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Facebook China Government

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington's Fears About TikTok (marketwatch.com) 97

Facebook spent more money on lobbying than any single company in the first half of 2020, That's according to figures cited by the Wall Street Journal from the Center for Responsive Politics.

But that's not all they did. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also began personally delivering a message last fall that TikTok "doesn't share Facebook's commitment to freedom of expression, and represents a risk to American values and technological supremacy." That was a message Zuckerberg hammered behind the scenes in meetings with officials and lawmakers during the October trip and a separate visit to Washington weeks earlier, according to people familiar with the matter. In a private dinner at the White House in late October, Zuckerberg made the case to President Donald Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook, some of the people said.

Zuckerberg discussed TikTok specifically in meetings with several senators, according to people familiar with the meetings. In late October, Sen. Tom Cotton, R- Ark. — who met with Zuckerberg in September — and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote a letter to intelligence officials demanding an inquiry into TikTok. The government began a national-security review of the company soon after, and by the spring, Trump began threatening to ban the app entirely. This month he signed an executive order demanding that TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance Ltd., divest itself of its U.S. operations.

Few tech companies have as much to gain as Facebook from TikTok's travails, and the social-media giant has taken an active role in raising concerns about the popular app and its Chinese owners.

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Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington's Fears About TikTok

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  • I smell anti-trust (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Sunday August 23, 2020 @10:38PM (#60434329) Homepage

    Getting the government to ban your competitors is bona fide anti-competitive behavior. Usually, I'm quick to jump to the defense of these social media shitbags because technically, anyone can register a domain, plug a $35 Raspberry Pi into their router and launch the next big thing, but clearly - there's some dirty dealings going on behind closed doors.

    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday August 23, 2020 @10:54PM (#60434357)

      Getting the government to ban your competitors is bona fide anti-competitive behavior.

      Indeed. But the root problem is our government doing the bidding of corporate donors.

      The solution is to make the government less corrupt, because the alternative of making capitalists less greedy isn't going to work.

      • The solution is to make the government less corrupt

        May I be so presumptuous as to assume you plan to start at the beginning?

      • by khchung ( 462899 )

        The solution is to make the government less corrupt, because the alternative of making capitalists less greedy isn't going to work.

        Making the government less corrupt means making politicians less greedy, you think that's easier than making capitalists less greedy?

        • Wrong currency, they seek power. Its not money its power. Any power without the expense of money is just as valuable to them. The only way to weed out corruption in government (when its power that corrupted them) is Term limits.

          • How would term limits help? So corporations have to back a string of puppets instead of just one, and those puppets have to cash in while they can, knowing they only have a term or two before they get kicked out, no matter how popular they are - you think that's going to result in a smaller percentage of puppets in power?

            Meanwhile, term limits mean that any (more) honest politician who managed to get (re)elected by actually working for their constituents will still get kicked out fairly quickly, giving the

            • Consider - term limits were imposed on the President in order to prevent the wildly popular Franklin D. Roosevelt from being able to run for a fourth term. That was NOT done for the good of the American people.

              I think there are/were some Japanese American citizens who would argue that preventing another FDR term was a good thing. And probably some of the Jewish American relatives of Jews who tried to flee Europe ahead of the Holocaust but were prevented by FDR's policies might agree it was a good thing. And if you were a white American in the late 1920's married to a person of Japanese heritage, you might not be a big fan of FDR's Op-Ed pieces, especially his tirades against mixing races. Some Italian Americans w

          • Wrong currency, they seek power. Its not money its power. Any power without the expense of money is just as valuable to them. The only way to weed out corruption in government (when its power that corrupted them) is Term limits.

            Money and power tend to go hand-in-hand and are often interchangeable. People both seek money for the power it gives them, and seek power for the money it can provide. In this context differentiating between them is a red herring.

            But I agree with your comment about term limits - and the term shouldn't apply to a specific position, it should apply to political office period. Just finished a term as mayor? Sorry, you can't run for governor for at least two years. And you can't be a lobbyist either.

