811–820 of 1001 posts
It would be nice if such a ban meant that a small competitor could get a jumpstart. Instead I fear the result is that Meta just gets bigger.
That was quicker than I had expected, though I thought they'd probably find a way to avert even a temporary shutdown to begin with.
I think a lot of people on here never spent much time on TikTok and it shows. It wasn't just for young people and it wasn't all brain rot. There were vibrant communities, subcultures. Real issues were aired there. Real people connected. From the early days of Covid it provided a window into a broader world.
It is not so different from the US-based social networks: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc... Both for the good and for the bad. And I think most people here understand that.
Shirtless pics
LGBTQ posts
My Hero Academia
The funny thing is, I saw videos from Chinese users that specifically mentioned not to post these things. I had to look up why the anime, and apparently the creator made choices that directly poked at old WW2 tensions between Japan and China.
As a European, I find it quite outrageous to demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held. It is the old-school imperialist school of thought. If you think Bytedance is harming Americans, despite following american law, then amend the rules for social media companies. Or at least be honest enough to say: "The free market is great, but only if we hold all the cards".
As a European, I find it quite outrageous to demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held. It is the old-school imperialist school of thought. If you think Bytedance is harming Americans, despite following american law, then amend the rules for social media companies. Or at least be honest enough to say: "The free market is great, but only if we hold all the cards".
An an American, I also find it outrageous. In fact, as I understand it, our most fundamental law (the Constitution) clearly guarantees "freedom of speech and freedom of the press" which specifically means that the government may NOT shut down a particular publisher because the government does not like what they say, or who it is that owns them. Unfortunately, our Supreme Court unanimously disagrees with me about what…
We take the global world for granted, but it is made up of sovereign states many of them have their own constitution.
Has anyone suspected foreign interference in our social media during the height of the culture wars in the last decade? We had people encouraging civil unrest on the Left (whenever there was some police shooting or event where racism was suspected), and we had people encouraging civil unrest on the right (an immigrant committed a crime, or similar). We had puppet trolls in Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc.
Russia and the United States have been doing this to each other - stirring civil unrest with propaganda - since the 1950s. It's an old war.
Does that not merit consideration in this conversation?
As someone who has used TikTok, I don’t hate the outcome, but hate the mendacity with which it was executed. TikTok is brain rot, a better way of describing it is digital crack. You can spend hours and hours on TikTok in a numb state, with no sense of what’s going on in the world around you. If the government decided, this addiction is not good, let’s treat it like a drug and ban it, I would be all for it. But claimi…
It is a tool of chinese propaganda and surveillance.
(Perspective from an American) Information is the gold of the 21st century. Whoever controls the flow of information has all the wealth and all the power. Therefore, data is the greatest currency in the world. This outcome was never intended to happen, but ByteDance is taking a chance that the American government will relent. We’ll see in a few months who wins the stalemate. TikTok has an immense amount of cultural p…
A better read I think is just Trump paving the way for Musk and his supporters to monopolize control of data and attention. First step for a silent oligopoly of democracy.
As a European, I find it quite outrageous to demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held. It is the old-school imperialist school of thought. If you think Bytedance is harming Americans, despite following american law, then amend the rules for social media companies. Or at least be honest enough to say: "The free market is great, but only if we hold all the cards".
An an American, I also find it outrageous. In fact, as I understand it, our most fundamental law (the Constitution) clearly guarantees "freedom of speech and freedom of the press" which specifically means that the government may NOT shut down a particular publisher because the government does not like what they say, or who it is that owns them. Unfortunately, our Supreme Court unanimously disagrees with me about what…
If it was just about content then yes, it'd be unconstitutional.
But security/trade concerns about a geopolitical opponent are not the same thing, have never been the same thing, and it would be crazy to treat them as the same thing.
Not to mention that as a trade issue, China already bans basically all the popular American social media sites, and just a ton of popular US sites in general. Turnabout is entirely fair play and expected when it comes to trade.