TikTok Says US Ban Inevitable Without a Court Order Blocking Law 110
TikTok and Chinese parent ByteDance on Thursday urged a U.S. court to strike down a law they say will ban the popular short app in the United States on Jan. 19, saying the U.S. government refused to engage in any serious settlement talks after 2022. From a report: Legislation signed in April by President Joe Biden gives ByteDance until Jan. 19 of next year to divest TikTok's U.S. assets or face a ban on the app used by 170 million Americans. ByteDance says a divestiture is "not possible technologically, commercially, or legally."
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hold oral arguments on lawsuits filed by TikTok and ByteDance along with TikTok users on Sept. 16. TikTok's future in the United States may rest on the outcome of the case which could impact how the U.S. government uses its new authority to clamp down on foreign-owned apps. "This law is a radical departure from this country's tradition of championing an open Internet, and sets a dangerous precedent allowing the political branches to target a disfavored speech platform and force it to sell or be shut down," ByteDance and TikTok argue in asking the court to strike down the law.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hold oral arguments on lawsuits filed by TikTok and ByteDance along with TikTok users on Sept. 16. TikTok's future in the United States may rest on the outcome of the case which could impact how the U.S. government uses its new authority to clamp down on foreign-owned apps. "This law is a radical departure from this country's tradition of championing an open Internet, and sets a dangerous precedent allowing the political branches to target a disfavored speech platform and force it to sell or be shut down," ByteDance and TikTok argue in asking the court to strike down the law.
Oh no! (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway. How's the weather?
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hot
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It's not really a good thing the way it's being done. US lawmakers are sort of skirting their responsibilities by aiming just at TikTok rather than implementing legislation that would protect the privacy and data of citizens.
Of course they have to protect the local social media consuming all our data
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What would a privacy and data law look like when it comes to a service owned and managed by a foreign power who dgaf?
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Similar to the GDPR. If they have a presence in the US then they'd face fines. If they don't have a presence then they wouldn't be able to take payment from US customers
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Yeah kind of, but still better than doing nothing.
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Let's add it up.
Takes low level access on users' devices, including local file storage and location data: check.
Can launch processes on its own, including deploying payloads: check.
Is owned and controlled by a hostile entity: check.
TikTok is a security threat, no matter how many fake CCP accounts farm modpoints on Slashdot to downmod their critics.
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I'm sure those users were fully aware and knew all the national security implications...
Notice all the ACs defending TikTok?
Re: Same security risks as Kaspersky. No surprise. (Score:2)
Scrotus is pro-American business. I think you will find that they are less enthusiastic about Chinese business which isn't engaged in enabling American business, but they absolutely love being associated with American security interests.
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No, the Congress has the power to regulate commerce and communications.
It falls well within their rights to do this. That constitutional authority rides a zillion miles higher than some silly EULA no one read.
I watch TikTok as a guest. I never login. I didn't click through a EULA. How does that apply in this case? By your logic, the Supreme Court will allow guests to be blocked but logged in account can continue using it. Which makes no sense.
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in order for it to be a primary news source, it first needs to be a news source. it is not.
a national disaster is when a propaganda channel is considered a primary news source for a sizable fraction of the population. You have it backwards.
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MSM propaganda and extreme partisanship seem t
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TikTok isn't better than our shitty corporate media news. It is just bad in a different way.
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And TikTok algorithms were written by a hostile foreign power. That's not ok, either.
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That's the point. You won't decide. China will.
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"Tik-Tok is the primary news source for a sizable fraction of the US population."
I am very afraid that you are correct in this.
"Losing it would be a national disaster"
Your first statement makes me regard such an event as more of a national boon, except that most users wouldn't replace it with anything better.
"and the courts will always side with ByteDance."
The First Amendment makes this pretty much a true statement, so all the above discussion becomes pretty much irrelevent.
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Anything is better than a hostile foreign entity.
Also, where do you think people got their news before 5 years ago?
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Anything is better than a hostile foreign entity.
