(Canadian founder in unrelated domain)
Where is the outrage then?
I am sure that Canadians will totally do this.
Well I guess if they want access to what those tech companies offer, then that is why.
But maybe they don't want access to the benefits of US tech companies. Thats understandable.
Just like I am perfectly fine with us not getting the "benefits" of tiktok.
The problem is solved in my book if there is a decoupling of these tech industries. Personally, I think the US tech industry is better and will provide the most benefits. But if other countries don't want that, thats fine by me as well.
1: Ban presence in the country
2: Add data provision requirements that personal information be stored in the country.
3: TikTok can’t meet requirements? Well that’s on them, guess they can’t operate here.
1. Show the current government is doing something after the CSE said the Canadian government has been breached by China's MSS [0]
2. A response to China for breaching Canada's systems.
3. A way to get a quick win to make bipartisan China hawks across the border in the US happy.
[0] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cse-cyber-threats-china-1.7...
ByteDance will keep no data in Canada, will not employ any Canadians, will not report any information to Canadian authorities, and will have no reason to comply with Canadian warrants or court orders. (Or even judgments.) At the same time, all Canadians can continue to use the app.
On balance, this seems bad for Canada and great for ByteDance.
It's hard to balance anything until they explain why they did it. So far they claim they aren't at liberty to share but claim it was bad enough to make a very unprecedented move like this.
... and Bytedance will not have any recourse if Canada bans the app.
Really not saying anything, but that's the line they are going with.
Canada has an extremely generous, massively exploited foreign worker program (it is actually one of the reasons this government is profoundly unpopular). ByteDance, like every other company, can unilaterally declare that they need to bring in an entirely foreign staff and get it rubber stamped. Given the company's alleged closeness with the party, using it as an easy vehicle to drop loads of intelligence workers of various sorts in Canada would be logical. Similarly China has a thing with running intimidation tactics against Chinese ex-pats living in Western countries.
TikTok is still going to collect that data, and it will be kept in China, far beyond Canada's reach. To remove concern over the data, I reckon you'd go about it backwards: Get rid of the app, which is up to no good. Keep the offices, so that they can be spied on or forced into transparency via the courts.
This makes the most sense if Canada expects (or has) Canadian troops secretly deployed somewhere. And that is one sobering thought.
I'm not sure I follow (maybe there's other details you know about that aren't in the article, or I missed it). I don't think there's anything preventing a Canadian company from paying a foreign company for ads? In theory I'd have to self-assess PST maybe but I order stuff (both physical and digital) from foreign companies with no Canadian presence on a pretty regular basis.
This has also been the catalyst behind the ban of TikTok in the US.
No it hasn’t. The war in Gaza is a foreign policy issue, which means most Americans tuned out from the start, and one that was a top issue for a very, very narrow slice of the electorate.
The sad truth is we’re aware of atrocities; we simply aren’t too bothered by them. (If you’re honest about yourself, you aren’t either. Nobody sane could be. There are too many of them, and they’re all burning furiously and it has been this was for a long time.) TikTok is about China, not the Middle East.
I remember when Trump had Canada re-ratify Nafta that Canada had to waive the right to require Canadian data stay in Canada.
I know Canada signed the agreement but I am not sure if that requirement was ever put in legislation or whether the requirement was universal or just for US-based companies.
I’m technically Gen-Z (but just barely) and this is something that really worries me. It’s become increasingly normal in recent times to share absolutely everything online but I’ve got a pretty grim feeling that this isn’t gonna end well. People don’t realize that the AI’s being trained on your data today will act as an internet history that you can never delete.
My point, winding as it may seem, is that this generations kids are bound to their social mediums just like the radio and then television generations were to theirs, for mainstream culture, and like the Beatniks, Hippies, Progressives(I'm not sure of the proper term here, but the non-internet groups of the 80s-00s, LGBTQA movement, the BDSM movement, etc) for the outliers. There are plenty of other subcultures out there that have waxed and waned as well, some of them crossing other boundaries, like the religious or politcal gaps in this country.
