Maybe he was speaking morally rather than legally.
For example, if I said "I believe people have a right to healthcare", you might correctly respond "people do not have a legal right to healthcare" (in America at least). But you'd be missing the point, because I'm speaking morally, not legally.
I believe, morally, that people have a right to be heard.
A problem is that social media websites are simultaneously open platforms with Section 230 protections, and also publishers who have free speech rights. Those are contradictory, so which is it?
Perhaps @rottingleaf was speaking morally rather than legally. For example, I might say "I believe everyone in America should have access to healthcare"; if you respond "no, there is no right to healthcare" you would be right, but you missed my point. I was expressing an moral aspiration.
I think shadowbans are a bad mix of censorship and hard to detect. Morally, I believe they should be illegal. If a company wants to ban someone, they can be up front about it with a regular ban; make it clear what they are doing. To implement this legally, we could alter Section 230 protections so that they don't apply to companies performing shadowbans.
Yet another tool that uses “freedom of speech” incorrectly
Often freedom of speech is a moral ideal, a moral aspiration, and dismissing it on legal grounds is missing the point.
If I say "people should have a right to healthcare", and you respond "people do not have a legal right to healthcare", you are correct, but you have missed the point. If I say people should have freedom of speech and you respond that the first amendment doesn't apply to Facebook, you are right, but have again missed the point.
In general, when people advocate for any change, they can be countered with "well, the law doesn't require that". Yes, society currently works the way the law says it should. But what we're talking about is how society should work and how the law should change.
I'm okay with algorithms not recommending certain posts. I just don't like shadowbans because the platform is lying to the user, the user interface is essentially telling the user "your post is available for viewing and is being treated like any other post" when it really isn't.
There's a balance between the free speech of individuals and the free speech of the company. I think a fair balance between the two is, once a company is big enough to control a significant percentage of the entire nation's discourse, the company at least has to be up front and avoid deceptive practices like shadow-banning. (This should only apply to large companies, once a company is large enough it has a responsibility to society.)
"Good game, but the company behind it is shit and required me to sign this contract. <Insert contract clause>. Remember this whenever your reading the totally honest reviews about how good the game is."
This is so stupid. Isn't this a free-to-play game? With one-time-purchase games you can try to fool people, then take your money and leave while people complain about the game behind you.
But this is a free-to-play game, they intend to make money by gradual ongoing revenue from in-game purchases, etc. You can't fool people who are actively playing the game.
The contract hurts their image, and prevents them from receiving critical feedback.
After reversing its position on remote work, Dell is reportedly implementing new tracking techniques on May 13 to ensure its workers are following the company's return-to-office (RTO) policy, The Register reported today, citing anonymous sources....
I've always felt the nation of Israel is squatting on the name. Like, aren't there people outside of Israel-the-nation that also claim to be Israel (in the Biblical sense)?
The government certainly does have the right to protect citizens and make whatever laws are necessary. In this case, the government can do so by amending the constitution. Until then, the 1st Amendment applies to all citizens, non-citizens, and business entities operating in the United States.
Criticizing the Israel government is okay (until our government outlaws it at least). Suggesting the people of Israel are some special kind of corrupt is not okay. Our corruption is our own.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has released a video of its concept for a lunar base to be developed across the next couple of decades....
The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.
Many people have created things entirely from their own mind, and then find that they're violating IP law.
Even things like Calculus were invented simultaneously in different parts of the world. I mean, think about it, Calculus allows us to solve all kinds of problem that humankind had spent thousands of years thinking about and being unable to solve. Then, independently, in separate parts of the world 2 people invent / discover Calculus around the same time. If world wide IP law had existed, it might swoop in and tell one of them their thoughts were not legal.
Yeah, parents are getting ruined by social media algorithms too.
Our government seems to be moving towards an "we only care about the children, but everyone, including adults, upload your government papers" approach.
Y'all got any of those protections for adults? I remember reading regulations that companies couldn't show children advertisements. Can I have some of that regulation too?
I just can't stop being cynical that there is little focus on homeless or underpaid adults, or other adult issues, but the one problem we're focused on just so happens to include everyone giving up anonymity on the Internet.
We do need to help kids with social media, but there's a lot of other challenges they will soon face as adults that we're ignoring.
He stopped making videos 3 years ago and said open source progress in gamedev has restored his enthusiasm. So he might be willing to share his videos on principle.
It's been a couple decades since I worked in a call center (tech support).
