As someone in the US who has had their private data leaked multiple times (ive lost count) and is extremely careful when browsing you tube as to not be drawn into a conspiracy ridden rabbit hole, I’m not sure what the point of this tik tok ban is. To me tik tok is social media business as usual. If congress is going to go this hard on a social media company and privacy concerns they should be doing this with all the other companies that pry into our private lives and try their best to manipulate us as well (car makers, appliance manufactures, phone makers, wearbales, ect…) otherwise to me this comes across as the US congress extorting a single company to make billionaires richer. It has been shown time and time again that even US based social media companies are vulnerable to influencing conspiracy theorists and swaying the votes of thousands of people.I feel like we are at the pinnacle of technological ignorance here. Thoughts?
I’m honestly surprised so many people are for it. I detest tiktok, but what precedent does it set when we start restricting the freedom to access the open internet just like those so-called adversary countries do. If it gets removed from the app stores and that’s it, then yeah whatever I guess. but if we end up like China and post 2022 Russia where we are blocking connection access to a worldwide foreign service entirely only because we don’t like not being in control of the data, then we’ve already lost as the public. Combine this with the potentialities of project 2025 or whatever and then look at that, now we’re the exact same as them.
If the government were doing this for anything other than a power move with theatrics, Instagram and Twitter etc would be cracked down hard too.