TikTok ban?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Needless to say, I am in favor of banning or forcing the sale of this app, owned and operated by the Chinese Communist Party, that is designed to be as addicting as humanly possible, and operates a confidential algorithm that as best anyone can tell is intentionally designed to maximize the amount of dangerous and harmful misinformation and political extremism injected into the brains of its users.

At the very least, the fact that such an overwhelmingly powerful information-spreading tool does not have any sort of controls on false or dangerous information amounts to handing each and every user an AK-47 pointed at the brains of every other user, which is wildly irresponsible and sufficient pretense for government regulation.

People can say "oh all social media is like this" but YouTube and Twitter and Instagram are way less effective as disinformation vectors.  TikTok places absolutely no safeguards on what people say, and more likely than not has biased the algorithm to actively encourage extremism, misery, dangerous behavior and flat-out lies. Because this kind of content simply does not flourish on any other platform to anywhere near the extent to which it flourishes on TikTok.  I mean I'm on Twitter, and it's pretty bad, but it's nowhere near as bad as TikTok for this kind of thing.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Look, this isn't about TikTok.  TikTok is really bad on its own, and it's entirely possible that after ByteDance is forced to sell its American operation to, like, Oracle or whoever, it will still be an outrageously addictive app, whose format naturally gravitates towards outrage and extremism and conspiratorial thought, and whose algorithm organically creates information bubbles where disinformation spreads like wildfire.

But:

A) Even if that is the case, this kind of information about how Americans think, what our neuroses and biases and fears are, what we love and hate, should not be in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.  This is just a simple, obvious matter of national security.  Delivering a foreign enemy the most perfect guidebook imaginable on how to manipulate Americans is bad.  Any app that produces data at sufficient volume and quality to make this a concern should not be allowed to operate in the United States if there is a risk of said data being shared with a hostile foreign power who could subsequently weaponize it against us.

B) It's inherently obvious that the app could be weaponized against Americans.  Now maybe you are like me, and you believe it's no accident that the app is dominated by anti-American viewpoints, conspiracy theories and flat-out lies.  But even if you don't, it's impossible to disagree that it could be weaponized by our enemy to inject propaganda into the minds of Americans in an incredibly effective and subtle way.  That's bad, that's a weapon we shouldn't give them.  That's a possibility we shouldn't allow for.

C) Part of the problem with CCP ownership of TikTok is that the U.S. government has no way to audit it, so if they are controlling the algorithm, or if they're not today but tomorrow they start to, we have no way of knowing.  If an American company owned it, we could regulate it, audit it, pass legislation forcing them to police disinformation and remove content harmful to mental health.  Even a simple community notes system similar to Twitter would be massive for cutting down on TikTok's ability to spread totally fake BS faster than the speed of light.  But we don't have any kind of control over its operations today, nor do we have any insight into the black box of its algorithm.

I would say the same about any app or website operating on American soil that becomes too powerful and collects too much data.  We can not allow any foreign app to obtain such a massive amount of data about Americans that could potentially be weaponized against us.  We can not allow any foreign app to hold such a massive degree of control over what Americans see every day, what we believe, how we perceive the world around us, etc. without any ability to regulate or audit it.

And this isn't some unheard-of position.  It's literally the position of the CCP.  There are tons of American apps that don't operate in China because of Chinese rules, or like Google they make special China-specific versions that China can audit/regulate.  Now that's not saying we should become the People's Republic of America.  Unlike China, we have a first amendment that lets us say whatever we please.  But that first amendment doesn't give foreign enemy states the right to collect unlimited data on Americans with zero accountability or regulation!

[GeneralMacArthur]

Summarized: we must control the narrative.

heatcharger, I do not think that is an accurate summary of my post.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Summarized: we must control the narrative.

heatcharger, I do not think that is an accurate summary of my post.

It is. Once you veer into complaining about the type of content on the platform it’s clear you want changes to what Americans are seeing on social media. Most anti-TikTok arguments end up in this direction.