Not always. Let's posit that ByteDance is wholly controlled by the CCP. Okay? Now, remember that TikTok embarrassed the US and state governments a lot during the pandemic by doing things like showing the Gavin Newsom video at the French Laundry or by showing completely hypocritical shutdowns of small businesses while Wal Mart was allowed to stay open. In fact, I had several experiences where I saw news stories on issues that were salient to my anti-authoritarian perspective. Some were widely disseminated an
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TikTok isn't the only place videos can be posted.
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TikTok IS censoring and propagandizing your news intake, you utter fool.
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I don't like the CCP, but it's not the CCP trying to censor my news sources and entertainment: it's Uncle Sam the Censor.
You missed this part. Uncle Sam is the big fat censor. They censored just as much as China, if not more during CV19 and any other shit they decide is "misinformation". Wake the fuck up, moron all governments are trying to control social media and censor it, TikTok is not my only source, but it's certainly one of them.
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First, you replied to me but quoted someone else. You replied to the wrong person, wrong thread it seems.
Second, to compare U.S. censorship, as bad as it has become, to CCP censorship, is ignorant. At least for the moment, it will get increasingly worse as the left rationalizes it more and more through the lens of "just a little more, gotta stop those evil Republicans" and "gotta save democracaaay!"
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First, you replied to me but quoted someone else. You replied to the wrong person, wrong thread it seems.
No, you neanderthal, I was quoting my original post you replied to saying "you missed this". You derped the whole thing and it flew right past you.
Second, to compare U.S. censorship, as bad as it has become, to CCP censorship, is ignorant.
No, it's not. It's accurate and they are similar in this respect. You need to pull your head out of your ass and realize our own government is behaving like the same bunch of filthy communists you constantly hate on. The CCP deserves it, but so does Uncle Sam. Why bury your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening? I'm more concerned with what happens in t
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First, you replied to me but quoted someone else. You replied to the wrong person, wrong thread it seems.
No, you neanderthal, I was quoting my original post you replied to saying "you missed this". You derped the whole thing and it flew right past you.
No, you derped it. If you're quoting a higher up comment, USE DOUBLE QUOTE BLOCKS. Like I just did. I did not say it, you did and I don't have the time to look up the comment history to see who said the thing I didn't.
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Also, where do you think people got their news before 5 years ago?
5 years ago those people took their news from Facebook. Maybe you heard about Cambridge Analytica...
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I get my news mostly from CNN and RealClearPolitics. But people use a million different sources. I'm just flabbergasted anyone would claim that losing TikTok's highly censored, propaganda 'news' targeting opposition politicians would cause the slightest hardship to anyone.
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Would the First even come into play? This is a foreign-owned entity. Are they in any way protected by the U.S. Constitution?
Inquiring minds want to know...
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"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
I don't see anything about foreign companies. OTOH, I also don't see the executive branch being Congress. Even the "interstate commerce" clause doesn't seem to apply.
Considering the "Alien and Sedition acts" (1798) I'm rather sure that
Re: Same security risks as Kaspersky. No surprise. (Score:2)
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"and the courts will always side with ByteDance."
The First Amendment makes this pretty much a true statement, so all the above discussion becomes pretty much irrelevent.
Does the first amendment protect the rights of foreign government free speech. The argument presented in this law is that this is speech from a hostile government. I'm not sure ByteDance has the freedom to extract the Chinese governemt from their operations. That can also be said about American corporations.
Personally, it's been some time since I believed that it's a government by the people for the people.
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A "national disaster." Ami?
But you're definitely not a CCP shill, right?
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Tik-Tok is the primary news source for a sizable fraction of the US population. Losing it would be a national disaster,
I might agree with your freedom of speech argument but if people at using Tik-Tok as a primary news source that right there is the disaster and shutting down can only make things better though probably not my much if they just switch to X/Twitter or some other social media platform.
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If TikTok is the primary news source for a sizable fraction of the US population then we've already suffered a national disaster.
