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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

We gain more from diverse points of view embodied in the ideal of free speech than we do from the safety of censorship. If individuals want to choose which media they consume, more power to them, but as soon as the government steps in and starts picking winners and losers, we all end up worse off.

Letting the people of the US decide which media to consume by voting with their feet is the only free and fair way to go about this.

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>but as soon as the government steps in and starts picking winners and losers

This already happens, constantly, and it's perfectly normal for governments to do this. There is no reason we have to adhere to "free markets" like some kind of religious principle. You can vote with your feet, sure, but we have to admit that social media is different, right? It's been beat to death but this isn't Toyota vs Ford. These companies all intentionally hijack your dopamine response to make you addicted, opening the door to all sorts of manipulation - benign or not.

Exactly social media is the opiate drug of the 21st c. People have no control, we’re hooked and as soon as someone tries to take it away we scream like… addicts? If anything this thread reactions shows you what a serious problem it is, and to not think there’s a massive COI that it’s a Chinese app and not think this is a geopolitical concern is a step in the wrong direction.

Yep.

I agree with "banning" TikTok, but only by methodology which will hit all of the US social media companies as well.

No one is owed a business model, and I think we've seen all the evidence we need to to see that Facebook et al. are extremely dangerous but would be less so if they were _forced_ to follow GDPR style rules in the US.

A foreign adversary injected a toxic application into our country, but because "people really like it" the government has no right to stop it? This is 21st century opium wars. Leaving the addicts to decide policies based on "let people be addicted" isn't a valid point.

If people aren't capable of signaling value based on market participation, then why have free-market capitalism at all? The two are fundamentally intertwined in an inseparable belief that people can make rational decisions that benefit themselves as individuals and which aggregate into a social good.

Yes exactly, unfortunately people don’t understand this.

Ah okay, you're a libertarian or ancap. Not sure why you didn't try to shift the argument of nationalism over to why I agree with statism at all. At least there you would get somewhere with my distrust of authority and minimal anarchist inclinations.

Probably better to have your “diverse points of view embodied in the ideal of free speech” on a platform that isn’t controlled by a hostile foreign power.

I can totally see their algorithm being used to push videos with views that they want to promote for political purposes while videos with views they dislike will never appear on anyone’s FYP.

P.S. The sad thing is there will probably be plenty of TikTok content creators who will create content for the CCP just for the chance of getting promoted by their algorithm.

No country has actual free speech.

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