As someone in the US who has had their private data leaked multiple times (ive lost count) and is extremely careful when browsing you tube as to not be drawn into a conspiracy ridden rabbit hole, I’m not sure what the point of this tik tok ban is. To me tik tok is social media business as usual. If congress is going to go this hard on a social media company and privacy concerns they should be doing this with all the other companies that pry into our private lives and try their best to manipulate us as well (car makers, appliance manufactures, phone makers, wearbales, ect…) otherwise to me this comes across as the US congress extorting a single company to make billionaires richer. It has been shown time and time again that even US based social media companies are vulnerable to influencing conspiracy theorists and swaying the votes of thousands of people.I feel like we are at the pinnacle of technological ignorance here. Thoughts?
I’m gonna go with hilarious. 😂
This is going to become the greatest game of whack-a-mole the internet has ever seen.
The argument so far seems to be:
- it’s not about the fact that they collect the data, but for whom it may be collected.
- their algorithms of feeding content to consumers can be heavily influenced by non-US political entities.
That being said, I’m all for the TikTok ban, along with all the other social media platforms that have been proven to have negative impacts on the mental and physical health of our society (esp. with how much of it focused on kids).
With each year we spend less and less on the education of our children, while corporations exploit them and force feed junk into heads. Reduce their access to the shit stream, put in effort into their education instead of undercutting it, and we may actually have a chance at a bright future.
With each year we spend less and less on the education of our children,
What’s fucked up is the real solution to the whole student loan debate is just extending k-12.
In the 40s only about half of Americans got a highschool diploma, most dropped out at 14 and started working.
But taxes still paid for education up to year 12. Those last four years was basically college back then. Sometimes people failed and quit, but they had the four years to get as far as they could.
Now we’re teaching a shit ton more science, math, history, not to mention how computers are a thing now.
And we just can’t cram it all into 12 years
Banning TikTok would be as good as banning Facebook, Instagram or XTwitter, by that I mean it would be a net gain for society as a whole. But you have to ban them all, without discriminating based on which nation they originated.
But this is not the case here, this is the US congress enacting barriers towards foreign competitors, just like they did with steel, sugar and cars (ever wondered why you can’t buy one of those little European cars in America?).
This TikTok bullshit is Huawei all over again. It’s not to protect “national security” or “the children”, the Huawei ban was all about protecting the business of American companies during the transition from 4G to 5G.
Huawei was sanctioned for violating sanctions, and creating fraudulent financial statements. It is still protectionism, but they absolutely fucked around and got caught.
I’m personally all for it. I’ve never used tiktok before and never plan to, but I can see the negative impact it has on my peers. I can’t hang out with my friends without it turning into them just showing their favorite clips to each other. It’s just bad for people and relies of maxing out the happy brain chemical thing to keep people there. It’s like penny slots at the casino. There’s also the data harvesting for the Chinese government through tencent (who is also very heavily involved with epic games and reddit to name a couple others). If I’m remembering right, when the “head” of tiktok was testifying before Congress, he outright said he’s doing nothing different from Facebook or Twitter, and he’s right.
I trust TikTok as much as I trust any American owned company. We all know either way, the data is going to some government or other. It just that America are more likely to do something with it that will affect me. I have no plans on going to China, but seeing as how buddy-buddy the US is with the UK, FAANG are more likely to do me harm than TikTok.
Vertical videos and short form content taking a hit can only ever be a good thing.
It’s not because it’s a big tech company.
It’s because the Chinese government controls it.
Let’s be honest: It’s because no US company, and therefore no US politicians, get a dime.
It’s because China is a hostile power who openly abuses its power to use tech to abuse its citizens, and the way their government works, has far more control over companies in their country than most of the rest of the world. Citizens are at much greater risk with their data on Chinese servers than they are with their data on US servers. It’s not that complicated. China outright requires everything to stay in China in the reverse case.
Should they also regulate data collection generally? Absolutely. But TikTok is different.
The reason the vote was 50-0 is because regular people used it to talk to each other instead of either Dem.or republican friendly billion dollar media conglomerates.
There are valid concerns about China trying to accumulate data and what they use it for, but if that was why TikTok got so much attention, it would have been spread out between pretty much all of social media, even reddit.
If Democrats and Republicans suddenly all agree on one thing…
It’s time to ask why. Because unless something shady is happening, it’s not going to happen.
If Dems proposed a bill saying Trump is president for life, the majority of Republicans would oppose it out of principle because a Dem put it up for vote.
