Its a platform that was secretly suppressing people for being disabled, black, queer or ugly. Cheering it’s death is reasonable, defending it on the grounds that people will have to advertise somewhere else really isn’t.
It’s exhaustively well documented that they did this, I’ve linked to one reputable source a couple comments up.
(FWIW putting users in those categories into a walled garden where their content is only shown some similarly-minded users is a popular form of suppression and you, one of the users in question, would still see that content on your feed. This is what TikTok was caught doing. Anecdotal evidence and all that.)
I think most people on here would agree that TikTok is a shitty app, but you can’t deny that just deciding to ban something in the manner they’re doing with this bill is shady. The bill is very obviously targeted towards TikTok but is worded in a way that it can be used on any software owned by a “Foreign Adversary” as defined by the government.
It’s proposed in the frame of national security with concerns of data collection being sent to China, but if that’s the case there are far worse offenders of that violation of privacy than TikTok! Most large tech companies collect data from their users and sell it overseas. They may not sell directly to China but the amount of data collected is insane and once it is out of the hands of Meta or Google or whoever, it becomes hard to know for certain where it ends up.
The point I’m trying to make is that if the real concern is national security, their focus should be on regulating data collection instead of banning a singular app which collects the same data every other app in the world does. I don’t defend TikTok, I couldn’t care less if it was gone, but the grounds on which it is being banned are concerning and somewhat contradictory.
If I have been misinformed of any of this please let me know, this is just what I’ve gathered from reading sections of the bill myself and from the court hearings.
Oh they also put TikTok’s name directly in the legislation. Which is unconstitutional. Not even by interpretation. The Constitution directly, and in plain English, bans the practice.
This entire thing is a giant cesspool of constitutional fuckery.
That is interesting, I didn’t realize that was how it was being argued.
In response to the other constitutional argument TikTok is making, DOJ said the law is not a bill of attainder because addressing national security concerns is not a form of punishment and bills of attainder apply to people, not corporations. (via Merriam Webster)
It does sound like there’s some contention about that, and although the national security bit is as cringingly craven as usual, the applicability of the restriction to corporate entities is going to be an interesting decision to see ruled on.
Did you know they defined this to cover any organization running a website that allows you to create an account, has a million users, at least 1 person can share content, and at least 1 person can view that shared content?
With the exception of product, business, and travel reviews.
Does that sound an awful lot like a news organization to anyone else?
Furthermore we already decided that companies have first amendment rights when we let Hobby Lobby have a religion.
If they decide this is good enough then we open the path to any organization in that incredibly broad description being banned. Daily Kos certainly falls under it too. People think Meta dropping fact checkers and going anti immigration just in the US is because Zuckerberg went MAGA? No, he sees the writing on the wall.
This kind of law is how Authoritarian states lock down media in their country.
I confess I phrased my intial comment a tad too harshly. There are many, many good reasons to criticize this; the loss of an advertising platform is not one of them.
Disabled, black, queer, ugly (which is subjective but whatever) seemed quite unsuppressed on tiktok to my perception and the perceptions of many in those spaces… I’m sure there are exceptions due to the large sample size.
I fit several of those categories and have been immersed in those spaces on tiktok for a long time and the opinion has always trended to it being far superior for discussing and being in those groups than Instagram or YouTube. Especially for disabled and queer groups, tiktok was always the bigger audience.
defending it on the grounds that people will have to advertise somewhere else really isn’t.
Shop is a lot more than advertising. Much closer to pre-enshittified etsy, and there’s a reason a lot of small businesses formed around it instead of instagram. Tiktok would actually allow those products to be shown to people rather than supressed in favor of corporations.
It’s pretty well documented that they did/do this. I’m sorry, you’ve fully bought into the PR TikTok spin. They present themselves as somehow an egalitarian organization. They aren’t.
Sorry I insulted your app waifu with my… substantiated claims about it’s conduct? How disingenuous of me. I should be ashamed, presenting its previous actions as things that it has done in the past.
You’re the one who seems pretty upset about things but sure. Feel free to stoop to name calling and bad faith accusations if you’d like.
Time is, in fact, a thing that exists. Pointing out the age of an article is not shifting the goal post. Bad actions can be learned from and it is possible for things to become less shitty. You are welcome to couch your opinions in out of date information.
Tiktok is absolutely not perfect. It absolutely has issues of over-censorship at times. It absolutely should be critiqued. Even so, it provides a valuable place for people who are disenfranchised on other social media, even if it’s simply that they are disenfranchised less on Tiktok.
