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The proposed ban on TikTok annoys me although I have never used it. Since I live in the United States, the CCP cannot do anything to me anyway so why should I care if they spy on me? If anything, I should be at least somewhat more concerned about the NSA spying on me because unlike the CCP, the US government can actually do something to me. There is not even any valid national security justification. Banning people who work at nuclear power plants and the military from using TikTok at work would be enough to satisfy national security concerns. I find it hard to understand how the idea of a blanket national ban on TikTok even became popular enough to go to Congress. To me it just seems like an infringement of free speech and free association. If I want to use TikTok while knowing that the CCP is collecting my data, so what? The CCP is a horrific government according to my value system, but Americans help them a lot more already by buying their manufactured goods than by using TikTok. It is hard for me to understand this proposed ban as anything other than a symbolic gesture, a sign of the sometimes understated unity that exists between mainstream Democrats on the one hand and conservatives (Trumpists included) on the other when it comes to near everything other than culture war issues, a lashing out against all possible enemies of the Wolfowitz doctrine that would properly be seen as silly soft authoritarianism if it issued from Russia or China. Should we not be better than Russia and China, though?
There is also the other angle of "won't somebody please think of the children?" But the moral fracas around the damage that social media is supposedly doing to children seems to me to have all the signs of a moral panic. Not because social media is not doing any damage to children, but because it is a slippery slope argument. There are plenty of great novels and works of poetry in libraries that also would do damage to a sensitive child, and certainly there are plenty of peer groups that a child might be exposed to which would need to have no recourse to electronic communications to also do damage to that sensitive child, but the authentic liberal response is not censorship. There is something that I find unpleasant about the whole idea of viewing information or an information medium as inherently damaging. But then, I am a liberal. The way I see it, by all means if you find the CCP to be morally objectionable then do not buy their goods or use their services, but is this a restriction that the United States government should impose?
Why the fuck are people allowed to use any apps on their work-issued phones, or bring personal devices into sensitive locations? That's what you do when you have real national security concerns, so any concern about this is misplaced. War-gaming military units (and probably some real ones, too) get killed by even indirectly-location-aware dating apps all the time (and that's data China can easily access from American apps).
Major tech companies buy up every startup that could compete with them to shut them down, utterly fail to come up with a competitive product, mad that China beat them and now possesses the network effect power they tried so hard to build up over the last 20ish years.
News at 11.
The US already abuses its financial infrastructure to target things its government doesn't like (Operation Choke Point) in both foreign and domestic markets. Sure, they don't directly jam Radio Moscow; but they're more than happy to make sure anyone who makes a radio capable of receiving the band on which they transmit can't get paid. I think that's the same thing in intent and consequence- it's only surprising now because this time it's more overt.
Social media is not doing any damage to children by itself. What it does do is amplify problems inherent to/emergent from how we treat them- so if high school is some highly-age-segregated hellscape where petty bullshit is the only thing that matters in life, social media means that its power structure comes home with you and follows you wherever you go. (This isn't unique to high schoolers; it's also why most people are aware of progressive thought despite not personally knowing anyone who is.)
It's not surprising most people just want to treat the symptom, or confuse the symptom for the root cause. (No shit they're mentally ill; we're actively causing it.) Hard to get someone to understand something when their socioeconomic standing is a reward for not understanding it.
How would you suggest we fix high school? Integrate different age groups or somehow force things other than social status to be popular?
It isn’t as easy as it seems.
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