BREAKING - Tiktok has now SHUT DOWN SERVICES in the United States, noting “A law banning Tiktok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate Tiktok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!”

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119 points

I just don’t see how this move and the timing was not orchestrated to manipulate uninformed TikTok users into supporting Trump. The explicit callout to Trump in the message… I have been fearing the next presidency and this was a blow.

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36 points

On one hand, yeah, on the other hand Biden literally signed the law banning it. If Democrats didn’t want Tik Tok being banned to be associated with them and to give Republicans an easy, obvious win by unbanning a wildly popular app, then they could have just… not done that. This was just completely an unforced error on the part of the Democrats.

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9 points

Accurate perspective but another one is this was a very successful social engineering of US politics by its global adversaries.

Dems have been been trying to pull back the moment they released they got played but its to late. Above messaging is additional salt in the wound.

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8 points
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How did they “[get] played”? Like the poster you replied too said, it was a completely unforced error on their part. It feels like they tried to jump on the right-wing “China bad” bandwagon and it bit them in the arse.

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2 points

they could have easily repealed it

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65 points

Or instead of targeting tiktok specifically, they could have chosen to pass a data privacy law and actually did something worthwhile instead of pointless, unpopular grandstanding. Haha just kidding, they would never do anything to reduce even slightly shareholder value.

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11 points

It’s never been about data privacy. Never.

It’s always been about control. Always?

Snape: “Always.”

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3 points

Apparently the law is written so that it would also be applicable to other apps like RedNote, if a president were interested in applying it.

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40 points

As is traditional, the Republicans drafted a law, got bipartisan support to push it through congress, and then after it passed publicly flip flopped their support for the law they just wrote when they realized they could score political points by complaining about it while the Democrats would hold to their agreed support.

This way the Republicans get the law they want, get to claim any benefits of said law by pointing to their voting record, and get to blame anything people don’t like about it on Democrats, all at the same time.

Meanwhile there are no consequences to their bad faith actions because the Democrats will just bend over and take it in the name of bipartisanship and working across the aisle because half of them are Republicans, they just don’t want to call themselves Republicans and leadership is willing to fight tooth and nail to protect said members.

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6 points

I’ll get a bit conspiratorial here, but if what Bernie has said is to be trusted in his video about oligarchy, up on his youtube channel, then Democrats are largely owned/influenced by billionaires who would benefit from the increased Trump support. It would make sense to do this, but yeah it could also just be a blunder, given how Trump was the first one to propose the ban and Democrats could take it as “hey if we do this, we’ll win the moderate right support again!!”, though who knows.

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4 points

It’s important to remember that politicians are still people, too. Some of them might just not have realized what would happen, some of them might just be corrupt, some of them might have known this was a bad idea but played along anyway to try and get support for things they thought were more important. There isn’t actually a single motivator for all of the Democratic Party. That’s just not how people work.

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17 points

I would imagine this is them putting political pressure on Trump to uphold his campaign promise. The uniformed will open the app, see that message, and know where to direct their attention.

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34 points

I don’t know if it’s that ByteDance wants to push people into supporting Trump, but it could be that Trump agreed to “save” it if they appeared to kiss his ass.

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15 points

Glazing Donald’s ego is a last ditch effort to save their platform. This is entirely on the Democrats—they didn’t have to agree to the ban, they could have insisted on higher standards for transparency and data security for social media instead. But banning the platform that featured pro-palestinian sentiment was more important to them. Now all that’s left is billionaire owned pro-Trump social media which Tik Tok may or may not join in the future. Good job guys!

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12 points

Hello, RedNote.

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40 points
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Or Loops. You know, being open source, privacy respecting and all that.

Nah, just kidding. Who wants any of that when you have the little red book instead.

Edit: Turns out, the fine print of Loops is worth reading.

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10 points

Loops privacy policy is shit btw.

Better that than TT or RedNote though.

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6 points

I just read it on their website and it looks pretty standard. What’s so shite about it?

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16 points

Or maybe people don’t want to join an app with no app (other than a TestFlight version, as far as I can see) and no user base? Maybe?

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2 points

Mastodon use to be tiny at some point, but some people joined anyway.

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8 points

Or just touch grass

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4 points

Why not both? The grass isn’t that wonderful everywhere.

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4 points

It’s always a bit ironic when people post this on the internet.

It’s not wrong, per se, but much more specific instructions on how not to waste your life would be nice. There’s old people that have spent their whole life on the metaphorical grass and are still dumb as shit.

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2 points

I like Loops too! I’ve ditched everything except Loops and RedNote for social media.

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4 points

Rights are soooo gen X.

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@TranquilTurbulence @orca
I think it still needs some time to get ready.

At least until the app is available without side loading or testflight.

But I think it will be great

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11 points

I downloaded that and it wanted my mobile number, so I uninstalled it.

People are weird.

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2 points

I think it only uses it for initial verification. I already get a ton of spam on my number so it doesn’t really bother me. Highly recommend checking some of the content out though if you want an unfettered view into everyday life in China. It’s been a fun adventure.

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10 points

Clowns will find some other teet

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31 points

Anddddd the Dems just lost more of the youth vote.

GJ guys.

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14 points

People forget shit so fast, it doesn’t even matter. All that matters is the present + six months for most Americans.

Shit, I think many 14-16 yo Americans don’t even know who Obama’s VP was, or would have to think for a second a least, haha.

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10 points

14 yo’s were 6 when Trump’s first term started

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57 points
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As an European, I sincerely envy you. Death to these crappy social networks.

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28 points

Social media peaked in 2012/2013, before just before recommendation algorithms became a thing. Everything became insufferable afterwards.

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11 points
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TBH, I found FB insufferable already in 2008, when I deleted my back-then 1 y/o account.

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5 points

Agree, I felt the bad effects of FB around then. It was just so pointless.

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2 points
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That’s kind of my feeling too, although it’s dangerously close to “better back in my day” given my age.

The period after they shut down browser popups, but before they invented those virtual DOM-hacking popups was great, and that’s a measurable change.

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2 points

Lemmy is nice though

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7 points

It’s not that they do that because they dislike social networks though

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1 point

The reason behind is not important. The effect is a net positive.

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7 points

Banning isn’t the solution. Thankfully this means less yanks on tiktok now.

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1 point

Unfortunately they will most likely migrate to Instagram as a result, which isn’t good at all especially considering their recently hate speech policy changes targeted towards LGBTQ people and immigrants.

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