The world is on fire but the kids are upset that they have to use another platform for their stupid fucking dance videos.
BTW: someone in the US should just make a similar app and call it tiktok. It’s not like China gives a crap about IP protection so turn about is fair play.
Nobody wants to be spied on by their perceived enemies. Also, how do you expect us to maintain an appropriate level of hypocrisy if we don’t constantly do hypocritical things?
I wish we would go after foreign investment, ownership, and political meddling as much as tiktok
I would be more afraid of being spied on by the government of the country I live in than by a government from a foreign country. Who do you think is more capable of doing something to you?
being spied on by the government of the country I live in than by a government from a foreign country
Ha, that’s a decent point. I don’t really care for either. I think about these things among others:
China has proved they are interested in conflict. They haven’t used any kinetic/traditional warfare against anyone lately, though they seriously want to with Tiwan.
China has been using nonstop cyber related warfare to conduct espionage, steal trade secrets, position themselves for assisting kinetic warfare with cyber warfare, etc.
I am not a direct target of these, but China killing the power grid or disabling telecommunications does have the potential to have a huge impact on my life.
The US government has used nonstop kinetic and cyber warfare over the last 20+ years.
The US playing world police doesn’t directly threaten my safety, but I definitely would be more worried about the US than China if I wasn’t a US citizen.
The US government spying on me:
Super annoying mostly due to the principle of a lack of privacy, regardless of whether I do anything bad or not
Becomes a serious problem if I was an active opponent of government policy and elected officials, and the government/leadership deems me a terrorist/insurrectionist/etc.
Their discretion of what’s my free speech and right to criticize the government vs leading insurrection would be more complicated if they were using the NSA to own my life and try to use any excuse to lock me up.
I guess I weigh what’s more likely to be a problem in my current/future life.
Yes, governmental surveillance is always bad. But let’s not pretend being surveilled by NSA is as bad as being surveilled by the authoritarian government of China.
it's worse. it's worse because they have the power to arrest me, freeze my assets, or do a hundred other terrible things. the chinese can... uh... find out my sense of humor is immature i think.
The fundamental fear of TikTok isn’t censorship. It’s fear of a media outlet that expresses views sympathetic to the Chinese government.
If Americans are exposed to these views, there is a horrifying possibility that they my agree with them. And if Americans agree with the Chinese government, it’s just a matter of time before America crumbles from within.
High school nerds pay attention. This is how you can make some money and have an excuse to talk to the hot girls…by installing a vpn on their phones so they can still have their tik tok.
Get one popular girls phone set up and every girl in the school will be hitting you up within a week.
And why do you assume everyone including hot girls & popular girls aren’t already capable of installing their own VPNs? Unless of course you mean the high school nerd is going to pay for our VPN service, then come on over!
I’m sure some do. I haven’t talked to many high school girls lately.
If this goes through and this happened when I was in school…that’d be a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’d probably never even think of it then. I’d probably luck into it by telling the rest of the nerd table at lunch, jock overheard, sell him my services, and then word of mouth from there.
That happening now…probably be the inspiration for the gen Z’s “American Pie”. Or “Superbad”.
They won’t want TikTok once the chumps who follow them stop using it. They’ll have to do something other than dancing for strangers to bolster their self-esteem.
U.S. lawmakers can’t force anything on foreign corporations.
If the bill passes in the House and Senate and is signed into law by President Biden, TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn’t sell. It also would lose access to US-based web-hosting services.
ByteDance would be banned from the U.S. market and lose it’s webhosting on U.S. servers.
Also, what’s with the “foreign adversary” status of China?
Lol yea. They also maintain control over their big corpos and that must be threatening to the 9 corporations in a trench coat that the U.S. calls a government. Still, the world doesn’t need any more adversarial relationships, thank you very much U.S.A.
Government is bad except when it comes to brutal subjugation of out-groups I don’t like, while the in-group gets protected and treated with kid gloves by the same.
