Are we acting like the US isn’t the biggest surveillance state existing in all history?
So because there’s one app they don’t control the data on, we need to ban it? Sounds like the free market to me.
deleted by creator
They didn’t care about it being China owned
They didn’t care about data sharing
Share info on the platform the US can’t censor though and then it’s ban time 😂
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.
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.
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.
Best line is at the end
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”
It’s a hosting ban on US servers and app stores. People already downloaded the app will continue to be able to use it.
That is if Bytedance doesn’t sell.
And what happens when they make it a criminal of fence to bypass the ban?
Probably the same thing that happens when I have a wet dream about Marilyn Monroe
You get violently thrown into a cage by people with guns?
The platform isn’t a national security threat, but a challenge to silicon valley’s dominance
No, I’m pretty sure it’s just both
Yes, and?
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.
Not all states are equivalent.
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.
The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
The US has over 750 overseas military bases around the world, and is building more to further encircle China. It constantly has multiple regime change operations in play around the world.
But China is not a capitalist state and is not driven by the forces of monopoly capitalism. I think it has one anti-piracy base in Djibouti.
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
If it’s a 100% capitalist state then why is it ensuring that its people can afford housing at the expense of the capitalists? CNBC this week: China’s housing minister says real estate developers must go bankrupt if necessary
“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.
The Federal Reserve is just the cartel of the US private banks, whereas banking in China is predominantly state owned. The Chinese state both runs these banks and has fiat monetary sovereignty, so it’s not answerable to the capitalists like the US is.
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.
China escaped from the imperial core’s predation in the last century, and is still in the process of recovering from it.
United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s FoundingDespite over sixty years of imperial core-enforced sanctions, Americans Can Now Expect to Live Three Years Less than Cubans.
Look up China Ghost towns.
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.
This Is What The World’s Loneliest Metro Station Looks Like Today
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.
Has anybody actually read the bill?
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.
The bill defines a foreign adversary as: “a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code”:
-
The People’s Republic of China, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (China);
-
Republic of Cuba (Cuba);
-
Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran);
-
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea);
-
Russian Federation (Russia); and
-
Venezuelan politician Nicolás Maduro (Maduro Regime).
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.
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?)
You like Russia? Why?
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.
Just curious what do you think of the invasion of Ukraine?
Btw, the USA is a flawed democracy but it’s still a democracy compared to Russia and most of the countries you mentioned.
Also from your link to that weird wiki, why is Greenland not “the global north” when it’s owned by Denmark?
Is that why we only have a choice between two rich geriatric whitte men
You obviously have a flawed system but you still have a choice compared to those countries.
And they are not only white men.
This year one of them is orange. Earlier, one of them was a women but you didn’t want to vote for her. Why I don’t know.
Before that there was a black man.
You obviously have a flawed system but you still have a choice compared to those countries.
As a bourgeois democracy we’ve never really much choice electorally.
Princeton University Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
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.
Before that there was a black man.
Michael Hudson on the 2008 Great Recession:
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.
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.
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.
Nice try CIA
Tiananmen square massacre
- The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
- 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots
- A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
- Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
- ‘Tank Man’: the full footage. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989
their genocide of the Uighur people
This bullshit never ends, does it?
- https://lemmy.ml/comment/8588979
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
their oppression of Hong Kong
Hong Kong was the product of the UK’s century of Chinese oppression, and their 99 year lease on oppressing Hong Kong ended in 1997.
steal Taiwan’s sovereignty
Taiwan is only considered sovereign by eleven countries, most of which are micronations like the Holy See, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan
was a bigger crime
-
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.
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? 😂
Yikes, what a flawed set of premises.
" 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.
As of January 2024 however, whoops, US citizen data(names, birthdates, location) is still being sent back to bytedance: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-pledged-to-protect-u-s-data-1-5-billion-later-its-still-struggling-cbccf203?mod=followamazon
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.
