My favorite part…
Tom Cotton: “Have you ever been Chinese?”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew: "Senator, I’m Singaporean.”
Tom Cotton: “So that makes you what? Korean?”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew: "No.”
Tom Cotton: “Is that because you’re Japanese? Which is just another word for Chinese so you lied!”
Is this a real quote?!?!
Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be, I’ve listened to a bit (Cotton’s testimony starts around 2:20:50 in the linked video, citizenship bullshit comes up around 2:23:45) and Cotton asks the TikTok CEO what nation he’s a citizen of, if he’s ever applied for Chinese citizenship, does he have a Singaporean passport, does he have any other passports, if his wife and children are American citizens, if he’s ever applied for American citzenship, if hes ever been a member of the Chinese communist party, and if he’s ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese communist party, before launching off into questions about the Tiananmen Square massacre and the genocide of Uyghurs, but no mention of Japan or Korea that I heard
Still pretty jaw dropping racism by Cotton to ask the Asian guy over and over and over whether he’s an agent of the Chinese Communist Party but never ask anyone else up there about that
Unfortunately yes. These are the kind of people that make laws about social networks.
Shit like this is why I can’t take the handwringing over Tiktok seriously. Yeah, their company work culture sucks, and social media in general sucks. But so much of the hate toward Tiktok is tinged with xenophobia that it’s unreal.
As a network engineer, so many of the arguments for why tiktok is terrible are dismissed because of xenophobia. It’s unreal, because it is blatantly obvious that it is just absolutely rummaging through your phone for every last bit of information it can steal about you.
I don’t care what nationality the people are that are receiving it, there is no excuse for that shit and you need to get off tiktok.
What’s your opinion on facebook and twitter?
From a network engineer perspective, facebook is probably more effective at stealing data, but steals ‘less’ (still a crapload) data than tiktok (seriously, you would not fucking BELIEVE how much data tiktok constantly sends to the servers). Plus, of course, all the data you give facebook, facebook gets. That said, it’s sort of 6 of one, half dozen of another- just because tiktok can’t find an actual use for some of the data it’s got, doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t later.
Twitter’s app doesn’t actually steal/exfiltrate all that much data, believe it or not. Most of their trackers and analytics are focused on your use of twitter itself. It’s still ran by a psychopathic manchild, however, and they are still, in my opinion, stealing data from you.
Personally, my home wifi has all three blocked via DNS. None of them get my data.
One is run by a psycho, the other by a guy who needs to get off the ketamine and find his big boy pants.
Now seriously: FB is more insidious in its tracking and targeted profiling (lawful evil). Twitter is just negligent and deliberately letting the crazies roam free (chaotic evil).
Is this a real quote?!?!
Unfortunately yes.
This may seem like homer visiting the ceo of kwiki-mart, but really? I can’t find anything online mentioning it. Do you have a timestamp or link?
This fits into the middle of the depressingly-plausible/unbelievably-stupid venn diagram and it’s really doing my head in.
Shit like this is why I can’t take the handwringing over Tiktok seriously. Yeah, their company work culture sucks, and social media in general sucks. But so much of the hate toward Tiktok is tinged with xenophobia that it’s unreal.
Yeah, anytime someone says they want to go after TikTok but doesn’t have anything to say about any other tech firm’s creepiness I stop taking them seriously. We need broad generalizable rules that deal with social media, data brokers, and lots of other issues, but all a lot of people are interested in is finding an excuse to go after something foreign so they can stir up their racist shithead followers.
also conservatives are mad kids can learn about the world and don’t like them as a result so they want to institute multipronged censorship of school curricula, libraries and the internet
yea, that part was pretty shambolic, but i cant imagine a republican forgoing a chance to bash the CEO of a company run in part by the CCP when they accuse anyone to the left of trump of being a “communist” ooga booga, lol.
the CEO of a company run in part by the CCP
TikTok is owned by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. However, the company is not actually registered in China, but is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
Although ByteDance and TikTok both have offices in China, neither is owned by the ruling Communist party and both insist they are not controlled by the government.
TikTok has offices around the world, with its largest in Los Angeles, California, but whistleblower ex-employees told CNBC that ByteDance was heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the firm, to the extent that American employees had email addresses for both companies.
In November last year, the chair of ByteDance—the company’s co-founder Zhang Yiming—stepped down; a move the Guardian said came as the Chinese government tightened its control of China’s tech sector and ramped up pressure on its entrepreneur bosses to support the party line.
