The main point is that tiktok can persuade people politically and cannot be sued by the US government. So it must be owned by a US entity so it plays by our rules… keep the same asshole politicians in power. You want bridges and got no rivers? A Republican or Democrat can deliver! And ofcourse all the partisan stuff like religion in school, freedom for everyone etc.
The whole bill is about giving the government power to ban “foreign adversary controlled applications” and there’s nothing about the president being able to ban whatever app they want.
So unless you are on the side of the enemies of the US and want social media apps controlled by them, I don’t know why you wouldn’t support this bill.
Edit: I think the misunderstanding/misinformation comes from a few places, but ultimately I think it boils down to the fact the bill requires the app/platform to be a foreign adversary AND it requires a presidential executive order before the app will be banned.
I will never really understand why china’s on these lists. I know it’s because theyre communist and commies = bad, but every other country on their has literally vowed to kill Americans, while china’s biggest crime is making close to as much money as we do.
china’s biggest crime is making close to as much money as we do.
Nah man, I’m pretty sure the Tiananmen square massacre was a bigger crime. Not to mention their genocide of the Uighur people, their oppression of Hong Kong, their attempts to steal Taiwan’s sovereignty.
ETA: big thanks to OP for so clearly and concisely showing they’re a tankie.
unless you are on the side of the enemies of the US
You mean enemies of the US’s ruling class of capitalists, who are the working class’s allies.
“Your enemies are not our enemies.” - Nelson Mandela (who, btw, was on the US terrorist list until 2013 and is/was an enemy of the US. Was Nelson Mandela your enemy?)
More accurate to say I support Russia’s role in geopolitics — as any working class person should — because their interests are broadly aligned with the Global South’s in ending the dictatorship that the US — and the Imperial core in general — has had on the rest of the world for the past century (it was mainly the UK before; it’s been the US since WW2).
While much of the economic and social progress the USSR had made has been undone with its overthrow and forced privatization and capitalism, Russia’s foreign interests have surprisingly remained in favour of the Global South (though unfortunately not as much; they stopped directly funding Vietnam, DPRK, and Palestinian resistance groups since it’s not profitable for capitalists). They’ve consistently supported Syria and Venezuela’s sovereignty against the US for example, and are a core part of BRICS.
All of whom are genocidal zionazis who can never go against the US gov’s imperialist interests.
The only US president who tried to do something half-decent, JFK, for wanting to abolish the CIA and giving an anti-imperialist speech titled “Imperialism: the Enemy of Freedom” to seemingly curtail the US’s invasions in foreign countries, made himself an enemy of both the political parties, and was thus assassinated by the CIA.
Political systems in the imperial core, specially in the US, only exist to protect capital and imperialism, while giving a thin veneer of “democracy”.
Btw, Putin has an approval rating of over 75% in Russia. Russia is much more of an actual liberal “democracy” than the US, where Trump won despite getting less votes.
While he does seem to genuinely care about Russia — it was under his presidency that alot of the mass capitalist privatizations after the USSR’s overthrow were undone and life in Russia started to catch back up to what it was, though it remained capitalist — he’s still a liberal. I imagine that’s probably because of a mix of wanting to increase his chances of victory even a bit more, and because there’s no genuine leftist opposition in Russia right now that would actually improve it (all his genuine oppositions have been far-right so far).
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
All of these loans were against fictitious mortgages, mortgages that pretended that there was value there, but there were mortgages mainly to Black and Hispanic borrowers by banks who cheated them, who over-evaluated the prices. The banks in general discovered a new way of making money after about 2004. They could make money by charging racial minorities much higher rates, almost double the rates that they charged white people. There were whole banks and brokers that specialized in this, and this was basically the junk mortgage group. Countrywide, Financial was the most obvious beneficiary of this.
There were a number of notorious banks that ended up being merged. Bank of America was one of the crooked banks. Citibank was one of the most crooked banks, as has been very well documented. Randal Wray at the Levy Institute and Kansas City published a big explanation of who were these $29 trillion, $27 trillion of loans for. It ended up many of these loans were rolled over and reloaned, so the net amount was not $27 trillion, but that’s how much was given to the banks with this huge jump. Instead of sending the bankers to jail, they made them billionaires. They rewarded them. That was the Obama policy, and that is what makes them one of the most viciously racist presidents in modern American history.
An inevitable escalation in the war that started in 2014 with the US-backed fascist coup in Ukraine that goes against the interests and wishes of Eastern Ukrainians
and the subsequent killings of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine, like Donbas, DPR, and LPR, by the coup gov for resisting.
