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ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 40 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Oh, eat a Hello Kitty lunchbox full of dicks. There's plenty of reasons to hate on TikTok (and Facebook, insta, YouTube, ad-infinitum/ad-nauseum). They're a damn cancer on society.

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  • [+] -15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    So are places like Reddit and Lemmy but here you are.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Are you being intentionally daft? You realise there is no algorithm behind Lemmy, right? You aren't being shoved controversial polarizing content subliminally here.

    The worst of Lemmy is a certain instance... That I have never heard from after defederation.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    The worst of Lemmy is a certain instance... That I have never heard from after defederation.

    Yeah, defederating from Beehaw was definitely a great decision. I'm so glad I don't have to see those guys' posts anymore.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You realise there is no algorithm behind Lemmy, right?

    Of course there is. Even "sort by newest" is an algorithm, and the default view is more complicated than that.

    You aren't being shoved controversial polarizing content subliminally here.

    Neither are you on TikTok, unless you actively go looking for it

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Neither are you on TikTok, unless you actively go looking for it

    That's just genuine nonsense. The whole point of platforms like TikTok are the modern recommender systems that (simplified) lead to algorithmic radicalisation. Because these systems heavily optimise towards user engagement, they naturally spread misinformation and controversial content.
    And because this kind of content statistically gets more user engagement as people commend on it and spend more time with it, it spreads quicker. This has also e.g. been confirmed by a leaked internal Facebook memo.

    And additionally, these systems are personalised, so when you start to interact with it, you get more and more similar content. This leads to a radicalisation pipeline in which the platforms normalises these positions in echo chambers to you.

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  • [+] -30 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yet you celebrate when the government illegally passes legislation targeting only one company to the benefit of meta and YouTube lmao. Hypocrit.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Uhhh, dude - it's not illegal. As others have mentioned, it's a foreign (hostile) actor contributing to election interference efforts in violation of established law. It is essentially enforcing another law that's already on place!

    The complication with fb et al is that as US companies, there are other laws that protect their actions (and I'm not going to minimize the effects of powerful lobbyists).

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    I'd love to see any evidence of TikTok acting on behalf of any country (especially China) as a hostile actor, or even any evidence of legitimate election interference. If anything banning TikTok is a significantly more hostile response from the US since it silences another forum for free speech.

    Social media is a cancer, but this ban is such obvious propaganda. The only reason TikTok was banned because the US government doesn't have free reign to spy on its users like it does with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.

    If the US government truly cared about social media and it's affects they would be regulating all of it. Instead they're trying to ban TikTok while screaming their heads off about China every chance they get. And that's before mentioning the extremely shady way they passed this; attaching it as a rider through a government 'aid' bill.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I find it amusing how people talk about things they read second hand without understanding.

    The nominal reason they are banning TikTok is because of the data collection. Nothing to do with election security, but national security. The real reason is that they want to lock down the digital information space in preparation for WW3. TikTok is harder to control and there's a lot of anti-government messaging on it.

    It's sort of like the Voter ID laws in GOP states. They pass laws for "election security" by making it so you need an ID to vote. The nominal reason is so that they prevent election fraud. The real reason is they've done statistical analysis and that law reduces black votes by a couple percent, and blacks tend to vote Democrat.

    The real reason in both cases would be unconstitutional, so they come up with another.

    And the mass of idiots online cheer on the deterioration of whatever legitimacy was left in American democratic institutions.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    So you're saying it's for national security... and that's unconstitutional?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    In other to infringe the right to speech, you need a valid justification. It needs to be a) narrowly tailored and b) actually accomplish the aim of the legislation.

    This is the same reason the judge stopped the Montana TikTok ban.

    For a) 170 million Americans use TikTok. So the law has to be ironclad legally speaking to be considered narrowly tailored. It needs to be the bare minimum the government can possibly do to alleviate the ill it claims to address.

    The fact is, this legislation does not actually result in a scenario where China loses access to data on Americans. They can just buy it - it's an ocean of data out there and there's no real way to stop them accessing it.

    Unless you were to make large sweeping changes to the way we handle data, like the EU data laws. But that would affect all social media companies.

    What I'm saying is it's not actually for national security. It's just that if they said the real purpose "ban content potentially manipulated by a specific group of people" then they would require a much higher burden of scrutiny which they could not meet.

    There's a difference legally speaking between "content-neutral" bans and "content-based". Content neutral for example is national security and requires less scrutiny. You can't just arbritarily ban content because of what it says. Note the specific text in the ban: because of data collection. Not the content itself.

    Make sure to pay attention to the upcoming court case on this situation. It will be an important case. The CCP has signaled they will not approve a sale to an American company, so Bytedance essentially only has one option, and that is to fight this in court.

    The fact is the federal government is playing games. They're playing loosey goosey with the laws in an attempt to manipulate the digital media environment.

    This isn't something a democracy should be doing. It's akin to banning foreign media. Like Israel banning Al Jazeera. Whole world is going nuts and we're pretending it's OK.

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