I have never visited TikTok and look down on those who use it. However, I think this bill is stupid. It’s reactionary at best. This does nothing at all to address the general malaise predated on the entire world by social media. There should instead be tighter restrictions on social media or even phone use by minors. Why are we preventing minors from harming themselves by smoking or drinking, with pretty strict laws, but it’s totally fucking FINE to let them be psychologically manipulated by corporations with no agenda other than profit? I am so disgusted.
I agree about tighter restrictions on social media in general, but this is specifically about tiktok sending personal, material data back to China, a clearly hostile government that has been and is currently committing cyber attacks and espionage against the US and its citizens consistently.
Tiktok, despite its claims, has been proved to be sending that data to China multiple times since claiming that it has no connection to the Chinese government.
It isn’t the same as banning Instagram.
Banning tiktok in countries under attack from China makes sense when it’s been proven that tiktok is sending personal, identifying data to China.
Ffs! This bullshit is pure demagoguery and corruption!
It’s an election year, so pretending to care about privacy rights and national security (even though they’re doing fuck all about American companies spying, including for oppressive regimes such as those of Putin, Modi, Netanyahu and MBS) while being “tough on China” is a demagogue jackpot.
Meanwhile, the ACTUAL reasons are thus:
1: With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube heavily censoring criticism of the Israeli apartheid regime, TikTok is the main social media outlet for pro-palestinian and anti-genocide activism. AIPAC and other reliable sources for legal bribes don’t like that.
2: In the event of a sale, the purchaser is likely to be an oligarch that also bribes American politicians and will do so even more afterwards.
The problem with your first reason is that this TikTok sale nonsense started before Israel invaded Gaza.
Nah, I’m pretty sure Tiktok didn’t exist in 1948 😛
Fair, although the activism they’re currently censoring was not being so heavily censored before.
I dunno, I only recall them talking about the Tiktok ban for 2-4 months, but maybe they started at least 3 months before that and I didn’t notice right away?
Either way, the (even more than usually) heavy censorship basically started on the 8th of October, with people getting canceled left and right for daring to criticize the Israeli war crimes immediately following the terrorist attacks without watering it down by explicitly adding criticism of Hamas in the same breath.
If you time-restrict Google to before October 7th, you’ll see it was talked about quite a bit-
Fair enough heh. Can’t get it to do that (it only gives me “at least this recent” options, not “at least this long ago” ones), but based on our previous interactions here on Lemmy I’m gonna trust you and take your word for it 😁
Weird. Not sure why. But just for anyone else curious, here’s an article from March 15, 2023:
I keep seeing this comment- it has nothing to do with the election. They have until January 19th to divest. That’s well past the November election date.
I think the bigger issue is that this is terrible timing for Biden and he’s being an idiot about it. The last thing he needs is to lose the youth vote.
Do you think it would be better for him to kick the can to the next president? I think that would only raise concerns that he’s in bed with China after a unanimous Senate vote.
Do you think anyone who would have voted for Biden would have believed he was in bed with China and then not done it?
Because I can think of a lot of young people who would be very pissed off by this. So yes, kicking the can down the road in terms of politics would have been the best thing to do.
I hear you. There’s not much he can do with such strong congressional support without it looking like a personal agenda.
He has a lot more to offer the youth vote than Trump, between marijuana reform, abortion rights, tuition reimbursement, DEI, LGBTQ+ rights, lower taxes, etc. He’ll have to run on those.
He really hasn’t reached out to the youth vote much so far, at least from what I’ve seen, although definitely legalizing marijuana would do it if he is able to (it’s more complicated than some people think).
He pushed to reschedule in his first year. HHS proposed rescheduling to class 3, from class 1. We’re waiting on approval from the DEA now.
It’s also on the November ballot in several states. The Florida Supreme Court, for example, put statewide marijuana legalization as well as abortion rights on this November’s ballot. This should encourage the 18-24 vote turnout. Trump only won the swing state with 3.6% last election, and he’s lost popularity in his home county.
Soon to be bought by US interests who will continue to use it to do all the nasty things the CCP is doing now.
Guess we’ll see how ineffective such legislation really is.
It’s very easily effective. They’ll have until January 19th (or a 90-day extension if in the process of sale) to divest or the platform is banned in the US.
The problem is, this bill should be privacy legislation instead.
Yea, no one who can sideload and/or use a VPN could ever get a banned app installed. Ohh wait…
Of course some will. The majority of users will migrate to the next platform. TikTok will eventually disappear in the US without enough US generated content. It’s already happened in over 20 other nations. It’s not a new phenomenon.
This isn’t about data privacy or protection at all. This is a bad look. I think Biden is throwing the election purpose at this point.
