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.
Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the public in harmful ways?
That's not at all obvious to me. On what grounds, moral or legal, should the US government tell anyone what to publish or promote?
Also for tiktok, the algorithm needs less than an hour to almost fully understand you and it will then push a mix of what you already like and agree with, things that you don't like and absolutely disagree with but in a way that makes it look bad so in the end you also agree with that, and some funny videos to keep you entertained. This way they are maximizing the time you stay in the app to increase their revenue. It polarizes your world view further and further and without people to talk to and discuss, your ideas and beliefs will be turned into religious level thinking, radicalizing you and making it more and more difficult to accept different opinions. If you only consume what you already believe, things will go downhill very quickly. That's the reason people can't talk to each other anymore, the truth in most if not all cases is somewhere in the middle.
What we need is social media that is not algorithm driven, not optimized to keep you at the device for as long as possible but to show you a multitude of opinions to a topic from different angles, not just the one you have already chosen as your truth. We need to talk again, accept that other people can have different opinions without shouting them down. We need to try to look at things from different perspectives not just our own.
And most importantly, we need to accept that we can't have an opinion about facts. We need to listen to people that actually have professional knowledge about a topic. The guy that used to be a fitness trainer but now has a telegram channel to spread some important truths about climate change actually knows shit about how the world works. They want to make money selling you any truth that works for you.
What I'm saying is that all of these platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in that they exist to predictably change individual behavior with a high degree of precision, through custom tailored information feeds that can be shaped to alter someone's perspectives on the world in the interests of whoever controls the feed.
I don't think it's better for that power to be in the hands of Elon Musk or of Mark Zuckerberg. I think that that power needs to be banned worldwide if democracy is to survive. Democracy hinges on the idea that voters will in general vote in their own interest, and the ability to individually manipulate voters into measurably changing their behavior breaks that assumption.
And note that this is fundamentally different than traditional media sources, which have a harder time shaping someone's entire life and worldview. WaPo can control what someone perceives the WaPo editorial board as believing. Only a social media platform can control their perspective of what their friends think.
It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
What's next? Should we prevent giving air time to people from 'adversarial' countries at all? Or only allow it when accompanied by a sanctioned commentary to 'correct' any unwanted information?
While we're at it, how about 'adversarial' parties within our own country? Why should they be allowed to mislead gullible people?
We've seen how well it worked with Fox News, ONN, Alex Jones...
Spreading misinformation takes nothing more than being persuasive. Being able to pick and choose stuff out of context or even just say anything without a shred of support makes hours of “content” easy.
I'm sorry, but that's a load of baloney on par with "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear".
Second of all: it's obviously false. There are loads of examples - contemporary as well as older - where people actively peddled "incorrect information" to line their own pockets at the expense of the money/health/wellbeing of others. Having the facts does not repair the damage, nor does it prevent future harm.
But, firstly and more importantly, this framing suggests we should allow for misinformation. We absolutely shouldn't. The public debate isn't resilient to malicious actors. That's what makes misinformation so dangerous and what makes this slogan so hollow. It assumes good faith on all parties. There isn't, so stop advocating for solutions that require that.
In more detail: the public debate is meant for an actual exchange of ideas, thereby enlightening the participants. Anyone who is not interested in that, shouldn't participate. In particular, misinformation should be barred from the public debate. - and those spreading it held to account.
Whether it is knowingly claiming that lead is harmless, that smoking has no negative effects on your health, or anything vaguely political of the last dozen or so years: if you're unaware, it's not your fault yet, but you'll need to stop being ignorant. If you're aware that the information you're spreading is wrong: shame on you! You should be barred from participating in (that line of the) public debate.
Ad-funded algorithmic feeds exist to change people's behavior. They're indoctrination machines, ostensibly designed to sell products (which is supposedly a good thing in a capitalist world) but very easily turned to indoctrinating about anything else. I don't believe that indoctrination machines should be allowed to exist. We've proven how malleable people are in the face of these machines, and it's simply too much power to let any one entity hold, regardless of who it is in charge.
Anyone willing to take a good-faith stab at why this couldn't equally well be a description of traditional media too - say - the WaPo?
