US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users

Can the US Lawmakers do anything about the US companies harvesting my data and selling it off… please?

Yes, they can make more money from it.
Can they? Completely wrong question.
"Will they" is what you wanted to ask but the answer is still firmly no
- Honestly it might be "Can they" given how partisan issues like industry regulation are.

So when do they plan to do something about those domestic businesses trying to manipulate citizens of America?

Capitalism abusing citizens? Just fine.
"Communism" abusing citizens? Avengers, assemble!
- They're prospective communists. Supposedly they're going to get there by 2050, but they just built a new massive luxury tower for their ultra wealthy so...
- I think they're more worried that it's a foreign corporation going after their citizens and not a domestic corporation.
- More of a capitalistic dictatorship
I mean, the domestic businesses are the ones who own Congress and are using it to get rid of a competitor.
- After the thousands of years of human history I've read about, getting rid of competitors seems to have been the primary concern of most of the ruling classes all over the world. Way back to Ur.
As soon as the foreign businesses get better at harvesting data than the domestic ones, of course.
While you're not wrong about double standards, anything that discourages the use of vapid social media platforms is a win in my book. Use whatever backwards logic you like to make it happen so long as it's effective.
- Well this goes into the direction of social media monopoly so I'm not sure
- He says, on a social media platform

Whatever Tiktok is doing, the correct response is to write enforcable laws to prevent ANY company from doing what Tiktok is doing.

This is bad governance.

That's what they did. The "correct response" is described in the article as the law 50/50 signed here.
- Did you read the article? The bill bans tiktok for being foreign. There is nothing in this article that describes a bill that outlaws any practices, conventions, or actions that tiktok has done.
  Being afraid of foreigners for being foreign is not effective regulation.
- I've read this comment over 10 times now and I have no idea what the words "the law 50/50 signed here" means, so I can't be sure I understand the argument you are trying to make. My best guess is that you are using circular logic to suggest that every democratically decided upon decision is always the right decision, which is nonsense because democracy is demonstrably fallible.

This was a committee vote. The bill now must advance to the floor, pass a vote there, then go through the same process in the Senate.

Many bills are passed out of committee but are never given an actual vote.

Especially in the least productive congress in US history, the odds of any actual vote are low.
- Technically, while that might have been true at the end of 2023, the US House of Representatives of the 118th congress have voted 796 times with 126 items passed, according to Govtrack.us with at least ten vetoes by the POTUS.
  So not really the worst by any measure.

I wonder if this could also be applied to games owned in whole or part by Tencent...

i hope they sell conan exiles to someone else, because then the shitty monitization that is destroying the game will end.
Or websites? Like Reddit? No, never mind, that's silly talk.

Many users called lawmakers' offices to complain, congressional staffers told Politico. "It's so so bad. Our phones have not stopped ringing. They're teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app and we can't take it away," one House GOP staffer was quoted as saying.

and they still voted 50-0. really tells you something about how much these politicians are willing to listen to their constituents.

It was a 50-0 to pass the commission and then go to the House floor for a vote and then the Senate for a vote and finally signed into law by the president unless he vetoes it, which is possible imo.
Honestly, teenagers and old people are the sorts of folks that need to be protected from themselves, I might just call in to my local representative to voice my support of forced sale, operating restrictions, or even outright ban.
EDIT: I sent him an email.
- Now do Facebook.
- what are you even trying to say here? that it’s okay for politicians to ignore entire demographics? or that it’s only okay for them to ignore entire demographics if, ultimately, it’s left up to a different group of politicians to pass the law?
  i don’t use tiktok or have any interest in the app itself, but it’s still very alarming to see a vote go through 50-0 despite a “nonstop” flood of calls opposing it.
- Yeah honestly if a bunch of addicted teens and old people were calling me screaming that I can't take away their drug of choice when that's not even what's happening, and it's not being taken away just moved to where there can be more control on quality.... Then I would be really considering the damage this is doing to them.
  I don't know if supporting the junkies being taken advantage of is the altruistic take that these "absolute freedom" supporters think it is.
- It's not just teenagers and old people. That's just some bullshit rhetoric that you ate right up without question. Because of course you did. Millennials/middle age folk are abundant on TikTok as well as young adults.
  The audacity of some of you to jump into action just to spite "teenagers and old people" is shameful. So easily manipulated.
- teenagers and old people are the sorts of folks that need to be protected from themselves
  Please, big daddy government, protect me from the freedom of choice. I cannot be trusted to consume without your permission.
- Nanny State.
It also tells you something about all the supposed gridlock in Washington that can magically evaporate when there's money and power to be gained from it.
From what I read, the calls actually evaporated opposition to the bill.
Which, I'm NGL, if you're worried about an app being used by a foreign adversary to encourage anti-social behavior in your youth, a bunch of people calling in acting like drug addicts getting their drugs taken away is only going to erase doubts.
It doesn't help that they'd even be more justified when it's known that it was caused by users getting pushed notified by Tik Tok to do it.
- Encouraging people to contact their representatives and demand action? Congress clearly can't have this. How will they do their jobs if they are constantly forced to engage with their constituents?
Are they "taking it away" though? Do normal people care about who owns it? Are they just worried about an unlikely ban?
- you’re taking it as a given that bytedance will sell the app if this law passes. there is a chance that they won’t want to sell and then the app will be banned. (but i think this unlikely.)
  also, if i’m understanding things correctly, there’s the possibility that they do sell and the app still gets banned. the article says
  An app would be allowed to stay in the US market after a divestiture if the president determines that the sale "would result in the relevant covered company no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary."
  depending on who the next president is, there’s no guarantee that they’ll say any sale will result in the company not being controlled by a foreign adversary. (although this past is just speculation.)
  anyways. this bill will certainly raise the chances that the app will be banned in the US. (and it opens the door for other apps to get banned if the US doesn’t like the country they were developed in.)