But for many of us that leaves us as the odd person out. Not being into the right hobbies or social activities or just having the wrong values and you soon find yourself distanced from those around you. The internet can give that back to you or help take it away, but in the long term the dossiers on each of us that being online produce is far less damaging than the lack of in-person connections many of us(not I) gain from social networks even as we give up our privacy and our opportunities for future dissent against the status quo, something that Eastern and Western societies alike are rapidly barreling towards an ultimatum on.
Assuming you're not YOLOing it, what will you give up for your life now, versus the lives you want to leave you to your descendants, or if you're not planning on your own and not a selfish jerk, for other people's descendants?
Footnote: This comment was written from an American point of view, although much of it still applies to our Canadian cousins and European/Australian brethren.
If everyone is spewing (sorry ... sharing) pics on TikTok, X and co then you won't stand out from the crowd. Unless those pics involve something too controversial.
I have an internet history that stretches back to Compuserve and I've always used my real name, which may or may not have been a good idea. Many years ago I decided not to give myself a silly pseudonym because I thought it would be futile and counter productive.
Cheers
wonky231You’re assuming people are consistent. You may have been photographed doing the same thing as all your peers, the fact that your photo can be highlighted unfavourable is ample ammo for proven lines of character attacks.
People are consistent but the media is not and the audience is far bigger than anyone can imagine. This is the Brave New World. We all know things are changing rather fast. Back in the day, I'd write a letter to someone - yes pen and ink (obviously being modern, I had a cartridge pen). Nowadays I pick up the phone and shout at the little twit who tries to hide behind email. OK we had phones back in the day but a call to say Australia (I'm in the UK) had a 2 second latency and a price in the £ per minute range. I remember the handover of pulse to tone dialing.
Nowadays we have an embarrassing array of communication methods and forums to chat and shout in and be heard all around the world (should anyone care to listen).
Yes you can be picked out and I suggest you be a little careful there but this is the world that we find ourselves within.
I was forced to read 1984 in 1984 when I was a lad. We also had Animal Farm and Brave New World on the reading and discussion list at school that year.
My doorbell looks at you (1)
Cheers
Noddy871
(1) It is on a VLAN that can't see the internet and Home Assistant looks at my doorbellGerdesj? Or Wonky231?
so then, under this premise, what changes things? a vote in congress
Therefore, surprise, surprise, Trudeau censors it now the day after the US election.
In May of this year, the Canadian government ordered two drone detection companies (Pegauni and Bluvec) to shut down using almost the exact same wording.
For comparison (this is actually quite interesting), here is the ByteDance release:
https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...
And here is the Bluvec/Pegauni release:
https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...
So, there’s no censorship but the releases are extremely similar to drone detection companies.
They should insist that the data doesn't leave their borders; this is the opposite of a ban. They're insisting on having all their user data leave.
Government being stupid. Imagine that.
Essentially, he's using China to distract from his own policy failings at home.
[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/trudeau-says-he-has-list-of-...
It’s not at all clear that that is even plausible. Also, the CSIS appears to be making very unequivocal statements in support of the policy approach.
Given this latest news about Tik Tok, i'd say it's more than likely, since this is hardly the biggest threat from China, especially if they've compromised members of the government.
You would think it would be an all out 5-alarm fire, and dealt with in the most expedient (and hopefully transparent) way possible. So that the public know they can trust all their government representatives.
> Also, the CSIS appears to be making very unequivocal statements in support of the policy approach.
The government has investigated itself, and found itself innocent, and following a divine path.
That kind of accusation needs some evidence.
I actually have no idea either.
https://therecord.media/canada-20-government-agencies-hacked...
I don't think it's a coincidence that this news broke a day after trump's election.
Edit
On a second read (it's been a long day) they're closing offices but not banning the app, my comment is worthless. But feel free to check out the genz subreddit and get appalled but what's being said there
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.
So, thanks for the charity, but I would rather prefer them to pay that as taxes.
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?
Our local billionaires goals are not in the same category.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Chinese social media is pretty vibrant with the exception that you can’t agitate for the fall of the government.
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.
I frequently see it mentioned in Chinese social media.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're not "at war" but that doesn't mean much.
