My TikTok feed is full of content that I find interesting and educational, from creators who work hard to make something valuable.

For them, banning TikTok means the work they put in to curating an audience will be partially lost, they’ll retain only the followers who find them on another app. If they are monetizing, they’ll potentially have to start over. That may discourage some who are just getting started from developing their craft.

If china, bytedance, meta, or any other platform is collecting user data in such a way as to be a national threat they definitely need to cut it out and this should be regulated. For example, it should be impossible to identify the location of military generals based on where their wives access TikTok from, or who’s having an affair with who based on proximity to each other, or to develop a vast dataset of individually identifiable profiles of every user that could be used to selectively damage their character.

Aside from these problems, which are potentially solvable, I think the individual creator/maker economy is an awesome way to give more power to the people.

It has its bads and a lot of the content is worthless trash, but it’s also a really good way to see what’s going on around the world from those people’s perspectives. You see a lot of stuff that doesn’t make it to Reddit or Twitter.

It’s a lot harder to be against Ukraine when you can see the horrors minutes after a Russian strike.

The government hates it because they can’t control it. They’d rather people only see what the mainstream media says, and not the fact everyone sympathizes with Luigi.

The free speech argument is genuine, despite how much I hate the shady practices of the platform.

I don’t use tiktok, I’ve never been interested in using tiktok, and if it was just going out of business or something then I would give precisely zero fuckaroos.

But I don’t need the government making the decision to block it for me arbitrarily. I confess that I’m not studied up on the reasoning behind blocking it (I’ve mostly heard about security concerns), but if Congress and the supreme court actually cared about digital security, then they’d be passing a bill of digital rights right now. Instead of doing that, they’re set on going after TikTok specifically, which tells us two things:

• Because they aren’t passing blanket digital privacy rights, it’s likely that TikTok is not the only company committing these privacy violations, but they don’t want to punish the “wrong” company.
• Given the previous point, it follows that they don’t actually care about digital privacy (duh), so the actual reason for banning them is likely something else. Other people in this thread have pointed out that the US government can’t control propaganda on TikTok like they can other social media, but it could also be as simple as clearing the way for American competitors/lobbyists who stand to profit from the ban.

So yeah, like you I don’t use tiktok so I’m not directly affected by the ban, I might’ve even supported it if it was due to an impartial bill of digital rights, but reasoning behind the actual ban is clearly bullshit on principle just by being so specific, and it sets a dangerous precedent. You saying that TikTok is shit so you don’t care if it gets injustly and unconstitutionally banned is no different then saying that George Floyd was a criminal so you don’t care if he was murdered by cops sans-due-process. You’re being distracted, soulifix. Think about it, if the government cared about addressing the issues with TikTok that you brought up in your post, why are they going after TikTok specifically instead of addressing that behavior generally?

I hate everything the US government does

they’re banning tiktok because people there are denouncing the crimes of israel and, and the ties to the US gvt, and they can’t force censorship like they can on US-based platforms, which are as bad, or even worse, in terms of data protection (since they keep selling & getting the data break which will inevitably end up in chinese hands anyway)

A TikTok ban would consolidate more power into the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Arguably, that’s worse.

I don’t care about tik tok, I hate it. But its concerning how the government could just bypass the first amendment. They could ban Lemmy Instances next.

I enjoy tiktok (using Vanced) but I don’t care if it goes away tomorrow. With that said, I don’t like this ban as it sets a precedent where corporations can just ban the competition.

Look, TikTok is trash, but clearly the people championing this ban don’t care at all about data privacy or social media manipulation. Ban none, or ban them all.

The one true way to resolve this issue (IMO) is to pass a digital bill of rights, regulating these social media corporations, and forcing them to make their products safe for all ages.

Banning one of many is pissing in the wind, and I don’t enjoy urine in my face (no judgement if that’s your thing, it’s just not mine).

It matters whether the government can do things like this at all, because if they can do it to TikTok, they can do it to anyone and anything else. TikTok may or may not be a good platform, that doesn’t matter at all.

For me it’s not about TikTok. It’s about using whatever flimsy, poorly worded law they will make to ban a platform I don’t use to open the door for further bans and possible censorship in the future. A platform should be allowed to function if it can. If it’s horribly made, or supremely unprofitable it’ll find its own way out. I don’t use it, I don’t plan on ever using it, and honestly it doesn’t affect my daily life outside of my mother in law thinking that some of the pallet crafts on there are worthwhile and me having to explain that they’ll look good for a moment and then fall apart rather quickly.

Because it’s clearly being banned, not because of privacy violations, not because of the nefarious impact of a foreign government, but because of the content that is shared on it. It is the only major social media platform with a strong pro-Palestinian viewpoint on it. And the people in Congress have been caught on camera explicitly stating this is why they want to ban it.

I hate Tiktok. I don’t use it. Never have. But I still don’t want to see the US turn its internet into the Great Firewall of China 2.0.

The leaders in Congress cannot stand the idea of there being a social media platform that is popular in the US that isn’t hosted in the US. Why? The answer is simple - control. All the US social media platforms are heavily influenced by the US government. Hell, most of them openly contract with the NSA. Facebook is an NSA contractor. These platforms get a ton of money from the US government. And despite what conservatives bitch at in regards to “being censored,” the real censorship is against anything that doesn’t advance US power and influence. Outside of Tiktok, the major platforms heavily censor pro-Palestinian messages and stories. Go to r/worldnews and post anything other than “Palestinians deserve to be vaporized,” and you’ll be banned within 5 minutes. It’s literally that bad. Even when outright bans aren’t in place, the platforms will severely down shift any pro-Palestinian content and keep it out of peoples’ feeds.

“Beware of he would would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.”

Regardless of how we feel about TikTok (I dont like it either for the same reasons)

The ban isn’t about privacy violations by the owning corporation or because of challenges or mental health, but rather that the US government (directly or by proxy through the owning corporation) isnt the one in control of the information collected or the algorithms.

Due to its younger user base and lack of US based corporate interests, things that US corporations would normally block, remove or downplay with their algorithms are allowed. This means the culture and information that would normally dissapear from US media and social media instead on tiktok tends to be much more liberal and available. On the other hand, information critical of china or contrary to their culture may be less visible, and your information is getting tracked by china instead of the us.

This difference was exemplified in the wake of the United Healthcare CEOs assasination. Traditional US media was extremely critical of the shooter, and dropped any presumption of Luigi’s innocence or deniability prior to the conclusion of his court case. Comments and posts were removed for displaying anything other than giving him the death penalty (hyperbole, but). They denied that there was a problem and downplayed peoples concerns with the US healthcare system and billionaires.

TikTok on the other hand (and smaller social media sites like on the fediverse) showed immense support for Luigi, and expressed their disdain for the US healthcare system and the ruling class.

Same for the war in ukraine, especially for the genocide in gaza perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinians.

The government and ruling class is upset that they dont have the personal and tracking information of TikTok users, that they cant control the algorithm, and cant ask the company to stop showing things that make them look bad or could potentially be used to create a movement against them. Its those very trends that travel quickly through tiktok that have the potential to be dangerous to them.

there’s also an economic problem with banning tiktok: tens of millions of americans rely on it as a source of income and its banning will effectively become the biggest layoff in american history and will have detrimental impacts to our already fraught economic situation.

I don’t use it because I learned about it from my boss’s middle school girls soon after it was released when that was the main demographic so I still feel super weird about adults using it.

That said banning a social media platform at the federal level is a super authoritarian move and is rather unprecedented. Federal book banning will be next (oh no a chinese author!).