by HAL3000 on 1/18/25, 12:32 AM with 333 comments
by lolinder on 1/18/25, 1:45 AM
These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature, increasingly so in the age of LLMs. They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astroturfing the platform and/or manipulating the algorithm (either through paid advertisements or by owning a platform and controlling the algorithm outright). They're places where a small minority of people can become an unstoppable movement that seems to have real support, sucking gullible voters in to join the growing "consensus".
In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent. The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
by quanto on 1/18/25, 7:28 AM
In general, I wholehearted support the freedom of speech, and if it were any other case, I would agree with the EFF statement here. However, knowing how the sausages are made, I am reluctantly agreeing with the ban, at least for now.
People underestimate how powerful these tools can be. Based on simple, readily available "anonymous" data, we can already impute your demographics data -- age, gender, family relations, occupation, income, etc -- using a decade-old ML techniques. In some cases, we can detect which stage of your emotional journey you are in and nudge you towards our target state. What surprised me about Cambridge Analytica was its ineffectiveness, at least as reported. There are plenty of teams out there that use these techniques to greatly further their gains, whatever those may be.
In Primakov doctrine, information warfare through sowing discontent and/or eroding psychological well-being is very much real and actualizable. I am not claiming that a foreign government is currently single-handedly controlling TikTok to brainwash the American youth; we do not have conclusive proof of that. However, the fact that such a tool is in a foreign country's arsenal is itself a massive danger to America's national security.
by delichon on 1/18/25, 2:00 AM
by isodev on 1/18/25, 4:57 AM
by Animats on 1/18/25, 6:07 AM
Yes, all they have to do is sign up for the usual services advertisers use.
by jmyeet on 1/18/25, 4:45 AM
> [Manufacturing Consent] argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
Tiktok doesn't push government propaganda to the same degree as Meta and Google.
But whoever pushed for this was smart enough to avoid making it about speech ("content-neutral" in legal parlance). It's strictly commerce-based and there's lots of precedent for denying access to the US market based on ownership. For a long time, possibly still to this day, foreign ownership of media outlets (particularly TV stations and newspapers) was heavily restricted. And that's a good analogy for what happened here.
What I hope happens is people wake up to the manipulation of what you see by US companies.
by benrutter on 1/18/25, 10:54 AM
I'm not making a case that that is justified, but I'm interested to know if other people in or outside the US share that perception?
by gorgoiler on 1/18/25, 3:32 AM
A ban on routers made by a specific foreign company — when the government knows full well the Internet can’t work without them — feels like a more likely scenario. When Huawei equipment bans were in the news, were there similar First Amendment arguments about that, too?
by x3n0ph3n3 on 1/18/25, 3:16 AM
by glimshe on 1/18/25, 12:10 PM
Tiktok can still exist and keep showing their garbage to Americans, but it can't do so while being owned by a foreign adversary that attacks us almost continuously.
Sure, they can still buy our information elsewhere, but this is like saying I shouldn't put a lock on my door because thieves can break in through other means. Just check the looting happening in Los Angeles as a result of the reduction in the barriers for theft. Cost matters and if we increase the costs for China's data theft, their ability to steal from us will be reduced.
by russli1993 on 1/18/25, 8:20 PM
by whycome on 1/18/25, 5:58 PM
by tracker1 on 1/19/25, 9:00 AM
That said, I don't think banning tiktok will have the desired results.
by whoitwas on 1/18/25, 3:47 AM
by pbiggar on 1/18/25, 6:21 PM
by baobun on 1/18/25, 5:50 AM
This ban is infringing of IMO fundamental rights of individuals in US to share and use the TikTok app freely. That China is doing similar things to their citizens can't be an excuse.
Yeah I hate TikTok and its effect on society too and good riddance etc but this is a first for something very bad. We have to look at the larger picture.
by blackeyeblitzar on 1/18/25, 9:07 AM
by arminiusreturns on 1/18/25, 7:59 AM
That doesn't mean you get to control what Americans can do on their devices.
Boiling the frog...
by gazchop on 1/18/25, 9:53 AM
There is actual harm done to democracy on these platforms. A democracy requires informed voters to function and the platform does the diametric opposite by misinforming them. Any attempt to regulate this or promote or moderate has failed simply because an actual structured funding source is misinformation. The only option to keep democracy standing is to kill it.
I’d expect the EFF to have some well read social or political staff. Apparently they don’t and are quite happy to spout absolutes.
by dzogchen on 1/18/25, 6:58 AM
by nialv7 on 1/18/25, 4:23 AM
Never expected to see the EFF dismiss an argument for user's data privacy as "shaky".
Quite disappointed honestly.
by ripped_britches on 1/18/25, 7:14 AM
by arlattimore on 1/18/25, 2:08 AM