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obtain vpn
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use tiktok as usual
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- Obtain VPN
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…the same shit is on Facebook.
The same exact mindless drivel bullshit.
They don’t care what the content or format is, just who owns it, and where the data is flowing. They want the data flowing into the U.S. and sold out. Rather than into China and sold out. That’s all it is.
This is only great news if you are Mark Zuckerberg and you want a near-monopoly on social media.
TikTok could have sold to an American company (read: a company that we can hold legally accountable for bad things that their product does) and made billions of dollars in the process. They chose not to, for some reason, and thus knowingly opted to face a ban in the United States. Those were the options and they knew it.
As I understand it American companies doing business in China almost always have to go through a Chinese company in order to operate legally and make products available to the Chinese market. Platforms like Facebook are already banned in China and must be accessed through a VPN because they don’t play ball with the Chinese regime, so why should it not be reciprocal?
Until TikTok is being managed and operated by a company that can be held legally accountable here in America, they are nothing but a security threat and a backdoor for the Chinese government into every cell phone of every person who is dumb enough to install that shit. Is that what the people want to hear? Probably not, but it’s the truth.
I wouldn’t install TikTok on my phone any sooner than I’d install RedStarOS on my PC, because the implications of using a proprietary, closed source application with ties to the Chinese regime should be fucking obvious to anyone with bare minimum technical knowledge. Likewise, I wouldn’t blame a Chinese person for being skeptical of Microsoft Windows or X.com for their close relationship with the American government. To think otherwise is just not smart.
You are aware that no western social media is allowed in China, are you not?
Fighting tryanny with tryanny isn’t the answer.
It’s been the answer in international trade for the last 1000 years.
Are you implying we should firewall free internet like china?
No. I’m implying that in general, international trade works by shared openness or shared closeness. If one country or economic region an import tax on something, the reciprocal thing is likely to be taxed by the opposite partner.
I was responding to someone saying “oh this just creates a monopoly for Zucks” when in fact the Chinese social companies have a monopoly in China (an ENORMOUS market) because our products are blocked over there.
So what we are doing is in line with the norm in international trade.
Is anyone else besides China doing this? Cannot really call it international norm if 1 country is doing this.
I don’t think I’ve explained my point very well, or you’ve misunderstood what I’ve said.
My point is all international relationship is tit for tat. Since China chose to block western social media, it’s not unreasonable for the west to block Chinese social media.
Excellent
Cheering on censorship and protectionism, the American chauvinist way
Obviously being on Lemmy you get people who support open access. But seeing the state of the average American, and the results of their latest election, maybe it’s time for big brother to step in a little bit…
Yeah, full support for the Trump administration to have the power to say which social media is acceptable, that’ll fix everything! /s
If that’s the logic, explain why meta and google still exist.
… They said the populous of Lemmy was more scrutinizing of privacy than other platforms. He never said anything about the people using meta or Google. I’m not sure people here are even reading what others are saying.
To me it comes like this. If China won’t allow a Chinese owned app to be used in China, it gives other countries reason to worry about it. Meta and Google can be controlled by the U.S. government and are allowed within the nation they are owned in.
Is it a good thing they collect so much data, no. But this law has nothing to do with privacy, and everything to do with the flow of usable data and who controls that.
It’s not “censorship” to ban a product like TikTok any more than it’s censorship to ban any other product. TikTok had the opportunity to sell to an American company (the same way all products on the Chinese market are forced to go through Chinese companies) and, for reasons that only they can explain, they chose not to do that. They would have made billions of dollars selling, but perhaps money isn’t their primary concern…
At any rate, we absolutely need to have a separate conversation about all social media in terms of privacy and data rights (though it’ll never happen under Republicans), but that doesn’t mean TikTok is free to continue being a completely opaque and unaccountable backdoor to the Chinese government.
so America bans tiktok for the same reason china bans Facebook
Short videos are dumb. Are people really that addicted? I have it and go on it sometimes. And by sometimes I mean like 10 minutes per week. The videos are OK at best, but half of them are ads or live weird shit and the search function for relevant topics are trash.
I’m guilty of using tiktok half the people on here have never used it. But you’re exactly right a few years ago it was actually not too bad, but these days every other video is an advert for some AliExpress level shit.
