Cool, now let’s ban Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and every single social media platform that does the same exact thing as TikTok. I have never used TikTok, but this is fucking bullshit. Facebook literally ruined elections and lives around the world.
Only the US is allowed to ruin elections.
Technically true of any country: only China is allowed to influence CCP elections, only Russia is allowed to fix Russian elections, only the US is allowed to ruin US elections…
They still try to influence each other’s ones, but they aren’t openly “allowed” to…
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Except that I did learn about that in high school.
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Lets drop this whole “lesser of two evils” thing […] it certainly doesnt work with comparing governments.
I think it is deeply unwise to take that to heart.
I grew up deep in the American Midwest, surrounded by Evangelical-leaning Christian fundamentalism. Out there, committing one sin was considered as bad as committing a hundred (see also: Matt 5, James 2:10). They dropped the whole “lesser of two evils” thing, and you know what happened? They treated gays the same way they treated murderers, because the two sins were equally easy to condemn. They put rapists in pulpits because in their eyes, molesting a child was just as easy to forgive as ogling an adult.
When you tell people to reject nuance in ethics, that there is no “greater evil,” you remove 90% of their moral compass. They become pliable and easily manipulated by whoever can seize power or respect (see also: Trump).
Every person has flaws, and every system, government, or ideology created by people is likewise flawed. If we refuse to judge the severity of those flaws, refuse acknowledge that there are lesser evils in government, then we claim our own ideologies are no better than fascism – after all, both have their sins, and we just claimed that all sins are equal.
This comment was brought to you by the US State Department.
Tell me, how many countries’ governments has China knocked over in the last century as compared to the US CIA?
How many countries did the US drop bombs on in the last decade, and how many did China?
It’s not even close. In terms of physical violence the US is the world’s #1 exporter.
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The history speaks for itself. China is less of a threat to other countries in the world than the USA is. Your idea that they’re some international boogeyman that’s going to take over the entire world and doom humanity is just you repeating “China bad and scary” State Department propaganda.
Even with China’s human rights record being what it is, they don’t export war across the entire world.
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Why would the American government ban companies based under their own jurisdiction? They can make use of all those other companies just like the Chinese government can make use of TikTok.
Sounds good.
the internet was a mistake
I thought that US was the country of freedom, but turns out that the freedom is just to racists, nazis and for them to fuck up other countries.
That’s an interesting take from this whole thing
Why do you think they are Banning tiktok?
Because China is collecting information from millions of US citizens. Plus they control what the US citizens can see and interact with. US has no control over Tik Tok and that scares them. Why are Facebook and X not banned? Because Facebook and X are US based have to comply with the US regulators and share every collected information with the government.
You do know that the overwhelming majority of investment and control in TikTok is already based in the US, and the only Chinese national involved with the app was the creator who already cashed out and retired a long time ago?
Tik Tok is owned by a Chinese company from China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance Data is collected in China. Not sure what you mean. Why do you think US tries to block Tik Tok?
60% of ByteDance is owned by global investors, most of which are based in the US. 20% is owned by the original co-founders, none of whom have any ties to the CCP, and the remaining 20% is owned by employees, almost all of which are in California. The overwhelming majority of the company is already owned by Americans. This entire thing is all about trying to silence a source of information that challenges and refutes government interests, particularly where Palestine is concerned.
None of this changes the fact that the operational headquarter of the company is in China and that they collect data that is send to China. Therefore China gets all the data from US citizen, regardless of who the investor is.
Except the operational headquarters is not in China. LA and Singapore are the operational headquarters of TikTok. I think you are conflating ByteDance and TikTok as the same entity, and that is not the case, and quite on purpose. TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance, and from almost all accounts the LA based CEO makes decisions. They are not sending data to China, they are sending it to Singapore. There are alleged cases of ByteDance employees having access, but nothing has been proven (not saying it won’t be, but we can’t operate on speculation). Also, data brokers exist. China can get “all the data from US citizens” outside of TikTok.