The issue isn't necessarily the type of content (I am not calling for any state control or banning of TruthSocial, for instance), the issue is that it is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.  Even if China was purely using this to inject truth and justice and happiness into our lives, it is still bad for America to give a foreign enemy state such a powerful information tool in the pockets of every American.

The fact that it's actually being used to broadcast harmful misinformation and complete BS, overwhelmingly in service of an anti-American foreign policy agenda that by sheer coincidence just so happens to align with exactly what China wants Americans to believe, is icing on the cake.

Regardless, if you think things like community notes on Twitter are a bad thing, it is most likely because you either have some agenda that is lie-driven and undermined by any sort of added context or fact-checking, or you believe something that deep down you know is false and get very triggered anytime you are faced with reality.

Again, whatever happened to Republicans being strong against China?  I'm old enough to remember four years ago when that was a thing.  Now Republicans are willing to die on the hill of defending the Chinese Communist Party's right to have an unlimited disinformation & propaganda chip plugged into the brain of every single American, and if I think that's bad, it's because I want to "control the narrative."  Whose narrative?  China's?  Why would it even be a bad thing for America to control China's narrative?  Why should we want China's narrative to dominate the American public?

[GeneralMacArthur]

It's a bit concerning that so many people want to see Tik Tok banned because they don't like it.

Love to spend twenty minutes putting a lot of effort into a five-paragraph post where I clearly and thoroughly explain my position, and list several extremely good reasons why TikTok should be transferred to American ownership, and then someone just says "lol you only want to ban TikTok because you don't like it."

clearly a lot of you do not realize the reach that Tik Tok has.  It only can take a few thousand votes in a few states to decide this election.

Yes, it can only take a few thousand votes to decide an election, which is why we shouldn't give the Chinese Communist Party the power to use their massively popular and totally unaccountable app to spread disinformation and lies about Joe Biden, American democracy or the logistics of voting to tens of millions of Americans.

Just one video of a girl sitting in her car looking at the camera saying "guys, you'll never guess what I just learned, they say you have to vote by a ballot, but actually you can just download this app to vote, and you don't even have to leave your house", which the algorithm artificially boosts into the stratosphere and specifically targets at young voters, would probably be enough to remove a few thousand votes.

Will China do it?  Probably not.  But why should we let them hold that kind of gun to our head?  Why should we give any foreign state this kind of power over us?  Do we really think there's a 0% chance that China is going to abstain from using its information superweapon to degrade the electoral chances of the candidate who's been tough on China and wants to take away their weapon, and promote the electoral chances of the candidate who's suddenly extremely soft on China and wants to keep it running?  Would Republicans have stood for this four years ago when one of their main conspiracy theories was that China was going to rig the election for Joe Biden because of Hunter's business dealings?

And by the way, I would feel the same way if China's interests were aligned with Biden and being used to undermine Trump.  American democracy should be owned by the voters not hostile foreign powers, be they Russian or Chinese or Qatari or who-knows-what, regardless of whether or not the agendas of those powers happen to align with mine for one cycle.

[GeneralMacArthur]

stealing, hording, and selling American's personal data should be a whites only industry

c'mon man

[GeneralMacArthur]

Okay the CCP has our data. Cool? What is the worst they are going to do with it?

What's the worst they can do with it?  Probably use it to craft the most finely-honed propaganda in human history to try and get Americans:

to advocate for the United States to withdraw from its role as a global leader in trade and security,

to agree that East Asia should be China's imperial domain and that Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other countries in the region should be Chinese vassal states for various historical and political reasons,

to argue in favor of China over America as the world's sole superpower, and more broadly, that China is good and America is bad,

to believe that the Chinese oppressive police state is either an American exaggeration or a totally necessary and good thing that makes life better,

and most importantly, to be totally OK with the fact that China is collecting data about them and using it to manipulate them.


And then, when they invade the neighbor state whose lands and resources they have craved for decades, they will count on their propaganda effort being so strong that the American public will be totally against any sort of American intervention or aid, and ultimately pressure their politicians to cravenly undercut and abandon its ally to Chinese conquest.

I mean, Russia already basically got away with this with the Republican Party, so why shouldn't China try their hand as well?