There's a major difference with the modern social media platforms, which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus. That illusion makes them much more powerful than anything that came before, to the point where they are different in kind, not just in degree.
When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.
The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.
At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.
> couldn't
Hypothetically, almost anything could happen.
> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication. For a brief period we had some social media platforms that made gestures in the direction of free communication. Then the investor capital came rolling in, and they were expected to increase revenue. How do you increase revenue of your free communication platform? You sell the messaging. Call it promotion, advertising, whatever. The only thing of value you have at your disposal are people's eyeball, you're going to sell what they see. You could ask your users to pay for the service... but then 80% of them will flake to a rival service that's still free. If there's a way to marry the profit motive and a truly democratic social media platform then our best and brightest have yet to find it. I suspect it doesn't exist.
The first step to reform would be to persuade legacy media to stop reporting the opinions trending on X/Twitter as "news". Stop reporting it entirely, it's manipulated, at best unverified, rubbish.
This logic applies to all media publications, not just internet platforms in the United States. When people say "anti-democratic" in the US I'm pretty certain they take it to mean "the government interfering in the speech of a private entity", not failing to uphold the principle of "1 tweet, 1 impression".
Every newspaper, television station, blog post, what have you consists of a small minority of people both creating and selling reach in unequal ways. If it is anti-democratic and therefore presumably not tolerated for a small minority to exercise or sell speech, then that's just equivalent to saying no private media enterprise should exist.
Needlessly to say the only person who can make this claim with a straight face is Noam Chomsky because he's been saying that about everyone for 50 years, but this is obviously not a position held by anyone currently trying to ban TikTok
When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.
The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.
At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.
The US Gov has a mandate to preserve and uphold democracy. Shuttering communication is prior restraint - an anti-democratic action.
Platforms have no mandate to preserve and uphold democracy.
In my dream world we’d get something like the rules we had, until fairly recently, restricting max broadcast media audience control in a given market for a single owner, but for Web platforms. Don’t like being limited to five million users or whatever? Then use a standard that puts control over curation and presentation in the hands of the user. Want to control all that, like all these awful platforms do? Then live with the limit.
Each of these platforms is fundamentally a propaganda platform—they're explicitly designed to manipulate people into buying stuff, and that capability is frequently turned to voter manipulation. The US government has decided that while US-based billionaires having access to such influence is fine and dandy, the CCP should not. So tiktok must be sold to a US owner.
If you want peace, you better prepare for war.
It is forbidden to forbid.
The necessary evil.
All that to say, we live in a complicated world, and beautiful ideals are only a direction to keep, never to be reached.
Of course, they don't HAVE to shutter. They can sell their interest in Tiktok and stay open. They have chosen not to do that thus far, and hence they have chosen to shutter.
It's now an industry, with enough companies with enough employees and, more importantly, enough political and economic power to destroy almost any attempts to push legislation that may actually protect privacy in any real way.
But, honestly, I don't think the TikTok ban has any overlap with privacy concerns. It's pure cold war.
The actual problem is and always has been control over the content being fed to users. It's not an issue of privacy, it's an issue of voter manipulation. It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.
On the one hand that's a very rational position for people who owe their election to algorithmic voter manipulation to take, but that doesn't really make it better ethically.
Which should be a major concerning point. Censoring a powerful media gives more power to the censor than censoring less powerful ones. Now the censor has the power to ensure that only US government and related big tech corporations are allowed to manufacturate consent over the public, with no way of having options of different views. Suddenly the media becomes even more dangerous.
I'm with the SCotUS on this.
https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
The Romanian National Liberal Party (opponents of Georgescu) bought the campaign. Their hashtag was "hijacked" (whatever that means) to boost Georgescu instead.
I do not know how TikTok works. Perhaps it is as simple as Georgescu supporters simply using the paid for hashtag for their own messages.
So, according to this article, the Russians did nothing. The Liberal Party engaged in questionable TikTok interference and Georgescu supporters jumped on the bandwagon.
The Western media falling silent on the issue would indicate that this politico.eu is correct.
(I don't like TikTok and I agree it is damaging, but this is just reasoning I can't get behind)
Like Hollywood, then.