Unfortunately most of them are the dupes not the protected class they think they are - “they’re hurting the wrong people” summed it up when it was uttered…
Too lazy to look up who said it, but there’s a quote I like that goes something like “conservative seeks to have an in group who the law protects but does not bind, and an outgroup who the law binds but not protects”
You have a misunderstanding of how China’s government operates. It does not matter how much stake the government holds, companies just cannot say no to the government’s request. Otherwise you will be disappeared. See Alibaba for example.
NSA can’t harvest user data from tiktok because it’s Chinese based, so they force them to split and sell to American subcompany that is obliged by law to give them access to their server. Everything else is political bullshit, like the Chinese gouvernement can “weaponize it’s app” ?? They can’t turn teenager into terrorist hating their country just like that, tiktok can only influence so much.
Cmon that’s not that difficult to understand: The same reason usa bans Chinese app. China, just as usa, has mass surveillance system and want to get every single data, they can’t do that with apps owned by usa based companies.
What’s more likely to work is something else will appear and distract the gnat-like attention span of our status-obsessed species, and we can go back to tik tok being the sound your you hear at night when you visit your boomer relatives and try to sleep in the guest bedroom.
I dislike TikTok as much as the next guy, but I think there are several issues with this bill:
It specifically mentions TikTok and ByteDance. While none of the provisions seem to apply exclusively to them, the way they are included would give them no recourse to petition this, the way other companies would be able to (ie, other companies could argue in court that they aren’t controlled by a foreign adversary, but TikTok can’t. The bill literally defines “foreign adversary controlled application” as “TikTok, or …” (g.3.A)). It also gives the appearance that this law is only supposed to apply to them, which isn’t what it says but it might be treated that way anyway.
It leaves the determination of whether or not a company is “controlled by a foreign adversary” entirely up to the president. He has to explain himself to Congress, but doesn’t need their approval. That seems ripe for exploitation. I think it should require Congress to approve, either in a addition to or instead of the president.
According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of “covered company”), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that’s included.
There is a specific exemption for any app that’s for posting reviews (g.2.B). I’m guessing one such company paid a whole lot to just not have this apply to them.
According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of “covered company”), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that’s included.
I’m glad clauses like this are common. We don’t want some teenager who wants to experiment with creating a “social media” website for his friends to have the full weight of the law immediately fall on their shoulders. People should be free to create website with minimal legal requirements, especially if it’s a small website.
The directed scope of the bill is going to do the same thing to TikTok that legislation did to Juul.
If you target Juul with legal repercussions for all their flavored vapes, then only Juul stops selling flavored pods. Now a million other disposable vape companies fill the void with flavored vapes that are worse for the ecosystem.
Targeting TikTok will just lead to another foreign data-harvesting social media app popping up to fill its place.
It’s not about data harvesting, it’s about targeting users with political ideas. If you watch a video for a certain amount of time then they will continue showing you those types of videos. There’s tons of bad faith political targeting on TikTok just like every other platform. The issue is that it’s difficult to avoid because the platform decides what you look at unlike other platforms.
This is why I’m having trouble understanding why people are confused about the bill’s purpose, especially in the context of the last dozen years or so. Allowing a political rival to maintain control over a platform like this is granting them soft power. Even if I agree that companies like Meta should be more heavily regulated (though not in this manner), I can see why they’ve put a bandaid on the issue given that there’s a non-zero chance that TikTok’s content has been actively in the past few years
An app would be allowed to stay in the US market after a divestiture if the president determines that the sale “would result in the relevant covered company no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.”
So apps can still be banned after divestiture, based on an arbitrary decision by one corrupt and potentially insane and/or senile person?
After all the talk of a “rules based order”, I’m disappointed - this isn’t a rule, its a leap of faith into the arms of serial liars.
So TikTok is sending out app notifications that they are at risk of being shut down and urging their users to call their representatives right now. They are not going down without a fight.
The 165 days time limit would land the deadline in August-ish, right before the most intense phase of election season in the States, and I do think TikTok would be a very influential part of the election strategy this year.