Anyways, my criticism was not time delineated, you asked for evidence, and now are claiming the evidence I provided to support my initial claim isn’t good enough because of a new condition you’ve brought out. That’s… I don’t have another colloquial term to describe it besides “shifting the goalpost”. You’re changing the requirements for evidence to render previous valid evidence invalid. There’s a term for that (a point I think I’ve amply belaboured by now).
And sure, poor behavior can absolutely be learned from. Thats a core tenet of society. But, just for fun, could you please give me an example of a massive multinational corporation, or a social media platform, voluntarily becoming less evil? There’s been absolutely no indication that TikTok has ever stopped these practices, too. So why are you giving them the benefit of the doubt? Have they ever done anything to justify such high regard?
Look I’m sorry this apparent egalitarian wonder app is on the chopping block, but do you seriously want to be a TikTok Apologist? Could you imagine your reaction to someone this zealously defending, say, Facebook? You’d think they were nuts, facebook has been exhaustively shown to be so evil their CEO is widely rumored not to be human. So why is tiktok, an equally bad app (but one you like), suddenly okay?
So why is tiktok, an equally bad app (but one you like), suddenly okay?
It shouldn’t be banned for the reasons the law is stating. I’m all for people moving to better places. Centralized moderation will always be influenced by the ownership and succiptible to problematic choices (intentional or unintentional) that will effect people. some content will be less moderated on different platforms and that will change over time, which is just the reality of the current social media landscape.
Look I’m sorry this apparent egalitarian wonder app is on the chopping block, but do you seriously want to be a TikTok Apologist?
I’d be happy to see a better option that works for people currently using Tiktok that doesnt have the baggage of the corporation. Maybe Loops can be that one day. Maybe something else will show up. But I’m not wishing an entire platform to just evaporate even if I have major issues with it, and pointing out things that it is good for compared to alternatives is not the same as being an apologist. Pointing out that a ton of people incomes (in a country in a time where small businesses and self employed income is at every increasing risk) is not defending EVERYTHING tiktok has done, currently does, or will do. Nor is any of that claiming it’s an egalitarian wonder app.
Could you imagine your reaction to someone this zealously defending, say, Facebook? You’d think they were nuts, facebook has been exhaustively shown to be so evil their CEO is widely rumored not to be human.
I’m all for people abandoning Facebook. While I’d be less caring if it got banned in a similar way, i would not celebrate it. There are still tons of normal people using it for normal reasons and they shouldnt be suddenly cut off like this. They should absolutely move away from it or their own voilition, not due to authoritarian intervention.
Facebook has actively promoted a genocide entirely of its own creation, which is quite a different issue from content suppression. You are mischaracterizing my arguments by making it out to be equivilant to a completely different situation.
You’re changing the requirements for evidence to render previous valid evidence invalid.
I never said your evidence was invalid, I just said it needed context.
I offered my opinion (which is absolutely personal experience bias!). I suggested you consider that the article in question it may not be universally applicable to the current state of the App due to its age. I did not say you had an invalid opinion or reason to dislike it. I did not say that there was not a problem. I did not say that there still aren’t problems.
Being in a minority on social media sometimes means choosing the places that are the least awful. Tiktok can be both good and bad for groups. That doesn’t mean it deserves to be banned.
Look, I’m just advocating for people who are being harmed by the actions of an authoritarian government against an app and suggesting that celebrating the actions of said authoritarian government is problematic, even if there are other reasons to dislike the app.
I really dislike point by point breakdowns, it’s too easy to take individual statements out of context and the lack of a clear thesis makes it incredibly difficult to respond without resorting to comments of even greater length.
In an effort to combat this, would it be fair to say your position is that while TikTok is bad, it’s okay to still use it because it’s extremely popular, and thus the ability to do things like engage or organize with other people in your subcultures is consequently quite high? “The good outweighs the ill” as it were? Which is a reasonable position to take, to be clear, even if your actual feelings are more nuanced.
(That’s not me being bitchy, I just genuinely do not have the time to respond to every single thing you’ve said there. Explaining the literary difference between explicit and implicit dismissal of evidence would alone take us beyond the character limit, as my self indulgent explanation spiraled further and further into the jargony depths of academic tedium…)
Its a platform that was secretly suppressing people for being disabled, black, queer or ugly. Cheering it’s death is reasonable, defending it on the grounds that people will have to advertise somewhere else really isn’t.