Tik Tok pushes so much toxic content towards children and teenagers it should be shut down in my opinion.

The can very easily apply to every single social media.
- Yes but unlike Facebook and other platforms, Tik Tok is aimed at and consumed by minors specifically.

My prediction is coming true: https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/10ofony/anything_to_protect_the_youth/

I watched that commercial - I guess banning TikTok is gonna work, huh?
- What's more likely to work is something else will appear and distract the gnat-like attention span of our status-obsessed species, and we can go back to tik tok being the sound your you hear at night when you visit your boomer relatives and try to sleep in the guest bedroom.
- For the commercial yeah, real life is more of a no.

Good. Fuck them and all social media controlled by any big mega corp. But fuck the CCP especially.

The fucked up thing is they don’t seem to have a problem with rich 1%ers owning and manipulating millions of people. Only when it’s the Chinese. Facebook, Twitter, instagram are just as harmful. Although the delivery method of the content isn’t exactly “tailored” on those services like TikTok. I dunno how I feel about this. I mean, I think all social media services should die out. This just seems like an uneven hand.
- Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
- Well the CCP does exert considerable control over TikToks parent company ByteDance. The CCP has already utilized data from TikTok to track protestors and other "dissidents"
  https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-china-bytedance-user-data-d257d98125f69ac80f983e6067a84911
  No the CCP does not own Tik Tok but it might as well own it.
  Unfortunately this situation is not unlike what the US government likely does. However, hopefully this precedence building policy recognizes that data privacy from 3rd party entities is needed. Will that standard be applied to US companies? Not likely any time soon but I'm optimistic.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20191127235720/http:/news.cpd.com.cn/n3559/201904/t20190425_836599.html
  They don't have to own it when they can make it do whatever they want. You won't find critical analysis of anything important on Chinese tik tok.

It can still be successful elsewhere. It's clearly about data sharing.
- I think here the point is that the US government seems to be not bothered by Meta's data collection which by the way has already been used by Cambridge Analytica to swing elections in favour of one of the opponents and most likely used on countless more occasions but it is now super worried about Tiktok.
  And what did they do against Meta? To the best of my knowledge nothing effective.
  If they do this they should apply the same measures against Meta and other companies but they don't. Which is disturbing.
  Same with Gaza and Israel. Hamas kills around less than 1 K civilians (mind you a lot of the killed on that first day were military), it is utter tragedy. Israel kills 30+K people, starves the local population, destroys almost completely the infrastructure and their homes and it is business as usual. And every now and then they are scorned to please their voting base while weapon sales to Israel are continuing. Replace Israel with Russia/NK/China or any other country the US considers hostile and they will have them sanctioned to hell, but since it is Israel, nothing of this is happening.
  At least have the fucking decency not to have double standards, because the rest of the world isn't blind or stupid.
I'm surprised that people are surprised that a country would favor it's own businesses versus foreign ones.
I'm also unsure of which countries act differently from this.
- I'm not surprised but I'm still outraged at the amount of hypocrisy they are pulling off out of this one.
Ah yes, the US, where no foreign company is allowed to be successful.
Such unsuccessful or banned foreign companies include Samsung, LG, Sony, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Aldi, Shell, Siemens...
And if foreign politics won't take care of it call the CIA and tell it they're hiding oil under the presidents house.