Are they still dominated by shitty ticketing systems that employees are expected to fill out while being on the call? I don't know if that was just an oddity of the call center I worked for or not. If I didn't fill out a ticket correctly we wouldn't get paid for the tech support, so management would get real upset if you didn't fill out a ticket correctly. There were like 400 fields to fill out in a ticket and you had to fill out about 15 of them just right; fill out one too many, or one too few, or the wrong one and management is upset.
Honestly, language models would do better filling out those tickets than they would handling the call. If an AI can't fill out the ticket, how can it solve an actual problem? It would sure make life for the call center employees better if all they had to do was talk instead of managing a bunch of tickets and paperwork using shitty internal apps. But who am I kidding. They'll probably find a way to make life worse for the customers and the call center employees and they'll make a profit, because that's how free markets work, right? Whoever makes life worse for everyone prospers.
Next year Windows 10 goes End of Life. Microsoft will undoubtedly push windows 11 hard, but a lot of machines won’t support it leading to a few economic points of interest:...
YouTube first spoke about pause ads last year when it started trialing them in select regions. At the time, the company said that when you pause a video, it will shrink, and an ad will appear next to it....
A neat programming project would be to migrate YouTube videos to PeerTube for content creators. If a YouTuber decides to put their videos on PeerTube as well, it should be as easy as possible.
Programmer pay is so bizarre, it makes me cynical about our entire economy.
If I'm a blue-collar worker maintaining the wires between banks, I get paid little. If I'm a programmer maintaining the banking software that controls everyone's money and is essential to the entire nation, I'm paid a little more, but not as much as some programmers.
If I'm a young man who creates a webpage that barely works venture capitalists are tripping over themselves trying to shove millions of dollars into my hands.
(Although, creating a webpage was the hot thing last decade, now the hot thing is creating an AI.)
I've always wondered what would happen if ByteDance sells TikTok for $5 to a US Citizen who frequently visits China for lavish vacations, and that US Citizen decide to keep all the algorithms the same.
If China has an ulterior motive with TIkTok, can't they just find a US Citizen to carry out their ulterior motive?
If TikTok's purpose is to spread Chinese propaganda, can't they just find a US Citizen that can run the website for them?
"Yeah, it's my personal website where I exercise my 1st Amendment rights, also it has 100 million daily users and I happen to agree with China on a lot of things." If a US Citizen were to say this, there would be nothing illegal about it I think?
Okay, but I'm more interested in intra-legal reasons this couldn't be done.
I'm sure they could find 2, 3, or 3000 US Citizens who are willing to sell out to China, and then TikTok would be owned by US Citizens, but would still be doing what China wants.
Why don't they just sell TikTok to a US Citizen who happens to believe TikTok should remain the same?
TikTok would remain exactly the same, with the exact same algorithms, but it would then be the free speech of a US Citizen so everyone would be happy. Maybe TikTok couldn't send the data directly to China anymore, but they could certainly sell personal data on the shadowy data markets, just like every other US owned tech company does, and if that data happens to find its way to China then 🤷 .
Shell companies hide the true owner of companies all the time. Why can't TikTok do the same?
The problem is they targeted TikTok specifically in the law and it will be easy to circumvent. "TikTok is banned, but check out this totally new website called TokTik with the exact same content but owned by a US Citizen".
This is why they should have created regulations that apply to all companies. Because making regulations that depend on who owns the company will only cause TikTok to change the technicality of who owns the company. They can do so through all kinds of legal tricks without ever actually giving up control.
If ByteDance is a normal company they will seek profits and sell for as much as they can.
But if TikTok is a Chinese psyop, they'll just use any of the many legal tricks we allow to change the "owner" while China still retains control. Companies do this all the time, look at shell companies and such. It's super easy for China to mask the true owner if they decide to.
This is why we should make broadly applicable regulations instead of picking on one specific company.
They can't actually ban TikTok by name, it's unconstitutional to make laws targeted at individuals.
The current law actually says "no company can operate in the US with over 20% owned by China, Iran, N. Korea, or Russia", or something like that.
There's a lot of people in the US and at least of few of them would be willing to run TikTok the same way, same algorithms, same content, and sell the users data on shadowy data markets (which China can surely get their hands on), etc. I'm repeating myself now.
Again, my point is there are a lot of people in the US and surely some of them can form a company willing to do what China wants, and isn't that their right by our laws and morals of free speech? I know if things get heated enough laws and morals will be ignored (see Japanese internment camps).
And my even broader point is that this move against TikTok has ulterior motives. We should have created regulations that apply to all companies instead of targeting TikTok specifically. Even though we didn't technically target TikTok specifically, we effectively did.
