[hintymad]

Exactly. And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat. Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.

[doctorpangloss]

It would have been great for ByteDance to IPO TikTok in the USA, it has had plenty of time to do so, it would have made lots of people boatloads of money, Chinese and Americans alike. Even Snapchat, which had similar levels of pervasive arrogance, IPO'd.

[cm2012]

Yes. The Chinese government probably lost its citizens around $100b by not allowing TikTok to sell.

[isoprophlex]

So, you could say that that sweet large scale mind control is apparently worth more than $100b to them...

[airstrike]

Sadly the expected value of it was less than $100B and the realized value in the end is zero.

[hintymad]

In the late 80s and early 90s, the foreign-exchange reserves of China was less than a billion dollars. The US government could spend $50M to negotiate a lot of things from China, like having a war with Vietnam even though it was Soviet who was behind Vietnamese government. Nowadays, Chinese government could easily say fuck this $100B. Papa can afford it to call your bluff.

It's great that an entire nation can gain wealth through hard work and good strategic decisions, at least in some way. But it hurts me that the US lost its way in the process by losing so much manufacturing capabilities, to the point that we can't even adequately produce saline solutions, nor could we make shells or screws for our war planes cheaply.

[encoderer]

When you think of it as enough money to give a $100 bill to ~everybody in china, wow. That’s quite a bit of money.

[russli1993]

Or the Chinese government can do its citizens a favor for forcing Apple, Tesla, Walmart, Starbucks, Johnson-Johnson, and all USA companies to sell itself to the Chinese people. So your suggest for how to deal with a pirate and terrorist is to bow down and pay the ransom. Got it, let's do that to you then. Could it be the inventor of Tiktok, who are Chinese citizens don't want their assets to be stolen by USA?

In fact, all countries in the world, USA just showed it is perfectly fine to steal a foreign companies' asset. Let's do that to all USA companies, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Qualcomn, Intel, all of them. U know how rich you will be if you just got a piece of them? U know you could end homelessness, poverty, balance trade, stabilize your currency, elevate tax revenues, get free education and health care for your citizens, provide great jobs if you just got a piece of USA companies? Now you can! All of them can be Indian, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Kenyan, Egyptian companies. Everyone gets a piece, everyone gets them equally, everyone will benefit and be happy!

[cm2012]

It's not stealing, obviously.

[callc]

Any amount of $$$ earned by CCP will not be easily passed down to citizens.

I’d be interested if there’s any objective measure of how much a countries money is passed down back to its citizens or hoarded by people in power. Is there any such measure?

[dmix]

Even if the money from the IPO itself doesnt go to directly to random citizens it still pumps a ton of money into their economy providing capital for other investments in new markets creating jobs, spending on goods/services by the company, hiring internally (IPOs always allow companies to expand), etc etc. That money doesn't just sit in a giant pile being unused, like Scrooge McDuck's gold pile.

Not to mention the training and development it would give a whole new class of people in China to operate global businesses.

[markus_zhang]

You don't put your treasure for sale, at least not when you have extracted its value first.

[Arkhadia]

So why didn’t they? Cmon. Is that not enough evidence to show you that something else is at play here? Of course going public would have been the honest and rational move. Communist governments would never

[henryfjordan]

The evidence and reasoning by Congress was all "non-justiciable" by the courts.

Congress looked at some evidence and made a decision. That is their purview and our checks-and-balances do not allow the courts to second-guess Congress like that. They can look at the "how" of the law, but not the "why".

Specifically the court looked at "what is congress' goal and is there any other way to achieve that goal that doesn't stop as much speech" and there isn't, but they can't question the validity of Congress' goals.

So there's no point in Bytedance arguing any of it, at least not in court.

[glenstein]

>And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat.

I think in a national security paradigm, you model threats and threat capabilities rather than reacting to threats only after they are realized. This of course can and has been abused to rationalize foreign policy misadventures and there's a real issue of our institutions failing to arrest momentum in that direction.

But I don't think the upshot of those problems is that we stop attempting to model and respond to national security threats altogether, which appears to be the implication of some arguments that dispute the reality of national security concerns.

> Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.

I think this is a great point, but perhaps their hands were tied, because it's a policy decision by congress in the aforementioned national security paradigm and not the kind of thing where it's incumbent on our govt to prove a specific injury in order to have authority to make policy judgments on national security.

[corimaith]

If you look at the people defending TikTok, if you ask similar questions they won't try to defend it either, it's an immediate switch to whataboutism with regards to native US tech companies or arguing that the US Gov is more dangerous than the CCP.

But all that only just confirms the priors of the people who are pro-Ban. And unfortunately it's about justifying why we shouldn't ban TikTok, not why we should ban TikTok. They can't provide a good justification for that, the best they can is just poison the well and try to attack those same institutions. But turns out effectively saying "fuck you" to Congress isn't going to work when Congress has all the power here.

[tomjen3]

As a European I have to ask is this really the way you want to go?

Because we could make nearly the same argument for banning Facebook.

[matwood]

If the EU and US became adversaries, I would fully expect the EU to do exactly this. The EU already has the GDPR with data residency protections that Meta was fined ~1B for violating.

[sweeter]

This is just hypocrisy baiting, this isn't a real analysis at any level. They didn't bring ANY evidence for them to argue against, it was purely an opinion by the state that there could exist a threat, which again is not supported by evidence, true or not. America has a lot to gain by controlling tiktok and one American billionaire will become a lot richer, that's all there is to it. I mean both candidates used tiktok to campaign while wanting to ban it. It's just a ridiculous notion and even they know that.

"Oh you love hamburgers? Then why did you eat chicken last night? Hmmm, curious... You are obviously guilty"

[firesteelrain]

There was evidence and it was discussed in the ruling by the Supreme Court. Please read it.

