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Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

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Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#261

Post by next_xibalba »

withinboredom wrote: post #211
throwaway4837 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children. This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their qu…

> [The] US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China. Yeah, except that any business can just buy that information. I can buy your day-to-day movements for dirt cheap. I own a non-American company (though I'm still an American citizen, but that isn't a factor), and it is insanely cheap to get information about any American you want. Hell, BingBot will tell you all about…

The federal government has many tools by which they could accomplish this ban. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has a long, successful history of forcing divestiture by foreign owners of domestic assets.

Additionally, app stores and ISPs are a pretty obvious route for blocking 99% of U.S. users from circumventing the ban. Any users who are able to circumvent those measures will be using an app whose network effect has been destroyed.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#262

Post by throwaway29812 »

gorwell wrote: post #214

Did anyone notice that the bill doesn't even mention Tiktok??? If it's a "bill to ban TikTok" why doesn't it name the target? It's a red herring. This is the Patriot Act for the Internet. Ironically they're copying the CCP playbook and want the same level of sweeping control with the implementation of a Great Firewall. It's extremely broad and includes everything connected to the internet that has >1M users in a year…

> the same level of sweeping control with the implementation of a Great Firewall

The same level ?

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#263

Post by realce »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #236
realce wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't read books from Eurasia, it's against the law.

That's silly of course, but what about a Ractive? I think something that actively tries to collect data on you and shape your perception controlled by a geopolitical competitor should be handled carefully and potentially outlawed.

So you agree that the Chinese government is doing the right thing when they block a Chinese citizen from viewing Twitter?

You agree with the usage of the Great Firewall? You agree with the ability for the government to tell you what websites you can visit? If you use a VPN to read a Chinese newspaper article, you agree that the government should be allowed to imprison you and take all of your possessions? That's madness IMO.

We should be making Super-TOR instead of this.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#264

Post by AlexandrB »

whythre wrote: post #19
breck wrote: post #9

1) I understand that the CCP bans sites and apps. Let's not sink to their level. (Instead, let's build more and more technologies to enable their people to get around said bans). 2) This is embarrassing. You don't like TikTok? Man up and compete. Don't ban it. 3) The complexity in this bills makes it reak of corruption. There will be winners and losers in this bill. The losers we can bet are 99% of the population.

I am fine with banning what is, effectively, a Chinese psyop marketed as a social media app. I don’t really think we should be competing to make the most addictive doomscroller possible. However, I do agree about point 3, wholeheartedly. This makes it seem like envy, where our government is salivating at the prospect of doing this themselves under the guise of protecting us from foreign powers.

> I am fine with banning what is, effectively, a Chinese psyop marketed as a social media app.

As a non-American, I would argue the last 70 years of Hollywood and social media has been a psyop by a foreign power. The DoD literally aids in the making of Hollywood movies as long as their ideological content is "correct"[1]. After all that it's pretty funny to see this kind of pearl clutching about "psyops" coming from American citizens.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unof...

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#265

Post by bratsche »

chimeracoder wrote: post #239
petilon wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This bill is absolutely horrific. In what way? Explain that, and let readers decide if it is horrific.

> In what way? Explain that, and let readers decide if it is horrific. The bill allows the Secretary of Commerce to unilaterally ban products associated with countries of their choosing, with a 20 year prison sentence for any US citizen who attempts to use a VPN to circumvent the access ban.

Wow, really? That's crazy!

My wife and I use WeChat because her family lives in China and we want to be able to chat and do video calls with her. If Secretary of Commerce declares that WeChat is illegal that is going to put an enormous strain on my family.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#266

Post by dvngnt_ »

hi5eyes wrote: post #130
lurker919 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying there are engineers sitting behind their laptops who upvote the "bathroom destruction" trend in some kind of global dashboard? You sound very certain about the degree of control they have over recommendation systems.

google devious lick tiktok incentivizes teenagers to create content, and makes going viral extremely easy... as long as you can up the ante on current edgy activity

tiktok doesn't actually incentivize it.

they hosted the videos and banned them as they were reported.

you can't even search the term anymore as it shows a get help button instead.

however i can go on youtube and watch all of the ripped tiktok that people downloaded before it was removed.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#267

Post by gabereiser »

The reality to me is that they want to suppress the Gen Z vote (who predominantly vote democratic) by banning "their" platform. They guise it under a "China vs USA" intelligence war (who makes all the phones and computers we use? Riiiight). It's simply to dumb down the next generation to suppress the vote so that sitting house members can continue to be sitting house members. Prove me wrong.

There's a bunch of 18-28 year olds who are going to be super pissed off.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#268

Post by dragonwriter »

late2part wrote: post #240

@dang - please change the misleading title of this article from "Senate Bill to Ban Tik Tok" to "Senate Bill to Criminalize VPNs and Enhanced Governmental Wiretaps"

@dang – if you are going to chance it from one piece of editorialized misleading clickbait, don’t change it to another.

Unfortunately, the bill’s official one-line summary (“To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes”) and title (“Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act”) are also misleading, though perhaps not clickbait (they are more to discourage looking inside by making it seem bland than to encourage attention.)

The summary is factually misleading, because the Secretary of Commerce isn’t authorized to prohibit anything by the bill, the President is, and the bill specifically prohibits delegating except to the Attorney-General, and that only for litigation purposes, and it is an obscurant because it is vague about what kind of transactions and why. And the title is basically word salad to fit a forced acronym, though it does hint about the business domain of concern.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#269

Post by goatlover »

chimeracoder wrote: post #239
petilon wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This bill is absolutely horrific. In what way? Explain that, and let readers decide if it is horrific.

> In what way? Explain that, and let readers decide if it is horrific. The bill allows the Secretary of Commerce to unilaterally ban products associated with countries of their choosing, with a 20 year prison sentence for any US citizen who attempts to use a VPN to circumvent the access ban.

Fuck the US government. There should be mass civil disobedience over this if it somehow passes. Let them try to prosecute millions of citizens. This is no better than what the CCP or Putin's regime does to it's own citizens. I see that the EU and UK have similar designs to control the internet.

Re: Senate Bill to Ban TikTok

#270

Post by withinboredom »

ddoolin wrote: post #247
withinboredom wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [The] US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China. Yeah, except that any business can just buy that information. I can buy your day-to-day movements for dirt cheap. I own a non-American company (though I'm still an American citizen, but that isn't a factor), and it is insanely cheap to get information about any American you want. Hell, BingBot will tell you all about…

TikTok disappearing from tens of millions of iPhones overnight (I have no idea about Androids) would probably work pretty well. If I had to guess, almost none of those people can jailbreak their iPhone to get it again, either. Your option would be to switch to Android and learn to sideload apps (which I think is pretty damn easy these days). The point is not to enforce against individual users, just to remove it from…

You can freely install apps on your iphone. All you need is an Apple computer. It only can be used for a week? before you have to install it again. I don't pay apple a dime and still develop software for iPhones occasionally without any issues.

Also, websites are pretty powerful. Apple even allowed websites to send notifications now.

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