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By more than two-to-one, Americans support U.S. government banning TikTok from Pew Research
I can't say I'm very surprised but it's more that I assumed it was getting banned either way. I'd be interested to see the trend over time to see if there's been some manufacturing of consent.
I think that sort of support (especially since the GOP is onboard and not playing criticizing) basically gives the government all the cover they need to actually do it but we'll see.
What I don’t get about this who,e TikTok thing is why TikTok is worse than other versions of social media. Every accusation you can make about TikTok can be equally true of American owned social media platforms. TikTok gathers data, but so do Facebook, twitter, instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit. TikTok wastes time? gestures at the entire internet. TikTok is propaganda? What about Facebook pushing a genocide in Myanmar, or Twitter being the place used by trump to rile his base about election fraud? Or tumblr normalizing asking for pronouns? In short, there’s nothing, other than being owned by a Chinese company, that would set TikTok apart here.
And I find the whole thing insane because what needs to be addressed is bad behavior, not the ownership of the company. The spying, the time-sucking, the propaganda, these are the problems not being addressed. If the discussion were about any of the above, fine, we can at least have a discussion about what private companies are allowed to do with their platforms. What we have instead is government banning a single platform because China bad, and heavily criminalizing trying to use the “wrong” platforms used by the wrong countries and companies.
I think that TikTok being a social media is to some extent a red herring and it should be viewed more as a strategic risk. For instance since 2022 there is a ban on natural gas, coal and oil imports from Russia into USA. Other countries in EU went even farther as they realize that having foreign hostile government in control of strategic asset poses huge security risk. Another example is that of Huawei ban since 2012 to be part of telecommunication infrastructure for its known ties to Chinese military. Another and relevant example is the fact that according to rules of FCC, foreign government cannot hold license for US broadcast station. I see TikTok ban in this light.
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New media is always evil. Remember how the last little bit of power the Traditionalist's moral majority had was spent on Grand Theft Auto and other violent video games?
That said, it's just a better content feed than US tech companies can (there are still lots of people at Google being paid 1% salaries to do nothing, just like there were at Twitter post-Vine... until Elon fired them all) or will support (in a free market of ideas, woke is outcompeted, and China is not prevented from recommending content or selling advertising to companies that Blues don't like- what are you going to do, not advertise or have a presence on a platform for 10 and 20somethings?).
A picture is worth a thousand words, there are 60 of them a second, and so long as you can figure out what those words are to which people you're unbeatable despite never having spoken a single word in chat.
Oh well, why innovate when you can regulate?
TikTok is unique because China can't be reliably leaned on to suppress Red political views and objectives, which threatens Blue dominance of the printing presses, so it needs to be banned. And if they can gut VPNs in the same legislation, they can make sure the Reds can't trivially skirt bans, makes the act of compromising a website more powerful (in fact, telecommunication companies hand that data out for free- that's part of why people use VPNs in the first place- and it would be a shame to stop getting invited to those nice NYC dinner parties, Mr. CEO...), and otherwise chill and criminalize speech beyond the strictures of 1A.
The Traditionalist Reds, being a bit more out of touch with technology, don't quite understand these things (or think handing dominance to the Blues is preferable to Chinese influence). Also, their tween daughter (and son too, probably) is shaking their ass for the camera in a way Snapchat didn't incentivize to the same level and that makes people (especially traditionalists) uncomfortable.
Twitter was the place the Blues used to incite 2 years of riots and mass hysteria.
Now they don't have it, and what's replacing it in mindshare is completely out of their control (Elon can at least be assassinated if the Reds start an American Spring- that's not something they can say for Xi). I would absolutely expect them to be apoplectic about that.
I expect all TikTok-related legislation to pass the House in a landslide for those reasons, and 10 Senators can surely be badgered into supporting it on the Red side since their base still kind of cares about moral turpitude (and being outflanked by the Blues on that is a quick way to make the base stay home come election night) and Chinese unpredictability.
