Lol they didn’t “ban” news, they refused to pay to make the news relevant. Canada basically banned news sharing on the internet. They can repeal the stupid law.
I don’t agree with the solution the government came up with, but the problem still exists and I don’t understand it well enough to come up with an alternative solution.
Making news is expensive, and good quality news (not mucked up by corporate interests) needs a way to fund that work. We don’t want news to be an outlet for corporations investing in a mouthpiece. So traditionally this was done through advertising.
Now people barely ever click through to the websites so the advertising doesn’t work. Meanwhile the places where people ARE seeing the news do have ads. The content is produced by one party, and the profit goes to another.
The problem exists and needs a solution, but I don’t know what it might be. Australia brought in a similar law successfully and Facebook/Google came to a deal. Canada might also be able to do that?
The other long term solution IMO is to make the platforms obsolete with things like Mastodon and Lemmy. That might take some time though
There ARE other downsides to this law, outside of the hissy fit Facebook is throwing.
For example, smaller independent news companies don’t have the bargaining power to come to a fair agreement with Facebook, like the larger organizations can. A solution to that might be to have some standard rates set up, but again, don’t know enough about it
The solution is for people who care about the news to start paying some small amount of money to support responsible news. Look at NPR or PBS but fuck paying corporate news outlets to bait me with outrage porn.
If people aren’t clicking through to read the details, the investigative journalism no matter how good is ineffective. So if the summarization one or two sentences is enough for most people then they don’t need more in-depth reporting
Well, I think the government at the core has a small point, network effects drive these sites, and the news being there draws people to them, which draws news to be there. But they frame it as one sided, and the fact is the news benefits from being on Facebook way more than Facebook benefits from people sharing news. People are on Facebook, the news is irrelevant if people can’t share it with each other in their lives, but Facebook doesnt become irrelevant without it. The government stepped out of line here and are doing anything and everything in their power to avoid admitting it, even resorting to propaganda. This is a shakedown for a failing industry that the government needs to continue to exist for it to control public narrative, that’s tye long and short of it.
Personally I’m of the opinion that all news is propaganda, and so I consume none of it. The fact that every news organization is parroting the government line about Facebook being a meanie and blocking the news tells me who controls the news and/or where power lies. If something’s important enough for me to need to know it, someone in my life will tell me. So I’d disagree with you that this needs a solution.
I do like your other long term solution, I don’t use Facebook either.
The sheer absurdity of labeling an organization with “United Nations” in its name as a terrorist org is astounding. At what possible point would someone there ask, “Hey, do you think it’s us who are the baddies?”
It’s the kid on the bus who keeps shoving the quiet kid over and over and over, but it’s not big and flashy so nobody notices. Nobody listens. Nobody cares.
Then the quiet kid punches the bully in his goddamn rat face and suddenly the quiet kid is the problem child.
The problem existed long before the quiet kid fought back, and they knew, it was just ignored by the people who could do something about it until it was too late.
SCOTUS has no more legitimacy. Full stop. They are declaring the constitution unconstitutional. The 14th amendment exists for a reason. A jury found Trump liable for insurrection. They are upending a jury’s decision as well as violating a constitutional provision
Generally when a lower court makes a questionable ruling, a higher court goes on to validate the legitimacy. What I don’t get about this whole process, is that logically a higher court should look at this case and determine if it holds true that Trump should be excluded across the US or not. Regardless of which way they decide.
The constitution doesn’t say you’re allowed to bar them if they’re an insurrectionist. It says you MUST. SCOTUS should be ruling on whether Trump is an insurrectionist and if Colorado was fair in their proceedings.
Unlike traditional automakers, which use independent dealers to sell and repair vehicles, Tesla sells directly to customers and owns and operates a large portion of its service centers. That gives the automaker extraordinarily detailed real-time visibility into parts failures, repairs and warranty claims, which Tesla engineers meticulously tracked and analyzed for years, the company records show.
