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And the logical interpretation of that statement would be "if a government doesn't do things I want, it's not functioning properly".

Seems a little slippery-slopey to me

I mean does it work? Other than profit making for the consulting companies?

Like someone else pointed out, if people are hiring them in order to provide cover for decision making, then maybe the whole thing being a charade is the point.


You missed the joke.


> for American economy.

There is more to American economy than big tech.

And that's precisely why this has started: https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...


>There is more to American economy than big tech.

Most of the stock market valuation is big-tech, and most of people's retirements are the stock market, so... if the AI bubble bursts a lot of the US will be affected.


>Most of the stock market valuation is big-tech

Which is why most of it is a bubble


I do not know why this is downvoted. This is true.


Agreed. I upvoted.


>the act of organizing and strategically disseminating the speech is not speech

It is, and the court acknowledged that editorial control is protected speech.

The ruling was made based on data privacy ground, not First Amendment Speech ground.


The case law around editorial control is at odds with most platforms' section 230 protection, which makes the fact that TikTok argued that its algorithm _is_ speech pretty different from how most platforms have argued to date (in order to preserve their section 230 protections)


I've understood that social media companies deliberately do not identify as editors because they don't want to be responsible for generated feeds of users. Is this wrong? This is why I'm asking to see evidence of a specific person from a social media company taking direct responsibility over a user's consumed content.


>owever, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.

How is it self-incrimination? That logic doesn't work.

80% of TikTok's users are outside of the U.S., why would they sell the whole thing?

And the law is written in a way that there is no value to just sell the American operation without the algorithm, they have to sell the whole thing, including the algorithm, in order for there to be a serious buyer.

It's technology highway robbery. Imagine if China told Apple "sell to us or be banned", we'd tell them to pound sand too.


No one is asking them to sell the entire company. Just the US arm.

Not sure that changes much but you seem to be talking about non US users, which wouldn't fall under this ruling.


The West told plenty of its companies, through public pressure or laws, that they have to divest from Russia, and they did. Rationally they recognized that selling their assets is financially more lucrative than just closing their operations and making 0$. Now why would an corporation which alleges to not be controlled by a government refuse to sell and forego billions in income, even though it is against the interest of their shareholders?


Because they don’t want to have a strong competitor in case they come back, or gave they competitor enter other markets they are still active in. Also, not all (if any) companies that divested from Russia sold "their assets" including IP such as algorithms.


from what I know the bids that have been put in place are just for the US operations and there are some bids that dont include the algo as a part of the deal.


> I think it is about banning a propaganda

The problem of allowing government banning propaganda is it allows government to ban anything they label as propaganda. There is no law defining what's propaganda, so you just end up with the government being able to ban any information they don't like.

Imagine the government drums up for another illegal war like Iraq using fake evidence, and we ban all counter evidence as "foreign propaganda". Do you not see how dangerous that gets?

>That, for me, is enough of a reason to ban it and justify it under our constitution

The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled in the past foreign propaganda is protected speech under First Amendment.

You cannot strip American citizens' rights to receive foreign propaganda if they choose to do so.


You left a few words off in my first quote. I did not say anything about banning propaganda! I am talking about the system of dissemination, not its content.


At the risk of sounding like a conspiracist, I absolutely do not believe any polling number from established institutions here.


I can believe it to some degree. Believing that what the killer did is wrong, and being unsympathetic to Brian Thompson's death isn't mutually exclusive.


They don't even need to do anything especially conspiratorial, I would expect those polls to have substantial anti-Mangione bias by construction.

Many people will want to avoid being on record as supporting a murderer, for fear of any consequences down the line. I know polls are almost certainly anonymous, but you need to trust the pollster to actually abide by that. If you have even an inch of worry, it's easier to just not answer (or answer insincerely) and move on.


There is no evidence whatsoever presented in that paid for NCRI study.

In fact, the same result can be used to interpret as "strong traces of anti-China manipulation on American social medias".


>Ticktock content is curated to fit CCP’s narrative not simply an algorithmic reflection of what its users care about.

