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My concern is with forced sales. How do we ensure that the politicians’ incentives matches with ours and that they aren’t being paid behind our backs by the companies that are now able to acquire TikTok at a discount? Congress is notorious for (alleged) insider trading, they could very well profit from such a sale.
Relevant: The American Trap by Frederic Pierucci
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/statement-on-tiktoks-conte... Is TikTok just straight up lying in the their official press release or is this just hysteria by our legislators? > We store all TikTok US user data in the United States, with backup redundancy in Singapore. Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law. > Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remo…
None of this is inconsistent with changing the level of amplification of certain topics in concordance with the preferences of the CCP, which is what the evidence appears to point to. Note the key word “removal”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of this is inconsistent with changing the level of amplification of certain topics in concordance with the preferences of the CCP, which is what the evidence appears to point to. Note the key word “removal”
Are you talking about that one "study" that claimed the TikTok algorithm aligned with CCP interests that was about as rigorous as a high school science fair project?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you talking about that one "study" that claimed the TikTok algorithm aligned with CCP interests that was about as rigorous as a high school science fair project?
There's also the court filing by Yintao Yu, formerly head of engineering for ByteDance, claiming the same thing. https://archive.is/9eUWX
On the other hand, they’re ostensibly a democracy, albeit one where only one party has significant political power. (For a country with the level of economic success that they do, maybe it’s understandable.) Singapore has an extremely low level of corruption on international indexes, even lower than in the US, and it’s seen as very business friendly.
Another thing to note, as I am learning more about it, is the extensive surveillance framework that is already available. (I’m about halfway through Byron Tau’s Means of Control now.) Surveilling people’s whereabouts is trivial, and for a nation state like China or the US it’s often easier to just buy information on the open market than allocate an agency to the task.
My final thought on this is that we’ve heard for so long about how private platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate content how they see fit. There are two cases in front of SCOTUS about this now. While I think this is a comfortably simple point of view, it elevates the speech of fundamentally profit-seeking entities to the same level of protection as that of everyday people. Once we start to block companies based on national security, we need to consider the ownership of other companies as well. Nothing is to stop Elon Musk from taking a bribe from a foreign adversary in a moment of drug-fueled weakness, and that bribe from affecting Twitter’s ranking algorithm.
TikTok today and then Twitter tomorrow on the chopping block. All Hail Big Brother.
I want to use TikTok as it exists today. Why should that right be taken away from me by the US government? This is going to have major political backlash from the millions of people happy with TikTok if they manage to pass it.
Banning TikTok wouldn’t be a dangerous precedent. Authoritarian countries do that all the time. My concern is with forced sales. How do we ensure that the politicians’ incentives matches with ours and that they aren’t being paid behind our backs by the companies that are now able to acquire TikTok at a discount? Congress is notorious for (alleged) insider trading, they could very well profit from such a sale. Relevan…
Wanting to live in a non-authoritarian country, I think you missed the point you just made, or were just being sarcastic and it went over my head.
There's a theory that this push for a Tik-Tok ban is being funded by Meta, who can't buy it like it bought other competition like Instagram and WhatsApp.
Monopolies are bad, mm kay.