See, this is where having monopoly control over the sales and repair of Tesla’s own cars could help them improve their product and supplh chain, be truthful and give refunds to people with defective parts, and build good rapport as a brand. Instead they collect all that data just to deny any problems and hide them from customers and regulators.
leadership considers such wise long term investments to be costs on their quarterly forecasts, the benefits of which they wouldnt be personally rewarded for anyway. its a fundamental flaw of modern capitalism.
I disagree. It’s a fundamental flaw of the people running Tesla. They’re not going to get away with this - there will be lawsuits and serious consequences which could easily have been avoided while still making both short term and long term profits.
The Pope calling it like it is. Christian conservative leaders in the US are way to focused on politics instead of their faith and the spiritual well being of their parish.
Religion is a system to execute control over uninformed and ignorant masses.
Which is why many big religions have been in significant decline in the past 100 years thanks to education efforts.
Which is why the religious are getting more involved in politics, and more involved in extreme, right wing politics, because thats where the most gullible peasantry is, and its from that they can steal the most power for themselves.
Its one of the big reasons why you see the right wing hating on education and the educated all the time.
No, what we really need is to end capitalism, not pin our hopes on one team or another when both exist to uphold the very system enabling this bullshit (hint: their agencies are never going to work for you).
Man, fuck taking any step in the right direction eh? Let’s just hope for the entire world to change instead of hoping for a reasonable change that is a big step in the right direction.
Ah, yes, incremental change and playing within the rules set by our oppressors, that's worked so well ..checks notes... never.
Lulling the population in to a false sense of security, but more importantly - comfort, is exactly how you not only maintain the status quo, but how you enable fascism.
But sure, to those who are privileged enough not to already be personally impacted, I'm sure voting for team blue feels like a real win.. 🙄
Union wins weren’t incremential change for the betterment of worker conditions…?
You really should check the dates on all those achievements… They weren’t granted from the beginning of even the young US, nor all at once.
It is ironically your gatekeeping of “progress” that holds back the gains you want to see because of your contempt at the only path proven effective. Sad.
Socialism isn’t a switch we flip. We cannot magic away the current systems of power. Like it or not, most people are too dumb, self centered, or just plain busy to consciously change the systems they deal with. It CANNOT be done by telling everyone the world has to be radically different.
Does it have to be radically different to be equitable? Yes. Is that one of the next 20 stops on the way to an equitable society? NO! You cannot jump to the peak of a mountain simply because you can see it on a clear day.
Pretending the previous power structure has magically evaporated simply because you’ve pulled a revolution is EXACTLY how every socialist movement gets turned in to fascism. Stop feeding that ignorant mindset that we do not have to deal with existing power structures and powerful. We ALWAYS have to deal with existing power structures. Completely. Even literally killing off the old to avoid their toxic influence creates a new power structure with capital punishment powers that not everyone will remotely agree with.
Again, your ignorance to how the real world works is alarming. Fix your perspective or continue to hinder progress. The choice is yours.
I mean capitalism is literally enabling the fossil fuel industry to continue to ramp up production, while we are heading into a climate apocalypse. It’s too late for steps.
No I promise whoever says that definitely fits my description of them. It’s not a strawman, it just looks like one because you assume I’m pretending to quote somebody I’m not.
Not necessarilly. They could very easilly be a victim of propaganda; they don’t have to be a benefactor of capitalism in order to believe in incrementalism (which keeps capitalism as the main economic force).
Neoliberalism drilled deep into American consciousness a while ago.
Temporarily embarassed millionaires aren’t your enemy unless they choose to believe AFTER they consciously observe how fucked up the mindset is.
Before that, they could easily just be ignorant. It’s not like US schools teach how fucked up and skewed it all is. They just say, “yep, this is how it works, and that’s how it works and why is the history of the stock market and yep we have it now!”.
They are presented it as if it’s not bad, so unless people get burned, they don’t think about it. “Well I’m not that bad off and I’m not that special (despite having the embarassed millionairre’s mindset) so everyone else must only be whining.”
