BREAKING - Tiktok has now SHUT DOWN SERVICES in the United States, noting “A law banning Tiktok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate Tiktok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!”
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On one hand, yeah, on the other hand Biden literally signed the law banning it. If Democrats didn’t want Tik Tok being banned to be associated with them and to give Republicans an easy, obvious win by unbanning a wildly popular app, then they could have just… not done that. This was just completely an unforced error on the part of the Democrats.
I’ll get a bit conspiratorial here, but if what Bernie has said is to be trusted in his video about oligarchy, up on his youtube channel, then Democrats are largely owned/influenced by billionaires who would benefit from the increased Trump support. It would make sense to do this, but yeah it could also just be a blunder, given how Trump was the first one to propose the ban and Democrats could take it as “hey if we do this, we’ll win the moderate right support again!!”, though who knows.
As is traditional, the Republicans drafted a law, got bipartisan support to push it through congress, and then after it passed publicly flip flopped their support for the law they just wrote when they realized they could score political points by complaining about it while the Democrats would hold to their agreed support.
This way the Republicans get the law they want, get to claim any benefits of said law by pointing to their voting record, and get to blame anything people don’t like about it on Democrats, all at the same time.
Meanwhile there are no consequences to their bad faith actions because the Democrats will just bend over and take it in the name of bipartisanship and working across the aisle because half of them are Republicans, they just don’t want to call themselves Republicans and leadership is willing to fight tooth and nail to protect said members.
Or instead of targeting tiktok specifically, they could have chosen to pass a data privacy law and actually did something worthwhile instead of pointless, unpopular grandstanding. Haha just kidding, they would never do anything to reduce even slightly shareholder value.
Apparently the law is written so that it would also be applicable to other apps like RedNote, if a president were interested in applying it.
It’s never been about data privacy. Never.
It’s always been about control. Always?
Snape: “Always.”
Accurate perspective but another one is this was a very successful social engineering of US politics by its global adversaries.
Dems have been been trying to pull back the moment they released they got played but its to late. Above messaging is additional salt in the wound.
they could have easily repealed it
How did they “[get] played”? Like the poster you replied too said, it was a completely unforced error on their part. It feels like they tried to jump on the right-wing “China bad” bandwagon and it bit them in the arse.
Its pure speculation but i suspect china may have purposely pushed for the tiktok is spyware narrative and fueled the china bad bandwagon themselves.
They made it a real privacy nightmare but also by made sure western leaders know it is a privacy nightmare.
Something i noted is that European parlement and many individual European govs have in recent years put up laws banning tiktok for gov officials and all staff but not the general public/citizens.
you know you can just…stop typing after that, right?
you’re making the same racist assumption that underlies the TikTok ban itself - that Chinese people are inherently nefarious, untrustworthy, always hatching schemes and plots and subterfuge.
the US does not need to be “tricked” into passing laws that are rooted in anti-Chinese bigotry. it’s basically a national pastime.
Lol, This implies that Chinese citizens somehow have a say in what their government elite desires. I don’t think they are much different then anyone else.
If it makes you feel better the US puts just as much energy into manipulating other countries as other countries do into them. And may i remind you of the chat control Europe routinely tries to sneak in a ban encryption for all its citizens without them noticing. my original comment addressed “global adversaries”, i only mentioned china replying to a comment specify about china. So not racist, I am anti any centralized power structure because power always corrupts.
The fact is that governments have always (amongst other things) been rooted in a centralized resource and population control. The big problem as i would call it is that the emergent complexity of global politics makes the dynamics so complex not a single person, not even a president is capable of knowing more then the micro-environment they exist within. This is precisely why states feel a need to create extensive bureaucracies and specialized agencies which historically have a tendency to evolve into centralized powered structures themselves and power always corrupts.
No nations, No borders, No gods, No masters
Honestly this just sounds like more conspiracy theory than fact. Remember Occam’s Razor, the simplest solution is usually correct.
Like don’t get me wrong, TikTok is absolutely an extension of soft power, and it’s likely that the Chinese government has access to the huge amount of data the platform collects. But I think anything beyond that is just not likely.