            • by kqs ( 1038910 )

              I don't agree that term limits will help. An assumption of term limits is that people don't start out greedy for power; they get that way over time, so we want to capture them at the beginning of the cycle. Instead, term limits mean that we get just as many greedy people, but now they have no incentive to compromise or to make things better long-term; just short-term fixes since they'll be gone before they have to pay for their decisions.

              Improving campaign finance should help. Fixing gerrymandering will

              • All good points. I would add that having very strict, very low campaign spending limits might help, as it would give a much wider variety of people from different economic brackets an opportunity to hold office. Levelling the playing field would likely result in representatives who actually represent their constituents because of shared similarities, problems, interests, and goals. As it is, politicians usually represent the corporate sector, because that's where they acquire the big bucks and connections n

          • The solution to making politicians more honest, is to make them more answerable to the people. Towards that goal, I've been working on the idea of "Continuous Democracy" to constantly re-allocate power to legislators based on public satisfaction with their performance.

            For example - have a fresh "pseudo-election" every month (or even week), where each citizen gets to choose which sitting Representative they wish to back. Then, whenever Congress gets together to vote on something, rather than counting one

            • I also think that a very similar system would make a better system of government, but I think it should be even more volatile, more of an optionally-direct democracy. For any issue you should have the option to vote directly or assign your vote to a representative, who can be anybody, but anyone who wants to be a representative has to set their vote for an early deadline in order to prevent "kamikaze politics" - if they don't, their vote on the issue is spoiled and everyone who assigned them as a representa

              • That's actually basically where I started (right down to the name), and it would be a relatively easy extension in principle.

                However, in practice it would greatly increase the logistical overhead (especially if you wanted to maintain anonymous ballots), and I suspect that only a small percentage of people would want to vote on individual bills and other actions directly anyway. So, basically a great increase in cost, with only marginal benefit under normal circumstances. And those unusual circumstances -

                • Good points, but I think there needs to be some protection against kamikaze politics (or you could call it a "political exit scam"), these things already happen sometimes in the real world, and lowering the stakes and costs of starting a political career could massively worsen the problem. Such scams could also cause people to lose trust in the system as a whole, so relying on the problem to self-correct in the long term might instead cause people to want to abandon the system entirely and go back to someth

                • I should also note that anti-exit-scam features would also serve to prevent voters from being unpleasantly surprised by their representatives' choice after it's too late, even if nothing nefarious is being done.

                  • I agree. In fact, that'd work wonderfully whether or not people can vote directly on the issues - Representatives publicly lock in their votes on bills, but backers aren't counted until after the next popular vote is confirmed. Of course you would also want to allow for for emergency actions... perhaps count current backers when needed to pass something urgent as a temporary measure, which will be automatically repealed if it doesn't still pass after the next popular vote.

          • by HiThere ( 15173 )

            Term limits didn't have that effect in Caif. What it did was cut a few capable and popular corrupt politicians out of office. The replacements were equally corrupt, but less capable and less popular. And did less good to the voters.

            The two roots of US government corruption are lobbyists and the cost of electioneering. It might be possible to do something about lobbyists...but it would require the current politicians to agree to it. The costs of electioneering seem inherent in campaigns over a large num

            • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

              or we could do it like jury duty. One day you go out to the mailbox and open your mail and go "Fuck! Ive got Senator this quarter".

            • I just read about this. Granted its the Sun, but holy fuck...

              https://www.the-sun.com/news/u... [the-sun.com]

              Shit like this is why social media just needs to burn to the ground. Who gets their sexual jollies doing this??? Just thinking of the victims of those camps makes my skin crawl. For someone to make light of this is just beyond sadistic. Its pure evil if evil had a name.

              Burn it all to the ground.

