea seriously.. global advertising spend is approaching like a trillion dollars every year.
Why not call for the dismantling of the global advertising networks in the US rather than Tiktok since you think it is a giant propaganda machine?
Saying a foreign nation has the capability to brainwash your citizens into making a vote is propaganda by itself. It's not only cheap and imbecilic, it's a waste of everybody's time.
It’s not cheap, that’s the point.. ads as an industry moves more money every year than the pentagon. That’s a lot of people betting that algorithmic influence campaigns work. Are you saying everyone is wrong about this but you, or is your position is that influence campaigns work for brands but not for nation states? Or nation states would not try? Or what?
I am saying that but would prefer to state it this way:
Individuals are not equipped to recognized and counter the effects of highly sophisticated influence operations run by adversaries with enormous resources.
The US could have just built a regulator and laws like we have for alcohol and drugs. It's not difficult. But banning the creepy Chinese thing is far easier.
The easiest real example I'm aware of is that there was a scandal around the Houston rockets and China (years ago) and you could not find their content or content related to them on TikTok. (You could for every other NBA team)
In this example: who cares? But the problem is how implicit everything is.
Imagine that a major US ally (like Israel) were attacked by a globally recognized terrorist organization. Imagine if, for some reason, a high percentage of people on TikTok ended up being opposed to the US government's support of their ally. Imagine if there were protests across college campuses. And counter protests.
Would we know whether TikTok was behind the scenes, sowing discord? This is the kind of thing - weakening our alliances - that china would love to do. If china can reduce our willingness to defend our allies (think the Philippines in the south china sea, or Taiwan which.... there's explicitly a project 2027 in China to be ready to invade Taiwan)
Do we want the Chinese government to have the ability to do this?
Sorry I'm confused by your comment. The American voter voted for Congress. A bipartisan majority passed this bill easily. The executive branch signed it. The judiciary branch confirmed it.
Congress has a "strained" relationship with the voter. On one hand, the voter put them in that position. On the other hand, the voter is a greater danger to the individual in Congress than any foreign adversary. As a result, politicians try to control the voter, the way an employee would try to manage their manager.
This is done in a number of ways. For example, because the media has a great influence on the voter, politicians seek to influence the media. Journalists who publish unfavorable information are denied valuable interviews, incentivizing them to stay close to the administration. Lobbyists with connections to major advertisers, which have a great influence on the media, are attended to with high priority.
Another method is to close off the voter's access to information that originates outside a politician's sphere of influence. This can be done by encouraging nationalist jingoism and a distrust of outside influence, by outright bans on foreign press, or in this case, by either banning or causing a transfer of ownership of a social media platform that had proven unhelpful to a past administration's intent for the media landscape. For TikTok, this was hosting middle east peace activism.
The American voter is sidelined the second their elected official is sworn in, and immediately reneges on everything they said they stood for in favor of their moneyed interests. 90% of politicians have no intent whatsoever of fixing problems, after all those problems are what got them elected.
It's obviously fine to be this cynical, but I think the particular shape your cynicism takes is incorrect^ and I also tend to think people who are overly cynical willingly reduce their ability to affect change
^ the description of campaign promises feels very 90s to me. We tend to have a lot of information about how our elected officials act. I think most of them believe more of what they're saying or advocating for (although the reasons why they believe those things are fairly widely varied)
Some people think Elizabeth Warren is pure evil incarnate, and I think she considers herself as a policy wonk who loves nuance and is trying to protect citizens from ruthless capitalist entities.
The same is more or less true on the other side (I'm not sure who the analog is exactly, but a republican Elizabeth Warren would imagine she is protecting companies and citizens from government overreach)
I agree they're different, but IMO they're on the same spectrum - "a difference in degree, not in kind". Where would you draw the line?
Bad - quietly manipulating social media recommendations for millions of Americans
...
- a chinese company launches a Netflix competitor in the US. They don't create content but they can choose which shows and movies are "recommended"
- a Chinese TV show series becomes popular in the US. They know it's popular in the US and not China. It slowly and subtly starts injecting plot points that are pro-China
...
OK - foreign news sources
This specific law draws the line at social media. That seems reasonable!
As a rough heuristic, compare advertising on social media vs on traditional tv. Note: we've actually (intentionally) reduced the effectiveness of online advertising (you can no longer target as narrowly)
Imagine being able to make sure that a very specific person receives a very specific type of propaganda. These are power tools. It is not in the United States' interest to allow foreign adversaries (countries that specifically view the relationship as adversarial) to wield them
You can be cynical. You should say the power tools shouldn't exist. But given that they do exist and given that we have a very limited amount of agreement in the US, is it better to ban TikTok? Or not? We do not get to say "don't do it because there are better approaches." This is the approach we have. It's the first time in four years the political will had almost enabled something that was genuinely better for America.
It seems that [the executive branches of] both parties are happy throwing that away though
Most geopolitical rivals already blocked US social media - Russia, Iran, China. Brazil blocked and forced X to censor opposition Brazilian politicians. It's already happening.
EU/NATO members can't outright block US social media for obvious reasons (military protection is not free). They try to do sneaky things to control social media with DSA, etc.
India/Indonesia and a few other countries are already debating banning foreign social media companies. India was the first to ban TikTok (for the same reason that US is banning TikTok now). US and India are not really rivals and US can retaliate against India if US companies are blocked so math is that it's not worth it to block for now but it can change in future.
Most other countries are not capable/do not have economy and critical number of people to have viable clone of social media. They block social media from time to time during elections, etc.
To me, this whole thing just comes across as craven and excessively politically motivated by the US government. If they were really concerned with apps (whether or not they're owned by the Chinese government) collecting and selling user data, they would pass adequate and enforceable privacy laws. Banning one specific app is addressing a symptom rather than a root cause, and any solution to an issue like this ought to apply to the entire field more broadly. I don't necessarily think that banning TikTok is a bad thing, but to do so in such an obviously politically motivated way belies a lack of concern about the underlying issue (i.e. the mass harvesting of user data).
> If China controls the recommendation system that decides what content people consume, then they can influence the narrative of the country.
From Noah Smith:
> Second, the refusal to sell the app tells us that the Chinese government would rather see TikTok destroyed than see it fall into American hands. Notably, that same government put up little fuss back in 2020 when the U.S. forced a Chinese company to sell the gay dating app Grindr to an American company. Why shut down TikTok and leave untold billions of dollars on the table, instead of just selling the thing like Grindr was sold?
> One possibility is that it’s an attempt to make young Americans angry, in the hopes that they’ll demand that Trump and Congress repeal the 2024 law. But a simpler explanation is that Chinese leaders simply think that TikTok, unlike other apps, is so important that they would rather destroy it than see it escape their control.
> Why? Some supporters of the divestiture bill argue that TikTok will transfer Americans’ personal data to the Chinese government — something it has already admitted to doing in a few cases. Others are concerned with TikTok’s social harms. But the biggest concern is that by controlling the TikTok algorithm, the Chinese government might be able to propagandize America’s young people — and to silence Americans who say things it doesn’t like.
> In fact, there’s some pretty strong evidence that TikTok already does exactly this. Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute has produced a number of papers about TikTok’s manipulation of information to suit Chinese government desires. The standard methodology is to compare topics on TikTok to similar topics on Instagram and YouTube. The NCRI people find that content on the different platforms is broadly similar, except where China-related issues are concerned. […]
The argument seems a bit hysterical, it's not like everyone is forced to use TikTok, they can get hair tips, learn about Gaza, or get whatever views from TikTok, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Twitch or...
American's would have the freedom to choose what social media they want to consume, now they are forced to only have one controlled by a US billionaire.
the point is that US has clear and direct influence to twitter/facebook/instagram algorithms and recommendations and they can suppress one topic or another. it is not the case with tiktok, and this is primary reason for this ban
If that is the what happened, they made the best case for shutting down US owned social networks across the world. It is not a specific case of misbehaving, but the power they give to the American government that can collude with these oligarchs such as Elon Musk.
I wonder how much ByteDance got from the incoming administration to pull that stunt. Super shady. "We voluntarily shut down our service in your country (er, I mean, we HAD TO, for real!) but don't worry, a true hero is soon arriving to save the day!"
Haha fair. But I don't think any company should be strong-armed by another nation into selling. Meta would never be allowed to sell their "Chinese arm" to a domestic Chinese entity...part of the reason there isn't one
China doesn’t allow US social media companies to operate there—why should the US unilaterally allow Chinese social media companies to operate here with no reciprocity?
Continuing to play cooperate over and over when the other player keeps playing defect is not smart.
> China doesn’t allow US social media companies to operate there.
This statement is not entirely accurate. It is possible for a US social media company to operate in mainland China, provided it complies with local regulations, including hosting its servers in China and adhering to censorship requirements. For instance, LinkedIn operated in China until August 2023. However, it may ultimately prove unfeasible due to factors such as user preferences, the volume of censorship requests, or even perceived unfair competition. Since at least 2010, when Google faced demands for compliance with Chinese censorship regulations, the requirements for foreign companies to operate in China have been clearly outlined.
No comment on these policies, but it is undeniable that businesses operating in foreign markets must comply with local laws. However, by intervening in business activities, undermining corporate property rights, and contradicting its own stated principles of free market economics and international trade rules, the U.S. has demonstrated economic nationalism. I can't tell who is playing defect in this case.
