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TikTok isn't being banned due to "potentially spying on users".
There’s almost as much antisemitism on Instagram (have you ever checked out reel comments on anything featuring any Jewish person?) and nobody seems to care at all, least of all Zuck. Hard to believe that’s the reason.
The algorithms of TikTok purposefully pumped anti Israeli content though, unlike instagram - the CCP are on the side of Palestinians after all and love love love framing America as the The Real Oppressor for Whataboutism purposes
This has not been demonstrated except by pointing to the success of certain content tags. It's funny how that works, Israeli support when it is proliferated by the algorithm is organic, but when opposition to Israel proliferates and is very popular that is because it is "purposefully pumped."
Nobody has shown an iota of evidence that "TikTok purposefully pumped" opposition to Israel. If criticism of Israel on TikTok is more popular than it is on other Gen-Z platforms, you should wonder who exactly is "pumping" the algorithms in which directions.
Pointing to the success of certain tags sounds like an iota of evidence to me
Your claim is that the success of those tags is politically motivated by intentional manipulations to the algorithm, and to support that claim all you point to is the success of those tags. You're begging the question.
Sure, I don’t have solid proof but the idea the CCP would intentionally boost anti American content (which anti Israeli content functionally is) is not some grandiose claim requiring any evidence at all, frankly.
Some evidence would be nice, though. If you’re going to
banforce divestment of a product worth billions because its owners are promoting anti-American propaganda, having literally any evidence that the owners are doing this seems pretty important.I don’t even approve of TikTok but the reasons for banning it seems very dubious. We seem increasingly close to, “we are going to impose totalitarianism on you to protect you from totalitarianism”.
I don’t know what reasons are being given but The owners are the CCP, a hostile government. Why would you let communist enemies have data on millions of Americans? They don’t allow it - why should we?
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Lol, no it is not. Israel is not America. Americans should be very critical of Israel.
You can argue that it shouldn’t be, but it is. America is currently wedded to Israel, that’s the status quo
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The boomer normies blame anything bad on social media on TikTok and pretend Instagram is a benign platform that lets them see pics of their grandkids more efficiently. It doesn’t have to be perfectly rational to be the reason.
And zoomers think TikTok is fun and Instagram is for hot girls™ to post alluring images.
TikTok has pleeeeenty of soft core porn (a friend told me this)
Oh, absolutely. But it doesn’t have the overriding reputation among zoomers that this is all that’s there the way instagram does.
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The boomers aren't entirely wrong? Instagram is a perfectly functional social network that's reasonably good to stay in touch with people, stapled onto a constant feed of slop; as far as I know, TikTok is just the feed.
Funnily enough, Facebook is better for that purpose, but you have to go where the people are and, as such, FB has become an AI infested wasteland.
We still use FB to post for the grandparents and their friends. It seems basically fine for that.
Yep, Facebook is still very fit for its original purpose (keeping tabs on friends and family through pictures and posts). It's just that the filler that they give you for the other 99 times that you check your feed during the day is lower quality than the algorithm-selected stuff from the other platforms.
Fair. The main other platform I use is Instagram, mostly for arts and crafts ideas. I am extremely sick of the videos with people slowly turning their canvases around, then cutting off just as the painting is revealed, as though it were a strip tease, but that seems to be what Instagram thinks I like. I'm considering quitting. It doesn't seem worth retraining the algorithm.
Facebook is also pretty good as a local newsfeed for basic restaurant, weather, construction, etc news, and neighborhood group of largely Gen X and above. Lots of attractive neighborhood sunset pictures. But yeah, the reel clickbait stuff has been gettin gout of hand lately, and it just doesn't show me some of my actual friends, which is annoying.
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The pro-Palestine content tags to pro-Israeli content tags were like 93% to 7%. Full disclosure I'm not an Instagram user but I seriously doubt Instagram is as threatening to the Gen Z perspective of Israel compared to TikTok.
Once again, you are not taking people at face value. Hundreds of Jewish organizations lobby for the ban, and people directly involved admit that the Jewish lobby was decisive in the matter which had previously stalled after failing to get enough support. It is the decisive reason, they even admit this.
In the interests of fairness, it would be quite nice to have a source for this, too.
I covered this months ago when the Ban was gaining support.
