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Garland desperate to be remembered for succeeding at anything even if it's just banning fucking TikTok
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Shut up Merrick you goddamn coward fuck. You had four fucking years to actually do your job, you can’t just pretend you weren’t sucking the wannabe mango Mussolini’s dick this whole time.
With all the bullshit that's about to go down, I'm having trouble caring about this anymore. All these social media platforms are data harvesting dumpster fires. Eliminating this one isn't going to do much, except probably put a bunch of Americans out of business.
It’s more broligarchy bullshit. Probably a bribe from Yass to Trump to protect Yass’s investment. Trump is the Billionaire’s lackey.
In the pitched battle between TikTok and Washington, few people stand to lose more than Jeff Yass, an American billionaire options trader who has emerged in recent years as a major donor to Republican candidates and causes.
Yass co-founded the Philadelphia-based trading firm Susquehanna International Group, which owns a 15% stake in TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance. Yass’ personal share is 7%, worth roughly $21 billion.
China will promote the one who will degrade U.S. power best. You think he is going to deep six one of his best supporters and allies?
Eh this is the one social media that the oligarchs can't censor so I'm fine with it sticking around. I'd rather have options than Elon and Zuck controlling the majority methods for average joes to get information out. Cause it doesn't seem like the fediverse is going mainstream for a while
Yeah, the reason they want to ban TikTok is because it's not an American owned social media platform like every other one in the country, which means that they can't as easily police its content and only China has that kind of power over it (but I think they don't really have much control over the international version? I don't know enough to say).
This is purely about America's ability to put propaganda on the platform.
There is only one reason I'm concerned about but it's a big one - China could at any time tweak the algorithm to influence a whole generation of people addicted to the network. At that level they could really tip the scales in their favor, and create unrest and instability, probably even violence or worse.
You're absolutely right, but I have the exact same concerns about Meta and Facebook, Google and YouTube, and Musk and Twitter - all of whom have been shown to be influencing the algorithms to censor left-wing news and people and favor right-wing groups and push right-wing extremism.
The other platforms are already doing that. So does the news when they report on events using different language (see the cyber truck blowing up vs. the New Orleans attack). The only difference here is that it might be China doing the propagandizing instead of the corporate overlords.
Absolutely a concern but at least Meta and Twitter do have some interest in stability in the USA. China does not necessarily have the same interests.
All the large platforms can do that. Elon cried about too many bots before he bought Twitter and now it's worse.
Meta has ai profiles. https://www.404media.co/metas-ai-profiles-are-indistinguishable-from-terrible-spam-that-took-over-facebook/
None of these big companies care as long as their profit goes up.
Gotta love the down votes people give for pointing out that it doesn't matter whether it's the US government, a foreign government, or even just the company having an agenda, someone has control over the algorithm and thus what people see.
They seem to want to believe that ignoring the idea that a foreign government can control what we see on social media is somehow inherently better, and that it isn't a legitimate national security threat.
Does that mean it needs to be banned? That's debatable. But it is delusional to insist that it's not a national security issue to have a foreign government in control of the social media nearly 50% of the population interacts with (170m monthly US users in Jan 2024).
They may have already done that
22.94%(19.6% more than second place) of voters voted for a person that claimed pepsi had microchips, said that Donald Trump, a dictactor that was responsible for facilitating The Holocaust in Romania and the founder of a fascist party were heroes, called global warming "a global scam", and spread covid 19 missinformation. As far as i know, his only marketing was tiktok. A lot of romanians were surprised by his place in the election
What evidence do you have that oligarchs in any nation cannot influence your TikTok algorithm? Like... we should assume they can by default until proven innocent.
Even if it's just a competing team of oligarchs fighting over who can produce the most amount of animosity and mistrust of the other, they're going to accidentally stumble across some shit that the other one doesn't want you to see and then they'll show it to you.
It turns out we don't have any way of getting clean unbiased sources so the best we can do is just have a lot of different ones with different biases since there is no such thing as clean public media anymore.
It's a weird one, China's constant hacking attempts seem annoying, but then their consumer products sold in America are generally decent because they want to sell goods. So it makes one think, in China, are American products suspect because America tries to spy on them constantly? Have we hacked their entire telecom infra and they run news campaigns about how Evil America Broke The Phones? Is this a scenario where these large dominant power nations all do the same crap to each other but purport to their own citizens that they're actually the good guys?
From there then, which would a citizen of a nation-state really trust? The software written by their own companies, with their own internal state-sponsored censorship and spying? Or that of another nation-state? Seems in almost every case, using the software from the other nation-state would actually allow more "freedom" - which is...weird to contemplate.
One exception I can think of, was that Kaspersky was very good antimalware software, but I caught it on several occasions completely blind to Russian malware software. Other AV software caught it, but Kaspersky just went deer-in-headlights and let it pass through. So perhaps, this isn't a black-and-white scenario.
In the case of social medias though, I'd say, consume as many different sources as one can. Sum up and divide to get the average. Likely, somewhere in there is where the actual truth lies.
…except probably put a bunch of Americans out of business.
If you mean “influencers” or the ultra wealthy, then good. They deserve to go out of business.
See also:
political activists/commentators, particularly ones who speak out against the fascist apartheid regime of Israel and the genocide it's committing. Such speech is heavily censored on the American owned major social media platforms for reasons as obvious as they're infuriating.
Comedians, singers, and other performers who benefit from the exposure to potential audiences. Especially ones who would be censored on the other platforms for the above reason or others.
The algorithm and spying is awful, sure, but not any worse than the American ones that cooperate with other totalitarian governments such as those of Russia, India, Israel, Hungary etc with impunity approaching that of Israel.
The main REAL difference between Tiktok and the other platforms is that it doesn't suppress anti-genocide speech, which is inconvenient to a political class where the vast majority is under the sway of AIPAC and other de facto Israeli government entities.
Ban all social media.
Nah, much better to regulate their behavior and then actually ENFORCE the laws and regulations.
put a bunch of Americans out of business
That would also be true for rational gun regulations, universal healthcare, and responsible climate policies.
I suppose it all depends on who donates more to his inauguration fund.
He fucking asked for it during his first mandate!
The difference is Russia knows how to manipulate Tik Tok now, as recent events in Romania have made abundantly clear. They no doubt used it to help Trump get elected.
Primarily due to kids fucking with his rallies. But now Dems decided to risk the income of a few million Americans and the circuses of a couple hundred million Americans for no real reason. So it's an easy political win for Trump if he can stop it, while of course enriching himself and his donors that have stakes in bytedance.
Sorry, "a few million Americans" make their money from TikTok? When did this start?
There's a shop. TikTok is the modern Etsy, where you can literally watch your product get made.
That sounds like it would be a minor side hustle for a few hundred thousand people and a major source of income for maybe a couple of hundred at most. I doubt it's a few million.
I doubt it's in the millions too, but it's definitely a significant number, not just a handful of people.
...have you never heard of influencers, the number one job kids want to do when they grow up in every poll done on the matter since 2012?
For no reason? China is using TikTok to derail elections in entire countries and promote civil strive everywhere by radicalising people against each other, while its Chinese counterpart is almost an educational app. TikTok is not a social media app, it's the psyops equivalent of a nuclear weapon.
You have evidence for this now? Did I miss where evidence other than, "trust us", was released?
Anyone still urging out there is delusional