Ancestors

Toot

Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-18 at 18:00

To be slightly blunter than The Atlantic allowed me to be: the tiktok ban is a protectionist subsidy to Meta and Google worth hundreds of billions of dollars: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/internet-censorship-tiktok-ban/681361/

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Descendants

Written by Adam Shostack :donor: :rebelverified: on 2025-01-18 at 18:42

@ethanz That's blunt! :)

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Written by Adam Shostack :donor: :rebelverified: on 2025-01-18 at 18:43

@ethanz on another note, Firefox claims the SSL cert on https://ethanzuckerman.com/ is expired

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Written by beerlynoticeable on 2025-01-18 at 18:44

@ethanz 100%.

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Written by huntingdon on 2025-01-18 at 18:53

@ethanz

Donald Trump will, no doubt, take his standard piece of the action. It's what Trump 2.0 is all about.

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Written by Weyoun 6 on 2025-01-18 at 18:55

@ethanz I enjoy seeing billionaires fight amongst themselves. And free speech does not entitle people to a platform.

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Written by Barbara Bohr on 2025-01-18 at 18:59

@ethanz You’re right the damage is done; but I doubt many will care.

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Written by Michael Brown on 2025-01-18 at 19:31

@ethanz @inthehands with all due respect that is bullshit. TikTok is a CCP propaganda tool and a national security threat to all liberal democracies.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/01/15/noah-smith-tiktok-china

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Written by A on 2025-01-18 at 19:34

@mluisbrown@techhub.social @ethanz@social.coop @inthehands@hachyderm.io It can be both you know?

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Written by Paul Cantrell on 2025-01-18 at 20:24

@a @mluisbrown @ethanz

Exactly so. And furthermore, if you swap out “CCP” for a fill-in-the-blank, then what you said is undoubtedly true of FaceBook and X as well. But somehow congress isn’t moving to ban them.

The threat is real. The legislative play has nothing to do with the threat.

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Written by Michael Brown on 2025-01-18 at 20:52

@inthehands @a @ethanz the CCP part is the threat. If a US buyer were found for TikTok the ban would be stopped, but China would prefer to have it banned than sell to a US company.

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Written by A on 2025-01-18 at 20:55

@mluisbrown@techhub.social @inthehands@hachyderm.io @ethanz@social.coop right because the other companies mentioned are not a threat at all

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Written by Michael Brown on 2025-01-18 at 22:24

@a @inthehands @ethanz Correct. compared to China, they are utterly insignificant.

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Written by Paul Cantrell on 2025-01-18 at 22:41

@mluisbrown @a @ethanz

Oh for absolute fuck’s sake

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Written by 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦 on 2025-01-19 at 00:02

@mluisbrown @ethanz @inthehands

无知夸口似专家，

错误坚持不认差。

浅见深藏傲慢中，

愚昧自负害国家。

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Written by Duncan Bayne on 2025-01-20 at 05:38

@mluisbrown @ethanz @inthehands Both those things can be true.

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-20 at 12:26

With all due respect, there's no evidence to support that position. Even the US solicitor general - making the case to ban the platform - admitted she had no hard evidence that the platform was being used to manipulate public opinion. My lab researches the platform and sees much less broadcast use (what you'd expect from propaganda) and more use of the platform for communication for small groups. Any data to support your claim?

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Written by Andy Fletcher on 2025-01-18 at 19:36

@ethanz

The whole tiktok thing feels like a combination of double standards and a mafia attack - that is a nice web platform you have, would be sad if we destroyed it, tell you what - you can sell it to us...

Of course the USA gets all bent out of shape when other countries block US based services.

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Written by deliverator on 2025-01-18 at 20:07

@ethanz nice article! I hadn't heard about people migrating to the other Chinese social media app 🤦

John Oliver did a take on this a little while ago: https://youtu.be/5CZNlaeZAtw?si=8CdzQZ0v-7GHyFfn

IMO, I think you're on the money. This is protectionist BS brought on by lobbyists. I don't see a black and white obviously right/wrong answer here. It's hard for me to believe the rhetoric about how evil the Chinese government MIGHT be while we have documented proof about evil done by US social media and there's crickets (Myanmar, Russia using FB to run disinfo/propaganda, etc etc).