You have ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt in panic proclaiming "We have a major Tiktok problem" and saying that they have to work together to solve the problem... which they have now done... Then later you get lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups to ban TikTok:
Before the ban acquired enough support, the Times posted an article called Why TikTok Needs to be Sold or Banned Before the 2024 Election which hardly mentions anything about some national security threat from CCP, and instead under the heading "Why it Matters" complains about the portion of pro-Palestinian hashtags on the platform and the spread of antisemitism:
And on top of that you have WSJ and Economist admitting that the momentum from the support came from the Jewish lobby.
This is completely typical of @2rafa, and frankly a typical audaciousness of many Jewish people. We have leaked recordings of Greenblatt proclaiming that something must be done about TikTok because they have a GenZ problem. Then you have Jewish journalists posting "why TikTok must be banned" which includes alarmism over anti-semitism as the chief concern. Then you get organized lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups to ban TikTok because of Israel, not CCP. After the political support for the issue starts to change due to that pressure, you STILL get people like @2rafa who just are unable or unwilling to see an obvious political play even when the means, motive, and opportunity are all crystal clear as day and directly admitted to by the people involved. You get Greenblatt saying on a secret call that "something must be done about TikTok" then you get organized lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups, but @2rafa enforces the norm that nothing nefarious can be attributed to Jewish people.
And there's a 20% chance I'll be banned for posting this comment, but at this point people like 2rafa are just admiring the Emperor's clothes when denying that the TikTok ban happened because of Jewish lobbying. Even when the people involved directly admit what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Edit: Also why not throw a quite from Mitt Romney into the mix:
Thanks for the links, they mostly check out. The only thing I’d add is that every link emphasis that they believe the content on TikTok is unnatural: Greenblatt talks about an unnatural switch to using Iranian terms, the other links argue that the ratio of pro/anti Israel content on TikTok is significantly different to that found on campus polls (and is therefore evidence of foreign manipulation). This concern about artificiality is probably a fig leaf, I doubt that most of these groups would be happier if they could show it was organic, but I imagine it flipped a few senators.
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If you get banned for extensive citations answering a direct question, I think it would just answer another question.
As he's not been banned can we consider that other question answered or will it be implied again?
It's only been a day, hasn't it
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I wish a little that it was about spying on users. I wish more that it was about how TikTok is the worst thing humans have ever created. Hypershortform content is gigafrying the developing brains of young people, and then there are the peculiarities of its content. TikTok text-to-speech, obnoxious subtitles on every video, five hundred thousand shitty clips to the same fucking 20 seconds of a song over and over and over, TikTok dances, splitscreen videos of Family Guy clips and Minecraft because attention spans have apparently become that bad. Adolescents are mainlining psychic polonium just from all of these, and that's before we consider the psychic demon core that is social media.
Spying on users would be a good enough reason. I don't know how people respond with "My government is spying on me." Yeah but it's our government. It's a different and in many ways a far grosser abuse of power but at least you can say there are legitimate reasons for the American government to keep data on American citizens. There is no conceivable above-board justification for the Chinese government creating-via-numerous-cyberattacks a general database of American citizens and its existence alone is grounds to ban them from all American telecommunications.
It was probably expedited to congress because of AIPAC but that was long after Trump tried to ban it and well after the Biden admin had it investigated and banned from government devices. It also must be said that however much congress and their AIPAC handlers get their hackles raised about Israel and JQ shit, the actual power in this country, the unelected bureaucracy, is clearly highly invested in righties wasting all their time posting about jews. Look no further than that preeminent JQ voice of Nick Fuentes being a fed.
Regardless of the actual motive, absolute justification for the ban is and has been the CCP having a tool to introduce political narratives in a social media platform used by a massive number of Americans. It's not Reddit or X where they have to work with shills and botting, it's not /pol/ where they spam slide threads and run psyops like they did at the onset of the coronavirus. It's a platform they control where they can push the figurative button and suddenly millions of people are seeing the exact content the CCP wants them to see. Google does that too, but I know their reasoning, why is 'based China' doing it? It's not because they're ideologically lockstep. It's because for the last decade they've been waging a next-generation war on the American people by destabilizing our politics. I still don't get how this has been missed, after a year of seeing commentators on the right making incredible snipes of nefarious deeds being snuck by the masses, only Sam Hyde has voiced a fraction of the animosity we need to exhibit toward China, which begins with expelling every single Chinese national in this country, and even he softened that with using it to frame a joke about honeydicking.
