The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance.
US officials have cited the widespread commercial availability of US citizens’ data as another source of national security risk. The US government and other domestic law enforcement agencies are also known to have purchased US citizens’ data from commercial data brokers.
I’m with Jamaal Bowman on this one, this is just about silencing and deplatforming pesky young people that ask lawmakers to protect the environment and stop genocides
I think this is the right take. There is so much political activism on there, it gets almost annoying at times. 9 times out of 10 if there was some corruption, suspicious trade, or other nefarious thing done by a congress critter I seen it on Tiktok first.
The Federal trollops find hot button issues that hit each generation to keep us all confused and pissed off, and bring up “bills” whenever they want to mess with, and distract us.
- Healthcare
- Women’s rights
- The rights of people of color
- Immigration and “the border”
- The rights of little metal objects that go pew pew
- …and now TikTok to go after the Zoomers
It’s so pathetically transparent. They’ll make sure these issues are never truly resolved to keep everyone too busy worrying about basic things so we forget how much they continue to fuck up the entire country for their rich betters.
Right? That was my IMMEDIATE gut reaction.
“We can’t silence the media but we can silence the masses.”
Cool.
Do Facebook next.
They are doing Facebook next, right?
Right?
I don’t love Facebook, but I’m not sure I understand the comparison. The objection here is that TikTok is operated by a Chinese company. Meta is a domestic company.
What difference does that make?
From the governments point of view it makes a big difference to national security.
Tiktok never played a key role in a successful foreign plot to illegally influence the outcome of an American presidential election. Facebook did in 2016.
Is that a defense of TickTok?
I don’t disagree about Facebook, but that doesn’t mean TickTok isn’t a national security threat.
I’m not sure what your trying to argue against here.I’m saying that Tiktok is not a national security threat and the only reason that congress is pretending so is because they don’t like or understand the people using it and because it’s a non-donating threat to some of their biggest sources of legal bribes.
I don’t use Tiktok myself and I’m in no way a fan of their awful algorithm, but that doesn’t give politicians license to just make shit up while blatantly ignoring the REAL threats because they are paid to.
That would be a very reasonable assumption. Accept that ByteDance does in fact donate and lobby quite a lot. It just isn’t working very well for them.
I’d argue that a foreign power using a local platform for propaganda, is one kind of threat. And a foreign power owning and controlling the platform itself, can be a more subtle and probably more potent threat. They don’t have to create the content like Russia did. They only have to tweak the algorithm a little, so as to surface content they want slightly more often. That would be much harder to prove.
Why not just pass some privacy protection laws with some actual teeth? Why single out a single company? They think TikTok is the only one making US citizens’ data commercially available?
because then the US companies won’t be able to legally spy on us and send all that info to the government
Because it was never about data protection or privacy. The issue is that the US government wants a monopoly on US users’ data.
I may be in the minority here. I think silencing CNN Business might be a good thing.
Or at least ending any pretense of it being a reliable source for anything involving US corporations and their competitors.
You mean app stores such as the one run by a US defense contractor, advertising platform, and spy agency poorly masquerading as a consumer-facing company?
Or the one run by the company infamous for subjecting their overseas workforce to such atrocious working conditions for so little pay that their method of keeping employee turnover to a minimum is suicide prevention nets?
