What about the content generators who earn their living from Tik Tok? Banning it is not the solution to fixing the problems with it.
How is this the single most important thing for the house to deal with right now?
Like is TikTok turning the migrant crisis at the border into gay trans athletes trying to steal the election (but only the presidency, not the house/senate) and destroy Christian families?
It sure seems like the message from Mike Johnson is “nothing is really wrong, so we just hate the app with the silly videos”.
Basically since Tik Tok launched, literally all I’ve ever seen from everyone regardless of age or political affiliation is that it needs to be blocked since it’s a data mining machine for the CCP. Now that it’s actually happening, everyone is saying the opposite, that we need to keep it, even though the data mining for the CCP is still happening. What the fuck is actually going on?
It’s probably not a data mining machine for china, they’ve done a fair bit to divest them selves from china at this point. If the CCP wanted to data mine Americans they can just buy that information from data brokers.
I suspect the main reason so many establishment politicians are terrified of it is because of how it suggest content.
Because there is very little direct user input on what it shows, It tends to spin people off in to communities and places people wouldn’t normally end up in. Trends there also tend to spread fast and unpredictably, most people won’t know about a trend until it shows up in their feed, making it difficult to monitor by a third party.
It can really throw a wrench in political messaging when you can’t be sure what narratives and ideas your constituents have been exposed to. These issues come from social media generally, but most big social media platforms are a lot less volatile in the trends, are easier to monitor, and are less likely to send people off in to spaces that they wouldn’t normally be exposed to.
The US is a capitalist dumpster fire. Seems like a lot of folks in here don’t use the platform much because they are just repeating the same talking points western media parrots.
The big problem seems to be that younger generations are connecting and organizing on there and they can’t shut it up. If the issue is that a foreign adversary is exposing the corrupt shit the US is doing and that they allow US citizens to connect with each other rapidly on such issues, well… where is the fucking problem?
Outside of that, it is a dope platform with a scary good algorithm. Lots of good folks in there. Most content creators flocked there because the other platforms are shit now. Bytedance has complied in every way but they are essentially trying to force the sale of tiktok despite them not wanting to sell. That is shitty.
Tiktok is not the problem. What a fucking joke.
Yah, this is very much politicians being terrified of how much TikTok undermines the narratives they want to play to.
I don’t use the platform so I’m not as familiar to if this is general nationalist issue or about specific practices in TikTok. I do think this is a slippery slope, though. Im afraid our elected officials are just too far behind on Technology to look at the broader issues on privacy and technology - this might pass simply because they can slap “not US = bad” on a campaign bus. It likely will boost VPN usage and/or drive people to less mature and even less privacy concerned services.
I do use the platform and used to think the same thing everyone else my age thinks but it is actually super good. Most content creators moved over for a reason.
There is a lot of “good activism” on there and I think that is the thing they would like to stamp out.
I think it’s a scary thing combined with the fact that politicians have been trying to pass KOSA and similar bills that outline very harsh punishments for anyone using vpns to circumvent national bans.
America isn’t free and it is getting less free by the day.
As a conservative I generally hate the idea of Chinese software collecting all our national selfie secrets, but I hate the idea of banning companies even more.
If there’s a problem about national security as it relates to Chinese social media, we need to address that with education not banning apps.
The domestic apps scrape and sell the same data to anybody who will buy it, foreign adversaries included. They are banning tiktok because the younger generation is way more connected on there and there is attention being brought to places they don’t want it. Simple as that.
everybody is pro capitalism until someone else beats them.
In Utah they’re so frightened of social media that they have made it almost impossible for any social media companies to thrive here. Tik Tok is now in their crosshairs because it’s the fashionable GOP target, but previously it was facebook and the internet in general. Now they’ve passed laws to restrict internet usage for anyone under 21 - on the off chance some kid might see a cartoon of a bare butt or something, and their head might explode.
EFF sent out a campaign to their mailing list this morning about how banning it is a bad move for free speech and a better option would be to create actual data privacy laws that companies have to follow to do business in the US, but of course that would just put more money in politicians pockets to ensure it never sees the light of day.
A classic authoritarian tactic is to make people think that other governments are worse and that only giving away your freedoms and giving power to them is the way to fight it. TikTok became to risky for the government not because of China’s propaganda, but because China didn’t want to ban or deprioritize posts against genocide in Palestine funded by the US government. When any government feels treatened they censor the media and call it propaganda from another country. This is prime example that US is not better then China or Russia when it comes to it, only that so far it was their companies that were more popular, so they didn’t need to.