I dislike TikTok as much as the next guy, but I think there are several issues with this bill:

It specifically mentions TikTok and ByteDance. While none of the provisions seem to apply exclusively to them, the way they are included would give them no recourse to petition this, the way other companies would be able to (ie, other companies could argue in court that they aren't controlled by a foreign adversary, but TikTok can't. The bill literally defines "foreign adversary controlled application" as "TikTok, or ..." (g.3.A)). It also gives the appearance that this law is only supposed to apply to them, which isn't what it says but it might be treated that way anyway.
It leaves the determination of whether or not a company is "controlled by a foreign adversary" entirely up to the president. He has to explain himself to Congress, but doesn't need their approval. That seems ripe for exploitation. I think it should require Congress to approve, either in a addition to or instead of the president.
According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of "covered company"), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that's included.
There is a specific exemption for any app that's for posting reviews (g.2.B). I'm guessing one such company paid a whole lot to just not have this apply to them.

According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of “covered company”), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that’s included.
I'm glad clauses like this are common. We don't want some teenager who wants to experiment with creating a "social media" website for his friends to have the full weight of the law immediately fall on their shoulders. People should be free to create website with minimal legal requirements, especially if it's a small website.
3 months later:
Hottest trending new app: TokTic
The directed scope of the bill is going to do the same thing to TikTok that legislation did to Juul.
If you target Juul with legal repercussions for all their flavored vapes, then only Juul stops selling flavored pods. Now a million other disposable vape companies fill the void with flavored vapes that are worse for the ecosystem.
Targeting TikTok will just lead to another foreign data-harvesting social media app popping up to fill its place.
- It's not about data harvesting, it's about targeting users with political ideas. If you watch a video for a certain amount of time then they will continue showing you those types of videos. There's tons of bad faith political targeting on TikTok just like every other platform. The issue is that it's difficult to avoid because the platform decides what you look at unlike other platforms.
Insert astounded meme when a shell partner aquires the Brand and now, (pick your)company is now a known CCP co-conspirator.

Bytedance needs to figure out which congresspeople Meta has been bribing.

Need to donate a couple hundred mil to Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and see if he'll give up his strategy.
- Oh man, is this a game? Are we supposed to name all the reasons this is dumb? The first two are obvious.

So TikTok is sending out app notifications that they are at risk of being shut down and urging their users to call their representatives right now. They are not going down without a fight.

The 165 days time limit would land the deadline in August-ish, right before the most intense phase of election season in the States, and I do think TikTok would be a very influential part of the election strategy this year.

On this particular topic, I think "both sides" is true. Both sides want to proceed down this "ban websites by name" road.

Bold move. Who are they going to blame all the online privacy issues once they cant yell about the Chinese? Or are we going to start pretending everythings fine then?

Why do you think that they give a shit about online privacy? This isn't a privacy bill, it's a bill stopping another government from doing exactly the same shit that the US government does through domestic apps. They aren't looking out for people, they're afraid of the competition.
- This is exactly the take I find the most interesting.
  This is what the US has been doing everywhere for a decade+ now and suddenly it's not ok? It's because the grip is loosening and the sense of control and power is absolutely slipping and while it's late to be grasping to get it back, it's not unwarranted.
  I actually don't think it's a bad idea cause seriously creating an addiction that can only be served by other countries is not good for a healthy and good local populace. Is it a bit karma sure but I'd rather not live it as the same non addict if we can help it.
I expect the latter

So NSA backdoors are mandatory but Chinese ones are bad.

Yes. 🤷
Nobody wants to be spied on by their perceived enemies. Also, how do you expect us to maintain an appropriate level of hypocrisy if we don't constantly do hypocritical things?
I wish we would go after foreign investment, ownership, and political meddling as much as tiktok
- You have a choice to not use tiktok, in this day and age you don't really have a choice to not use a phone...
- I would be more afraid of being spied on by the government of the country I live in than by a government from a foreign country. Who do you think is more capable of doing something to you?
Yes, governmental surveillance is always bad. But let's not pretend being surveilled by NSA is as bad as being surveilled by the authoritarian government of China.
- Sure bro, it's the CCP out to oppress Americans and arrest and assassinate reformers and journalists, because they hate our freedom!
- it's worse. it's worse because they have the power to arrest me, freeze my assets, or do a hundred other terrible things. the chinese can... uh... find out my sense of humor is immature i think.
I mean, it's not one or the other. No interference from Congress means we get surveilled by China and the US. Congress can cut that number in half.
Both are bad but fuck Xi and the CCP 🖕
The former is more pressing than the latter.

