It would be nice if they could also prevent hostile autocratic domestic(ish) powers from leveraging their current cultural power. But they didn't, so naturally those in power are going to build their moat to maintain it.
I have been coming around to the idea that we should ban all* algorithmic content surfacing.
It's taken a while, but the longer we go down this path, the more clear it seems that it is impossible to design a content algorithm that does not have significant negative cultural side effects. This is not to say that content algorithms don't have benefits; they do. It's just that they can't be useful (i.e., designed to optimize for some profitable metric) without causing harm.
I think something like asbestos is a good metaphor: Extremely useful, but the long-term risks outweigh any possible gains.
> It's just that they can't be useful (i.e., designed to optimize for some profitable metric) without causing harm.
That's not the pattern I've seen, as close as you are to it.
I've seen lots of platforms be wildly useful. Digg was good for a while; StumpleUpon, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit and even Facebook all had periods at the start where they added real value to people's lives.
At some point they start to "optimize for some profitable metric" - and quickly become heinous.
The problem isn't the algorithm; it's that it gets twisted toward profit. And that's basically a tautology - once you start trying to suck money out of the equation for yourself, that juice has to come from somewhere.
I can envision a platform that isn't based on profit being far more useful than harmful - if it can only ward off the manipulations of the yacht class.
Reddit is still extremely valuable if you curate it heavily. My entire feed is my narrow interests and passions (though I still use old.reddit, which helps. The minute that's gone, I probably am too)
> if it can only ward off the manipulations of the yacht class.
The inevitable enshittification of goods and services once they reach a certain level of maturity (i.e., profitability) basically guarantees that the yachted-classes will be involved.
Given this de-facto inevitability, the original premise (that algorithmic content is eventually a bad thing) makes more sense
Emails, torrents, Mastodon, VLC, Blender, Linux - They're all either solid, or even getting better over time.
Why? Because the capital class were explicitly denied, by design or by principle.
Like with healthcare, transport, post services, housing, and much else, there's simply areas where the public good is too important to give the profit motive too strong a foothold. I believe social media is one of those areas.
I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.
Don't believe me, we've got lots of data correlating the rise of social media and mental health crisis. As time moves on the evidence linking the two continues to become stronger.
You strained to look past the parent’s point, nowhere did they excuse the private institutions for their part in this; just that a totally unaccountable foreign power having this capability is not ideal.
I guess the counterpoint here is that we have lots of data how external actors (e.g. Russia) is influencing large parts of the political landscape in Europe right now.
> having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us
Dogs kill more Americans than lions, but that doesn't mean that we should be letting people have lions as pets.
I'd personally be happy to see something like Australia's recent restriction of teen use of social media in the US, but bringing that up now is just a whataboutism.
uh... "... worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us"... yet. this is only true because we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation-- up to now, the U.S. has had a monopoloy on social media giants and the like. it is absolutely not guaranteed that this will hold true, and there are many reasons to suspect that it won't be true. given how china views about U.S. sovereignty when it comes to setting up their own (secret) de facto government, police state, etc. on U.S. soil, it would be shocking if they didn't put their thumb on the scale.
and none of that is to say that i agree with the ban-- i think the mere fact of how unamerican, frankly, taking possession of foreign assets for american gain at others' expense is as blatant a signal as possible that we shouldn't be doing it. if we are trying to protect america, western values, etc., if we don't act in accordance with those values, what are we even protecting? the way to protect the american way of life is not through becoming more "unamerican".
in my personal opinion, the so-called "decline of western values", or whatever, has nothing to do with imperialism, nor to do with those values being short-sighted or wrong. it is because of our collective crisis of confidence in these values because of the (many) mistakes we have made along the way. the moral compass still points essentially in the same direction; it's just that for whatever reason we seem to have convinced ourselves that we don't want to go North after all, and instead prefer to just wander around the map aimlessly (all the while shitting on how the compass isn't taking us where we want to go). and so now we have people who unironically defend organizations like Hamas at the expense of the United States as though believing in universal freedom and equality of opportunity is merely a "cultural" value, rather than an absolute one. and, more insanely, that these values are somehow subordinate to the political issue du jour. these values don't give anyone carte blanche to coerce others who don't share them, but the idea that they are somehow subjective or relative-- that they are negotiable-- is the height of insanity.
how would you describe musk's control of twitter, or Zuckerberg's over facebook and instagram?
there's no democracy involved in the running of social media websites. the rules are what the boss says. sometimes the autocrat is benevolent, sometimes not. the CCP has been more better social media autocrat than musk has, and there is at least more people involved in decision making
> I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.