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Yea, the same SCOTUS that has clear issues with corruption and being off the rails when it comes to pushing the personal political beliefs of members. It's time to make taking payments from any special interest a felony, so all those lobbyists as well, give them the option to provide who took payments, or go to prison themselves for giving bribes.
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That it HASN'T been banned until now speaks to how much money the chinese communist party dumped on lobbyists.
Oh, it's cheaper than that. All they have to do is promote a the videos of few influencers who name the names of the congressmen who signed off on the Tiktok ban. It's an afternoon or two of algorithm tweaking, users will do it willingly because their view counts will go through the roof, and if those videos make the rounds again a week before the election, they'll all but guarantee that 18-25-year-old voters will have a reason to go to the polls to vote out those Congressmen.
No lobbying money needed.
It's a company (Score:2)
that happens to have been founded by some people who live in China.
Tiktok's algorithms are designed to maximize engagement and revenue, just like everyone else's.
Very little room for (or sense in trying) deviant little brainwashing side-projects.
Unless... it's all a brilliant scheme to distract us unsuspecting decadent fools with dancing girls, while meanwhile.....
Maybe take off your red-colored glasses.
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How come the Chinese version is basically an educational site and the US version is the second lowest form of social media trash?
The world has changed. (Score:3, Interesting)
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I wouldn't say the world changed.
The primary problem is people tried to change the wrold.
But the world refused to change.
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Different place or time, same old story.
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China "proved" no such thing. Foreign governments do NOT have free speech.
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Nonsense. The strategy of appealing to Americans' xenophobia to achieve otherwise illegal domestic ideological or economic goals is tried and true.
Example, prohibition of marijuana. The propaganda:
https://sites.uab.edu/humanrig... [uab.edu]
https://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/w... [kqed.org]
The motivation:
Harry Anslinger, Commissioner of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics
(https://www.csdp.org/publicservice/anslinger.pdf)
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That's nice.
Anyway, there's no value in having your citizens taking drugs with street names like, "dope".
Maybe having millions of stoned out people wasting space is bad all on it's own?
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Maybe US Citizens should have this thing I often hear about called "Freedom", meaning they are adult enough to make their own decisions about the substances they consume? Then again, judging that the average mental age of your average US citizen is about 14, maybe they aren't adult enough at all.
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To be fair, less than half of Americans read at greater than a grade six (12 year old) level. Which I would argue makes it less moral to propagandize them, not more.
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I figured you were an "ends justify the means, so long as I like the ends" kind of guy.
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The American idea of free speech was not created in 1991, it was born 250 years ago when the First Amendment was signed. And opposing a foreign power's propaganda and influence tool is not the same as opposing free speech.
That is an insidious false equivalence.
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The "Open Internet" was always a daydream, kind of like the Wild West. People loved the freedom of the American West, before it was civilized. But civilized it was, and people had to start following rules, just like everywhere else.
Once the internet grew up past its original freedom-loving ways, it was bound to be locked down too. Remember when SMTP was completely open, didn't even require authentication? Right, those days are gone.
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It's not China's fault the USA has a Section 230 law, or the USA lacks a privacy law, or the USA lacks a genuine truth-in-advertising law, or the USA is strongly anti-socialist (despite having socialist services, such as education and vaccinations), or the USA is strongly pro-corporatism (a variant of fascism), or US-ians think their preferred political party will fix everything they dislike. It's like a naked USA touching it toes on a street-corner: If the USA is abused, that's a USA problem. The USA sh
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So you want to ban TikTok?
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My rant declared US hyper-partisanship is the problem. The country has a culture that demands extreme polarization and forces ordinary US-ians into ignoring poor leadership (See: Benghazi 'witch-hunt', Hunter Biden conviction). A lot of entities benefit from that incompetence. Banning one of them, for example, China, won't improve 'national security'.
Resolved: That You Should Get Off My Lawn (Score:2)
social media iron curtain incoming? (Score:1)
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Misinformation (Score:2)
TikTok is a blight giving a voice to people who shouldn't, not even counting the whole Chinese influence thing.