Sooo... How do Republican's square being the party of "Small Govt" and then interfering in a private business?

Is it a private business if it's owned by the Chinese government?
- It's really not though? The Chinese government has a 1% stake in ByteDance. Meanwhile ~60% is foreign investors – believed to be mostly American.
- No. It's a malicious foreign entity.
They don't. It's all bad faith to get what they want - control.
- Government is bad except when it comes to brutal subjugation of out-groups I don't like, while the in-group gets protected and treated with kid gloves by the same.
  Unfortunately most of them are the dupes not the protected class they think they are - "they're hurting the wrong people" summed it up when it was uttered..
Foreign policy

...TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn't sell. It also would lose access to US-based web hosting services.

Oh no. Where would children act out jokes they stole from old tweets?

So many out of touch people in every thread that mentions TikTok. The same shit we did on YouTube , FB , Twitter, vine, etc is the same concept on TikTok. Memes evolve or new ones are born, that is nothing new
- It's genuinely embarassing to see people here behaving this way. And disappointing.
Oh no... Someone that was told the opinion they should have about tiktok years ago never bothered to think about it for more that five seconds before repeating it
Did it hurt? Becoming a boomer.

High school nerds pay attention. This is how you can make some money and have an excuse to talk to the hot girls…by installing a vpn on their phones so they can still have their tik tok.

Get one popular girls phone set up and every girl in the school will be hitting you up within a week.

And the cycle of infantalizing women continues...
- Lemmy does draw a certain crowd unfortunately.
- Everything will keep going as planned /s
Highschooler here, everyone already uses vpn's to bypass the school firewall to view blocked sites and stuff while on school wifi.
- The kids are gonna be alright
And why do you assume everyone including hot girls & popular girls aren't already capable of installing their own VPNs? Unless of course you mean the high school nerd is going to pay for our VPN service, then come on over!
- I’m sure some do. I haven’t talked to many high school girls lately.
  If this goes through and this happened when I was in school…that’d be a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’d probably never even think of it then. I’d probably luck into it by telling the rest of the nerd table at lunch, jock overheard, sell him my services, and then word of mouth from there.
  That happening now…probably be the inspiration for the gen Z’s “American Pie”. Or “Superbad”.
- aren’t already capable
  Anyone who can read and follow directions is capable
  Most people can't install a VPN, including hot or cold girls
They won't want TikTok once the chumps who follow them stop using it. They'll have to do something other than dancing for strangers to bolster their self-esteem.

I don't see why users would even have a problem with this. Same services, more competitive market, and with less ties to an evil dictatorship should be celebrated, right?

It depends. I’ve heard second hand accounts that TikTok can push pro-Chinese propaganda, and whenever I pointed out that China isn’t some lefty paradise to some people in my life they were either shocked or fell into the “you’re falling in line with the Western Propaganda, I see 😏”
- I'm much less concerned with what they're giving than what they're taking with the app. It's been shown to collect message history and photo library data, that alone is a threat to us all.

An app would be allowed to stay in the US market after a divestiture if the president determines that the sale "would result in the relevant covered company no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary."

So apps can still be banned after divestiture, based on an arbitrary decision by one corrupt and potentially insane and/or senile person?

After all the talk of a "rules based order", I'm disappointed - this isn't a rule, its a leap of faith into the arms of serial liars.

I feel there's a lot of China influence in this thread. I wonder why that is...

sinophobia
- CCP-phobia, I think. It is inappropriate to conflate the CCP with the Chinese people.

Tik tok is at the root of so many of the social issues we're facing today. It's absolutely worse than Facebook, although both need to be addressed.

- It has a huge hold over our youth today, even folks up to 30. It’s so ubiquitous it’s used as a replacement for Google to find new information including political.
  Problem is it’s absolutely chock full of misinformation and propaganda, which doesn’t just exist on the platform, but is actively pushed on American youth today.
Sorry but this is giving 'old man yells at clouds' energy. How is tiktok any worse than any other social media platform? They're all echochambers filled with misinformation, it just what happens when you get a lot of people online.
- That you're trying to 'they're all the same' bs shows how ignorant many people are on this. They're not all the same, this one is especially bad and it's not JUST because it turns you into a fucking retard when you use it.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The House Commerce Committee today voted 50-0 to approve a bill that would force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company or lose access to the US market.

If the bill passes in the House and Senate and is signed into law by President Biden, TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn't sell.

