TikTok was banned. TikTok has been restored.
It’s hard to really care anymore. No matter what he does, the MAGA fan base will praise it.
First, Charlie Kirk wanted to ban the “evil CCP-compromised app TikTok”. Now he’s giving Trump credit for not banning it.
I just don’t give a fuck anymore what these people say.
Having lived with someone with dementia, chaos is expected. If this kind of behavior still surprises us, we have not yet accepted what’s happening.
The ban was never anything besides security theater in the first place.
Going after TikTok was meant to put Democrats on the spot by asserting they won’t regulate the app because the rank and file right thinks liberals are secretly Maoists. Now that the liberals are permanently out of power, they want it for themselves.
Took you long enough, PZ. =P
You want help from Trump? It’s easy! Just wave a couple of billion under his nose. Anyone of us can do that, right?
I still don’t see why I should care that TikTok is owned by the Chinese commies.
I don’t have a TikTok account and rarely have any reason to end up on TikTok.
Mostly I watch music videos on YouTube anyway.
IIRC, the issue was that TikTok might be vacuuming up my personal information and sending it to China.
Not good but how is this different from what is happening already?
Which is that Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter now X, Instagram, Meta, YouTube, Hula, etc.. are already vacuuming up my personal information and using it for their own purposes, not mine.
Or they would. I don’t have accounts on any of those websites either and avoid anything that Zuckerberg or Musk have any control over.
I’m a lot more concerned and afraid about our own oligarches who are Over Here, wrecking our society than the Chinese equivalent which are Over There, wrecking their own society. Which group has the most leverage and interest in US citizens and why?
To the Chinese, I’m nobody but a potential consumer of Temu or Schein.
To the oligarchies, I’m an enemy of their power and money and in the way of them completely taking over and owning the USA.
@6: Boy, you really have this completely missing the point stuff down to a fine art, don’t you? I am awestruck.
Charlie Kirk back flipped so fast even Simone Biles was impressed.
Jordan Klepper on the Daily Show did a piece on Trump’s TikTok flipflop. They used two clips. In one Trump says he won young voters by 34 points, in the other he says he won them by 36 points…by next week it will be 110%. Klepper went on to note that Trump lost the youth vote by 11 points. In any case, I smell someone…Elon?…wants to by TikTok and they’re just trying to manipulate the price.
I was reading about the owners of TikTok last night, ByteDance. Nothing really surprising, although in addition to Beijing (headquarters), they are incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Per Wikipedia:
Several of those are American investment firms, in fact, 60% of ByteDance is owned by investors outside of China. Primavera is Chinese owned and SoftBank is Japanese. In 2021 a Chinese government investment fund bought 1% of ByeDance. Disney is also tied into TikTok.
The big winner of the uproar over TikTok is RedNote which apparently is largely owned by China. Out of the frying pan…
Follow the money.
TikTok is too valuable to fail.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the end, TikTok is owned by one of the Trump MAGA oligarches.
As I pointed out in the earlier thread, this is Fascism 101.
Gain control of the mass media. Even Goebbels knew that almost a century ago.
Viktor Orban of Hungary and all the other fascists have done the same thing.
My State Farm agent told me about this “great program ™” called Good Driver or something that involves putting a Bluetooth transponder on the windshield and connecting it to an app on your iPhone. The gizmo tracks your speed, breaking and LOCATIONS, giving you a rating on what a jolly good driver you are. You get a discount on your coverage for giving State Farm all this information. Once I read the details of this Big Brother scheme I opted not to do it.
Then, just this week, our fascist AG, the indicted Ken Paxton, filed a lawsuit against Allstate for doing the same thing and selling driver location data to Who Knows Who. Must be really bad if MAGA Ken is after them, or maybe they didn’t give him a big enough cut.
@#7 Ed Seedhouse
I think Raven laid out the situation quite correctly and succinctly. You OTOH, merely sneered at them with nothing to back your post up. Would you (could you?) remedy that?
It’s stupid revenge for China closing their internet to Xwitter, Amazon and Google.
@ Doc Bill #11
I get why you would be freaked out by that program, and honestly I am a little squiggly about it myself, but if you look at it from the insurers POV it does make a lot of sense: they find out you were traveling at 70MPH at 3PM last Tuesday. Well, should they be concerned about that? If you were driving on a freeway posted for 65MPH, no not really, but if you were driving through a school zone posted at 15 MPH, then hell yes they should be concerned. People got mad when car insurance companies charged more to people living in certain zip codes and various other actuarial data points, yet the fact remains that some drivers are going to cost them a lot more than others. Now, they have the ability to evaluate your driving habits as an individual and charge you based solely on how you drive. What is fairer than that?