If you can show evidence of that you should give it to the U.S. government, because it has repeatedly said there is no evidence of such and any threat remains hypothetical.


> If you can show evidence of that you should give it to the U.S. government

Tens of millions of teenage Americans are addicted to it is the evidence. Chinese don't allow their kids to waste all day long on stupid douyin, Americans don't have such luxuries, as tons of red necks are going to jump up and label it as anti free speech if you want something similar. As a result, you see Chinese kids spend time on STEM subjects, building toy robots and learning how to code AI stuff while American kids are all dreaming to be the most popular influencer on social media.

The whole system is an algorithm carefully designed. Let's just be honest. btw, Chinese national posting from China here, you'd be seeing me protesting in the Tiananmen Square if some American social media apps manage to waste Chinese teens time while being carefully restricted in the US for their own kids. It is just shocking to see it takes almost a decade for the US to actually start doing something concrete.


> Tens of millions of teenage Americans are addicted to it is the evidence. Chinese don't allow their kids to waste all day long on stupid douyin, Americans don't have such luxuries, as tons of red necks are going to jump up and label it as anti free speech if you want something similar. As a result, you see Chinese kids spend time on STEM subjects, building toy robots and learning how to code AI stuff while American kids are all dreaming to be the most popular influencer on social media.

So it's Chinas fault that the US doesn't have the same laws restricting social media content and screentime for children? Or, if it is the red necks fault, then how does 'TikTok is spreading CCP propaganda' follow from 'US red necks oppose laws that are anti free speech'? It seems you're skipping some steps to get to that conclusion.


I’ve read it in a few places ex:

https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-...

Not sure how creditable their research is, but I’d place it above random news articles.


There research is not credible because their only "evidence" is that when using certain keywords, Instagram and YT returned more "anti-China" content than TikTok.

So instead of arguing the U.S. social media has an anti-China bias, they argued that it's the evidence of TikTok being more pro-China.

Using American social media as the control group for neutrality on China is absolutely insane.

The most likely cause is that TikTok is just a lot less political and more international than YT and Instagram.

For rest of the world, people do not automatically associate words like "Xinjiang" to "Chinese government oppression", the fact that they expect that to be the top result can be argued that American media is the one manipulating information.


The damming bits were 100% on Ticktock, no need for comparison.

On TickTock, views to likes ratio for anti China content was 87% lower despite higher upvotes on TickTock anti China content. Read page 4 suppression on anti China content.

That alone shows the algorithmic alone isn’t selecting results and they are instead engaging in propaganda. The credibility question in my mind is in regards to how they are classifying videos and other bits you don’t see, but that’s a deeper question than the methodology.


>No speech or information is being suppressed;

Except the whole reason for the TikTok bill is that information/speech will be under Chinese government control on TikTok and that can be weaponized.

So make up your mind, if you say TikTok is being banned for the possibility of "weaponized propaganda", then it is information being suppressed.

If you say it's not about information suppression, then you can't use the "Chinese propaganda" argument, which is used by pretty much all ban supporters.

>This isn't like China where the government bans any services they can't control, and directs the services that they can control to suppress any information they don't want people talking about.

That's exactly what it is.


> … if you say TikTok is being banned for the possibility of "weaponized propaganda", then it is information being suppressed

Eliminating weaponized propaganda is not even a little bit close to suppressing freedom of speech. Your argument falls apart there, like completely.


Except it is. The Supreme Court has actually ruled that the First Amendment rights for Americans to receive foreign propaganda, even during the Cold War:

https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/lamont-v-postmaster-...

I don't think you know what the First Amendment is. Not only does it guarantee freedom of expression, but also freedom to receive other's expression and speech.

The U.S. government is not allowed to ban any foreign books, movies, or even propaganda.

I really wish people like you do a little bit research before making such a confident statement like that.


They may not legally be allowed to ban it, but that doesn't mean it has to be easy to access it. This is probably also why banning Tiktok was / is such a challenge and couldn't just be done with Trump's exective order after Zucc whispered it in his ear in 2019, and why they can't just block it, but have to subpoena the app stores to delist it.


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