Crazy that the proposed solution to propaganda is banning media instead of investing in education that promotes critical thinking. Or maybe the idea here is “no propaganda except mine”.
Investing in education is counter to the clear goals of the USA. Smart people would revolt, protest,and you know, hold companies and billionaires accountable. Uneducated people are often poor, can’t afford to fight back and are scared they will lose what little they have.
At some point we need all to fight back, but it might be too late. And worse, too few will join in out of fear of death.
If people can pick apart China’s propaganda it means they can pick apart US propaganda, too.
Can’t have that.
And yet China is banning basically the whole Western internet, foreign companies must enter joint ventures with Chinese companies under government control. Reciprocity is fair. Why should Byte Dance be allowed to take in billions to fund Chinese gulags?
China does thing: Bad
America does same thing: Good
At least the US government can’t harvest US citizens social media data without a warrant (excepting all the patriot act stuff). But there is zero protection for your data from the CCP if it’s on TikTok. That’s understandably a pretty huge security concern. I can also understand China not wanting data from their citizens in the hands of American social media companies. Idk if any if it is good or bad but it’s certainly common sense on a national level.
As someone who’s neither chinese nor american I want nothing more than these countries to keep their hands to themselves. I don’t like China doing it, and I don’t want the US doing it because China does it. Are y’all gonna hand a piece of your companies to every country they operate in? I’m guessing “no”.
Well, of course. They aren’t banning Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. That’s exactly how they want it.
they aren’t even banning tiktok, at least they’re trying not to. What they’re trying to do is force a sale specifically to US government insiders. They’re seizing it. They want that sweet, sweet propaganda and data mining for themselves.
Wow good find. The revolving door in action.
Removed by mod
You could argue that the perceptions of TikTok as a CCP tool of propaganda is an indirect foreign aid to Taiwan
God knows how much Russia tries to use social media to turn sentiments against Ukraine
Ultimately I think short form content encouraging platforms at large need to go down anyways so sucker punching the current biggest offender is right by me!
The only thing I’ve seen about Taiwan on TikTok are videos talking about just how bad China’s casualty rate would be if they tried anything.
Short form content platforms aren’t going anywhere, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts are just a carbon copy of tiktok. No problems with them, of course, because they’re American.
I was against banning TikTok despite never having even used it. I still think the fact that’s it’s CCP controlled is a valid point so I get why this doesn’t affect reels or shorts but I still think it’s naive to ignore them. They’re bad for mental health and political division the exact same way TikTok is and just like TikTok there are foreign countries using them for propaganda purposes just aswell.
“Pork” on a bill has been a problem for decades.
This is not the definition of “pork” in a bill. This is an additive that has nothing to do with the bill, sure, but “pork” is when someone diverts funds to their cause with no direct reason to have it in the bill.
SINGLE ISSUE BILLS, FOLKS.
Why do you think pork needs to be actual dollars?
I’ll bet you that many congress folks already own stock in whatever company is most likely to pick up US Tiktok.
so youre saying tik tok is addictive
Yup and that is the same issue with elections. Candidate A wants to ban private jets and burn tyres, candidate B wants to legalise child labour. A wins then claims they have a mandate to burn tyres
Just First Past the post voting things
How about a digital bill of rights that applies to every corporation you fucking cowards!
They don’t care about every corporation because they work with those corporations. It’s because it’s a foreign power that started doing the same shit they’ve been doing for decades now. None of these countries & corporations deserve any sort of sympathy or support from any sane individual.
I see no issue with banning tik tok.
It’s not even “banning tik-tok”. It’s “separate your interests, or we block your product”.
Which isn’t exactly something that we haven’t seen before in the U.S. and it for sure isn’t anything new in China where plenty of services, games…etc are blocked with “Chinese only” versions of those services.
We forced the sale of Grindr and nobody even brought it up.
Given how many politicians are deeply closeted, I like to imagine they hurried this one along quietly
Except they would be ignoring all the other shitty social networks but it’s a start.
It’s not a start tho, it’s killing competition of Facebook and Google. It’s consolidating power if anything. I believe this bill has nothing to do with security issues and everything to do with campaign contributions to make sure America never has to compete with another country in this space.
eh, It would look like more of a shakedown if it was just the US doing it, but tiktok is getting banned all over the place, particularly for government devices.
Oh I know their motivation is greed.
what did tiktok do to deserve being banned, and why is it okay for other companies to do that?
Feeding data to the CCP, helping them identify people who can be easily swayed into espionage. Say someone gets into a position of power. “Hey, remember when you were 12 and said this on tik Tok? Now we need you to be out bitch or we’re leaking this.”
