the US government doesn't like how little control they have of the information flowing over there
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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This is the best answer.
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?
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.
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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.
Except FB and Twitter sell their data to the highest bidder. If China wanted American's data, they can just buy it.
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A motivation that hasn't been mentioned yet:
Every successful attempt so far by the US government to control what Americans may and may not access on the internet has been rooted in pre-existing legal restrictions on the content, or on access to it. It's just been things like piracy, CSAM, drug trafficking and the like - things that are illegal in and of themselves, so banning sites that are involved with them has just been a response to thecrxisting illegality.
This is the first time that the US government has succeeded in banning a site without pointing to violations of any existing laws, but simply because they've decided to do so.
That's a significant precedent, and to would-be tyrants, an extremely useful one.
This happens all the time. Almost every country has laws about foreign ownership of media and telecom. Here in Canada, Americans cannot come in and just buy up all the media companies. The consortium that bought my cell provider included a wealthy Egyptian national who was forced to divest before the sale could be finalized.
China was forced to divest from Grindr in the US like five years ago for the exact same reasons.
The only thing that's really weird here is that China is refusing to do so and would rather burn it to the ground than sell it. That's at least in part because having all that information - including granular tracking data - on 50% of the US population is an insanely powerful intelligence tool.
That’s not a motivation, but rather an (admittedly astute) comment on the legal context. Appreciated nonetheless.
Establishing that precedent just in and of itself would most certainly be more than enough motivation for anyone with a desire to manipulate or limit public discourse and access to the authority by which future bans can and will be implemented.
AIPAC wants it gone because Gen Z can't easily be manipulated into thinking Israel is a peace-loving democracy surrounded by savage terrorists.
Appealing to an out of touch, jingoistic voting base and cracking down on a social media platform where "the youths" are exposed to "woke commie socialist propaganda". Also, yes it is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance.
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Two reasons, both related to being owned by a Chinese company.
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It's mining data for the Chinese company.
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The Chinese company can make their algorithm present whatever they want. So they can play up criticism of the US and downplay criticism of China.
The degree of separation between the communist government and private companies is uncertain, so yeah.
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In Congress, during a private session, intelligence on their spying was presented.
That and the unanimous SCOTUS decision really say something as to what our government knows.
It's because it pissed off the wrong people. The initial push to ban tiktok was by Trump and republicans after TTers organized a mass RSVP of one of Trump's events and he spent a lot of money on extra staff and ended up performing in an empty stadium.
That failed and Trump was mocked. 4 years later, it was used to counter zionist propaganda, and that got the democrats on board. Here's Blinken admitting as much.
Additionally, Insta is TT's biggest competitor, and FB, which owns Insta, lobbys to the tune of 20M/year.
They want them to force to sell it to a US company, so the US interests can be forced onto the algorithm....
So that Trump can swoop in and "save" it.
After seeing the video the ceo posted, as well as the messages from when tiktok got banned and then unbanned, I'm starting to think this is the reason
Because Facebook can't compete fairly so they're using regulatory capture to kill it.
Technically the Chinese government could also use it to spy on Americans and that's a problem because they'd be taking Er Jerbs - 'Muricans should spy on 'Muricans.
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It's about narrative control. Cia has tools to promote/restrict content with x and facebook. (read twitterfiles). They don't have it for tiktok.
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All social media apps generate enough data about their users to engineer effective disinformation campaigns, influence elections and sway public opinion.
The US would prefer that China has to ask Russia to do that, rather than having direct access.
It also helps the china hawks in the US government who want war by contributing to the perception of China as implacably malicious.
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