Certainly, they've been trying, but I'm not sure they've been getting anywhere prior to TikTok. Certainly, Russia's had more total success (although Trump probably didn't ask for Russian help, it was given, and it was almost certainly given specifically because Putin wanted to stoke the fires of the culture war).
Speaking as a former reddit powerjanny, not that insider knowledge is necessary as the admins posted this publicly, the Reddit "Russian bot" story was a total fabrication.
Admins banned 61 accounts. It wasn't unusual for me to ban more spam accounts than that on multiple single days in any given month, and very often those accounts had already accumulated thousands of upvotes.
The American intelligence apparatus had highly politicized reasoning for depicting Russia as an adversary. They're also part of the true power in this country, so personally I just can't find credibility in their words. After all, I saw for myself the proliferation of the bot hoax on Reddit. I can't say with certainty China was or is shilling on the site, but I can say how I was on /pol/ more than anything else just after Wuhan was quarantined, and those coronavirus general threads had videos from China of things that never happened. If Chinese cyberwarfare finds value in sliding and psyopping /pol/ and fielding an army of "wolf warrior" bots on Twitter, it's fair to suspect them of doing the same on Reddit.
I'll also say, having been introduced to just a taste, Chinese meme culture is incredibly complex, brilliant, and funny, all this even passing through translation. Heavy state censorship in the information age is cleverness' perfect crucible and surely some number of those people take their talents to contribute them to the state. If they haven't been doing any of this and it's just all a series of unfortunate coincidences, I don't think it's because they're lacking citizens who know how to talk like Americans, argue like Americans, and truly so importantly, meme like Americans.
I'm not sure how this relates to my post. I was mostly talking about 2016 wrt Putin helping Trump (the DNC hack being Russian is TTBOMK uncontroversial).
As for propaganda, I'll just say that I've had a couple of instances over the years of mistaking RT for Western conservative thought, whereas this has never happened with Chinese media TTBOMK. And there are incidents that are frankly embarrassing like the Fourteen Demands.
Uncontroversial, as in fashionable opinion often repeated by talking heads, or uncontroversial, as in, proven with evidence beyond reasonable doubt?
Uncontroversial (this is the correct spelling, btw), as in "the Mueller report lays out exactly which Russian military units did it on which days".
The Mueller report does not allege that Trump asked for this.
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In defense of Russia, there are a lot of non-conspiracy reasons that Russian conservatives might sound like American conservatives.
First of all, Russia is, for Europe, a pretty conservative country, and therefore its views are going to match up. They have similar concerns, and similar beliefs and similar hopes for the future. Therefore when a Russian says something conservative, it’s going to sound like American conservatives because— they agree, more often than not.
Second, unlike China, Russia is a European, Christian country. Yes they’re orthodox Christian but they are Christians and therefore when they talk about their values it matches up with conservative Christian values. Both groups want Christianity to be more prominent in society and things like gay, trans, and abortion to be if not banned, at least harder to get. When they explain their reasoning, they’re appealing to Christianity and to the Bible and traditional family values derived from Christianity.
Given just how much the two groups share, it’s not really all that odd to find them sounding similar to each other. Heck we can probably find conservatives sounding like AfD, not because German trolls, but because they share a concern about immigration.
Uh, Russia has the world’s highest abortion rate and IIRC there is no mainstream political party which sees it as different from normal birth control. The American religious right by and large actually practices their Christianity; Russia has a church attendance rate which is lower end of average for Europe. It’s true that Russia is homophobic and transphobic, but a bunch of that is the probably-accurate view that LGBT advocacy groups are vectors of American influence.
I’m not going to claim Russia is progressive, but it’s not a based conservative country either. United Russia may have slightly more in common with the GOP than with the democrats, but at the end of the day this is a corrupt imperialist power giving special rights to minority groups to keep the peace and operating off extreme centralization, state owned companies, and militarism.
If you want to see actual social conservatism in europe, look at certain Celtic regions(Hebrides, northern Irish Protestant bastions), Georgia, and the byzantine Catholic belt in the Carpathians(mostly western Ukraine, but also parts of Poland and Slovakia).
It's not true and haven't been for a long time. Just look at the current data.