I don’t support the invasion per se. In fact, its goal of suppressing fascism in western Ukraine seems to have kinda backfired from this after all, with the Ukraine gov using this as an excuse to suppress the left.
But the point is, what else could’ve they done? They’ve already tried to join NATO multiple times from even before the USSR’s overthrow and have been denied (since it’s an imperialist org whose entire purpose is to suppress socialism globally, and particularly Russia) and they already had the Minsk agreements which the US sidelined through the coup. Not doing something about it would lead to the continued killing of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, and NATO getting even closer to Russia since the post-2014 US puppet gov doesn’t abide by the Minsk agreements.
Those are not my adversaries, they’re the adversaries of US military industrial-complex and the imperial core capitalists in general. One reason they’re a thorn in the capitalists’ side is that they’re unable to exploit them through neocolonialism.
That’s fine if you want to believe that, but that’s not what the article is about that you posted. The article states that the president will be able to ban ANY non-us application by executive order which is inaccurate.
Yes, I too would love the US president to decide which social media platforms I am allowed to legally use and who I can legally communicate with. I’m so scared China is going to, checks notes, influence my opinion that I’m willing to sacrifice my free speech rights in the process. Regulate me harder, daddy! 😍
I would find this all extremely concerning if China didn’t regulate US platforms so heavily. For example, Tiktok has safety limitations for children in China while they have nothing at all for children in the US. It’s being used as a social/mental health weapon.
Just remember that daddy allows you access to the propaganda that encourages defending Tiktok.
Finally, your speech has not been limited. You can take it to any of the competitors. There would be free speech concerns for Tiktok, but it’s a Chinese company, not protected by the US constitution, and checks notes China proactively limits speech.
Your defense is “some other dictatorship does it, so that doesn’t concern me?”. Saying things are OK because the CCP or Putin does them is a very slippery slope.
I would find this all extremely concerning if China didn’t regulate US platforms so heavily. For example, Tiktok has safety limitations for children in China while they have nothing at all for children in the US. It’s being used as a social/mental health weapon.
So you’re saying China is better than the US because it regulates social media while the US does literally nothing for its own children.
I agree.
So! Instead of political banditry and forcing TikTok to sell to a US company we should regulate our social media companies too just like China does! Or do you really think TikTok will collect less data or exploit children less when it is owned by a US company? 😂
Bans can be bypassed, but my concern is if the new law makes it criminal to use tiktok. If so, the media should stop saying “tiktok ban” and instead say “new law makes it a crime to use tiktok”
Democrats have convinced themselves taking over TikTok is the solution to their problems, but the reality is that if Joe Biden signs this bill into law when he is already tanking in the polls, particularly with young voters, he will hand the election to Trump. The youth will not forgive a party that was so extreme it banned or hijacked their favourite platform to censor them in order to keep a genocide going.
Large centralised social media platform should all be banned. I miss the times when all you had was forums hosted in someone’s basement, the Internet was a better place. Short form video content is the worst of the bunch though.
China is the biggest surveillance state, both in population and in extent of surveillance, so literally by every single metric that could be thought of. So, not sure how you convinced yourself of that but even though I agree with parts of your sentiment you’re doing your argument no favors convincing yourself of things which are literally false in every sense.
" What if Canada did the same thing to the US? They did!"
No, they didn’t. Canada tried to boost Canadian media presence on American streaming platforms.
Making sure gooby gets an international viewing is very different from transmitting information to an overtly hostile government known for cyber attacks on its international peers.
“The platform isn’t a national security threat”.
It’s a fact that the app TikTok is based off of, Douyin, sends the private data of every user straight to bytedance, owned in powerful minority stake by the Chinese government and that tiktok did the same thing with US user data until they promised they stopped a couple years ago.
It’s not some baseless concern, it’s a national security consequence against data disclosures that were already carried out and have continued to this year despite assurances 2 years ago that data leaks to bytedance are not happening.
“Instrument of soft power”
Marvel movies becoming super popular internationally is an example of soft power. Gathering the personal information of users with a continuing precedent attacking US digital infrastructures and democratic institutions is not soft power, it is hostile statecraft.
I am not a proponent of monolithic tech companies nor am I particularly aligned against international competition in tech supremacy, but this ban isn’t about theoretical cultural competition.
This tiktok ban is about the recent gathering of personal information that can be used to assess and attack digital infrastructures and electoral behaviors by entities that are continually attacking digital infrastructures and electoral processes, entities focused on consolidating power not within some international free market of soft cultural influence but by gathering and consolidating power and using that power to forward state ambitions.
Does anyone think that China is just full of the warm fuzzies and wants us all to hold hands, make smores and sing kumbaya? They are every bit after power as the US is to hold onto it.