This is not going to be good for
Bitcoin1A.I tend to agree with this. It’s not that it’s uniquely bad. It’s just not under the control of the right people. In that sense it’s a bit like the hysteria around Parler— a right-coded free speech site that started as a work around for Pre-Musk Twitter often banning right leaning accounts.
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I suppose "reliable"' is debatable but TikTok has actually suppressed "Red" (tbh I don't even count this as "Red") talking points like #SuperStraight - which I believe we talked about on the old board. Which...I was honestly surprised by. You'd think TikTok would either lean conservative or stay out of the whole mess.
I really do think it's something unusual and rare: a moment of bipartisan consensus due to the fact that the elites are less polarized on foreign policy. Or rather: China specifically.
Both parties have taken a harder and harder line on China. Obama pivoted to Asia to try to prepare, Trump...I mean, that one's obvious. But even Biden, who was supposed to be a rollback of Trump, has conspicuously not filled that role on this topic.
It's pretty telling that, unlike other Trump stances that were reflexively rejected as evil (e.g. lab leak) this one is still hanging around even though Blues (and self-serving Chinese) said it was racist and "Sinophobic" when Trump was hammering China.
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I suppose Chinese-owned TikTok can't be pressured into taking down DR content, but would they need to at all? It is China we're talking about here, after all. The only thing I can imagine that would bring Bytedance and the Blue Tribe to blows would be if the Blue Tribe went all-in on Taiwan like with Ukraine.
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Generally I'm getting a bit tired of the "people in the past used to worry about X which was new at the time, therefore we should dismiss anyone worrying about new thing Y", but this is stretching it. The issue here isn't even what people are being shown on TikTok (though it's not like it's hard to criticize that), it's the mechanics of the whole damn thing.
I also agree a lot of the pushback is political, but fail to see how it's an argument against the ban. Why should the US allow China to exercise the same kind of narrative control that the US is doing on other social media platforms?
True- why should the US allow US citizens to use Chinese printing presses?
After all, they could print seditious or blasphemous material, or find out about our culture and weaknesses through our writing, and surely our own printing presses are sufficiently neutral and decentralized to result in all content legal under the First being printable so there's no reason any of our citizens would need to go around that. Our citizens always act in such good faith towards each other that this is not a valid problem.
That's the main reason I'm suspicious of the ban, and read other legislation that specifically targets the ability to bypass bans as running up against 2A issues. (And yes, I'm aware that Chinese-made weapons are banned from import through the same legal mechanisms- too bad that import ban greatly benefits US industry so the lobby groups won't ever touch that one; I doubt the EFF will lift a finger over VPNs for similar reasons should it come to that provided the Blues pick the right initial target.)
[To piggyback off a sibling comment's argument]
True- the Chinese have a history of "fortifying" Blue politicians in the West (evidence of this always red meat for red tribe).
My objections center around not being sufficiently convinced this is true on their platform right now; I support the ban coincident with my certainty that it is.
TikTok employees have the ability to amplify or dampen specific videos and trends as they see fit. The analogy here to a (supposedly neutral) printing press would be inaccurate.
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That's not what I'm saying, quite the opposite in fact. I'm asking if you're the US government, why would you allow a foreign power to pull the same kind of psy-ops on your citizens that you've been pulling in recent years?
And to that point in particular, have you missed the part where I was in favor of banning all big platforms?
Again, don't get me wrong. I'm sure the ban is not proposed in good faith, and it amounts to the US government wanting to keep narrative control over it's own citizens, but if you want good arguments for a ban, there are plenty.
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More like, why should the US tolerate Chinese newsstands set up by the entrances of high, middle, and elementary schools which freely give away slick magazines which appear to be about everything teens and kids enjoy but also have an editorial undercurrent of “disobey your parents”? Also, for some reason the newsstand vendors are always looking at the schools through binoculars and taking notes.
Because part of what’s concerning is the content the platform pushes, and part is the sheer breathtaking volume of telemetry the app collects.
But of course the cure is worse than the disease. It turns out this particular legislation is worse for American freedoms as the app is for American security. So, I don’t support the legislation, even though I support banning the app.