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Abortion isn't end all be all of being conservative. Plenty of prolifers argue on that basis that abortion "is racist because blacks have more if them", "is eugenics", "targets vurnerable women" and other such leftist pablum.
United Russia would take a strong pro-life stance if their ties to Orthodox Christianity(which has identical views about abortion to the RCC) were genuine; their rhetoric on race/ethnicity is 'woke' and they have enacted strong hate speech laws. This isn't some kind of consistently conservative country even before you get to commie nostalgia.
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I feel very differently. I don't like China's government and I would hate to live in China, but at the same time, I definitely view the US government spying on me as being more dangerous than China spying on me. After all, I am a US citizen, so it is very unlikely that China would do anything to me no matter what kind of information they had on me. The US government, on the other hand, could do all sorts of things to me.
I mean, there's the "how sure are you that you are immune to tailored propaganda" issue and there's the "how sure are you that they can't figure out something to blackmail you with" issue. But those aren't the big points. The big points are:
Chinese families are small due to low TFR and chinamen make good immigrants- it is trivial to grant visas to all the clan of chinamen in the west whose enemy agent status actually matters.
That only solves the problem if both they want to come and the CPC lets them come. Obviously, by the point of them being explicitly hostages, the CPC wouldn't let them emigrate.
‘Chinese expats or their children being granted a security clearance or background checked for sensitive work are asked to provide a list of relatives who will immediately be granted visas upon completion of the process’ seems to solve the process- presumably the CCP isn’t preemptively taking hostages. It’s just when they need something. And these kinds of security checks already ask to disclose ties to foreign nationals and discriminate in otherwise unconstitutional ways- it’s not a huge stretch.
In any case, orientals in general seem to love America even before you get to the ‘totalitarian polluted and poor’ aspect of red China; I have a hard time imagining grandma and brother in law are passing up an opportunity to move and massively increase their standard of living.
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Yes, I didn't articulate the point as well as I could. I think the best I could say is this: every bit of excess data collection by the US government is horrifying, as is all of that with regard to Five Eyes. Nominally about terrorism, maybe they've even stopped a fair bit, but I do often wonder if it's the NSA more and less behind the hacks of conservative websites and if it's also the NSA carrying out doxxes of certain individuals before laundering it through chosen contacts for parallel constructions.
Still, however dark the purposes are of our government as they collect such data, the severity is matched and multiplied when asking: but why does China want it?
It could be reciprocity, if the US government maintains a database of every single Chinese citizen. Do we? I think I would have heard that as a retort, "The US government is doing the same thing with Chinese citizens" is, to me, much stronger than mentioning USFG domestic surveillance. To the point I would consider it entirely exculpating if we did it first.
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Small point but I imagine that split-screen videos of Family Guy and Minecraft are ways to elude automated copywrite detection. At least, Youtube Family Guy clips have weird oddities like that for that purpose.
Fair point about specifically the Family Guy mashups, but I've come across videos of whatever bigbrain podcast audio overlaid on whatever game, and that I'm confident is about attention spans.
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By the way, it's "copyright", not "copywrite" because it's about who has the right to make copies of a work.
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I mean, I agree, but banning TikTok wouldn't do anything at this point. TikTok was the first, but once it proved that the thirty-second video + infinite scrolling model was much more popular and addictive than regular video, it didn't take long for other websites to copy it (YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc.). You need to ban the format, not just a single company.
Congress can't legislate video length and I don't think it's necessarily the format. Shortform itself is not fundamentally bad, comedy is perfect for clips, same for sports and video games. Where these degrade is the race to the bottom in algorithm-pleasing content, and AI customer retention could be legislated against. The scientific data on the destructive nature of social media piles by the day, so there's a compelling health interest, and a law that flatly prohibits AI customer retention wouldn't fall afoul of other constitutional freedoms, it's not what they're randomly pushing, it's that the content is being randomly pushed, and these are multinational corporations engaged in interstate commerce, so even a very scope-limited interpretation of the Commerce Clause would find some degree of congressional authority in regulating such practices.