[GeneralMacArthur]

stealing, hording, and selling American's personal data should be a whites only industry

c'mon man

I was being deliberately provocative there, but listening to skeptics of this legislation, it's very clear that people are angry about the government's indifference towards American tech companies stealing our information and spying on us. Instead of targeting TikTok we could kill the whole problem at once and do it in a way that almost everyone would support.

If an American tech company was giving our data to the government of an enemy state, I would have just as big a problem with that as I do with TikTok.  As it stands, American tech companies do not do this.  On the contrary, I work for an American tech company and I can tell you that the amount of regulation and restriction we have to deal with to remain compliant in our handling of user data is quite onerous.  And it is only getting worse with the advent of the DMA.

The current loophole being exploited is that enforcement of EU regulations is delegated to the European country you declare as your "main establishment", and all the major tech companies have picked Ireland, a small country whose regulatory authority is overwhelmed by the underfunded auditing mandates now incumbent upon it.  But yes big tech companies do have to comply with these data usage and privacy regulations, or run the risk of being audited and incurring incredibly steep fines running into the billions of dollars.

A fundamental difference is that I think using personal data to improve the efficiency of targeted advertising is ultimately a good thing, at least as an abstract concept (obviously there are specific cases where it's bad).  As I've written elsewhere on this forum, if you have to have advertising, having to watch the same cellphone, insurance, car and food ads a dozen times over and over and over is such an inferior experience to targeted internet ads that build a profile of you, know what you like to buy and how you like it presented, and serve you those ads.  Since those ads are far more efficient, there's lower volume of them.  If college football was able to do targeted advertising based on personal data, we could get 20 minutes of ads per game and they'd almost all be interesting and relevant, as opposed to two hours of repetitive, lowest-common-denominator ads for products and companies I couldn't care less about.

In comparison, I think using personal data to develop propaganda whose purpose is to undermine American foreign policy and promote Chinese imperialism is bad.  We live in an age where information warfare is more important and more powerful than conventional warfare.  And given that China is an increasingly aggressive enemy state with clear imperial ambitions in Africa and the South China Sea, it's absolutely a national security vulnerability to allow them to keep building this information weapon.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Republicans doing a complete 180 on this issue solely because of Trump is hilarious.

They just keep acting like our position is "I don't like TikTok so it should be banned" even though the actual reasons for banning forcing the sale of TikTok are very obvious, have been clearly stated over and over again, and in fact were clearly stated and espoused by the exact same people now mocking us for agreeing with their former position.

[GeneralMacArthur]

China is totalitarian? So is the UAE, yet they’re one of the US’s closest Middle East allies. Come to think of it, the UAE is also very close to China and Russia, and they are helping the latter evade US and EU sanctions re: Ukraine. Ouch!

Guys are we seriously saying that it's A-OK for China to spy on U.S. citizens and collect an enormous amount of data on us, which it then uses on its propaganda app that each of us has in our pockets, because while China may be a totalitarian state, there are other totalitarian states that America has a better relationship with?

I'm tempted to go back to the Chinese Spy Balloon thread and see how many of you guys were totally cool with China spying on American citizens back then.  I mean I feel like I'm taking crazy pills or something.  Did I just hallucinate the last 5-10 years where people were super concerned about China spying on Americans?  Am I just totally fabricating this notion that up until 72 hours ago or so, most Americans viewed China as our #1 global rival and a serious threat?

And what is up with this bizarro position where everyone spent the last twenty years freaking out about the American government collecting data on American citizens, but now we're all totally cool with the Chinese government collecting data on American citizens because "what's the worst they could do with it?"

Honestly this thread is just convincing me more and more that banning TikTok is a matter of national urgency and needs to be treated as our top security priority.  The extent to which you all have been manipulated into espousing beliefs that you would have never dreamed of espousing just a few short years ago, it's just wild.  I feel like I'm in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, like I'm the only guy here who doesn't actively use TikTok so I'm the only one who hasn't had my brain stolen by Chinese propaganda.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I don’t use tik tok, so maybe I’m missing something here, but what kind of “data” is it specifically that we’re worried the Chinese are stealing from users?

