And they’re already kissing Trump’s ass
I’m starting to think of Trump as one of those old school firefighters that would set fires and then swoop in to put the fire out lol.
He was one of the first people saying to ban it in 2020. To me it’s more like he is easily swayed with lobbying so it ends up looking like he is a pioneer on pushing new policy when in actuality he is the first person people go to when they need to bribe a politician.
This is not unique to Trump. Politicians say “they changed their views” if there is enough oil to grease wheels.
He absolutely is. All presidents are.
Those type of firefighters exists in droves still because that is not an old-school thing.
Yeah, fuck the CCP for spying on Americans. The US Government would never do such a thing!
Comparing the spying that both of these countries do on innocent citizens, as if they are anything alike, is demented.
It’s not apples to apples. It’s comparing an orange to the sun.
You’re right, the us govt captures all internet traffic, all calls, all texts, and has complete subpoena power for all companies that interact with anything in the us; while deploying drones, planes, and satellites that watch us citizens; while encouraging citizens to sell each other out to the government.
It’s not comparable.
TikTok was a Chinese intelligence operation in the end.
It was? How do you figure when no evidence of that was presented to Congress according to congressional members and senators?
where’s all the Chinese government apologists at now?
Tik Tok removed platform access from their US userbase voluntarily.
This was their choice.
The law is literally not even being enforced.
So I am assuming most Lemmy people don’t use Tiktok or Meta stuff. Here is some things you may or may not already know.
- Shou (CEO) made a parting video praising Trump on the last day
- Shou will be on the stage with all the other tech billionaires during inauguration
- People have noticed the last couple days that FB and Instagram have had a “link your Tiktok account” so you don’t lose anything on the platform
I think it’s pretty obvious now that Tiktok is going to become a part of Meta one way or another.
Good. Tiktok is fucking cancer.
You people that are embracing cancer and not treating it are absolutely retarded.
You created your account today just to tell us that?
Prove it
Hey, look over here at the TikTok performative theatrics while we set up an oligarchy and rob you of your labor, your health, and your livelihood.
Tiktoks removel is not a distraction from oligarchy, it is oligarchy in action. This is meta collecting on what they paid congress for.
So wait, you’re complaining cause they did something? But if they had done nothing you’d also be complaining
You see me complaining? I’ve never used TikTok, but the entire controversy around it is just wag-the-dog type distraction.
And nothing of value was lost.
Term that to the millions of American small businesses that thrived on the app. Billions of tax revenue just vanished.
TikTok turned the youth pro Palestine whereas Facebook and Xitter censored it.
And those same youth then gave us an oligarchy, useful fools
The oligarchy has been in charge since before those people were born.
Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand
im baffled by the blase response by lemmy users to government overreach
Same! It is definitively unconstitutional and the us gov just pushed it through anyway (with even supreme court backing it up?!) Shit is crazy, and yet I see a lot of ‘no big loss’ type comments on it.
The SCOTUS decision was wild too, because it was a fucking 9-0 vote. The decision was unanimous. That’s a word that’s virtually never used to describe the SCOTUS or any kind of government vote. That unanimous decision made it perfectly clear that the government knows something we don’t, and that TikTok had them fucking terrified. My bet is on the genocide being much worse than even TikTok was showing, but TikTok was the only place you could see anything about it that didn’t have a massive “Israel is just helping them root out terrorists” spin.
I said exactly that a few days ago. Got downvoted nicely, hope you have better luck.
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/14527149
Your comment made me feel a little more sane.
Spreading for awareness, I’ve been posting this in relevant threads for a week - This is all theater.
trump is going to “save” tik tok after starting the initial push to ban it (for the wrong reasons) to pretend he did something for you. Worst part is that all of the no/low info voters and non voters will eat it up.
It’s the equivalent of a person pushing you into the middle of the street and at the very last second, that same person tells the drivers to all stop. “Wow, I owe you my life!”
And now, this adds two layers:
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You think trump and the Supreme Court are colluding? now they get to say, nah uh!!! Even though again, this is all convoluted.
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trump gets to look “stronger” than the “highest court in the land” to help delude the next generation of low info tiktok folks.
