Summary
TikTok faces a U.S. shutdown by Jan. 19 unless the Supreme Court delays or blocks a law requiring its Chinese parent, ByteDance, to divest.
The Biden administration defends the law as a national security measure, citing potential risks of Chinese government influence. Content creators argue it violates free speech.
Donald Trump, once a supporter of the ban, seeks a delay to reach a “political resolution.”
A shutdown could cost TikTok millions of users and revenue. The court’s decision, due soon, could reshape U.S. digital speech policy.
replace “data” with “ads/propaganda/right-wing content”.
Sorry about the bad quality, i’ve resent this picture so many times now that there’s barely any pixels left.
Meanwhile, FB and Google which are courting Trump, and Elon courting both Trump and Nazis, are perfectly fine.
Why do people.keep saying this? It’s obviously not fine.
These guys get dragged in front of Congress all the time. The US has the right to take measures against a business they feel they can’t control, doing things they consider detrimental to it’s people. Ideally that would occur in a more balanced method than now, and it would be nice if Nazi’s weren’t also American citizens with 1st amendment rights, but here we are.
There are many Chinese based companies that do business on American soil with no issues. This isn’t even really Chinese based, but has a major Chinese stakeholder. For some reason, this company, over many others, was believed to be a threat. It may not be the weird racism you’re being led to believe. What if it actually is a very credible threat from an outside actor? Is there a world where that’s possible and acceptable to you?
Just curious because I feel like there’s some strange zeoltry for TikTok that I haven’t seen so much with other media corporations lately, that aren’t actively pumping out propaganda. FOX News being the obvious example.
No one thinks it’s a case of “weird racism”, but it does seem politically and/or financially motivated. If it was a legitimate threat, they could have informed the public as to the actual threat. The fact that they didn’t implies doing so would undermine the decision.
Beyond that, most folks are not mad TikTok is getting banned, they (myself included) are mad that obvious and legitimate threats to the public relating to social media and data harvesting are being ignored. And to avoid having that conversation, TikTok is getting a blanket ban.
So to answer this question, yes, that is possible and acceptable in two (not mutually exclusive) worlds. One where the actual threat is revealed so it is obvious why it needs to be addressed. Or two, where the government is (or better yet already was) acting in good faith to protect Americans from the other more obvious threats of social media and data privacy violations.
Without one or both of those worlds, it is extremely difficult to assume this was a decision made in good faith. Afterall, they didn’t create rules to prevent TikTok from harvesting data, nor create rules that propaganda needs to be monitored and labeled. They didn’t draft up a Digital Bill of Rights to protect Americans, and then ban TikTok for violating it. They just dropped the ban hammer with a “trust me bro”.
And given that, it also shows how far the government is willing to go to avoid holding American companies accountable. Which, imho, is the crux of why so many folks are peeved with this ban.