      • Its not money, its power. The only way to get rid of that particular type of corruption is term limits. Obummer showed the world just how popular a tool GroupThink can be. He was the first politician here to use social media to paint his narrative. Trump, China, Russia, they just refined the process. A few more cycles and it may just get worse. It empowers the corporation as much as it does the power addicted politicians. It is a drug dealer-junkie relationship. If we do not insist on a ban of major politic

      • Well, I thought you were Americans! So isn't tyour usual solution of "shoot the thing" going to work against the capitalis plague? I'm inconsolable! (I only run in a GUI shell? ;D)

    • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      technically, anyone can register a domain, plug a $35 Raspberry Pi into their router and launch the next big thing

      No, many users (and increasing numbers) are stuck behind CGN so you can't host anything...

      • No, many users (and increasing numbers) are stuck behind CGN so you can't host anything...

        Sure, not everyone can host at home and it wouldn't take much popularity before you outgrow a homebrew server, but my point was that the tools to build a better mousetrap have never been more accessible and affordable. Back in ye olden days (the early 90s), I ran my own dial-up BBS. That required buying a dedicated computer, a rather expensive (at the time) modem, and having the local telco install a dedicated phone line. Also, the proprietary software the system ran was ostensibly to have a registration

        • Also, dynamic DNS is a thing. And if the service blocks dynamic IPs, like stupid asshole Google does not alloe mail servers on there, you can still get a fixed IP at most providers. If all else fails, a VPN with a fixed IP helps, or rent a minimalist server just to do the relaying.

      • by green1 ( 322787 )

        That said, a VPS that is more powerful than that Pi, hosted in an actual data centre, and with unlimited bandwidth, can be had for less than $100/yr. In terms of starting a company, that's peanuts.

        Unfortunately that ignores the real barriers to entry which aren't the hardware or the network connection. Social media by definition requires that lots of people be on it before it's useful, it doesn't matter if you have a site that is thousands of times better than facebook, if the people you want to talk to are

        • by green1 ( 322787 )

          Oh, and you have to do all of this while your competition actively lobbies lawmakers to make your new product ILLEGAL.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Sunday August 23, 2020 @11:59PM (#60434467) Homepage

      Facebook investors watch the fuck out. The only reason to do it because Facebook was losing a lot of customer engagement time to tiktok, enough to make that huckster zuckerberg panic and go out with that lie to reduce the damage being done to facebook engagement time, REAL DAMAGE, enough to make the slimy little liar run out their in a panic with the first lie he could come up with.

      The idea that his real competitors will pick it up, even worse for the scummy bastard, kind of funny. Now we know why they want to buy tiktok it was taking away enough facebook engagement time to make facebook panic, obviously facebook investors are completely unaware of this because it should crash facebooks share price.

    • You must have a bad sniffer. You can only advertise on Tik Tok with little videos. You can advertise on Facebook/Instagram with all sorts of things. We also have Google, Disney/ABC, Twitter, and other ad platforms. Facebook isn't anywhere near a monopoly.
      • Because Twitter and Disney+ are competitors to Facebook, just as John Deere and JCB are competitors to Ferrari and McLaren.

        They make totally different products which do totally different things.

        You cannot, in any meaningful sense, talk of Facebook having competitors by listing things that aren't the same.

        • by DogDude ( 805747 )
          They're all advertising platforms. I advertise on all of them. What's the difference?
          • by Alcari ( 1017246 )
            Newspapers, comicbooks, skywriting and hollywood productplacement are all advertising platforms, but you really can't say they're in direct competition.
            • Hey, I get my comedy news from sky writers, you insensitive clod!

            • by DogDude ( 805747 )
              People see different ads in different places. I advertise on FB/IG and those people see those ads there. Twitter people see the Twitter ads. People on the web see the Google and Disney/ABC ads. They all all different platforms. Facebook has a monopoly on Facebook, but that's their platform. So, there's no monopoly to speak of.

