This isn't a choice being made by TikTok, this is due to regulations/laws in China. If the US passed laws requiring TikTok to do the same in the US, they would obviously comply.
> If the US passed laws requiring TikTok to do the same in the US, they would obviously comply.
Except for the part where that law would end up being declared unconstitutional, and rightly so. Then again, if TikTok has no US ownership, perhaps it would pass constitutional muster. 1A doesn't specifically mention US citizens or US-owned corporations, though, just that that government shall pass no laws abridging the freedom of speech, so maybe not.
There are plenty of laws forcing companies to engage in certain kinds of behavior. The latest I've seen is the beer manufacturing / distribution / sales breakup as a result of the post-prohibition policies. Manufacturers can't distribute, distributors can't sell to consumers and so-on.
I think people might not tolerate such govt interference, but assuming it's law I don't think it'll be unconstitutional.
The Constitutional bar is pretty high for requiring anyone to engage in forced speech, even if it's purely commercial. Laws requiring broadcasters to transmit a certain amount of public interest or educational programming were generally upheld by the courts because spectrum is a limited public resource, and radio waves reach into everyone's home whether they want it or not. But cable TV and streaming video services have effectively unlimited capacity, so those old rules never applied to them.
Alcohol is a separate issue entirely. The 21st Amendment gives states broad authority to control distribution.
Right, and I think it depends on what the intent is. If TikTok's default would be to just promote "dumb" content everywhere (because that's what increases engagement and sells ads or whatever), but the Chinese government is like "no, you're making our citizens dumber; you have to promote 'smart' content in the China market", then that's totally fine. I mean, I don't agree with the level of interference the Chinese government has empowered itself with, but that's their business.
If the Chinese government were forcing TikTok to promote "dumb" content to citizens of adversary countries, then that would be a bit more nefarious.
>If TikTok's default would be to just promote "dumb" content everywhere (because that's what increases engagement and sells ads or whatever), but the Chinese government is like "no, you're making our citizens dumber; you have to promote 'smart' content in the China market", then that's totally fine.
But that is what happened. The CCP went on a huge clampdown on the newer internet companies around that time that Jack Ma was abducted and passed numerous laws censoring and limiting what people could do online, such as how long teenagers could play video games.
In China, all companies with more than 50 employees are legally obligated to have dedicated Chinese Communist Party representatives overseeing, according to Harvard Business Publishing (https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/R1403J-HCB-ENG). Social media companies? They probably have tons of mandatory representatives guiding the system. ByteDance also had a "nominal" 1% ownership taken by the Chinese government, which then got 1 of 3 board seats supposedly from that investment (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/17/chinese...).
So you have a company which is absolutely at the size where dedicated CCP representatives are mandatory, with a board seat possessed by a representative of a state-owned enterprise. How much separation is there, really? Add to that, TikTok has been censoring the Uighur genocide, Tiananmen Square riots, Falun Gong, so forth despite not operating in China, as well documented (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...) and (https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/xinjiang-china-...). If you censor things in non-Chinese nations to please the Chinese government, plus the earlier facts, you're controlled.
Finally... putting that together, it is safe to say TikTok is under substantial control of the CCP. What does every Chinese student, and almost every Communist Party leader, learn in their schools (for being a communist leader has mandatory education in many things, including lessons taken from the fall of the USSR, to avoid such a fate)?
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." - Sun Tzu
Your point would be stronger if YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and every streaming service in the country was showing the same kind of content. TikTok getting bashed for serving American consumers American content is one of the silliest trends on Hacker News.
I'm sorry but I cannot take this politician seriously. Hawley has a storied history of talking mad smack and writing bombastic, strongly worded letters at California tech companies which never really go anywhere.
To me at least, it comes off as red meat for the base.
I'm dead serious. Go on Facebook, Twitter, even Fox News, how many images can you find without revealing clothing, suggestive poses, suggestive dances, etc.? Not far.
For them, it's a financial motive. For TikTok, because it is so bottom of the barrel, I think it has both financial and strategic motive.
TikTok is a private company that wants to make money. If it could make more money by showing Chinese audiences more trashy content, it absolutely would. And in fact, it does show a great deal of mindless content in China.
However, as is well known, China has recently been trying to regulate children's use of the internet (e.g., time limits on internet gaming). If companies were already willingly doing what the Communist Party wants, the Chinese government wouldn't have to pass these new regulations in the first place. And guess what happens when the government passes these sorts of regulations? Companies immediately start looking for ways to skirt them.
> legally obligated to have dedicated Chinese Communist Party representatives overseeing
No, at least legally, these committees have no oversight role in private companies. Companies with over 50 employees are required to allow a Party committee to organize and meet, but it doesn't have a role in management.
There are far too many grand statements nowadays about how China works, coming from sources that don't actually seem to be very familiar with the country. There is a very strong tendency in the West now to view everything about China through a paranoid lens. The truth is usually much more boring.
In this case, the truth is that Douyin (TikTok in China) has plenty of trashy content, but that there's more government regulation than before.
I recommend going to China and seeing for yourself.
What you read from afar and what you see on the ground are very different. Imagine if all you heard about the US were constant stories about gun violence, drone strikes and homelessness. You'd have a very distorted view of life in America. That's basically the situation with China, if your only point of reference is what you read in the English-language media.
I don't know what the subject we were discussing (whether TikTok is part of a plot to dumb down Americans) has to do with Xinjiang.
> every single message you have posted is defending China
I just comment on what interests me at the moment, and because of the rising level of paranoia about China (paranoia which I think is dangerous), I've been commenting more on these sorts of issues - which I happen to know a bit about.
Shill accusations go against HN rules, by the way.
I should have visited China back when it was opening up and relations were relatively friendly. But now that we have entered a new Cold War it's too late, I missed my chance.
About 150 million tourists (or shall we call them "idiots"?) travel to China without incident every year.
I don't know what, specially, is happening in the 200 cases described by the Politico article you linked to. Politico mentions one accusation of drug trafficking and another of spying.
