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Tiktok is owned by a Chinese company, so all of the data harvesting that's perfectly fine for Facebook and Twitter to do suddenly became a problem for the US government.
It's not about the data harvesting, please stop repeating this falsehood.
It's about how China is controlling the algorithm for polical goals. From pushing its claim over Taiwan to interfering with global elections by showing(or hiding) speicifc content to sway peoples choices.
So what is considered perfectly fine for Facebook and Twitter to do, got it
What if I think Facebook and Twitter should be shit canned too?
Are you the US government cherry picking privacy concerns to eliminate competitors?
They all suck, yeah. I think banning individual social media services is not the solution. The solution is to create meaningful laws that hold any company, Chinese or American, accountable for data privacy and misinformation/election interference violations.
Funny you say that, because Chinese apps like tiktok can't ever be compliant with GDPR, and American ones are fully reliant on an executive order where Biden pinky swore to not use the Cloud Act against GDPR.
We don't do that here
Unless you live in California, they kinda do.
That wouldn't solve the problem because the Chinese government is not bound by US law in China.
They are while doing business in the USA
Yes, which doesn't solve the problem because the problem is in China. The Chinese government can demand any information that ByteDance possesses. Under Chinese law, they are bound to comply and bound to deny that they were even asked under threat of extremely harsh punishment.
It does solve the problem at least as far as then you’d have legal standing to ban til too, and equally anything else that doesn’t follow the law
I would expect a meaningful data privacy law would involve forcing the client software to be audited to ensure they aren't collecting the information in the first place?
You're conflating privacy and espionage. The reason basically every country in the world has laws about foreign ownership of media and telecommunications infrastructure is not because of privacy concerns -- it's because of the potential for espionage. That fanciful law with no chance of passing in the US (even if it should!) would reduce but not eliminate the problem. It's illegal for China to operate weird little secret police stations in foreign countries to threaten, intimidate, and control the Chinese diaspora, but that hasn't stopped them from doing it. Having them control powerful monitoring and tracking tools doesn't make it harder. They are very capable of surreptitiously doing shit they shouldn't.
No I'm not conflating anything, you're just moving the goalpost...
from
to
People can still do murder even though its illegal and most murderers are never caught, so we shouldn't have laws making murder illegal because it doesn't "solve" murder
🙂 perfect is the enemy of good. I don't think we're going to "eliminate" espionage, something that has existed for all of written history...
No, you're conflating privacy and espionage.
I'm not moving the goal posts. The order for China to divest is about espionage. The ban stemming from their refusal to divest is about espionage. Your privacy law doesn't solve this problem because it's not a privacy problem, it's an espionage problem.
To take your murder example, it's like saying 'I don't see why everyone's so worked up about China coming here and shooting people. People get shot here every day and the army doesn't get involved!' Despite sharing some details, domestic gun violence and war are different. You're focusing on the trees and missing the forest.
I'm not opposed to your proposed law. I'd support the hell out of it. It would solve other important problems, even if it wouldn't solve this one. But saying that a country can't do anything about espionage unless they pass that law is unrealistic.
Who said that?
You, in a nutshell. You're saying that they shouldn't address specific threats. Why not both?
Reading comprehension
lol no. But nice try. I applaud the attempt!
It's like having siblings. It's okay if I call my siblings buttheads, but you're not allowed to because you're not family.
I mean, that's exactly what Facebook and YouTube and Twitter do as well just over different things like radicalizing people towards Maga and whatnot.
Facebook and You tube haven't been pushing Maga content, they're just allowing it to exist. The feed itself isn't set to give it to everyone or hide left-wing content for a default user.
Twitter is a different story, and should probably also get banned at this point. Elon is absolutely using it to push his own rhetoric.
It's also about the data access by the chinese gov, as you can read here: https://www.nytimes.com/article/tiktok-ban.html
(not the harvesting, but the access to the harvested data.)
Seems like the most honest answer so far. The U.S. doesn’t trust the CCP with its citizens’ data. No surprise there.
Please read my reply to the comment, it's not about data ownership, it's about weaponizing algorithms.
Just like meta and xhitter are doing.
Companies weaponizing algorithms for profit is different than governments weaponizing algorithms for all sorts of far worse reasons.
If you can't see that, you're a bloody idiot.
You don't think meta and xhitter are weaponizing algorithms for Republicans? They might not be the whole government, but they are now in power after coordinating their hate filled messaging and misinformation.
Meta, no. Twitter, yes.
Twitter should be banned as well at this point. They have absolutely weaponized it, but not for government purposes, it's for Daddy Elon's purposes.
Meta is just allowing the hate content, they aren't prioritizing it to all users or something. My feed certainly doesn't contain any of it.
Except FB and Twitter sell their data to the highest bidder. If China wanted American's data, they can just buy it.
Good point. Seems like another issue of concern. As usual, the issue seems to be data privacy laws overall.
It is, but the relevance to the discussion is that China getting american's data isn't the reason for the ban. Nor is China influencing Americans because they tend to derank politically spicy videos. If China was controlling the algo to make the US look bad, videos tagged BLM wouldn't have been deranked.
Tiktok also wouldn't have hired a bunch of state department spooks if they weren't intending to keep amplifying US narratives.
It depends on the manner in which said “politically spicy videos” are being censored. If it’s being done in a manner that promotes Chinese narratives while demoting American narratives, that’s an entirely legitimate concern for the U.S. and I don’t really see why not demoting BLM videos is not in the CCP’s interest; videos that make America seem racist seems entirely in the interest of an Anti-American country.
I also don’t see why hiring former American intelligence operatives demonstrates a pro-American stance, as their motivations for doing so could be to learn about American intelligence-gathering methods while promoting Chinese interests.
Spicy in this case means protests, police misbehavior, stuff the US wouldn't want amplified. The big waves of censorship came in 2020 and 2022. You can search news articles from the time with lots of people wondering why they're no longer getting that content in their FYPs and content creators getting <1/10th of the views. FB and reddit do the same thing.
Amplifying the videos that show America's response to antiracist movements would make America look like the racist country it is. Demoting them conceals that.
CIA agents living in America who disseminate intelligence-gathering methods while promoting Chinese interests get charged with treason.
They were hired to help identify and amplify US state department narratives, same reason CNN and Fox hires them.
No, that doesn't make sense. Amplifying shows of division in a country promotes the view that said country is flawed and weak, in this case along racial lines. China has plenty to gain by showing that.
And America is no less racist than China, btw. I would argue far less so.
That seems entirely speculative. There are plenty of other reasons to hire them. Can you provide evidence for your claim?
Exactly! So demoting those videos suggests that China is not using the algorithm to promote anti-american views.
No, CIA agents don't go around saying they're working for media companies to disseminate propaganda, and media companies don't broadcast that they take extra care to make sure their coverage lines up with the state department's narratives.
??? You're trying to have it both ways with this. I'm out.
No I'm not, you've been misunderstanding me from the start.
Tiktok does not amplify views that make the US look bad, it demotes them. That demonstrates that china is not using tiktok to influence Americans because they would want the opposite.
Instead they do exactly what any media subservient to the state department does.
Hard to believe this post is in good faith. This ban has been discussed at least for like 4 years now