Not that it personally affects me- I’m not in USA and it’s one of the platforms I dislike the most. But I can’t find a concise explanation for why.
I’ve searched for news articles and those I found either don’t address the reason behind the ban and talk about US politics, or are vague about it, saying it would collect user sensitive data.
I’ve also found lists of countries banning TikTok from government devices, okay I understand that, and some countries banning it completely because of cultural sensitivities, which I doubt is US’ case.
Fair enough. What kind of user sensitive data would it be collecting? Isn’t this what most social media apps do already? What makes TikTok stand out in this regard?
It basically boils down to the USA not wanting China to be the ones collecting all that data. Which is a bit tenuous. The owner of TikTok is ByteDance, ByteDance is registered in the Caymans, with global headquarters in LA and Singapore. The current CEO is a Chinese national, but lives in Singapore. TikTok does collect quite a lot of data, but the FB app collects at least as much. It’s a bit of Sinophobia.
My personal pet theory is the US alphabet boys have a deal with all the other social media giants for first pick of data they mine, and TikTok didn’t want to play ball.
This is just what I’ve kinda thought, it’s by no means absolute fact, and I look forward to hearing what other people think/know about it.
A few years ago, all of that was China and nothing else but China.
Maybe these “international” items are just deliberate actions to conceil the truth?
Literally the first sentence of ByteDance’s wikipedia article says they’re HQed in Beijing. Which means the CCP has unfettered access to the company’s property and can strong-arm their leadership to do their bidding (as is standard for all Chinese businesses).
The data TikTok collects is extremely sensitive and is digital gold for things like training facial recognition models, which China totally does not use for bad things
But nice try, comrade bot
I literally did what everyone says you shouldn’t, and looked at the first result on Google.
Also get fucked with the comrade bot shit. I don’t have any issue with the Chinese as a people, their government is fucking dystopian.
I was going off what was obviously incomplete information, which I did try to make clear in my post. You think cause this is .ml account calling me a comrade bot is some kinda gotcha, but there’s a pretty wide spectrum of people on this instance and you can take that shit and fucking shove it.
Sorry man I just think it’s irresponsible to be spreading disinformation. You even admitted at the end of your post that you have no idea if what you said is true, so like, why even post? You’re contributing to the problem the same way bots are