Ive tried to use it, my wife is on it a lot. I can get through a few videos before the constant changing bothers me and I physically feel a need to get away from it. Its to quick, too short, too shallow. My brain is wired nearly the opposite.
I stay the f away from it. You haven’t spent enough time to properly train it. As you watch, it tracks time spent on each video, interactions, passive and active choices and slowly builds a dossier on you.
As you keep going, it occasionally throws adjacent stuff in. It starts tossing you stuff that other people with your likes watch. If there is content on there that you’ll appreciate, it will eventually find it. If there is enough, it’ll stream it to you non-stop.
They’ll find people who share your political alignment and say precisely what you want to hear. If you like brunettes with flowy blouses or redheads who are gym rats, you’ll get them. If you like skeptics or preppers, you’ll get them.
My wife gets a lot of her news from it, I find probably 1/3 of it to be suspect and 90% of it biased toward what she wants to hear. Nothing there is telling both sides of any story. (to be clear we have the same political/ethical views, but I’m a touch more skeptical about journalism and random influencers, especially popular influencers)
My wife gets a lot of her news
Wow, that’s scary. I’m guessing a surprising number of people do this as well.
For my wife, it never occurred to her that she could trust tiktok influencers far less than even corporate journalists. They have to ethical requirements on tiktok, no verified sources or corrections or redactions, or any accountability at all.
I had to point that out over multiple videos, although to be fair some of the people on there do put up a front like they are legit to trick people into taking them seriously.
The same nonsense happens on YouTube and Instagram. Just look at the motivations, these “content creators” get paid via ads (so views) and corporate sponsors, so they don’t get rewarded for truth, they get rewarded for saying things their spomsors and viewers like.
I’m not saying they’re intentionally misleading people, but journalism is hard and clickbait and copycat “journalism” is easy, so they’ll tend to do more of the latter.
I think its the mentality in america of, “whatever I need to do to get ‘mine’ is good”.
Theres a reason people ask “was it worth it” about nearly everything here. I dont know how to convince people theyd be happier if greed didnt drive their values.
Why is it shocking that people hear about topics through social media? Seriously? Why? I heard about the UHC shooter through TikTok. And it’s not necessarily just memes, there are “real” news accounts on TikTok. The same way I hear about new on Lemmy because people post links to stories. Like the literal platform and thread we are currently discussing.
It’s not shocking that they hear about news through social media, it’s shocking that people trust it anywhere near as much as traditional journalism.
There’s no incentive for someone on social media to fact check or tell any more of the story than will get them views.
Did you fact check this article?
Not personally, but it’s from a media org I trust, and they generally do a good job citing sources.
If the BBC got caught lying, it would be big news. If a random influencer got caught lying, people would shrug and say, “that tracks.”
So how is it different if someone sees a news story from BBC’s TikTok account? https://www.tiktok.com/@bbcnews
For all its bullshit, YouTube is the same. I’ve found myself on it more lately precisely because of the reasons you’re saying. It’s amazing how much niche content there is for any taste, even ones you don’t yet realize you have.
Youtube at least realizes when its suggestions are in a rut and gives you that little popup offering to show you stuff slightly outside of your current echo chamber. Just how different it actually is I can’t really prove.
I actually really like short-format videos for recipes so you don’t have to watch somebody chopping onions for ten minutes. Also, Ronaldo highlights set to Brazilian phonk are kinda cool. Other than that, the format seems pretty worthless.
Framing this as people being pouty because their favorite social media is being banned is a shit tier take. This is a problem of censorship and government overreach.
Yes with the attention span of a ground squirrel.
Why do you think they all talk vast with stupid ADHD inducing shit on one side. (Minecraft parkour, GTA V driving or subway surfers)
Because people will scroll away if you don’t jingle keys in front of them
As someone who never uses this platform, this comment made me chuckle.
I was on tiktok and even created for it for a bit, but it did get exhausting quickly after getting flooded with a painful amount of ads. I do like short form content though, I’ve been enjoying Loops!
It’s about xpntrolling the narrative. Tiktok is one of the few (if not the only one) popular social media apps that doesn’t censor everything that the US government decides. Just look at how much Palestine stuff goea around there compared to anywhere else.