It’s been pointed out in various places that the one who really wanted a Tiktok ban was Zuckerberg.
https://www.404media.co/a-tiktok-ban-is-a-gift-to-meta-and-instagram/
He kept pushing the “China controls Tiktok” to Congresscritters at various hearings and such. Congress took it seriously.
As noted, the CEO of Tiktok has no doubt shown that he can kiss the ring and grease the outstretched hand just as well as Zuckerberg. The Zuck is no doubt pissed, but what can he do?
Well, he can take solace in banning other competitors from being mentioned on Meta.
https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/
For quite some time I”ve been considering the idea that TikToc is the one major information source in the USA not controlled by US elites. Uncontrolled information is a threat to the powers that be.
@12
So at least he now has company in missing the point entirely then.
I never cared in the first place.
(So, I can’t stop caring)
@#15, Owlmirror:
Not him alone. AIPAC and associated pro-Israel lobbying groups very specifically wanted a Tiktok ban because they couldn’t censor people who were pro-Palestine on it, as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have all been repeatedly caught doing. And that’s why it was bipartisan.
@ 17 Ed
So the answer is no. You can’t back up anything. Thanks for playing.
The disregard for truth exceeds even Orwell’s expectations. At least The Party knew they were lying. Kirk and his ilk don’t even seem to care anymore.
I’m sure that’s fine. They clearly don’t care what they say either.
Also, the second childhood gerontoligarchy does too know what it wants! And it will remember it any moment now, but in the meantime it’ll ponder what it can do to gut the working class and rip off the poor some more.
Silentbob, No. 20, and moarscienceplz, No. 12, here’s the point that you missed.
The oligarchs want my information so they can send me advertising and try to get me to buy their products. And as annoying as it is to open my inbox and find fifty spam emails, I can simply delete them and it doesn’t really do me any harm.
Communist China, on the other hand, is arguably the most oppressive, brutal, human-rights-violating dictatorship on the face of the earth with the possible exception of North Korea. Whatever issues you may have with the US government, China is ten times worse. And they want my information to further their imperialistic ambitions by making it harder for the rest of the world to stand up to them.
So no, the two are not the same. I have the same opinion of the oligarchs as everyone else here but in this case they are the lesser of two evils.
On social media everybody thinks they are a star. It is a form of addiction. The government, companies, and corporations are using this to gather information about everyone to help them exploit people even further. This (to me) is the lowest common denominator. The battle over control of the different social medias is a control for money and power.
There have been hints on social media that some of Trump’s fanbase is already feeling a bit put out by things like Trump deciding H1b visas are all right, the more general influence of MAGA newcomers like Musk, Trump’s new memecoin moneymaking scheme, and not getting to sit on Daddy Trump’s lap at the inauguration. Whether this expands or fizzles out will become clear over the next few months.
jkrideau@16, content on a social media service run by a Chinese company will always be at the whim of the Chinese government. Specifically in Tik Tok’s case it’s not allowed on the Chinese internet.
@#25 timgueguen – content on a social media service run by a Chinese company will always be at the whim of the Chinese government. Specifically in Tik Tok’s case it’s not allowed on the Chinese internet.
Then how do the Chinese control their citizens? Oh, never mind.
Never used TikToK. Never will use TikTok.
Does anyone know if the app can be used as a vector to spread things like Stuxnet? My assumption is that anything connected to the Chinese government, no matter now loosely, that has such capability will be used either for intellectual property theft, or infrastructure attack.
Does anyone know if the app can be used as a vector to spread things like Stuxnet?
Yes and no. Stuxnet used more precise injection vectors and was designed to manipulate specifically Siemens PLCs.
There is lots of other malware. For example, if you want to accept the fear mongering, the TikTok app itself could contain Chinese government code, just like US apps contain NSA or CIA code. Its potential as a distribution system is huge. Incidentally that is why the NSA was pushing the government to deinstall Huawei network gear: it doesn’t have the backdoors that Cisco gear has.
The big danger would be something like the “TokTok install government malware on my phone challenge!” which would net a few million new endpoints.
Basically what is going on is that the Ministry of Truth is deflecting people’s concern that Big Brother is watching them by screaming that Immanuel Goldstein is maybe distributing malware.