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I dislike TikTok as much as the next guy, but I think there are several issues with this bill:
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It specifically mentions TikTok and ByteDance. While none of the provisions seem to apply exclusively to them, the way they are included would give them no recourse to petition this, the way other companies would be able to (ie, other companies could argue in court that they aren’t controlled by a foreign adversary, but TikTok can’t. The bill literally defines “foreign adversary controlled application” as “TikTok, or …” (g.3.A)). It also gives the appearance that this law is only supposed to apply to them, which isn’t what it says but it might be treated that way anyway.
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It leaves the determination of whether or not a company is “controlled by a foreign adversary” entirely up to the president. He has to explain himself to Congress, but doesn’t need their approval. That seems ripe for exploitation. I think it should require Congress to approve, either in a addition to or instead of the president.
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According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of “covered company”), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that’s included.
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There is a specific exemption for any app that’s for posting reviews (g.2.B). I’m guessing one such company paid a whole lot to just not have this apply to them.
Insert astounded meme when a shell partner aquires the Brand and now, (pick your)company is now a known CCP co-conspirator.
3 months later:
Hottest trending new app: TokTic
The directed scope of the bill is going to do the same thing to TikTok that legislation did to Juul.
If you target Juul with legal repercussions for all their flavored vapes, then only Juul stops selling flavored pods. Now a million other disposable vape companies fill the void with flavored vapes that are worse for the ecosystem.
Targeting TikTok will just lead to another foreign data-harvesting social media app popping up to fill its place.
It’s not about data harvesting, it’s about targeting users with political ideas. If you watch a video for a certain amount of time then they will continue showing you those types of videos. There’s tons of bad faith political targeting on TikTok just like every other platform. The issue is that it’s difficult to avoid because the platform decides what you look at unlike other platforms.
This is why I’m having trouble understanding why people are confused about the bill’s purpose, especially in the context of the last dozen years or so. Allowing a political rival to maintain control over a platform like this is granting them soft power. Even if I agree that companies like Meta should be more heavily regulated (though not in this manner), I can see why they’ve put a bandaid on the issue given that there’s a non-zero chance that TikTok’s content has been actively in the past few years
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Foreign adversaries don’t have 1st amendment rights.
According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of “covered company”), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that’s included.
I’m glad clauses like this are common. We don’t want some teenager who wants to experiment with creating a “social media” website for his friends to have the full weight of the law immediately fall on their shoulders. People should be free to create website with minimal legal requirements, especially if it’s a small website.
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Even if China has access to my data, that’s way less scary than Zuck, musk, Bezos or any other tech bro.
So NSA backdoors are mandatory but Chinese ones are bad.
The former is more pressing than the latter.
I feel there’s a lot of China influence in this thread. I wonder why that is…
So when do they plan to do something about those domestic businesses trying to manipulate citizens of America?
Capitalism abusing citizens? Just fine.
“Communism” abusing citizens? Avengers, assemble!
They’re prospective communists. Supposedly they’re going to get there by 2050, but they just built a new massive luxury tower for their ultra wealthy so…
It’s just like Marx said: “If you do an oppressive oligarchy for 100 years, it magically transforms into communism”
If that were true then the United States would have been communist by now
I think they’re more worried that it’s a foreign corporation going after their citizens and not a domestic corporation.
More of a capitalistic dictatorship
While you’re not wrong about double standards, anything that discourages the use of vapid social media platforms is a win in my book. Use whatever backwards logic you like to make it happen so long as it’s effective.
He says, on a social media platform
Lemmy is a message board, not social media. Like fark or something awful. You have no idea who the duck i am. How is that social?
It is social media, just because your talking anonymously doesn’t mean you aren’t interacting socially. Jesus Christ your talking to people. Right now. Your being social media’d. Stop acting like your above it.
My tiktok account is also anonymous.
Your Lemmy account can likely be used to identify you, given a big enough data set.
Undoubtedly, especially since I haven’t taken particular steps to obfuscate my identity here.
But as I said in a comment below, I’m more worried about some unhinged nutbag online randomly targeting me than being a person of interest by any nefarious groups or organizations.
No it isn’t.
When you download the app you let them have the following information/data about you:
Purchases, location, contacts, search history, identifiers (!!), diagnostics, financial info, contact info, user content, browsing history, and usage data.
Please tell us how any of that is “anonymous”.
Cool dude, you’ve identified that big corporations data farm.
Random bloke user with a vendetta still doesn’t know who I am, and that’s who I’m more worried about on the personal scale.
Cool dude. Well you said your account is anonymous, and it isn’t. Words mean things.
Users create and/or share content, check. Users discuss content, check.
Unless you think something is missing from that definition, Lemmy is social media. It is pseudonymous, but it is still social because of the users.
Since when did that define social media? That’s the same thing as IRC. is IRC social media?
ICQ had message boards where people would chat about the news. Was that social media?
Again, fark is a place where people share content and discuss the news. Is that social media?
Yeah, I suppose those would. I wouldn’t have thought it, but definitionally, it would be! I mean, heck, some of those are listed by Meriam-Webster! Isn’t language neat? You learn something new every day.
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Well this goes into the direction of social media monopoly so I’m not sure
As soon as the foreign businesses get better at harvesting data than the domestic ones, of course.
I mean, the domestic businesses are the ones who own Congress and are using it to get rid of a competitor.
After the thousands of years of human history I’ve read about, getting rid of competitors seems to have been the primary concern of most of the ruling classes all over the world. Way back to Ur.
Rulers don’t play fair, because power corrupts.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The House Commerce Committee today voted 50-0 to approve a bill that would force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company or lose access to the US market.
If the bill passes in the House and Senate and is signed into law by President Biden, TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn’t sell.
