Are we acting like the US isn’t the biggest surveillance state existing in all history?
So because there’s one app they don’t control the data on, we need to ban it? Sounds like the free market to me.
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Yes, and?
Does anyone think that China is just full of the warm fuzzies and wants us all to hold hands, make smores and sing kumbaya? They are every bit after power as the US is to hold onto it.
Yeah it’s sort of like accusing a presidential campaign of being “all about gaining political power”. Of course that’s the goal. That’s not the metric by which you should judge its actions.
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Freedom of speech? Yes and no. The government has freedom of speech, but American TikTok clones do not. If TikTok users are successfully forced to use YouTube Shorts instead, they’ll get stuck with YouTube’s censorship and content control for corporate friendliness and user engagement. People like Elon give “free speech” a bad name, but it is actually a problem if for most people “the internet” is controlled by a small number of big technology companies and those companies use their positions, intentionally or not, to suppress ideas and control public discourse. TikTok users will still need to use words like “unalive” on platforms owned by American corporations.
Constitutional protections for your home and property? Not really. Many people are renting and protections for renters vary by state. Property can be stolen by police through civil asset forfeiture.
The opportunity to improve your socioeconomic standings, ie The American Dream, is largely a myth. Recently, the poor get poorer. Real estate values and cost of living are climbing much faster than wages for those at the bottom. If you’re at the bottom, it’s even more difficult than usual to get the four year degree and years of prior job experience required for many entry level positions with better pay.
America has legal slavery enshrined in the constitution. If somebody is convicted of a crime, they can be sent to private prisons to do slave labor for somebody else’s profit. This disproportionately affects poor people and minorities.
These freedoms are a strength indeed, but they are also a vulnerability that can be exploited by foreign powers. Freedoms remain free so long as the people exercising those freedoms do so responsibly. I think a lot of people in the US do not exercise this freedom responsibly. I think a lot of Americans are being manipulated into voting in autocracy. Ironically.
Complete and total freedom is just anarchy, and anarchy collapses on itself and turns into autocracy.
Not all states are equivalent.
The US is the hegemonic imperial core country (like the UK before it) and has been since the end of WWII, and even moreso since the end of Cold War I. The imperial core’s imperialism is driven by the monopoly stage of capitalism. The imperial core has been pillaging the Global South for the last 200+ years, including putting China through a century of humiliation. It caused WWI & WWII & Cold War I, and has now started Cold War II.
The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
The US has over 750 overseas military bases around the world, and is building more to further encircle China. It constantly has multiple regime change operations in play around the world.
But China is not a capitalist state and is not driven by the forces of monopoly capitalism. I think it has one anti-piracy base in Djibouti.
I’ll look through your sources because they seem intersting but China is 100% a capitalist state. They ditched communism years ago and only kept the authoritarianism
If it’s a 100% capitalist state then why is it ensuring that its people can afford housing at the expense of the capitalists? CNBC this week: China’s housing minister says real estate developers must go bankrupt if necessary
“We will scale up the building and supply of government-subsidized housing and improve the basic systems for commodity housing to meet people’s essential need for a home to live in and their different demands for better housing,” an English-language version of the report said.
Unlike Obama, who bailed out the private banks at the expense of people with home mortgages. Michael Hudson, 2023: Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over
The financial sector is the core of Democratic Party support, and the party leadership is loyal to its supporters. As President Obama told the bankers who worried that he might follow through on his campaign promises to write down mortgage debts to realistic market valuations in order to enable exploited junk-mortgage clients to remain in their homes, “I’m the only one between you [the bankers visiting the White House] and the mob with the pitchforks,” that is, his characterization of voters who believed his “hope and change” patter talk.
The Federal Reserve is just the cartel of the US private banks, whereas banking in China is predominantly state owned. The Chinese state both runs these banks and has fiat monetary sovereignty, so it’s not answerable to the capitalists like the US is.
Capitalist countries still have social programs mate. Unless you think Canada is a communist country because we have free healthcare? I suppose I could call it a mixed economy if it makes you feel better
On a side note, owning a home is culturally very different in China than in the western world. They have a massive housing bubble ongoing and its pretty wild. Look up China Ghost towns. Some insightful shit.
