Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children.
This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear. The narrative of child safety, for example the story about the kid who commit suicide because of their "for you" page, is being used as a kind of legal "pretext" so they can ban TikTok.
Dialing up things to cause unrest, dialing down stuff critical of the CCP. It’s not an issue about data, or even an issue about speech, it’s an issue of ownership of a media company by an adversary that will weaponize it against you.
Who controls and owns media companies is a reasonable national security question. The CCP knows this risk, they don’t play fair.
This argument could make sense to me in a world where powerful corporations, PACs, and monied individuals didn't wield so much control over the media and politics. These domestic entities have far more influence than the CCP, and to the average American I don't think they are any less harmful. These entities profit from disunity and a chaotic government the same way a foreign adversary might. The current divisiveness in America is due to the outsized influence of powerful domestic actors. They are a much bigger concern.
I think this attitude is wrong. A strong democracy doesn't need to fight "fake news" legally and doesn't need their own propaganda op in foreign states like Radio Free Asia etc. If you are banning foreign media in your own country, you are doing the same as China in the end. Why not establish a great firewall?
Do you think the USG would have allowed the USSR to buy NBC?
These aren’t new issues, there are certain types of corporations where there is a national security interest in American ownership and capability (see also: Intel). Ownership of airlines is another example, you can’t have a foreign controlling interest in a domestic airline (Richard Branson couldn’t save Virgin America due to this).
There are good reasons for a nation to have rules about foreign control in certain types of companies that carry a national security risk.
In the case of airlines it is just straight up protectionism. There's no national security risk there: if push came to shove in time of war the government could simply seize the assets and operate them as they saw fit.
If that’s your view, then it seems better to be up front about the ownership limitations than pretending otherwise until a war comes along and pulling the rug.
It is already law in the United States that companies may be compelled to act in certain ways during emergencies. There is no pretending, it's all there in plain writing in the USC. Look up the Defence Production Act.
> A strong democracy doesn't need to fight "fake news" legally and doesn't need their own propaganda
your argument to me sounded like :
> Brave people don't fear heights, you are brave and hence you should jump from empire state building. And you don't need protection, remember you are brave.
Since you are straw manning the argument, brave people should be protected from their foolishness by banning rock climbing and base jumping. How does that sound?
A well-informed electorate isn’t a prerequisite to democracy. This is precisely why fake news proliferates - it’s relatively easy to elicit an emotional response, and that tends to win over critical thinking.
While fake news and undue outside influence absolutely must be protected against, the line is hard to draw. For instance, would Snowden have been considered undue influence, would Wikileaks have been considered fake news, at least sufficiently enough to cross the ban threshold?
There are pros and cons to both approaches, and it really doesn’t come down to whether or not people agree with a statement that contains such vague terms. It comes down to interpretation of those terms.
Of course the clear meaning of this paradox is that everybody who disagrees with me is intolerant of me, therefore it is my moral imperative to be intolerant to everybody I oppose. /s
Or here's a better idea: The Golden Rule. Eye for an eye is how you run a war, not a civil society.
That doesn't always work so well. If some Viking expedition is coming to pillage your "civil society," for example, there's really not much you can do except to fight. Of course, you can decide who to support or oppose as your moral imperative, but don't be surprised if it has negative consequences to you.
If a war comes to you, then you've got to fight a war and an eye for an eye is the way to do that. But that's no principle on which to organize a civil society.
> The United States does not have a strong democracy. Half (more or less) of the population believes the election was rigged.
From various recent polls, it looks like somewhere between 30-40%, somewhere under 2/3 of Republicans and Republican-leaners and basically no one else.
30% is about par for the course when it comes to contemporary controversial POTUS elections [1][2].
It seems to ebb and flow: each side takes their turn being the aggrieved party and then alternate next go around (2000, 2016, 2020).
Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.
The tapestry of dysfunctional patchwork that make up the American Constitutional Republic, while tattered and frayed before, has found ways to persist.
> Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.
Is that not what we're experiencing now?