I am not sure if you are oversimplifying on purpose, but if not you should probably look closer at the corporate structure of TikTok instead of spreading incorrect info.
TikTok itself is owned by ByteDance, but is incorporated in the Caymans. It has corporate entities in Singapore, Australia, the US, and the UK. The CEO is US based. Data is collected in Singapore, not China. There is a little evidence someone at ByteDance has access to the info, but according to official statements and documents they do not. But, even if they are lying, China can still buy that information from data brokers just like the US Government does right now.
We need privacy protection laws, not arbitrary bans of apps that do the same thing as US social media apps
We need privacy protection laws, not arbitrary bans of apps that do the same thing as US social media apps
The ban of the application is not to protect our privacy, otherwise they would ban US social media apps too.
The ban of the application is not to protect our privacy, otherwise they would ban US social media apps too.
That is exactly my point. The ban does nothing functional. It shouldn’t matter where the company is based, they should not be allowed to collect that data in the first place. This is at best a distraction from the fact the US continues to fund and supply genocide in Gaza or at worst an effort to stifle queer folks, dissenting voices, and non-corporate news.
the overwhelming majority of investment and control in TikTok
Let me stop you right there. The idea of “investment == control” is a capitalist fantasy, not a real-world thing.
Real world is:
- Preferred shares
- Veto power
- 99% worker owned (represented by the CCP) with 1% capitalist investor owned
…and other variations on who gets the control.
Because is Chinese. And that’s not what I think, it is what it is.
Or they will ban X and Im not aware?
Does the legislation also include penalties for Samsung for preinstalling TikTok on my fucking Smart TV and making the app non-removable ?
Who the hell would want to watch vertical videos on a smart tv??
Just mount the TV at a 90° angle. Problem solved.
Have you met the people of the land?
I think people that are very interested in TikTok largely overlap with the vertical video crazies :-)
Have you like, talked, to a teenager or early 20 year old at all during the last three years? Either you don’t understand the huge cultural impact tiktok has had for that age group, or you think every single person that age is a “vertical video crazy”.
, or you think every single person that age is a “vertical video crazy”.
Sounds about right to me ^
No. And they never will
I don’t understand why people get so upset about this. Yes, Google, Facebook, etc. hoard your data too. But there’s a big difference wether that data is hoarded domestically or by a foreign nation that is pretty blatant about their industry espionage and political propaganda. Yes, the US do it too. But you really can’t blame a country for protecting it’s interests, be they ethical or not.
As a user and not as a government agent, why should I care? If anything, having a foreign government hoard my data and spy on me is better than the government that actually has jurisdiction over me. If I were posting things critical of my own government I would rather have a foreign government hoard that data than my own government. There’s a lot more of a chance that US data hoarding leads to action against US citizens than Chinese data hoarding.
I don’t see how this benefits average Americans in any way. This helps the government and corporations.
It’s not just about data hoarding, though. It’s also about a social media company having considerable influence over the messaging seen by a very large part of the voting population.
Yes, it’s no different to other social media companies, but with one exception: the company in question is subject to the whims of the Chinese government. Something the US government is clearly fearful of.
The domestic social media companies are at the whims of the billionaire class which I would argue is just as bad for voter influence. Neither side wants you to vote in your best interest.
Yep, agreed, but at least the government of the day can try and reign them in with legislation and regulation. Not saying they are (or will), but they’d have the option, if they had the balls to do it.
If I were posting things critical of my own government I would rather have a foreign government hoard that data than my own government.
At first glance, that would be true… but beware, since either will be happy to throw you under the bus whenever it helps their agenda.
If, for example, China was to hoard data about voters for A, B, and C… whenever they wanted to favor B voters, they could “leak” the most compromising data about A and C so the US government would take action… or if they wanted to wreak havoc and favor D, they could leak all data about everyone.
A much simpler case, is that having more data on more people, allows them to better tailor and target misinformation campaigns that benefit them.
So really, any kind of hoarding has a similar chance of getting acted upon.