That's pure, shameless whataboutism, and one that desperately tries to hide the fact that totalitarian regimes are using social media service as a tool to control you and your opinions.
You can bring up any bogeyman you'd like, but you are failing to address the fact that these totalitarian regimes clearly are manipulating you to act against your own best interests.
I'm not trying to distract people away from discussing how totalitarian regimes are abusing services like TikTok to manipulate people from Democratic countries to act against their best interests and in line with the totalitarian regime's interests.
Now, can we go back to discuss how the CCP is using the likes of TikTok to manipulate people to do their bidding? Or is the subject being discussed verboten?
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. A foreign enemy keeps us from focusing on our own domestic policies. Turns out, if you look into it, we're the baddies.
In addition to widespread data collection and social manipulation, we also intentionally shove our culture down the throats of other nations in order to maintain cultural supremacy.
> A foreign enemy keeps us from focusing on our own domestic policies.
The nice thing about fiction is that you can make anything sound plausible. Ironically, what people consider the most prosperous time of America happened to be the time when America was opposing a vague foreign adversary. If anything, nihilist platitudes like this that have created a void in civic engagement that megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill in.
> Ironically, what people consider the most prosperous time of America happened to be the time when America was opposing a vague foreign adversary.
It happened to be at a time when the rest of the world's industrial capacity had been almost completely destroyed by a devastating world war which hardly touched US infrastructure.
Outsized returns to the post-war US economy were consequent on being the only intact industrial economy; the regulatory system which ensured those gains be shared with the working class was a response to communism.
The US is a hostile autocratic power with undue cultural power on our own citizens, so even if it's a given that TikTok is mostly a propaganda platform (which I completely, categorically disagree with), wouldn't it be better to at least have a choice? Or be able to compare between them? You are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't capable of making their own decisions which is about as autocratic as it gets.
"You are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't capable of making their own decisions" - the overwhelming majority of HN users would support U.K style ISP blocking of websites and apps deemed hostile to the government.
Endless comments about reciprocity, as if the American citizen doesn't have freedom of expression rights vastly different than Chinese citizens.
Yeah I think you're right. Unfortunately I'm coming to appreciate that many of the users here are heavily pro-censorship / "protect the children" types. Never thought I would see it happen. Feel like I'm waking up from a coma realizing everything's changed. It's so antithetical to the HN I knew and loved.
The type of power China has is very different than Zuck's. You aren't going to get taken to a black site for talking about Tianamen Square on Facebook. (or something like the Tusla Race Massacre may be a better example, since that is embarrassing to the US similarly to Tianamen Square in China)
China didn’t ban U.S. apps. it maintains a policy that sets a high bar for foreign operators, such as requiring domestic servers, domestic partners legally responsible for operations, content access and moderation to meet local standards, etc.
U.S. apps and websites simply choose not to operate there due to these requirements.
The U.S. has been complaining about this for years, advocating for a free internet without censorship in the Chinese market. But now that Chinese apps have access to American data, we’ve begun implementing the same measures.
I can get to the main Xinhua news website -- the Chinese one, not some US-specific page -- easily enough as an American. You definitely can't do the equivalent from within China, you can't get to Voice of America, or the New York Times, or similar sites.
That's the difference. It's not about operating as a business within the country, it's about banning access to even the foreign version of the site or app.
China commonly bans Western websites and apps, even ones that have never operated or attempted to operate as businesses within China. The US doing the same is relatively rare, situations like this TikTok ban are very uncommon.
We can't have people doing things like searching for Tiananman Square or Mao Zedong or talking about how Taiwan and Hong Kong want complete independence from China.
I'm sure a big part of the cost is the additional infrastructure and manpower to implement all of China's censorship, tracking, etc.
Ah, more misinformation from the PRC defense squad, right on time!
> China didn’t ban U.S. apps.
Yes, it did.
It's not just that the websites and apps don't operate as normal businesses within China, but you can't even reach the foreign versions from within China without using a VPN. That's what makes them truly banned.