Basically, there are 2 legislation in the world, legistlation and the China legislation. In China, there are laws on the surface and there are rules underneath. For example, the government never admitted that the GFW exists, yet it keeps blocking more and more sites. The government never bans online forums, yet it never grants license to open a online bbs, since like ten years ago.
During some political sensitive times, the government would send secret requirement to local companies like ByteDance and Tencent on how to censor the social media. Back when I worked at ByteDance, when the 19th Communist Party congress was open, the auditors would be in a war room, just for making sure that no negative news or comments would be released. American companies also work with the government on censorship, more or less, but that's another story.
It's very common for Chinese people who have been fooled by the government to say that, these western companys left by themselves. But it's not the laws that on the surface drives them away, it's the rules underneath.
I'm not against your ideas in general, but I have to point out that I have several friends in China running small online forums despite the obstacles. Yes, it is rather difficult to get the licenses; Yes, they have to censor themselves; Yes, they have to temporally shut down during congress.
My point is that China isn't selectively banning websites from a single country. I wouldn't criticize if US apply the reasons of banning TikTok to all foreign websites.
The US is taking more control over social media, more than the government ever had over traditional media. This is similar to how the switch to the digital medium has been used as an opportunity to weaken the fourth amendment.
I agree that the US is going to the wrong direction. I was just saying that what China did is a bad example, not a justification for other governments.
> > China doesn’t allow US social media companies to operate there.
> This statement is not entirely accurate. It is possible for a US social media company to operate in mainland China, provided it complies with local regulations, including hosting its servers in China and adhering to censorship requirements.
>This statement is not entirely accurate. It is possible for a US social media company to operate in mainland China, provided it complies with local regulations, including hosting its servers in China and adhering to censorship requirements.
Read about Google's search engine project in China aka Project Dragonfly[0]; it was a totalitarian dystopian nightmare where CCP wanted to know everything about people who use Google, like their queries and mobile phone numbers and plus they demanded from Google that millions of websites/webpages must be censored (removed from Google's China index).
Project Dragonfly was like Stalin's manifestation of perfect surveillance and propaganda tool.
US is liberal democracy, China is not and how much information is censored on Google.com if any? And did US government use Google to target individuals or ethnic groups within US?
Western companies operating outside China are often forced to agree with China's censorship requirements too. Look up the "great cannon" on wikipedia. Many such examples.
It is possible for a US social media company to operate in mainland China, provided it complies with local regulations, including hosting its servers in China and adhering to censorship requirements.
From experience I can tell you that also means handing over all encryption keys which is a violation of most companies compliance requirements. That means creating an entirely separate org for compliance in China with entirely different b2b and end-user contracts, terms, etc... I know of a few companies that get around this only because they are more totalitarian than China and have their own circuits bypassing the great firewall. Not naming them.
This sounds good on the surface, but China and the US have very different regimes. Full reciprocity would mean turning the US into a China style dictatorship. For instance, if China censors western press in their country should we be censoring Chinese press here?
I don't want reciprocity between limitations on the rights of Chinese citizens and the rights of Americans. Our government should be defending our freedoms, not imitating Communism.
We're supposed to be a democratic republic with safeguards for our rights, not a mercenary war machine that can be reprogrammed at will by a few people lucky enough to influence policymaking.
Does China have a first amendment restricting the abrdigment of all press and ? Was there are special carve out in the American first amendment for issues of reciprocity or for foreign media? No.
My biggest fear isnt China or Russia (like Im told it should be) but becoming like China and Russia. It's happening faster every day.
When the first and the fourth amendments are shredded then Putin and Xi Jinping get to say, with increasing truthfulness, "America is no better than us".
Things get a little weirder when they're mass media. A lot changed when the 'fairness doctrine' got thrown away… essentially you're arguing that adversarial powers should get to run mass propaganda operations with all the technological means we've learned, on the grounds it's 'speech'.
No citizen has comparable power to influence (and hide their tracks/sources) no matter how manically they post. It's rapidly becoming 'giant computer farms full of AI following scripts' and that still counts as 'speech', but rather than an individual's opinions it's targeted influence operations towards indirect goals.
It can be as close to 'crying fire in a crowded theater' as you like, except it's methods to coordinate teams of people all crying fire, knowing there's no fire, but intending to cause a mass casualty event through their actions.
The supreme court ruled that banning it because of "the risk that user data stored on American servers might be exfiltrated" didnt fall under the first amendment.
The head of the FBI (among many others) said the ban needed to happen because China could use it to spew propaganda.
When Russia is heavily critical of what one of its media outlet says and then bans it because of tax irregularities or something, only Putin supporters are under any illusions as to why it happened.
The 1st Amendment does not apply to Chinese companies operating in the US.
And even if it did it isn't a suicide pact that forces the US to do very stupid things like let the CCP use TikTok to manipulate US citizens to the benefit of the CCP and detriment of the US.
The first amendment applies to the communication of US citizens. If TikTok is found to be unlawful for non-free speech reasons and its distribution is outlawed, 1) Americans can still use it for communication and 2) Americans can use any number of other things for communication.
It wasn’t even the manipulation that was the NatSec concern, it was the amount of sensitive data they were pulling of not just TikTok users but any friends or family of theirs that they had in their contacts. This means they have data on people who work in sensitive departments, military bases, etc. and they had already been established as providing that data up to the Chinese Government. It’s the same reason India banned it, it was being used as an espionage tool.
Now the other problem is that Meta will sell much of the same data to anyone who is buying. We need to do something about surveillance capitalism from private industry too.
You know that there is no Facebook in China? The same for Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
Even Google Search is not available in China.
And not because those companies didn't want to work in China, simply China forbade them to do it.
Funny thing, even TikTok in China is blocked... Chinese audience have Douyin from ByteDance.
So it isn't like this that "bad US is doing something to poor Chinese company"
There is no Facebook in China for the same reason there will be no TikTok in the United States. Both Meta and ByteDance won't let another country run their business. Facebook was given the chance to operate in China if they complied with China's rules
The Chinese don't really use facebook in the first place do they though? And facebook's utility to China is the same as TikTok's, just less direct: manipulating Americans and other non-Chinese users of Facebook. It seems like people want to be manipulated though.
Word, I imagine there are all kinds of shenanigans at play, I'm just not spending that much effort thinking about it. We'll never know the complete story on any of this stuff. Maybe in tens of years, if ever.
This message about Trump saving TikTok is just wishful thinking from TikTok.
1.) It's pointless, TikTok is officially banned in US. Even if trump decides to find a US buyer for it, it will go under strict ownership investigation. So there's no way Chinese government has any influence anymore.
2.) This means that any future Chinese apps that get popular will get banned, and no need to go through any court challenges since there's precedent and law
3.) A lot of people already left TikTok and will not come back - why would they when they know the app could be gone at any minute? The traffic from the original TikTok will just keep getting split and syphoned, until the magnificent seven claims most of it
I think 3 is a weak point. I've left multiple social media platforms several times and got sucked back in days or months later. That was when I was actively trying to not use them.
Edit: I think all it needs is a link from a friend to some TikTok content and they are back in.
I read the message as more as being an ego stroke to someone that everyone else is ego stroking right now - seeing as Trump has a lot of influence over people further down in his party's org chart, there might be enough reason.
Trying to argue about legality is unlikely to hold much sway given how other legal issues ended.
That's a lot of confidence, you must know something I don't. I'm but a bystander Canadian without much of a dog in this race, but it's a pretty serious allegation to suggest that tomorrow's World's Most Powerful Man is on the ByteDance/TikTok payroll.
Is it, now? He’s a corrupt convicted felon who brags about lying, which despite that was elected president. Do you think he gives a shit about anyone’s allegations? He’d sell your mother for a pack of peanuts. And why not? From his point of view he can do anything he wants and there will be no serious consequences.
I recently learned, thanks to another HN comment, that more than half of the USA population has a literacy level below the 6th grade. Suddenly it answered so many questions.
> (a friend on Facebook pointed out that 5% of Obama voters claimed to believe that Obama was the Anti-Christ, which seems to be another piece of evidence in favor of a Lizardman’s Constant of 4-5%. On the other hand, I do enjoy picturing someone standing in a voting booth, thinking to themselves “Well, on the one hand, Obama is the Anti-Christ. On the other, do I really want four years of Romney?”)
People have been accusing Trump of this or that for almost a decade, but where is it? 90% of lawyers are partisan democrats who have hated Trump from day 1 because he is a threat to the professional managerial class. They have been digging for nearly a decade to find something to use against him.
> 90% of lawyers are partisan democrats who have hated Trump from day 1 because he is a threat to the professional managerial class.
That is clearly a conspiratorial statistic taken out of nowhere.
> He was convicted for paying with his own money to pay a pornstar to hide an affair
He was convicted of falsifying business records with intent to defraud and conspiring to “promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means”.
> That is clearly a conspiratorial statistic taken out of nowhere.
95% of law firm contributions in 2019 went to Biden: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/snubbing-trump-law.... This support wasn’t out of economic interest. The overwhelming majority of lawyers are ideologically captured and hate Trump at a visceral and irrational level for not subscribing to that ideology.
> He was convicted of falsifying business records with intent to defraud and conspiring to “promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means”.
Why quote the statute instead of the facts, which aren’t really in dispute? After he had already won the election, he reimbursed his lawyer for paying off a pornstar through his family business, and booked the reimbursements as “legal expenses” instead of “pornstar payoffs.”
