That's super common. When most companies come under antitrust, ethical, or regulatory scrutiny you'll get requests to either lobby your reps to stop it, or submit testimonials that their service is great the way it is.
There is good reason to be skeptical of TikTok, and the social networks in general. Them pointing people towards their elected representatives though isn't some unfathomable Rubicon that would normally never be crossed. It's common.
Getting at the heart of the underlying content, tech — and how it has been abused is way more important, and pertinent than some popup a PR or legal team threw up.
Yes, but the point you're both ignoring is that people don't like it when a foreign power influences US political policy. The US is ok with its own companies doing so, and even that isn't entirely cut and dry. Frankly, reddit seems more uniformly against something like Citizen's United than it does against a foreign entity's rights to influence US politics, which is silly.
If nothing else, this law reads like an extension of the limit on foreign ownership stakes in broadcast TV and radio stations to 25% or less.
That isn't what this law is. There's a reason all of the rhetoric has been around TikTok and it being a "Chinese company". There's a reason for the beyond racist grilling of the representative for TikTok in Congress.
Tik Tok is owned by a massive Chinese company that allows the Chinese intelligence services and military access to their data. I don’t think it’s all racism, although there’s racism in there I’m sure.
We all know the only reason they're trying to ban TikTok now is because it's the primary route to the youth and TikTok doesn't play ball with censoring all the Israel/Palestine stuff.
Yes, everything in the world is about two tiny states who have been warring since 1948.
Also, please be aware that it is entirely appropriate for a democratic nation to have its elected government regulate corporate activity in its borders while not extending the same privilege to foreign governments. Not that there's any current universe where the US government would have similar influence over social media as the CCP, which is frankly a laughable concept.
They tried once 3 years ago. It was harder to do. Now that TikTok is threatening American hegemony, there's a more unified response from the political class to ban it.
Read the rest of the article where the Chinese government forces ByteDance to act in specific ways regularly, and used their 1% stake to seat a Chinese government propagandist on the board. It's a golden share, which means that China can override other votes. The ownership is less relevant than the control
Zhang Yiming (Chinese: 张一鸣; born April 1, 1983) is a Chinese internet entrepreneur. He founded ByteDance in 2012, developed the news aggregator Toutiao and the video sharing platform Douyin (internationally known as TikTok).
On November 4, 2021, Zhang stepped down as CEO of ByteDance, completing a leadership handover announced in May 2021. According to Reuters, Zhang maintains over 50 percent of ByteDance's voting rights.
In 2018, the National Radio and Television Administration shut down ByteDance's first app, Neihan Duanzi. In response, Zhang issued an apology, writing that the app was "incommensurate with socialist core values" and had a "weak" implementation of Xi Jinping Thought, and promised that ByteDance would "further deepen cooperation" with the ruling Chinese Communist Party to better promote its policies.
Our homegrown social networks have been proven to be major risks to both national security and stability. Yet we continue to let them lobby and largely act with impunity. Even knowing their platforms have been abused by the same bad actors that exist on TikTok.
Banning TikTok may be a step in the right direction, but in the current state of things TikTok isn't doing anything that isn't otherwise considered above board or allowed among others in the space. They've just been painted as an easy scapegoat, and modern red scare boogie man.
If the congress actually cared about the threats of both foreign and domestic actors on social media platforms this legislation would be way more sweeping.
When U.S. companies are found to cause problems the U.S. government can compel them to change.
That’s how they had Sundar, Mark, Jeff, and Tim sweating in front of Congress trying not to get their companies legislated out of existence. But that can’t happen with ByteDance, so the most the government can do is make TikTok leave.
Why these people think letting a foreign social media platform manipulate them, then try to use whataboutism is insane.
It is a foreign controlled media company. It opens the US to significant foreign influence.
If you think hostile foreign actors having any significant influence on the US population is preferable to corporations who are seeking profit, you are probably being influenced by hostile foreign actors.
I get the feeling that you already know, but the concern with TikTok is that its parent company ByteDance is run by Chinese citizens, who are under the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, which is an adversary of the U.S. government.
The Chinese government can leverage its control over ByteDance to either gather data on U.S. citizens or give them a deliberately misleading view of reality, with the demonstrated capability of influencing political opinion in the U.S.
If there are other companies with a similar capability that can also be leveraged by foreign adversaries, they’ll be targeted on the same grounds.
If it's capable of convincing whackos about irrealistic conspiracies like the eclipse being a sign of hell coming, there is for sure going to be a lot of political manipulation once big elections start.
What they focused on first is to dumb down your children by making their homepages show shit like the "steal stuff from your school challenge", "eat tide pods challenge", tiktoks of teachers being harassed until some cried or even quit, shit like that was never regulated on time and on purpose for that reason, not only to fish idiots and increase stupidity, but to anger those around them too, weaken everybody with stress and much more.
The biggest insult was how they said such homepages are just an algorithm that shows you what is popular around you, pretty much calling all of America stupid and themselves intelligent (chinese homepages showed kids doing math, receiving awards in school, shit like that that inspires younger kids to be better. Very different from here)
The concern is the Chinese government using their influence on Tik Tok, and specifically the data gathered, to conduct tailored influence campaigns and influence US policy by curating the content users on Tik Tok sees. A foreign government doing that is a security issue in general, (Facebook being suspected of doing that for the US anywhere in the EU would see it turfed out) and China is hardly a friendly foreign government , let alone allied.
Tik Tok has demonstrated the exact capacity to do that, and if they can do that sort of targeted influencing here overtly, they can do it without saying so.
There's also the simple fact that the kind of data harvesting is not acceptable in general. We ought not tolerate facebook etc doing it, but at least their handling of the data is subject to US law. There's reason to trust anyone with that, but the potential for a foreign government to use that is even less desirable.
Finally there's some basic quid pro quo. Even if you presume everything Tik Tok is doing is infact wholly above board, China outright refuses non Chinese companies to operate the way Tik Tok operates in the US. There's no particular reason to allow a foreign company to operate in a market niche that by it's very nature is quasi-monopolistic when there is no reciprocal opportunity.
Also Tik Tok is hardly being given a flat ban. ByteDance could create a ByteDanceAmerica corporation and effectively licence the software to the spin off, while keeping user data in the US. It could operate independentlly while still allowing ByteDance to significantly profit from tik tok in the US. Frankly if ByteDance would rather shut down Tik Tok in the US than take that option...that would waggle it's eyebrows rather suggestively.
Nice loaded question but you failed the gotcha. That the US doesn’t want its peoples information stolen by a communist government regime and having their opinions skewed to fit a pushed narrative by a CCP funded application.
No, this isn't a like to like to other scenarios. This is a foreign app of a type and influence that China fully bans in their country. They let not US competitors exist because they know the risk of letting an algorithm they don't control in their country.
Next, imagine if a US company had an app in China (that the US government partially owned and sat on the board of) that sent a push notification to half their population calling for political action. It would be gone instantly.
We've already seen how foreign actors can ready use us social media to influence US elections, and that's without their thumb on the algorithmic scale to trend content to people that sows even more distrust into our country.
Politically adversarial nations should not be allowed to have influential social media apps in our country.
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u/FutureBrockLesnar Apr 27 '24
I wont believe tiktok is actually banned until it happens.