The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban TikTok unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divests its interest in the app.

I’m not kidding. This will make Gen-Zers vote for Trump. All he has to say is he’ll reverse the ban. He’s already announced that he opposes this bill and that this only supports Facebook.

Biden and the Democrats are so fucking insane. I do not understand it. They want to lose all support with every fucking base they have.

I’ll never stop being on TikTok.

  • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]English
    88•8 months ago

    It’s clear the objectives here are to force a purchase of TikTok so that the state can:

    • (A) reap the private profits
    • (B) install a more cooperative administration so they can:
      • (1) gain backdoor access to its data and get easy warrantless searches of American’s online activity
      • (2) install a moderation / community safety lead who aligns with state interests (similar to ex-cia agents being employed at Facebook, Google, and Reddit) to try and shape the content on the platform, likely to be more bourgeois in character.

    .

    These are definitely bipartisan goals. TikTok has proven itself over the past few years as a kind of gorilla journalism vehicle, by intention or not. Some of the people posting on TikTok likely wouldn’t even consider themselves “journalists” by any standard; however, the reality is they are. If someone is posting video of an unfolding event live, from a boots-on-the-ground perspective, they are performing a kind of journalism.

    The TikTok algorithm has this uncanny ability (and at times manual ability) to catapult a video in front of nearly everyone on the platform. That kind of exposure to these unfolding events has steadily eroded the base that the mass market media has been sitting on for decades, in a way that no other platform has done before.

    I have no doubt that this will pass. Their gross attempts at trying to spin this as some kind of security threat or as the ghoul good-morning has put it “not an attempt to ban TikTok. It’s an attempt to make TikTok better. Tic-Tac-Toe. A winner. A winner” will slide off the younger generations. To most in that demographic it will appear for what it is, a transparent and patronizing attempt to maintain American hegemony, and nothing more.

    Make no mistake, when this is passed, you will have your speech on that platform curtailed. You will see the algorithm change to support a more western, bourgeois narrative. American capital will walk away with the reward. You will be left holding the bag. You will see the state execution of TikTok in the town square.

    Every accusation is projection, this is no different.