And they’re already kissing Trump’s ass
TikTok was a Chinese intelligence operation in the end.
where’s all the Chinese government apologists at now?
I wish people knew that TikTok being banned was more about it not suppressing posts about Palestine than national security or whatever else they say. Antony Blinken and Mitt Romney outright said last year it was about stopping people from seeing the truth about Israel committing genocide. If the government actually cared about foreign influence operations they’d regulate data privacy and social media algorithms in some way (idk how, but I’m sure you could) but they obviously won’t because US companies manipulating people and stealing their data is totally fine.
How did you go from “foreign influence operations” to “US companies manipulating people”
Blinken and Romney. name a more trustworthy duo!
ironic you talk about manipulating people in a comment that’s goal is to…manipulate people.
This whole thing just comes across as craven and politically motivated by the US government. If they were really concerned with apps (whether or not they’re owned by the Chinese government) collecting and selling user data, they would pass adequate and enforceable privacy laws. Banning one specific app is addressing a symptom rather than a root cause, and any solution to an issue like this ought to apply to the entire field more broadly. I don’t necessarily think that banning TikTok is a bad thing, but to do so in such an obviously politically motivated way belies a lack of concern about the underlying issue (i.e. the mass harvesting of user data) in my opinion.
Tik Tok removed platform access from their US userbase voluntarily.
This was their choice.
The law is literally not even being enforced.
I hear that businesses existing in the face of unenforced laws are really stable and enduring. \s
Large businesses literally operate in conflict with the law until the law directly forces consequences, usually in monetary form. So, until they get caught and are forced not to do the thing. Explain to me why this is any different.
So I am assuming most Lemmy people don’t use Tiktok or Meta stuff. Here is some things you may or may not already know.
- Shou (CEO) made a parting video praising Trump on the last day
- Shou will be on the stage with all the other tech billionaires during inauguration
- People have noticed the last couple days that FB and Instagram have had a “link your Tiktok account” so you don’t lose anything on the platform
I think it’s pretty obvious now that Tiktok is going to become a part of Meta one way or another.
Hey, look over here at the TikTok performative theatrics while we set up an oligarchy and rob you of your labor, your health, and your livelihood.
im baffled by the blase response by lemmy users to government overreach
Same! It is definitively unconstitutional and the us gov just pushed it through anyway (with even supreme court backing it up?!) Shit is crazy, and yet I see a lot of ‘no big loss’ type comments on it.
The SCOTUS decision was wild too, because it was a fucking 9-0 vote. The decision was unanimous. That’s a word that’s virtually never used to describe the SCOTUS or any kind of government vote. That unanimous decision made it perfectly clear that the government knows something we don’t, and that TikTok had them fucking terrified. My bet is on the genocide being much worse than even TikTok was showing, but TikTok was the only place you could see anything about it that didn’t have a massive “Israel is just helping them root out terrorists” spin.
I said exactly that a few days ago. Got downvoted nicely, hope you have better luck.
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/14527149
Your comment made me feel a little more sane.
Boomer lib shit.
And nothing of value was lost.
TikTok turned the youth pro Palestine whereas Facebook and Xitter censored it.
And those same youth then gave us an oligarchy, useful fools
I did some research and now I know why Trump wants to “save” TikTok.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-tiktok-courted-conservatives-before-trumps-win
https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/tiktok-and-white-supremacist-content/
This one is especially damning:
TikTok is spending $50,000 on an inauguration party honoring influencers who helped Donald Trump spread his campaign message, according to the party organizer — and it’s scheduled for Sunday, the deadline for the company to spin off from its China-based owner or be banned in the U.S.
CEO Shou Zi Chew is expected to attend.
Well yeah, it’s no secret that TikTok had a white supremacy problem. There was a researcher who discovered that they could make a brand new account and (by only interacting with certain types of content) get white supremacists on their For You page within 20 minutes. Algorithmic feeds are funny like that, because they just gauge engagement. The algorithm isn’t making any moral decisions on whether the engaging content is socially acceptable. For better or worse, it just goes “this person likes this content, so I’ll show them more.”
$50,000
lol peanuts aren’t that damning… Capital in USA is spending millions and millions on Trump’s inauguration.
50k gets you an “I’ll see what I can do” .
