this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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There is sooooo much weird conspiracy shit in these comments. The government is banning TikTok becuase they collect too much data and the Chinese government could eaisly get access to all of it. The correct thing to do would be to regulate data collection but that would be problematic for Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple..etc etc... so instead they just ban TikTok. All this TikTok refusing to spread deep state US govt propaganda horse shit is a bit past nuts.
They’re not hiding it. It’s not a “conspiracy” when it’s out the in the open.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/blinken-romney-israel-hamas-tiktok-b2540021.html
You make a good point and then draw the wrong conclusion.
You hit the nail on the head with what they should be doing (broad industry regulations), but then you COMPLETELY missed the point you made. Congress is NOT banning TikTok because they collect too much data, they're banning it because it's TikTok and the "data" is just an excuse...otherwise they'd pass real data privacy laws.
Another platform will pop up over the next week if TikTok is banned. What they want is to sell TikTok to someone that will change the platform because it's too powerful. This isn't to push "government propaganda", but simply to change the algorithm to not be so good. They don't want you to gain class consciousness or have political discourse, they want you to be distracted with silly cat videos and memes...and maybe a side of culture war, but nothing else.
Or an existing social media will try to take its place; Meta and Google have sites which imitate TikTok's UI (at least, in part).
I don't think it's the only reason necessarily (and I'm inclined to agree your reasons are, at least, part of it) but I think the chance for U. S. companies to cannibalize TikTok's market demographics is, also, a happy little coincidence of the consequences.
The thing with TikTok is almost all americans on it have gravitated away from other platforms because it has more to offer. I don't think there's a large demographic on TikTok who don't precisely understand why they use TikTok over other platforms. (Edit: youth I suppose) I also believe this is why they want to force TikTok to sell, they want to have it exist as a platform but with new management.
If TikTok doesn't sell and it does get banned, I almost guarantee the demographic will quickly find themselves on another, likely Chinese owned, platform. This will still be a win for Congress as they'll have fractured TikTok and weakened the demographic as a whole.
Time will tell.
Yes the banning of TikTok is absolutely the wrong thing.
This is a pretty sane explanation.
I'm also at least partially convinced that it's motivated by our social media giants' interest to "think of the children" their competition away.
Seeing as the order was basically "Get bought by an American corpo or get banned." They either plunder the competitor's insane data collection, userbase, and profits, or kick them off their corner.
You can also see it as retribution.
"Get bought by a Chinese entity or get banned" is the default posture of the Chinese government. BMW China is Chinese. Samsung China is Chinese. Panasonic China is Chinese. GM China is Chinese. If TikTok US is forced to be American, it wouldn't be the most unfair thing this week.
You can't have your "we're better than them cos freedumb" cake and eat it too.
Well, let's set the bar at not having concentration camps or not going to jail or being made "dissappear" for criticizing the government. For now...
I'm not sure that's a bar you even clear, given the ice "detention centres" you set up domestically and places like abu ghraib or Gitmo you run on foreign soil. And as for criticising the government, what's the practical use if a felon and a billionaire can rig your election without any repercussions anyway?
"I can call trump a criminal online, that's freedom right there!"
"Will he actually be arrested?"
"Well no, but it feels good to say it"
I don't know who is this "you" person mentioned, but I'm thankfully not American and my country has done nothing of sorts.
Plus people are not tortured even in ice centers. Gitmo is another story, but those are war crimes, not genocide. I know, weird argument, but I like to be precise m
People aren't tortured with an iron maiden, but when you have conditions like under trump in 2020, and the suicide rate in ice detention jumped 11 times higher than the previous 10 year average, I don't think you can suggest ice detention is that far away from concentration camps.
Also, Gitmo isn't for enemy combatants - they can chuck anyone suspected of terrorism in there, even US citizens. It most definitely isn't exclusively "war crimes".
Negligence (and even cruelty) is different from literal torture and (allegedly) extermination of an ethnic/religious group.
Also, gitmo holds hundreds of people, not hundreds of thousands.
You're splitting hairs here for the sake of winning an argument. There's no practical difference between cruelty and torture to the people suffering it. "Oh and don't worry about it, because it's only hundreds, not thousands in this particular ~~torture~~ cruelty facility".
And as far as genocide goes, you're moving the goal posts here, but if we're playing that game, the native Americans might have something to say about that.
I mean, going back to the original argument here, my overarching point is really that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and the US's track record of authoritarianism and human rights abuses is comparable enough to make them just as untrustworthy at the most and certainly not in any position to criticise a state who is trying to manage billions of people at the least.
There very much is difference between cruelty and torture, same as with 1st and 3rd degree burns and denying that is awful.
The native Americans are not being genocided today, Uygurs are. I don't know about you, but I cannot change the past.
The US track record is by no means clean, but miles away from the likes of China, specially in recent years. And you should be able to criticize both (or more) without whataboutism.
Aren't they a 49:51 split international company:Chinese version?
As long as the Chinese entity has control, it's fair game.
I mean occams razor is the best way to feel sane in the disinformation age so im with you. But i think its more accruate to do our best understand what is possible and suspend holding a specific belief like that because it doesnt matter if you are right or wrong. Many things could be true at the same time, especially with who you ask.
Kind of makes our conversations worthless, which i think is the strategy of disinformation. We cant know, so should we really be claiming whats true or not? Seems like we should just offer what seems most likely rather than tell everyone they are wrong unless you have information sources to help them understand why they are likely wrong.