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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.
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.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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