this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Political Memes

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (34 children)

It's a good start tho. Fuck the CCP.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Senator I'm from Singapore

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

This is how elites can keep bamboozling us. How the fuck our life would improve without tiktok? At least If you ban every personalized social network or add strong regulation to them, but no, just ban tiktok and pretend you are doing something. CCP can eat shit, I'm worried about what is happening around me and not in a country in the other side of the planet.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

An adverserial nation in control of an algorithm that influences and effects behaviors here in the united states effects you.

Have you not once considered the NSA or silicon giants a potential adversary?

At least with NSA you could say for the purpose of national security, but Google would happily kill people for money if they figured out a way to not get caught.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Any examples on how this has taken effect?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

For starters, TikTok algorithms are made to downweight any topics relating to subjects censored in China. HERE is a link to a study on the subject from Rutger's University and nonprofit NCRI. Since NCRI also directly advises Congress, it's a big part of the information available to legislators making this decision to force TikTok's sale.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm not going to click that, but idk probably. That's the point, downweighing can't be easily observed without a large dataset.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

It's a video covering all sorts of forbidden topics in China and tagged with hashtags like #uyghur and #tiananmensquare but the video showed up on people's "for you" page and engagement/views was in line with most of his other videos. On the other hand, his videos where he brings up other topics like the CIA get outright censored. He uploaded a video about Palestine and tagged one with tags like #freepalestine and then uploaded the same video again without those hashtags and the one with the hashtags has <70k views versus the >930k views of the video without the hashtags.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Simple. When the bill was first introduced, TikTok blasted a notification telling people to call their congressman to stop them. We then had literal lemmings doing that exact thing without understanding the entire scope of the bill and why it's being done. Good fucking thing it was mostly younger kids.

Now imagine the same scenario where we have 18 year old voting adults. It can and would be able to sway an election or worse.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Not to mention common lemmy shills post this garbage up constantly to keep the youngins riled up. All ploys. All benefiting not us.

I would prefer legislation towards protecting our data rights too, but that ship sailed after we pissed net neutrality away, and that talking point is merely used as wedge between us. All to keep us mad at each other, ineffectual, and unlikely to vote.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The loopholes are there by design, it's not a mistake. Just look up lobbying in the United States.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The problem isn't that they want to ban Tik Tok, it's that they completely ignore ever other questionable app. Let's make laws that address both data harvesting as well as platforms that use misinformation to manipulate large groups of people in exchange for money. We already know Facebook has been guilty of this but as an American company they can offer campaign donations to make politicians forget the problem. Sigh.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

I'll give you one guess as to which company has lobbied for this bill.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Absolutely. Is apps using addictive based systems to hook people in and then harvest their data aggressively to turn around and sell it to groups who use that data however they want an issue?
It sure feels like it should be. And if it is then it should be an issue of any app doing so.

But it's keeping the wheels on this economic disaster of a ride. So only the ones that don't pay directly back into the country letting this run full scale without restrictions because of small kickbacks, aren't ok?

It becomes abhorrently two-faced. And it should be apparent by now that the wealth generated by these American companies are not actually being shared with the American government or people. But getting to be close to it and get small feedings from them is enough to appease our geriatric/out of touch ruling class.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

"write him up Chum"

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If only there was someone in government who was workin on that shit

(I don't know how directly the simple 15% minimum has already impacted things, but taking a quick look at e.g. Amazon, it definitely looks like they're paying more after December of 2022 versus before.)

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Oh fuck off with all these tiktok apologetics posts. It's a shitty app comtrolled by a shitty government. Move on.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Two things can be true

It can be nakedly hypocritical, this Kabuki theater of oh woe is me it's so difficult to do anything of substance to reign in these companies, it's just politically very tricky what with the free market and all-- oh it's Chinese and they don't give me money? Fuck 'em get 'em out of here, 50-0, fuckin ban it.

And at the same time Tiktok can also be legitimately a much more dangerous company than Facebook or Lehman Brothers or whatever, even as regular-criminal dangerous as those two and the rest of the bunch are.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago

In what way is this a TikTok apologetics post? It’s calling out the governments inability to close tax loopholes for billionaires. No one gives a fuck about TikTok. Or are we just moving on about the billionaires tax evasion?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

yeah, i will lose 0 sleep over what happens to tiktok.

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