There's an arguable national security angle. Potential surveillance, and, especially, manipulation and dumbing-down.
Earlier, I also heard complaints about TikTok implications for individual health. Which, when implying US Big Tech social media as an acceptable alternative, sounds like an abusive parent: "If anyone's going to beat up my kids, it'll be me!"
Sounds like US Big Tech might've decided on the complaint angle of "some other country could spy on people" -- since all the other valid complaints about TikTok, including intimate surveillance, also apply to TikTok's counterpart US Big Tech products.
Outlaw the irresponsible behaviors, not the competition.
For example if representational content of people falling in love with Osama Bin Laden is a total of 3 hours of content, and there are a billion hours of guitar playing good ole American BBQ content, TikTok can show the 3 Bid Laden hours to most people and 0.0000005% of the American BBQ content.
War through means we haven't figured out yet.
IMO the real threat the US perceives isn't TikTok manipulating information, but them not manipulating it. Look up information about the Gaza War on YouTube and you'll be inundated with various sources promoting a uniformly pro-Israel narrative. The relatively low views on these hits (no recommendation had more than 400k views) for such a hot topic, with premium placement in the search results, suggests it's not resonating or organic, to say the least. But that's because, again, I don't think the goal is to actually get people to watch this and suddenly start cheering on Israel or whatever. Rather, I think the idea is to encourage people to think that they hold a minority view, and motivate them to self censor their own views and opinions. And that's pretty hard to do when you have this massive 'uncontrolled' site openly allowing people to express their wrongthink, and it not being artificially downranked.
We have Russia Today in the US. We have CGTN. Both are okay because their viewership isn't sufficient to challenge the pro-Israeli propaganda put out by the MSM.
Even Mitt Romney admitted a lot of the pressure to ban TikTok came from the pro-Israel lobbyists: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/tiktok-ban-china...
What pro-Israeli propaganda is the "MSM" putting out? Because all the pieces on the current invasion of Gaza I've been seeing have had a strong undercurrent of "what the fuck are you doing Israel?"
We’ll still have TikTok.com even if Bytedance refuses to sell.
I'm not a TikTok user, but over the long weekend was around people that clearly are. The things they discussed we so outlandish that I was confused on where they got their information. Of course it was a lot of TikTok and YouTube being used as sources.
Personally, I'm much less concerned by any potential surveillance tool. However, the especially part of your sentence is much more worrying to me.
> Outlaw the irresponsible behaviors,
By this do you mean people posting utter nonsense? At that point, you verge on censorship. I recognize that free speech includes speech I don't like, but holy shite batman!, I've never seen such an effective tool for the crazies to find not just a voice with a megaphone but a 30,000w sound system where ever they go. Oh, and they are monetarily rewarded for behaving that way.
So other than slippery slope reasons, I couldn't careless if TikTok were to no longer exist. The net negative of it existing is not worth it in my opinion.
did people not believe crazy things in the mid-20th century? i remember that polling suggests that a third of people believe they have literally spoken with the dead
Big Tech aren’t Chinese. There is no public coalition civically engaged against Big Tech’s surveillance. There is a solid bloc concerned about China.
If you want to regulate surveillance capitalism—and I do—convince people to care about the issue (and call their electeds and vote).
But the people being targeted by the platform are all watching videos telling them how their votes don't count, the deep state, and other things to encourage people to believe the system does not work. It is the absolute ultimate anti-democratic tool I have ever seen.
A foreign nation wants to ban it because it doesn’t serve its interest, this foreign nation happens to buy up all our politicians.
ALso, the bill doesn't ban Tiktok. It forces Bytedance to sell Tiktok to a US controlled entity so the US security state can more easily threaten them and force them to censor their anti-imperialist content.
No, it does not. (It requires sale to a non-foreign adversary controlled person. A sale to an Indian, South African or Brazilian company would be fine.)
https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
> Romney replied, "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
>strip down like 50% from overall content because it is not in line with CCP's ideology?
Of course, play by same rules/guidelines as domestic players. Will also have advantage in offering filtered content from abroad vs domestic players, also will gain a shitload of unique content from PRC net. Many of interesting content producers in PRC if Google leverages AI to transcribe, translate, dub. Plus handover dissident information, but thats table stakes. And eventually get pressured to block antiPRC rags like FLG media globally or be put on sanction/unreliable entity list.
Google and facebook are allowed to participate in the chinese market. If they follow chinese rules. One of them being storing chinese data in china which google and facebook refused to do.
Why are microsoft, apple and other tech companies allowed to do busy in china? Because they follow chinese laws.
> Strip down like 50% from overall content because it is not in line with CCP's ideology?!
As opposed to stripping content to line up with israeli ideology, european ideology or anyone else's ideology?
Other than hypocrisy, do you have a point?
How can that be reconciled with abridging the freedom of speech of millions of citizens by requiring that their preferred press must only controlled by the government's preferred owners?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny
I think it won't.
By “preferred owners” you mean literally anybody not from China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia or Venezuela [1]. Anyone in America, Europe, most of the Americas, most of Asia, and all of Africa. (Oz can come too.)
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
Phase 1: restricted if from China
Phase 2: restricted if influenced by China
Phase 3: restricted if sympathetic to China
Phase 4: China isn’t the only bad thing for America. If you have the following ideas, those are just as dangerous. “Speech is violence.” Also “silence is violence.”
This has been lived out in front of our eyes so many times.
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/lamont-v-postmaster-...
This legislation was overwhelmingly bipartisan supported and placed under national security, in an election year, whose court case will happen by Dec. 6 in order to seek review from the Supreme Court if needed before Jan 19th ban. But the election is 1 month prior.
That this most likely will become an election issue where republicans and democrats can 'be on the same page' about and show some unity.
[1] - https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/half-support-banning-tiktok-2024...
Which means the public can make it an issue if it wants to.
That's what I'm saying, it's highly probable that it will be.
