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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27825 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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I think there are a few lenses with which to view the "TikTok ban": you can call it protectionism for American social networks, but I think in practice it makes more sense as a tit-for-tat response to a tightening global market for social networks. Many other countries have, at this point, adopted measures attempting to limit the exfiltration of their social information. Europe has GDPR, which attempts to apply extraterritorial jurisdiction to its citizens against (largely-American) multinational corporations. China simply banned American companies like Facebook and Twitter, requires its allowed networks to be subject to state surveillance, and has tried to place limits on foreign companies collecting data on its' citizens.

Until TikTok, the United States has never found itself needing these things: all the other major networks are domestically-controlled, and probably aren't shipping user data to potentially-hostile nations for cloud processing even if it wasn't explicitly banned previously. For all the concerns about "surveillance capitalism" here, I think simple "trade war retaliation" is a much easier angle, and Trump's positions on those elsewhere suggest that either he'll try to leverage the ban for something in return (unlikely: I can't see China unblocking Facebook) or let it go into effect. I don't think this is a sympathetic battlefield for even absolutist libertarian-minded free-tradeniks to take a stand.

This makes more sense than "they can use it to spy our citizens."

There are data brokers that operate in the open that will sell you nearly everything TikTok could collect about you. Having access to an app would give you a bit more, like real-time geolocation data rather than stale geolocation data. But for targets where that matters you'd be better off having your intelligence agencies compromise the target's phone. Anyone with reason to be paranoid about the Chinese government spying on them would not have TikTok installed anyway.

That, and cultural conservatives seem to really hate TikTok for whatever reason. I don’t know if it has anything to do with anything in particular. Trump has to make cultural conservative noises and deliver some token victories and this is an easy one.

I think to some extent cultural conservatives are doomed to always hate whatever new thing "the kids" are into. A few decades back it was heavy metal and skateboarding.

Which isn't to say it's the only reason, but I think it's one of the larger elements at play.

cultural conservatives

There's a well-established overlap between cultural conservatism and traditionalism, and a further overlap between traditionalists and the intellectually lazy.

"Just parrot whatever came before uncritically, everything new is bad" is the easiest social heuristic to follow, even more than "tear down everything that came before, everything old is bad", which is why progressives have a cultural advantage over traditionalists. (People think intelligence is just reversed stupidity for a reason.)

It's always been difficult for defenders of freedom to argue against the national security predicate, but you're allowed to argue against the draft because they did.

Just because States are colluding against their people to grab total control of cyberspace doesn't mean that you should let them.

That's a surprisingly-reasonable frame to look at it from, I hadn't considered that until now.

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