this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
607 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
59174 readers
4341 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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