I see. You're right about the text of the law. Thanks for taking the time to post that.
I would say it violates the 1st Amendment then. US Citizens have a right to say what they want, which includes saying what China wants if that is what the person wants.
I've also heard the data is physically stored and hosted by Oracle. So maybe China just copies it? The primary copy is in the US currently. Which doesn't really mean much.
I wouldn't be surprised if Meta's data ended up in China too. But Congress isn't targeting them.
You've made the most substantive comments in this post. Especially quoting the law and this information about Facebook.
For context, Facebook's revenue in 2019 was 70 billions dollars. So a 5 billion dollar fine isn't nothing. Everyone can judge these bans and fines for themselves and judge whether there's a double standard though.
You seem upset because I said TikTok stores their data in Oracle, but that's what they said in 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/17/tech/tiktok-user-data-oracle/index.html But, as you say, it appears in 2018 they were storing their data in China, and presumably that continued up until mid-2022.
I'm not a shill, but I am a cynic who believes the government is acting on behalf of their corporate friends (US media companies) rather than on general principles. I have no love for China. I wanted regulation that applied equally to all US companies. If you don't want to talk to me, fine, I'll discuss my opinion with others; even so, you've shared a lot of important and concrete information here, so thanks again.
What prevents a few US Citizens from forming a totally new and independent company called BitDance and then ByteDance sells them TikTok for $3.99, and then BitDance hires a company from China to help consult on the algorithms they use.
All the public will have to do is type "tiktok.com" in their browser and their computer will connect to directly to servers in China. For now, they don't even need a VPN.
Then our politicians will start discussing a national firewall. We'll show that we're better than China by doing the same things China would do (/s).
It wont work either, there's so many legal tricks that can change the owner of a company without actually changing who controls the company.
"TikTok was evil and controlled by China, so we banned it. Oh look, here's a totally new website called TokTik owned by a US Citizen named Mr. ILoveChina who built a TikTok replacement in 15 minutes by hiring foreign consultants for 2 cents an hour."
I get you, but asking people to participate in democracy is not "weaponization", and I'm 100% okay with popular figures, even from other countries, telling people how to vote, because who doesn't tell people how to vote these days?
As an programmer, I want to think out loud about possible technical solutions.
I would have kept the understandable / hand-made algorithm as the core of search results. If you want to do fancy machine learning, do it on the periphery and we can include the machine output in our algorithm and weight its importance by hand. This would allow us to back out of the decision, because we could lower the weight of the machine learning output as needed.
It sounds like Google jumped strait to including the machine learning in the core algorithm though, and now with a decade of complexity in the core algorithm they are no longer able to go back without huge effort.
In general, it’s important to consider “is this a decision we can easily back out of?”.
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Though the way the leaker describes it makes it sound more like a 3rd person MOBA than a hero shooter....
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban ( arstechnica.com )
The United States be like, "Who are you voting for?" ( lemmy.ml )
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On today's episode of "This shouldn't be legal"......
US to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs next week ( www.arenaev.com )
Dell responds to return-to-office resistance with VPN, badge tracking, and color-coding of employees ( arstechnica.com )
After reversing its position on remote work, Dell is reportedly implementing new tracking techniques on May 13 to ensure its workers are following the company's return-to-office (RTO) policy, The Register reported today, citing anonymous sources....
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TikTok sues the US government over ban ( www.theverge.com )
TikTok is taking the US government to court.
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The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has released a video of its concept for a lunar base to be developed across the next couple of decades....
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30% of Children Ages 5-7 Are on TikTok ( www.honest-broker.com )
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Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO ( www.techspot.com )
ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US ( www.androidauthority.com )
Are you prepared for the ramifications of windows 10 EoL?
Next year Windows 10 goes End of Life. Microsoft will undoubtedly push windows 11 hard, but a lot of machines won’t support it leading to a few economic points of interest:...
YouTube Tests Showing Ads When You Pause a Video, Calls it ''Pause Ads'' ( www.androidauthority.com )
YouTube first spoke about pause ads last year when it started trialing them in select regions. At the time, the company said that when you pause a video, it will shrink, and an ad will appear next to it....
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Can an online library of classic video games ever be legal? ( arstechnica.com )
ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say ( www.reuters.com )
TikTok's CEO is feeling the pressure and users are freaking out ( www.businessinsider.com )
Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to Biden, who has already committed to signing it ( www.theverge.com )
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The Man Who Killed Google Search ( www.wheresyoured.at )
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