As a simple user, you are right that you shouldn’t care much about who hoards data about you, your main care should be about anyone hoarding that data at all.
Personally, I just find it really disappointing. This Tik Tok issue could have been an opportunity to improve privacy and reduce data collection across the board. Instead, it’s a surgical strike in order to not disrupt American tech companies doing the same thing.
What will happen is that Bytedance will sell the US Tik Tok to an American VC firm and it will continue data hoarding as before. This time, the US government will be getting the data instead of the CCP. I’d rather nobody got it.
You can absolutely blame a country for doing that actually. What kind of argument is that? People shouldn’t be upset when their government does something unethical as long as it’s “protecting its interests”?
That’s not quite what I meant.
The argument I most often see and is that TikTok should stay because Facebook and Google are just as bad. That’s stupid because foreign espionage is obviously worse than domestic espionage to any government.
If your argument is that the TikTok ban is good and Facebook and Google should be next because of the similar practises then I’m 100% with you.
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There is also a massive difference in user experience in China vs abroad, to the point where they might as well be two fundamentally different apps. Even just things like time limits for children exist by default in China and are unavailable elsewhere, which kind of feels like an admission that they only take things like platform safety seriously at home.
As someone who doesn’t live in the US:
The data from google and facebook is hoarded by a foreign nation (the US is basically a quasi-democratic plutocracy which also has extremely extensive surveillance both legally and agencies caught working in grey areas) to boost surveillance and that is pretty blatant about their espionage and political propaganda. We get US political right wing propaganda on these platforms all over the rest of the world.
There is a difference of course, but the gap is closing significantly every few years.
The US encourages international business competition, but not if you do it better than they do.
We’ve not actually seen for sure that TikTok data is being passed to the Chinese government - supposedly the USA data is being kept separately. But we have certainly seen US data brokers gathering data from all over in the US and selling that on to any 3rd party (domestic government, as well as anyone else). Facebook has been caught more than once being in the business of leaking private data. I’m just surprised that the US gov did not leave this choice up to its citizens to choose on - the ideas of freedom of choice and speech seem to be rather dictated here now.
I’m just wondering if it is not more a case of the US gov has no control itself over TikTok (think US CLOUD Act) and this is what is irking them. I’m not in the US so one way or the other I don’t really mind. What I do mind about though is that TikTok does not sell out to a US company. We really don’t need one single country controlling all the mainstream social media platforms. US laws after all do not represent all of mankind, so some diversity is a good thing.
So I guess I’m rather for a “ban” than a “sell out”.
You have guessed right. The US government had a massive hand in the creation of modern social media, such as a significant amount of funding for Facebook during its startup phase. The intelligence agencies are mad that they can’t pull data from TikTok or influence its algorithms, on top of the American social media companies wanting to kill off their foreign competition as much as possible.
This bill has nothing to do with data privacy because if Congress cared about that they would’ve banned other platforms too. It’s about control and unfair competition.
I don’t like big government but I have zero sympathy in this case. TikTok is the greatest cancer on modern society and I will not change my mind on that.
We literally have a global rise in violent fascism and multiple ongoing genocides, and TikTok is the worst thing you can think of?
Social media in general is likely contributing to the rise of violent facism. Anything that can reverse that trend is good IMO.
This is social media too. How is your comment “contributing to the rise of violent fascism”?
Also keep in mind that fascism comes from the top down, there is zero chance of a government to “reverse that trend” by taking over. This is nothing else than the US trying to beat China at it, which is worrying.
Only way to reverse the trend of social media fascism, is to split it up, not to just transfer ownership.
Hey, did you know that Facebook is partially* responsible for a more recent genocide? So, considering TikTok’s ties to the Chinese government, which is also known to commit genocides, I’m gonna go ahead and say this is probably a good thing.
Edit: changed because Facebook just incited it, people are responsible for their own actions.
Tictok is horrible but this entire ban is being driven by the swamp being upset that young people have come to the wrong conclusion about Israel. I think that the idea is that as long as people are using facebook or google-owned properties, people can be shown only information that will lead them to the correct, approved opinions.
