It would be very funny if WW3 were triggered by tiktok
The USA is the leading tiktok-using country, I’ll give them that. But according to this statista page, the following three countries already double the total of USA users.
That means ByteDance stands to lose way more by divesting themselves of TikTok than losing their USA audience. Not only are they isolating themselves diplomatically and economically from the rest of the world, now they’re backing down in hubris culturally as well.
Although I really dislike the TikTok business model for obvious reasons, banning it on USA territory is going to be really nice for the whole TikTok ecosystem.
So, when poor oppressed Americans are going to start getting VPNs to escape their Great Firewall?
This slowly feels more and more like the US cannot handle the idea of anyone else making something successful,
AUTHORITARIAN REGIME
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EUnironically, communism is when governments don’t bend the knee to the US empire.
Oh so that means tiktok is owned by the CPC
In the same way that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, AT&T, Twitter, Reddit are owned by the US government, that is subject to regulations of the government for the country in which they are legally headquartered, in which most of their engineering work is carried out, in which their primary development and internet distribution infrastructure is and in which their CEOs and top staff are.
Or how about how the top micro-chip lithography company ASML despite being headquartered in the Netherlands had its sales of its products to China vetoed by US pressure under the guise of US national security and suppressing China. So much for the free market from the country that claims to be capitalist. So much for allowing freedom of operation by private enterprise. And not just ASML, they’ve banned an American company, NVIDIA from selling it’s top AI chips to China as well, guess NVIDIA is an arm of the US government.
The US regularly applies pressure to companies.
That’s not even getting into a whole plethora of other areas where the US exercises hard and soft power.
It would be nice to see this train wreck of a privacy nightmare be banned rather than sold and perpetuated. Let’s take FB and Google down in the same sweep and take back control of our data. This *** had been going on for too long.
They were targeted for being Chinese. If they sold to a US company they could double the privacy invasive practices and you wouldn’t hear a peep. It’s not about privacy, none of your legislators give a fuck about that. In fact they use private companies to spy on you to get around that pesky constitution which says they need warrants or special legislative carve-outs but nothing about them buying your data from private companies who collect it anyways.
The US could easily have passed a nearly guaranteed to pass judicial review (unlike this) broad bill aimed at forcing better privacy practices for all social media that would either force better privacy for users or drive these companies out of business or out of the US market. But that would target Facebook which has been one of the primary lobbyists behind the anti-tik-tok scare campaign because it is murdering them in the young people market and ad dollars for retirees are not quite as good as for the younger crowd and any social media stuck with only the old is destined to whither to irrelevancy.
This is a hit job, make no mistake. By Facebook and by western investors who have been unable to invest in it and thus profit from it unlike western social media so it has to go.
If anything actions like this prevent more people from having an honest conversation and understanding of the privacy and other issues of modern social media. By putting all the blame on it being Chinese and not examining the psychology, the privacy invasiveness, etc of all of these social media apps they prevent an honest conversation, honest questioning and discussion.