P.s. The Chinese “protest” apps are going to mine the FUCK out of these millions of phones in the brief window they have them. Also, when the kids inevitably move back to tiktok, majority of them will leave these other apps installed on their phones, dormant and collecting in the background.
I think there’s an even simpler explanation: political debt to Jeff Yass (15% tiktok owner) and his cash for the 2024 campaign.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-jeff-yass
Why does Trump need to pretend to do something for you?
Trump has your support no matter what. He will rape children but you’ll line up to vote for him.
With that said he’s already in office. Your opinion is meaningless to him. He already got what he needed from you.
Stop trying to find reason in a situation devoid of reason. You’re clinging to that for personal comfort, if you feel like you can wrap it with a bow, you feel in control of it. You’re not.
He’s a broken narcissist and a psychopath. His dad didn’t love him and told him so. He’ll spend every worthless day of his life trying to get his dead dad to say “I was wrong about you”, and of course, his dad is dead so that won’t happen (wouldn’t have anyway, as that guy was likely an even bigger piece of shit, just not born with money like trump was so didn’t reach the same heights).
So ask yourself why you don’t realize the above. If there’s an end to this presidency, or if say he gets diagnosed with a terminal disease, there’s a non-zero chance he launches all of the nukes with the hope of a worldwide nuclear holocaust - because at the end of the day, if his life was ending, and you told trump he could press a button and be sure that nobody was laughing at him after death, posthumously convicting him of crimes or just pissing on his grave, he’d kill every single person on the chance.
A stranger’s opinion is meaningless to him? Brother, it’s fucking everything to him.
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This whole thing just comes across as craven and politically motivated by the US government. If they were really concerned with apps (whether or not they’re owned by the Chinese government) collecting and selling user data, they would pass adequate and enforceable privacy laws. Banning one specific app is addressing a symptom rather than a root cause, and any solution to an issue like this ought to apply to the entire field more broadly. I don’t necessarily think that banning TikTok is a bad thing, but to do so in such an obviously politically motivated way belies a lack of concern about the underlying issue (i.e. the mass harvesting of user data) in my opinion.
Not to doubt that it’s politically motivated, but the ban law as written could be applied to any app with a country of origin on the US “Foreign Adversary” list AND declared to be a national security issue
I did some research and now I know why Trump wants to “save” TikTok.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-tiktok-courted-conservatives-before-trumps-win
https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/tiktok-and-white-supremacist-content/
This one is especially damning:
TikTok is spending $50,000 on an inauguration party honoring influencers who helped Donald Trump spread his campaign message, according to the party organizer — and it’s scheduled for Sunday, the deadline for the company to spin off from its China-based owner or be banned in the U.S.
CEO Shou Zi Chew is expected to attend.
Well yeah, it’s no secret that TikTok had a white supremacy problem. There was a researcher who discovered that they could make a brand new account and (by only interacting with certain types of content) get white supremacists on their For You page within 20 minutes. Algorithmic feeds are funny like that, because they just gauge engagement. The algorithm isn’t making any moral decisions on whether the engaging content is socially acceptable. For better or worse, it just goes “this person likes this content, so I’ll show them more.”
And now Trump gets to be the one who saved TikTok, despite starting the process.
It’s an own-goal for Biden - an unpopular law that starts being enforced the day before Trump gets to stop enforcing it.
No one is enforcing it, it’s a play by TikTok. TikTok did it voluntarily. The server is still there, my wife logged in and saw the notice.
It’s just theater.
$10 says Trump influenced TikTok to go dark today to make him look better when it turns it back on tomorrow.
We all know they didn’t actually have to do this.
TikTok and its service providers are liable. “No one is enforcing” is meaningless, because they can still be prosecuted retrospectively if the US Government changes its mind.
Yup. They even asked for clarification on the “no enforcement” and the Biden administration basically just said “it is what it is”.
What big company is going to take a risk like that?
Not sure why you think it’s an own goal. Biden didn’t set the day for it to take effect, that was written into the law by Congress. You could say it was an own goal because Biden announced he wasn’t going to enforce it, but that seems to be the opposite of what you’re trting to claim And even with that decision to not enforce the law for 1 day before the Trump admin takes over, none of the companies TikTok works with like Apple or Google to list it in the app stores gave a shit about that lack of enforcement because of the uncertainty.
