Please criticize the us government for this as hard as I have been criticizing China for locking it’s citizens out of the world stage with their “great firewall”.
Or don’t, it’s not like hypocrisy doesn’t get enshrined and worshipped here lmfaoooo
They’re shutting down instead of blocking new downloads, seems like a stunt. But the blocking of new downloads is obviously happening if SCOTUS doesn’t step in…that’s the law. That’s just what the law says.
The law prevents other American companies from hosting their infrastructure so they don’t really have much to do other than shut down and offer the minimum required to off-board employees and contractors.
get a vpn (that isn’t proton) now people cause it’ll only get worse
How come not proton? Did they get caught with their hands in the
cookie jartraffic logs?CEO honestly thinks Trump and the Republicans are going to go after tech monopolies. Either he’s detached from reality or he’s trying to keep them from coming after Proton by cooperating. Either way is not great.
and cozying up to american gov no matter who it is just gives me bad vibes that they would happily turn over anything they want when asked
Zuckerberg is behind it, just like he was when they banned it on India. Politicians get what they want by eliminating a company that doesn’t support them, Meta gets more usershare in the U.S. they can control the narrative and keep their guys in place so they don’t get regulated and they get more tax breaks.
In other words, the US government exists solely to serve its wealthiest constituents.
Meanwhile China says no American internet sites in their country and I guess that’s ok for some reason.
who said it was ok?
It’s ok because USA is doing it too. Every state, every politician is basically the same. It’s all about violent control of the planet. These apps are just the tip of the iceberg.
They are going to ban themselves as protest for banning them…?
Essentially yea, the laws enforcement mechanism as-is is just having the app delisted from app stores
Everything else is of TikToks own doing
And that’s all it should be. Currently, the US government does not have the facilities to block traffic to specific websites or IP addresses on a country-wide basis. We don’t have a “great firewall” the way China does, and we should keep it that way.
Yes it does? All it would take is a single piece of legislation and a couple of hours for all ISPs to block all traffic to certain IP ranges.
Sure, it doesn’t prevent VPNs but it would block 95% of access. The remaining 5% can be blocked through banning VPNs and deep packet inspection, the latter of which doesn’t require that much new infrastructure.
I said “currently”. Sure, the US could pass legislation that would require ISPs to implement that ability. I said they do not currently have that ability, and you are disagreeing because it is hypothetically possible for the US to build its own great firewall. I do not want to assume your intentions but it appears you misinterpreted my message.
What I said is still correct. The entire point of my comment was that the US should not pass legislation to build a great firewall.
Oh, I thought you meant physically unable (for some time) - meaning they’d have to upgrade their router hardware or something which would take a couple of weeks/months.
But yes, right now the US is unable to implement a firewall. Though with the current Supreme Court it might as well decide tomorrow that free speech doesn’t extend to communication via electrons or something.
Idk why you are downvoted. They have that yes
Except banning vpns would kill the economy immediately. Pretty much every big corporation is utilizing vpns to facilitate their work from home infrastructure. Hell, often even internally. Not to mention state and federal governments also use them. Suggesting they could do that is a joke.
From what I understand, in my country OpenVPN and Wireguard work fine within the borders, but the protocols are blocked to foreign servers.
I wasn’t talking about the technology behind VPNs. Every single country that “bans VPNs” still uses them commercially to some extent.
What I consider a ban on VPNs is a ban on commercial B2C VPN providers that do not comply with US legislation - meaning they’d allow customers to access banned sites.
Add the fact that pretty much all major payment providers happen to be US companies and I’d wager 99% of “normal” access could be blocked.
They’ll just make legal carveouts for government and commercial use, and go after consumer-facing VPN providers that refuse to comply. For VPN providers based outside the US, they could delist their websites from DNS or block their IPs. They can’t stop someone who’s determined from finding a way, of course, but just a few simple barriers prevents most people from putting in the effort.
That many carveouts pretty much renders the entire thing pointless.
Are you seriously trying to predict the actions of the US federal government using an argument based on logic and common sense?
False, feds have taken down whole domains for violations
They cannot take down a domain registered with a registry and registrar outside their jurisdiction. They could try and compel domestic DNS providers to block queries for that domain, but there are numerous providers who are unlikely to comply with that request on grounds of the 1st amendment.
Given that the OP is about TikTok (a foreign website) being blocked in the United States, your point has very little relevance here. Further, if the website was hosted stateside they could just physically seize the servers themselves.