You are feeding the exact same ignorance from the other side. Stop it.
My friend was in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He told me that they were delivering relief food to refugees camped out of the city of an-Nasirya during the Battle of an-Nasirya. While offloading the food from a 7-ton truck onto the ground, there were armed and armored Marines protecting the food to hand it out evenly and orderly. There were women and children present. After a bit, the refugees got too restless from desperation and started storming the food. The Marines could totally have gotten aggressive to set an example, but that would have been ridiculous. The people were starving and living in tents made out of bed sheets and trash out in open fields under the Sun. The Marines moved out of the way and just ensured that no one got hurt in the chaos. War is chaos.
None of the recalled cars are EVs, and yet the main photo used in the article is the EV9 and the headline is ambiguous enough to suggest it’s EV fires causing the recall.
I’m not saying this is necessarily intentional, but it seems suspicious to me.
i generally like reuters so i submitted feedback (bottom of reuters website) regarding that article in the hopes that something will come of it. i agree that it does seem very weird to do
I mean there are literally videos of Ukrainian men being kidnapped so they can be conscripted into the military. The user you are replying to is clearly making a dark joke about that.
Two countries at war. One is the aggressor and other is the victim of aggression. But of course hexbear.net comrades would want the victim country to act all up to standard, and ignore how the aggressor country is doing its own military recruitment.
The confederacy also considered themselves to be the victims of a war of aggression, in fact some schools in the south still teach the civil war as the “war of northern aggression” even though they started that shit
Nazis are never the victims, if anyone attacks them first it’s just self defense
the aggressor country is doing its own military recruitment.
Conscripting prisoners and shit is also abhorrent. We shouldn’t have to say it anytime we criticize what Ukraine is doing though. Especially since what Ukraine is doing is the subject of the fucking thread.
“Boot camp” meaning some dumbass NATO instructor showing you how to kick open doors and do counter-insurgency for 2 weeks before being sent off to run into a minefield
Vigano referred to the pope only by his surname, “Bergoglio”, and accused him of representing an “inclusive, immigrationist, eco-sustainable, and gay-friendly” Church
First time I’ve ever heard the words “inclusive” and “eco-sustainable” used with the intent of condemnation.
Feels like a dog whistle. Things western world is pushing for, and he’s spewing it like he’s some middle eastern despot criticizing men for letting their daughters go to school
For money. Whoever buys it has to pay you for it. Shutting down just means leaving a gaping hole in American social media that some other company will fill and you’ll be in the same position but with less money.
Yeah I agree, there really is no incentive for a for-profit company to choose shutting down over selling. Unless they never cared about profit and had ulterior motives from the very beginning.
Not really, they would still be operating the same business in every other part of the world, except for the US. So you’d then have US Tiktok competing with World Tiktok. They can’t be forced to sell the global operations due to a mandate from some American court, no matter how much they think to be the world police.
H.R.815 Sections H and I have already passed, and there is no “sales agreement” because TikTok hasn’t officially negotiated with any potential buyers. The US Government as a whole doesn’t want or need TikTok, they just don’t want China using it as a weapon.
Why don’t they just sell TikTok to a US Citizen who happens to believe TikTok should remain the same?
TikTok would remain exactly the same, with the exact same algorithms, but it would then be the free speech of a US Citizen so everyone would be happy. Maybe TikTok couldn’t send the data directly to China anymore, but they could certainly sell personal data on the shadowy data markets, just like every other US owned tech company does, and if that data happens to find its way to China then 🤷 .
Shell companies hide the true owner of companies all the time. Why can’t TikTok do the same?
The problem is they targeted TikTok specifically in the law and it will be easy to circumvent. “TikTok is banned, but check out this totally new website called TokTik with the exact same content but owned by a US Citizen”.
This is why they should have created regulations that apply to all companies. Because making regulations that depend on who owns the company will only cause TikTok to change the technicality of who owns the company. They can do so through all kinds of legal tricks without ever actually giving up control.
Why don’t they just sell TikTok to a US Citizen who happens to believe TikTok should remain the same?
