• Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    once again - not a ban, a seizure. Steve Mnuchin is heading a group of government insiders who want to buy TikTok, and this bill bans it if and only if they don’t sell. The government has decided that TikTok is a dangerous propaganda and espionage network and intends to steal it and run it themselves. Even if you think that TikTok is that dangerous you have to ask yourself: why is it legal for everyone else and why does our government want so badly to do it themselves?

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Yup. And the precedent this sets is horrifying. Even monopolies get due process. Being able to declare a company as a foreign enemy and force them to leave the market or be bought out is a ridiculous measure in a supposedly free society.

    • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      so they can do the death penalty on a company, they have a model

      they just don’t do it to Exxon or Facebook or Monsanto or…

    • RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      First off, source? Second, the npr interview I heard mentioned specifically that China has to approve the sale because the algorithm is proprietary to a Chinese company. So anyone “buying TikTok” is buying a name and none of the actual bones of the social media platform

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Aren’t the bones the cheap part now? Think truth social for instance, why was it supposedly worth so much if anyone can spin up a Mastadon instance and make it the same restrictions over the weekend. The userbase numbers are all that mattered there I assume. Why is reddit worth more than Lemmy? Is it because the bones are expensive? Or is it that they have access to a large userbase already.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          9 months ago

          the reason truth social was so highly valued is probably related to trumps chronic addiction to over valuing his assets by about 10-100x the original value of them.

          you would think the userbase of truth social would be big, it’s not. It’s several orders of magnitude smaller than twitter, and it’s value is theorized to be heavily independent of the actual user count, the board of truth literally said as much. I.E. basically fucking bullshit.