I’m pretty sure every imperial app is also censoring anti-genocide perspectives, etc. That’s literally the whole point of this ban.
https://newrepublic.com/post/181327/mitt-romney-congress-ban-tiktok-israel-gaza
But the inquisition said it’s to root out heresy, so that means its okay when imperial apps do it.
You have evidence of that? Because I saw all of that in my feeds on the daily.
It’s exhaustively well documented that they did this, I’ve linked to one reputable source a couple comments up.
(FWIW putting users in those categories into a walled garden where their content is only shown some similarly-minded users is a popular form of suppression and you, one of the users in question, would still see that content on your feed. This is what TikTok was caught doing. Anecdotal evidence and all that.)
So people who didn’t want to see LGBTQ content didn’t see it? Seems like the algorithm was doing it’s job.
Glad to see you’re up to your usual form, buddy. Keep on fighting the good fight.
I’m a simple person. I see rhetoric being passed as fact and I cannot help myself. I know, super popular, invited to every single party.
Nah, you just come into every interaction cloaked in a miasma of confrontational obstinance. It can be really tiring to deal with.
So you’re saying I’m invited to your next party?
Bud we’re lemmy users. We don’t get invited to parties, even ones thrown by other lemmy users.
I think most people on here would agree that TikTok is a shitty app, but you can’t deny that just deciding to ban something in the manner they’re doing with this bill is shady. The bill is very obviously targeted towards TikTok but is worded in a way that it can be used on any software owned by a “Foreign Adversary” as defined by the government.
It’s proposed in the frame of national security with concerns of data collection being sent to China, but if that’s the case there are far worse offenders of that violation of privacy than TikTok! Most large tech companies collect data from their users and sell it overseas. They may not sell directly to China but the amount of data collected is insane and once it is out of the hands of Meta or Google or whoever, it becomes hard to know for certain where it ends up.
The point I’m trying to make is that if the real concern is national security, their focus should be on regulating data collection instead of banning a singular app which collects the same data every other app in the world does. I don’t defend TikTok, I couldn’t care less if it was gone, but the grounds on which it is being banned are concerning and somewhat contradictory.
If I have been misinformed of any of this please let me know, this is just what I’ve gathered from reading sections of the bill myself and from the court hearings.
Oh they also put TikTok’s name directly in the legislation. Which is unconstitutional. Not even by interpretation. The Constitution directly, and in plain English, bans the practice.
This entire thing is a giant cesspool of constitutional fuckery.
Wait, what about that is unconstitutional?
It’s called a bill of attainder.
Merriam Webster is literally using TikTok as an example definition.
That is interesting, I didn’t realize that was how it was being argued.
It does sound like there’s some contention about that, and although the national security bit is as cringingly craven as usual, the applicability of the restriction to corporate entities is going to be an interesting decision to see ruled on.
Yeah well I like my rights well protected.
Did you know they defined this to cover any organization running a website that allows you to create an account, has a million users, at least 1 person can share content, and at least 1 person can view that shared content?
With the exception of product, business, and travel reviews.
Does that sound an awful lot like a news organization to anyone else?
Furthermore we already decided that companies have first amendment rights when we let Hobby Lobby have a religion.
If they decide this is good enough then we open the path to any organization in that incredibly broad description being banned. Daily Kos certainly falls under it too. People think Meta dropping fact checkers and going anti immigration just in the US is because Zuckerberg went MAGA? No, he sees the writing on the wall.
This kind of law is how Authoritarian states lock down media in their country.
I confess I phrased my intial comment a tad too harshly. There are many, many good reasons to criticize this; the loss of an advertising platform is not one of them.
Disabled, black, queer, ugly (which is subjective but whatever) seemed quite unsuppressed on tiktok to my perception and the perceptions of many in those spaces… I’m sure there are exceptions due to the large sample size.
I fit several of those categories and have been immersed in those spaces on tiktok for a long time and the opinion has always trended to it being far superior for discussing and being in those groups than Instagram or YouTube. Especially for disabled and queer groups, tiktok was always the bigger audience.
Shop is a lot more than advertising. Much closer to pre-enshittified etsy, and there’s a reason a lot of small businesses formed around it instead of instagram. Tiktok would actually allow those products to be shown to people rather than supressed in favor of corporations.
It’s pretty well documented that they did/do this. I’m sorry, you’ve fully bought into the PR TikTok spin. They present themselves as somehow an egalitarian organization. They aren’t.
This was absolutely happening in 2020. That was a long time ago and the App is practically unrecognizable from its 2020 state.
