Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada

Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.

Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.

The essence is, by denying agency of your country’s users, you deny the whole set of ideas it bases on. If that’s a natural vulnerability of the ideology, addressing it by banning media is a patch over a bleeding wound.

Canadian teens will simply learn about VPN, like they always do in other countries which ban internet resources. Not a single one of them will leave tiktok.

Our local billionaires goals are not in the same category.

As a citizen of a country, as much as I would love to believe in free exchange of information, it's better to limit what enemies are able to broadcast directly to our phones. that's a commons with a lot of tragedies in it.

The threat is that it silently engages in manipulation, rather than something like RT or New York Times where the bias is well known ahead of time.

If you're going to cry foul, maybe you shouldn't block the other party in the first place.

However, that said, I do agree with your broader point. I'm suspicious of Tik Tok and the Chinese government's intentions and I think banning it was a good move.

I think it has been so long since the Pax-Americana West has dealt with an overtly hostile major power that we’ve collectively lost the concept that there can be real enemies with goals that run explicitly counter to our own.

We're not "at war" but that doesn't mean much.

It is happening on our local platforms here. Meta, based in the US, is systematically censoring Palestinian content that would otherwise be available here in Canada.

Details:

* https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

* https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...

For a very recent example, one of the few remaining prominent Palestinian journalists, with a following of over 1M on Meta, was banned today:

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/11/7/al-jaze...

They booted TikTok corporate from the country as a threat to national security.

Given how China operates globally and especially in Canada, I’m completely fine with them getting told to beat it

Long form content, unrestricted by executives telling people how to run their show, all that makes a big difference. There is no need for corporate bureaucrats to try to run things.

So, thanks for the charity, but I would rather prefer them to pay that as taxes.

Describing them as an enemy might be too far, but you certainly wouldn’t describe China as a friend.

But since Bytedance doesn't dance at NSA's tune, different rules apply.

When the Elkann family (which owns majority stake in Stellantis, Juventus, Ferrari and many others) got pissed off by the largest newspaper in Italy reporting on them (despite their businesses impacting the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Italians) they simply bought the newspaper and the major critical voice of them disappeared.

I've always been terrified to think about how much of my data is out there, but I don't understand enough about how it can be used, and the potential risks.

If there is a major nation on this planet that has never done anything bad to mine in its history I can think of is China.

I can remember American, British, French troops raping and humiliating that country, I can't remember a single time the opposite happened.

While China does not always play fair and there's plenty of despicable things they do I don't like, I just don't see them as my enemy and see no valid reason to do so.

Tiktok's Canada-based offices must have been up to some other form of skulduggery for them to have been shuttered while leaving Canadian use of the platform completely status quo.

[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

Many of the Tiktok generation live in a world where reading for 3 minutes is a heavy effort they are unwilling to do. All information is supposed to be presented in short entertaining video clips.

In China online time for the youth has been strictly regulated years ago. But harming other nations is only in their interest.

Yes, he "avoids" taxes by using every legal strategy available to him, as does every single person who pays taxes. This is called "paying the correct amount of taxes you legally owe".

> Anything that maximizes his personal wealth could very well be hostile to the well being of the country.

Let's look at the things that have maximized his personal wealth:

Paypal - made online payments popular and safe. Enabled millions of people to start online business.

Tesla - made electric cars popular. Reduced C02 emissions. Gave thousands of Americans good jobs. Made many employees and investors rich.

SpaceX - re-ignited space exploration. pioneered re-usable rockets. Dramatically reduced the cost of launching satellites.

Starlink - brought Internet access to rural areas.

Please tell me, which of these personal wealth maximizing activities has been hostile to the US?

Chinese social media is pretty vibrant with the exception that you can’t agitate for the fall of the government.

I'm don't want to be completely pollyannish about the past - there were probably things we weren't hearing about from those fewer outlets. But I'm also not sure how we move forward as a society in a situation where there are so many different shattered views of what is true.

The biggest foreign meddler and spy in Canada is the southern neighbor.

We know for a fact through leaks that US has put all Canadians under mass surveillance both in communication and movement (like the wifi hacking at airports leaked by Snowden) since more than a decade, or the 2023 Pentagon leaks that were quickly scolded as "but they were trying to find Russian activity in Canada", and don't forget the AT&T whistleblower which also exposed mass surveillance on Canadians by US intelligence.

And yet..nobody cares..even though we know for a fact it happens, we don't care let alone call the US an enemy.

So, what is the difference? The media and politicians calling 24/7 China your enemy (something nobody would've done before 2018/2017), but ignoring or pretending that the real spy of all spies which hacks and spies on all of its allies, even the personal phone of the German chancellor is cool.

I find those double standards not only mind blowing, but dangerous.

We're letting the White House to dictate globally who can play by the rules and who is an exception.

That said these sorts of issues were way down the list in these elections and people have to compromise on some issues and vote on the aggregate. I do think that it's pretty clear the Republicans were and are a lot more understanding and publicly supportive of Israel vs. the Democrats. They didn't try to do a "both sides here" but clearly communicated who they consider to be the aggressor and who they consider to be defending themselves. That doesn't mean that every single republican voter feels that way but a lot of them do.

The US also supported and brokered quite a few peace initiatives in the middle east. It's not fair to say it only acts to support wars.

The law should be against general bad behavior by social media companies, but it isn't because the unsaid reasoning is too impolite to speak: we can compromise with Western companies' spying, manipulation, and exploitation of us, but it's unacceptable if a Chinese company does the same.

These sorts of movements gain a life of their own at some point, but the cynical side of me suspects the TikTok ban animus started with big tech lobbyists, not a grassroots movement from concerned citizenry.