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It's basically everything that's bad about twitter (short attention spans, intentionally addictive skinner-box-esque design) turned up a notch and operated by a hostile power. Not being a libertarian, I have no problem saying "TikTok is bad and should probably not exist". Honestly, I wouldn't mind seeing twitter taken down as well, but recognize that that's probably outside the Overton Window.
Not just Twitter, every big social media platform. Of course not only would it be outside the Overton Window, it would be the American government shooting itself in the foot, so it's never going to happen, but one can dream.
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I must admit I'm a bit surprised, both in the direction and the magnitude of the direction. A priori, I would have guessed that the strong norms of free speech and personal liberty would have made it so that Americans would generally be against a government-mandated ban on TikTok. The trends between Republicans/Democrats and conservatives/liberals doesn't surprise me, at least, since I would expect the former to be more prioritizing of stuff like protection of children from social media brainrot and protection of US citizen data from Chinese governments over freedom of people to use social media services that could be harmful to themselves and others. On a personal level, I think TikTok is probably a net negative both to US society and to US citizens, but I also think that the government setting a precedent of banning TikTok is probably a much bigger net negative to US society and to US citizens.
American attitudes towards liberty are all over the place. For example, from what I understand only a small minority of Americans support fully legalizing cocaine for adult consumption, even though one might think that few things are more of a bedrock of liberty than the right to put whatever one wants into one's own body as long as it does not immediately and directly endanger others (like, for example, swallowing a bomb that has a timer and then boarding a plane would).
I think that the widespread perception that TikTok is a non-serious toy for teenagers also works against it. Social norms already generally support censoring content for youngsters while making it available to adults. Of course the reality is that even if TikTok gets banned, every 12 year old with a smartphone will still be able to easily go online and see hardcore pornography if he or she wants to. But even if someone wanted to, there would be no practical way to prevent minors from viewing pornography. In a war on porn, porn would win easily and decisively even more than drugs have won the war on drugs. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to ban a specific company like TikTok, which has been widely pilloried because "won't somebody please think of the children" and is run by a widely disliked country.
I mean, who is “one” in this “one might think” construction? You might think that, but actually it appears that the vast majority of people have a very different conception of liberty than the maximalist conception that you are using here. Surely if there are “bedrock” elements of liberty, you could imagine at least a handful of rights that are more centrally important to liberty than the right to snort cocaine. Even if you think that’s a super important one, I would think that you would recognize a number of other ones - freedom of speech, freedom of private property, freedom to vote, etc. - that are more crucial than… “freedom of ingestion”.
Not really. The truth is that, by and large, Americans don't actually care about liberty as a goal in and of itself. If you were to press a normie who doesn't think cocaine should be legal, you could pretty easily get them to admit that it would increase liberty to let people consume cocaine. They just care more about "cocaine is bad" than they do liberty.
I think a big part of this is a product of the way modern academics strategically equivocate between "freedom" and "liberty", using one when they mean the other. Kind of similar to the whole "positive" vs "negative" rights formulation, liberty implies some level of rights, and rights by extension imply responsibilities. Even if they might not frame it this particular way, I think the average person is smart enough to recognize that while letting people shoot up heroine on the street might increase "freedom" it's not going to make their town a nicer place to live because junkies as a class are not responsible, and thus their presence is incompatible with "liberty".
Freedom is being able to do whatever you want.
Liberty is being able to leave your property unattended and let your kids roam the neighborhood without having to worry about them being taken.
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No, it's that a normie American doesn't care about liberty to the exclusion of all other values, including second-order impacts. Sure, decriminalizing cocaine would allow more liberty to use cocaine, but it would also have second-order effects on safety, which directly impinges on other people's liberty to make choices unimpeded by crackhead violence. Posing this as a simple "yes/no" on the liberty question is a false dichotomy; the value that normie Americans place on a particular choice being available or not depends on a substantial amount of context.
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Freedom is important.
One of the most important freedoms that the USA trample on is freedom of association.