              If Facebook were the only place to advertise on the Internet, then sure, I'd say we have a problem, but we're nowhere near that.
          • John Deere, JCB, Ferrari and McLaren all make wheeled vehicles. They all have wheels. What's the difference?

    • I don't think cheaper hardware is the solution. If it was, then Moore's Law would have already solved all our problems. I would characterize the "main" underlying problem as a crooked system where the biggest crooks bribe the cheapest politicians to keep on rigging on. That's "rigging" as in rigging the game to help the corporate cancers continue getting bigger.

      My solution approach starts from the philosophy of my sig. Choice is good. Competition and freedom and all that jazz. So tax companies more heavily

    • Or that an international bully is in control of the data being farmed and the content that is delivered. CCP is ultimately the Parent Company of TikTok and all other companies. This is not like any other Americas or Euro company. FB didnâ(TM)t lobby India or Taiwan.
  • by bonedonut ( 4687707 ) on Sunday August 23, 2020 @10:47PM (#60434343)
    shortly after Trump announced that he was going after Tik Tok, Instagram announced their Tik-Tok rival, 'Reels'. Since Facebook owns Instagram, this kinda makes more sense now.
  • by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Sunday August 23, 2020 @10:59PM (#60434367)
    I told that some time ago, all that nonsense with Huawei and TikTok is just a sign of the US industry flailing around in panic. It turns out that it's losing its dominant position of the global innovation juggernaut.

    So all the tales of "free market" and "competition" went out of the window immediately and the US started doing what it does best: trying to destroy things.
    • by U0K ( 6195040 )
      Depressing, but it is nothing out of the ordinary. (That doesn't make it OK)

      The same thing goes for free speech essentially. If its your speech or you agree with it then it's good and censorship is bad. If it's not your speech and you don't agree with it bad and censorship is whatever.

      Now there are exceptions to the rule where people really care about a free market with competition and free speech for all, but those are rarely elected into any position of power because in our "either you're with us or y
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Sure, but it's also all self inflicted.

      The US could've been a global leader on green technologies like electric cars and the leadership could've pushed this with strong emissions standards.

      Instead the likes of Trump weakens emissions standards to allow car manufacturers more short term profits. That's great until you realise the rest of the world has innovated to meet their touch emissions standards and US designs are now illegal in many countries in the world due to their inefficiency and so the market for

    • You must be part of the CCP troll army. Your government is racist, homophobic, Misogynistic, and more. You support slavery, police brutality, censorship, racketeering, genocide and so many more horrific ideals. Yet you get a pass from the wealthy that have invested in your honey pot scam.
      • I couldn't have made a better parody comment to ridicule your nutjobbery, if I tried.

        Thr sad part is that it is really hard for us, to not think this is what typical Americans are like.

        But hey, keep being in covercompensating denial! That way you won't see it coming and will be helpless to stop it. :D

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • True, about China, and fuck them, ... But: LOL. What do you think lobbyism is?
        Your US government literally is a corporate oligarchy. You are not even a citizen! Corporations are america's ctizens, with voting rights! You are just the livestock and you only get to vote between ones, pre-selected by corporations... after being told what to want with your imaginary free will, via partisaning propaganda.

        China wishes it had a total control of the minds of its livestock as advanced, natural, casual and all-encomp

      • by Cyberax ( 705495 )

        Chinese social media and Huawei are controlled via state directives to support the CCP's interests... Here in the West, governments just bicker about how much to tax them;they never see them as a instrument for greater national interests.

        And in the US it's vice versa, the government is owned by companies! They scratch each others' backs, like Cisco adding backdoors for the NSA.

        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          And both are dialectical variations of Mussolini's fascism. And will tend towards identical behavior. And neither is currently a pure fascism, they're got some portions with other goals. Possibly that's an enduring state. E.g., both exhibit racial prejudice, and prejudice against other minority groups, that a pure fascist state would not exhibit, but which is a traditional tool of authoritarian demagogues.

