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Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to Biden, who has already committed to signing it
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
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This is the wrong way to go about solving this problem IMO, but then again the problem they're trying to solve is more about security than privacy as a right.
Watching from Europe I have no idea what the problem is. The US spies on our data, the CCP spies on our data. I can see why the US government might worry that they can't access the data (except TikTok runs its servers on Oracle databases in the US just to satisfy them). But I don't understand why the citizens of the US would support tightening the monopoly to just Facebook and Google.
Its actually also a media problem. For example, the largest Tiktok account of a german politician belongs to Maximilian Krah, of the far right party AFD. Just yesterday it was revealed that his personal assistant is actually a Chinese spy. Krah himself voiced a lot of pro-Chinese opinions before, like being pro annexation of Taiwan and denying the genocide on the uigyurs.
This begs the question if his Tiktok popularity is based on a non-biased algorithm or if the CCP made a deal with him, boosting his Tiktok popularity in exchange for being pro-China.
Yeah well, it's not like it's beneath the US government to do the same thing. Remember Cambridge analytica, or the Snowden leaks? My point being, as far as I'm concerned as a citizen, banning TikTok just transfers power to a more concentrated group of actors. That makes the problem worse.
Wan't CA a Russian op though?
That said, this new hybrid war era has nation states conduct disinformation campaigns against each other. Tiktok was a tool to conduct such a campaign, the US wants to defend itself. It's not like China or Russia doesn't do the same even harder to try and defend itself. It's not a crime yet to accept Russian money as an NGO or politician in the US (as least not in itself), it is definitely a crime in Russia to do the same.
Don't get me wrong, it's a move that will definitely consolidate control over opinions, and that's not a good thing. It's like a fever. We can't have nice things because China would break them, so we need to put them away until China stops doing that.
The US would break them (and has always broken them) even if China wasn't around.
How do you know? The US would be a different country if it wasn't targeted by Russia during the 2016 election. Russia made Trump. Russia made Brexit. How do we know how the world would look like if that hasn't happened?
PRISM
Bullrun
List of government mass surveillance projects
List of FBI controversies
List of CIA controversies
Human rights violations by the CIA
The CLOUD Act
This started long before the 2016 election and is deeply ingrained into the way the United States government operates. I'm definitely not saying China is innocent, but a lot of the US government's fears are rooted in projection. "We do it, so we must assume they do it too".
That's my point, all that shit was justified by pointing to Cold War enemies. Of course, no country exists in a vacuum, but if the US and the USSR hadn't been both engaged in a dick-measuring contest for a century, we would live in a different world. Both of them justified their horrendous human rights records by saying, "they are doing it too!"