Re:Misinformation (Score:4, Insightful)
But misinformation is not unique to TikTok or any foreign-owned social media... if the concern was misinformation, then there should be laws against misinformation, not targeting a single source because "omg CHINA".
Ministry of Truth (Score:3)
if the concern was misinformation, then there should be laws against misinformation
Absolutely, and to make this work we'll need a Ministry of Truth to determine what the truth is so we have a way to clearly know what misinformation is. I can see this working out oh so well.
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They tried making a ministry of truth a few months ago but it got shot down.
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https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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Another reason to ban TikTok is it's full of idiots spreading useless medical information. I just listened to this report on NPR, written version here [npr.org] talking about how stupid GenZ "influencers" are arguing against using sunscreen as though it's somehow more toxic without it. And now dermatologists are seeing an uptick in people in their 20's with melanoma.
TikTok is a blight giving a voice to people who shouldn't, not even counting the whole Chinese influence thing.
That's not a TikTok exclusive problem though. That comes down to education. And since we've spent forty plus years gutting education, people no longer have the ability to reason or to think about situations from the perspective of "is this reflective of reality, or does it seem completely fabricated?" That's not an issue you fix by pulling information sources from people. Unfortunately, we're at a point where it would take a full generation, or more, if we switched to actually giving a shit about education
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No. It is not down to education. What it's the result of is the opening up of easy communication channels to everyone. Most people will be "sort of reasonable", but there will always be a highly motivated fractions that aren't...and the more extreme positions are the ones that are more noticeable. So the communication channels will tend to favor the more extreme views, as that attracts interest. (Note that "correct","honest", "insightful", or "truthful" doesn't appear anywhere in this formula.)
And peop
Why so long? (Score:2)
If politicians actually cared about 'saving us' then as soon as the Bill passed TikTok should have been banned until becoming compliant. That way there is no wishy-washy deadline that the next politician can kick down the road until the next voting cycle.
And nothing of value was lost (Score:1)
Seriously... nothing at all.
Except your freedom? what about /.? (Score:3)
Seriously... nothing at all.
What happens when they go after /.? parler? truth social? What about some retailer? I don't see an objective reason why we're banning TikTok vs any other site. I don't use TikTok...never will...but I am not really comfortable with this. I would prefer we have clearly stated rules and they have not objectively stated why TikTok needs to be banned or what they can correct about their behavior to avoid the ban...beyond not being owned by a Chinese company. Otherwise, this is arbitrary censorship and I'm
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Are any of those owned by a hostile foreign nation?
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ByteDance is only 1% owned by the CCP, so by that standard, probably all of them are. But the CCP's golden share in ByteDance gives their government a guaranteed board member, which on a three-person board, represents vastly disproportionate influence over the way ByteDance is run compared with what a 1% share in Facebook (for example) would give them. :-)
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Every Chinese company is literally 100% controlled by the Chinese military, by law. Even as a Chinese citizen, you are required by law to cooperate fully with the military in all aspects of their lives and business.
This was of course, always true, but they made it very explicit just a few years ago.
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The Chinese National Intelligence Law (2017) requires Chinese all Chinese citizens and organizations to "support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work."
IDIOT.
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Yes, people do make stupid moral equivalence all the time. Cuz they're stupid.
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Do they think their enemies, countries the like of China, Russia, and North Korea, have their citizens' best interests at heart more than their own citizens?
If you say 'yes' you're a fucking moron, or you're arguing in bad faith.
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Just because the US way of doing things is familiar to you, it does not make it the best way.
Do a search on US world rankings for Health, Education, Democracy, Capitalism, Corruption, violent crime, mass shootings, infant mortality, happiness, work life balance, freedom of the press, prison population, etc etc etc.
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None of what you just said has anything to do with what I said.
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The USA is not the country you think it is. If the USA thought it was in their best interests to sacrifice another country, they would not even blink.