I dunt lik big gubmint butt…
Nah, this entire thing is about US control. They’re upset that it’s a different government that’s spying on us this time. No sympathy for TikTok but there’s no good way to spin this.
Btw, you know if TikTok sells to a US company, they’ll be just as rancid, right?
I agree but TikTok is worthless in general. The content it serves people is literal brain rot. Also, I don’t want it to sell, I just want it to die and never come back.
I love that this and more funding for other countries’ wars are a higher priority than the housing crisis.
Conservatives have been purposely tanking uncontroversial legislation so that “Biden doesn’t get any wins”. Do you genuinely think it is possible for the current legislature to pass bills that would fix something as complex as the housing crisis?
I would accept that as an excuse if the Democrats did anything meaningful when they have a majority, but they don’t.
The last time they had a meaningful majority they spent their time (72 working days) on ACA (a major healthcare reform), pulling us out of a recession, appointing two supreme court justices, and so much more. They are known as the most productive Congress since Lyndon B Johnson was president. The last official majority they had they spent their very thin majority cleaning up after Donald Trump and dealing with COVID.
Democrats don’t get strong majorities for long periods of time like Republicans do, and they are expected to fix every issue plus clean up after the newest national disaster that Republicans created. Maybe if we gave them time and a strong enough majority they would get more done.
First, you should put this in air quotes: “a major healthcare reform”. It’s only a reform if you the consumer can absorb the price gouging required to access our health care system in the first place.
Secondly, Obama had a supermajority for a time. He could have done anything if he’d have been willing to do the work.
Americans can’t eat excuses, and for me at least, it’s no longer acceptable to simply be slightly less conservative than the other conservatives.
I 100% agree that they should have gone further with the many things they accomplished during their super majority. A universal healthcare system would have been better, they could have gone further with digging the average American out of the recession, etc.
However, it is disingenuous to pretend they did/do “nothing meaningful”. ACA expanded healthcare to millions of people who couldn’t get insurance at all, expanded Medicaid and Medicare, and it lowered healthcare costs. That’s pretty meaningful and a major success even if it wasn’t universal healthcare.
I think it’s also disingenuous to compare democrats who make small progress forward to Republicans who are actively trying to roll all of our laws back to the 1800s. Again democrats aren’t ideal, and really we need a more progressive major party in the US because they don’t go far enough, but it’s better to make any progress forward than it is to fully regress.
Democrats not being progressive enough is an issue we can fix in time, but it will take decades of hard work (and continuous work even after we succeed). We need to start helping more progressive candidates with their campaigns and even personally running campaigns during local, state, and national primaries. It would also help for us to push for major election reform while we work towards getting progressives elected. It is unacceptable we only really have only two major parties and really only one choice during general elections.
You just stood directly in the way of a perfect whataboutism….
Now you apologize right now!
In 2013, foreign buyers made up about 7% ($92.2 billion) of transactions in the $1.2 trillion U.S. real estate market. Canada was the main buyer with 19% of sales (decrease from 23% the year before), China was on the second place with 16% of sales, while on the first place considering total foreign sales by dollar value (24% or $22 billion). Mexico ranked third with 9% of sales and India and the UK both accounted for 5%.[2] Florida is the most popular destination with 31% of sales, followed by California (12%), Texas (9%) and Arizona (6%).
But yeah tiktok bad mmmmk
If you think Taiwan and Ukraine are “other countries’ wars” I have bad news for you. It’s better to pay as much money as we can now before the payment is made with american lives.
Israel is something else obviously, as was US involvement Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bulk of the money is absolutely worth spending if you value your freedom. It has nothing to do with the housing crisis whatsoever. The US has enough money for both.
Respectfully, the “fight them there so we don’t fight them here” and “help them stand up so we can stand down” nonsense is straight out of the chickenhawks’ war branding guide. Our government wasted tens of trillions on these meaningless platitudes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those boondoggles led to the rise of ISIS.