"But the Chinese government will know everything about you!"

... Just like , which will happily sell that to anyone for the right price? Even foreign governments? Maybe they'll even try to obfuscate it with some corporate shell games so they can claim they "had no idea"?

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Written by Mark Wollschlager on 2025-01-18 at 22:49

@ethanz American technology was the basis for the "The Great Firewall" and the panopticon that is the internal internet in china. The beta testing was done in development there and they took the ball and ran with it. The same thing will happen here, just more of the 'frog in a pot of warming water' sort of way. "We need to be protected" is just the first couple of clicks of the stove dial.

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-20 at 12:22

@markwoll Mark, do you have a reference for that? I studied internet censorship for many years and while functionality of Chinese and US routers were similar - you can argue that China was copying features of US tech - the tech used to create GFW was Chinese, as far as I know.

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Written by Mark Wollschlager on 2025-01-20 at 18:43

@ethanz A bit of hyperbole on my part, but it is well documented that Cisco and Juniper ( and Nortel ) were providing hardware and project support during the beginning of the GFW. Just hardware!! But with the knowledge of what it was to be used for.

I appreciate the distinction, but the bottom line is that the US and other 'western' corporations are the primary developers of surveillance tech. Developed and sold to governments with a strong profit motivation.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-dodge-responsibility-facilitating-human-rights-abuses-export

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-20 at 21:04

@markwoll 2016 is a pretty late reference - I'm talking in the piece about 2000-2010. But yes, the capabilities were in most hardware, and in that era, the best hardware was US made. There's a big distinction between being able to filter packets and using that capability to surpress political speech. And China was certainly developing their own hard and software dedicated towards different forms of suppression at that point.

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Written by Edward Champion on 2025-01-19 at 00:13

@ethanz I'll be blunter than you. It is the beginning of a totalitarian state designed to make the American population nothing more than slaves who are obeisant to all plutocrats. It is the destruction of community that helped people struggling during dark times. It is a full-bore assault on alternative media and the true originals in American culture. It is the final breath of democracy as we once knew it. It signals that there is no real difference between the two parties.

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Written by MylesRyden on 2025-01-19 at 00:59

@ethanz

A possibly Pyrrhic victory. A normal SCOTUS would have ruled that the 1A over ruled whatever vague threats were implied. Google, Apple, Meta, etc are now not safe as they could be banned for some vague "data" or "health" threat and the 1A won't save them.

What a massive grift opportunity for the new admin -- "pay up or we start investigating your data collecting."

This is the way fascism works.

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Written by gio on 2025-01-19 at 12:49

@ethanz I think Trump will likely reverse the ban or ask DOJ to suspend enforcing the law. He already has wealthy donors that are invested in the platform. I don’t even think he’ll force a sale at this point. He can’t resist looking like a hero to all those TikTok’ers.

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-19 at 14:27

@stevegio I agree that that's a likely pathway. There's another problem with that outcome - we don't want Congress and the Supreme Court to be so easily overridden by a super-powered executive, even if it leads to an outcome that restores speech. It's a shitty situation on many differently levels.

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Written by gio on 2025-01-19 at 14:35

@ethanz Totally agree. It would be interesting to see if, given that outcome, would the Congress and the Courts actually perform their constitutional duty to check presidential power. The bill passed with broad bipartisan support. Will the GOP senators and representatives stick to their guns on this issue or will they simply bow to the will of the executive branch?

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Written by Lennard van Otterloo on 2025-01-19 at 16:28

@ethanz It would be hilarious if a number of European countries would now use the exact reasoning used by the US to ban foreign networks that undermine democracy, the rule of law and national security.

Foreign networks such as Facebook, X and Instagram.

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Written by lj·rk @ #FOSDEM on 2025-01-19 at 19:10

@ethanz Yup. I could get on board with a TikTok ban (or regulation) if it’d hit X, Meta and Google too. We’ve seen what Cambridge Analytica can do, this issue is by no way exclusive to Chinese products…

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Written by Jonathan on 2025-01-20 at 00:35

@ethanz and Truth Social

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Written by CyberAl on 2025-01-20 at 03:31

@ethanz Well, now it is gone so who knows.

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