And they're already kissing Trump's ass
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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I'm starting to think of Trump as one of those old school firefighters that would set fires and then swoop in to put the fire out lol.
He was one of the first people saying to ban it in 2020. To me it’s more like he is easily swayed with lobbying so it ends up looking like he is a pioneer on pushing new policy when in actuality he is the first person people go to when they need to bribe a politician.
This is not unique to Trump. Politicians say "they changed their views" if there is enough oil to grease wheels.
He absolutely is. All presidents are.
Those type of firefighters exists in droves still because that is not an old-school thing.
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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.
Not to doubt that it's politically motivated, but the ban law as written could be applied to any app with a country of origin on the US "Foreign Adversary" list AND declared to be a national security issue
TikTok was a Chinese intelligence operation in the end.
It was? How do you figure when no evidence of that was presented to Congress according to congressional members and senators?
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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.
If that were true then they wouldn't have given ByteDance the option to sell 80% to citizens and continue operating.
The law also bans every company from doing the same thing, sending personal data to any of the listed adversarial nations or being more than 20% owned by them. Why ban every company if they only cared about the Palestine message?
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How did you go from "foreign influence operations" to "US companies manipulating people"
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Tik Tok removed platform access from their US userbase voluntarily.
This was their choice.
The law is literally not even being enforced.
Multiple apps must have done so.
That's what I see when I search for Marvel Snap on the playstore. Someone mentioned it was down as well earlier
Because they are distributed by a company that is owned by Bytedance. You know. The people who own Tik Tok.
Yeah, that's why I brought that one up
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.
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