I'm an American too, and I trust an app that has "china" somewhere in it's org chart more than Zuckerberg or any meta product.
Don’t mince words. Meta absolutely has issues with data collection but it’s comical to think they somehow China is better.
The risk with TikTok is that it presents media entirely algorithmically, and that algorithm is controllable by the Chinese government and is opaque to everyone else.
The true threat to our democracy is a foreign power. It's just not China.
They also profited heavily from picking favorites. Senator Cotton mysteriously increased his net wealth by 2 million in the past year.
This isn't a battle of moneyed interests vs. penniless altruists. There is plenty of money on TikTok's side here.
If you find yourself buying into a simplistic narrative about a single organization buying the exact law they want, you've been had. It's never that simple.
AIPAC wanted this.
They threaten congressmen who buck them with being primaried. They reward compliance with money. This is not behavior we see routinely from other special interests.
It has nothing to do with the AIPAC besides that they happened to support the "well duh" position on this.
I get that "it's the jews" is the preferred cope of people on TikTok who don't want to think about this too much, but it really has nothing to do with this. This all started years before the middle eastern omnicause du jour.
Who is more likely to give my data to my government to adverse affect?
Who is more likely to lobby my government to adverse affect?
At the end of the day you are the outgroup when it comes to the CCP and it'd be best to remember that.
[0] In the dictionary sense of the word: https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the...
Dude, the concern is that allowing TikTok is quite literally allowing the CCP to indirectly lobby. It's how this whole thing got started in earnest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/tiktok-phone-cal...
The geopolitical utility of the app is to give the CCP more power to manipulate and hurt you. They want to get closer to the level of power that domestic US powers-that-be have. I'm blown away that this seems to lost on so many people commenting here
Your interests are probably not aligned with the CCP. The American public's certainly aren't. The Chinese government wants to achieve a hegemony and export their economy and culture by undermining the US wherever they can. We don't fit into that in a way that won't result in a markedly worse life for us.
TikTok would boost content about how Israelis making target practice out of Palestinian children is great and needs to happen more often if it made the US look bad. That you can't see that, or can't separate that instance from other possibilities, is exactly why TikTok is under scrutiny.
Using "CCP" shows your ideological bias.
The issue is ability to manipulate people. However, should not the NSA monitor how the algo is working, and be empowered to cut off TikTok if for example you start seeing a million videos saying "Taiwan, the eastern province of China". I am sure we will still have control, we just need to be smart enough to "tap" into what content is being fed.
"Please share a source that the allied powers are going to invade the beaches of Normandy". You can't, because people are working incredibly hard to keep that secret.
It is perfectly reasonable to infer what might happen based on past actions by the specific powers, and on world history. Attempting to gain geopolitical influence through propaganda is nothing new.
In one case it was "we have specific evidence of something that should cause us to go to war".
In this case it is "we can infer that a hostile foreign power will use a straightforward conduit to push propaganda to our populace if we come into conflict".
It's defense, not offense.
Maybe I'm being naive because I don't use TikTok, but all the partisan misinformation I see is being spread by either Americans on American social networks or maybe Russian disinformation bots operating on American social networks.
Answer this: who has genocided 10s of millions? Who has crushed Tibet and threatens Taiwan?
CCP or Zuckerberg?
Just like one person getting vaccinated is useless, I want the country to be inoculated from insidious propaganda outside of democratic control and review.
And it is within my rights to point out the hypocrisy of those who cry freedom
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-rednote-...
Trying to mix and match is obviously just disingenuous here.
By that standard, Norway, Sweden and Denmark should be shunned for their slavery, raping, looting and imperialist colonizing abroad -- in the 10-11th centuries.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361...
(Please don’t ask naively how US controls mass-media, no desire to follow up on that.)
Not substitution, and you somehow missed the fact that it's China's CCP, not ByteDance. It's China's CCP that acts through a de-facto shell corporation called ByteDance, the same CCP that stands behind the Uighur genocide, Tibet annexation, threat of invasion of Taiwan, etc. That's who you are defending as the desirable option.
https://www.fcc.gov/proceedings-actions/mergers-transactions...
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/biden-admin-delays-enf...
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168079/grindr-sold-chine...
Are you even aware of the context of the reasons why Tiktok went dark? Did they do it with no provocation? By accepting the US's arguments for the Tiktok ban we're just aligning ourselves with the same ideology of "the enemy" you're trying to malign.
The US has done plenty of that sort of thing in south America and the middle east, but it has always had the extra burden of maintaining a narrative under which it was not doing those things. If we let the US ban services that are contrary to its narratives, what's left to stop the US from behaving like China even more than it already does?
Both sides of the strait want the status quo in Taiwan for various reasons. Detent would be the correct approach instead of further military armament. It would be like if the Soviet Union continued to militarize Cuba from the Cuban missile crisis until the current day.
I'm more concerned about the genocide in Gaza than some CIA assets in Germany playing make-believe.
You probably know some that have enough non-China presence.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-rednote-...
This … you are right in that West has issue … where you are wrong is that the issues are just as dangerous (if not A LOT more) than China. I quoted “US-owned” cause one of the biggest social media platforms that everyone considers “West” is owned by an African