          It's a question in my mind of whether a pure fascist state would be stable. I can't decide, but I s

    • You think industry is flailing?

      More like a flailing president...

      American companies are doing fine.

  • Torn (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday August 23, 2020 @11:04PM (#60434371) Journal

    I don't trust Xi, I don't trust Zuckerberg, and I don't trust Trump. Is there any real evidence TikTok did something sinister?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by dstwins ( 167742 )

      No.. that's the thing..

      There is ZERO evidence they did anything inappropriate.

      Much of the supposed "evidence" comes from them scraping clipboards from user phones.. (something that Facebook, Twitter, and others all do FYI).

      So basically they are being penalized for daring to do what other firms are doing.. but having the gall to be Chinese while doing it.

      From a government security perspective, quite frankly none of these apps should be on government devices/phones (facebook, google, twitter, etc...) because

    • by tokul ( 682258 )

      > Is there any real evidence TikTok did something sinister?
      Their users tarnished pristine election campaign for some current government official in Tulsa.

    • According to Wikipedia, [wikipedia.org] normal CCP censorship stuff.

      moderators had been instructed to suppress posts created by users deemed "too ugly, poor, or disabled" for the platform, and to censor political speech in livestreams, punishing those who harmed "national honor" or broadcast streams about "state organs such as police" with bans from the platform....TikTok suspended the account of another user whose viral video called attention to human rights of the Uyghurs.....CEO Zhang Yiming issued a letter in 2018 stating that his company would "further deepen cooperation" with the ruling Chinese Communist Party to promote its policies.

      Also security that is about as good as Zoom's (iow really bad) and data collection that is as bad as Google's (iow really bad).

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by teg ( 97890 )

      I don't trust Xi, I don't trust Zuckerberg, and I don't trust Trump. Is there any real evidence TikTok did something sinister?

      The real problem Trump has with TikTok is that TikTok got in the news because youth organising there made his Tulsa rally a failure [cbsnews.com].

    • Apple discovered TilTok key logging and call logging while not app. You are very simplistic if you canâ(TM)t see the threat of a government collecting all info on all the population of its adversaries while not allowing its citizens to consume non controlled foreigner news aggregator apps ( FB, Twitter, Quora, Reddit, YouTube....)
    • Like probably most people, just go with Tiktok being useless, and harmful in terms of what else kids could be doing instead (of being addicted to attention whoring). So I am not opposing it being killed.

      I am opposing its equivalent opponents (like Facebook) too, though. So my hope is that I can be the Brave Little Taylor who throws rocks at one giant so that he thinks it was the other giant, and vice versa, until they kill each other.

      Hey Facebook: Tiktok totally is your deadly enemy!
      Hey Tiktok: Facebook tot

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Hmmmmmm ( 6216892 ) on Monday August 24, 2020 @12:23AM (#60434499)

    Crony capitalism is an economic system in which businesses thrive not as a result of risk, but rather as a return on money amassed through a nexus between a business class and the political class. This is often achieved by using state power rather than competition in managing permits, government grants, tax breaks, or other forms of state intervention over resources where the state exercises monopolist control over public goods, for example, mining concessions for primary commodities or contracts for public works.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • by edis ( 266347 )

      Getting businessman to run the state is something, Wikipedia isn't ready for.

  • by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Monday August 24, 2020 @01:32AM (#60434607)

    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington’s Fears About TikTok

    Aug. 23, 2020

    When Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg delivered a speech about freedom of expression in Washington, D.C., last fall, there was also another agenda: to raise the alarm about the threat from Chinese tech companies and, more specifically, the popular video-sharing app TikTok.

    Tucked into the speech was a line pointing to Facebook’s rising rival: Mr. Zuckerberg told Georgetown students that TikTok doesn’t share Facebook’s commitment to freedom of expression, and represents a risk to American values and technological supremacy.

    That was a message Mr. Zuckerberg hammered behind the scenes in meetings with officials and lawmakers during the October trip and a separate visit to Washington weeks earlier, according to people familiar with the matter.