They have servers here otherwise it would be a laggy mess to use tiktok
I think if people in the US had the capacity for introspection and empathy we would have had a collective
are we the baddies
moment every year for the past 250y…
I completely misunderstood the ban then. If you go back and read my previous thoughts on the matter, I debated IF this was good or bad.
And my debate was, do you allow actual spy services to keep spying in your country? Or do you ban the services, and introduce a precident which could easily be used towards a government lockdown of services?
And ultimately I landed of the belief that we shouldn’t ban tiktok. But that was under the assumption that it was a nationwide services ban. Not just a delisting from the app store.
Tiktok can still host the apk on their own website. Any other installations already installed on apple devices would still work. This isn’t a ban. It’s an app store delisting. And that’s fine. That initself doesn’t fly against the concepts of net neutrality. It becomes a matter of availability at that point.
And if tiktok is doing this of their own choice, then that doesn’t go against net neutrality either. That’s YOUR choice (if you are tiktok).
So, yeah. This small clarification really made this “debate” not much of a debate to me anymore. Ignore all previous positions I held. This issue just became simple. Fuck tiktok. Thats on them. The government didn’t ban them. They delisted an app.
Childporn is illegal on any network. As well it should be. Tiktok is not illegal as a result of this “ban”. That’s what I thought was happening. It’s not (assuming you are correct, which I have no reason to doubt).
(Edit 2: read the bill, it also bans American companies from offering hosting services to a company that is banned through the law https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text)
Arguably, if the app isn’t easy to obtain then the cost of all the US-based servers would become an enormous expense. All US customer data is on its own US-based infra hosted by Oracle. Migrating all the US data elsewhere would also be an enormous expense. Server infa for 170 million Americans on an App is not gonna be cheap to keep running, esp since even if tiktok tried, the best they could do is get apk’s to android users. iOS users are SOL.
Given how iOS dominates the US still and only a small portion of android users are comfortable manually installing apps from non-store locations, why would they go through the effort to stay around for a fraction of the previous user base.
Its a perfectly uneerstsndable business decision, and its one they may be making on the hopes thay the ban will get reversed shortly after its put in place. Its also perfectly understandable to not want to sell the US-based component of the App when they still operate in plenty of other countries, including China, and the sale would devalue what they retained.
(Edit: and while their web offering has improved over the years, they probably are assuming a similar drop of userbase since only so many would be willing to move their usage to a web app that is not super easy to use for capturing video or handling notifications)
Why not read it? It is a ban and no it’s not a delisting
It was either this or self immolation
A shutdown would be preferable than a sale of the active app and userbase to Elon no?
No. Elon would turn it into a far-right platform, like he did with xitter, and thereby accelerating Americas downfall.
I’m surprised they’re taking that approach rather than pushing the web version.
First time in years I see something not bad happen in the US
Imagine cheering on your own imprisonment.
You’re not looking very closely then
You got some suggestions on where to look? We’re speedrunning the fall of rome over here, it’s pretty much to the point that even hope is an unreasonable thing to hope for…
I meant the claim that this was somehow a good thing, and not a performative “anti-china” bill that was really about cutting out the young people’s current venue for organizing against the wealthy’s interests, like their criticisms of the genocide in Gaza. China will still get all that info by buying it off the hundred other apps that collect it. If they cared about the data collection, they’d have addressed all data collection.
Yes TikTok, that’s what a ban is.
Yeah this just sounds like compliance with the media making it seem like a protest for clicks…
Wild to me how much people here are celebrating the App ban.
I get that this is the fediverse and the goal is decentralized social media, but this ban also means thousands of small businesses will lose a primary or secondary source of income that they can’t just replacewuickly, tons of people will lose access to methods of communication that would otherwise be censored on US platforms, and it eliminates a platform that has excelled at breaking down governments placed barriers of communication between different groups (which is something the fediverse does well, too)
Celebrating this is rather selfish and anti-free speech.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Just fucking do it alreadyyyyyy
Still time to send them on some luxury vacations, I hear they like those!
Can you order
an RVa motor coach from Temu?
Hoping they shut down and open source their algorithm. They already released part of it on github, apparently, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it. Would like it if I could somehow use it for a personal Loops server in the future.
That looks to be 2 years old. It’s probably much different than the current one
“They” say they are banning it over national security concerns I think it’s deeper then that. They can’t have a socialist like platform having an audience. Which in my opinion is why they wanted to force a sell or just ban Tiktok.
I don’t think, that they will go after Rednote if it doesn’t gain popularity the way that Tiktok did.
When they say “national security” reasons, they mean capitalist, imperialist, etc. reasons.
