alt Hacker NewsSupreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline
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Good, now do it for the rest of them, from linkd-in to facebook.
This whole thing is both silly and unsurprising.
Everybody knows the fearmongering about Chinese control and manipulation is a smokescreen. The real reason is that Tiktok doesn't fall in line with State Department propaganda [1].
It's noteworthy that SCOTUS sidestepped this issue entirely by not even considering the secret evidence the government brought.
That being said, it's unsurprising because you can make a strictly commerce-based argument that has nothing to do with speech and the First Amendment. Personally, I think reciprocity would've been a far more defensible position, in that US apps like Google, FB, Youtube and IG are restricted from the Chinese market so you could demand recipricol access on strictly commerce grounds.
The best analogy is the restriction on foreign ownership of media outlets, which used to be a big deal. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, US companies would defend themselves from foreign takeovers by buying TV stations, for example. That's basically the premise of the movie Working Girl, as one (fictional) example.
Politically, the big loser here is Biden and the Democratic Party because they will be (rightly) blamed for banning a highly popular app (even though the Congressional vote was hugely bipartisan) and Trump will likely get credit for saving Tiktok.
The kids flocking to another Chinese app just to avoid using Reels, Shorts, or whatever abomination is on X continues to be so funny to me. Looks like a long game of whack a mole starting.
US should ban all Chinese software apps and services as long as CCP does not allow Google and Facebook to operate in China. As a matter of fact not only Google and Facebook but all the Western internet social apps and services should be allowed in China. We want equal opportunity and equal rights for business. This way it is not fair play, it is botched market economy.
<< Second, I am pleased that the Court declines to consider the classified evidence the government has submitted to us but shielded from petitioners and their counsel. Ante, at 13, n. 3. Efforts to inject secret evidence into judicial proceedings present obvious constitutional concerns. Usually, “the evidence used to prove the Government’s case must be disclosed to the individual so that he has an opportunity to show that it is untrue.”
Good grief.. I clearly wasn't following it closely, but even the fact that this could have become a thing ( SCOTUS ruling using 'redacted' as evidence ) is severely disheartening.
By the given reasoning every official at the EU wonders why they ever allowed Google, Facebook or Twitter to exist.
This is balkanization.
People don't fully understand what is at risk of being lost here. Science, history, and technology tutorials, practical life skills like cooking, budgeting, mental health, chronic illness, trauma recovery, creative expression, small businesses, home repair, friend groups, communities, and many people who make their living on TikTok. Losing TikTok means losing a massive ecosystem and all of its connections, knowledge, and content. It's like a library of books vanishing, or a large city disappearing off of a map.
This is ban is only because US has no control over the content and organic anti Israel content was not censored like it was in all other us social platforms.
Wait, where's the Facebook/Meta ban? Is unlawful data collection only unlawful if it's done under a foreign adversary? I guess not to the US Government where their interests align with adversarial data collection practices against its own people.
So what are the real dangers?
- Frying teenagers' brains with short attention deficit videos. That one seems logical, but others are doing it, too.
- Political indoctrination.
- Compromised politicians who can be blackmailed: The big one, but a certain island run by the daughter of a certain intelligence agency operative was largely ignored.
- Corporate espionage: Probably not happening on TikTok. Certainly happening in the EU using US products.
I can agree to an extent that TT (and social media in general) is an addictive app and harmful to youth and society in general. Spend enough time on these types of apps and suddenly your worldview is just whatever the TT algorithm pushes to you.
It’s not entirely unprecedented either. There was the case of FB and Myanmar/Burma which strongly promoted military propaganda. This unfortunately lead to violence against Rohingya.
But the argument is very weak in my opinion, and wouldn’t be a reason to outright ban it. Prohibition never works.
The only thing that does work is fixing our society. In the USA, we have increasing wage disparity, increasing homelessness, increasing poverty, food scarcity, water scarcity, worsening climate change related events (see Palisades fire…), and a shit ton of other issues that will remain unsolved for at least the next 4 years.
Yet leadership is doing almost nothing to address this. Neoclassical economics and neoliberalism have outright ruined this country. Fuck the culture war the billionaire class is trying to initiate.
Supreme Court only likes when data is stolen locally by good US-based corporations
It's hard not to see this as a continuation of the American corporate interests controlling the media their population consumes. TikTok I think has the largest share of American's attention out of all the social media?
Doesn't seem to matter which clown flaps about in the wind at the oval office, control of the narrative holds a steady keel for decades. This is the same story, in a new medium. Sure, as the "sides" in culture wars take turns "ruling", certain things are allowed or disallowed. The real consequential stuff, ideas and patterns that would lead to the empowerment of the working class vs hoarders of capital -- all the back to basic education, critical thinking, civic engagement, and the implicit/explicit deprioritization of any and all that in favour of obedient consumerism.
With the "new" tech they've discovered they can really shape people's opinions, tweak the emotional charge to make people act in such unconsidered ways, en masse, against each others' and their own best interest -- of course they'll hold on to that at any cost. It's unprecedented, though not unimagined.
I wonder what will fill this space. Over all the rises and falls of the various blinking nonsense, I've never really seen people go -back- to an app / service / etc. They all just wither away as the next new things comes up.
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> Although Trump could choose to not enforce the law
Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance.
> The nation’s highest court said in the opinion that while “data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age,” the sheer size of TikTok and its “susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects” poses a national security concern
What is the point of these "rules and regulations" and "the nation's highest court" when the president could decide just not to enforce them?
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Somehow people shilling for Russia can operate unimpeded in this country.
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Snoop free speech eh?
Banning an app because of China's threat only makes you resemble China itself.
The sitting president of the United States of America was banned by almost every major AMERICAN company, and even some Canadian companies (Shopify), yet we're going after Tiktok.
No Chinese ever banned the sitting president of the United States.
Good riddance.
The clock is still "tiking" for TikTok.
As usual, the digital crack / cocaine addicts of this generation are now running to Red note for their next fresh hit in less than 48 hours.
Nothing's changed. Just a new brand of digital crack / cocaine has overtaken another one who's supply is getting cut off by the US.
Although a fine would be better than an outright ban as I said before.
In a developed country, government would ensure its citizens receive top notch education so that they are able by themselves to understand that using a Chinese owned app is just as bad as using Facebook for instance and so these app would be dead, no one would use them.
Instead when you cut so hard on education that you get millions of flat earth believers, you got to protect them from their own behavior with law. But as far as I know, no law can prevent little Jimmy from putting crayons up his nose.
Blocking TikTok won't just make its user look for better privacy, or at least more independent alternative. They will use something else just as bad or worst.. little red book for instance.
I mean this won't happen. The TikTok CEO is invited to Trump's inauguration.