In other words, some of the Westerners’ hypocrisy when it comes to the views they hold on their socio-economic system never ceases to amaze me, especially now, as we’re in the middle of a new translatio imperii phase.
These platforms are much less subject to manufactured consent than the traditional news media, which was controlled by a small number of entities aligned with the elites of the day. Decentralised information transmission is fundamentally better for the people than centralised information transmission controlled by a few gatekeepers who suppress anything not in their interests.
Look at how homogenous in views the baby boomers are relatively to the younger generations, as evidence of how much more effective at manufacturing consent the traditional media are.
Personally I don’t think singling them out is anti democratic, because this platform and Chinese run companies in general have issues unique to them.
TikTok lied under oath about the location of data they claimed was stored in the US. That’s fraud and has concerning privacy and national security implications:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index....
This is why divestiture to an American entity with no ties back to a mainland China owner makes sense - it severs the tie that results in illegal surveillance. It’s not a ban on specific content or even the app - just a ban on the owner.
Another issue - it has also come out that TikTok (not Douyin) employees have to uphold the goals of the CCP as part of their job:
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
And then there’s the basic lack of reciprocity in market access, since all non Chinese social media is banned in China and yet their apps can access consumers outside China.
Manufacturing consent still works via the traditional newspapers. That is where "the (current) truth" originates from. That is what is amplified on social media, including here. It takes years of struggle of independently minded people to argue against mainstream. Often after two years mainstream takes the position of independently minded people and takes the credit.
TikTok is different in that it addresses teenagers. They don't have any political power and will change their opinions in their 20s/30s. The data collection and blackmail arguments are still valid. But they also happen in the West, except that three letter agencies collect compromising material on domestic and foreign politicians.
I mean, really? On social media anti-China sentiment is at an all time high. This Chinese manipulation operation must have really failed.
When values are in conflict, which should win? In the hierarchy of values, where does economic world position stand in terms of national concerns?
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.
This implies people outside the US should relate the same way to Meta, X, etc. (Which seems fine to me, just pointing it out)
A "national security risk" is only a problem for the national security apparatus itself—not actual Americans. Kids don't want to die for their government because its failures have already shaped so much of their personal lives. It's evident in their rents, their student/medical bills, and the character of their neighborhoods. It's rather insulting to say shifty Chinamen are tricking them in all this.
Second, the US realizes that it cannot reliably manufacture consent if its citizens are not tuned in to the information sources that it can influence.
It's rather you're overestimating it (no wonder the ineffectiveness of CA was a surprise to you). It's such a low-power tool that it couldn't even be used to avoid its ban.
> In some cases
In some cases you don't need any of the ML techniques to do that. But at any rate, that's an irrelevant scale when it comes to "massive danger"
Clarence Thomas is not actually conservative in the small government sense.
When the mind-reading algorithm provides each user with their own reality to live in, then we are talking about editorializing. And allowing a communist, anti-Western government direct control over that power does not seem reasonable.
inb4 "better than my own government" - great, we agree that social media algorithms are a net negative to all society.
Communications is great. Video is great. Social media algorithms controlled by rage-inducing profit seekers and governments is not great.
When the EFF sounds about as sane as a sovereign citizen…
With friends like these, who needs enemies…
(I would say something even stronger than "extraordinarily difficult", but then I'd be on thinner ice.)
You have the freedom of speech to manipulate and be anti-democratic as long as you are the US government or bound by its control.
But it's not though? They are requiring divestiture from an adversary nation, not because TikTok is somehow inherently “manipulative and anti-democratic”
Nothing about TikTok has to change except who owns the company (unless of course the owners are manipulating the company's operation, in which case divestiture would indeed by quite disruptive).
What’s perplexing to me is leftists love how companies in America can be forced to sell and broken if they are declared monopolies. But if an app is declared an agent of foreign powers suddenly forcing a sale is wrong? It makes me feel even more certain that HN is astroturfed by Chinese bots because who cares
I suspect that people pattern-match this declaration to McCarthyism.
