Can’t say I’m surprised, but I will reiterate what others have already written. This bill targeting one specific social media company does little more than affirm the government’s ability to single-handedly legislate a business out of existence and maybe provide some short term benefit against foreign influences, which can simply turn their efforts to other platforms.
If we really cared about protecting Americans, we’d pass consumer protection laws. But we don’t do that. In fact, we have worked to erode these laws for decades.
This smells more like an excuse to brutally murder the competition for the benefit of homegrown social media. Can’t we call a spade a spade, where there’s money to be made?
Question: Do you think china would allow an adverserial nation to control a portion of their social media?
Who cares what China does?
No. But I would also hope we’re better than China. There are tools other than a sledgehammer to get social media companies to take action against these bot farms and fake news articles.
This is certainly an option, but I don’t think it’s a very good one.
For example, if the algorithm is the problem, let’s require transparency or place restrictions on how algorithms can select content for users.
Tiktok offered to do everything people are suggesting with project Texas. It would have made them the most transparent social media company in the US…
So of course Congress goes pfft… nah. We still want you to sell, we don’t want transparency, we want to control the narrative.
I have never visited TikTok and look down on those who use it. However, I think this bill is stupid. It’s reactionary at best. This does nothing at all to address the general malaise predated on the entire world by social media. There should instead be tighter restrictions on social media or even phone use by minors. Why are we preventing minors from harming themselves by smoking or drinking, with pretty strict laws, but it’s totally fucking FINE to let them be psychologically manipulated by corporations with no agenda other than profit? I am so disgusted.
I agree about tighter restrictions on social media in general, but this is specifically about tiktok sending personal, material data back to China, a clearly hostile government that has been and is currently committing cyber attacks and espionage against the US and its citizens consistently.
Tiktok, despite its claims, has been proved to be sending that data to China multiple times since claiming that it has no connection to the Chinese government.
It isn’t the same as banning Instagram.
Banning tiktok in countries under attack from China makes sense when it’s been proven that tiktok is sending personal, identifying data to China.
Things that matter? No Shit that makes lives better? No Conspiracy bullshit? Let’s go!
Ffs! This bullshit is pure demagoguery and corruption!
It’s an election year, so pretending to care about privacy rights and national security (even though they’re doing fuck all about American companies spying, including for oppressive regimes such as those of Putin, Modi, Netanyahu and MBS) while being “tough on China” is a demagogue jackpot.
Meanwhile, the ACTUAL reasons are thus:
1: With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube heavily censoring criticism of the Israeli apartheid regime, TikTok is the main social media outlet for pro-palestinian and anti-genocide activism. AIPAC and other reliable sources for legal bribes don’t like that.
2: In the event of a sale, the purchaser is likely to be an oligarch that also bribes American politicians and will do so even more afterwards.
I keep seeing this comment- it has nothing to do with the election. They have until January 19th to divest. That’s well past the November election date.
I think the bigger issue is that this is terrible timing for Biden and he’s being an idiot about it. The last thing he needs is to lose the youth vote.
Do you think it would be better for him to kick the can to the next president? I think that would only raise concerns that he’s in bed with China after a unanimous Senate vote.
Do you think anyone who would have voted for Biden would have believed he was in bed with China and then not done it?
Because I can think of a lot of young people who would be very pissed off by this. So yes, kicking the can down the road in terms of politics would have been the best thing to do.
I hear you. There’s not much he can do with such strong congressional support without it looking like a personal agenda.
He has a lot more to offer the youth vote than Trump, between marijuana reform, abortion rights, tuition reimbursement, DEI, LGBTQ+ rights, lower taxes, etc. He’ll have to run on those.
He really hasn’t reached out to the youth vote much so far, at least from what I’ve seen, although definitely legalizing marijuana would do it if he is able to (it’s more complicated than some people think).
He pushed to reschedule in his first year. HHS proposed rescheduling to class 3, from class 1. We’re waiting on approval from the DEA now.
It’s also on the November ballot in several states. The Florida Supreme Court, for example, put statewide marijuana legalization as well as abortion rights on this November’s ballot. This should encourage the 18-24 vote turnout. Trump only won the swing state with 3.6% last election, and he’s lost popularity in his home county.
The problem with your first reason is that this TikTok sale nonsense started before Israel invaded Gaza.
Nah, I’m pretty sure Tiktok didn’t exist in 1948 😛
Fair, although the activism they’re currently censoring was not being so heavily censored before.
I dunno, I only recall them talking about the Tiktok ban for 2-4 months, but maybe they started at least 3 months before that and I didn’t notice right away?
Either way, the (even more than usually) heavy censorship basically started on the 8th of October, with people getting canceled left and right for daring to criticize the Israeli war crimes immediately following the terrorist attacks without watering it down by explicitly adding criticism of Hamas in the same breath.
If you time-restrict Google to before October 7th, you’ll see it was talked about quite a bit-
Fair enough heh. Can’t get it to do that (it only gives me “at least this recent” options, not “at least this long ago” ones), but based on our previous interactions here on Lemmy I’m gonna trust you and take your word for it 😁
Weird. Not sure why. But just for anyone else curious, here’s an article from March 15, 2023:
I used tiktok once in my life when it first blew up and i was younger and after that i decided not to use it anymore. I think everyone using it is selling data to get brainwashed. BUT, i think banning a service because its foreign is a very bad idea and sets a bad example. Tiktok wasnt banned for spying. It was banned because it spies for another country. All social media spies. Thats the thing that should change. If social media companies cant spy that means not only tiktok but facebook and the rest would be also banned.
And there it is. The reason they aren’t doing that. Congress is way too invested in American companies which dominate social media and data collection to ever want to put drastic limitations on their lucrative profit strategies. They want an American company to control it so they can invest and profit off of its spying. They don’t care about your privacy; they care about their money and power.
Nice, so congress can tell any company to get fucked and sell to the highest bidder? So much for free market republicans.
China will just find another company to buy our data from, because as it turns out, the problem isn’t just TikTok, it’s the fact the it’s legal for companies (foreign and domestic) to sell and exchange our data in the first place. TikTok will still collect the same data, and instead of it going straight to China, it’ll go to a rich white fuck first and they’ll be the ones to sell it to China instead.
And if the problem is the fact that it’s addictive, well, we have plenty of our own home grown addictions for people to sink their time into. You don’t see congress telling those companies to get sold to a new owner.
It’s not just data collection that TikTok grants its owners. It’s also a very affective social manipulation tool, as we’ve seen from every other social media company.
Soon to be bought by US interests who will continue to use it to do all the nasty things the CCP is doing now.
This isn’t about data privacy or protection at all. This is a bad look. I think Biden is throwing the election purpose at this point.
Guess we’ll see how ineffective such legislation really is.
It’s very easily effective. They’ll have until January 19th (or a 90-day extension if in the process of sale) to divest or the platform is banned in the US.
The problem is, this bill should be privacy legislation instead.
Yea, no one who can sideload and/or use a VPN could ever get a banned app installed. Ohh wait…
Of course some will. The majority of users will migrate to the next platform. TikTok will eventually disappear in the US without enough US generated content. It’s already happened in over 20 other nations. It’s not a new phenomenon.