Yeah it’s sort of like accusing a presidential campaign of being “all about gaining political power”. Of course that’s the goal. That’s not the metric by which you should judge its actions.
The US is the hegemonic imperial core country (like the UK before it) and has been since the end of WWII, and even moreso since the end of Cold War I. The imperial core’s imperialism is driven by the monopoly stage of capitalism. The imperial core has been pillaging the Global South for the last 200+ years, including putting China through a century of humiliation. It caused WWI & WWII & Cold War I, and has now started Cold War II.
I’ll look through your sources because they seem intersting but China is 100% a capitalist state. They ditched communism years ago and only kept the authoritarianism
“We will scale up the building and supply of government-subsidized housing and improve the basic systems for commodity housing to meet people’s essential need for a home to live in and their different demands for better housing,” an English-language version of the report said.
Unlike Obama, who bailed out the private banks at the expense of people with home mortgages. Michael Hudson, 2023: Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over
The financial sector is the core of Democratic Party support, and the party leadership is loyal to its supporters. As President Obama told the bankers who worried that he might follow through on his campaign promises to write down mortgage debts to realistic market valuations in order to enable exploited junk-mortgage clients to remain in their homes, “I’m the only one between you [the bankers visiting the White House] and the mob with the pitchforks,” that is, his characterization of voters who believed his “hope and change” patter talk.
Capitalist countries still have social programs mate. Unless you think Canada is a communist country because we have free healthcare? I suppose I could call it a mixed economy if it makes you feel better
On a side note, owning a home is culturally very different in China than in the western world. They have a massive housing bubble ongoing and its pretty wild. Look up China Ghost towns. Some insightful shit.
The imperial core countries affords those—notably deteriorating—social programs through the exploitation of the periphery countries, programs which the core does not allow the periphery to have. The global north working class paid for those concessions with our blood & sweat, though no one seems to remember, thanks to two red scares and a cold war. The purpose of FDR’s New Deal was to save capitalism from socialist threats, and the capitalists have spent the last fifty years chipping away at their New Deal concessions. Europe had its own, even stronger socialist movements, and their capitalists similarly ceded ground temporarily.
I am familiar with them. Those were planned communities that were photographed after construction but before being populated. Perhaps there were some duds, I couldn’t say: researching every bit of US propaganda gish gallop isn’t my day job.
China intentionally popped its housing bubble recently, and that’s why some capitalist real estate developers are going bankrupt, and China isn’t trying to save them because they’re capitalists.
Why is it that all of you guys from hexbear are trying to pour into other communities just to spew propaganda? You guys don’t even make it hard to spot. If I see 10 links in a gish gallop style I will automatically downvote I don’t even need to read it.
I don’t use TikTok and I don’t think anyone really should but if we’re going to ban TikTok for data collection then there are a lot of platforms that need to be banned. We know the 2016 election was fucked with through Facebook and not a damn thing has been done
Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big DealOn the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
Seems pretty cherry picked. From the Wapo regarding Twitter:
But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.
It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.
All of the US corporate social media platforms are part of the US military-industrial-intellegence complex now. Look at their boards of directors and executives. Look at Reddit:
Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.
One can’t prove a negative, and I’m sure there isn’t literally nothing that has happened or will ever happen. But trying to propagandize the voters of the most propagandized country in the world probably isn’t the most efficient way to go about it. Bribing politicians surely would be more efficient, for example.
We definitely need to legislate the way that they operate and make the majority of the corporate surveillance that is happening now illegal. Facebook should face consequences, as should Google, Reddit, and all the others. That doesn’t mean that we ignore TikTok though. We should address problematic companies both domestic and foreign. But only one of those companies is partially owned and heavily influenced by an oppressive foreign government.
It’s one thing to regulate foreign corporations and you don’t see me making a case against the EU for regulating Apple or Google. You see me saying this isn’t about data collection like they say, it’s about preserving US power in the software space. The US is completely within it’s rights to block TikTok but you don’t need to lie to me and say it’s for security. The servers are located in the US, there’s no real evidence China has done anything illegal and if Google did the same thing and sold the data to China it would be fine. This whole issue is a bunch of individuals sucking on billionaire tech giant toes.
The probability of a war between the US and China is very high as judged by the US military. Prominently over the Taiwan situation. Having service members with tiktok on their devices would be terrible for opsec. To me this confirms that we are continuing to track on that train of thought. With that line of thinking this seems to an increased likelihood. Be careful out there folks.
TikTok is banned from official devices, i.e. and phone provided by the DoD, etc. There is no ban on it being on a personal phone; just a strong recommendation against having the app.
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