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?