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Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada

(www.cbc.ca)
423 points empressplay | 6 comments | 06 Nov 24 23:04 UTC | HN request time: 1.111s | source | bottom
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not2b ◴[07 Nov 24 00:01 UTC] No.42071538[source]▶
Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X. What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices. The Chinese can buy all of the information they want on Americans and Canadians from ad brokers, who will happily sell them everything they need to track individuals' locations.

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.

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imgabe ◴[07 Nov 24 00:03 UTC] No.42071557[source]▶
It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

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

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1. wruza ◴[07 Nov 24 00:21 UTC] No.42071716[source]▶
It’s your people who decide to see it, not a foreign govt. Chinese media like cnn and nyt exist, no need to imagine either that or the situation where China buys cnn and nyt and gosh now you have to watch their propaganda.

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.

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2. a123b456c ◴[07 Nov 24 00:40 UTC] No.42071892[source]▶
You might reasonably be describing the current TikTok algorithm, but companies often modify algorithms over time.
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3. gruez ◴[07 Nov 24 00:41 UTC] No.42071896[source]▶
>It’s your people who decide to see it, not a foreign govt

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.

4. octacat ◴[07 Nov 24 00:49 UTC] No.42071956[source]▶
Sure, so ban when they change the algorithm. But for some political powers even a current algorithm is a threat, because they cannot control it (like they could do with the local media).
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5. throw-the-towel ◴[07 Nov 24 00:55 UTC] No.42072021{3}[source]▶
But how would the gov't know they changed the algorithm? It's not like TikTok sends newsletters to the House of Commons.
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6. octacat ◴[07 Nov 24 01:07 UTC] No.42072127{4}[source]▶
They could request an audit (and ban if tiktok refuses). They could monitor the results they are getting in the recommendations based on specific list of criteria. They could propose moderation rules tiktok would have to follow (kinda similar to how it operates in China - they have a different algorithm there). They could request tiktok servers to be in Canada.