The House approved a bill that calls for China tech giant ByteDance to divest TikTok or the popular social video app will effectively be banned in the U.S.
I think delisting it from ios and android appstores would probably be half-sufficient to kill it. Most people won't go out of their way to sideload an app or use a website. Making it so American advertising companies cannot exchange money with tiktok would probably be the other half. No money, extra effort = dead platform.
Edit: just read the draft bill, it probably deosn't even go far enough. It does the first half, but not the second half. It looks like under the bill, advertisers as businesses would still be able to interact with the platform, but the platform would only be accessible via a browser, and no US hosting/vps provider could host any of their services. Any violations would be a civil penalty of up to $500/user (presumably with the penalty of completely being cut off from us businesses if they didn't pay up).
Honestly seems more reasonable than I'd have initially given it credit. It mostly solves the "a foreign adversary could update the app to use my phone as a wiretap" or "a foreign adversary could use their legitimate business dealings to spy from within a datacenter" without actually creating a great firewall.
Everyone keeps saying “Tik Toc ban,” but this is more of a ByteDance ban. If they want to sell off or spin off the business for markets outside of China, they could 100% do that.
What could possibly be wrong about an incredibly engaging experience, that makes me lose track of time, and constantly keeps trying to sneak Joe Rogan content into my day?
Everyone on hexbear is too busy echo-chambering “L liberals” to actually see this for what it is.
I’m so grateful for my frontal lobe development, without it I would’ve indulged in those conversations and lost additional brain matter trying to argue
isn't it odd that tiktok (which is used by the youngs) is this MAJOR SECURITY ISSUE but facebook (which was credibly implicated being used by the russians to interfere in the election but not used by the youngs) and twitter (which is actively promoting disinfo and white supremacy including from the site's owner and also not really used by the youngs) are skating off scott free.
seems to me that the issue is that established media and political influencers don't know how or can't get any kinds of traction on tiktok that they could via twitter or fb so they're trying to get rid of it. with the existence of facebook and twitter and their known privacy issues, getting all out of sorts about tiktok because they're controlled by the chinese when in reality any government could get their hands on that kind of data is very much misplaced outrage bordering on hysterical. especially since the chinese could get your data by means other than tiktok.
rule 1 is don't put your private self out on public social media.