Basically how we think, what kind of persuasion techniques we're susceptible to, the optimal strategies to appeal to us with disinformation, how to take advantage of our neuroses and individual personality proclivities.  Not as a whole, but on the level of each individual person.  Maybe the strategy for convincing you that China has a god-given right to annex Taiwan is completely different from the strategy for convincing me.  No matter, with the degree of highly-personalized data that TikTok has on each of us, that's an easily-solvable problem.

I mean this isn't some hypothetical.  Russia purchased Facebook data via Cambridge Analytica so it could utilize this exact strategy to figure out how to appeal to various different political subgroups in America, categorized every single Facebook user into one of those subgroups, and then executed different boutique strategies to try and pursue a different goal per-subgroup.

China has it much easier because they already have all this data, they're collecting more and more every second, the kind of data they're collecting is far more valuable, and they can run experiments in real-time by personalizing the algorithm.

I honestly don't know how to appeal to Republicans with this analogy because I don't know if you guys think what Russia did was awesome, or you hate Russia but think the Cambridge Analytica thing was just a hoax, or you think Russia's strategy didn't work, or you think China executing this strategy would also be awesome because now you love China because Trump said so, or you think China would never try to pull something like this, or what.  Your positions on our two primary geopolitical rivals change so much that's impossible to keep up.  I'm not sure even Republicans know what their positions are supposed to be right now.

That's why I'm happy to be a Democrat.  My position for the last 15 years has consistently been that Russia and China are both bad and that we shouldn't hand them any tools they could use to secure any sort of advantage over us.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The issue is that any potential manipulation of TikTok's algorithim as well as any data collection use by the CCP can both be addressed by means short of a ban. Simply open up the algorithim to regulators so they can see what's in it, would solve the first issue. And keep all the data in the US with the passwords only available to employees of a third party auditor or a regulator would solve the other issue.

And further, require a corporate structure so that the US operations are essentially independent, and any communications from "HQ" down are monitored by regulators, and any policies issued from HQ down subject to regulatory approval.

With those reforms in place, there is no need for the most draconian restriction on Americans' speech in a century, as well as opening up the can of worms of the government telling people which apps can be used or not. And besides, all of the data collection and manipulation concerns regarding TikTok also apply to other social media companies. They may be of a different scale, but our privacy should be protected against misuse by domestic actors as well. So there should be a bill covering general privacy protections rather than this bill.

This is hardly "the most draconian restriction on Americans' speech in a century."  It is not demanding any change to TikTok's functionality at all.  It is just saying that an app that stores massive amounts of user data in a totally non-transparent way should be owned by an American company.  The amount of disinformation and conspiratorial thought around this issue is staggering.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Facebook purges left-wing pages and individuals

ho hooo man.  I was expecting this link to be to some dumb s--t, but I was expecting, like, The Intercept or something.

I was not expecting World Socialist Web Site -- online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement.

https://newpol.org/on-gutter-journalism-and-purported-anti-imperialism/

One example of pro-Putin, pro-Assad “left-wing” propaganda combined with gutter journalism is the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), run by a “Trotskyist” cult led by a political sicko named David North, which perpetuates a long worn-out tradition of inter-Trotskyist sectarian quarrels in fulfilling its role as apologist for Putin, Assad, and their friends. Another example is Grayzone, a website founded by a particularly versatile character named Max Blumenthal.

These websites have in common the habit of demonizing all left-wing critics of Putin and the likes of Assad by describing them as “agents of imperialism” or some equivalent. The main “target market” assigned to them is naturally the left-wing readership. This implies that they must strive not only to convince their readers of the virtues of Moscow and its clients by a resort to fake “left-wing” and “anti-imperialist” arguments, but also and most importantly to discredit their left-wing critics. In doing so, they resort to the oldest trick of the slandering profession: outright lies.

where the hell you gettin your information man

[GeneralMacArthur]

I am never clicking another link from GP270Watch lmao

As for the ban, that's only the enforcement for divestment.  I would also be OK with fining ByteDance into oblivion for storing data in China.  But a ban is more practical.  Realistically, the point is to get them to divest.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I am never clicking another link from GP270Watch lmao

As for the ban, that's only the enforcement for divestment.  I would also be OK with fining ByteDance into oblivion for storing data in China.  But a ban is more practical.  Realistically, the point is to get them to divest.