Brilliant minds came over from top law firms to fit those facts into to a clever legal theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carey_R._Dunne. They figured it out, just like the figured out how to make Google’s profits magically all materialize in Ireland. But the underlying conduct remains a politician covering up an affair. That’s the best the legal industry could do after eight years of digging.
Let's back up a bit. Ancestor comments are saying "I wouldn't put it past Trump to take money to bring TikTok back." That's what's being discussed here. I'm not sure why you're on some personal crusade to make Trump seem unjustly persecuted. It's a bit strange, even, since that wasn't even the main contention here.
Yes, that's what's being discussed, and the argument that's being made in this discussion is that Trump has so far apparently never done anything like that before.
Yes but 34% of adults lacking literacy proficiency were born outside the US. It seems to me that this is more a reflection that the US has the highest percentage of immigrants of all countries on earth.
Edit: The parent comment completely changed what it said, making all replies look out of context. I’m leaving my original reply, which includes a verbatim quote of the parent, below.
> It may be you who lacks the critical reasoning skills. Did you happen to think about the fact that 23% of the population is actually younger than age 12, meaning they wouldn’t even be in 6th grade yet?
This is incredibly ironic. It’s 54% of the adult population, which is abundantly clear by the provided link (in a bullet point, it’s hard to miss). It only takes a minimum of good faith and critical reasoning skills to:
1. Realise that of course the statistic will not include people younger than the level used as the threshold.
2. Click through and at least skim the link to steel man someone’s argument.
They completely changed their post after the Tronno reply, which made the replies look out of context.
Their original post, quoted verbatim in my other comment¹, was:
> It may be you who lacks the critical reasoning skills. Did you happen to think about the fact that 23% of the population is actually younger than age 12, meaning they wouldn’t even be in 6th grade yet?
It's hard to find definitions of payment which don't relate to money. There's no doubt in anyone's minds that geopolitical positions benefit some states over others, it's a completely different premise to prescribe real direct compensation.
The waters get pretty muddy if we're willing to suggest that American presidents are "paid" by other nations to enact policy which benefits said nations, it's not unreasonable to ask for clarity about such claims.
Money is simply debt; an IOU to hand in for something of value in the future. If it helps to have the money abstraction in mind, imagine the debt being called immediately, whereby the thing of value is delivered immediately.
> Most people I know treat money as fiat, something concrete and exchangeable.
Exactly. Money is the decree – the concrete representation of debt. A recognizable token that can be given to someone that says "I owe you something", which can subsequently be exchanged back by the recipient to get the something of value that they are owed. Which you already know if you've ever used money before, and no doubt you have.
But, as it pertains to the topic at hand, in cases where there is no reason to delay delivery of the actual value, you can skip holding the debt. You could go through the motions of receiving money, and then giving it right back in exchange for the thing of value that you are owed, but there is no practical difference between that and cutting money out of the picture and simply accept the thing of value as payment.
> What I think you’re describing is political favor
Money might be a tool used in offering political favor, I suppose, but that is well beyond the content of my comment about the function of money. How did you manage to reach this conclusion?
I think it's fairly obvious, no? The originally presented case was that Trump had received payment for assuring TikTok's survival. I've noted a few times in this thread that this is a really poor framing, and that it's more likely his actions were motivated by politics, not fiduciary gain.
Trump has displayed a disturbing pattern of changing his opinions and actions after meeting with monied or powerful people who have vested interest in said change.
Often this is accompanied by a public message of flattery or a donation to his "political" coffers.
Totally agree on that, public flattery's a very common tribute in international politics. So I'll ask again, are we of the opinion that Trump is being paid by actors, foreign or domestic, to enact change here?
So, just to make it very clear what I implied, yes. I believe he and his organisations receive benefits, directly or not, in money or other forms, for him steering policy towards what’s convenient to whoever is paying.
An easy way is for TikTok to just promise to algorithm away any criticism of him in the US.
> Do you think Trump's being paid by ByteDance to lift the ban?
There is never a need to be that direct. Republican and Democrat donors tell politicians what positions to take. Trump doesn't need to take money directly from a company. He takes it from his donors, who in turn take it from the company in some form.
In this case, the theory is that billionaire Jeff Yass (an investor in Tik Tok) has "persuaded" Trump to flip his position.
rbanffy's comment was exactly as direct as I specified, and I'll reiterate their comment for posterity - "I’m sure they expect the issue to be resolved by paying the incoming president".
My understanding now is that now we've shifted from "ByteDance pays Trump to flip" to "American businessman Jeff Yass meets with Trump and convinces him to flip"
I hope you can understand that as a non-American observer I see a lot of distance between those two claims and find myself confused when they're treated with equivalency.
How out of touch with general politics are you? This is how things are done, globally, in every democracy, since forever, you just need to look close enough. I can see similar type of corruption all over Switzerland for example where I live, mostly in public projects and decisions. Locals mostly don't see anything, so everybody is happy. You just have to have a keen eye for corruption, which is easy for somebody coming from eastern Europe since there its ingrained in the system(s) and permeates every aspect of societies.
Non-democratic places have more direct path for bribes but otherwise its same.
I’d say I’m generally fairly in touch with global politics, it’s a bit inflammatory for you to ask, truthfully.
I think that local level corruption in my small town in Canada or in yours in Switzerland is pretty markedly different from what’s been originally presented, which is that DJT was paid directly by ByteDance to adjust his position.
I said that ByteDance expects that paying Trump will make everything go away. From his comment on an executive order, it seems clear he’s willing to go over a law passed by the Congress.
It doesn’t even need to go through Jeff Yass. It can just be a new Trump resort and casino getting expedited approval in Hong Kong, or some other place. Imagine the business opportunities being POTUS will bring to him and his family. The possibilities for corruption are endless.
It doesn't take much imagination; he spent 4y as POTUS and most people agree it was to his personal benefit. I'm not aware of this leading to expedited approvals for Trump resorts in other countries, but it seems you're more familiar with his dealings than I am.
I'd still love your clarification though - do you still stand by the claim that Trump is being paid to reneg on his position re. TikTok, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42755872 ?
Edit: it looks like we've had to warn you about this kind of thing more than once before, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26742673. However, the good news is that it seems to be rare in your otherwise very good commenting history (for which, thank you!) so it should be easy to avoid in the future.
I think that the message put up by TikTok today is already, at least in part, its own payment. "The bad guys blocked your favourite app, luckily you'll have to wait just one day for President Trump to fix this regrettable mess" is a powerful message to send to more than one hundred million Americans. Stupid as you want, but powerful. Same as for the Gaza ceasefire (which will be ignored as soon as the inauguration is over and focus has moved onto other matters).
I think it's fair to demonstrate a pattern of behavior without speculating on specifics. Similarly, Trump did not collude with Russia in secret, but he did openly ask them to help him run the election on national TV. What did Russia get for that? Maybe nothing. Maybe goodwill.
Much of Trump's decisionmaking in his first term was erratic and generally unwarranted, but I still I think it's totally fair to ask for clarification about claims of that level of severity.
To my knowledge, if I'm understanding rbanffy's position correctly, this would be the first time in history US president was directly being bribed by a foreign actor, so I still maintain it's worth seeking clarification.
Am I wrong in holding skepticism here? I don't doubt there are political points to be gained for Trump here, especially given the domestically controversial nature of the ban, but I'd really love for someone to hold true to the original notion under question that someone (ByteDance, CCP, etc.) is "paying the incoming president", as rbanffy suggseted.
As somebody coming from a third-world country, it’s a matter of fact that the people view politicians as a corrupt group. They think they are better than the people they represent, they are multiple times richer than the population and campaigns range from distorted truths to clear lies.
Proven or unproven, a claim that a given politician received bribes to influence something is not met with skepticism, but a mere “yeah, of course”!
Some say the US is a rich third-world country, or becoming one.
Why do we bother with the farce that elected representatives are better than us? They are looking for their own interests.
See the inauguration fund. Money completely unaccounted for and that his team is saying pay to get exclusive access to Trump. It’s pay to play and it’s legal (at least for Americans).
Certainly. The whole corruption setup is always done in such a way that there is never direct proof, only some more or less well hidden ones. So if you expect somebody here will post a recording of their bribe negotiations, that won't ever happen, Trump would directly order CIA to eliminate such person with extreme prejudice, and that's how it would have been done.
Look, he is crook, smart, properly fucked up man baby with issues that no psychologist could ever fix, but he is a crook at the core. These are facts. Enough evidence with few seconds of googling to condemn 10 such persons of highly amoral and sometimes also criminal behavior. And everybody knows it, even here. So folks understand how to deal with such currently most powerful person, so they do.
I don't get where your doubts come from. Facts are out there, you only need to connect few dots.
Certainly this is not the first time that's happened. Trump has been President before. What he got up to is indeed the first time in history that happened, but not because he was directly bribed by a foreign actor: that's most likely already happened. The case of Trump is entirely stranger.
What? The incumbent is on his way out, and it is the incoming guy that has the opportunity for the win by bringing it back afternoon tomorrow (Jan 20th).
This is eerily similar to the Carter/Regan hostages situation
> the “look how we made you look like the hero” aspect
They know exactly what they are doing. That message is going to be effective and the person it’s targeted at doesn’t understand that it can be spun any way the CCP wants to spin it. How does he not see how risky letting a foreign government run something like TikTok in the US?
