this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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It's a good start tho. Fuck the CCP.
Banning TikTok and not banning Meta and Google is a stupid idea that will just give more power to the fewer people with less competition. They are all bad of course and they should all be banned, but giving one bad group all the power is worse then letting two bad groups compete for power.
OK, you have this all wrong. Let me explain what the differences is. Tiktok has NO COMPETITION. Tiktok's ***intent *** is not like the others. The others are competing for ad revenue. Tiktok's purpose is solely to influence us Americans. Tiktok doesn't care about your ad revenue or even a sustainable business. They are banked rolled by the CCP.
If META or Google(um...what social media company does google have?) was banked rolled by Russia and had its servers all there and the app was installed on 75% of all Americans, they essentially have eyes and ears on everyone in America. But they are not owned by Russia. Its own by stakeholders who only care about money and how much they will make them.
While I agree that META and Google(really google?) has too much control over our data, at the very least the intent is not to disrupt the American democracy.
I'm sorry, what evidence do you have that they don't care about ad revenue, or that no other businesses are interested in influencing elections?
They'll double down on condescension, derision, and dismissiveness in order to maintain a rhetorical higher ground while never doing any work to substantiate their point.
Inevitably, they'll distort your question to something you're clearly not saying and answer that. It's all very predictable and still frustrating. The only thing left for them is to ignore your question because they don't have answer to it.
They haven't even bothered to answer lol
Google owns Youtube (and gmail, most popular mail provider). You should think more deeply about what ads are and what are governments motivations. It is both the same thing. Google and META want power, they want money, because money is a voting power for allocation of resources in the society. Chinese governments want power, so they can have more money and more voting power for allocations of their resources.
The nationality of people in these governments doesn't matter at all to them. Chinese government doesn't care about regular Chinese citizens no more then US government does about their own. They simply care for their own power/money. And that is their interests.
Google and META work with the governments, they have actual NSA offices and follow any orders from the government, just like TikTok does. The problem here has nothing to do with what country it is in, it is simply that one set of rich folks are bothered that they can't control something other rich folks are controlling. People, in both cases, suffer and have no power whatsoever in the process.
TikTok has no competition? Reels for Instagram, Shorts for Youtube.
They copied TikToks format, because it does that format very well.
TikTok is not competing for your wallet. They are competing for your influence and from the sound of it, it's working.
Senator I'm from Singapore
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.
1
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.
No because if these silicon giants want to continue to do business in the USA, they would not try and influence the American people for a foreign adversary.
Tiktok's intent is not to make money. It's to influence us and use our data to spy on us. Did we all forget about the Forbes journalist that was tracked on Tiktok?
Yeah, they'll only have to influence the American people for a domestic adversary
Any examples on how this has taken effect?
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.
You mean like what Uber and Lyft did but nobody is talking about banning them? https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/4/21549760/uber-lyft-prop-22-win-vote-app-message-notifications
I completely understand why these companies are assholes, but we ALL understand why they are being assholes. Money. Greed. You gotta keep sqeezing the bottom half of Americans to get that fucking G6.
But Tiktok's intent is not money. Its power and intel. Power and influence on our American citizens. They don't care about your money. They want your data and so they can better influence you into thinking how they want you to think.
And what they want you to think directly benefits China. A weaker America is a stronger China. Fuck the CCP.
Uber and Lyft were telling voters to vote against their own interests and it worked. If you think that US companies aren't using your data to influence how you think then you're a prime example of their success. It's not just "innocent" money-making schemes, it includes manufacturing consent for wars.
Again. Asshole move. So they can make more money.
Now, how about the when TikTok influences Americans to vote to politicians that align with China. And let's just say..... China decides to invade Taiwan and America doesn't step in to stop it. Now they own 90% of advance semiconductors.
How about after China finishes with the south china seas then gets grabby and decide that Korea is now part of China again. Or when they finally invade India.
Imagine if they had a tool that can influence a country that would stop them.
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.
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.
Like this video?: https://www.tiktok.com/@cancelthisclothingco/video/7345905852164918570
I'm not going to click that, but idk probably. That's the point, downweighing can't be easily observed without a large dataset.
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.
So you're big "Gotcha" moment was to illustrate you didn't understand the concepts after they were explained to you. That science is wrong because you found a video with views on it?
That "sCiENcE" being:
So they work off the assumption that tiktok and instagram would have similar amounts of usage for the same hashtags. Fucking why? Did they not think different platforms would have different audiences?
Meanwhile I posted a clear example that demonstrates that not only do they not suppress content critical of China, they actually suppress content of certain sensitive topics for the US. You'd know that if you clicked the link, but you can't even be bothered to read your own link, so I guess my expectations of you were too high.
That difference amounts to nothing past hundreds of millions of users, much less constrained to US Based statistics. Basically the demographics would average out at that sample size.
People don't go to tiktok for the same reasons as instagram. It's not just a function of number of people. There are a lot of people on facebook but it's got a reputation as boomerville for a reason.
Reading your other comments, it reminds me of boomers on facebook. Have you ever used instagram? Try reading the comment section of a black guy or a woman or a muslim or worse all combined.