From there, it's simple. No endless scrolling, the sites can't serve unsolicited content based on, for example, the notion a user might want to watch a video, and especially might thus want to keep watching videos. For YouTube Shorts and others this would mean a user could go to their subscriptions and watch all the new Shorts, but when they watched them all, that's it. For Instagram and others it would mean no generic "explore" pages. It can't show you something because it thinks you might like it. It could possibly serve content analyzed as objectively or justifiably similar. If I enjoyed an hour-long history of whatever, I could ask it for other hour-long histories of whatever, but it wouldn't be analyzing clicks, view-counts or retention in its pushes. It would just be "Here's 25 videos of measurably similar content." Same for searching, no more "related" no more "you might also like" no more "users also searched," literal searched text in the title or the video transcript, limited tagging to prevent abuse in the video descriptions, and nothing from the comments. Ideally it should be suddenly very easy to search YouTube and be so specific or maybe so wrong that it returns no results.
And of course, a categorical prohibition on minors using the internet. This law wouldn't be targeted at the minors exactly, nor their parents. It would be targeted at corporations with astronomic fines for violations. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is already anticipating exactly such a law and has at least the framework for DeepMind-powered age-based captchas, because the only question I have is if their analytics determine with >99.99% accuracy any given user's age, or age bracket.
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In fact, it's not even being "banned" at all.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-preparing-us-shut-off-sunday-information-reports-2025-01-15/
There is a relevant in that first sentence. Let's try it out with different subjects and objects to see if we would call that a ban:
The law signed in April mandates a ban on liquor sales at Total Wine if bottles are not labeled.
The law signed in April mandates a ban on Toyota produced in Japanese-owned factories rather than American-owned factories.
The law signed in April mandates a ban on cheeses if the milk is not sourced from FDA-inspected farms.
I would not describe these as "bans". They impose requirements (divestment from ownership by an adversarial government in this case). Perhaps they're bad regulations, but they aren't bans on the products in question. That ByteDance is apparently going to elect to sunset the application rather than take the money and run is strongly suggestive of the real value being non-monetary advantages to the Chinese government.
TikTok, as it exists today, is getting banned. You can call it an attempted expropriation if you want.
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What of intent?
If the intent was to ban TikTok, they would have just banned TikTok. The intent was to stop having one of the most used social media applications in the United States owned by the chief adversary of the American government.
I disagree, because singling out one business like that with no justification is illegal in the American system.
You have to make tortuous arguments to meet a predicate that allows you to do what you ultimately wanted to do. In this case national security.
The question then is: according to their own statements, is it likely that the justification offered by American politician in this case is in good faith?
I don't really care on free speech grounds personally, but if you want to argue it you have to address TikTok's own argument, which is that this ban is in bad faith.
This would be a lot more convincing if the US didn't just complain about Georgian laws that prevent foreign funding of NGOs.
So it's quite easy to formulate the argument, you just take the official position of the US on Georgian NGO regulation and swap some words.
In principle I'd be ready to agree for both cases that "this is what countries do sometimes". But I have the moral luxury of believing in free speech as a natural right, so I don't really give a shit that exposing people to foreign propaganda is inconvenient for national security. I have a right to see what the other side publishes, and that extends as much to Russian newspapers as it does Chinese brainrot apps.
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It isn't singling out a business, it's singling out an owner.
How do you feel about a hypothetical law that would ban any press publication that is owned by a Chinese person?
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PAFACA does expressly name ByteDance and TikTok but they're given as examples in its purpose, which is banning social media platforms owned by foreign adversaries such as the CCP. The Commerce Clause gives Congress plenary authority to regulate foreign trade and that's original intent, it's also a fundamental power of all sovereigns. Banning any foreign social media is nothing more than an embargo, and embargoes are intrinsically legitimate exercises of constitutional and sovereign authority.
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China has long banned foreign social media companies from operating in its borders, and in 2021 passed severe restrictions on companies taking data on Chinese citizens outside its jurisdiction. If TikTok were willing to keep its US data in a US subsidiary that operated entirely domestically by employees under US jurisdiction, we'd be having a different conversation, I think. IIRC Facebook et al already have to keep EU data within the EU too under GDPR.
America has long advertised itself to the world on the basis of being fundamentally, philosophically not-China.
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” doesn’t work here because precisely by imitating the controls that China puts on what its citizens can access, America is saying that it does not believe its citizens can be trusted to make right choices for themselves and their country.
Put another way, “nobody’s making them download Chinese propaganda/spyware” might be groan worthy naïveté but considering that to be naïveté rather than nobility strikes at the heart of what I would consider the American project.
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Does this argument work for other forms of tyranny that exist in Europe and China already?
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