Who? What USA citizen is prepared to buy something for the privilege of fighting the USA government with would obviously get mad and probably block the sale if byte Dance TikTok is still involved.
I don’t really follow USA politics but didn’t this law pass by quite large margins? They could obviously ban toktik.
They can’t actually ban TikTok by name, it’s unconstitutional to make laws targeted at individuals.
The current law actually says “no company can operate in the US with over 20% owned by China, Iran, N. Korea, or Russia”, or something like that.
There’s a lot of people in the US and at least of few of them would be willing to run TikTok the same way, same algorithms, same content, and sell the users data on shadowy data markets (which China can surely get their hands on), etc. I’m repeating myself now.
Again, my point is there are a lot of people in the US and surely some of them can form a company willing to do what China wants, and isn’t that their right by our laws and morals of free speech? I know if things get heated enough laws and morals will be ignored (see Japanese internment camps).
And my even broader point is that this move against TikTok has ulterior motives. We should have created regulations that apply to all companies instead of targeting TikTok specifically. Even though we didn’t technically target TikTok specifically, we effectively did.
This is part of Section H of H.R.815 that was signed into law:
<span style="color:#323232;">(A) any of—
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(ii) TikTok;
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(B) a covered company that—
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(4) FOREIGN ADVERSARY COUNTRY.—The term “foreign adversary country” means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.
</span>
So, no, they don’t just get to change their name. They don’t get to change everything and still send data overseas to China. They have to cut ties with the CCP or else they cannot escape this.
For the record, they’re not currently sending data to China. Though they’d probably only have to gently twist one or two arms and need about 12 hours to do so.
The company openly stores the data in China. Ex-employee Yintao “Roger” Yu, who was head of Engineering for all of ByteDance’s US Operations in 2017-2018, claims that the CCP had full immediate access to all collected data.
I’ve also heard the data is physically stored and hosted by Oracle. So maybe China just copies it? The primary copy is in the US currently. Which doesn’t really mean much.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Meta’s data ended up in China too. But Congress isn’t targeting them.
When Facebook was investigated following the 2016 election for selling Data that inevitably ended up in Russia, the DOJ reccomended their case to the FTC who in 2019 fined them 5 BILLION USD. This isn’t even the only time they’ve been fined or investigated, either, they’ve got ongoing lawsuits from the states and federal governments.
And now, the FTC no longer has to wait for a DOJ investigation because H.R.815 also included Section I that enshrines their ability to fine the companies who sell data to adversarial countries including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc.
But sure, “tHeY’RE NoT TaRGetTiNG faCeBOoK.” I can’t tell if you’re supremely uninformed or a CCP shill, but to be very frank I don’t have patience for you in either circumstance.
You’ve made the most substantive comments in this post. Especially quoting the law and this information about Facebook.
For context, Facebook’s revenue in 2019 was 70 billions dollars. So a 5 billion dollar fine isn’t nothing. Everyone can judge these bans and fines for themselves and judge whether there’s a double standard though.
You seem upset because I said TikTok stores their data in Oracle, but that’s what they said in 2022. www.cnn.com/2022/06/17/tech/…/index.html But, as you say, it appears in 2018 they were storing their data in China, and presumably that continued up until mid-2022.
I’m not a shill, but I am a cynic who believes the government is acting on behalf of their corporate friends (US media companies) rather than on general principles. I have no love for China. I wanted regulation that applied equally to all US companies. If you don’t want to talk to me, fine, I’ll discuss my opinion with others; even so, you’ve shared a lot of important and concrete information here, so thanks again.
I see. You’re right about the text of the law. Thanks for taking the time to post that.
I would say it violates the 1st Amendment then. US Citizens have a right to say what they want, which includes saying what China wants if that is what the person wants.
IG is owned by FaceBook which actually has about double the userbase of TikTok if you don’t count DouYin’s 700 Million. I kind of hope that they also fuck up and trigger Section I if not full blown Section H of the bill.
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