Describing them as an enemy might be too far, but you certainly wouldn’t describe China as a friend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A far worse problem is when 3 things come into confluence: (1) a lack of transparency into what content is actually shown to any individual due to algorithmic feeds, (2) an infrastructure of human editorial teams with well-established capabilities to manually and discreetly adjust content emphasis at scale, and (3) an entity with known political goals that can tightly control the composition and behavior of those editorial teams, even at the expense of profitability.
Arguably (1) and (3) apply to X, as Musk's editorial tweaks have been anything but discreet. And only (2) and (3) apply to traditional broadcast media.
But TikTok is well documented to have all 3 stages of this process, and to have the teams in (3) highly influenceable by a foreign power. It's not unreasonable for TikTok to be singled out as a risk here.
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...
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/
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...
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.
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.
But since Bytedance doesn't dance at NSA's tune, different rules apply.
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.
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.
Second, if the company is as dangerous as they say, they are doing a huge disservice to citizens by withholding that information and handicapping our ability to make an informed choice about using the app.
Pushing their operations out of Canada also reduces their accountability footprint to subsequent lawsuits or legislation.
This is a weird half-measure and I have trouble making sense of it.
However that's not the endgame. I believe the current phase is simply gathering data and creating personal profiles accurate enough to imitate humans. With a bit of progress in AI those imitations will be used to create videos on the fly, tailored to each user. Those videos won't be limited by laws of physics or common sense, and this will give them an impressive insidious power.
As an European those double standards and American exceptionalism (the idea that common laws and rules do not apply to US) will never cease to bother and annoy me.
You do know that Canada is not the US, and most Canadians do not identify or want to be seen as American.
In any case, the solution here is glaringly obvious. If you think that American companies pose a national security threat, or that they serve as unofficial tools of an adversarial government remove them from the country using legal means, just like Canada did.
That's what worries me, the easiness with which we label one as enemy, and assume the other one being normal.
The issue here is that TikTok was allowing its offices to act on behalf of the CCP in opposition to Canadian interests. If we discover Google is running anti Canadian CIA ops we would have an issue with that as well.
The difference is presumably that Canada is happy to have google collect data since google is happy to cooperate with CSIS.
A big part of that is how the media is used to push a particular narrative. Every US tech company plays ball with the US government and moves in lockstep with US foreign policy.
The threat of Tiktok (to Western governments) is that allows users to see things that other platforms bury, downrank, outright block or otherwise censor.
A big example of this was the train derailment in East Palestine, OH [2] last year. I reember for at least a week seeing things about the chemical spill, the evacuations and the smoke from the burn (which was visible from space) and I saw absolutely nothing on mainstream media.
You see this in the last year where what's happening on the Middle East manages to get out on Tiktok in a way it really doesn't on IG, Youtube or Facebook [3]. Information simply cannot be tolerated to move as freely as this, hence the scare campaign about Chinese control of Tiktok.
That's why you don't see any effort to, say, have a data protection regime. The goal is to control what you're allowed to see.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/east-palestine-ohio-train-derail...
[3]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
For too long these foreign companies have been "shaping public opinion" - to quote a sibling comment here, who I think accurately sums up at least some of the reasoning behind this kind of development.
In case there's some ambiguity here - I am being sarcastic. I hope Ireland doesn't do that. I have strong issues with some of the above platforms and companies, but governments getting involved like this is nothing to be cheered.
that said, banning their operations appears to remove any legal leverage the govt might have with the company while still dealing with the app being installed everywhere, which seems clumsy. with less than a year left in office the govt probably doesn't have any remaining runway for strategy, so this may just be posturing. there are a lot of ways to look at it.
cynically I might speculate there could be a domestic surveillance/interception rationale for making them close their operations, as the app is a full communications platform and if it backhauls to a domestic regional data centre, the federal agencies need warrants to do interception and would have to give their monitoring tech to the chinese company on their premises, whereas if the traffic is international, they can do mass interception using their existing mandates.
The public will probably never find out the scope of ByteDance’s operations in Canada for the Chinese government, but if it follows the same arc as other Chinese operations in Canada, I expect it is far more pervasive and frightening than one might expect. This isn’t about the app. This is about the offices.