The imperial core countries affords those—notably deteriorating—social programs through the exploitation of the periphery countries, programs which the core does not allow the periphery to have. The global north working class paid for those concessions with our blood & sweat, though no one seems to remember, thanks to two red scares and a cold war. The purpose of FDR’s New Deal was to save capitalism from socialist threats, and the capitalists have spent the last fifty years chipping away at their New Deal concessions. Europe had its own, even stronger socialist movements, and their capitalists similarly ceded ground temporarily.
China escaped from the imperial core’s predation in the last century, and is still in the process of recovering from it.
United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s FoundingDespite over sixty years of imperial core-enforced sanctions, Americans Can Now Expect to Live Three Years Less than Cubans.
Look up China Ghost towns.
I am familiar with them. Those were planned communities that were photographed after construction but before being populated. Perhaps there were some duds, I couldn’t say: researching every bit of US propaganda gish gallop isn’t my day job.
This Is What The World’s Loneliest Metro Station Looks Like Today
China intentionally popped its housing bubble recently, and that’s why some capitalist real estate developers are going bankrupt, and China isn’t trying to save them because they’re capitalists.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This Is What The World’s Loneliest Metro Station Looks Like Today
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Why The Government Has Infinite Money
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Let’s take a page from Helldivers and call it “Managed Capitalism.” Surely far better than rootstock /s
Americans downvoting you, mad they are the bad guys.
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Large centralised social media platform should all be banned. I miss the times when all you had was forums hosted in someone’s basement, the Internet was a better place. Short form video content is the worst of the bunch though.
I don’t use TikTok and I don’t think anyone really should but if we’re going to ban TikTok for data collection then there are a lot of platforms that need to be banned.
We know the 2016 election was fucked with through Facebook and not a damn thing has been doneWe definitely need to legislate the way that they operate and make the majority of the corporate surveillance that is happening now illegal. Facebook should face consequences, as should Google, Reddit, and all the others. That doesn’t mean that we ignore TikTok though. We should address problematic companies both domestic and foreign. But only one of those companies is partially owned and heavily influenced by an oppressive foreign government.
It’s one thing to regulate foreign corporations and you don’t see me making a case against the EU for regulating Apple or Google. You see me saying this isn’t about data collection like they say, it’s about preserving US power in the software space. The US is completely within it’s rights to block TikTok but you don’t need to lie to me and say it’s for security. The servers are located in the US, there’s no real evidence China has done anything illegal and if Google did the same thing and sold the data to China it would be fine. This whole issue is a bunch of individuals sucking on billionaire tech giant toes.
It didn’t but you’re still correct about the rest of your comment.
We know the 2016 election was fucked with through Facebook and not a damn thing has been done.
Okay I’ll beat that dead horse.
- IT Pro: Cambridge Analytica models were exaggerated and ineffective, [UK Information Commissioner’s Office] claims
- Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
- Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
- Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
- Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
- Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
- Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
- Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
- MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
- Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor’s Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
- Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
- Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away
I appreciate you beating the dead horse, especially with all the sources.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
how do i nominate your for a commendation?
Seems pretty cherry picked. From the Wapo regarding Twitter:
But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.
It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.
It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to “Protect Democracy”
All of the US corporate social media platforms are part of the US military-industrial-intellegence complex now. Look at their boards of directors and executives. Look at Reddit:
- Jessica Ashooh: The taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant tabbed to do it
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
- r/neoliberal was created by a neoliberal think tank » BPR Interviews: The Neoliberal Project
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TikTok as well. We’ve known since Snowden that US “cloud”/hosting companies are deeply embedded. The US already forced them to move their service to the US onto one of those providers, and they have already put people with a history of aligning with “American interests” into executive positions, like CEO Shou Zi Chew and vice president Michael Beckerman.They have their eye on the fediverse now, too: Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World
As I’ve said before, the threat has always been coming from inside the house:
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Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.
One can’t prove a negative, and I’m sure there isn’t literally nothing that has happened or will ever happen. But trying to propagandize the voters of the most propagandized country in the world probably isn’t the most efficient way to go about it. Bribing politicians surely would be more efficient, for example.
Democrats have convinced themselves taking over TikTok is the solution to their problems, but the reality is that if Joe Biden signs this bill into law when he is already tanking in the polls, particularly with young voters, he will hand the election to Trump. The youth will not forgive a party that was so extreme it banned or hijacked their favourite platform to censor them in order to keep a genocide going.