If I were allowed to keep my family away from the kind of people that desire the freedom to do cocaine and other mind-altering substances, then it would not be that bad if these substances were technically 'legal'.
If I had a choice, when sending my kids to school, to pick the teacher they get trained by, why should I care that it's legal to hire gay pedophiles?
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I do recognize more important ones, which is why I said "one might think that few things are" instead of "one might think that nothing is".
Within the framework of supporting liberal values I can see no rational argument for banning the freedom of ingestion. I understand the authoritarian argument for banning recreational drugs. Authoritarians in general are fine with using the power of the state to create the kinds of societies that they want even if it means substantially restricting personal freedom. While I am not an authoritarian, I can imagine why if I did have a preference for authoritarianism, I might be in favor of banning drugs in order to sculpt society into what I wished it to be. However, in a country that prides itself on liberty the bans on recreational drugs seem nonsensical and hypocritical to me.
Many conservatives in particular are guilty of such hypocrisy. Every argument that I can think of in favor of the right to bear arms can be applied also to the right to consume recreational drugs. Even the argument that "guns help one to protect one's freedom from the government" has a parallel argument in favor of legal drugs: "legal drugs can help one to get to know oneself better and to achieve insights, which in turn increases the individual's ability to resist government power". Someone might argue that most drug users do not use drugs for these purposes. But then, if push came to shove and the boogaloo started probably most gun owners would not join a militia and go fight the government either. But some would.
I find this every bit as specious as the people who talk about drug legalization in terms of “the government wants to stop me from putting a particular plant in my body.” Those people know as well as I do that crystal meth is not a plant, but rather a complex chemical concoction literally designed to turn a normal person into an aggressive and unstoppable violence machine; and you know as well as I do that PCP and fentanyl are not used by anybody to “achieve insights”. That’s not what they’re for, and it’s not a plausible effect of those drugs. Using a justification that makes perfect sense to justify, say, LSD, and trying to smuggle in the legalization of PCP and fentanyl and meth… that’s dishonest. It’s the epitome of the non-central fallacy, and I trust that you are smart enough to be employing that argument cynically, rather than actually believing in it.
you can address drug addiction induced violence by punishing the violent people, its unfair to ban the drug thereby punishing nonviolent users.
No, you cannot, because deterrence does not work when everyone thinks "well I can just not be violent on drugs".
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Imagine being the victim of that extremely predictable and preventable violence, and being told, “It’s fine, we needed to wait until after he did the thing we all knew he was going to do. Sorry it had to be you that it happened to.” If it were me I’d sure be pretty fucking miffed that nobody did what needed to be done before I became the victim of violence.
Im pretty sure that cocaine does not turn all of its users into violent criminals, but lets imagine that it does. In that case my response is that I don't want my tax money going to contribute to the state trying to eliminate this trade because I would rather keep that money to myself and do something else with it.
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Is publishing a website speech?
What if my website is merely a proxy to another site?
What if I inject a header that insults Congress into every HTTP response?
The proposed RESTRICT Act (the new Patriot Act being sold as 'ban tiktok' bill) would make using a VPN to avoid a ban on a service punishable by up to $200k civil liabilities, and also criminal.
Not sure how it's at the moment, though.
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One of the small subthreads of commenting on the recent right-wing victory in Finland (I will hopefully have a longer article on this soon so I haven't commented yet here) is that the right-wing populist Finns Party has a very high youth support, and one reason that's been suggested for this is that they have young politicians who are very adept at creating fast-spreading provocative content (of the "SJWs getting OWNED by facts and logic!" type) on TikTok. If EU starts discussing a TikTok ban as well, I wonder how that would affect this strategy (they'd probably just move to another platform, though).
Given how much platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have been pushing their own versions of portrait-aspect-ratio-short-videos, that's what I'd guess too. The extent to which YouTube has been pushing their "shorts" to me as a viewer has been... almost upsetting, TBH. And from what I've heard, they've been pushing creators to it as well for better overall treatment by "the algorithm," though I take that with a grain of salt. This sort of follow-the-leader effect by TikTok has been by far the worst impact of TikTok I've noticed, as someone who doesn't use that platform.