There are plenty of Chinese websites who do not operate as businesses within the US, but Americans can still freely access the sites if they want to, thus they're not banned.
Could you elaborate on that? I have no clue how the US banning TikTok for granting the CCP the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Americans somehow justifies the decade plus of the GFW, blocking Western social media, rampant censorship, etc.
I think the OP is saying that both nations are banning software because of the risks of the software/data collection posing risks to the political stability of each nation. You can obviously say "our reason is better because X", but the outcomes being the same means that there is justification.
Both sides say it's worth banning "Tiktok/Google for granting the CCP/USA the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Chinese/Americans".
Data sovereignty — the idea that every country should protect and prevent its citizens’ data from foreign entities.
We never discussed this seriously before because we held a monopoly on it. For decades, other countries provided us with a direct feed of their data. Only recently have they begun to grasp the ramifications of that.
China never bought into that narrative. They have consistently upheld their data sovereignty policy, requiring foreign entities to host servers within their borders to operate, and that looks like the direction the rest of the world is heading.
I wish for an open world where data & communication flows freely, but it's unclear who can be trusted to wield that power.
The US government has never provided any direct evidence of their claims of CCP puppet-mastery, the whole thing is generally some combination of "Trust me bro" and "Well obviously China's government is gonna control a Chinese company."
Meanwhile China's reasoning for blocking US companies has been eerily similar arguments the entire time. Hard to prove them wrong when we have the major aristocrats of US tech companies completely prostrating themselves at Mar-a-Lago, offering bribes (er, sorry, the going term is "funding inauguration parties") to the incoming administration in broad daylight, staffing themselves with party officials, etc.
Arguably both are right, and it's a shame because the general working class people of both nations have more in common with each other than they do with their ruling classes. I think the thing that terrifies those in authority the most is the idea that the citizenry might realize this if there's enough communication.
It demonstrates Western weakness. Remember, during the Cold war the "iron curtain" was meant to prevent Soviets from seeing Western culture, political points of views.
The United States does not feel confident in its ability to persuade Americans that it's model, culture and political ideals are superior to global alternatives. Hence a Western Iron Curtain.
Simple exposure to culture, propaganda and points of view is child’s play compared to the modern strategy of inciting discord by amplifying existing differences and mass scale disinformation.
Don’t forget that part of the reason there’s a compartmentalization between Douyin and Tiktok is China’s own concerns about their nationals being exposed to outside influence in a manner far greater than what the US dictates the other way.
I really enjoyed TikTok and will miss it, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t at least provide the potential for the CCP to more directly have an intentionally negative influence on western audiences.
You fundamentally misunderstand the rights American citizens have that are being violated. The government doesn't get to decide where it's citizens get their information from. We're supposed to be free to come to our own conclusions even if presented with propaganda and disinformation.
Once the government decides it has the right to curate what media it's citizens are exposed to you are living in a n authoritarian state.
I made no assertions as to whether or not this was an appropriate trade-off.
The issue at hand, however, is not about any particular media content being censored but about the manipulation of how that media is presented or suppressed by a foreign source. I think people should be given the freedom to choose what to view, but I am also not naive enough to think that we as a whole are not susceptible to influence, often without even being aware of how we are influenced.
To the end that the US has a national security interest here: We have other laws on foreign political influence like FARA and the Logan Act that have similar tradeoffs around free speech and free association, but these elicit much less controversy. There’s a fundamental question: should the ideals of free speech be allowed to undermine the framework that allows that free speech to exist? To some, saying yes to that question is like arguing the US Constitution is a death pact.
> Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
Religion is distributed through churches, synagogues, mosques etc, the medieval equivalent of a digital social platform. A social media platform is kinda like the Vatican but x10000000.
Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider has to bake American policy position into its algorithm, what's going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own algorithm?
From here on out, are only US government collaborating social media apps going to be allowed to scale? If so that is a chilling effect on speech. I want to use my own algorithm. I don't need China nor the USG to tell me what I want to watch. I'm perfectly willing to write my own feed algorithm to do it, I tinker with several on Bluesky right now. Will this be banned?
Is there even a single phone that doesn't have a component that's derived from China? It's never been about security. I agree, the US wants access and they can't make a foreign company comply, even trying exposes the US.
Other countries have rules, make rules, the reality is they don't want to make rules because that might persuade foreign companies from not doing business here. Why make rules when you can get a warrant from a fisa court preventing any and all public scrutiny and getting everything you want?