ByteDance created a new unit in May this year called the Beijing Douyin Information Service Ltd to run Douyin—the Chinese version of TikTok—and the company has admitted that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does indeed own a share of that business.
But the company tweeted that claims ByteDance itself is owned by the CCP “is mistaken… a Chinese state-owned enterprise has a 1% stake in a different ByteDance subsidiary called Beijing Douyin Information Service Limited, not in TikTok’s parent company.”
Ffs, I didn’t realise this was about the whole “repeal section 230, think of the children!!”
Well, the threat was made, let’s see if they follow through and what final shape that takes.
They barely even need to alter Section 230. What they need to do is actually enforce it.
The protections Section 230 gives to websites are lost when the website fails to act. These websites have failed to act - as demonstrated by the people who gave their accounts of what happened at the start of the video. The websites can be sued, they can be penalised, but that isn’t happening.
The government won’t admit they also have responsibility for the failures here. Instead, they’re turning this into an opportunity to repeal legislation that is essential to how the internet functions, all so that they can better control the narratives online.
Yea, makes sense, but if it is law already, it should already have been possible to sue these giants: class-action lawsuits that haven’t been brought forward for some reason.
Yes I’m not sure why either. It could simply be that no one has brought forward a case, as legal action is expensive and complicated, which can be very daunting and off-putting. It could also be that a judge has ruled and thus established case law that says their Section 230 protection stands - in which case the government should amend the law to more clearly define where the limits are.
Hoping to get new zuck memes.
With that soul crushingly terrifying picture, how can we not?
It’s a fun one
I thought it was great: unanimous bipartisan support for once, a bashing that made my voice feel heard (and Im not even American). And yet…I didnt know where to post this, half the places i posted this on reddit automod blocked it, the other half had no reaction…i was expecting live megathreads for this kind of thing…but there is just silence…do people not care about this, does this bore them or is there some intentional silencing going on by social media giants?
I can’t speak for anyone else. I’m just tired. Tired of an endless circus that never seems to result in meaningful progress, change, or a sense that the good guys are winning. I don’t mean to seem defeatist but I feel defeated.
Honestly I thought it was a rerun of the first time they grilled Zuckerberg from the thumbnail. Didn’t expect Discord and Snapchat to show up.
Excited to see what comes out of this though, although I wouldn’t say I have high hopes of positive change happening.
Discord is horrible for exploitation. Since it’s lots of closed chats a lot of it goes unmonitored and unreported.
The Zuck does like grilled meats though.
oh no, this is a patented ZuckerBurger
The problem was that their bipartisan support was for the increased mass surveillance of the internet. How do you enforce something like an age restriction unless you have ID databases with the government?
it’s very worrying. we need to resist. no “age restriction” nonsense, openly defy the law
there are lots of ways to do this, but government-issued online ID is probably the way to go to figure out if you are talking to a human or a muppet (I’d prefer to have a private info “wallet” which is rendered and validated, but never stored anywhere but by me). I think of it as an internet driver’s license. You can still post anonymously in places like reddit, lemmy and 4chan, but nobody has to take anything you say seriously.
Or instead of increased spying and mass surveillance, they could actually enforce the laws we have now instead of admitting they fucked up and haven’t even tried out the current setup.
Complaining that the current laws dont work and need to be replaced with authoritarian mass surveillance when they haven’t even TRIED to actually enforce the current laws is a bad look.
I see your angle now, I don’t think it would need to be more mass surveillance than it already is, but understand why enthusiasm for these hearings could be damped by that waryness.
We don’t need ‘slightly more’ or ‘the same amount’ of mass surveillance, we need drastically less.
More to the point, there’s no actual guarantee that repealing section 230 will have it actually be replaced by anything, which would effectively kill free speech on the internet, if not actually kill the internet itself.
if these platforms are not
reigned(might as well spell it like that given their regning attitude) reined in, the internet will die anyway…just a few walled fiefdoms that will dominate all markets and public spheres in the world.
Who’s going to suck off the CEOs the most? Republicans or Democrats or will we have a tie?
I saw it today and they were both bipartisan in their inability to understand technology. Both parties were seeming to ask for mass surveillance. It was creepy.
Jerking off would be more efficient, since you could line them all up tip-to-tip and go milddle-out
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