this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (4 children)

This is the kind of thing that gets to me in this whole TikTok situation the most.

China bans most American based social media and what it doesn't ban is heavily monitored censored and regulated.

Why would we (Americans) want to willingly use a Chinese owned/based/operated social media platform like TikTok?

We should never have started using it in the first place or at least immediately dropped it as soon as it became common knowledge that it had substantial ties to china.

There is so much hypocrisy on all sides of this issue.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago (2 children)

What's funny about this is that the fear of Chinese Authoritarianism leads Americans straight into American Authoritarianism.

It's this close to self awareness and then veers straight into hypocrisy

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It does smack of hypocrisy but I've been feeling more it's a paradox of tolerance thing. Which itself a sort of hypocrisy now that I'm thinking about it. Huh.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

nah, i don't see it as a tolerance issue at all, I see it more through a Chomsky/Foucault lens.

US social media has been used as a state messaging apparatus for going on two decades now, and a foreign-owned platform is simply not as responsive to US state pressure as a domestically-owned one. China was simply playing the same game as the US has been. It's not at all surprising that the US would want to ban one that has gotten to be so widely used - but what's funny about it is the messaging/logic used to do so.

"A communist authoritarian actor is influencing civilian opinion through media curation, so we must take drastic authoritarian action to control media curation to stop foreign influence of civilian opinion."

I think seeing it through a 'paradox of tolerance' lens kinda misses the point of the irony I see in the response.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Well, they probably read Machiavelli and may not always have our best interests at heart so it's not inconceivable it's entirely intentional.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We are not in China, are we? The (american) government should NOT have control over what information its citizens have access to. We should not strive to be like China in this regard.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I think they mean that the users shouldn’t use it. Not that the government should ban it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

China censors what its people sees on its platforms so its people started using facebook. Then China started demanding that facebook censor itself in China (there was a major terror attack that sparked this) but Facebook refused so they banned it. Same thing happened with reddit and such.

Meanwhile, the US started censoring its major media platforms people either fled to niche libre sites like this or the shiny new addictive app from China. China doesnt care about what americans see. It'll happily let americans see Israelis document their war crimes. The US said, sell to american investors, and be censored or be banned. ByteDance chose being banned. Welcome to the great american firewall.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I don't know if Chinese government actually reaches out to social platforms before banning them, I remember reddit was avaliable in China in 2015 - 2016ish. Then it got banned, I believe its because of its political contents (r/china and such).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

China bans most American based social media

they've banned all the big ones except youtube, but their version of youtube is extremely censored.