The law does not disallow Americans from accessing this service. It only disallows Apple and Google from distributing the app on their stores. This shutdown of the service is a publicity stunt.
In which case, the question is: what were other Republicans told that they didn't sign off on this plan? It seems quite a bit like a coordinated arrangement between China and ONE guy who was running for office.
Since he was running as a Republican, why are they not also signing off on all this? Why is the completely Trump-friendly Supreme Court not signing off on all this?
And it's ironic because this is a perfect example of what the law is intended to prevent -- a Chinese-owned company boosting Trump in front of a hundred million Americans.
If that's not foreign influence, I don't know what is.
There's plenty of evidence, it's just circumstantial - but that doesn't make it any less obvious that there is something going on between TikTok and DT.
Bytedance didn’t get anything. They likely posted this message without Trump’s knowledge to create social pressure on him by setting up an expectation. It’s a manipulation technique, which is exactly why this app needs to go away.
Exactly, Bytedance/Chinese government wants Trump to look bad, if TikTok stays dark. Nevermind that Trump was the one that tried to ban TikTok in the first place. And never mind that everyone from house to senate to Biden to Supreme Court voted to ban TikTok.
And never mind that the majority of users on TikTok are far left woke democrats.
I don't doubt he said it, because I think it's pretty plain to see it's a correct analysis - antisemitism is rife with the new generation to a degree that, to me at least, is quite scary. I just think it's quite instructive that a hostile state is trying to use this to sow discord.
Is there an example one could provide of this which shows members of the new generation criticizing Jewish people for being Jewish? Surely it wouldn’t be examples of people voicing criticism of the actions of people who happen to be Jewish.
Yeah but what was the prevalence of anti-Israeli sentiment prior to the 40k civilian massacre?
I wasn’t even paying attention to the news one day and CNN was casually interviewing a Palestinian father holding a dead baby corpse in his hands, with the head covered in a blood soaked bag. On CNN, at 10am.
You don’t have to be particularly impressionable to be affected by this.
History is going to be unmerciful in its documenting of this, no one is going to forget the sin here.
Yeah, fair enough; it was a mistake to ask for examples, I realize that now. One could probably go to twitter and search “chemtrails” and find a lot of words written seemingly without preceding critical thought. I don’t think many people would assert that chemtrail conspiracy theories are rife with the new generation, however.
Sure, it's an old trope to sit back and ask for examples, pretending your epistemic standard is whether someone on a forum can muster up the examples, and then when nobody does or you wave them away, you've proved that something isn't happening. You've done the investigation.
There's an extent to which that word was used to mean criticism of the previous administration's foreign policy. Politicians are generally not known for their honor, and will try to hide behind anything, no matter how sacrosanct.
Anyone who actually cares the tiniest bit about antisemitism would have the decoupling of Israel and the Jewish identity as the first order of business. Nothing comes even close.
A state consistently using Jews to excuse its actions, behavior which is validated by US policymakers, it's just orders of magnitude worse than anything else, Israel has promoted antisemitism more in a year than every other group in the last 50 years put together.
It's also really easy for Greenblatt to issue a denial.
That is, of course, unless it is true.
A denial wouldnt necessarily indicate that it is false (he has every reason to deny it, but lying is a risk) but the lack of a denial is very strong evidence that it is, in fact, true.
There is a very low cost to denying lies, so the absence of a denial (unlike its presence) is a very good indicator.
"No rumour is true until it's categorically denied" -- Otto Von Bismarck.
> There is a very low cost to denying lies.
So people can just lie.
See: Clinton and Lewinski, the Profumo affair, Russian troop buildup on the Ukraine border 2022, Russian attacks on Ukraine 2014+, claims by NSA execs prior to the Snowden leaks, etc.
NYT, WaPo, etc would disclose whether they had been able to verify the source or authenticity of the recording in some way.
A state-controlled newspaper in an autocratic county? It could be something they did verify as true and just happens to align with their agenda - or it could be nonsense and they know it. Or they couldn't just shrugged and said "makes the US look bad, run it."
I think most people don't appreciate the levels of internal review and fact-checking that go on when a national paper in the US ends up with a big story in its lap.
> Schwartz said as much in an interview with Israeli Army Radio on December 31. “The New York Times said, ‘Let’s do an investigation into sexual violence’ — it was more a case of them having to convince me,” she said. Her host cut her off: “It was a proposal of The New York Times, the entire thing?”
> The bigger scandal may be the reporting itself, the process that allowed it into print, and the life-altering impact the reporting had for thousands of Palestinians whose deaths were justified by the alleged systematic sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas the paper claimed to have exposed
NYT, WaPo, etc aren't very likely to publish it. It'd be in the same bucket as Jeff Epstein - politically toxic and the majors aren't going to take the lead drawing attention to it even if it is plausible. Facts would need to be in the public sphere for a while and gaining traction before they pick it up.
It might be the Iranians making stuff up, although realistically that sort of activity is what should be expected without any leaks at all. It has been obvious since around 2016 that the corporate media doesn't have the ability to single-handily dominate the narrative any more and that will impact national security propaganda because, you know, what military would be stupid enough to leave that sort of messaging to chance?
Only worth noting if Greenblatt has denied the phone call.
E.g when Russia stopped denying the presence of North Korean troops, it was pretty much cast iron proof that Ukraine's recent videos of the prisoners were not fakes.
A denial wouldnt necessarily mean it wasn't true, but the lack of a denial is very strong evidence that it is.
Israel is the only Jewish state globally, and its efforts to counter Iran-backed proxy groups have contributed to broader regional and global security. While there are some Jewish groups that dissent, they represent a minority. The majority of Americans, Israelis, and Jewish communities support Israel's actions against Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian proxies.
Your 3 other posts were flagged and removed for glorifying genocide, and now you're back for a 4th attempt with a softer tone.
I already mentioned this in your other comment, but these Hasbara talking points come off like they're written by a corporate PR department and are getting stale.
Now estimate the age of the International Court of justice, the United Nations, and dozens of international aid organizations who have called Israel's actions as a genocide? lol or do you consider them to be Iranian proxies too?
You seem to operate solely in terms of propaganda: iranian, russian, israeli. The inability to see beyond a few narratives and denying agency to other people make it impossible to have a conversation
It's like talking to a finite state machine that emits duckspeak
Yawn.. Same old Hasbara talking points. You guys really need to update your guide books to include some more creative talking points. These ones are overused and stale.
Your last two replies here were flagged (most likely for glorifying war and genocide), so you have deleted them and tried again with a softer message. Hasbara is out in force this morning!
It’s very telling that the TT ban was not a standalone bill, but rather just one item of a bill that included $26 billion in aid for Israel, $13b for Ukraine and $8b for Taiwan
Congress can’t even agree on the federal govt budget, but they can almost unanimously agree to support war, and banning TT
If ByteDance's interest in TikTok was purely commercial, they would have made the commercial decision to spin out the US market into a US-listed public company or sold it to a US buyer.
The fact that they chose to shut down instead, strongly suggests, that they have interests in TikTok beyond financial.
Google also opted to pull out of China instead of selling their Chinese operations to a domestic company. Does it imply that Google had interests beyond financial when operating in China?
I think it's more likely that they don't want the brand name dilution that comes from having a separate TikTok US that's probably going to be a shittier version of the original since it doesn't have the original algorithm (which isn't allowed to be exported) or the original TikTok engineers working on it.
> Google also opted to pull out of China instead of selling their Chinese operations to a domestic company. Does it imply that Google had interests beyond financial when operating in China?
Yes. At the time Larry & Sergey still ran the place and did have a somewhat idealist approach to running Google. When it turned out that it was impossible to bring an uncensored search engine to China, they shut it down.
The TikTok branding and user base are already firewalled from ByteDance's Chinese operations.
Their Chinese variant of TikTok is called Douyin, so there wouldn't be any brand dilution from spinning TikTok off.
I also have doubts that the technology behind TikTok would be difficult for a western engineer to understand. It's a relatively straigtforward algorithm, and it's details have been shared in a public paper.
That doesn't follow. A third option is: shut down, wait for the pushback and for things to return to how they were before. And it might just be working.
However, there’s been a lot of people not just signaling but openly announcing they are vying for the purchase. Like Kevin O’Leary, who said he’s offering $20b in cash to buy TT
I don't know how you think other politicians operate, but their self-interest always comes before the interests of their constituents (maybe there is the odd exception).
And loves being the hero. When the app was taken down, there was a generic message about the ban. Then 1 hour later, it was changed to include:
“We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!”
I wonder what happened behind the scenes. This gives me flashbacks of the signed stimulus checks
It seems to imply he’s not the only one who’s done something like that. In that case, I totally agree, political figures are masters of political posturing and taking credit
And that goes for any party and probably every country in the world
It baffles me that people can seem to comprehend that only the United States government has interests in its media outlets, and the authoritarian second to the US in the global stage don’t. 1. TikTok in the westernized form is banned in China. 2. When some people tried to move to rednote (the in the open Chinese app), they were getting banned in the first few hours for being gay and other ideas that came with them, so it’s very entirely plausible that also TikTok is heavily regulated from the officials of a foreign actor.
US is the only state that pretends to champion absolute freedom of speech, to the point of citing violations of it when imposing sanctions on other nations.