Tangent: I've never understood the portraitification of everything. Do people not realize smartphones can be turned on their sides? Or that not everyone is viewing content on a smartphone to begin with? Why would anyone want to view something in portrait form?
I can understand the desire. If you're using your phone on public transit or walking, it's significantly more convenient to hold it in portrait mode than in landscape mode. At a minimum, it's more comfortable to the wrist, and due to how big modern phones tend to be (which is a problem in itself; don't get me started about the lack of sub-5" flagship phones, when sub-4" should be the actual standard), the button placement might necessitate the use of 2 hands. For me, I just don't have any interest in watching short 15-60 second videos, portrait or landscape. It seems like a pathway to addiction and constant dissatisfaction over needing the next bite-sized thing, which I get enough of in text form on Twitter.
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It's a lot more clumsy to film stuff in landscape. You have to grab the phone by its edges rather than have it be an extension of your hand (so the shot is more stable and a bit more physically intuitive to "aim") and your fingers easily get in the way of the camera.
And when you're making bite-sized throwaway content, especially when it involves a person (taller than they are wide, usually) I'm not surprised the portrait mode is being used for portrait content.
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I didn't look into it, but the word on the street is that the "Ban TikTok" bill is actually Patriot Act 2.0. If so, smart marketing on the part of the politicians because as jaded as I am, when I see "ban TikTok" my first reaction is positive.
That bill (Restrict) doesn't even have the support of the ones who proposed it. Then you have the Data act.
But there are multiple anti-tiktok bills and the one with actual support would ban it under the purview of existing laws.
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Be fun to see the GOP crying foul when Telegram gets banned.
Why would they?
Most of the GOP (as distinct from the alt-right) mostly runs off of discord, teamspeak, and old-school privately hosted bb/slashcode forums.
Discord? Why not just send transcripts to the DNC?
because voice chat is ephemeral in a way that written communication is not and the FBI is almost certainly listening anyway. Everyone comes in knowing that the random no-name white dude pushing for "radical action" is either a Fed or deeply disturbed which is why when you go back through Dylann Roof's chatlogs you see literal KKK members trying get him help rather than signing up for his crusade.
In contrast to the average blue-triber the average red-triber is well aquatinted with how to operate in a contested and/or hostile environment.
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I'm under the impression that Telegram is favored by the hardcore right, not so much the more milquetoast elements of the American right.
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Speaking totally off the cuff, here are some thoughts about why banning tik tok has such wide consensus:
This leads to:
But i also thing a strong factor is:
I think when you don't use it, it looks like a deliberate hypnotic assault on American society and feels like a platform thats designed to completely supplant the rest of the internet and capture and waste the attention of its users. Americans will embrace whatever tools they can to get rid of it, because its an app from a foreign adversary of America designed to weaken the next generation. The more you look into it, the more apparent that becomes.
What’s weakening America is America.
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The Chinese government has indicated it will invoke technology export controls to block any TikTok divestiture, so unless they're bluffing it's not inconceivable that banning TikTok may just mean banning TikTok.
Technology export controls? The ones meant for missiles and fighter jets and nuclear submarines? To block Americans from buying TikTok?
I apologize for the low-content comment, but I couldn't not mention how ridiculous this is.
It's not at all unusual for data analytic tools, cryptography functions and proprietary algorithms to end up on tech export control lists. If a Chinese company tried to buy Twitter, the US government would do the same thing.
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It's silly, but if I were whichever CCP or corporate functionary best-positioned to act, I'd not let the Americans win that easily.
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.. why'd it even matter that tiktok is banned when same sort of retardation (vertical short videos) is being pushed by Facebook, Youtube and probably every other site with videos I don't use.
Social media sites tend to all imitate whichever site is most popular at the time. I remember all the Twitter imitation trends 5ish years ago.
I feel some sense of cosmic justice that the websites that try and hook people into following pointless online trends are themselves doomed to follow pointless online trends.
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