By banning (or forcing sale of) TikTok (which I loathe), Congress -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- and a Democratic president just performed extreme censorship of the Internet.
They claimed it was for your privacy, but that is a flagrant and stupid lie.
They believe you have no privacy rights, and deserve none, and have made that clear again and again.
We need public spaces controlled by the public, not rapacious companies and control-freak lawmakers.
> We need public spaces controlled by the public, not rapacious companies and control-freak lawmakers.
But you're not under the impression that that's what TikTok is right?
If we've learned anything from the disastrous mid 20th century, it's that propaganda and misinformation are extremely dangerous at scale.
The justification for free speech (and hence the reason to oppose censorship) is the same as the reason to oppose mass disinformation. Namely, a functioning democracy requires access to the truth. Censorship increases the cost of accessing the truth by making the truth scarce in absolute terms. Propaganda increases the cost of accessing the truth by flooding the market with lies and making truth scarce relative to other information. Both have the same effect.
Theses sorts of decisions should be cause for healthy skepticism and debate, but I don't buy the argument that a country should never mitigate an adversary's propaganda campaign because doing so would be censorship.
@dangillmor The concern is legitimate. There are tradeoffs. The real risk is TikTok’s black box algorithm and its continuous misrepresentation of its relationship with parent ByteDance. *The bill forces a sales, not a ban. China may blocks it with its recent law classifying the algorithm as a national security asset.
*If China blocks the sale, it validates the US concern that it would use the algorithm to manipulate free speech or, it would prefer political discord over letting ByteDance profit.
@dangillmor I am not a fan of tictok, but dislike what is being done to them. Why should we force them to sell when the larger similar company youtube has been operating in a STRONG monopolistic manner, facebbok has pulled comments that go like "I like this message." along with other (larger, similar) companies that are operating MANY times worse that tictok has ever done and nothing is being done about it.
@dangillmor it is hardly extending freedoms of choice etc at all. The rest of th world too, would prefer not to have a single country dominating/owning all the major social media platforms.
@dangillmor anyone who thinks that tiktok is a problem but meta is not, is either racist as hell or painfully naive to the abuse USian corporations put the rest of the world through. The idea that tiktok would be less harmful if it was US owned is laughable at best.
anyone who winds up making noise against acting against #tiktok is no friend of privacy and is morally confused and not acting on principles, they are merely posturing and showboating
we don't get perfect when we go after tiktok, yes. and?
if you care about privacy, you celebrate going after tiktok
@joeo10@dangillmor@mcc I follow and respect mcc, but I generally dislike slippery slope arguments. As she pointed out, there is a short list of specific countries, and Congress has had classified briefings that I wish they would share, but I still think this is a good move. I think Congress should also pass general data privacy laws, but I think both the divestment or ban of TikTok and data privacy laws are required.
@mdylanbell@joeo10@dangillmor The bill creates a class of applications that are banned from the entire computing platform that is the iPhone. As far as I am concerned that is the bottom of at least one slope, even if (as will likely be the case when/if ByteDance divests) no specific applications fall within the banned class at this time.
if your best argument "they might do something bad, so we can't do this good" then you have no argument at all, and you're merely fearmongering and posturing
heaven forbid we ever do anything good in this life because someone might do something bad someday
what a crock
why the f*** are people i respect wasting time and energy attacking a move against the radioactive slime that is tiktok is beyond my understanding, and a rank disappointment
@benroyce@mdylanbell@joeo10@dangillmor Although there are a range of possible final outcomes I can imagine coming from this bill, none of those outcomes plausibly involve the TikTok service reducing its reliance on algorithmic recommendation systems
@benroyce This bill affirmatively helps Facebook [Instagram]. It does not cut off one part of the problem you identify as a step toward attacking other parts of the problem. It bolsters one part of the problem at the expense of a different part of the problem.
we don't engage in this anti-moral argument of "well other things exist that are bad, so we can't go after this bad thing here"
it's the same as "well we can't oppose russian imperialism in ukraine, because the usa is also imperialist"
you see this empty zero principles posturing on many topics, it's a common cognitive weakness apparently that many people make the argument, and others buy it, and it's complete sh**
@paninid I really want to stress I can't identify any user privacy effects or implications of division H of the bill. The separate division I concerns privacy but H is just a ban on a particular company acting as an intermediary for speech acts.
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