There's plenty of openly gay Chinese RedNote influencers, as there have been for years now [1]. I don't know why you're pushing disinformation. The Americans getting banned probably just violated their ToS, since they were in Chinese and they couldn't understand them.
"Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
I don’t imagine discussion of what’s happening to the Uyghurs is getting much traction in TikTok either.
Movement against TikTok started started with the Trump admin well before Oct 7, 2023 [1].
I think this is less Israel / Palestine and a better explanation lies elsewhere. Namely, that anti-China sentiment has been growing for a while now and Meta has plenty of money to burn (on the Metaverse, Lobbyists, etc.)
The actual law was passed after accounts of spying on Hong Kong citizens were made public [2].
This reminds me of the Al Jazeera America (“AJAM”) news channel. They weren’t banned per sé, but it’s obvious they were doomed from the start. An Arab news network operating in the United States… if you think TikTok had a target painted on its back for being Chinese-owned…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_America
They arent "just" an arab media. They are financed and controlled by the dictatorship of qatar. That is like claiming Russia Today was domed because it was a "slavic" network. No it was domed because it is propaganda financed and controlled by a dictatorship.
Technically the BBC is a state broadcasting service subject to King Charles who, AFAIK, nobody voted for.
State run propaganda networks are actually a pretty good source of information; they are well resourced and have a vested interest in being perceived as high-credibility so they can tip the scale on a small number of issues critical to the state. And good propaganda is mostly done by omission and careful fact selection, although a lot of the bit-player dictatorships aren't competent enough to handle good propaganda.
It always rub me the wrong way that YouTube puts a "this is a state actor" disclaimer on a video uploaded by the well-known public media corporation of a western democracy, but put zero disclaimer whatsoever on a random video uploaded by an anonymous account created 2 minutes ago.
I thought it was normal to take media with whatever slant it had and look for evidence supressed by others, check a few opposing outlets and piece together a narrative as close as possible to neutral. When thise outlets aren’t available we’re likely to get a much more distorted story.
UK is millions of times better than Qatar but BBC is not too great. Somethings are great with BBC not everything. Fox news? Qatar doesn't micromanage everything.
My guess is that the uniparty can’t afford a popular platform they don’t fully control and where there is significant dissent.
On Russia-Ukraine, the voices against US propaganda didn’t gain enough traction for them to worry about it. With Israel-Palestine, the opposition was for the first time reaching people who they previously never could.
This has been going on for years now. The Navy banned TikTok because of security concerns in 2019.
Then in 2020, the US announced it was considering banning them. ByteDance planned to divest by selling to an American company. The Chinese government disagreed.
TikTok sued and that took a while to go through the courts.
Then TikTok tried negotiating to avoid having to divest for a couple years by placing all private user data in the US, but later leaked recordings made it clear that Chinese employees still had access.
A law to ban TikTok on US government devices was then passed.
Then a law to ban TikTok unless they divest was drafted, but it took a couple years to pass and then that had to wind its way through the courts.
I'll go against my better judgment and ask: What are China's relations to Palestine and Israel? I genuinely do not have the slightest clue about that dynamic.
For that matter, what are China's interests regarding Russia/US? It seems like China would lose a lot of money in the event of America taking a major dive, but they could be preparing to make the case that they are a more stable regime with a more stable currency. I feel like that would be aligned with China's interests.
> For that matter, what are China's interests regarding Russia/US?
"If these two get into a fight, we can move on with our Taiwan agenda."
That's why Trump is pushing the EU to properly finance their defense, so the US can concentrate on Asia Pacific. He signalled this during his Notre Dame meeting with Macron, France being the only European NATO ally with a reliable army and interests in the region. To Trump, China is the new US rival, Russia is merely a bigger Iran with nukes and more advanced tech. I don't see him giving Tiktok a break.
Possibly none. But the logic goes like this - China sees that amplifying positive Palestinian stories serve to destabilize US discourse so they put their thumb on the scale to push those over positive Israeli stories.
And we know this type of thing works because we see it everyday with US internal propaganda. The last thing the US needs is an adversary with a direct line to the US populace controlling what they see. Also, I'm not even talking about misinformation, just pushing what stories are seen and not seen. Once you add in misinformation and bots it's pretty wild how easy it appears to control the population.
Ok but doesn’t that cancel out with other platforms that push the thumb in the other direction of the scale? What just happend reeks of supression of information to me.
TikTok already suppresses information in ways that furthers Chinese interests. Those interests can be as direct as promoting China or as nuanced as simply making people in the US dislike each other.
> Ok but doesn’t that cancel out with other platforms that push the thumb in the other direction of the scale?
The point is not to push Americans towards Israel or Palestinians, the point is to push Americans apart from each other, so that each half of the political divide sees the other as supporting baby-murderers, as people you cannot be friends with, compromise with and shouldn't even try to talk to.
I am not exaggerating, each of these things I have seen being explicitly pushed.
What evidence do you have that preexisting news coverage was biased regarding Israel/Palestine? From many Israeli perspective, much of MSM is biased against Israel! And funny enough, I can see that repeating pattern for every interest group. Left-Wingers say MSM is all Right-Wing and biased against them, Right-Wingers say MSM is taken over by the Woke Mob.
There are dozens of contradictory narratives depending on who you ask, what makes your paticular narrative more compelling than the competing narratives?
The whole TikTok legislation was not created to suppress Palestinian views, even if that may have been a side effect of it, and repeating that does not make it true.
It’s a convenient narrative because it sounds like „the government“ or „they“ want to conceal the truth, and suppress the honest rebels. It’s a trope.
Again, it may well be that some parts of the government feel like the side effects are beneficial, and I’m not commenting on that. But spinning the story to say this was the whole purpose of the law is simply not the truth, and instead pushing a certain narrative.
The choice doesn't have to be binary. There can be multiple factors, which should all be discussed.
Dismissing a frequently reported on factor that mentioned by officials requires a higher burden than vague commentary on narrative shaping. Trying to minimize it despite factual statements is its own narrative.
I don't disagree with you, and I don't dismiss any factor, but oppose the altered storyline of events offered by GP, which is simply not factually true. Subtly twisting history into a more convenient version may be presidential territory now, but that doesn't mean we should let a proper discussion devolve into shallow, black-and-white stories just because those are easier to understand.
In the second paragraph of the link you posted this is said:
> But in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, conservatives have become hyper fixated on policing pro-Palestinian messages on the app, accusing TikTok of influencing young Americans to “support Hamas” and favoring pro-Palestinian content.
If you follow the link attached to "influencing young Americans", you'll find Palestine isn't mentioned once, but Hamas is.
Of course there's bias everywhere, and we should have by now ways to follows stories to their source automagically by now. But anyhow.
The article and the poll it is based on is wild. Questions like, "do you think all Palistinians are anti-Semitic or just the Hamas terrorists" and similar push poll style nonsense offering limiting answers to slanted questions.
However at least one question is about whether the attacks on Israel...
Can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians
So while most questions force them to pick sides between Hamas and Israel with no option to say they support Palestinians they do get at least one chance to say whether they think the Palestinian people have legitimate grievances (though still only in context of supporting an attack).
And the Intercept article is very clear when they link that they think Palestinian and Hamas support are being intentionally conflated, just as you've tried to do again here.
It was explicitly written in this law specifically that the president can unilaterally decide that an affected platform has done enough to no longer qualify for the ban.
They are supposed to be separate. The obvious problem is that once you let money into the process (when was the last time someone was elected to congres without spending money on a campaign? And why is that?) and the president (current, former, next) has any control at all over the flow of that money, then the branches are no longer "separate".
You have a risk of ending up with one or more people in congress who owns favors to the other branch of government. Or who are afraid of having a harder time defending their seat if they criticize the wrong person. And that people shrug this off as "well, that's how politics works" is really dangerous.
> The obvious problem is that once you let money into the process (when was the last time someone was elected to congres without spending money on a campaign? And why is that?) and the president (current, former, next) has any control at all over the flow of that money, then the branches are no longer "separate".
I'm sorry but your argument doesn't make much sense.
If money had such a large influences then why did a Presidential candidate who spent about half the other candidate win?
And then you claim the President will control the money, but the President doesn't control campaign funds. They don't even control government spending, Congress does.
> You have a risk of ending up with one or more people in congress who owns favors to the other branch of government. Or who are afraid of having a harder time defending their seat if they criticize the wrong person. And that people shrug this off as "well, that's how politics works" is really dangerous.
Ok, this makes more sense.
But the issue you raise isn't unique to the US system. It's not even unique to politics. Any human interaction can result in people "owning favors".
If you criticism is just human behavior, then I agree. But not much you can do to solve that.
Are you seriously asking why the guy who owns a social media platform and is heavily endorsed by another only needed to spend half of the others "campaign finance" budget? Not to mention all the other money and propaganda that's off the books.
> If money had such a large influences then why did a Presidential candidate who spent about half the other candidate win?
Because there was more enthusiasm for the politics and/or they spent it better? But ask yourself if someone with even more support for policy but $0 could have won. And if not, why.
> Any human interaction can result in people "owning favors".
Economic favors we usually call "corruption".
When I look around the planet I find few places (among western liberal democracies) that have the same sickness with money in politics.
If you look at "democratic health" as e.g. "how many in a parliament were born to (very) rich parents", it feels like there is room for improvement.
Only superficially: the dictator cannot be subjected to any judicial control, but the dictator’s party has a two-thirds majority on the top rung of the judicial system.
