Oh no, now we have to ban them all?? What a shame!
/s
But you can’t charge me with murder! That guy committed it too!
selective enforcement of the law is a real issue. One of the reasons Donald Trump will likely never go to jail is the failure to prosecute nixon, reagan (iran contra, iran hostage crisis meddling), and Bush/Cheney(wmd fiasco)
I’m surprised so many people think this is a good argument. TikTok is a social media platform. Temu is an online marketplace. The potential to cause disruption within US society is completely different.
This is a good point actually. That’s almost like trying to ban Naruto because it’s Japanese, but not banning Dragonball Z. We’l see where this goes. If they would enforce these law equally it wouldn’t be as much of a concern. Overall, whether they ban TikTok or not, if as a user you don’t like a said platform, just don’t use it.
Yes and no. Without endorsing them, the arguments for banning Tik Tok are subtler than Chinese = security risk. The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S. When you look at the history of how even relatively benign data from sources not controlled by foreign adversaries has been used for intelligence gathering, e.g. Strava runs disclosing the locations of classified military installations, these fears make a certain amount of sense.
Temu, et al., on the other hand are shopping apps that don’t really lend themselves to influence campaigns in the same way (though, if they are sucking up data like all the other apps, I wouldn’t be surprised if folks in the U.S. security apparatus are concerned about those as well.
Ultimately, I think the argument fails because it assumes an obligation for Congress to solve every tangentially related ill all at once where no such obligation exists.
They desperately need to do something about car software before China starts being really relevant here in EVs too.
I absolutely support massively restricting what anyone can gather, not just China, (and the same for social media/ad networks/retailers), but it’s fundamentally not the same threat as data vacuums controlled by an enemy state.
Extremely well said, thank you.
pretty sure china can just buy all the info they want from facebook, twitter. If I recall a bunch of US secret military sites were exposed by apple watches
TikTok is correct. Ban them all.
While i dislike tiktok as much as the next one, please do temu first. Temu might actually be the downfall of our planet that is already falling down the stairs pretty hard.
I knew someone who got caught up in their
pyramidmarketing scheme. The prizes were some low quality shit. The watch they won got badly scratched and the wristband’s pin fell off the same day from regular use. It was pretty funny watching it disintegrate in real time.I abhor those Temu YouTube ads.
I generally think that TikTok sucks but do agree with this argument. It’s silly to say that domestic companies can be evil but foreign ones no.
That’s not a silly argument if your argument is about national security. For the exact same reason, China blocks almost all western apps. It gives a potential route for whatever nation is considered hostile to influence your population, and TikTok has actually activated this influence at least once directly. They tried to activate their users to protest congress from passing laws restricting them.
Basically, they have the ability to influence users, and they also have the will to do so as they’ve already shown. In what world eould they not be a national security threat? It’s also really hard for me to accept this argument from a Chinese company when China has the great firewall to “protect” it’d citizens from outside influence.
You can argue that it is not to benefit the citizens and rather just the state, which is fair. You can’t reasonably argue that the state has nothing to fear.
The argument isn’t that they’re “evil”, it’s that they could be used as tools by strategic rivals.
Tiktok is probably used 10 times as much though (users x time on the app) and Temu isn’t spreading messages in quite the same way. Comparing apples and gerbils, whataboutism, etc.
So ban them too
What’s temu?
A Chinese-owned fast fashion hazwaste app
AliExpress clone but you can only use it after installing their app on your phone.
Oh I use the website on my phone. Keeps asking me to spin Some stupid wheel though.
In the fine print, you’ll see it says “wheel is for illustrative purposes only, all users will receive the best prize”.
It’s an emulator for the Nintendo GameTube
Fisher said that Americans have a “fundamental interest” in working with the publisher or editor of their choice
Bruh. Did you really just throw away all of your Section 230 protections?
Game on, motherfucker.
It’s called a desperate gambit for survival.
I mean. Why not?
The part that actually describes how the ban would work is at least one hyperlink away from the article.
If ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok, app stores in the US would have to drop the app, and Internet hosting services would be prohibited from providing services that enable distribution of TikTok in the US. Companies that violate the prohibition would have to pay civil penalties.
(5) INTERNET HOSTING SERVICE.—The term “internet hosting service” means a service through which storage and computing resources are provided to an individual or organization for the accommodation and maintenance of 1 or more websites or online services, and which may include file hosting, domain name server hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private server hosting.
Temu isn’t a social media network that has been known to boost specific narratives with their algorithm. The U.S. isn’t saying that China can’t sell and market to the American audience, just that they’ll need a supervisor if they want to mess with media.