Look, I would be 100% on board with a divestment, but the problem is the CCP has to approve a divestment, and they have stated they won't. This bill gives them way too much power to determine that outcome.

So what is the position here?  That we should somehow force the CCP to approve a divestment?  That we should invade China and seize the codebase and data centers that constitute TikTok if they don't divest?

The most we have the power to do is to ban the app from operating in the United States.  That is now what we are threatening to do, to try and force ByteDance to divest.  If the CCP is unwilling to approve a divestment, there's not much more we can threaten it with other than a ban.  And I don't see any way to force ByteDance to give TikTok to an American company other than by threats.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I am never clicking another link from GP270Watch lmao

As for the ban, that's only the enforcement for divestment.  I would also be OK with fining ByteDance into oblivion for storing data in China.  But a ban is more practical.  Realistically, the point is to get them to divest.

Look, I would be 100% on board with a divestment, but the problem is the CCP has to approve a divestment, and they have stated they won't. This bill gives them way too much power to determine that outcome.

So what is the position here?  That we should somehow force the CCP to approve a divestment?  That we should invade China and seize the codebase and data centers that constitute TikTok if they don't divest?

The most we have the power to do is to ban the app from operating in the United States.  That is now what we are threatening to do, to try and force ByteDance to divest.  If the CCP is unwilling to approve a divestment, there's not much more we can threaten it with other than a ban.  And I don't see any way to force ByteDance to give TikTok to an American company other than by threats.

The position should be to force them to keep the data here, open up the source codes and algorithim to Oracle, and make the management independent here. That's the policy which is both feasible and addresses national security concerns without a ban.

Their CEO testified before Congress that all data was shored within the United States and that turned out to be a lie.  What should the consequence be?

How would we even know if they're storing data here or in servers at CCP HQ?  You could literally just run a scheduled job every night to copy all the data from the American servers to the Chinese servers, run it on a Chinese machine, and there's no way anyone would know.  Given how trivial it would be to build this I would be shocked if this is not already happening.  Which of course explains why China is so adamant that they (why is it "they" isn't ByteDance independent of the CCP?) will refuse to sell TikTok no matter what the price may be.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Honestly this feels like a big watershed moment test case for our ability to withstand foreign propaganda efforts in the nefarious new age of the internet, where information ecosystems (falsely labeled "social media") have become obscenely powerful.

2-3 years ago, heck even 2-3 weeks ago, most Americans would have agreed that it's bad for enormous amounts of data to be harvested by TikTok and stored by the Chinese Communist Party for their future uses in whatever hostile campaigns they can dream against the United States of America.

Now that American politicians are ready to make the move, we are quickly seeing just how powerful these massive corporations are at manipulating people.  Between the full-court-press of propaganda coming from ByteDance, and the bribery of Donald Trump, paired with the lack of any comparable pushback from our politicians, we are seeing American public opinion shift very rapidly.

We are now in a race against the clock.  Will our politicians be able to get this done before both public and private pressure to bow down to China becomes too great?  Or will Donald Trump, ByteDance's bribed billionaires, and a massive slew of propaganda be enough to convince our politicians to flip on their previously-held convictions and surrender?

We are already seeing many Republican politicians abandon their earlier position of being "tough on China" and instead bow down and lick the dirt off China's boot.  And Republican voters seem to be A-OK with it.

If this effort is successful in keeping China in charge of the most powerful information ecosystem operating on American soil, then it will be a massive green light for every other adversary of the United States to try a similar operation.  Because America will have shown that with enough bribery and cajoling, we're willing to go along with being manipulated and having our data harvested by malicious actors.  Who wouldn't want to take advantage of us?