The President doesn't have additional powers in the Tiktok example.
The President has always been able to veto laws. Biden could have vetoed the bill if he wanted.
And a Congress that passes a bill that says the President has a say in it's execution isn't odd either. The administrative body always has powers of execution.
And Congress is free to pass a law to reverse the law and make Tiktok legal if they want.
it’s about to start looking significantly less fascist if Trump admin can pull off their various goals and shake off some of the entrenched regulatory capture
Views centered on revolutionary nationalism. Using judicial means to remove opposition and replace holders of governmental positions with followers. Commanding paramilitary forces into an assault at the capital. Consolidation of power to close allies and financial supporters. Alienation of democratic powers. Foreign policy aimed at expanding the nation’s possessions.
No it wasn't. The law specifically states that the president can only enact an extension in the event that TikTok is credibly attempting to negotiate a sale. They are not doing that, hence an extension will not happen.
If you mean section 2.1.a.2.a, it just allows the president to add additional apps to the ban list, not to lift TikTok, which is "hardcoded" into the law.
> The Act exempts a foreign adversary controlled applica- tion from the prohibitions if the application undergoes a “qualified divestiture.” §2(c)(1). A “qualified divestiture” is one that the President determines will result in the appli- cation “no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.” §2(g)(6)(A).
My understanding is that the law doesn’t ban TikTok. The law gives the president the power to ban TikTok.
So the president can elect not to use said power.
if the law explicitly says bytedance and there is no way for bytedance to avoid it then its a bill of attainder and unconstitutional. presumably, they have worded the law in a way that avoids this for example by letting the president remove bytedance for being in violation if he considers them no longer in violation.
No, he can't. Congress would have to revoke it. But it has bipartison support. So its just more of the same charade BS that he rants on about. Its all nonsense from him. It will be worse this time around bc he is not all there (even moreso than 2016). The next 4 yrs are going to be quite comical. He can't even control his bowels and he has to wear diapers to stop leaking.
I'm no fan of trump, but the law explicitly states that the president can exempt a platform.
> The Act exempts a foreign adversary controlled applica-
tion from the prohibitions if the application undergoes a
“qualified divestiture.” §2(c)(1). A “qualified divestiture” is
one that the President determines will result in the appli-
cation “no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.”
§2(g)(6)(A).
> The President must further determine that the
divestiture “precludes the establishment or maintenance of
any operational relationship between the United States operations of the [application] and any formerly affiliated entities that are controlled by a foreign adversary, including
any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content
recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to
data sharing.”
The content recommendation algorithm is TikTok. It is developed in China by Chinese engineers. There is no lawful way for TikTok to operate under this law, and the SC has completely failed by not considering this. It's a really lazy judgement.
Probably the outcome Congress was hoping for is that it gets sold to a US buyer who would operate TikTok with the technology under license, and everyone would just pretend that now it's operated by a US interest despite that being impossible. Like sure, they would be running the servers, but the code would largely still be written in China!
Edit: Actually it would be kind of worse, because thinking about it TikTok has a lot of engineers outside China now, so how would it even work? Would they fork the code and then that would be it? It's such a crazy proposition.
Real time content recommendation algorithm can be rebuilt from scratch relatively quickly (weeks). At the beginning it won't be as effective as current TikTok algorithm so iterations will be required but frankly treating algo like something that can only be done by Chinese engineers is silly.
When TikTok developed recommendations it was novel and on the frontier but now how it's done is much better understood and with GPUs availability can be implemented by any good ML team. Similar to Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and other, the secret sauce is content and users, not algorithm.
Concentrating power in the hands of the few is certainly a good way to get an oligarchy, which is what the "checks and balances" system of the US government is supposed to prevent. It's strange to see so many people wanting the president to have more authority and power, but I guess it's a response to Congress's reputation of being dysfunctional and refusing to compromise.
As of 2024, a representative strong-executive democracy with a large authoritarian leaning and an unhealthy obsession with oligarch-worship.
In 2028, who knows. The current president told his supporters that in four years, they won't need to vote anymore, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean.
I was googling for $100m and didn't find it but there was some interesting other stuff:
>So far, Yass has contributed $46 million to conservative causes and PACs, but nothing to Trump directly. If Trump wins Yass over, it could open the floodgates to a torrent of cash. (Mar 24, Vanity Fair)
>If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!” Trump posted to Truth Social on March 7. It was a stunning policy reversal, in no small part because Trump had attempted an earlier TikTok ban himself.
>Susquehanna’s roughly 15% stake in the privately held ByteDance is worth some $40 billion (also mar 24)
So it seems quite plausible even if they haven't published details.
Why are you asking for citation? Shouldn’t the person making the claim provide the evidence, instantly remove account if named man said “I take bribes.” So I believe he took a bribe. Why would you believe otherwise?
It will return, and very soon. 100% sure.
They just need to turn it into something they can control through a local "broker" while maintaining some compatibility with the platform; 170 million users willing to be indoctrinated by government propaganda are hard to ignore.
Trump is the kind of guy that likes to create a crisis, so that he can be the knight in shining armor that comes to save people from it. Whether it is a constructed one, or a real one, that's what he does.
To save you a click, the message displayed on TikTok reads:
- -
"Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now.
"A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now.
"We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!"
- -
That last paragraph is 100% the language of authoritarian regimes.
"We are fortunate to have the Leader's personal attention!" — and he hasn't even taken office yet. Incredible.
> "I think we're going to have to start thinking because, you know, we did go on TikTok, and we had a great response with billions of views, billions and billions of views," Trump told the crowd at AmericaFest, an annual gathering organized by conservative group Turning Point.
>
> "They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to see, and as I looked at it, I said, 'Maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while'," he said.
If only things like kids getting shot in their classrooms or people dying while insurance companies profited was as compelling as whatever was in that classified briefing
And on cue - Trump has signaled his intention to stall the ban via executive order. The wording of that message is like kryptonite to that man. It’s simply begging for him to come out and say “see only I can fix it!”
This is what it currently says for me on the homepage when I view it:
Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now
A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now.
We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!
In the meantime, you can still log in to download your data.
> We regret that a U.S. law banning TikTok will take effect on January 19 and force us to make our services temporarily unavailable.
> We're working to restore our service in the U.S. as soon as possible, and we appreciate your support. Please stay tuned.
Exactly an hour later, it changed to:
> A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now.
> We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!
Ha, is that uniparty vote supposed to be something meaningful? If the government had true concerns, they could 1) be aired to the public and 2) other senators like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul would not be speaking against the ban.
People can change their views and minds. It's only a problem when you lie and pretend you didn't. Pres Biden signed the law and could suspend it now if he wanted, but he chose not to do it as it'd be contradictory to his own signing. And of course soon-to-be President Trump will get the credit for reverting it. Nobody cares about the details beyond those invested into politik.
It's meaningful because it's one of the few things congress could actually pass. You can count on one hand the number of bills that passed this year with that kind of support that wasn't something like a budget bill.
Yes, occam's razor would suggest the government randomly decided exactly now was the time to start working in our best interests, and also those interests are super secret and have absolutely nothing to do with recent geopolitical happenings nor anything to do with the stated beliefs of the politicians driving the government.
This is take is so naive. Tiktok is the equivalent of CBS, NBC, FOX and ABC all being owned by the US's largest threat/enemy's government.
Chinese nationals are banned from even accessing TikTok within China in addition to the Chinese government not allowing America media apps to compete their market.
There isnt an argument in the world that this app isnt bad for US interests and the only reason this is emotional at all for people is that it took too long for the government to act.
I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark! I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security. The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.
Americans deserve to see our exciting Inauguration on Monday, as well as other events and conversations.
I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up. Without U.S. approval, there is no Tik Tok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars - maybe trillions.
Therefore, my initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase we so choose.
—-
Basically the same thing - I will extend (so I’m hero) but you need to sell.
Walked downstairs this morning to my 12 year old girl complaining about the Tik Tok ban and noting that she saw that message. She’s now asking me what Trump can do to save it. It’s going to be hilarious when Trump reverses the ban.
I’m not sure if this message from the team is a smart move. ByteDance’s decision seems quite strange—it actually strengthens the arguments of those supporting the ban. Critics can now point to this and say, “Look, this proves our concerns.”
While Trump has hinted at possible delay of ban, he has also made many statements that are unlikely to materialize. This is Trump for god sake - we all now what we are getting here.
In my opinion, he won’t delay the ban immediately. He’ll likely wait a few days to gauge ByteDance’s reaction. If the owners aren’t overly concerned about losing access to the U.S. market—given its strategic value beyond just financial aspects—then the ban might not be postponed.
Also, keep in mind that both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg wield significant influence over how this situation unfolds. Additionally, platforms like Truth Social play a role in the broader landscape.
Moreover, there are classified briefings, intelligence reports, and strategic simulations—such as how TikTok’s algorithm could potentially be weaponized in the event of geopolitical conflict—that we simply don’t have access to.
The ban is not targeted directly at TikTok but at the app stores, which will have to pay a fine of $5000 per user if they keep the app available in the store.
I wish CPC could do the same thing to Telsa and Apple, or even to kidnap Tim Cook just like how they kidnapped Meng Wanzhou, gee, that would be thrilling
You're taking a decision to protect national interests that safeguards investor's interests, and here you are spinning it with "mafia" nonsense.