Shifting the goalpost muchSorry I insulted your app waifu with my… substantiated claims about it’s conduct? How disingenuous of me. I should be ashamed, presenting its previous actions as things that it has done in the past.
You’re the one who seems pretty upset about things but sure. Feel free to stoop to name calling and bad faith accusations if you’d like.
Time is, in fact, a thing that exists. Pointing out the age of an article is not shifting the goal post. Bad actions can be learned from and it is possible for things to become less shitty. You are welcome to couch your opinions in out of date information.
Tiktok is absolutely not perfect. It absolutely has issues of over-censorship at times. It absolutely should be critiqued. Even so, it provides a valuable place for people who are disenfranchised on other social media, even if it’s simply that they are disenfranchised less on Tiktok.
(um, name calling?)
Anyways, my criticism was not time delineated, you asked for evidence, and now are claiming the evidence I provided to support my initial claim isn’t good enough because of a new condition you’ve brought out. That’s… I don’t have another colloquial term to describe it besides “shifting the goalpost”. You’re changing the requirements for evidence to render previous valid evidence invalid. There’s a term for that (a point I think I’ve amply belaboured by now).
And sure, poor behavior can absolutely be learned from. Thats a core tenet of society. But, just for fun, could you please give me an example of a massive multinational corporation, or a social media platform, voluntarily becoming less evil? There’s been absolutely no indication that TikTok has ever stopped these practices, too. So why are you giving them the benefit of the doubt? Have they ever done anything to justify such high regard?
Look I’m sorry this apparent egalitarian wonder app is on the chopping block, but do you seriously want to be a TikTok Apologist? Could you imagine your reaction to someone this zealously defending, say, Facebook? You’d think they were nuts, facebook has been exhaustively shown to be so evil their CEO is widely rumored not to be human. So why is tiktok, an equally bad app (but one you like), suddenly okay?
It shouldn’t be banned for the reasons the law is stating. I’m all for people moving to better places. Centralized moderation will always be influenced by the ownership and succiptible to problematic choices (intentional or unintentional) that will effect people. some content will be less moderated on different platforms and that will change over time, which is just the reality of the current social media landscape.
I’d be happy to see a better option that works for people currently using Tiktok that doesnt have the baggage of the corporation. Maybe Loops can be that one day. Maybe something else will show up. But I’m not wishing an entire platform to just evaporate even if I have major issues with it, and pointing out things that it is good for compared to alternatives is not the same as being an apologist. Pointing out that a ton of people incomes (in a country in a time where small businesses and self employed income is at every increasing risk) is not defending EVERYTHING tiktok has done, currently does, or will do. Nor is any of that claiming it’s an egalitarian wonder app.
I’m all for people abandoning Facebook. While I’d be less caring if it got banned in a similar way, i would not celebrate it. There are still tons of normal people using it for normal reasons and they shouldnt be suddenly cut off like this. They should absolutely move away from it or their own voilition, not due to authoritarian intervention.
Facebook has actively promoted a genocide entirely of its own creation, which is quite a different issue from content suppression. You are mischaracterizing my arguments by making it out to be equivilant to a completely different situation.
I never said your evidence was invalid, I just said it needed context.
I offered my opinion (which is absolutely personal experience bias!). I suggested you consider that the article in question it may not be universally applicable to the current state of the App due to its age. I did not say you had an invalid opinion or reason to dislike it. I did not say that there was not a problem. I did not say that there still aren’t problems.
Being in a minority on social media sometimes means choosing the places that are the least awful. Tiktok can be both good and bad for groups. That doesn’t mean it deserves to be banned.
Look, I’m just advocating for people who are being harmed by the actions of an authoritarian government against an app and suggesting that celebrating the actions of said authoritarian government is problematic, even if there are other reasons to dislike the app.
I really dislike point by point breakdowns, it’s too easy to take individual statements out of context and the lack of a clear thesis makes it incredibly difficult to respond without resorting to comments of even greater length.
In an effort to combat this, would it be fair to say your position is that while TikTok is bad, it’s okay to still use it because it’s extremely popular, and thus the ability to do things like engage or organize with other people in your subcultures is consequently quite high? “The good outweighs the ill” as it were? Which is a reasonable position to take, to be clear, even if your actual feelings are more nuanced.
(That’s not me being bitchy, I just genuinely do not have the time to respond to every single thing you’ve said there. Explaining the literary difference between explicit and implicit dismissal of evidence would alone take us beyond the character limit, as my self indulgent explanation spiraled further and further into the jargony depths of academic tedium…)