Just yesterday the US Senate was holding confirmations for Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. For the last 10 years he's been a co-host on a Fox News show.
I suggest making a substantive argument instead of just posting snark.
I think that the amount of information one can consume on tiktok in 1 hour is FAR more than the amount of information one can consume on Fox in 24 hours, nevermind the 10.5-to-14 ratio you cite.
If this is a question that can be answered with user-minutes, it's probably worth factoring in that TikTok has loads more users than Fox News has viewers. I (naturally) can't find a MAU for Fox News, and I can't find a DAU for TikTok, but the apples to oranges comparison is 1.6M daily viewers at Fox to 120M MAU at TikTok, so we're probably talking at least an order of magnitude.
> Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
There is no evidence for this belief. Really for either religion or for "social networking platforms".
You could maybe make the claim that this is true in terms of reach, but the implication here is that "these mediums can be used deliberately to influence people in a chosen direction", and this is just kind of silly. It's fun to imagine that some nefarious powers (or benificent powers) have some magical insight into how to make people believe things but this just isn't true and I think intuitively we all understand that.
To make the case that this is true you would have to do an examination of all attempts to spread messages, not just look at successful cases where messages catch on. Nobody has the power to do this on demand through some principled approach, or else they would be emperor of the world.
Are you implying that this was a deliberate attempt by an agent to create tourettes-like tics? Are you also asserting that this hypothetical boogieman can do similar attacks on demand because of their understanding of social contagion [1]?
The idea of social networking (or other broadcast or widely disseminated media) being able to influence beliefs or behavior is kind of inarguable. In specific cases there might be causal confusion - whether the media was effective because of existing trends or piggybacked on other phenomena vs. creating the effect directly. But this is a far cry from claiming that it can be deliberately weaponized, or that it is more effective for this purpose than other means of information dissemination.
[1] Social contagion, a phenomenon that long predates the internet
The shallow response here is that use is important. The hammer on your shelf is an effective tool for hammering in nails.
Is the hammer on your shelf an effective tool for influencing public opinion? It can be used for that -- you can smash statues of people you find objectionable and maybe have a greater effect on public opinion than you could by trying to tear down statues with your bare hands (although the nature of the public opinion change is not really that predictable). But it is not a tool for that because it cannot be directed to the general purpose of influencing public opinion. You cannot convince people that assisted suicide should be acceptable or that we shouldn't keep cats as pets or that we should not go to war to defend Taiwan using the hammer.
I'd call your reasoning shallow, but there isn't any. You state a bunch of stuff about a hammer and conclude "therefore TikTok cannot influence public opinion." It is manifestly obvious that many advertisers pay TikTok huge sums of money to literally influence not merely public opinion (of their products) but to incite action (buying those products).
Look, when you do business in a country, you obey that countries law. If you think the law is backwards and incompatible with your business, you don’t operate there, this is what google, fb did. They CHOOSE to not operate in china because they are not able to meet the requirements.
TikTok has met all requirements to operate based on the us law. It still got banned.
That’s a big difference. If data security is a concern the country should have rules regulate how foreign companies handle its citizens data, and it should apply to all companies.
This quote you're mindlessly parroting is about private consequences (like boycotts). If the government could punish you for your speech, it wouldn't be free speech.
> Constitution gives you the rights for these speech. Doesn’t make you immune to the consequences of these speech.
That’s literally what it does. It makes you immune to the consequences of speech from the state. If government can punish you for speech then you don’t really have that right, do you? This goes really for all free speech arguments - saying free speech doesn’t mean no consequences is nonsensical, since that’s what is necessary for someone to have the freedom to speak. In the case of governmental bureaucrats, it is definitely unconstitutional. Not that this would stop California, as we’ve seen in repeated violations of the second amendment.
> makes you immune to the consequences of speech from the state
Not all consequences, technically speaking. USSC has already carved out exceptions to that rule in various cases.
This said, you're correct that the quote about "not free from consequences" applies to private individuals and businesses but not to the State (specifically because of the First Amendment).
"You are free to speak freely, but me as a government bureaucrat can take a hammer and crush your knees to a pulp. Look you are free to speak freely but you are not free of the consequences"
I'm sure your civics teacher would be proud of you.
An American and a Russian were discussing their two countries.