Best line is at the end
They didn’t care about it being China owned
They didn’t care about data sharing
Share info on the platform the US can’t censor though and then it’s ban time 😂
Yes, I too would love the US president to decide which social media platforms I am allowed to legally use and who I can legally communicate with. I’m so scared China is going to, checks notes, influence my opinion that I’m willing to sacrifice my free speech rights in the process. Regulate me harder, daddy! 😍
It’s actually Congress
I would find this all extremely concerning if China didn’t regulate US platforms so heavily. For example, Tiktok has safety limitations for children in China while they have nothing at all for children in the US. It’s being used as a social/mental health weapon.
Just remember that daddy allows you access to the propaganda that encourages defending Tiktok.
Finally, your speech has not been limited. You can take it to any of the competitors. There would be free speech concerns for Tiktok, but it’s a Chinese company, not protected by the US constitution, and checks notes China proactively limits speech.
I would find this all extremely concerning if China didn’t regulate US platforms so heavily. For example, Tiktok has safety limitations for children in China while they have nothing at all for children in the US. It’s being used as a social/mental health weapon.
So you’re saying China is better than the US because it regulates social media while the US does literally nothing for its own children.
I agree.
So! Instead of political banditry and forcing TikTok to sell to a US company we should regulate our social media companies too just like China does! Or do you really think TikTok will collect less data or exploit children less when it is owned by a US company? 😂
Your defense is “some other dictatorship does it, so that doesn’t concern me?”. Saying things are OK because the CCP or Putin does them is a very slippery slope.
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Damn I didn’t know Hexbear was this based
I didn’t realize “low effort posts” was just lemmy.ml for “anything I don’t like.”
Yikes, what a flawed set of premises.
" What if Canada did the same thing to the US? They did!"
No, they didn’t. Canada tried to boost Canadian media presence on American streaming platforms.
Making sure gooby gets an international viewing is very different from transmitting information to an overtly hostile government known for cyber attacks on its international peers.
“The platform isn’t a national security threat”.
It’s a fact that the app TikTok is based off of, Douyin, sends the private data of every user straight to bytedance, owned in powerful minority stake by the Chinese government and that tiktok did the same thing with US user data until they promised they stopped a couple years ago.
As of January 2024 however, whoops, US citizen data(names, birthdates, location) is still being sent back to bytedance: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-pledged-to-protect-u-s-data-1-5-billion-later-its-still-struggling-cbccf203?mod=followamazon
It’s not some baseless concern, it’s a national security consequence against data disclosures that were already carried out and have continued to this year despite assurances 2 years ago that data leaks to bytedance are not happening.
“Instrument of soft power”
Marvel movies becoming super popular internationally is an example of soft power. Gathering the personal information of users with a continuing precedent attacking US digital infrastructures and democratic institutions is not soft power, it is hostile statecraft.
I am not a proponent of monolithic tech companies nor am I particularly aligned against international competition in tech supremacy, but this ban isn’t about theoretical cultural competition.
This tiktok ban is about the recent gathering of personal information that can be used to assess and attack digital infrastructures and electoral behaviors by entities that are continually attacking digital infrastructures and electoral processes, entities focused on consolidating power not within some international free market of soft cultural influence but by gathering and consolidating power and using that power to forward state ambitions.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
If we wanted national data and communication security we would shut off the transatlantic cables and physically separate the U.S. Internet from the rest of the world. All matters of diplomacy could be conducted in public courts at the coastlines instead of over telephone wires and emails. Problem solved. We could set up a nice star-spangled curtain and let all the globalists rot from the fallout.
“Afraid of your neighbor’s dog? Never leave your room, add a harness to your bed and strap in, wear plate armor at all times”.
Not exactly practical.
There are ways to improve security without immobilizing yourself.
Blocking the widespread distribution and use of an app that sends personal and national data to a hostile government actively collecting and using that data to conduct digital and electoral attacks is not immobilizing, it’s a simple step with zero downside that safeguards hundreds of millions of people.
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You’re arguing the international merits of “separate but equal” while ignoring how much the United States and other countries have benefited from open borders.
You are wrong top to bottom here on every short-sighted jingoist allegation.
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You haven’t entered a discussion, you’ve cried incredibly short-sighted neoconservative talking points that I’ve completely taken apart in my other reply to you.
I attacked your ridiculous comment, not your character, unlike your personal insults.
You’re labeling me a “reactionary” because I didn’t call you any of the slurs you listed.
You might want to sit in that a while.
Actually, I have time, so let’s dismantle your comment.