It's hard to 'both sides' this issue with a straight face, when the biggest election denier in America is a former president and current presidential candidate. When was the last time that happened?
> It’s hard to ‘both sides’ this issue with a straight face, when the biggest election denier in America is a former president and current presidential candidate. When was the last time that happened?
The closest parallel was probably Aaron Burr and his…whatever exactly he was trying to achieve in 1806-1807 in the Southwest after being dumped as VP in 1804 in part resulting from Jefferson’s suspicions that he was trying to pull electoral shenanigans in 1800. But that’s a long time ago, in very different circumstances, and not a particularly close parallel. So, never anything really similar.
For better or worse, I've found reading (deep dives) US history adequately anesthetizes one to modern day shenanigans.
But you raise a good point in that Al Gore was far more gracious when aggrieved. He comported himself with the norms established in the last 60 years during the modern mass media era.
For the most recent presidential election maybe. For the previous one a majority of Democrats including many high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.
Clearly you aren't going to have a large contingent of deniers of elections that your favored party won.
When push came to shove, how many Democratic leaders (Reps and Senators) voted against or objected to the electoral college results in 2017? It was less than 10 Representatives and no Senators, meaning none of the objections were even put to a vote[1]. That is a far cry from what occurred in 2021.
Talk about clutching at straws and trying to find any possible metric to deflect from the dangerous 2016 election deniers and conspiracy theorist lunatics.
You can't just pick out some other thing and claim that is what is matters most. Just saying "when push comes to shove" doesn't mean anything. How many times did the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee lie about something like having evidence for the delusional conspiracy theory that "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", dangerously fueling election denial and undermining confidence in the democratic process, like Adam Schiff did? Aside from rhetoric and assertions by partisans and conspiracy theorists involved in the whole mess, where is the evidence to say what one side does is better or worse or more or less "damaging to democracy"? There isn't any.
If you in denial of the reality that both sides question elections and make up conspiracy theories when it suits them, you are incapable of anything approaching an objective understanding of the topic. Sorry.
> For the most recent presidential election maybe.
Yes, that’s generally what “believe the election was stolen” without further qualification means; its not a reference to the total sum of people who believe at least one election in the history of the US was stolen.
> For the previous one a majority of Democrats including high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.
A large percentage of Democrats believe Russian interference and other improper interference influenced the election results, but that’s different than thinking the actual vote was rigged or invalid.
Yes they were a huge number of election deniers for the 2016 election and a vast amount of irresponsible rheotoric around it that was very dangerous to democracy. Don't try to gaslight on this one. A lot of uneducated morons and delusional conspiracy theorists thought "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", fueled by dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric from certain anti-democratic election denier politicians and media corporations.
The one question you present evidence of is not questioning the legitimacy and validity of the election; there is a difference between believing (rightly or wrongly, with or without sufficient cause) that improper activity effected the popular vote tally and believing that the election is illegitimate.
You present no evidence relating to actual election denial.
If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you. Therefore could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? Including, but not limited to: not being snarky, not calling names, not making personal attacks, not posting flamewar comments, and not using HN primarily for political battle.
Yes, if that's what they were doing, but I'd have to see specific links. (For example I don't think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366985 broke the site guidelines although it wasn't entirely un-edgy either.)
I don't have a problem with the comment you linked. But this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 kicked off the snark with the first sentence, and quickly escalated to namecalling, calling me a liar a few comments later.
So yes I should have just ignored them or kept the higher ground, but sometimes that kind of trolling sucks me in.
I don't think the first sentence of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 was snarky. Interpretations differ, of course, and often by quite a bit when someone is speaking to you personally, but FWIW that sounds rather neutral to my ear.
They can bitch and whine as much as they like, letting people blow off steam is part of the process by which democracy keeps the peace. Aside from various small and short riots, there has been very little political violence in America since the 1860s.
Attempting to overturn the results of the election as the votes were being counted in the Capitol is quite an escalation, though. Sure, it's not up to 1860s standards, but it's still unprecedented in modern times.
