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.

    • Academician@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      I don’t love Facebook, but I’m not sure I understand the comparison. The objection here is that TikTok is operated by a Chinese company. Meta is a domestic company.

          • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Tiktok never played a key role in a successful foreign plot to illegally influence the outcome of an American presidential election. Facebook did in 2016.

            • Steve@communick.news
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              4 months ago

              Is that a defense of TickTok?
              I don’t disagree about Facebook, but that doesn’t mean TickTok isn’t a national security threat.
              I’m not sure what your trying to argue against here.

              • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                I’m saying that Tiktok is not a national security threat and the only reason that congress is pretending so is because they don’t like or understand the people using it and because it’s a non-donating threat to some of their biggest sources of legal bribes.

                I don’t use Tiktok myself and I’m in no way a fan of their awful algorithm, but that doesn’t give politicians license to just make shit up while blatantly ignoring the REAL threats because they are paid to.

                • Steve@communick.news
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                  4 months ago

                  That would be a very reasonable assumption. Accept that ByteDance does in fact donate and lobby quite a lot. It just isn’t working very well for them.

                  I’d argue that a foreign power using a local platform for propaganda, is one kind of threat. And a foreign power owning and controlling the platform itself, can be a more subtle and probably more potent threat. They don’t have to create the content like Russia did. They only have to tweak the algorithm a little, so as to surface content they want slightly more often. That would be much harder to prove.

  • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I’m with Jamaal Bowman on this one, this is just about silencing and deplatforming pesky young people that ask lawmakers to protect the environment and stop genocides

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Or at least ending any pretense of it being a reliable source for anything involving US corporations and their competitors.

  • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    You mean app stores such as the one run by a US defense contractor, advertising platform, and spy agency poorly masquerading as a consumer-facing company?

    Or the one run by the company infamous for subjecting their overseas workforce to such atrocious working conditions for so little pay that their method of keeping employee turnover to a minimum is suicide prevention nets?