- People: Why doesn’t the government ever pass a law that protects its citizens.
– Government: Here’s a law to protect our citizens from a foreign government spying on them.
– Gen Z: Noooooooooooooo!!!
Ah but that foreign government is cool and good! Gen Z knows that because the propoganda platform they’ve become addicted to tells them that China is cool and good, so clearly the U.S. is bad and being mean to the Chinese.
Also large chunks of this one, too. Theyre really trying to make this seem like its about stripping ur privacy. Like, theres literally another bill right now thats passing thats actually about stripping away ur rights to digital privacy, this one in particular has nothing to do with that. This one truly is, adversarial govts shouldnt get to spy on our citizens.
I have literally never seen a single pro CCP tik tok. Been using it for several years daily. Not that they don’t exist, but if you’re not looking for them it certainly does not direct you to them.
Glad to see Dems are taking the threat of Trump getting into power serious by focusing on issues that their base support:
Stop funding and supplying a genocidePacking the clearly biased court so things like student loan forgiveness can pass and all these anti trans and other crazy far right laws get shot downNot breaking rail road workers strikes- Banning one of the most popular social media apps
Nevermind the bill has bipartisan support! Republicans must have ZERO to do with this bill! 🙄
Get serious or get out.
Bringing up that it had bipartisan support is completely irrelevant.
The headlines are going to be “Biden signs bill banning Tick Tok”. When his support of a horrible genocide is already depressing how much non republicans want to vote for him going out and doing this is just adding more reasons.
Maybe you and him need to get actually serious and focus on things people actually care about.
He is only campaigning on “I’m not trump” like literally if you got to his website and click on “Joes Vision” you get taken to a 404 page. There’s nothing talking about where he stands on issues or what he offers.
He is only campaigning on “I’m not trump” like literally if you got to his website and click on “Joes Vision” you get taken to a 404 page
(X) Doubt
I’m not a ban fan but social media like that is psychological cancer that is definitely harming the young and old mentally.
Kids growing up these days have the burden of the disgusting need for social media self-promotion. They are conditioned that attention and Likes are the most valuable social currency, and waste so much of their valuable youth pursuing that hollow bullshit.
I’m keeping my kids off social media for as long as I can so they can experience growing up without Cloud-automated peer pressure.
They said this about TV. And game consoles. And computers. And every social media website. They said this about movies when they first came out too.
Social media is a reality of the world. This ban isn’t getting rid of that, just banning one specific platform. Why is Intagram Reels acceptable but Tik Tok isn’t? Because ones is owned by a Chinese company and the other isn’t. That’s all this ban is about. Literally nothing else.
Yeah, I’m almost 100% sure the “tiktok is damaging kid’s brains” is the millennial equivalent of boomers “videogames and TV are damaging kid’s brains”.
I’m a millennia by the way, and we are starting to sound a bit afraid of technologies.
Short form video is genuinely pretty bad though… Most social media is too, it’s not just a new medium people are scared of, it deliberately trains people to maximize use of it
Facebook pioneered most of the (unethical) experiments that make it so bad. They experimented with what makes people use the app for longest - controversial topics, quickly decreasing the amount of “desired” content as you scroll to push you to the optimal reinforcement schedule in operant conditioning, and copious amounts of alerts to give you fomo
Video games can be bad for the same reason - they can also be built to cultivate addiction. And social media can be built without it… The difference between Reddit pre-investment (which coincidentally, I think was also related to tencent/bytedance… They have an obscene amount of money invested everywhere) and Reddit now is a good example
It’s not just people clutching pearls about the new thing or a rise in mental illness coinciding with the growth of social media - there’s a science-backed arms race between engineering more time in app and understanding/treating the effects
(That being said, I agree we millennials are starting to emotionally reject new technology - in this case there’s just solid science showing how this is being misused with bad effects)
You can’t ban peer pressure. That’s like trying to stop the flow of water.
Look what it did to boomers. Legit. Ban all that shit. Geocities for the win.
I’m a new parent trying to navigate all this myself.
Most research I’ve been able to find suggests that social media doesn’t cause problems, but rather kids with problems tend to spend too much time on social media. As in there’s no causal link between social media and whatever social problems.
I guess when my kids get to that age the best I’ll be able to do will be to try to keep them engaged with the physical world however I can.
Since when does Congress ban websites or dictate what apps people can have on their devices? Regardless of how you feel about this particular company, I feel like no one is talking about the internet-killing precedent that’s being set here, and that should be concerning.
It’s being used as an infiltration device by the Chinese government. Not that I agree butvits not just a website. Same as Twitter and Facebook bit we have more control over those.
It’s being used as an infiltration device by the Chinese government
Please prove this.
There’s obviously not going to be proof, it’d be huge news if there were. At the same time, I also wonder why people so adamantly defensive of TikTok in particular? It seems trivial enough to establish that they could exert an undue influence on a global audience through social media with just a few (I would think uncontroversial) assumptions
- Social platforms have more than enough information to create a good idea of your politics, personality, and interests
- Platforms such as TikTok operate on “pushing” content the algorithm wants instead of users “pulling” content they want to see
- You are not immune to propaganda. Nobody is.
With a state ownership stake in the picture, it creates a pretty uneasy tension, right? If they know (1), they could just push ads and content which would help prime you emotionally and mentally to receive that advertising via mechanism (2). This is their actual business model.
Alternatively, if so motivated, they could just as easily use that same profile and mechanism to push content which nudges the content consumer in any myriad ways (politically, socially, etc.). Start with something that’s “close” to the viewer’s existing views, and cumulatively keep pushing content which leads folks down pipelines. They don’t even need to make the content. The users create it; the sentiment, quality, and popularity data informs which shorts to push where; refine the model based on receptivity; repeat as necessary.
Given (3), especially at the scale we’re talking about with TikTok, I think it’s obviously possible that the platform could be used to meaningfully influence public opinion, sow discord, spread misinformation, whatever. Whether they actually do this is purely speculative, but I also have a hard time thinking people would be quite so enthusiastically defensive of a similar social platform under direct influence from their own government?
Same as Twitter and Facebook bit we have more control over those.
Only in the sense that the people using them to manipulate us are the same ones making the laws. They’re leveraging it for their own ends, not stopping it.
The correct course of action (from the perspective of the American people, in stark contrast to that of the American government/oligarchy) would be to ban TikTok as the threat it is, and also ban Facebook, Twitter and Reddit for the threats they pose as well. The trouble is that it won’t, because it is the entity wielding that weapon against the American people and will not voluntarily disarm itself.
Banning them is the exact wrong way to go about the problem. That just gives the government the power to ban apps that contain information that doesn’t fit the narrative the government wants to put out. It gives them control over the consumer.
What should happen is comprehensive privacy protections for consumers and extensive fines when companies don’t abide by them. That way, the consumer benefits and the government has more oversight over companies, not people.
To be fair they didn’t actually name TikTok. That would be clearly Unconstitutional. Instead they made a bill that will only apply to one company. So unconstitutional but most people won’t notice.
And even better Meta, Alphabet, Apple, and GM are all busy selling China your information as fast as they can anyways.
While also expanding their own surveillance capabilities, right?
Yeah, tiktok is a Chinese data mine so… they don’t want it to go away, they vwanna control it.
Who downvoted this shit? This is 100% the case. The problem isn’t any of the negative effects of social media. The problem is that the US government doesn’t get to store and sort through all the data on TikTok like they do with US social media companies. They don’t give a shit about its effect on Americans. They just want the ability to use it against Americans like all the rest.
