> TikTok is a social network that could not be made by an American company, due to its complete disregard for free speech and embrace of censorship.
This is nonsense. All the social networks have things they will remove and ban your account for, from spam and CP upwards (Instagram and FB being notoriously touchy about sexuality). It seems that TikTok is heavier about politics than most, but censorship is not a boolean.
>TikTok is a social network that could not be made by an American company, due to its complete disregard for free speech and embrace of censorship.
Huh? Are you just going to ignore Vine? Twitter completely screwed the pooch on Vine by not paying creators which drove many high profile influencers to move to Instagram. To attribute TikTok’s success to censorship is to eagerly insert your own political bias into their story. Regardless TikTok, née Musica.ly had already started gaining steam as an American company without any major decision on whether to participate in culture wars
> TikTok is an app designed for kids and No Politics policies make the app friendly for kids, which is preferable to the Youtube radicalization treadmill model.
I think this is a false dichotomy. You are mentioning two companies that play this game in bad faith. There is a middle-ground.
> What I love about tiktok is how they've managed to ban all political content.
This is... not my experience with TikTok at all. I think what you've just described is your own little filter bubble that Tiktok presents.
My Tiktok is very gay. Not that that is political, but I get a lot of trans rights content, queer issues/advocacy, BLM content, pro-choice content, "landlords are evil" content etc etc and usually its funny and witty and I love it.
Millions (?) of Americans have freely chosen to receive and interact with the app, wouldn't their freedom of speech allow them to enjoy the content they choose?
>Banning TikTok wouldn’t be a dangerous precedent. Authoritarian countries do that all the time.
Wanting to live in a non-authoritarian country, I think you missed the point you just made, or were just being sarcastic and it went over my head.
There's a theory that this push for a Tik-Tok ban is being funded by Meta, who can't buy it like it bought other competition like Instagram and WhatsApp.
> TikTok is imho one of the closest approximations of a marketplace of ideas
Given they are fairly aggressive at censoring views that run against progressive perspectives, can they really be a true marketplace of ideas? Topics like the lab leak theory or nuanced views on trans issues will net you a ban a lot sooner than on other platforms.
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Yes, Facebook's and Instagram's business operations are fundamentally accountable to American lawmakers, and thus voters, in a way TikTok is not.
No, they are accountable in the same way. You pass laws that restrict corporate behaviour, and then you fine/ban applications that don't follow them.
What you don't do is write a 'TikTok sucks so it's banned' law, while permitting the same problematic behavior from other vendors.
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The major problem with TikTok[1] is that it disrupts an American oligopoly on public mindshare, and the US is afraid of it for the same reason that CCP is afraid of Facebook, or the CCCP[2] was afraid of jazz music and Hollywood.
[1] The other major problem with TikTok is that Facebook and Twitter and another major tech company are scared of it, and instead of competing, are very interested in lobbying until it goes away.
> but you will become just like China: a state that censors information and speech from its citizens because the government is scared of it.
There are several legit arguments against banning, but this isn't one one of them. Banning Tiktok is not censoring information and speech, let alone doing it because of fear. If it were, then they'd also ban all of the numerous other methods by which people can talk to each other.
>And to clarify, those were bans. This is not. TikTok just needs to be sold to a non-foreign adversary country.
If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place.
> it isn't controlled by a company that is ultimately beholden to the US government.
The issue isn't so much that TikTok isn't beholden to the US government. The issue is that TikTok is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. If TikTok were Japanese or Korean or something, this wouldn't be a problem.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and (to a lesser extent) YouTube are weapons of psychological warfare that have been optimised to spread political misinformation and outrage.
TikTok, on the other hand, is just hot chicks dancing, stupid memes and Shrugging Black Italian Man. It reminds me a lot of old YouTube in that regard.
> There you have it. I've seen TikTok videos go viral being really critical of the US government including its foreign policy. The kind of video that would just be invisible or outright banned from Youtube or Facebook video. That's why they want to get rid of it.
Videos such as? Seems to me that the kind of videos banned on Youtube, Twitter or Facebook aren't really the ones that are really critical of the US government, especially the executive branch.
> Because TikTok is a software asset of a foreign adversary known to engage in covert activities and which is diametrically opposed ideologically with nearly everything the U.S. (however flawed) stands for.
You can make the same argument to ban Facebook because of its use by the GRU, and it would be equally silly.
I don’t use any social media, so apologies if this is a dumb question. What is TikTok doing that other ones like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook isn’t? The only difference I am seeing is that the parent company is China. Misinformation is omnipresent across all those channels too. So on what basis should we ban them?
Is that referring to the content or the company itself? I don't see how it's any more of a cesspool than any other social platform. Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? Every sufficiently large platform is filled with a very wide range of content, from great to awful.
As a company, I do agree they have shady practices, but again, don't most other social media apps such as Facebook and the gang use similar tracking and data collection? Of course that's a low bar to compare to but I don't see why they're being singled out here.
This is nonsense. All the social networks have things they will remove and ban your account for, from spam and CP upwards (Instagram and FB being notoriously touchy about sexuality). It seems that TikTok is heavier about politics than most, but censorship is not a boolean.
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