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.
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.
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.
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.
Look what it did to boomers. Legit. Ban all that shit. Geocities for the win.
You can’t ban peer pressure. That’s like trying to stop the flow of water.
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)
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.
How about a digital bill of rights instead of playing ineffective whackamole?
Harm the stock portfolios of US billionaires? You sound like someone who hates receiving RVs and fishing trips.
Because the US can control the topics shared in the other platforms, but since tiktok is owned by a chinese parent company, they can’t
Also, tiktok was originally told they had to sell to a us based owner to avoid the ban (see hostile takeover)
This ban has nothing to do with privacy and Chinese manipulation, and everything about control and profits.
Hell, Besos and The Zuckster are the two main forces pushing for this ban.
Good.
Let’s go further. Any company using an algorithm to profit off people’s engagement has to publish the code.
Code’s not enough. The data the algorithm is analyzing (both the training data and live data) has to be public too, in order to actually understand what the algorithm is doing.
The training data, yes. As for the live data… I would say “yes” in the sense that the service shouldn’t be storing anything but what the users explicitly choose to make public to begin with.
If I have it correct, the law wouldn’t immediately ban TikTok but would require it to actually be sold to a real US company within a certain amount of days otherwise it’d get banned. The CCP obviously doesn’t want that. So if this passes, TikTok isn’t removed immediately.
Probably what happens is the CCP, I mean Bytedance, sells it to a US company then puts their people there to still siphon data.
The law is to force any company that isn’t US owned that the US doesn’t like to hand over ownership. Regardless of your thoughts on TikTok/ByteDance/China in general, this is not a law one should praise. It’s incredibly dangerous and is one more step toward the US becoming a full-fledged fascist state.
What exactly is fascist about it? Being able to ban companies from hostile nations seems like a legitimate tool that frankly is concerning that we didn’t have before. Russia and China are using massive propaganda farms and the US has been paying the price of that for too long. We are moving into a hostile multi-polar world and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Internet isn’t segregated sooner or later if hostilities start
I guarantee you that Facebook, Twitter and Google are selling data to China on the regular. And anyone else willing to pay up.
That’s all fine and dandy for Biden though because he gets to sort through it all first unlike with TikTok.
I’m pretty sure Biden is not sorting through everyone’s social media information. I think he’s a little busy.
It’s already run by a Singaporean group. Transferring it to the US is just a chance for our Social Media conglomerates to part it out and destroy competition.
TikTok Ltd was incorporated in the Cayman Islands and is based in both Singapore and Los Angeles.[11] It owns four entities that are based respectively in the United States, Australia (which also runs the New Zealand business), United Kingdom (also owns subsidiaries in the European Union), and Singapore (owns operations in Southeast Asia and India).
From the Wikipedia. This isn’t hard information to find.
60% of Bytedance is owned by institutional investors. It’s a private company. The CCP doesn’t own the company. 3 of the 5 board members are American. Don’t spread made up bullshit. If there’s any reason not to sell the company to a US company is because only 150 million Americans are tiktok users on an app with over a billion monthly active users globally. Not to mention that the US companies are gonna lowball the shit out of their offers because they think Bytedance is gonna be begging to sell. Also, there’s a chance that if the US bans tiktok, then maybe they could get access to China, which tiktok is not currently available in.
Any business that does business in China, especially ones based in China, are under the CCP. Doesn’t matter who the “owners” are and they can have 1000 American board members.
China has private industry AND state owned industry. While everything is monitored by the CCP, they don’t control private businesses. They do indeed have capitalism in China. The only difference is that in China, rich people get killed when they fuck people over. Even the US is an insanely corrupt surveillance state.
