Responding to a lawsuit from video-sharing platform TikTok, the US Justice Department argued that China could order the company to manipulate TikTok’s algorithm and expand Beijing’s “malign influence.”
The US Justice Department defended a law that aims to either ban TikTok or force it to divest its assets in the US after the social media company filed a lawsuit against the legislation.
Under the law, the social media platform will have to find a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban in the US by January 19, 2025.
The Chinese-based TikTok is challenging the law before a US appeals court.
What is really going on here? Fear of conpetition? How will divestment ensure data is still not shared?
Fuck the CCP is what’s going on here.
Not sure I understand. Trying to have a sincere discussion.
You don’t give an authoritarian government with a freedom index of 9 access to international user data.
They can already buy it. They are already getting it! Look at ALL of the latest televisions on the market - they require you to accept user agreements to basically suck the life out of you. They listen, report what you watch, how long you watch it, when you change channels, it is really unbelievable. And cars are doing it too! How fast you drive, what you are saying. All of the Google and Apple Home Pods, Amazon’s Alexa products. It is a joke. Except it is not! I think it is a competition for information between big companies backed by big governments.
And we can reject it. Fuck the CCP (1st), but also fuck Google, Amazon, Apple next.
You’re talking past the other guys point. We all agree that the CCP sucks, but just going after tiktok doesn’t solve the problem when they can just buy user data from a broker. You need to go after all surveillance adtech if you want to keep entities like the CCP from buying that data anyway.
Tiktok isn’t special here, just about every online advertiser will run whatever campaign you want as long as you pay their prices so you have to go after all of them to resolve the issue. Tiktok has CPC ties, yes, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg if you’re serious about the national security risk of adtech.
Edit: if you really want to go after manipulation of public sentiment you’ll also need to mandate disclosure and auditing of social media feed and advertising algorithms to a regulatory agency with extremely heavy fines (say X million $/day) for violators. That’s about the only way you can actually stop the sort of behavior the CCP is engaging in on tiktok.
Adtech itself is an entirely bigger ball of wax, if you want to reduce adtech’s social influence you’re going to have to take ownership of private user data out of the hands of advertisers and give it back to people themselves.
I agree. But first thing first
You really think people are going to come back and talk about the privacy problem of US companies without this stuff in the news? People need to push for this now, otherwise they’re going to fall back into the rut of the status quo. This should raise eyebrows that they’re finally doing something about one company when it’s US companies that brought us a shit stain like Trump into the presidency.
A chinese owned company, by chinese law, is the CCP’s bitch. An american owned company, by contrast, at least has the chance to refuse government requests, not that they always do.
I thought Snowden already made it pretty obvious that US companies don’t. Basically the only thing you can do as a US company is try to obfuscate your data with encryption so not even you can read it. That’s why some VPN companies advertise about not keeping laws, so they have nothing to turn over when the feds come a-knocking.
The other problem is that you don’t even need official government power to get data from US companies. A lot of these companies will sell their data on you to make a quick buck, anyway.
Unless they get subpoenad by a district court and the C suite is willing to go to jail for not disclosing it.
Also the US govt already has asked for built-in backdoors to iPhones and the like. They even have highly complex de-anonymization algorithms for data that almost every American with a credit card is giving to their “private” bank so we can have FICO credit scores and venmo.
The private ownership isn’t doing shit for our data protections.
Frankly, it doesn’t ensure it, there is no way to fully guarantee data will not be shared. Just makes it harder.
Is it really such a stretch to say a Chinese owned company managing the feeds of the most active social platform would use that platform to sow division and hatred in the US?
Isn’t that already happening by American companies? Data is being sold for pennies to the highest and lowest bidders, which are probably not all domestic interests.
“Whatabout US companies”
US companies have seen similar criticism, antitrust suits, and billions in fines.
It is true that US tech companies have horrendous practices when it comes to data privacy and security, and that the US needs better federal regulation similar to GDPR to protect the consumer. This must be corrected.
It’s also true that the location of the parent company of a social media platform does not protect that platform from bad actors and adversarial abuse. See: Facebook in 2016
However, there is a big difference between selling bits of redacted data to ad companies, and providing raw database access to a foreign adversary with malicious intent.
Add to that the fact that kids/teens use tiktok more than any other platform, and their habits are exposed without their knowledge or consent.
The possibilities are endless, but to name a few concerns:
The EU has already fined them for their negligent privacy practices: https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/15/tech/tiktok-fine-europe-children/index.html
It’s not enough. I don’t think a ban is the right solution, but the problem is clear.
We’re already dealing with the aftermath of this with US Corps evidenced by the destruction of unions and workers rights if you replace “privacy” with “education.” Why is privacy important
One of the biggest lies I see is this foreign adversary being a bigger threat than the endless local adversaries (capitalists) that are actually destroying this country. The Chinese didn’t destroy the healthcare industry, nor rail, energy, telecommunications, airline, financial industries. They have not suppressed the regulating of the internet, religion in politics, nor have they aided to the degrading of education, social security, disability support, or our laws against bribing politicians.
Nah, they haven’t, otherwise we’d have laws (regulations) around them that would prevent them from, say, in the tech industry, distributing our data.
We know of techniques to pull out excess data from claimed “anonymized” datasets. Can you prove this data is redacted more effectively than that? Can you prove that they are only selling to ad companies? Can you prove it’s more malicious intent?
The answer is no, because we already avoided regulating this industry due to internal malicious actors.
Hey. Keep your facts and logic out of my emotional baggage.
Your reply doesn’t even make sense in response to the comment. Let me spell it out for you.
The CCP uses TikTok to sow division and hatred in the US.
TikTok is not even available in China, they use another much more controlled platform called Douyin where you can’t say shit about anything.
Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms are used for exactly the same purpose, all you need to do as an adversary is place an ad buy and you’re plopped right into user feeds.
You’ve got the right idea that adtech is a national security risk and should be treated as such but the solution can’t stop at just “tiktok and the CCP bad” - the solution needs to be a whole lot bigger.
Oh I fully agree, but you have to prioritize your battles, this isn’t fantasy land.
I think that’s the biggest thing here that defenders of TikTok need to understand. The Chinese think it’s worth the West having but not worth them having it. What should that tell people about their purposes?
Not “the Chinese” btw, it’s Xi fucking Ping, Winnie the Pooh himself, the…ladies and gentlemen…CCP!
I mean, to me, that says that maybe it’s not completely controlled by China? They love spying on their own people after all. They have their own Chinese version of Tik Tok, so it sounds more like they just encourage a more Chinese version of the app.
There’s not even any proof it’s banned, just that people don’t use it there because it’s not on their stores, which could be as simple as ByteDance not putting it there because they already have the Chinese version there.
It’s a small amount of protectionism.
I don’t think it’s foreign ownership or hostile intent. The data and influence angle is shaky - any company, including those accountable to hostile foreign governments can buy data. And that data can be put to use running influence campaigns with our without official platform support on pretty much any platform.
But TikTok isn’t beholden to the U.S. They don’t have to adhere to the same sorta of content moderation policies, and they don’t necessarily have to have the same values. If I may be conspiratorial, I think that other social media platforms tweak their algorithms in ways that keep U.S. regulators happy
To me, it’s telling that the U.S. made threats about it until the Gaza war, and that much of the U.S. opposition to it has been engendered through TikTok. It seems once that became apparent, the U.S. set to make good on its threats to shut TikTok down.
I’m not a big TikTok booster, but I sort of think they’re on the receiving end of injustice here - ironically, for being free in the content they show (U.S.) users.