Spreading for awareness, I’ve been posting this in relevant threads for a week - This is all theater.
trump is going to “save” tik tok after starting the initial push to ban it (for the wrong reasons) to pretend he did something for you. Worst part is that all of the no/low info voters and non voters will eat it up.
It’s the equivalent of a person pushing you into the middle of the street and at the very last second, that same person tells the drivers to all stop. “Wow, I owe you my life!”
And now, this adds two layers:
-
You think trump and the Supreme Court are colluding? now they get to say, nah uh!!! Even though again, this is all convoluted.
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trump gets to look “stronger” than the “highest court in the land” to help delude the next generation of low info tiktok folks.
P.s. The Chinese “protest” apps are going to mine the FUCK out of these millions of phones in the brief window they have them. Also, when the kids inevitably move back to tiktok, majority of them will leave these other apps installed on their phones, dormant and collecting in the background.
I think there’s an even simpler explanation: political debt to Jeff Yass (15% tiktok owner) and his cash for the 2024 campaign.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-jeff-yass
Why does Trump need to pretend to do something for you?
Trump has your support no matter what. He will rape children but you’ll line up to vote for him.
With that said he’s already in office. Your opinion is meaningless to him. He already got what he needed from you.
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That second paragraph is just vile. Donny brought this ban into motion and now they say he will save them?
The current Ban was not brought into motion by Trump, the current Ban started being discussed in congress in 2024, trumps efforts fell apart, shockingly enough. https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-timeline-ban-biden-india-d3219a32de913f8083612e71ecf1f428
I know bad for democracy and everything but
This app has done nothing positive for my life, arguably began my social media addiction, filled my brain with negative content at the height of COVID and severely impacted my mental health
I don’t think governments should ban platforns. But do I think TikTok should have ever existed? No
I dunno. Thanks to Black creators there, I learned about Tulsa, Rosewood, a lot about America indigenous culture, learned about the cops city protests and actions…
Sounds like TikTok was very good for democracy.
Don’t you need to learn these at school?
You would think… but those aren’t taught.
I find Tiktok haters funny. Vast majority aren’t users, and when you do find a user and they disparage the content, it’s pretty obvious that it’s a them problem and not a tiktok problem.
If you want tiktok to be cooking videos, just like nothing but cooking videos. If you want it to be about palestine, then like that content. If you want to be in MAGAtok, well that exists too. If you see nothing but thirst traps, that’s because those are the videos you actually fully watch. Your fyp page is just a mirror into yourself.
The only haters I can agree with are the ones who say “too many ads”
It helped my spouse deal with medical trauma by finding content creators expressing similar experiences. It worked better than any of the support groups which often felt more hopeless and isolating.
At this point though my spouse just hates instagram reels and how chaotic and pointless this is shaking out to be.
And yet most of it’s users are either to stupid or addicted to see the issue and just switch to RedNote, no questions asked. Which in turn nullifies the ban altogether.
If not for TikTok Israel’s genocide would have gone unreported in Western media and censored on US social media.
I don’t use TikTok but I knew plenty about Israel’s actions. It was all over the internet and plenty of news sources.
Yeah because teens love opening the paper in the morning and reading about how Israel is “liberating” Palestine?
The majority of media and news learnin’ is not TikTok or newspapers.
Do you want to help a company that kisses Trump’s asshole or do you want to find the next free app that does the same thing as TikTok?
I was spamming info about ActivityPub… found out there is a delay timer if you post too many comments lol.
It’s more of an IG replacement than a TikTok replacement, but I’ve been kinda enjoying Pixelfed for the past week or so. It’s slow right now but that should change I imagine. The huge influx of users needs to be managed prior to optimization.
Option C, just no thanks for the same thing as TikTok in general.
And now Trump gets to be the one who saved TikTok, despite starting the process.
It’s an own-goal for Biden - an unpopular law that starts being enforced the day before Trump gets to stop enforcing it.
No one is enforcing it, it’s a play by TikTok. TikTok did it voluntarily. The server is still there, my wife logged in and saw the notice.
It’s just theater.
$10 says Trump incluenced TikTok to go dark today to make him look better when it turns it back on tomorrow.
We all know they didn’t actually have to do this.
No one is enforcing it, it’s a play by TikTok. TikTok did it voluntarily
Yup. In fact, Biden had specifically said he will not enforce the ban.
