I’m usually all for fediverse folks shitting on big corporate social media platforms, they definitely all deserve it. But unless I’m mistaken, and I very well might be, TT seems like it gets wayyyy more vitriol than the other big bads. Hopefully that’s not for “old man yells at cloud” type reasons.
Anyway, definitely looking forward to Loops when it’s ready!!
It gets more hate because it’s owned by a Chinese company that more than likely shares data with the CCP. I assume you live in a western nation, so it’s basically the result of propaganda. Perhaps it’s warranted, perhaps not, but that’s why.
It’s ironic because everyone flips out that China is vacuuming up information, as if the US government isn’t doing the same thing. If you think the US govt snoops that data only to keep you safe, I have a bridge to sell you.
Guess the issue is that us big bads are blocked in china. So while ccp can leverage social media to monitor western countries. Western goverments can not leverage western social media to do the same in china.
Considering our data is being bought and sold by US companies to whoever I don’t think this is going to help with that. Tbh, I’m more scared of the US having our data than China. The US can use it to find people seeking abortions, or to track protestors trying to get human rights, or things like that. Not China. I’d rather they make a general law to preserve privacy, but this half-assed measure to preserve US monopolies.
As an Australian I could not care wjaty the CCP knows about me, happy to send them as many butthole or dick pics photos as they want.
What concerns me is the invasiness of my own national government and its asshole FiveEyes conspirators. They can take my liberty. Those bastards I trust not one inch.
I think the reason is less about “i, an individual, am getting my data harvested” (though certainly still a factor) byt more because China is still very much considered an enemy of the US, and they are not only harvesting americans data in a very invasive way - as in, recording pretty much everything you do on your phone, not just in the app - but an adversarial government now has access to all of that. Additionally, because the chinese “free market” has been effectively neutered in recent years, high chance that the CCP is able to influence TikTok’s algorithm to affect what people see and push propaganda. People should be concerned about it in the same way people should be concerned about russian bot farm, but more so, because there isn’t an audience of millions feeding russian bot farms their personal information.
It gets more hate because it is actually worse. They try to exploit the phone as much as possible even more so than the American social media spyware companies. There was a security researcher redditor post somewhere I forgot what it was, but they basically went over how much more shit tik tok was able to harvest.
I’m with you, it’s kind of annoying to see just how much people seethe over a platform. It looks exactly like what redditors did with IG, or TT, or emojis. I understand people’s frustrations with TT, but as someone who’s made content for both TT and YT shorts, engagement for small guys absolutely sucks on shorts and when TT is banned, there’s basically no real alternative. Not only that, but I’m also very concerned about the precedent that’s set by effectively censoring parts of the internet for Americans.
That being said I am also super pumped for Loops, I hope there’s more updates soon because I’ve been keeping an eye on that for a while!
In case you’re serious, a video-centric social media. It focuses on short vertical videos. Naturally, they’re generally too short to have much useful information, so it’s mostly dumb addictive content, or straight up misinformation. It’s meant to feel like you’re not wasting time while you definitely are. “I am not spending 15 minutes to watch a normal video, I just watched a few (maybe 50) short (around 1 minute) videos.”
The right for a business to operate is not protected by the first amendment, though.
I could use that argument to stop the government from closing/dismantling any physical space because I might use their walls to express my first amendment rights. But the argument just doesn’t hold up.
It’s not the right of the business, it’s the right of US citizens to consume media and information from any source they please. The Govt has no right to say “You can’t read that newspaper” or “You can’t listen to that speaker”, so they have no right to say “You can’t get information through this app”. The first amendment isn’t just about the right to speak, it’s also about the right to listen and research especially the stuff the government doesn’t want you to know about.
1A protects us against censorship, and this law is precisely that. If I have TikTok and I use it to communicate, the government is censoring my speech by taking it down. There is a lot of case law on when the government can legally censor speech, and I’m not going to repeat it here, but the government’s lawyers have a massive hill to climb on this one. Maybe they can succeed, maybe not.
There’s other precedent about “making a specific business illegal”. Essentially, legislatures can make conduct illegal, but courts don’t like it when they make businesses illegal, because it’s a violation of due process. But this is complicated and detail-specific.
Anyway, there’s a lot of great information online about these two legal arguments. I encourage you to look it up.
But again, you can make that argument about any platform or medium where speech can be posted or displayed. If the department of public health condemns a local movie theater where I host indie movie screenings, that is not a violation of my first amendment rights because they are not prohibiting my ability to make or share content, they are simply removing the space it is currently shared. If that comes out to the same effect for some people who are all-in on TikTok to the exclusion of any other short-form video sharing service, sure, maybe there are grievances. But that still ends up being a self-imposition made by the individual at the end of the day.
Not to mention, the US government is not trying to close down TikTok. They are prohibiting the owners of TikTok from doing business in the US. The company itself would be the one to make the decision to close the service rather than sell it off, so unless the fed is going to force a private business to keep itself open to placate the masses, it’s a decision made by a private company outside of any constitutional law.
Exactly. All censorship could be a violation of 1A. The bar is high on this one. The government has to jump through difficult hoops to legally suppress most speech. The courts have long since ruled against the “but they have other channels” argument that you propose.
As for the latter point, again you miss the legal argument. The government is targeting a company, and not conduct. That could easily be a Due Process violation.
Of course we don’t know. The courts will rule. But what you wrote ignores basic legal precedent.
I could try to summarize it, but if you just do a web search for EFF and TikTok, you will come across a good explanation.
Of course we don’t know how the courts will rule. My belief is that the odds are in favor of TikTok and of TikTok users, but we’ll have to wait and find out.
Lots of data, access to the Chinese market, a social media app under their wing, and an aligned work culture. Alongside the gains for ads, moving their shit to AWS, and retail gains, it seems like a better idea than throwing money into the AI fire.
They refused to entertain offers. 1T dollars seems mighty, but TikTok is a multi-year if not multi-decade data collection hub. That data is on the youth of America and their trajectories.
That’s priceless to the power hungry. It’s not just money, it’s control.
Wouldn’t be surprised if there was an exceptionally well funded US startup that makes a debut before TikTok is blocked if they don’t sell. TikTok has to weigh the possibility that they can’t compete if they don’t exist.
Um, actually that’s one perk of federation. It’s much harder to take down networks that are run on dozens or hundreds of servers across the globe… In other words, we already solved this problem, at least in large part.