While true, the law has also come down harshly on the participants. It should have a chilling effect for other would-be rioters. It was bad, I agree. But perhaps the silver lining is that its occurrence may help set a firm line on what behaviors are acceptable.
This is an excellent point and I agree. Social media apps are basically brainwashing devices, and whoever controls the knobs and buttons can change how people think. Very easy to get radicalized with propaganda, or in this extreme case, even be convinced to end one's own life.
Maybe we should then pass laws restricting what companies can do with our data? What kinds of algorithms they can run if they want to be treated as a platform rather than a publisher?
New accounts on issues like this always make me wary of the 50cent party (kind of a case-in-point example of the kind of nation state influence operations and risk). [0]
It shouldn’t have gotten to this level, but it’s where we are. Users will move to reels or something else that takes its place without the national security risk.
It's a clone, but you can't directly compare one social network to another like that. There are differences in the culture and community that won't necessarily survive being transplanted.
> like they cant influence twitter, facebook and all the rest?
Well, no, that’s more Maximum Bone Saw’s purview than the CCPs, and that foreign influence isn’t (at least per the initial list written into the proposed law) considered adversarial.
(EDIT: That’s specific to Twitter, not Facebook and all the rest.)
i think the point is, banning tiktok just means influence can move to these other platforms via other means (troll farms etc), it doesn't solve the issue (unless you want to ban twitter et. al)
There’s a distinction between adversaries trying to cause trouble within American companies and a foreign hostile government effectively owning the company and dictating policy in its own interests.
Probably? I think that was one of the options iirc (ownership by an American company via a sale), but I don't really know enough about the specifics to have a strong position on the implementation.
> [The] US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of
China. Yeah, except that any business can just buy that information. I can buy your day-to-day movements for dirt cheap. I own a non-American company (though I'm still an American citizen, but that isn't a factor), and it is insanely cheap to get information about any American you want. Hell, BingBot will tell you all about me, what I do for a living and where I live.
This is about China, but it is a stupid and pointless zero-point game. This bill would get shot down in 30s for being unconstitutional, especially if the company has an American LLC or corporation (making it a legal entity protected by the constitution). Further, you'd think congress would have learned from prohibition that banning something ... hmm, doesn't work? At all? How would you even enforce something like this, stop people randomly to violate their privacy further and search their phone? Will this be another thing to get arrested for when you have a 'broken tailight'?
TikTok disappearing from tens of millions of iPhones overnight (I have no idea about Androids) would probably work pretty well. If I had to guess, almost none of those people can jailbreak their iPhone to get it again, either. Your option would be to switch to Android and learn to sideload apps (which I think is pretty damn easy these days).
The point is not to enforce against individual users, just to remove it from the main distribution channels.
Did anyone else notice this bill includes a provision that requires the department of Commerce to inform the president Quiet partwhen wall street has made such a cockup of gamblingQuiet part that it becomes a national security risk and gives him the power to issue an Executive Order requiring the general investing public sell that particular stock so hedge funds can pay off their debt?
Re-reading, I may be mistaken. S.686 is still in committee and it looks like S.1143 looks to have passed the Senate. I read an article this morning that suggested S.686 is meant to be a rider, can't find it now.
You can freely install apps on your iphone. All you need is an Apple computer. It only can be used for a week? before you have to install it again. I don't pay apple a dime and still develop software for iPhones occasionally without any issues.
Also, websites are pretty powerful. Apple even allowed websites to send notifications now.
If you believe that a significant portion of iOS users are going to set up an Apple development account and manually reinstall TikTok every week then I have a bridge to sell you.
They will just switch to a different social network, which is equally destructive but not Chinese.
I think you are overestimating the tech know-how of the average person and how driven the average teenager is. TikTok a year ago was pretty unique, but now you have YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. I'd bet a hard money that 99% of people will just switch to those in a heartbeat if TikTok was banned.
> Kids will do whatever it takes to get what they want. I’d buy that bridge.
What they want is cheap dopamine hit from the smartphone. It's really close to drugs, make heroin hard to get and people will go to an analog like fentanyl.