Look at the things that have gone viral on Tik Tok, it’s like their algorithm prioritizes things that are toxic to make American youth shittier. Kia boys comes to mind.
There is also the fact that China bans all American social media out of fear that we’d use it to manipulate their people. If they aren’t allowing our businesses to compete fairly, why should we allow theirs? Also, they probably are projecting that fear because they are doing exactly that with TikTok.
The app has more permissions than most apps and is highly invasive. They sent a push notification to all their users based on Geo location saying who their rep was and giving their phone number saying to call them to stop this bill. That alone seems like a major abuse of power. They are using the data they have to try to sway the American politicians already.
you’ve failed to answer my second question, which I believe was the important one: why should this behavior be perfectly legal for everyone other than tiktok?
Not a single thing you said has convinced me. And I am going to get on Tik Tok out of spite when this passes into law.
Sounds like a lose-lose scenario
Not really. It might have something I enjoy on it.
TikTok is very heavily influenced by the CCP and could be used to collect data from Americans (probably they already are). Not wanting your biggest geopolitical rival to harvest data from your citizens is pretty understandable.
Chinese government is a lot less a threat to me compared to the US. We are at most two elections cycles away from a Christian Nationalism state. China is over there, not my problem. I can avoid them if I want.
i hate TikTok but also Instagram and YouTube shorts should be in the same list
Well the Senate killed the earlier bill. There’s a decent chance they pass the Ukraine/Israel aid bill without this amendment. It would then be stricken in reconciliation. Unfortunately there’s also a decent chance the Senate passes it because this version probably fixes things the Senators had problems with.
If it does get passed there’s a very good chance there’s a court order to prevent anything until the courts rule on the constitutionality of the law. If Bytedance loses that there’s zero chance they sell though. The US market is not big enough for them to jettison an international company.
Why are you cheerleading for TikTok to remain in the hands of a US adversary, during the same week when said adversary forced a US company to abjectly ban US-based messaging apps?
Retaliation. Tit for tit.
If the government can just point at a company and force a fire sale then there is no market, there is no order, there is no financial industry. This is an incredibly dangerous law.
The alternative is to outright ban it. Tik Tok is a cancer directly controlled by a hostile nation state. The government absolutely has the right to block foreign interference like this.
Pray tell how is this any worse than Facebook? Is the CCP in the Los Angeles TikTok office moderating content?
Or is this just more bullshit invented on the spot to justify an unconstitutional power grab?
Tik for Tok
Weren’t you all just hating on Republicans for not voting for that bill.
How about an all bills must be fucking separate bill?
This was a separate bill. Til Tok, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel were all separate. They were brought to the floor at the same time, but they could’ve all been voted on differently
At least the Genocrats cant hide behind the “it was bundled in with Ukraine” excuse now. The end up the exact same as the Republicunts.
Both sides are exactly the same.
What is a genocrat?
Linkerbaan is just a troll. Always trying to muddy the conversation with terms like “genocide joe” and “sleepy joe.” I assume “genocrats” are his clever portmanteau for genocide Democrats.
Edit: notice how he edits his comments to make them more “both sides” instead of the original “Democrats bad” message.
You need to fix voting in congress first. The reason riders get put in is because some small bills that are of no interest to some in congress would never make it because they’d never get enough votes to pass. Of course the system got abused to hell with poison pills and shitty bills that are crammed into popular legislation to make it hard to pass or make good legislation pass shitty laws.
So yeah, split the bills. But make these clowns vote on everything.
Can we just put the american and chinese government in a room and let them fight it out untill they are done?
Just let me watch my funny cat videos and cooking videos in peace thankyou very much.
“they won’t let the algorithm be sold and without it, it’s an empty deal” I don’t see how that’s a problem. Obviously there’s a great deal of knowledge about what “the algorithm” does across the userbase; just get users to raise tickets about what they miss and others to upvote them, then knock them off one by one. There’s nothing magic about “users who liked post A also liked post B” or “company X paid us $1000000000000 so here’s post C whether you like it or not”. It might even end up being better than the original.
I will never vote for my rep again because of this. Climate change, runaway COL, rising wealth inequality, legalize cannabis, Middle East on fire, flood in the district that killed people…utter silence.
Banning Tik Tok was the priority.
I won’t vote GOP but my rep is never getting my vote again.
Is your rep speaker of the house Mike Johnson? If not, they don’t choose which bill is voted on…
Could have voted nay, could have refused to vote on it, could have demanded a rider be attached passing universal healthcare. Choose to vote against our rights to use as shitty app. Therefore I choose to never vote for them again.
Unless you got a time machine my decision is final.