[GeneralMacArthur]

I also will note he didn’t at all respond to ElectricCircus’s post calling him out for his “auditing” idea, suggesting he is not influenced by logic here and does not want a legitimate discussion but rather everyone to fall in line with his “thinking”.

I made a number of points in that post that didn't get a response. His bit about "auditing" algorithms was not just BS, but implausible BS.

Maybe he was too busy musing over his next chest-thumping speech?  "Chinese Communist Party, Trump, China, Trump, Republicans, China, China, China!"

Sorry I didn't respond to every single post in this thread that has nearly 200 posts.  I don't see the one being referenced here in the last three pages of this thread and don't know what it's referring to.

I am not constantly on Atlas.  I usually check it in the morning and in the evening, and many days I don't check it at all.  If you write a post in a fast-moving thread in the afternoon it is entirely within the realm of possibility that I will only skim it or skip it entirely to try and get to the head of the conversation.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Not sure why everyone thinks that this will hurt Biden so horribly. Most Americans seem to hate social media. It's not like this is the "Ban Netflix" legislation or something. Almost everyone knows at this point anyway that TikTok is Chinese spyware.

My girlfriend uses TikTok for probably about five hours a week and her take on this has always been kind of like the same as if you tried to talk to her about how much sugar Starbucks puts in their drinks or something.  Like "haha yeah I know it's bad but I love it anyway."  I asked her this morning how she would go on living if TikTok was banned, she just shrugged and said "it's not the only social media app."

[GeneralMacArthur]

Every social media platform can be and has been used for information warfare.

But TikTok is disproportionately the annoying Zoomer app, and the US government as of January 20th, 2017, has decided that we must have a new Cold War, so…

The difference with TikTok is that it is owned by a hostile power that wants to engage in information warfare against us.

For all the faults of Facebook, I do not believe that Facebook is, or is answerable to, a hostile entity that wants to unleash information warfare against the American people.  But if it was, thank God that it's an American company that is subject to Congressional oversight, compliance legislation and audits from various institutions within the federal government.

I do think Facebook is a tool that is utilized by those hostile entities, who use its power to unleash information warfare.  But that is a very different thing.

[GeneralMacArthur]

If y’all don’t think the government arbitrarily banning an app

You guys really need to come up with a better way to argue if you're going to convince anyone.  It's not arbitrary.  The reasons for banning TikTok are extremely clear.  We've spent eight pages of this thread talking about them.  We've spent nearly six years talking about them.  We've had Congressional hearings on this subject.

The full text of the bill is here.  https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text

There are only four countries it applies to.  The bill specifically references Title 10, Section 4872(d)(2) which reads:

(A)the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea;
(B)the People’s Republic of China;
(C)the Russian Federation; and
(D)the Islamic Republic of Iran.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/4872

can we all agree that if Iran or North Korea were to make an app that became wildly popular in America, and they used it to harvest data on Americans that they could then use to manipulate American public opinion, that would be a really bad thing and it should be banned?

The main app I could see also getting banned under this bill is VKontakte, the social media app controlled by the Russian government.  But it is not popular at all in America so the president probably wouldn't bother deeming it a national security risk.

[GeneralMacArthur]

And yet no actual hard evidence to support the claims. The logic is “it might be possible” and no matter how much you try to spin, that’s not going to make voters hate your policy any less.
Electric Circus and others have already responded well to you on why your demands are unrealistic (which you have ignored because you know you don’t have a good response)

Is the post you and Electric Circus keep begging me to reply to this one he wrote on Saturday from page 4?

I'm struggling to understand the distinction that you're drawing when it comes to regulation. The federal government has no way to "audit" the algorithms used on platforms owned by publicly traded companies like Meta or Alphabet, let alone privately held ones like X. These organizations have made changes to both their feeds and their advertising policies in response to political pressure from various quarters (regulators, consumers, shareholders - if applicable), but that's also true of ByteDance.