I guess many of us underestimate how many teenagers own a smartphone but not a laptop/desktop computer. In older generation it was the reverse, people owned a laptop/desktop before owning a smartphone..
Even if they have a computer, it's not necessarily going to be an Apple computer. Unless you're a developer, interoperability between your mobile hardware and your desktop hardware is barely a concern.
What percentage of TikTok users are you expecting to do either of those two things in order to access the app if it’s banned by the federal government?
Serious question: would Apple and Google allowing users to install their own apps on their phones count as aiding/abetting in this case, when the crime is an American using TikTok?
The bill doesn't directly ban data sharing but instead focuses on foreign ownership in US companies. It would be enforced similar to anti-trust laws today, by preventing Chinese nationals from purchasing or having an ownership stake in certain large technology companies deemed a security risk. I don't like the bill because I think it's unnecessary but it has nothing to do with searching people's phones or regulating actual data in any way.
The federal government has many tools by which they could accomplish this ban. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has a long, successful history of forcing divestiture by foreign owners of domestic assets.
Additionally, app stores and ISPs are a pretty obvious route for blocking 99% of U.S. users from circumventing the ban. Any users who are able to circumvent those measures will be using an app whose network effect has been destroyed.
I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership, but I assume at face value that there is some very embarrassing facts that our local spooks are not keen to share with China.
What does the great firewall of America look like, from the infrastructure & interface angle? Would we want to share that with China? Your Google searches and all your metadata that can likely be accessed with relative ease… is there a similar surveillance capability that we’d wish to share with China in how spooks make data requests?
China has no jurisdiction over you… there’s no real punishing to relate to what you have viewed on TikTok, so why are your viewing habits a threat to national security?
I don’t believe this to be a zero sum game. This is further extension of authoritarianism from a government that is terrified of anything short of pervasive colonoscopy-tier data collection.
>China has no jurisdiction over you… there’s no real punishing to relate to what you have viewed on TikTok, so why are your viewing habits a threat to national security?
I mean, I mostly agree with what your saying above this, but this particular line I disagree with.
People get blackmailed all the time for different reasons. If I'm looking for a person in a hardware/software company that has weaknesses, having a full view of their social media is a great starting place.
"Traditional" hacking is getting pretty rough, basically a gamble to find an exploit, social engineering will be the easiest vector to attack something. Being able to gather data and influence will make it that much easier. I mean even Jeff Bezos got hacked by his Saudi "friends."
>I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership,
The propaganda part.
Remember a month ago when everyone's feed had a video in it from the TikTok CEO encouraging people to side with TikTok.
They are scared shitless of not being mostly in control of that kind of power when applied to Americans. They are worried that the next Saddam is going to pay TikTok, or some future foreign competitor to torpedo whatever the next WMD lie is (and this will be done with Chinese blessing because that will be in their geopolitical interest).
The possibility was easy to ignore back when all the social media giants were American and the feds had jurisdiction and soft power over them. Now there's a new entrant that China has jurisdiction and soft power over. They want the status quo back. Hence why all the bill language is mostly about preventing foreign ownership.
The establishment can squash Elon if he gets so far out of line that it pisses a critical mass of them off. He's a US Citizen. His business assets are in the US (mostly). They can get at him so long as some large subset of "they" is ok enough with it.
They can't do that with "hypothetical Chinese Elon" so long as said Elon remains in good standing with the powers that be there.
I don’t really know anything about buying data or whatever, but how would you actually go about buying my day-to-day movements and how much does it actually cost?
I was always under the impression that when people say ‘Google collects all your data and sells it’, or whatever, they really mean that google sells ads which may be targeted based on the data they collect, and it’s only small companies with much less data who might sell it.
Anyone can get your address and phone number from just about anywhere. What you can't purchase are the thousands of data points that Facebook or Google has about your habits, location, and preferences. That's their secret sauce after all.
Seems to be a suspicious number of people in this thread purposefully "point missing" and slinging whataboutisms instead of talking about what the CCP (specifically) can do with that type of information...