And this...simply because they were going to go into competition to supply Bananas and how US elite were going to lose their control.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/... [zinnedproject.org].
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I literally did not say anything like any of that. But you keep straw manning yourself. I'll watch.
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What happens when they go after /.? parler? truth social? What about some retailer? I don't see an objective reason why we're banning TikTok vs any other site.
None of those other sites have a representative of a potentially hostile foreign government holding one-third of the power on their board of directors.
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This border already exists in the physical world, why is it so scary 'on the internet'?
The 'one world' internet is great until it isn't. Local social interactions are the first to whither.
But if you are someone with interests that don't match anyone in your local physical world I can understand why it might be scary to lose that. Nothing is
Re: Except your freedom? what about /.? (Score:2)
The ban is bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
99% don't have any stuff worth spying. The 1% (and that's optimistic) who actually are interesting to be spied upon, should get government issued phones, where all apps on the phone are vetted by an intelligence agency, or at least get a work phone which is completely locked down.
This ban is absolutely absurd. There are apps which ask for way more invasive permissions, which come from sources who are a lot less reliable than Bytedance.
If Tiktok gets banned in the US, the entire world is qualified to ban Meta and Google (in the least) over the exact same concerns. I wonder how much the US uses those platforms to spy on citizens (and their important persons) of other countries.
No, this ban is simply an anti-competitive action by the US government, no more, no less.
This is the same situation where there were concerns by the US government of the Chinese technology industry supporting its military. Certain companies were banned over this, and the Chinese tech industry is being targeted because they might support China's military. Here's the deal: in the US the tech industry also supports the US military. Do they get banned in other countries? Nope.
This obsession of the US government with the Chinese tech industry has exactly one purpose, and one purpose alone: to make sure China remains dependent on the US for its technology. God forbid the US might lose its hegemony!
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This global economy thing is proving to be a house of cards. Eventually all that will be remaining is one corporation that owns everything.
The global one big social society thing will also prove to be such a disaster. Everyone will be subscribed to one or two influencers and nothing else will matter because everyone will think the same because they simply aren't offered any other thought.
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If Tiktok gets banned in the US, the entire world is qualified to ban Meta
If you can make that happen, we've got a deal. Throw in Twitter while you're at it.
The rise of social media is probably the one thing everyone can point to as a cause for the rancor and discontentment we're currently experiencing; example: every economic indicator we have shows the US economy is doing awesome right now, but everyone still "feels" like it's terrible while they're in good shape themselves, most everyone they know is in good shape, we have 50-year lows on unemployment, 0.0% inflation in the m
Yikes! (Score:4, Funny)
If Tiktok gets banned in the US, the entire world is qualified to ban Meta and Google (in the least) over the exact same concerns
Don't threaten us with a good time!
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Oh please! Don't globally ban all social media companies! Whatever you do! Don't throw us in the briar patch!
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China has banned and blocked imports to stop outside influence on the people of China, so suggesting that the Chinese government should be able to operate without limits is absurd. It would be like encouraging members of only one political party in the USA to own guns, then complaining when those not in that party buy guns to deal with the threats that they are getting.
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On Jan 19th... (Score:2)
Wait a minute. I thought this was about national security...hahah... If it's so important, then why are we waiting that long? We should be shutting that shit down yesterday if it was THAT important.
Oh right, election year. If the government banned tiktok yesterday, Biden won't have a shot in hell at getting reelected because he will most certainly take the blame for it. So national security issue but clearly not THAT important, well, unless tiktok interferes with the election I guess.
Thirty Million Teen March (Score:2)
If the ban gets enacted as scheduled, it'll be interesting to see whether a few million teens from AcelaLand (and elsewhere, via bus) decide to defy their parents and descend upon Washington, DC (possibly, orchestrated directly or indirectly by TikTok itself) to protest/riot/throw a collective generational tantaum.
Seriously, if a riot with millions of teens broke out in DC, the authorities would be hopelessly outnumbered & DC would be fucked. It's not like the police or military would dare to use deadly
tik tok (Score:1)