Which, incidentally…might be the same thing Trump does to “unban TikTok” once he takes office. Which is bizarre, on both sides. Like…that’s literally not legal for a president to do. They can’t legally just ignore an Act of Congress.
Not that the law matters in America anymore. The Supreme Court has pretty definitively seen to that.
enforcement is up to the ag, so yea. they could just ‘ignore’ the law.
the only thing the ‘president’ can do is extend the deadline by 90 days given evidence that the company is closing-in on a deal.
with scotus out of the way, ruling in favor of trump’s initial desires, and that which subsequently passed through congress; it is now up to congress to undo the legislation if they so choose.
enforcement is up to the ag, so yea. they could just ‘ignore’ the law.
In practice, there’s no real mechanism to force it (especially if Congress is unwilling to impeach & convict). But legally speaking, the Take Care clause of the constitution obligates the President (through his executive) to enforce all laws passed by Congress. Ignoring it would be unconstitutional.
The executive branch can selectively enforce laws, look at all the weed dispensaries the feds could just waltz into and have a federal case against everyone.
TikTok and its service providers are liable. “No one is enforcing” is meaningless, because they can still be prosecuted retrospectively if the US Government changes its mind.
Yup. They even asked for clarification on the “no enforcement” and the Biden administration basically just said “it is what it is”.
What big company is going to take a risk like that?
As designed by the republicans. There are legitimate reasons to regulate tiktok, if Biden opposed though, they’d say he was a weak Chinese sympathizer, if he complied, they’d do this.
It was a trap where you were fucked either way, as the republican think tank ghouls drew it out.
Didn’t Biden specifically say that enforcement was up to Trump?
Not sure why you think it’s an own goal. Biden didn’t set the day for it to take effect, that was written into the law by Congress. You could say it was an own goal because Biden announced he wasn’t going to enforce it, but that seems to be the opposite of what you’re trting to claim And even with that decision to not enforce the law for 1 day before the Trump admin takes over, none of the companies TikTok works with like Apple or Google to list it in the app stores gave a shit about that lack of enforcement because of the uncertainty.
Not to mention Trump being the start of the ban in the first place. He was President when all of this started to work it’s way through the process, even if Biden was the President when it actually made it through Congress, with bipartisan support. Trump only changed positions because he wants TokTok to pay him to continue to allow it to continue.
More Americans have TikTok accounts than vote. For a shitload of normies who have only the vaguest notion of politics and current affairs, the app they’ve been enjoying gets cut off as the defining event of the waning days of the Biden administration. They are not going to care about how Trump tried to do it first, or it was bipartisan, or whatever. It’s hard not to see how this will cost Dems dearly.
No it won’t. Biden is already out of office as far as normies are concerned. He has been since the election, but definitely within 24 hours of inauguration. TikTok stops working and the next thing they see is Trump having a huge party with a shit ton of pomp and circumstance for his inauguration as he gets into the White House. And then TikTok still doesn’t work when they open it up. Maybe he brings it back, maybe he doesn’t. Voters don’t pay enough attention to separate his inauguration and the TikTok ban happening 24 hours apart, they’ll bundle it together as one event.
Unless he gets a massive cash infusion from Bytedance in the next 24 hours, he won’t give TikTok an extension on day one in office. He’s the kind of person that expects his payment up front.
So everyone will instead see it stop working as President Trump takes over, and then it continuing to not work after. Some may give him the benefit of the doubt, but they weren’t ever going to vote for anyone else anyway, he’s their God Emperor President and they’ve confirmed their world view around him being perfect.
Heck, he might try to spin it as some sort of promotional opportunity for Truth Social.
The law isn’t being enforced. TikTok can just put it back up tomorrow and imply it was Trump that did it.
That won’t stop Apple and Google from keeping it pulled from app stores until things are more concrete.
TikTok only blocked access and put that notice up in the app after their partners decided that a statement from the outgoing administration 24 before the transition wasn’t enough for them to not comply with the law.
https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/tiktok-and-white-supremacist-content/
No wonder why Trump wants to “save” TikTok. It has the stuff Republicans crave.
Democrats getting played by Republicans, a classic.
There’s still loads of bullshit surrounding the name. Hope your personal filters are up to the task the next 4 years.