These applications present a clear national security threat to the United States and necessitate the decisive action we will take today," she said before the vote.

Gallagher also said his bill puts the decision "squarely in the hands of TikTok to sever their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party."

While the bill text could potentially wrap in other apps in the future, it specifically lists the ByteDance-owned TikTok as a "foreign adversary controlled application."

An app would be allowed to stay in the US market after a divestiture if the president determines that the sale "would result in the relevant covered company no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary."

The original article contains 601 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I want my data to be centralized, profiled and used against me, but I want it by American corporations, dammit!

The world police is scared about the competition lmao, "only us should violate worldwide privacy!"

Who knew the magical word was China to turn everyone here into a meta lapdog
- I'm pretty confident in saying the majority of users here don't like meta either -- the userbase on lemmy is predominantly people trying to avoid corporate social media.
  ByteDance and Meta both privacy nightmares, it's just a question of what fucked up things they doing with the data.
- In this case, my enemy’s enemy is also an enemy. Life ain’t easy for a poor righteous teacher.
- The red menace has always been a winner.

The world is on fire but the kids are upset that they have to use another platform for their stupid fucking dance videos.

BTW: someone in the US should just make a similar app and call it tiktok. It’s not like China gives a crap about IP protection so turn about is fair play.

The world is on fire but lawmakers are doing petty antagonistic policy and turning a blind eye to atrocities.
- That's right. What's important is TikTok and Chinese interests of course. /S

Can they do that with a Chinese company?

Technically, they're forcing the US Based shell company, which the Chinese were using, to sell out to some other American, or maybe just shut down.
- Seems pointless.

The free market economy for you

Never has been. 🧑‍🚀 🔫 🧑‍🚀

But....how will we dance to save Roe vs Wade now????

Ahhh....hmm. Kindof a point-and-shoot sort of thing, isn't it? Blow away/take over (well, "unrelated parties may buy," ha ha) any app associable with Russia, North Korea, Iran, or China 🤔 'Course, they can edit that list too.

Nah, I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong. US government never abuses powerful, broad powers it gives itself 😃👍

They are. This just isn't an example of one.

NSA can't harvest user data from tiktok because it's Chinese based, so they force them to split and sell to American subcompany that is obliged by law to give them access to their server. Everything else is political bullshit, like the Chinese gouvernement can "weaponize it's app" ?? They can't turn teenager into terrorist hating their country just like that, tiktok can only influence so much.

If the Chinese government believed that why do they ban so many US apps in their country?
- Cmon that's not that difficult to understand: The same reason usa bans Chinese app. China, just as usa, has mass surveillance system and want to get every single data, they can't do that with apps owned by usa based companies.

Even if China has access to my data, that's way less scary than Zuck, musk, Bezos or any other tech bro.

U.S. lawmakers can't force anything on foreign corporations.

If the bill passes in the House and Senate and is signed into law by President Biden, TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn't sell. It also would lose access to US-based web-hosting services.

ByteDance would be banned from the U.S. market and lose it's webhosting on U.S. servers.

Also, what's with the "foreign adversary" status of China?

Actually a court in any country can prevent a company from doing something. When you do business in a country you have to abide by their laws.
- That's right, I totally came off wrong. I meant that U.S. lawmakers can't force ByteDance to sell TikTok, as the headline implies.
Also, what’s with the “foreign adversary” status of China?
China is attacking us by having a bigger economy
- Lol yea. They also maintain control over their big corpos and that must be threatening to the 9 corporations in a trench coat that the U.S. calls a government. Still, the world doesn't need any more adversarial relationships, thank you very much U.S.A.

The only social platform that doesn't try to actively censor Pro-Palestinian voices. What a coincidence that it's suddenly a security risk.

Big ups to Rathbone https://www.tiktok.com/@rathbonemakesmusic/video/7289906736847129902

Suddenly? It's been labeled Chinese spyware since day one.
- And Twitter, Instagram and others are American spyware. The timing is very interesting since TikTok was the only platform not censoring Palestinians into oblivion especially at the start of the Genocide. Even now you can see a drastic difference in recommended content between TikTok and American based platforms. Which is a major reason that the youth reacts a lot different than boomers.
  Full control of social media must be held. Free speech btw
Ya, the site being abused by Iran, China and Russia isn't a problem. Nope not at all
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2024/02/06/iran-accelerates-cyber-ops-against-israel/#:~:text=This%20marked%20the%20first%20Iranian,UAE%2C%20UK%2C%20and%20Canada.