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Comment by jaylittle | Hacker News Reader

Just when I think I have a handle on how stupid our politicians are... they find some way to make me realize they are even dumber than I previously thought.

According to HuffPost it was a 352-65 vote, so this stupidity was bipartisan. So much for one party being smarter than the other. Banning an extremely popular app, in an election year no less, while providing absolutely zero evidence to prove what you accuse it of doing is really some kind of next level idiocy.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tiktok-ban-congress_n_65f1b24...

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I'm from Europe.

Since China was supporting Russia to start a war on European soil. I sure hope that China's influence is reduced to a minimum as quickly as possible.

Ofc, that includes propaganda through TikTok.

This bill does nothing to address the problem of nation state propaganda spreading via social media. It just allows American politicians to claim a fake national security victory over a Chinese owned company while ignoring the fact that American owned social media companies are a steaming cesspool full of such content.

Dont get me wrong, I think TikTok is terrible. I won't use it. Ever. But that still doesn't mean it should be banned. Unless you want to ban all social media apps all at once. Probably still not something I would support, but I could definitely see proponents being able to form much more compelling arguments in favor of such an action.

As it stands right now, this makes zero logical sense.

Ofc it does. Byte dance literally has a internal Chinese Communist Party committee since 2017.

If China were really THAT involved in the day to day operations at Tiktok, one would expect to see more pro-Russian propaganda with regards to the war. There's little to none that I've seen.

Not from my pov. China has nothing too gain with backing Russia so directly. It's also not how propaganda works.

China has way more benefits of taking non-western stances on anything and spreading those.

Eg. If a terrorist organization would kill and rape, support those that are not defending their country through TikTok.

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