Not to mention Trump being the start of the ban in the first place. He was President when all of this started to work it’s way through the process, even if Biden was the President when it actually made it through Congress, with bipartisan support. Trump only changed positions because he wants TokTok to pay him to continue to allow it to continue.
Well, it definitely looks to have backfired on US government. The politicians figured that they could force Bytedance to divest TikTok using a ban in the US as a threat, assuming that TikTok wouldn’t want to lose access to the US market and the 180 million or so (!) users. Instead of complying, ByteDance did nothing and the politicians and the US government were put into a position of actually enforcing a very unpopular ban.
The timing of course is interesting. This comes right at the end of Biden’s administration, allowing for Trump to swoop in and lift the ban and take all the credit for that. Of course ignoring that is was Trump who originally kicked this whole thing into motion back in 2020 with his executive order to ban TikTok.
More Americans have TikTok accounts than vote. For a shitload of normies who have only the vaguest notion of politics and current affairs, the app they’ve been enjoying gets cut off as the defining event of the waning days of the Biden administration. They are not going to care about how Trump tried to do it first, or it was bipartisan, or whatever. It’s hard not to see how this will cost Dems dearly.
No it won’t. Biden is already out of office as far as normies are concerned. He has been since the election, but definitely within 24 hours of inauguration. TikTok stops working and the next thing they see is Trump having a huge party with a shit ton of pomp and circumstance for his inauguration as he gets into the White House. And then TikTok still doesn’t work when they open it up. Maybe he brings it back, maybe he doesn’t. Voters don’t pay enough attention to separate his inauguration and the TikTok ban happening 24 hours apart, they’ll bundle it together as one event.
Unless he gets a massive cash infusion from Bytedance in the next 24 hours, he won’t give TikTok an extension on day one in office. He’s the kind of person that expects his payment up front.
So everyone will instead see it stop working as President Trump takes over, and then it continuing to not work after. Some may give him the benefit of the doubt, but they weren’t ever going to vote for anyone else anyway, he’s their God Emperor President and they’ve confirmed their world view around him being perfect.
Heck, he might try to spin it as some sort of promotional opportunity for Truth Social.
The law isn’t being enforced. TikTok can just put it back up tomorrow and imply it was Trump that did it.
That won’t stop Apple and Google from keeping it pulled from app stores until things are more concrete.
TikTok only blocked access and put that notice up in the app after their partners decided that a statement from the outgoing administration 24 before the transition wasn’t enough for them to not comply with the law.
As designed by the republicans. There are legitimate reasons to regulate tiktok, if Biden opposed though, they’d say he was a weak Chinese sympathizer, if he complied, they’d do this.
It was a trap where you were fucked either way, as the republican think tank ghouls drew it out.
Didn’t Biden specifically say that enforcement was up to Trump?
https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/tiktok-and-white-supremacist-content/
No wonder why Trump wants to “save” TikTok. It has the stuff Republicans crave.
There’s still loads of bullshit surrounding the name. Hope your personal filters are up to the task the next 4 years.
Be better if it was just banned worldwide period and the “TikTok influencer” crowd can go get real jobs and perhaps users can improve their attention spans again.
yawn
I know bad for democracy and everything but
This app has done nothing positive for my life, arguably began my social media addiction, filled my brain with negative content at the height of COVID and severely impacted my mental health
I don’t think governments should ban platforns. But do I think TikTok should have ever existed? No
It helped my spouse deal with medical trauma by finding content creators expressing similar experiences. It worked better than any of the support groups which often felt more hopeless and isolating.
At this point though my spouse just hates instagram reels and how chaotic and pointless this is shaking out to be.
If not for TikTok Israel’s genocide would have gone unreported in Western media and censored on US social media.
I don’t use TikTok but I knew plenty about Israel’s actions. It was all over the internet and plenty of news sources.
Yeah because teens love opening the paper in the morning and reading about how Israel is “liberating” Palestine?
The majority of media and news learnin’ is not TikTok or newspapers.
