TikTok ban?

[All Along The Watchtower]

Y’all realize this doesn’t “ban” tik tok but would force it to be sold to an American company

It is concerning how crassly protectionist the US has become in the name of “security.”  This applies to many issues (notably immigration), not just social media companies or trade.

[All Along The Watchtower]

stealing, hording, and selling American's personal data should be a whites only industry

c'mon man

I was being deliberately provocative there, but listening to skeptics of this legislation, it's very clear that people are angry about the government's indifference towards American tech companies stealing our information and spying on us. Instead of targeting TikTok we could kill the whole problem at once and do it in a way that almost everyone would support.

If an American tech company was giving our data to the government of an enemy state, I would have just as big a problem with that as I do with TikTok.  As it stands, American tech companies do not do this.  On the contrary, I work for an American tech company and I can tell you that the amount of regulation and restriction we have to deal with to remain compliant in our handling of user data is quite onerous.  And it is only getting worse with the advent of the DMA.

The current loophole being exploited is that enforcement of EU regulations is delegated to the European country you declare as your "main establishment", and all the major tech companies have picked Ireland, a small country whose regulatory authority is overwhelmed by the underfunded auditing mandates now incumbent upon it.  But yes big tech companies do have to comply with these data usage and privacy regulations, or run the risk of being audited and incurring incredibly steep fines running into the billions of dollars.

A fundamental difference is that I think using personal data to improve the efficiency of targeted advertising is ultimately a good thing, at least as an abstract concept (obviously there are specific cases where it's bad).  As I've written elsewhere on this forum, if you have to have advertising, having to watch the same cellphone, insurance, car and food ads a dozen times over and over and over is such an inferior experience to targeted internet ads that build a profile of you, know what you like to buy and how you like it presented, and serve you those ads.  Since those ads are far more efficient, there's lower volume of them.  If college football was able to do targeted advertising based on personal data, we could get 20 minutes of ads per game and they'd almost all be interesting and relevant, as opposed to two hours of repetitive, lowest-common-denominator ads for products and companies I couldn't care less about.

In comparison, I think using personal data to develop propaganda whose purpose is to undermine American foreign policy and promote Chinese imperialism is bad.  We live in an age where information warfare is more important and more powerful than conventional warfare.  And given that China is an increasingly aggressive enemy state with clear imperial ambitions in Africa and the South China Sea, it's absolutely a national security vulnerability to allow them to keep building this information weapon.

China is an enemy state that the US has full diplomatic relations with, unlike Taiwan. Hmm.

FWIW, there is no actual ideological competition between China and the US, because the CCP has long given up on trying to export ideology and instead focuses on economic development and global trade to strengthen the power of the Chinese state. And it would only make sense that Communist Party-ruled states would not bother with fighting the West ideologically, since it’s been over three decades since that was even theoretically a real conflict.

China is totalitarian? So is the UAE, yet they’re one of the US’s closest Middle East allies. Come to think of it, the UAE is also very close to China and Russia, and they are helping the latter evade US and EU sanctions re: Ukraine. Ouch!

[All Along The Watchtower]

I don’t use tik tok

Neither do I.

If the US government insists on banning it, then by all means. But the national security paranoia and protectionism that motivates this panic while ignoring American companies engaged in similar behavior is just ridiculous.

Important to note that plenty of Americans have found themselves on the wrong end of the national security state, which goes back over a century really (see: J. Edgar Hoover’s career). And the post-9/11 permanent securitization only intensified it. Americans—younger cohorts in particular who have no memory of a pre-9/11, pre-GWOT world—could be forgiven for being skeptical of claims that foreign governments are the ones they should be most frightened of in their daily lives.

Doesn’t help that the rapid deterioration in relations between the US and China started under the American President most brazenly hostile to democratic norms and the rule of law, in addition to him being a massive racist and xenophobic jackass. In an ideal world, the identity of the messenger would have no bearing on the content of the message itself, but we live in the real world.

[All Along The Watchtower]

TikTok is one of the few places the youth can get a pro climate, anti-corporate, anti-military industrial complex, reform or anti-capitalist messages.

[All Along The Watchtower]

their government is insecure and weak, and can't stand up to scrutiny or free debate.

Yes, members of Congress have no defense for their incompetence or their insider trading.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Every social media platform can be and has been used for information warfare.

But TikTok is disproportionately the annoying Zoomer app, and the US government as of January 20th, 2017, has decided that we must have a new Cold War, so…

[All Along The Watchtower]

The correct answer is to regulate the algorithim and the content.

snip:

Essentially, all the supposed harms of this app could be addressed by regulation that gives auditing and oversight of the algorithm, data, to US officials and third parties, as well as adding data privacy requirements and encouraging use of features like parent mode that are within First Amendment allowances.

I’m sure this would be enthusiastically welcomed by American social media companies.

Further, on the same day the House Energy & Commerce Committee passes this bill 50-0, they tabled a bill that would have stopped data brokers from selling Americans' data. If they are s concerned about protecting our data, why would they do that? Not to speak of the fact that while they are adamant about the equivalent of the death penalty for TikTok, they have zero concern for enacting any regulation that would address the harms of social media in general.

oh

[All Along The Watchtower]

Images of suffering Palestinians—and Israeli soldiers broadcasting their own war crimes.

Showing things like that cannot be allowed, and we especially cannot let that be seen by our impressionable young people who are already driving us insane with all of their Woke Gender Ideology. It’s all CCP propaganda anyway, right?

[All Along The Watchtower]

Yes China bans American websites because they are a communist country, but we are not. I'm tired of our government pretending like it's morally superior to the CCP and then follows similar tactics against freedom.

Theoretically we should severely restrict other Chinese tech companies too if not ban them . Tit for Tat is perfectly fine when it comes to trade policy

Tit for Tat is what leads to global annihilation.