@Varyk@sh.itjust.works @davel@lemmy.ml
If we wanted national data and communication security we would shut off the transatlantic cables and physically separate the U.S. Internet from the rest of the world. All matters of diplomacy could be conducted in public courts at the coastlines instead of over telephone wires and emails. Problem solved. We could set up a nice star-spangled curtain and let all the globalists rot from the fallout.
“Afraid of your neighbor’s dog? Never leave your room, add a harness to your bed and strap in, wear plate armor at all times”.
Not exactly practical.
There are ways to improve security without immobilizing yourself.
Blocking the widespread distribution and use of an app that sends personal and national data to a hostile government actively collecting and using that data to conduct digital and electoral attacks is not immobilizing, it’s a simple step with zero downside that safeguards hundreds of millions of people.
deleted by creator
Actually, I have time, so let’s dismantle your comment.
"Keeping thieves and robbers from entering your house is not, ‘immobilizing yourself.’ "
Nobody said it is.
“The idea that America would be immobilized by taking care of itself instead of carousing around with the rest of the world is just silly.”
Something nobody said again, but:
Thinking that having literally enough land to fit people and resources to perpetuate some contemporary level of technology ignores all of history and every metric of national success.
You know who had overabundant physical resources and separated themselves from other civilizations?
Incans.
“Canada could also seal off its borders and in a thousand years from now still be going strong.”
So we ignore Canada’s transportation imports, machinery imports, electronics imports, plastics imports, energy imports， services that alone account for 1/3 of Canadian GDP, then Canada will “go strong”?
5 winter months a year without cars, oil or modern manufacturing to compensate for the weather, not to mention financial services, infrastructure services, science in every form; they’re sunk.
Oh and we can’t forget that you are wishing away Canadian exports, which also account for 1/3 of Canadian GDP.
Your canadian isolationist whim has zero legs to stand on and 1.5 trillion dollars of debt annually.
“International relations are the cause of war” in the same way that air is slowly poisoning you to death.
Such a zoomed-out, irrelevant statement ignores literally every significant factor of conscious reality.
There are two hundred ish countries.
Show me the thriving utopias that refuse to interact with any other countries.
You’re arguing the international merits of “separate but equal” while ignoring how much the United States and other countries have benefited from open borders.
You are wrong top to bottom here on every short-sighted jingoist allegation.
deleted by creator
You haven’t entered a discussion, you’ve cried incredibly short-sighted neoconservative talking points that I’ve completely taken apart in my other reply to you.
I attacked your ridiculous comment, not your character, unlike your personal insults.
You’re labeling me a “reactionary” because I didn’t call you any of the slurs you listed.
You might want to sit in that a while.
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 doneWe know the 2016 election was fucked with through Facebook and not a damn thing has been done.
Okay I’ll beat that dead horse.
- IT Pro: Cambridge Analytica models were exaggerated and ineffective, [UK Information Commissioner’s Office] claims
- Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
- Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
- Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
- Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
- Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
- Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
- Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On 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.
- MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
- Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor’s Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
- Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
- Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away
I appreciate you beating the dead horse, especially with all the sources.
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.
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 TikTok ban is The Patriot Act 2.0
No, that’s massively downplaying the Patriot Act.
deleted by creator
Yes, and I’ve read most of it. It’s not nearly as bad as the Patriot Act.
I’m absolutely against this ban on first amendment grounds, but it’s not nearly as bad as the Patriot Act was and still is (it has changed names, but it’s pretty similar to how it was when passed).
deleted by creator
Yes, the bill isn’t that long, but I kind of skimmed parts.
The Patriot Act was reauthorized several times, and it eventually expired, but it’s still effectively enforced by permanent provisions as well as other bills passed since then.
Regardless, equating this bill and the Patriot Act is nonsensical. This bill allows the government to ban apps and services from adversary countries. It doesn’t authorize data collection on citizens or any of the other nonsense we got from the Patriot Act, it merely allows the government to block certain apps and services from US markets. It’s hardly the same thing.
deleted by creator
Seeing as how Mussolini has a daughter who is alive today and just as fascist as their father, is this person Marx’ descendant?
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.
Just my thoughts…