Pray tell, how do you address the problem of having a totalitarian regime manipulating and spying on your whole country? Do you try to shut down the operation? Or do you argue they should continue their psyops operations because otherwise it "sounds like the mafia"?
Thank you for using the correct acronym (CPC, Communist Party of China) rather than the incorrect acronym-of-the-colloquial-variant CCP, which seems to be achieving ascendancy in the discourse.
Acronyms are like variable names, we would do better to use the right one and then stick to it.
> Thank you for using the correct acronym (CPC, Communist Party of China) rather than the incorrect acronym-of-the-colloquial-variant CCP, which seems to be achieving ascendancy in the discourse.
Glad you pointed out the details. CPC is the correct official name. If someone insists on using CCP, here's my speculation, it usually means they have been heavily influenced by anti-communist propaganda and narratives from the U.S. government, or they are deliberately using the incorrect name to be derogatory.
funny I just saw something similar in other thread:
> I will use the term Ruzzia and Ruzzians to identify the Zed regime and the Zed patriots, Ruzzian != Russian, Ruzzian = a Zed patriot, a imperialist Russian or Putin fanboy, proud to stick a Zed on his face,body or property
> If someone insists on using CCP, here's my speculation, it usually means they have been heavily influenced by anti-communist propaganda and narratives from the U.S. government, or they are deliberately using the incorrect name to be derogatory.
Do you think there's a meaningful difference between the (official) "Communist Party of China" and the (colloquial) "Chinese Communist Party"?
It seems like if derogation was the goal, you could come up with something more effective than an equivalent translation.
There's a US federal agency called the CPC. Disambiguation could be a reasonable explanation.
Sure, but that's not the correct usage with proper noun acronyms, i.e. ones referring to official names. The official name is the Communist Party of China.
Fair point, but it doesn't point directly toward "intentional derogatory perversion by the US government".
Also keep in mind that the official name is not in English. And what is the standard process for nations to produce "official" foreign-language names for internal subgovernmental organizations, anyway?
Is there an official name in French, or Mandarin, for the Blue Dog Coalition?
> Biden could have cut a deal with TikTok instead of this. That would have left the US with a least one major social media not in the pocket of Trump.
This take is extremely disingenuous.
TikTok is a espionage and propaganda vector currently controlled by China's ruling regime. The only decision at this point is whether China continues to operate their propaganda and intelligence operation with free reign within the US. The only question at this point is whether Trump is in the pocket of the CCP.
TikTok's propaganda is clearly targeting Trump. I mean, ByteDance rejected a sale and instructed TikTok to unitalerally turn the lights off and post messages on how Trump was their savior. This is extremely transparent. There is nothing Biden could do to counter this.
What makes your take extremely disingenuous is the fact that you are arguing that Biden should fold to the CCP's pressure to continue their propaganda and intelligence campaign within the US, and you're trying to frame this somehow as keeping a major social not in the pocket of Trump. As if Trump is the issue.
That's simply untrue and has been for a long time. Between Sinclair, Fox, and Twitter, more Americans consume far right media than left leaning media. Reality way have a well known liberal bias, but the American news media does not.
> That's simply untrue and has been for a long time. Between Sinclair, Fox, and Twitter, more Americans consume far right media than left leaning media.
Pedantic, but that's not the same thing as the parent claim.
Consumers consuming more from one end does not mean that there isn't more of the other.
Epstein friend Donald Trump is a rapist, felon, charity-stealing serial liar with a God complex. He is an undeniably stupid man who has a hilarious blindness to his own idiocy. His first term was one disaster after another. His second is likely to end the American Empire: If it doesn't lead to the dissolution of the Union, it will destroy America economically and geopolitically. The era of China's dominance begins tomorrow.
The majority of news media, including supposedly "Liberal" venues like the NYT, have been sane washing this corrupt trashman for the years. That he got the nomination and then won the election was entirely courtesy of a bought and paid for media. There is literally no low that is even really notable any more -- oh look, the felon conman launched a new shitcoin crypto to extract billions more from the presidency...eh, whatever -- yet any misstep by his opponents received nonstop coverage.
The US is toast. Short of a literal armed revolution or armies of Luigis, your country is done. It has been overthrown by the stupid who are being levered by the oligarchs.
And just to be clear, US politics has been astonishingly corrupt for decades. We all knew it. This is the end result. It's the Stage 4 cancer that is the end of the line for the US political system. It was an inevitable idiocracy.
I was on RedNote just now. I saw some gay content that had been there yesterday as well, and has not been removed.
BTW, the RedNote userbase in China is 70% female, similar to Pinterest in the US. That may be why there's an affinity with a portion of the Tiktok userbase. The RedNote users are not into politics (at least were not). They cats, cooking, fashion, interior decorating, travel, sports.
One American user, who identified themselves as “non-binary” on RedNote, was censored after publishing a post on Tuesday asking if the platform welcomed gay people. The post was removed within hours, the user told CNN [0]
The next day, they uploaded a new post saying they will quit the platform over the decision but was soon on the receiving end of homophobic comments, with some users accusing them of cultural imposition.
A Chinese user suggested that he try covering his nipples, as Chinese social media platforms generally impose restrictions on displaying them when it is perceived as sexually suggestive.
A few RedNote users also noted that posts about the Japanese anime My Hero Academia, which faced censorship in China since 2018 due to controversial references to Japan’s wartime history, have since been removed from the platform.
Thanks for the ref. Not sure why that particular user got banned. A search just now on RedNote using the hashtag "gay" returns 8.7k posts. The results show plenty of men in skimpy clothing with uncovered nipples.
Why are you spreading misinformation? There's plenty of Chinese gay influencers on RedNote and there have been for years [0], saying LGBTQ talk there is banned is nonsensical. The ban waves are probably due to the app struggling to scale moderation to handle all the new people, including the ones disrespectful of Chinese societal norms.
I’ve seen social media posts by Chinese users on how not to get censored / banned on RedNote, and one common tip is to not share any LGBTQ content. Clearly there’s a fear about it, and gullible young people who flocked to little red book are only understanding reality when they get suddenly banned for something harmless.
I've never understood this conspiracy theory. If Russia does have bot farms, and they're effective, surely the US has much, much larger bot farms - their budgment for this sort of thing completely dwarfs Russia.
Or is the US just too much of a moral actor to do this?
This underlying idea that the US state is “just the same” as Russia, China, etc. (and that as such they will function in the same way) is imho one the biggest factors on the decline of the quality of western democracy today. I’m not American, have only been there once a couple of days, and have no special sympathy for the country, but the fact that so many people do not understand that the US democracy is fundamentally different than the Russian or Chinese regimes is such a sad, depressing thing.
They're "just the same" in the sense that they would surely both use similar tools in the information war. Just like they're "just the same" in having submarines, fighter jets, etc etc.
The content of the information war or different, but it's still a war, and the idea that the US would just cede all advantages to Russia because they're above using bots strikes me as faintly ridiculous.
OK, why only external policy?
we are talking if the Ruzzian regime and the USA state would do the same stuff, if they are the same, because the topic was "if Ruzzia is doing it then USA is also doing it"
a contra example or more should shut this idiotic take and we can find some other evidence for this invisible USA bot farms.
So your claim is USA does it but in a very intelligent way that nobody sees it, where Ruzzia is doing in such a dumb way that intelligent people can see the bots and the politicians in Ruzzia are so stupid that they publicly reward the trolls.
I do not believe it, UK did a brexit where the Ruzzian bots were active so it is clear they do not have bots to fight them,
USA elected again a special person supported bytthe Ruzzian bots so again no chance USA has super intelligent bots that are hidden but manipulate the public opinion .
No my claim is that USA doesn't constantly point out the obvious ways they are doing it. And of course most of it will be in foreign languages so nothing we can really come across.
In regards to things our secret government agencies do, we are the same though (and secret police/courts/governmental organizations are very much anti-democratic in principle, so it says a lot that we have them in our "fundamentally different" US democracy)? Covertly manipulating opinions in foreign countries is very much spy agency territory IMO. Seems like they should be running bot farms as well if they are effective.
So the claim is USA has bot farms but they are much, much better then the Ruzzian ones since we never seen them, and no USA hired criminal publicly got medals and rewards for running them.
But is a very typical Ruzzian stuff happening in response to my original comments
1 denial, "are the Ruzzians bots in the room with us" , trying to imply I am mad and there is no such thing as Ruzzian bot farms funded by Kremlin
If bot farms are effective, we probably have them. I doubt that bot farms are good enough to prefer over the "feed a story to friendly media" approach which has been working very well so far.
> Or is the US just too much of a moral actor to do this?
US government has massively more oversight because of still somewhat functioning legislative and judicial systems. Also free press is still a thing (compared to Russia anyway..).
Ao any large scale program like this would inevitably be leaked and scrutinized (of course if they keep it somewhat low scale it will probably pass under the radar).
Russia was just flowing USA's lead, Centcom was contracting out influence operations through sock puppet accounts since 2011, no different than Radio Free Asia really, influence hearts and minds, now with just a little automation.
And what’s the point you’re trying to make? If Russia was trying to drop bombs on DC and the US was trying to drop bombs on Moscow, would you think it strange for the US to try to prevent the bombs from being dropped on DC?
Say it is true, then both are wrong and evil.