Well, this is Canada we are talking about. All of the countries in OP's list are foreign.

Not foreign, but we already have that problem with Sinclair and local TV affiliate stations.

People talk about Rupert Murdock and Jeff Bezos all the time. Who else do you feel we should talk about? There is that one conservative owner of most radio stations in the US.

> People don’t like Musk owning Twitter/X, that’s a start

After Elon took over, he deleted my Twitter account. Still not sure why, but it happened around the time reporters who retweeted #Elonjet had their accounts deleted. And I did retweet it.

Media consolidation is an issue, but Musk with Twitter is so petty, racist, and blatantly self serving. I refuse to be associated with it.

> but start reading about who owns the rest (especially traditional media).

traditional media != social media. The potential for manipulation is much greater with social media.

Or Pooh Bear.

Or South Park entirely after one episode of joking about China influencing Disney about Pooh Bear.

Or failures of the central government.

There are a lot of things banned online in China; this is so not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China

Actually, there is a lot more. About 30% people (of USA) use TT, ~60% under 30. You guess it, they don't to look only at dance videos. Social media had become a huge source of information for a big chunk of the population.

On TT, and on most social media (SM), what you watch is mainly determined by the recommendation algorithm. This algo can hide subjects the SM can't put ad on but also subjects the they don't like and boost the one they do (shadow ban). That how you politicize SM. That about, the first thing Musk did with Twitter (after firing people).

When it's a state controlled SM, it's more like foreign interference. There is a lot of books about that. It's documented, not a secret of something. Uyghurs for example, have been a subject of ban on TikTok, shadowing it heavily.

If you look into the data, you'll generally find that they don't.

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

You can still follow individual reporters posting their own content. For example I can access both https://www.instagram.com/wizard_bisan1/ or https://www.instagram.com/clarissawardcnn/, etc.

But I can not access the organization pages like https://www.instagram.com/cnn/

I frequently see it mentioned in Chinese social media.

We are “divided” now because we are basically in a battle for what is consensus reality, and the only way to have a satisfying answer to that question is to have unfettered access to the underlying facts and knowledge of who is who.

I think it's an interesting area of research. However on many fundamental issues, let's say illegal immigration, foreign policy, or abortions, it's not immediately obvious that business interests hold power most of the time. If that was true then it really wouldn't matter if you have democrats or republicans in power but you see definite shift in policy when that happens.

Sadly, and I think I called that out few years ago, there was a notable turn in US foreign policy. In effect, it means establishment expects actual confrontation with China. This, naturally, means uptick in anti-China propaganda. It is a difficult position to take now in a pragmatic way given events in Ukraine and Israel, but that is clearly the direction. Hence, comments like those of OP.

This is provably false. The Green Party explicitly ran on support for Palestine and voters in parts of Michigan voted for the party in decently large numbers to split the Democrat vote.

Not enough voters saw the issue as big enough to switch their votes on a national scale but that’s not a failure of lack of choice, the people spoke with their votes that they don’t care about Israel and Palestine nearly as much as other issues.

But what is happening here is different. We are saying: we don't Z company so we are going to treat them differently from the other companies in the same space.

And I am saying this as a person with minimal social media footprint.

We banned a single corporate entity from operating offices inside the country in response to credible intelligence that those offices pose a national security threat. That corporate entity is directly linked with an adversarial government with active election subversion campaigns.

Is there some reason you are twisting the actual circumstances around this?

I'm concerned we're going to get to the point where people are willing to kill each other over what they consider to be the "consensus reality". That's happened often at other points in history. In many cases it was due to religious differences over what constituted "reality". I'm not so sure that many of these current squabbles over what constitutes "consensus reality" aren't religious in nature. Social media already seems to be pushing the limits of human nature in some destructive directions such that politics now is like holy war.

I think we need to focus more on the "consensus" part (including peacemaking and bridge building) instead of the "battle" part. I'm not seeing a lot of that happening. That requires a lot of humility as in we're all like blind people groping our way to figure out reality and none of us has the complete picture. Until we're ready to take on that kind of humility on a societal level, I think this "battle" you refer to can be a very dangerous endeavor.

https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2024/2024-121.htm https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/industr/info.htm

If you're pro C-11, you really don't realize how bad this would be to give the government to determine what is "hate speech" and command companies to take it down.

Its not about who has the data, although that is important. Its not about subversion of a population by a foreign state, although that is important too.

The crux of the issue is reciprocity.

China does not let any CAN or US companies into China markets, without first demanding local factories, forcing local production, requiring equity control and even IP. And if you dont share it, bohoo they will steal it anyway. And, there's no recourse.

The chinese govt has abused free trade for so long. Its time to demand fairness.

They dont give us access into their markets? OK! We close our markets to their corporations.

Its as simple as that. The golden rule.

The second part, well, I guess I can read a book, and maybe children should, too.

It wasn’t long ago that we regularly witnessed rhetoric hinting at putting people into camps and denying them access to food because they didn’t buy into the official narrative about vaccines.

Is that a better option? I don’t think so.

I do agree that there is a basis for building bridges and finding common ground but this is better done at the local level between people vs. trying to force it from on high. And definitely, in my opinion, not via some controlled medium.

The majority of Canadians share the majority of Americans' view of China.

Neighbors in Asia and Europe often have completely unaligned political politics due to a language and media barrier. Even the US and everything south of Texas don't align as much as the US and Canada.

And where was that happening? On social media. Outside of China (and maybe some similar regimes), I don't recall any government official suggesting anything about camps or limiting access to food (China even delivered food to the people they welded into their apartments, so not even them), certainly not in the US.