Technology

Are we acting like the US isn't the biggest surveillance state existing in all history?

So because there's one app they don't control the data on, we need to ban it? Sounds like the free market to me.

Yes, and?

Does anyone think that China is just full of the warm fuzzies and wants us all to hold hands, make smores and sing kumbaya? They are every bit after power as the US is to hold onto it.

Large centralised social media platform should all be banned. I miss the times when all you had was forums hosted in someone's basement, the Internet was a better place. Short form video content is the worst of the bunch though.

I don't use TikTok and I don't think anyone really should but if we're going to ban TikTok for data collection then there are a lot of platforms that need to be banned. ~~We know the 2016 election was fucked with through Facebook and not a damn thing has been done~~

Democrats have convinced themselves taking over TikTok is the solution to their problems, but the reality is that if Joe Biden signs this bill into law when he is already tanking in the polls, particularly with young voters, he will hand the election to Trump. The youth will not forgive a party that was so extreme it banned or hijacked their favourite platform to censor them in order to keep a genocide going.

Best line is at the end

They didn't care about it being China owned

They didn't care about data sharing

Share info on the platform the US can't censor though and then it's ban time 😂

Yikes, what a flawed set of premises.

" What if Canada did the same thing to the US? They did!"

No, they didn't. Canada tried to boost Canadian media presence on American streaming platforms.

Making sure gooby gets an international viewing is very different from transmitting information to an overtly hostile government known for cyber attacks on its international peers.

"The platform isn't a national security threat".

It's a fact that the app TikTok is based off of, Douyin, sends the private data of every user straight to bytedance, owned in powerful minority stake by the Chinese government and that tiktok did the same thing with US user data until they promised they stopped a couple years ago.

As of January 2024 however, whoops, US citizen data(names, birthdates, location) is still being sent back to bytedance: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-pledged-to-protect-u-s-data-1-5-billion-later-its-still-struggling-cbccf203?mod=followamazon

It's not some baseless concern, it's a national security consequence against data disclosures that were already carried out and have continued to this year despite assurances 2 years ago that data leaks to bytedance are not happening.

"Instrument of soft power"

Marvel movies becoming super popular internationally is an example of soft power. Gathering the personal information of users with a continuing precedent attacking US digital infrastructures and democratic institutions is not soft power, it is hostile statecraft.

I am not a proponent of monolithic tech companies nor am I particularly aligned against international competition in tech supremacy, but this ban isn't about theoretical cultural competition.

This tiktok ban is about the recent gathering of personal information that can be used to assess and attack digital infrastructures and electoral behaviors by entities that are continually attacking digital infrastructures and electoral processes, entities focused on consolidating power not within some international free market of soft cultural influence but by gathering and consolidating power and using that power to forward state ambitions.

Yes, I too would love the US president to decide which social media platforms I am allowed to legally use and who I can legally communicate with. I'm so scared China is going to, checks notes, influence my opinion that I'm willing to sacrifice my free speech rights in the process. Regulate me harder, daddy! 😍

The probability of a war between the US and China is very high as judged by the US military. Prominently over the Taiwan situation. Having service members with tiktok on their devices would be terrible for opsec. To me this confirms that we are continuing to track on that train of thought. With that line of thinking this seems to an increased likelihood. Be careful out there folks.

Just my thoughts...

Bans can be bypassed, but my concern is if the new law makes it criminal to use tiktok. If so, the media should stop saying "tiktok ban" and instead say "new law makes it a crime to use tiktok"