But from my POV Ruzzia has more interests in destabilizing my country and region then do a invasion they would call liberation and grab some strategic lands.
This is well known but ou can contionue to pdo your job pretending it is not.
Independent group also could prove this, it is easy, thousands of accounts that were created at the same time, then slept for years are activated at the same time and spread same content.
Ruzzia was very proud by the cyber troll army, did they start denying it now? And now do you belive their Mistier of Invasion ? I mean they are still reporting that they are always downing 100% of the drones but the debries sometimes hit the target, sometimes cigarrates or lighting cause fires... so please let's ignore everything those criminals say.
Do you pretend bot farms do not exist?
>It's horrible, how should we identify them?
Social Media can identify them if they want.
As a regular users in general you can spot a bot account if it is new or hybernated for years and just started posting. But the issue is with bots that vote, give lies this ones are used to boost content so the algorithm pushes that agenda in fron of real users.
but having many bot accounts increase their evaluation so they are not putting effort into silencing them.
> classified briefing that made them vote together across party lines.
Romney pretty much said it was Israel. They think that--but for tiktok--zoomers would be supporting the genocide in gaza.
My guess is that Trump will negotiate with China that tiktok sticks to the party line on Israel and then it's allowed back in. Possibly it will come with some kind of verification system for someone in the US to pre-vet narratives going forward. Fortunately China already has sophisticated systems for this pre-vetting which they are currently using on their own population.
On foreign policy and intelligence issues, there are no “party lines.” There’s just the uni party. Same people who said Iraq had WMDs. Default reaction to anything they say should be to assume the opposite.
The bill specifically says "ByteDance/TikTok bad", and says for other companies the President needs to make a written determination. So in theory it can affect any other company based in China, provided the President makes that determination.
Douyin is comepletely separated from TikTok. The apps cannot legally be the same. They do not want their citizens and foreigners talking on the same platform.
The app was shutdown a couple of hours ago in the US and this was the message all TikTok users saw when they opened the app.[1]
The same guy who pushed for a ban massively last year, is going to save the app despite the security concerns he and most of our government said they had. If only we knew what happened in that classified briefing that made them vote together across party lines.
> If only we knew what happened in that classified briefing that made them vote together across party lines.
I don't know about any classified briefing, but TikTok publicly shot itself in the foot badly during the vote, though a hamfisted attempt to influence it. I think that was enough in itself to bring about bipartisan unity.
This is what happens when the process of law gets thrown out of the window and instead power is negotiated by people at the top. As someone who lived in a dictatorship -> democracy -> dictatorship, seeing tech CEOs pilgrimage to the Trump house, the US is critically close to turning into a dictatorship.
This is exactly what we saw when Sept 11 happened (over 20 years ago) and the Republicans decided to invade Iraq and carry out all sorts of extra-judicial mischief.
I started to think the world was going to end but its ticking along in the same manner which has now coloured my views.
They’re massaging his ego and quite honestly it might be their best strategy. A whole lot of people out there want their TikTok back and you can bet Trump would love to call the press conference announcing that he, and only he, did the greatest deal and got the app back. Classified briefing be damned.
“Freedom
loving Trump saving freedom of speech from the dictators that ban apps” would be such a boon for Trump. It’s amazing that the current administration set up such a scene.
> According to Rasmussen’s Napolitan News Service survey released Friday
Rasmussen consistently gets ranked as one of the least reliable major pollsters, and has a heavy conservative bias. I would take that with a whole salt crystal.
People who want something they don't use or directly effected from be banned are not the same as the people who use the thing and getting directly affected.
People who loose stuff will feel much much strongly that those who on political or intellectual level support the ban. The later will move on, the former will remember.
He can even appear like fighting the anti-freedom establishment that tries to take away something they like and make people believe that any other legal troubles he might have later be of political nature.
The TikTok legislation was included as part of a larger $95 billion package that provides foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel and was passed 79-18.
iykyk. Also this article from two days ago is hilarious, "congressional leaders who championed the law are now shying away from calling for the ban to begin Sunday" with Schumer, Jeffries and the White House all trying to pass the buck to someone else and try to avoid a ban:
Reality is this was a game of chicken. American leaders wanted to force a sale not be left standing like a trophy hunter next to the corpse of one of the most beloved apps. Now the elephant is dead and there's no hunters to be found! We'll see what happens.
And Trump so far is only offering a 90 day extension to find a new US buyer. The ban was signed into law late April last year, but they've spent much of that time trying to fight it legally than actually find a buyer.
The American people by and large do not know how government operates, who has power and authority over what, etc. Blame and reward usually is attributed to the President who has high visibility.
You chose a side by submitting that comment due to the implication and probability distribution of the next thoughts that will occur in someone's head upon someone reading it.
Not at all. My first sentence was in reference to the Israel/Palestine conflict.
It's completely possible, perhaps even likely, that Israel is justified in the conflict, but doesn't change my feelings that they have too much control of our own government, mostly via AIPAC.
After Poland managed to collapse communist regime in partially
free elections in 1989 where all elected sits went to democratic opposition the whole Soviet Union collapsed. Ukraine declared independence in 1991, all regions of Ukraine decided to stay with Ukraine in national referendum.
In 1991 Polish and Ukraine GDP were about equal, both countries have around 40 million citizens.
Poland immediately turned towards West. We rapidly liberated our economy - Balcerowicz reforms. We aimed at joining NATO and EU as guarantees of our independence from Soviets/Russia. After invading Poland in 1939 with Germans, last Russian soldiers left Poland in 1993. We joined NATO in 1999 and EU in 2004.
Ukraine on the other hand was divided between West and East.
In 2021 Polish economy was 3 times bigger than Ukrainian. More than million Ukrainians were economic migrants in Poland.
We made the right choice with turning immediately towards West with full force. Ukraine stumbled.
But they saw that Poland is doing so much better than they were doing. That's why they wanted to join EU. That's what started Euromajdan.
Now Russia is threatening all of us with nuclear holocaust. Every other month you can hear from the highest Russian leadership nuclear threats.
We have lost 20% of population in WWII started by Germany and Soviet Russia. Every fifth person killed.
We are taking Russian holocaust threats 100% seriously.
There was nothing in the classified briefing. The ban was enacted because their zionist donors told them to. Our government is corrupted past the point of recovery.
If you read Senator's quotes from the the time, for example here https://www.npr.org/2024/03/21/1239691465/tiktok-ban-bill-se..., all the senators are saying the briefing should be public, aka it's b.s. there's nothing in it. They talked about chinese collecting data and potentially manipulating the algorithm, just the standard public discussion about this. Halfway through that article Tom Cotton slips and complains about a "clear skew in pro-Hamas propaganda" which is a flat out illegal 1st amendment violation, censorship based on viewpoint.
Many popular podcasts would show the video, or pull up fact-checking in real time. If that's what you mean by "newer media" I would say it's 10x better.
Reuters is legacy media, hence why I mentioned legacy media.
Linking the publishing source is needed too. So many videos get reposted and mislabeled.
Like basically any rocket attack I assume happened in like 2006 and between completely different belligerents than whatever a post claims at this point
Well nobody asked me before changing the meaning! And by the way, a “selfie” can only have one person in it, and a “video” is something on MTV. Don’t get me started on “hack.”
A video podcast is distributed over RSS like any other podcast, unlike a talk show which is distributed via television.
Additionally there are far more genres of podcast than one or two talking heads. I wouldn’t call a Dungeons and Dragons podcast a talk show, video or audio.
> Additionally there are far more genres of podcast than one or two talking heads. I wouldn’t call a Dungeons and Dragons podcast a talk show, video or audio.
That's fine with me. In that case, what's the difference between a "video podcast" and a "show"?
> A video podcast is distributed over RSS like any other podcast, unlike a talk show which is distributed via television.
Both of these are obviously false; podcasts need not be distributed by RSS and talk shows need not be distributed by television. Most obviously, radio is well known for the number of talk shows that are distributed over it. Next, podcasts tend to be distributed by providing download links on a web page. Then, talk shows are defined by their content and are distributed via any and all video channels; here's one I follow on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUUc-rp7o3g
That particular video involves asking three guests to discuss the differences between chopsticks in each of their home countries. What would you call it?
I find that most people who criticize legacy media as a monolith are angry at it because it doesn’t meet their own political leanings. I certainly rank legacy media well above 99% of the drivel on social media and podcasts. But I think it is in fashion to only surround yourself by news sources which confirm your (or my) personal bias. I’m certainly not immune to it, but I read multiple sources from right, left, and center and try to pluck out the truth.
Thousands of combatants are wearing bodycams, and pretty regularly, there are videos released by Russians of a dead Ukrainian's last moments taken from their corpse and the same happens vice versa.
In theory, with parametric design (eg OpenSCAD, Autodesk Inventor, etc) a model could allow you to enter the phone dimensions and it automatically re-calculates the correct geometry.
In practice, experience says doing this (in a robust way) is a lot harder than it sounds. ;)
It's not really that much harder, as long as you know which dimensions you want to be variable from the start. Going back and changing everything after the fact is a massive pain.
I think it's doable with a parametric design in Fusion but it is definitely more work up-front or re-work after you have a working version. Getting a well parameterized and set of constrained sketches can be a time consuming process since I don't do it every day. It's probably the part I've struggled with the most in making 3D printable designs (I'm not OP but design cosplay props for my kids) since I don't always know what I want the final dimensions to be.