The American said: "In my country, we have free speech. I can go to the White House, stand in front of the president, yell 'Down with Eisenhower', and no one will arrest me".
The Russian said: "In my country, we have free speech too! I can go to the Kremlin, stand in front of Stalin, yell 'Down with Eisenhower', and no one will arrest me".
Here is the logic, if you allow tracking, we would show your more relevant ads, if you don’t allow, we will spam the shit out of you. Either way, you see tons of ads, but allow tracking, you see ads more relevant.
Of course that’s not how they word this. They framed it as a benefit,
Notice how it’s worded - allowing for better personalized ad experience - I bet when worded this way, a good percentage of people will think, of course I want the ads to be more related to me and click allow.
Because Facebook's ads require a panopticon of surveillance across every page with a FB like button in order to function in current form.
People are sending much more data to facebook than they realize, and are typically upset when they learn the scope of facebooks dragnet.
If Facebook only used data from the Facebook platform itself (and none of their web of acquired companies), I think people would have much fewer objections to the tracking.
If you are selling related stuff(belts, holster, vest, gun case etc), be prepared to have your fb ad account banned often(as the algo will likely (mis)-categorize you into selling weapons).
Advertisers in this space generally are very good at 1) cloaking, 2) renting or purchasing ad accounts.
both are against fb policy.
But in the end, as long as there is a positive ROI, and there is a way to circumventing the system, people will continue to do that. I don’t see how that’s fbs fault.
Maybe they could address the whole "there is a way to circumventing the system" thing? I mean, they own the system, so they should probably be responsible for any circumvention.
Pretty sure its unskilled low paid labor humans clicking yes or no for fb ads. You would not believe what things i managed to get trough. My account was only later deleted because i was advertising self made cotton masks. Which for some reason raised red flag suddenly
It's a much harder problem then it appears. Similarly to security, it's a cat and mouse game with the people who are trying to game the system, and developing solutions to catch them without too many false positives.
They're not circumventing the system, they're circumventing the false positives of the gun-detection algorithm. As the parent pointed out, advertising these gun-related things is explicitly allowed by Facebook.
I guess so. It's not as if there's anything morally wrong with playing the game of hide-and-seek that Facebook created. No laws are being broken and nobody's being harmed.
Incorrect, and that’s a common misconception. There are countries with way cheaper labor. China now has the manufacturing knowhow and eco system no other countries can compete. That’s it’s power
This is the same playbook amazon did - give investors a vision, convince them short term profit are less important than the eventual goal. Get the capital at a really really low cost, and then use these capital to build hard things, and crush competition.
Whats the path that Tesla crushes the competition though? Seems like existing competition can ride the coattails if anything. Only way to stop it would be to engage in some incredibly anti-competitive behavior.
Tesla's electronic platform is at least a generation ahead of big auto makers. Confirmed from my friends at Shanghai auto. Other good things are the software platform, direct sale channel.
So Tesla is like 6 months ahead w/ some modest differentiators and no moat for those differentiators? I think Tesla is doing good things and Elon is some fresh air but still I don't see the competition giving all their customers away (or even a huge portion). Isn't it customers that matter?
Where is 6 months coming? I routinely hearing people in auto supply industry claims 3-5 years is usually how a new component enter market with serious adoption. For system like Tesla's entire electronic, 5-10 years seems what they are speculating.
Tesla is already losing to the competition. See Europe where it is no longer the top selling EV company. This is probably the biggest difference between Tesla and Amazon. Namely, that Tesla isn't able create any kind of network effect to keep competitors out.
Just because the ad placement is low quality (eg audience network) doesn’t mean they can’t produce a positive ROI. Keep in mind, Lower quality comes with a lower price, so it makes sense for some brands, and some products. The reason people dont get a positive return on low quality ad placement is that they often use the same ad, or adverse the same product as for the higher quality ad placement. These ads and product often needs to be tailored for that specific placement.
Depending on what kind of advertising you are talking about. Direct response advertisers measure ads to the cents. And they know exactly what the ROI is and where the customer is coming from.
Social networking platforms are among the most effective tools for mass influence, second only to religion.
The U.S. has held a monopoly on this power, leveraging it to gather data on citizens worldwide and projecting our value systems onto others.
Banning TikTok is simply an effort by us to maintain that monopoly, and making sure a foreign adversary do not wield such power.
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