US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users
US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users
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Lawmaker: TikTok must "sever relationship with the Chinese Communist Party."
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US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users
Lawmaker: TikTok must "sever relationship with the Chinese Communist Party."
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I dislike TikTok as much as the next guy, but I think there are several issues with this bill:
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.
This is why I'm having trouble understanding why people are confused about the bill's purpose, especially in the context of the last dozen years or so. Allowing a political rival to maintain control over a platform like this is granting them soft power. Even if I agree that companies like Meta should be more heavily regulated (though not in this manner), I can see why they've put a bandaid on the issue given that there's a non-zero chance that TikTok's content has been actively in the past few years
So we're censoring political speech?
Foreign adversaries don't have 1st amendment rights.
Insert astounded meme when a shell partner aquires the Brand and now, (pick your)company is now a known CCP co-conspirator.