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House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

nytimes.com

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Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#361

Post by asd88 »

kalverra wrote: post #36

Nate Silver did a nice write up on the probability and implications of all this here: https://open.substack.com/pub/natesilver/p/why-the-political... When Biden passes this bill (which he said he would), I can only assume Dems will lose a large part of the younger voting demographic. If jot now, then 4 years from now. Because no chance in hell is China selling this thing, and Trump is already talking about how much h…

> Because no chance in hell is China selling this thing

Didn’t they agree to sell it to Oracle back when Trump threatened to ban it?

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#362

Post by slibhb »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #328
slibhb wrote: post #319

This whole thing is embarrassing. Banning an app is something the CCP does. It's not supposed to be something the US government does. That's leaving aside the feasibility. I suppose tiktok could be banned on Iphones easily enough but it's less clear how the web app or android apps could be banned.

Bans don't have to be perfect to be effective. Free speech isn't absolute, not even in the US. It's normal and healthy for a society to adapt it's view on speech over time and as the world evolves. Hopefully toward being more open, yet openness must be balanced against the negatives.

Every generation is scared of "what the kids spend their time doing". In the 80s it was the PMRC. Later on there were at least a few video game scares ("What if my son plays Mortal Kombat and tries to rip my head off?").

Today it's "evil Chinese apps". Embarrassing.

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#364

Post by harkinian »

AlexandrB wrote: post #253
bushbaba wrote: post #164

[flagged]

The New York Times was used by a nation state to convince a meaningful portion of American voters that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The resulting war cost the US taxpayers trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, not to mention the cost to Iraqi civilians. Seems like that's a far more meaningful impact than whatever is happening on TikTok.

That and we have strong lobbying groups within the US representing Israel, a foreign nation.

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#365

Post by youniverse »

I like Scott Galloway's take on this which is that ByteDance will simply be forced to divest/sell the US business to western interests because they won't take a $250B loss or whatever the valuation is. So we will keep our cocaine app and still secure the security interests. Sounds like a win win to me if this happens.

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#366

Post by xeromal »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #175
LordKeren wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has banned YouTube, twitch, wordpress, medium, etc.

> China has banned YouTube, twitch, wordpress, medium, etc. Also TikTok! ByteDance operates a separate app in China [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok#Douyin

Isn't it an education app in China?

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#367

Post by suoduandao3 »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #267
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can make similar arguments Hey remember when Apple, Google & Amazon all colluded to ban Parler off the face of the planet within days, a purely political move, based on some shaky allegations of moderation? Meanwhile TikTok is labelled as a "must have" app in the AppStore....

>Hey remember when Apple, Google & Amazon all colluded to ban Parler off the face of the planet within days, a purely political move, I actually don't remember that. I do remember lots of terroristic and genocidal posts on Parler though.

It's easy to botspam a competitor with terroristic and genocidal posts if you only need a fig leaf to remove the platform - not a great precedent to align with.

Also, didn't a spokesperson for Harvard recently say some calls for genocide were acceptable on their platform (campus) depending on context? Why aren't the anti-1st amendment types trying to ban Harvard?

Edit: Not a rhetorical question for the downvoters.

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#368

Post by BadHumans »

sebazzz wrote: post #297
Spivak wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parler off the face of the planet, a purely political move Having a policy against hosting apps that host illegal content and taking no measures to remove it is a political move? There are plenty of active conservative communities on the internet, Parler just went the "free as in anarchy" speech route. Tumblr faced a ban on iOS for pornographic content and Reddit also has to sanitize their default experience to be…

> Parler just went the "free as in anarchy" speech route. This is no different than X nowadays. But the political landscape has shifted even further to the right, why now no action is taken nor desired [by the politics] to do anything about it. For instance: There is only one Dutch moderator for the entire Netherlands/Flemish community.

Twitter is pretty heavily moderated if you don't align with the hive mind. The hive mind just shifted from the left to the right.

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#369

Post by coupdejarnac »

tzs wrote: post #205
TulliusCicero wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free trade should go both ways. It's ridiculous to let Chinese apps and websites operate in the West when China blocks so many Western sites and apps: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...

Free trade generally does not mean you have to let foreign companies operating in your country do things that domestic companies are not allowed to do. Most of those sites are not in China not because China says that they cannot operate there but rather because China say they would have to obey the same rules Chines companies do. That generally involves things like storing data on Chinese citizens only on servers in…

This is post hoc nonsense. China blocked US tech companies so that they could copy what the US companies do without any threat of superior competition.

Re: House passes bill to force TikTok sale from Chinese owner or ban the app

#370

Post by criddell »

codedokode wrote: post #340

If US bans TikTok then other countries should ban US apps because they can be used for spying and manipulation of public opinion the same way. Either a country makes its own apps or it becomes a subject to foreign influence.

Other countries do ban US apps. For example, Twitter/X is banned in China, Iran, Russia, North Korea, and a few other countries.
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