cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12876226
The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance.
US officials have cited the widespread commercial availability of US citizens’ data as another source of national security risk. The US government and other domestic law enforcement agencies are also known to have purchased US citizens’ data from commercial data brokers.
Thank you for those resources, they are pretty compelling, especially the Twitter thread, which if true, is good evidence that China has used the data to target specific individuals. That’s a problem. And the individual bit is important because I’m unpersuaded by “mass data collection” arguments because a) everyone is doing that and no one seems to care and b) basically the same data is freely purchasable.
The harms associated with the first few links are definitely real, but I would certainly be interested in an apples to apples comparison to other platforms, especially YouTube.
But I think it’s also important to recognize that there is a lot of good that comes from TikTok as well. If I can get personal here, I’ve moved away from family and friends to work a demanding job, and I’ve found some sense of community on TikTok with people who are into the same hobbies as I am, which I’ve had difficulty finding IRL. It has also given voice and community to [certain groups of] marginalized people, and, (for better or for worse) is a major platform by which creators can generate revenue by which a lot of them survive.
Obviously a lot of that COULD and SHOULD be hosted on a different platform without all these issues, but right now they are not, so we need to make sure not to throw the baby out with the bath water.
I pointed it out in other comments, but I feel as if the current bill provides too much power to the executive to unilaterally ban foreign outlets from functioning in the US. I’m not a nutty free speech absolutist or anything, but I think anything that has the potential to shut out alternative perspectives like that takes us closer to Chinese style censorship, not farther away.
Ironically, I wonder if a better solution is mandatory integration of positive content algorithms like it seems like douyin has. But then the question is, who picks what’s positive? Is religion positive? Patriotism? Depends who you ask.
All in all, I think social media of all kinds has been basically the worst thing to happen to the world in my lifetime, but I think that that the cat is out of the bag on it and we’re just pretty fucked.
Thank you for the honest and level conversation here, I do appreciate it.
Thanks for sharing that perspective.
Btw, everyone zones in on the “ban Tiktok” narrative, whereas the proposed bill actually says that Tiktok would need to be sold to another company not in China. That’s the bill’s first choice, but if that’s not possible, THEN ban Tiktok.