Additionally, the US has been invoking national security for a series of extremely dubious moves recently as well -- e.g. Biden's latest decision to block the sale of US Steel to Nippon on shaky grounds of national security, and his administration's recent policy to introduce export limits on GPUs to all countries except 18 (most US allies, NATO or otherwise, are now unjustly being restricted in how many GPUs they can import). Coupled with the incoming Trump administration's threats of trade war and expansionist designs on Greenland, people -- especially non-Americans, also in countries that have historically been friends of the US -- are very quickly running out of goodwill for the US, and in light of these events naturally the TikTok ban is seen as just another draconian attempt by the US to practise (economic) imperialism.
I despise communism myself, as my country went through 45 years of it. I agree with TikTok being forced to sell, and I'd like to see all social media sites offer more transparency mechanisms to NGOs and government agencies to show how their algorithms really work to have some watchdog be able to check if what we're seeing is heavily manipulated, especially during election years.
Yes, all they have to do is sign up for the usual services advertisers use.
> [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.
Do you have a source for this claim?
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?
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?
And the government doesn't offer any kind of remedy - you can't pick up your whole social cluster and move to another platform.
tiktok didn't had its 1A rights infringed, but every american that wants to listen to clips of old episodes of friends does.
what if this was YOUR business getting banned?
On the other hand, we have much more relaxed restrictions going the other way. Why not consider “fairness” from that perspective as well?
What if it was a ban, not on printing presses, but on a specific model of printing press, made in China, that happens to have 99% market share.
I want to try to see an analogy with Freenode, Libera, and IRC, but that was self inflicted damage by a private entity rather than by a government mandate.
Apply reasonable privacy and transparency rules to all social media platforms, regardless of ownership.
I’m not sure the EFF really needs to spell it out at this point.
It's the kind of naivety that gets your lunch money taken at school
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.
Why do you think it’s YOU who decides to be the gatekeeper on all that data and no one else?
You see the double standards here? The hypocrisy?
When GDPR was created there was a huge wave of people arguing that Facebook and other similar platforms would withdraw from EU. That did not happen, but if it had it would have been perfectly fine. Instead most American companies decided to create EU specific version of their platforms in order to comply with GDPR.
The next wave of privacy protecting regulations will likely recreate similar reactions. Those companies that want to stay in EU will comply, and those who don't will withdraw and give space to new ones. The trend of moving to national platforms/cloud providers has already started and been going on fairly strong in my country, especially from government organization and defense adjacent companies.
That said, I don't think banning tiktok will have the desired results.
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.
Facebook and others were in the Chinese market but they got blocked because they would not censor things that the Chinese government wanted censored and would not turn over user information that the government asked for. Chinese social media companies also are subject to those same censorship and user disclosure requirements, and will be banned (or worse) if they do not comply.
Would Facebook be allowed back in if they agreed to the censoring and to turning over user information? As far as I know none of the major American social media companies have been willing to do so, and so we don't know.
That doesn't mean you get to control what Americans can do on their devices.
Boiling the frog...
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.
The distinction between this and China's "great firewall" and speech restrictions should be obvious.
Never expected to see the EFF dismiss an argument for user's data privacy as "shaky".
Quite disappointed honestly.
Unfortunately it seems the powers that be are dead set on pursuing destruction of not just specific competitors but, eventually, the entire notion of constructive competition and its win-win outcomes provided the right safety nets.
The EFF routinely sides with big tech companies. See their work on copyrights, patents, etc. Tech figures fund them. See https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine
You'd be wrong.
What value would a concept like the First Amendment have if it were voidable as easily as "we have national security concerns" or "the information on there isn't valuable." Given that those are pretty much the immediate go-to excuses for any autocrats clamp down on speech, such a right would be totally meaningless.
I would argue that in this case the platform itself is expressing speech by ranking, recommending and promoting certain content. A foreign entity has no such first amendment right- we have had restrictions on foreign ownership of news media for decades now.
I think it’s an interesting issue especially now that you have TikTok users who think they’re being treated unfairly moving to a pure Chinese platform RedNote and encountering actual censorship. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-redn....
And now unconfirmed reports that RedNote is considering segregating the new American users from the Chinese users, ironically so Americans couldn’t influence Chinese users - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
Instagram doesn't have the same culture at all and it's not a substitute. TikTok is a like a digital "third space" for communities, and just like the real life equivilents, is slowly disappearing. People without community are easier to control.
