Every news article descending into tangents on any other point than that is part of why we can't have nice things.
The whole country has turned into some sort of lower primate improv troupe where whatever stupid thing comes up gets a "Yes and let's" diversion instead of an adult in the room standing up and cutting the crap.
YOU want this ban and you don't like that OTHER PEOPLE like TikTok. Clearly you don't have a TikTok account and that's not enough. You want to make sure no one else is allowed to have a TikTok account either
Instead of spreading the message about possible harms you'd rather ban other people's abilities
There seems to be a real risk of propaganda on Tiktok, but foreign ownership alone isn't a sound reason for a ban.
You're right -- but foreign ownership by a repressive regime with undemocratic ideals certainly is. For example, I don't think anyone would be too concerned if a European country was the one that founded & owned TikTok.
The US is even working on their great Firewall. It's red apples Vs blue apples at this point.
I certainly _do_not_ want this.
Ha ha, I guess you are discovering, many many people do want this.
It's not that other propaganda doesn't exist, it's that a likely intended effect of Chinese propaganda is destabilization and/or delegitimization of hostile governments. Ad spend is more about destabilizing consumers' savings.
You’re not a government, you’re a person. Either way you’re being manipulated, and the US government definitely doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
The only people thinking in such a arrogantly privileged manner ironically are Westerners, try saying this crap in China or India and people will laugh at you all day. Or I doubt this poster has the best interests of Americans in mind either.
How exactly is that different from a dictatorship?
By stifling freedom of expression under the guise of "national security" you're creating blind spots that allow atrocities to go unchallenged. I thought we learned from history but maybe I was wrong.
I'm confused why you think China's interests are irrelevant to you, unless you truly believe geopolitics is a zero-sum game. We compete in markets, militarily in the indo-pacific, and technologically in ways that are not mutually beneficial.
Because this imaginary world where the US somehow equally controls Facebook on the level that China directly influences TikTok isn’t one that exists?
This low resolution view of the world is grating. “Facebook is a US based social media company so it’s exactly the same as China and TikTok” is completely devoid of the context of reality.
Not only does Facebook actually have 1st amendment speech rights with a judicial system empowered to enforce them. But even the slightest appearance that the US government was attempting to influence speech on Facebook would be a career ending scandal.
Compared to TikTok where the CCP literally has a seat on ByteDance’s board by law and has for its entire existence had its algorithm nuke political topics that China does not want discussed.
It’s not the same thing.
So from where I’m standing it’s the same thing.
And to give you some perspective, there’s plenty of content critical of China on TikTok even though that stuff gets banned on DouYin.
> "lower primate improv troupe"
> "No one who actually uses it or understands it wants this."
"Everyone's generalizations are stupid, except mine."
Many things aren't that democratic when you look at it like that!
Tiktok US users of voting age are already accounted for in that process, they don't get extra sway just because they use the app.
A majority of American citizens want affordable healthcare, housing, and education, net neutrality, an arms embargo vs Israel, an end to illegal forever wars, stronger environmental protections, cleaner water, less fossil fuel use and an end to fracking, etc - and there's still bipartisan resistance in our politics and media against all of those.
Congress doesn't actually represent us, it represents capital. Been like that for a long time. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
Either it's a dictatorship or it's listening to the majority. There is nothing democratic about acting against the majority. Never was
The polls on all the above are pretty clear. There's no need to rely on your own viewpoint.
> otherwise they would have implemented a government where the majority is heard, but they didn't.
May I suggest reading some Chomsky, or at least watching Manufacturing Consent.
> Either it's a dictatorship or it's listening to the majority.
It's a plutocracy, and this has never been more obvious.
> There is nothing democratic about acting against the majority.
Well, there you go. Do check out those polls.
If everyone is so outraged and there's so many TikTok users, they can rally and vote out the people who voted for this.
I for one support this ban fwiw. You'll find out a lot of people do too. So in this instance and quite a few others, my representative has voted in my favor.
It is possible that every single candidate on the ballot is in agreement on a topic that every single non-candidate voter has the opposite view on. That doesn’t mean nobody gets elected.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/05/support-f...
Would you feel the same way if the US government banned all mainstream media organizations except the ones you ideologically oppose?
On the contrary, I think it is about banning a propaganda and social engineering vector that is under the thumb of an adversarial foreign government. That, for me, is enough of a reason to ban it and justify it under our constitution.
The fact that I am in favor of banning all social media should tell you that it is not ideological, but rather that I think social media is extremely addictive, and has huge negative externalities.
The problem of allowing government banning propaganda is it allows government to ban anything they label as propaganda. There is no law defining what's propaganda, so you just end up with the government being able to ban any information they don't like.
Imagine the government drums up for another illegal war like Iraq using fake evidence, and we ban all counter evidence as "foreign propaganda". Do you not see how dangerous that gets?
>That, for me, is enough of a reason to ban it and justify it under our constitution
The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled in the past foreign propaganda is protected speech under First Amendment.
You cannot strip American citizens' rights to receive foreign propaganda if they choose to do so.
I'm not accusing you of being ideologically motivated, I just think that your (otherwise understandable) support for banning social media is inadvertently helping a bad actor in stifling freedom of speech.
Could China be using TikTok to spread propaganda in the US? Sure, but I haven't seen any evidence supporting this and if there was concrete proof I'd support the ban. Meanwhile the US government is labeling truthful discussions about Israel's genocide "antisemitic propaganda" and using them as motivation for the TikTok ban.
On one side we have vague communist boogeymen, on the other there's expressed desire to take control of unpleasant narratives. That tells me that they're really just trying to take away people's ability to discuss their dissenting ideas.
-Content is user-generated -Content is curated by the company (i.e., users don't have the ability to fully turn off what is shown to them) -Content is not universal (i.e., users don't see the same thing)
* my representatives didn't vote in line with my requests *and*
* that they tend to vote in line with me for other issues *and*
* that there are no other viable options either due to no competition or worse competition
When it comes to *restricting* rights (not growing them), it's very concerning that such a large percentage of people can _not_ want something and still have it forced upon them.
Naturally either you don't want it. or you don't care.
Singling out TikTok without a universal principle or law leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, and the US gov. will just be playing whack-a-mole with whatever the TikTok successor is.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/944039053/u-s-judge-halts-tru...
https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7520/BILLS-118hr7520eh....