Signal has been blocked by Venezuela and Russia
> “We’re aware of reports that access to Signal has been blocked in some countries,” Signal says [https://x.com/signalapp/status/1821979304626155930]. If you are affected by the blocks, the company recommends turning on its censorship circumvention feature. (NetBlocks reports that this feature lets Signal “remain usable” in Russia.)
Does ByteDance publish TikTok’s transmission protocol to demonstrate transparency?
Asking the person you’re debating to look up your own citations is certainly one way to converse. But ok, let’s go for it.
In Aug 2023, Forbes published an article describing the proposal of “unfettered access” you referred to:
www.forbes.com/…/draft-tiktok-cfius-agreement/
In June 2024, the Washington Post reported that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) turned down the proposal and includes some broad reporting as to why:
www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/…/ar-BB1nfAcE
The article isn’t very technical, but it mentions some interesting responsibility angles that the US wouldn’t want to back themselves into:
The second article explains this somewhat, but I’m admittedly painting some conjecture on top regarding how a malicious actor could behave. I’ve got no evidence that Byte Dance is actually doing any of that.
But going back to the “influence the public” angle, I’m struggling to see how different TikTok is versus NHK America (Japan’s American broadcasts) or RT (American media from the Russian standpoint) aside from being wildly more successful and popular. But I guess that’s all there is to it.
I’d prefer our leaders also be transparent with us regarding their concerns about TikTok. The reductive “because China!!1!” argument is not compelling on its own.
For the past four years the Biden administration and TikTok have been negotiating a deal to resolve national security concerns posed by the Chinese-owned app. Here’s a look inside a draft of the deal.
As of our latest Android release, Signal builds are reproducible. Reproducible builds help to verify that the source code in our GitHub repository is the exact source code used to build the compiled Signal APK being distributed through Google Play.
Well, one is used as a massive government data collection tool, another does the same thing for private corporations and is profitable.
Profit. That’s why many refuse to make it standard.
not “misinformation, social engineering, and mass data collection platform masquerading as a social media platform”
Yeah and what do you think Russia for example sees almost every American “communiction platform” as? And it’s not as if they don’t have a reason, like every american platform that is every other major social media that isn’t tiktok is censored, controlled and swarming with bots doing narrative control and spam. It really is the height of arrogance and hypocrisy to say that TiKTok is the real pressing problem. I don’t even use TikTok, but I find it so fucking disgusting how every “freespeech freedomlover” comes out of the woodwork to demand it’s shutting it down just to enforce American social media monopoly over the world. Even if Bytedance has bent over backwards to prove that there isn’t any misconduct (of things that US based tech companies are routinely mandated to do for US gov, state department and the intelligence services), because it’s only bad if somebody else does the excact same thing to us as we would have done to them.
I’d say social media platforms are an entire different beast.
Facebook is not the same as Facebook Messenger for instance.
tiktok is a platform to share information and communicate, yes
which is why the french government banned it in Kanaky (“new caledonia”) during the protests there, as it was a tool of communication used by the protesters
Pro-independence Kanak parties use the name (la) Kanaky
I kinda disagree - that’s not to say that they don’t usually do so for illegitimate reasons (or that these bans are legitimate), but there’s plenty of valid reasons why a government would want/need to ban a platform
X, for example, has been giving the UK a whole lot of good reasons why they may wish to consider it (restoring the accounts of people like Tommy Robinson, allowing misinformation, the owner of the platform himself actively spreading that misinformation)
Poe’s Law
Do you really not see that this is literally just “we are the good guys so it is ok if we do it”?
“Misinformation” is whatever those in power decide to be such, whether it can be found on Signal or X or wherever, and whether the ones deciding it are in power in the UK, the US, India, Germany, Venezuela, or Russia.
Several countries have recently blocked Signal, leaving their residents without a trusted and safe place to communicate. To help in this situation, Signal provides a built-in censorship circumvention feature and also includes support for a simple TLS proxy that can bypass these blocks in many cir...
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