"Keeping thieves and robbers from entering your house is not, ‘immobilizing yourself.’ "
Nobody said it is.
“The idea that America would be immobilized by taking care of itself instead of carousing around with the rest of the world is just silly.”
Something nobody said again, but:
Thinking that having literally enough land to fit people and resources to perpetuate some contemporary level of technology ignores all of history and every metric of national success.
You know who had overabundant physical resources and separated themselves from other civilizations?
Incans.
“Canada could also seal off its borders and in a thousand years from now still be going strong.”
So we ignore Canada’s transportation imports, machinery imports, electronics imports, plastics imports, energy imports， services that alone account for 1/3 of Canadian GDP, then Canada will “go strong”?
5 winter months a year without cars, oil or modern manufacturing to compensate for the weather, not to mention financial services, infrastructure services, science in every form; they’re sunk.
Oh and we can’t forget that you are wishing away Canadian exports, which also account for 1/3 of Canadian GDP.
Your canadian isolationist whim has zero legs to stand on and 1.5 trillion dollars of debt annually.
“International relations are the cause of war” in the same way that air is slowly poisoning you to death.
Such a zoomed-out, irrelevant statement ignores literally every significant factor of conscious reality.
There are two hundred ish countries.
Show me the thriving utopias that refuse to interact with any other countries.
The probability of a war between the US and China is very high as judged by the US military. Prominently over the Taiwan situation. Having service members with tiktok on their devices would be terrible for opsec. To me this confirms that we are continuing to track on that train of thought. With that line of thinking this seems to an increased likelihood. Be careful out there folks.
Just my thoughts…
I thought government employees were already banned from having TikTok on their devices. Does that not also apply to military personnel?
TikTok is banned from official devices, i.e. and phone provided by the DoD, etc. There is no ban on it being on a personal phone; just a strong recommendation against having the app.
Hard to say, they’re in a different chain of command.
That just doesn’t seem very enforceable.
How so? Have them use government equipment and restrict what gets installed on that equipment. It’s not that hard.
They can use what they want on their personal devices, and the government can restrict access to their personal devices while they’re on duty
Right, so not banning it on their devices, which would be hard to enforce.
Banning on personal devices would likely be unconstitutional, unless there’s a nationwide ban. Banning on work devices is totally acceptable.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
The fiasco is just political theater. Watch the right hand, don’t see what the left hand is doing.
Bans can be bypassed, but my concern is if the new law makes it criminal to use tiktok. If so, the media should stop saying “tiktok ban” and instead say “new law makes it a crime to use tiktok”
It’s a hosting ban on US servers and app stores. People already downloaded the app will continue to be able to use it.
That is if Bytedance doesn’t sell.
And what happens when they make it a criminal of fence to bypass the ban?
Probably the same thing that happens when I have a wet dream about Marilyn Monroe
You get violently thrown into a cage by people with guns?
Seeing as how Mussolini has a daughter who is alive today and just as fascist as their father, is this person Marx’ descendant?
The platform isn’t a national security threat, but a challenge to silicon valley’s dominance
No, I’m pretty sure it’s just both
The main point is that tiktok can persuade people politically and cannot be sued by the US government. So it must be owned by a US entity so it plays by our rules… keep the same asshole politicians in power. You want bridges and got no rivers? A Republican or Democrat can deliver! And ofcourse all the partisan stuff like religion in school, freedom for everyone etc.
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I can taste your irony.
The TikTok ban is The Patriot Act 2.0
No, that’s massively downplaying the Patriot Act.
Not if it literally kills Open Source.
How is open source related to anything at all here?
That reminds me that it’s happened before: Export of cryptography from the United States
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Yes, and I’ve read most of it. It’s not nearly as bad as the Patriot Act.
I’m absolutely against this ban on first amendment grounds, but it’s not nearly as bad as the Patriot Act was and still is (it has changed names, but it’s pretty similar to how it was when passed).
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Yes, the bill isn’t that long, but I kind of skimmed parts.
The Patriot Act was reauthorized several times, and it eventually expired, but it’s still effectively enforced by permanent provisions as well as other bills passed since then.
Regardless, equating this bill and the Patriot Act is nonsensical. This bill allows the government to ban apps and services from adversary countries. It doesn’t authorize data collection on citizens or any of the other nonsense we got from the Patriot Act, it merely allows the government to block certain apps and services from US markets. It’s hardly the same thing.
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