These applications present a clear national security threat to the United States and necessitate the decisive action we will take today," she said before the vote.
Gallagher also said his bill puts the decision “squarely in the hands of TikTok to sever their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.”
While the bill text could potentially wrap in other apps in the future, it specifically lists the ByteDance-owned TikTok as a “foreign adversary controlled application.”
An app would be allowed to stay in the US market after a divestiture if the president determines that the sale “would result in the relevant covered company no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.”
The original article contains 601 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Whatever Tiktok is doing, the correct response is to write enforcable laws to prevent ANY company from doing what Tiktok is doing.
This is bad governance.
That’s what they did. The “correct response” is described in the article as the law 50/50 signed here.
Did you read the article? The bill bans tiktok for being foreign. There is nothing in this article that describes a bill that outlaws any practices, conventions, or actions that tiktok has done.
Being afraid of foreigners for being foreign is not effective regulation.
The bill itself says, more or less, “any foreign adversary controlled app is banned. Also, TikTok is a foreign adversary controlled app”. So it doesn’t apply exclusively to TikTok, but it does explicitly include them.
I think most of us here are concerned with foreign adversary interference as much as we are concerned with corporate interference and espionage. The law seems to only address the surface level issue (ownership) and none of the actual problems (action).
The point is that companies like Google and Facebook do the same data harvesting and manipulation but aren’t being held to the same standard. The law is clearly written to benefit the US government not the citizens, while the justification is stated to be ‘for the benefit of the citizens.’ It’s like buying your wife a lawn tractor for her birthday even though you know she has no interest in using one. You’re claiming it’s for her but it’s really for you.
The lawn tractor was for my wife’s boyfriend actually, but thanks for just assuming I was being selfish.
Interesting wording there, “foreign adversary controlled”, goes a long way to protect all the companies that are based in tax havens, or controlled by foreign allies, like Saudi Arabia or Israel
In a democracy one of the very most important choices that must be made by citizens is what other nations are considered allies or an enemies.
The funny thing is that US citizens have absolutely zero control over who the government decides is our enemy or ally. That aspect of government is entirely partitioned off as separate from the “democracy”, as if the foreign policy element of our government was itself a foreign nation we have no control over.
While we are on the topic, fuck the government of Saudi Arabia and Israel, both governments are horrendously violent.
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My point might be a little Covid brain fogged but I’m just pointing out that they did exactly what the guy asked for, if they bothered to click past the title which makes it sound like a targeted “ban Tiktok” law.
I am not a guy. I read the entire article before commenting. The law did not do what I asked for. You would know if you read my comment all the way through.
I think you’re making assumptions that I can read into what exactly you find wrong with Tiktok. That context is not there in the original comment.
Being chinese by definition can’t effect any company. There is enough context.
I don’t see why users would even have a problem with this. Same services, more competitive market, and with less ties to an evil dictatorship should be celebrated, right?
It depends. I’ve heard second hand accounts that TikTok can push pro-Chinese propaganda, and whenever I pointed out that China isn’t some lefty paradise to some people in my life they were either shocked or fell into the “you’re falling in line with the Western Propaganda, I see 😏”
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Doesnt tiktok have a personalized feed for China that promotes healthy habits and everywhere else it’s more likely to morph into brain dead content spirale?
Personalized feed? What? I’ve never heard of anything like that
One of the things I read about: https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/china-is-hurting-us-kids-with-tiktok-but-protecting-its-own/
BUT I don’t know if it’s actually true.
TikTok is banned in China
That remains unproven:
“TikTok has never been available in China, as the country has its own version of the app, called Douyin. Both apps are owned by the same Chinese company, ByteDance. Thus far, we’ve been unable to find definitive proof that TikTok is or is not officially banned in China.”
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-tiktok-banned-in-china/
I’m much less concerned with what they’re giving than what they’re taking with the app. It’s been shown to collect message history and photo library data, that alone is a threat to us all.
I agree! Both are issues, but I was giving a different context where a TikTok user may not care about it being under the thumb of the CCP.
Why would I care? Is it somehow better for google or facebook to profit off of my data? China doesn’t even solely own the app. They don’t even own enough of the app to censor it and so it’s banned in China lmao
They don’t even own enough of the app to censor it and so it’s banned in China lmao
Why do you keep repeating that all over this post? It’s not even true (unproven):
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-tiktok-banned-in-china/
But…how will we dance to save Roe vs Wade now???
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They are. This just isn’t an example of one.
I wonder if this could also be applied to games owned in whole or part by Tencent…
i hope they sell conan exiles to someone else, because then the shitty monitization that is destroying the game will end.
Wishful thinking I’d wager.
yeah
Or websites? Like Reddit? No, never mind, that’s silly talk.
So TikTok is sending out app notifications that they are at risk of being shut down and urging their users to call their representatives right now. They are not going down without a fight.
The 165 days time limit would land the deadline in August-ish, right before the most intense phase of election season in the States, and I do think TikTok would be a very influential part of the election strategy this year.
On this particular topic, I think “both sides” is true. Both sides want to proceed down this “ban websites by name” road.
Ahhh…hmm. Kindof a point-and-shoot sort of thing, isn’t it? Blow away/take over (well, “unrelated parties may buy,” ha ha) any app associable with Russia, North Korea, Iran, or China 🤔 'Course, they can edit that list too.
Nah, I’m sure nothing could possibly go wrong. US government never abuses powerful, broad powers it gives itself 😃👍
I want my data to be centralized, profiled and used against me, but I want it by American corporations, dammit!
Can the US Lawmakers do anything about the US companies harvesting my data and selling it off… please?
Can they? Completely wrong question.
“Will they” is what you wanted to ask but the answer is still firmly no
Honestly it might be “Can they” given how partisan issues like industry regulation are.
Yes, they can make more money from it.