For example, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf

Gorsuch pg 3

[tveita]

Assuming you mean this:

  According to the Federal Bureau
  of Investigation, TikTok can access “any data” stored in a
  consenting user’s “contact list”—including names, photos,
  and other personal information about unconsenting third
  parties. Ibid. (emphasis added). And because the record
  shows that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can require TikTok’s parent company “to cooperate with [its] efforts to obtain personal data,” there 
  is little to stop all that
  information from ending up in the hands of a designated
  foreign adversary. Id., at 696; see id., at 673–676; ante, at
  3. The PRC may then use that information to “build dossiers . . . for blackmail,” “conduct corporate espionage,” or advance intelligence operations.

It basically just says that the app asks for the user's contact list, and that if the user grants it, the phone OS overshares information. That's really thin as evidence of wrong-doing. It doesn't even say that this capability is currently coded into the app. This sounds more like an Android/iOS problem - why is the contact sharing all or nothing? Would the ban still be OK if the app didn't have read contact permissions?

[russli1993]

USA should ban the air, because the air is breathed by Chinese communists, the air is tainted with communism. The air could influence how American people think, could infect them with disease, cause people to be sick or death. This is a national security threat, USA government must ban the air.

[firesteelrain]

It’s a great question. Gorsuch goes onto say

"But before seeking to impose that remedy, the coordinate branches spent years in negotiations with TikTok exploring alternatives and ultimately found them wanting. Ante, at 4. And from what I can glean from the record, that judgment was well founded."

Maybe that was one of the alternatives. I wasn’t on the task force but if I was asked to then I would have went one on one with their tech lead’s and asked them to stop collecting this.

But it seems it is greater than that. How you interact with it, your likes and dislikes can be used as a fingerprint and against you.

This fingerprint can then be used against firesteelrain some time in the prophetic future.

Gorsuch says

“To be sure, assessing exactly what a foreign adversary may do in the future implicates 'delicate' and 'complex' judgments about foreign affairs and requires 'large elements of prophecy.' Chicago & Southern Air Lines, Inc. v. Waterman S. S. Corp., 333 U. S. 103, 111 (1948) (Jackson, J., for the Court). But the record the government has amassed in these cases after years of study supplies compelling reason“

Then he says this.

“ Consider some of the alternatives. Start with our usual and preferred remedy under the First Amendment: more speech. Supra, at 2. However helpful that might be, the record shows that warning users of the risks associated with giving their data to a foreign-adversary-controlled application would do nothing to protect nonusers’ data. 2 App. 659–660; supra, at 3. Forbidding TikTok’s domestic operations from sending sensitive data abroad might seem another option. But even if Congress were to impose serious criminal penalties on domestic TikTok employees who violate a data-sharing ban, the record suggests that would do little to deter the PRC from exploiting TikTok to steal Americans’ data. See 1 App. 214 (noting threats from “malicious code, backdoor vulnerabilities, surreptitious surveillance, and other problematic activities tied to source code development” in the PRC); 2 App. 702 (“[A]gents of the PRC would not fear monetary or criminal penalties in the United States”). The record also indicates that the “size” and “complexity” of TikTok’s “underlying software” may make it impossible for law enforcement to detect violations. Id., at 688–689; see also id., at 662. Even setting all these challenges aside, any new compliance regime could raise separate constitutional concerns—for instance, by requiring the government to surveil Americans’ data to ensure that it isn’t illicitly flowing overseas. Id., at 687 (suggesting that effective enforcement of a data-export ban might involve).”

And the nail in the coffin is this

“All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional. As persuaded as I am of the wisdom of Justice Brandeis in Whitney and Justice Holmes in Abrams, their cases are not ours. See supra, at 2. Speaking with and in favor of a foreign adversary is one thing. Allowing a foreign adversary to spy on Americans is another.”

[throwaway199956]

Of course if the app have done anything seriously illegal it would not have been necessary to bring this law to ban it, because existing laws would have sufficed to do it.

Perhaps because US government wanted to do it despite TikTok not breaking any serious provisions of law this law has been made.

It feels like a sleight of hand from government to ban something that has broke no (serious) law (yet).

Did the SCOTUS go into the necessity of having this law to achieve what government wanted, if existing laws would have sufficed, provided that government met the standards of evidence/proof that those laws demanded.

If not, it is as if government wanted a 'short-cut' to a TikTok ban and SCOTUS approved it, rather than asking government to go the long way to it.

[firesteelrain]

I suggest you read the full 27 page ruling and what I quoted again. Supreme Court doesn’t weigh on the wisdom. But found enough evidence that TikTok does not refute that showed that they were engaging in the conduct that Congress alleged and that the law is not unconstitutional.

[seanmcdirmid]

Trump tried to ban it first by executive power, but the Supreme Court decided he didn’t have the authority to do that. Then congress passed a law, and the Supreme Court is saying that the law is valid and Trump has no grounds to ask for a pause for him to “work a deal.” Congress could just repeal their law, but other than that it stands.

[gunian]

Can you link it here would be super grateful

It's super interesting to see the custom code in TikTok not in Reels that can enable this not into politics but the algo would be cool to look at

[firesteelrain]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12271

https://kvombatkere.github.io/assets/TikTok_Paper_WebConf24....

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04086

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-76520-0_...

https://redfame.com/journal/index.php/ijsss/article/view/566...

https://github.com/SyntaxSparkk/TikTok

https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-122/?utm_source=...

[gunian]

Saw the GitHub thing a while back I meant comparatively TikTok vs Instagram vs YouTube where they differ / are the same etc

[firesteelrain]

I updated with the paper comparing how TikTok is beating FB

[dclowd9901]

Do they do this with other bans, like those against network hardware? Other countries sell their goods here at the American government's leisure. It's always been this way.