Well yeah, ByteDance directly takes orders from the Chinese government. Big Tech can also take orders from the American government, but America is bound by the rule of law and isn't actively imprisoning millions in concentration camps so it's way better
America’s political system also has plenty of problems, so any absolute comparison is easy to pick at or "what-about", as other commenters are doing.
But more to the point here, the American government responds to pressure from the electorate and U.S.-based stakeholders, which the Chinese government by and large does not.
Can you explain what you mean? The USA never had “lockdowns” at all – to some degree because of public pressure though also because for the first year or so of the crisis the federal government flailed around passively/counterproductively due to abject incompetence (plus some grifting) at the top. Meanwhile China’s Covid policy had nothing whatsoever to do with the American electorate or stakeholders, but was instead driven by political pressures internal to China.
If your point is that different American states responded differently despite broadly similar public opinion based on party affiliation of the legislators and governors, that’s true, and part of how our the US system works. Public preferences clearly aren’t the only thing driving policy decisions.
I think fooster's point is that Xi had to eventually give in to pressure from "the electorate and [China]-based stakeholders" as evidenced by the CCP having to eventually abandon its zero covid policy, so there are some constraints from the people on his power.
Though I think it's less that Xi responded to pressure from the people and more that his personal power was starting to become at risk due to the policy from others in the CCP.
In that case they are entirely missing my point. Obviously Chinese politics responds (to one extent or another) to internal pressure. My point is that as an American citizen/resident I don’t have any influence on Chinese politics, so if a Chinese company under influence from the Chinese government infringes on my rights I have no real recourse. Whereas if something goes wrong here in my own country based on action of local citizens or locally based companies/politicians, the residents here can put direct pressure on the domestic political system, bring civil/criminal legal action against wrongdoing, etc.
It reports a greater percentage of prisoners. Other countries may exceed that percentage, but just not report it.
Totalitarian countries like China, with strict controls over what its government and media report is a prime candidate for grossly underreporting its prison population.
That when we talk about China, we see all of their flaws as completely damning them and everything they do as a country, but in the same breath we speak of the rule of law in the USA as if that means something when it comes to mass surveillance (it does not - the USA is a pioneer in illegal mass surveillance). This is a particular problem when it comes to TikTok, because senators look at TikTok collecting data and influencing Americans and they say "We cannot let China do this to us!" while completely ignoring Facebook and Microsoft doing all of the same to us. This leads to harmful bills like this TikTok bill when what we really need are protections from all mass surveillance, foreign and domestic.
But that will never happen as long as the good citizens of the USA continue to pretend that the rule of law has any meaning in the USA when it comes to mass surveillance, and we point at China and chide them for the millions they have imprisoned as if that is not the pot calling the kettle black.
Calling out China will change very little there, and serves mostly to distract the conversation from the problems we really have the power to solve. We only have the power to change ourselves. The people in the USA and around the globe who suffer from US surveillance will continue to suffer all the while.
And what is worse, China will simply start running domestic companies and collecting our data all the same, because these bills aren't solving the real problem.
Blindly pointing the finger at China causes real harm to us.
They both take orders from their respective governments, but the nature of those orders, the nature of the business, the relative power, the domain over which the information is valid, transparency, proportionality etc are all very different.
ByteDance isn't under the direct authority at any given moment of CCP, but, they will, at any time, receive arbitrary orders for any particular reason, and they will follow them. Notably 1/2 of the Western world uses this app.
Google isn't under the thumb of US Gov. but with a court order, the FBI can obtain specific bits of information. Notably, Google does not operate in China.
Now - the more secretive relationship with NSA/CIA/FBI aka national security has with Google is a different question, it's a bit guesswork, but just given the nature of the two regimes, and the fact that again Google has no material presence in China it's plain to see the difference.
The Congressional Hearing was a farce in the wind, but the underlying issues of both security and trade are really serious.
It would have been better to create comprehensive legislation a decade ago about data and corporate ownership so companies could make progress. Even if ByteDance owned 49% of a US company that was 'TikTok' and it was based anywhere but China, that would probably be fine.
