Don’t mince words. Meta absolutely has issues with data collection but it’s comical to think they somehow China is better.
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.
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.