    In a private dinner at the White House in late October, Mr. Zuckerberg made the case to President Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook, some of the people said.

    Mr. Zuckerberg discussed TikTok specifically in meetings with several senators, according to people familiar with the meetings. In late October, Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.)—who met with Mr. Zuckerberg in September—and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) wrote a letter to intelligence officials demanding an inquiry into TikTok. The government began a national-security review of the company soon after, and by the spring, Mr. Trump began threatening to ban the app entirely. This month he signed an executive order demanding that TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance Ltd., divest itself of its U.S. operations.

    Few tech companies have as much to gain as Facebook from TikTok’s travails, and the social-media giant has taken an active role in raising concerns about the popular app and its Chinese owners.

    In addition to Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal outreach and public statements about Chinese competition, Facebook has established an advocacy group, called American Edge, that has begun running ads extolling U.S. tech companies for their contributions to American economic might, national security and cultural influence. And Facebook overall in the first half of this year spent more on lobbying than any other single company, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2018, by contrast, it ranked eighth among companies, the center’s data show.

    It couldn’t be determined exactly what role Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments have played in the government’s handling of TikTok. A spokeswoman for Sen. Cotton said his office doesn’t comment on the senator’s meetings.

    Asked about the dinner, a White House spokesman said the administration “is committed to protecting the American people from all cyber related threats to critical infrastructure, public health and safety, and our economic and national security.”

    Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said Mr. Zuckerberg has no recollection of discussing TikTok at the dinner.

    The CEO’s comments in Washington about the Chinese app were tied into Facebook’s campaign to blunt antitrust and regulatory threats by emphasizing Facebook’s importance to U.S. tech pre-eminence, he said.

    “Our view on China has been clear: we must compete,” Mr. Stone said in a written statement. “As Chinese companies and influence have been growing so has the risk of a global internet based on their values, as opposed to ours.”

    In an employee meeting this month, Mr. Zuckerberg called the executive order against TikTok unwelcome, because the global harm of such a move could outweigh any short-term gain to Facebook. The remarks were earlier reported by BuzzFeed News.

    TikTok has gained more than 100 million U.S. users and become the biggest threat to Facebook’s dominance of social media, as the app’s blend of danc

  • I pledge allegiance to the big data overlords of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under Zuk
  • What a team!
    A psychopath and his nutjob horse.
    Almost as great as Darth Cheney and his funny monkey! ;)

  • Zuckerberg has violated every espionage law on the books and yet the US justice department has not arrested him. FaceBook collects private personal information about people who hold Secret and Top Secret clearance in sensitive national defense jobs, tracks their location, and then sells the information to our enemies. FaceBook is an espionage tool and threat to our national security. There are only two possible explanations. One is the justice department does not prosecute billionaires no matter how man
  • by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Monday August 24, 2020 @10:20AM (#60435807)

    Sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reason.

  • Tik Tok collects data all the time. It collects way more data than Facebook and other social media apps.

    Honestly, I would never install it on my phone and I have told my kids not to use it. It is frightening what that app is doing without the users knowing.

    And don't play the "users should be aware" card. Play the "reality of what users know about their apps collecting data" card.

    • by kfh227 ( 1219898 )

      I should add that it;'s one thing for kids to use it.

      Anyone that needs to secure their data should NOT USE IT! All hte immature 40 year olds with top secret clearences .... those types!

  • Sounds like Zuckerberg was behaving like a scammer who calls you and tells you there's virus on your computer and you have to install this software that they point you to to fix it. And Congress is the person who doesn't understand technology too well and does what he ways.
  • I am shocked, simply SHOCKED that a huge tech company, facebook no less, would act in an anti-competitive manner.

    Seriously though, I've been suspicious of this since the start. Facebook has a great position to control the narrative on most anything, certainly it could be used in a situation like this to cut off their competition.

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