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Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

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Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#271

Post by mateo1 »

flappyeagle wrote: post #24
segasaturn wrote: post #5

99% Invisible recently introduced me to the political concept of Noticeably Improving People's Lives (abbreviated as NIPL), which refers to how politicians get votes by making visible, positive improvements to people's lives. Not only is this bill bad policy (does nothing to protect people from foreign surveillance and violates free speech), its shit politics. All it's going to do is make the 150m Americans who use T…

My girlfriend not zombifying herself for 3 hours a day noticeably improves her life and my life

She will just do it on Instagram reels now. I wish They were banning all short format video platforms and black box algorithmic suggestions. But obviously they aren't.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#272

Post by throwaway5959 »

cranberryturkey wrote: post #262
pelagicAustral wrote: post #258

Will be nice to see how this going to be implemented. Good luck with that.

seriously, tiktok canibalizing ad revenue at bigtech so they ban it? how is that not communism?

Pray tell, what do you think communism is?

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#273

Post by autoexec »

Aloha wrote: post #261
autoexec wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Further, Chinese government officials would show up unannounced and plug shit into our networks, and required access to our encryption keys and accounts databases and employee & customer lists etc. This happens in the US too and has been happening for a very long time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A ) only when it happens to US companies they get gag orders and/or paid off. (see https://www.theguardian.co…

While I'm not always thrilled that about the amount of monitoring United States Government does, as a United States Citizen, my government is at least marginally accountable to me - if enough of us are bothered by this policy, we can choose to elect representatives who will change it. I can't say that about China, certainly not to me as a United States Citizen, and not even really to Chinese Citizens either - which i…

> While I'm not always thrilled that about the amount of monitoring United States Government does, as a United States Citizen, my government is at least marginally accountable to me - if enough of us are bothered by this policy, we can choose to elect representatives who will change it.

On the other hand it's our own ostensibly accountable government that we have to worry about violating our freedoms, abusing and misinterpreting this data, targeting innocent people, etc. If China has this kind of data they still have no power to throw me in prison (provided that I stay out of China) and very little impact on my day to day life. I'm still not happy about them collecting my data, but I have much less to fear from it.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#275

Post by phone8675309 »

vyrotek wrote: post #267

@dang, Am I imagining things or did something unusual happen with the ranking of this submission? Shot up and then dropped despite votes and comments.

You'd have to know how many people have downvoted this to know that for certain.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#276

Post by autoexec »

wumeow wrote: post #265
autoexec wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Further, Chinese government officials would show up unannounced and plug shit into our networks, and required access to our encryption keys and accounts databases and employee & customer lists etc. This happens in the US too and has been happening for a very long time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A ) only when it happens to US companies they get gag orders and/or paid off. (see https://www.theguardian.co…

> The difference is that when the servers are in China the US government can't get that kind of access/cooperation. Except that TikTok’s data, or the main copy of it at least, resides in the US, so the evil US govt theoretically already has access to it. That’s not the motivation for this bill.

I know they've said they would plan to store American's data on US-based servers, but wouldn't promise to stop sending data back to China or keep ByteDance from accessing it. I'm not sure that the US government having exclusive access to this data enough to make them go this far.

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#277

Post by notyourwork »

cranberryturkey wrote: post #262
pelagicAustral wrote: post #258

Will be nice to see how this going to be implemented. Good luck with that.

seriously, tiktok canibalizing ad revenue at bigtech so they ban it? how is that not communism?

This is because of ad revenue?

Re: Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest

#278

Post by trafficante »

Aloha wrote: post #263
mrtksn wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is not straight up a ban but it is a ban. Maybe Musk will buy it for pennies ona dollar and will turn my TikTok feed to my Twitter feed, which is full of lunatics, conspiracy theories, racist, dog whistle racist, conman and Tesla boys. Maybe Zuck will buy it and will start showing hot girls, meals and tourist attractions like they do on Instagram? Since I'm not it the USA, maybe I will be able to use the…

I've watched people end up radicalized by content on TikTok - in ways that twitter, facebook, youtube, et al doesn't seem to do. You end up seeing the opening for a rabbit hole, and then suddenly you're very deep into said rabbit hole. I get your concerns over loss of something you enjoy - but the content is steerable enough by algorithm and addictive enough that a little twiddle of the knob, and suddenly a bunch of…

Remember about a decade ago, when you’d read about YouTube’s algorithm creating an “alt-right pipeline”?

Without making any judgments on the alt-right label, it was absolutely a real thing. Many documented cases showing how a fresh account could go from “Sesame Street, cooking videos, and CNN” on the default feed - and, within ~10 relatively innocuous clicks down the suggested video rabbit hole, the home feed would be full of Alex Jones tier stuff.

TikTok is heavily reminiscent of the old YouTube. Just taking a few steps down the Free Palestine recommendation road will get you into “Happy Birthday, Uncle Adolf” videos (hyperbolic, but only slightly).

I don’t blame certain parties for getting rather nervous over that. But I wish we could have some honesty from elected officials about why TikTok is suddenly such a pressing issue again.

Whatever happens, I hope they’ve learned from YouTube’s earlier mistakes. In trying to break the alt-right pipeline, they ended up breaking the entire recommendation engine for years (tbf it’s a lot better now).

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