Meanwhile I can look over the border and see Mexico spending a mere 8 billion a year on war and Canada a mere 26 billion. Meanwhile we’re up to a trillion and a half this year, but sure, it has nothing to do with the housing crisis or the standard of living in this country. We’re definitely not neglecting our own people to feed an insatiable war machine.
Frankly, I’m sick of watching our government impoverish our people to pay for more super yachts for warmongers.
So much easier than passing an actual data privacy law–and maybe Bobby Kotick will buy TikTokUSA!
VPN subscriptions about to explode.
Naturally, they’ll try to ban VPNs next.
I feel like most people would rather use shady, free VPNs instead. There’ll probably be an increase in them too
Then why is the bill about DIVESTMENT of Tiktok from Chinese ownership? The operation headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore. I’m beginning to think you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Lol nice bad faith argument. Fucking Lemmy sockpuppets.
Hey, even if the above is a bad faith argument, this is not a constructive or nice way to bring that up in conversation. Please try to do a better job of communicating going forward. Thanks!
why is the bill about DIVESTMENT of Tiktok from Chinese ownership?
“Chinese ownership” == “CCP control”
The US doesn’t want a highly addictive app to be controlled by a potentially adversarial regime… which is still way less than China blocking all “potentially uncontrolled” apps.
Interesting that Temu and AliExpress are also China owned, yet there’s no mention of any issues with them.
Well, they’re totally different platforms . The rationale behind the TikTok ban (and I’m not saying I’m in favor of it or opposed to it) is that they can do spooky spooky things with your personal data and your attention – your opinions can be nudged once there’s enough data on you and your eyeballs are on the app half the day. And just to repeat, I’m not saying I agree with the ban (well, not with banning just TikTok anyhow…)
Temu and AliExpress have their own problems (like the absolutely mind boggling waste of finite resources) but nobody’s worried Temu is radicalizing boys or collecting tons of your personal data. And yes even Temu does collect data just like everyone else nowadays, but it’s a shopping site; compared to a social network there’s not all that much you can get out of your users or too many ways to really influence them outside of making them spend more money
The “data privacy” argument is bullshit and the people pushing for this law know it. That’s what is being sold to people but it is not why this TikTok ban got passed. It got passed because American social media companies are pissed that TikTok is outcompeting them for the attention of young people, and because the US government has a heavy hand in what algorithms are allowed to push on Facebook and Google and others. A good portion of Facebook’s initial funding came from government sources.
“Data privacy” is just an excuse. Lobbying from the intelligence agencies and social media companies is why it’s really being enacted.
Agreed that “data privacy” is mostly an excuse in this case. The main reason is “(control over) mindless app addiction”, which TikTok has perfected way better than other platforms.
Actual “data privacy” and “platform addiction”, would be much better targets to address (the EU seems to be going in that direction), but obviously none of the other data-selling addictive platforms want the US to also ding them for that.
Oh yeah it absolutely is bullshit, I’m not saying that. Or, well, it is true they’re likely collecting tons of data but it’s not like US companies don’t do it too and for reasons that are probably just as bad. This is why I tend to think that if you’re going to ban TikTok for collecting data, you can’t ignore Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple et al
I suggest you read the bill. It isn’t a tik tok ban. It’s actually quite a good piece of legislation.
It is a vague and sprawling piece of legislation that gives money to Israel and Ukraine, makes Fentanyl more illegal, makes money laundering for fentanyl more illegal, allows seizure and use if Russian assets, restricts “foreign adversaries” from distributing and maintaining apps, restricts “foreign adversaries” from transferring data away from the US, and makes Iranian terrorism more illegal.
It does like 3 things that are fine, but these should all be different bills (the data transfer bits, seizing Russian assets, and sending aide to Ukraine, though that is getting iffy)
It IS a TikTok band and explicitly names ByteDance and TikTok, and also vaguely defines foreign adversaries to the point where it could be any person operating in a country that the US doesn’t like.