>ByteDance isn't under the direct authority at any given moment of CCP, but, they will, at any time, receive arbitrary orders for any particular reason, and they will follow them.
If Musk hadn't bought Twitter, we never would have been able to prove that this is also true for Twitter and arbitrary orders from the American government.
I agree with the concentration camps. But imprisoned… yes. I don’t live there, but I still have to file my taxes. I can’t go back longer than 35 days, or I have to pay taxes like I live there for five years, even if I don’t. Every banking institution that is willing to do businesses with me has to report my activity to the IRS. I’m not allowed to invest because I’m an American, I’m also not allowed to invest in America because I’m not a resident.
If I didn’t have family there, I’d probably give up my passport, because outside of America it is more of a hindrance than a boon.
Of course it is! and storks deliver babies and the moon is yellow because it's made of cheese.
> [The USA] isn't actively imprisoning millions in concentration camps
It's actively imprisoning millions in prisons. What's the difference between a prison and a concentration camp? Perhaps the guards twirling their evil mustache more?
You are able to write your comment criticizing the US government (Congress) because we follow the rule of law and that rule of law includes the 1st Amendment guarantee to freedom of speech and expression.
yeah ask how people who backed trump fared once he lost? ban from social circles, political oponents “tracking” the people who worked with him or under him so that “they never have jobs anymore”. its just one example. just like china, if you are on the bad side you don’t exist anymore. see assange.
There is a stark difference between a sovereign power gagging or stifling perceived dissidents and other citizens (whether they are elected officials or not) deciding you're an unethical asshole others should be warned about.
What happened to Nixon? What happened to OJ Simpson from the victim's family?
> Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children.
This overlooks the "possibility" that those platforms have an "agreement" of sorts with the US Government. The Twitter Files have gone into some of that, but be careful: it is possible for things to exist that each individual/civilian may not have knowledge of, even though most people seem to be strongly under the impression that this is impossible, perhaps because it could be considered (or, has been marketed as) [only] a conspiracy theory.
> This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear. The narrative of child safety, for example the story about the kid who commit suicide because of their "for you" page, is being used as a kind of legal "pretext" so they can ban TikTok.
It is plausible that there are certain ideas that they would not like the minds of the American Public exposed to, certain conversations they would prefer they do not have, etc. There is a surprising amount of detail to reality, but we miss out on most of it (and often do not realize it), for a variety of reasons.
The thinking on these sorts of matters one reads in this thread is rather eye opening....I suspect a lot of the styles of logic that are perfectly acceptable in threads on this topic would be very unwelcome when writing software.
This. I had this very conversation today. I dislike applying rules not across the board. I would love if the same argument applied to TikTok, were applied to other social media.
However, this is not about the arguments presented. Those are merely talking points as a way to get an upper hand on China. That is it. It is annoying, because there is actually a dire need to make children a little less addicted to screens ( not to mention the chance to get some privacy ).
Try using Tik Tok in China vs USA. The feeds are very different. The CCP has the influence to only allow more positive and educational topics on their social media. In the USA its the EXACTLY OPPOSITE. Whether you can blame culture, the government, whatevers, something needs to be done. USA media is out of control and if the gov needs to have a hand in it, let them.
Politicsgirl makes the case this is about shutting down marginalized voices, among other things. I’m no TikTok user myself but the argument holds water.
> Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children.
Do they? My Impression is a bit different here. TikTok is much more focused on the automatically selected content, and has fewer options for letting users make their own choices. The format itself (video) also strongly boosts the connection between people. And both combined let TikTok-Trends move much faster and ingrain deeper in the minds of people. It was quite interesting to see how fast and deep the brainwashing on TikTok was spreading after the CEOs appearance in senat, and also kinda concerning.
> US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear.
But isn't that legit concern of any country regarding other countries with even less security than you have yourself? I mean in Europe we also have strong concerns against the USA and their poor handling of data.
This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear. The narrative of child safety, for example the story about the kid who commit suicide because of their "for you" page, is being used as a kind of legal "pretext" so they can ban TikTok.