...

because I'm not saying the federal government should audit the details of the algorithm.  I'm saying it can audit who is controlling it, who is having any say over how the algorithm is changed and built.  Changing the algorithm to align with CCP directives would absolutely involve a paper trail.  It would be a large project with product planning, engineering designs, meetings galore, and then the actual code changes.  The company may try to hide that the command to make these changes came from the CCP (internal communications retention law right now is strict for financial companies but loose for everyone else) but it would be difficult, and they'd need a plausible alibi for why they made these algorithm changes.

Doing oversight of social media is difficult, but hardly some impossible or unheard of task.  We looked into this a few years ago with Facebook after the whistleblower incident.  We've also had plenty of legal back-and-forth regarding ownership of, and responsibility for, content on a platform.  The EU imposes plenty of regulations on social media companies.  In fact TikTok is under EU investigation as we speak for allegedly violating various regulations.

At any rate the only reason we'd want to do so is because ByteDance answers to China, so not only is it a national security risk if China dictates the algorithm, we have no way to find out if they do.  If TikTok was an American company, it wouldn't answer to China, and there would be no such risk, so it's moot anyway.

[GeneralMacArthur]

You say this, but you do understand even if tiktok operations in the US were sold to an American company, there would still be plenty of easy ways for China to access the data if they really wanted to, right? Will you move the goalposts once again, or will you accept that some risk has to be accepted at some point? I’m fine with making tiktok operations be sold to an American company. ByteDance will moan but eventually will have to cave and that could create new jobs here in America, but will you accept that once it happens or will you find another reason to try and ban tiktok?

China is an authoritarian state and as long as ByteDance is operating as a Chinese company, there's no reason to think the Chinese government couldn't just order ByteDance to give them their data.  Or assign representatives of the state to monitor the operations of the company.  Or simply take data that's stored on Chinese servers that the government already has access to.

If ByteDance was an American company storing its data in America, there's no reason to believe China would be able to do this.  Sure they could hack the data -- they could do that for any company -- but that's an entirely different matter.  "There's no point keeping data out of China's hands because they'll just hack it anyway" is a silly argument (one that was made elsewhere on this thread).

[GeneralMacArthur]

Imagine if federal government employees were storing our nuclear codes and other top national security secrets on a version of Google Drive that was actually, like, Kwangmyon Drive, and it was a North Korean company operating under the purview of the DPRK government.  And we knew some data from usage of the app was being stored on DPRK servers, but the CEO went before Congress and pinky promised that none of the most important top secret data was.

Like, it's just so obvious that this would be unacceptable.  There's no way!  I would fully expect Congress to immediately ban all federal government employees from storing top national security secrets on this app.  Any arguments about free speech in such a scenario would be obviously spurious.

Except in this case, it's not federal government employees, it's all Americans.  And instead of top national security secrets, we're giving them something even worse -- a blueprint of how Americans think, what we like and dislike, who we trust and distrust, and exactly how to manipulate each and every one of us.

Yes, Americans don't sign contracts the way federal government employees do, subjecting ourselves to federal policy on handling of top secret data.  But that's because we don't typically have the capability to deliver such information to foreign adversaries because the government prevents us from finding ourselves in such a situation.  This is a unique situation where the valuable information is an aggregate over all Americans.  But basic principles make it obvious that the current situation is unacceptable.

[GeneralMacArthur]

If I may respond to one clunky analogy with another: Should it be literally illegal for me to voluntarily handwrite and mail a letter to the Chinese government informing them of how I think, what I dislike, who I trust and distrust, and how to manipulate me?

No, but I think if Americans started doing that en masse it would be fair to regard it as a national security thread.  After all, I would say that fentanyl is a national security threat, because lots of Americans are destroying their lives doing it.  Obviously fentanyl is far worse than merely giving an enemy state a blueprint for how to manipulate you.  But voluntary self-destructive behavior is bad and when it happens at scale it becomes a threat to the country, which is the sum of its citizens.

I think the Russian government, another enemy state, having a blueprint for how to manipulate Americans (which they acquired illegally from Facebook via Cambridge Analytica) was also bad and had disastrous consequences for our national security, as it let Russia manipulate Americans into electing as president Donald Trump, a man who was beholden to Russian interests.