“Quite a good piece of legislation” is only true if you mean quite as sprawling and good as ill defined
“sending aide to Ukraine, though that is getting iffy”
This tells me everything I need to know. That you would even say something like this means you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Additionally, you realize that those are all separate bills, right?
This tells me everything I need to know. That you would even say something like this means you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Really? Just writing someone off without even hearing why?
Looks like I was mis-remembering Zelenskyy talking about moving troops into Russia, so that is the part I was iffy on. I never said they should not get the aide
Additionally, you realize that those are all separate bills, right?
It is one bill with 13 divisions called H.R 8038. The TikTiok part was fast tracked as an addendum to the bill. I can’t find any other bill related to it, and that is one referenced in most news outlets that I can see, but if you have more info I would love to read it.
But even if that has evolved into it’s own separate bill, that doesn’t change the fact that “foreign adversary” is poorly defined to the point where it can be anyone residing in a country deemed as an adversary. That means even say a rando in Cuba puts out an app with no ties to the Cuban government it would be illegal to have that app in the US. The bill also still names TikTok explicitly, so it is still a TikTok ban (with the exception that they sell, which they are unlikely to do).
There is an “iffy” part in the aid to Ukraine, in the sense that Zelenskiy said it’s going to be destined to finance German firms building munition producing facilities in Ukraine… so it’s somewhat hard to tell who exactly is benefitting from it… but that’s more of an “iffy as business as usual” rather than “particularly iffy”.
“foreign adversary” is poorly defined to the point where it can be anyone residing in a country deemed as an adversary
That’s on purpose, and in part caused by the fact that countries have the last say on what their residents are allowed to do. Like, you can’t have a private corporation in China without the CCP controlling most of it, or forcing you to save all data on datacenters controlled by… corporations controlled by the CCP.
Most totalitarian countries work like that, doesn’t really matter whether a certain resident is against the regime and making an app to let people get slightly freer from it.
Oh for sure I know the vague nature was 100% on purpose, but it doesn’t mean the bill is good or that is what I want to see from my government. Data privacy protections for citizens regardless of which country controls an app would have been more effective. Instead, our own homegrown unethical social media companies still get to hoard and sell our data. But of course that is useful to the US government, so…
Yeah… the bill is probably as much of an agreement as they could reach.
For contrast, the EU has tackled “data privacy” directly through the GDPR, and has plans to tackle “addiction” in upcoming legislation. That has lead, just this week, to TikTok withdrawing monetization features from TikTok… Lite, I think?.. from all across the EU, pretty much because they’re risking fines of “up to 5% worldwide gross revenue”, which is turning out to be a nice stick that’s keeping even large corporations proactive about following these laws.
And nothing of value was lost.
My only issue is with Congress telling us all “you have not seen what we have seen, you have not been in the classified briefings”. Yeah, I heard the same shit about WMD’s in Iraq where two of my battle buddies died, two more got wounded beyond any recovery, and a bunch more chose to end their lives after we got home.
“Trust us, bro”. Nah, fuck you. You want the world to support this, you need to share the information.
It will be interesting to see if tiktoks newest big selling point (relatively free from US influence) will be able to offset it’s loss in users.
It’s doubtful that Tiktok would even agree to sell and there is precedent in the courts that a Tiktok ban is unconstitutional considering it’s already been blocked in Montana.
Then there’s the entire notion over the fact that Apple is ALREADY under fire for anti-competitive practices involving the app store and remove the ability for all iDevices to access the app with no other way to access it outside of the app store will just add more fuel to that case.
It’s likely that they will form a new organization in the US, so they can operate in that country and still have Tik Tok alive. My expectation is that the US based Tik Tok would still interact with the world, but block China.
Any sale would have to be approved by the Chinese government so that is definitely not happening.
I didn’t suggest to sale the Chinese company. I suggest to create a new one in the US from the same organization in China. This is a normal practice that is being done for many years by many companies to overcome limitations from those countries.