Most videos on my feed are 3 - 10 minutes, they are ttending less short.
I like tiktok, it’s the only “social media” I use other than Lemmy. I normally hate finding video content, YouTube sucks, and their shorts are even worse. But on Tiktok I get served all sorts of interesting videos, I will stumble upon some cool topic that has been chopped up into five 10 minute videos and then find the video or a similar video on YouTube or something.
It’s an excellent way to discover things fast. You just can’t use it as a good source, need to do external research.
My biggest gripe is as you said, they have really seemed to amp up the ads and stupid live crap.
ITT: Braindeads defending government censorship of the internet as if Zuckerberg won’t immediately replace the void with his own platform or by buying out TikTok in a bid.
Banning one platform would not magically get rid of short attention span and brainrot you fools. Every social media company already copied or utilizes the same techniques as TikTok, which is already a massive platform because they don’t spam ban or regulate content as hard as Facebook and YouTube do.
It is insulting that a Chinese run social media platform provides more freedom of speech online than its US competitors.
They’re banning it to remove competition, congress does not care about its effects on privacy or health, otherwise they’d have done something about Faceebook, Insta, Twiiter, and YouTube decades ago. They pulled their usual committee shenanigans to pretend to care by calling in CEOs to testify, and then promptly accepting a shitload of lobbying money.
Competitor lobbying doesn’t even enter into it, I’d guess.
The US State Department won’t tolerate Americans being exposed to media that doesn’t adhere to its view of the world. What large groups of Americans think - and vitally, the bounds of what they are permitted to think - is a national security ‘issue’ in the eyes of the state. No such problem exists with Facebook, cable news, the establishment newspapers, etc. As Chomsky teaches, propaganda is equally about what isn’t in the news.
Banning one platform would not magically get rid of short attention span and brainrot you fools.
Ah yes, the old “Taking this action won’t solve all of the problems therefore we should do nothing” argument.
You think the communist party of China will allow western billionaires to buy one of their asymmetrical psyops weapon systems? Ha!
Absolutely none of this law was ever about privacy or mental health. No one ever claimed it was. The law is banning tiktok because it is based in China. That is the reason given by the law itself. The possibility that meta or Google or some other American company will buy or replace tiktok and operate the same way is not an unintended outcome. It is literally the whole point of the law to get bytedance to sell tiktok to an American company.
Hence them saying it’s braindead to say otherwise.
What would be interesting to see is if other countries ban Facebook because it’s a “national security risk” lol.
From China’s perspective, Facebook probably IS a “national security risk”, which is why it is already banned over there.
For American to do business and sell products in China, they almost always have to go through a Chinese company. I’m sure that’s part capitalism and part accountability theater, but it’s just a fact. So why is it such an outrage for America to ask TikTok to do the same?
Agree on this except I have doubts that this statement is true
It is insulting that a Chinese run social media platform provides more freedom of speech online than its US competitors.
Yeah tiktok is the reason we have words like unalive, I wouldnt call it freedom of speech just incompetent moderation.
Words like “unalive” are a form of doublespeak just to get around the restrictions, it’s silly.
I have to admit, it’s a bit bizarre seeing so many comments holding up TikTok as if it’s a free speech bastion away from western-run social media companies.
Isn’t this the one where people started saying “g*y” because there’s only one sexuality and Taiwan doesn’t exist?
I cannot decide what to support here. On one hand, Tiktok is a blight and a cancer upon the whole world. But on the other hand, I’m kind of a libertarian, anyone should be able to do what they like.
I get it, but also can you imagine a foreign country banning Amazon because “it means the US can see what you’re up to and it gets to choose what deals to push at you” etc?
I mean… Facebook for god’s sake…
Being protectionist makes sense sometimes but it screws you over when other countries start banning your apps in favour of home grown alternatives…
The US should ban Amazon
The US should have humane worker rights.
The People’s Republic of China has banned Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc). Brazil has banned Twitter and the European Union is considering it.
Brazil banned Twitter because Musk thought he could just ignore their laws.
Well, TikTok refused to abide by the law saying they had to be sold to a US company, which is why they’re being banned, so it’s technically the same situation, if for different reasons.
Not really, Brazil’s demand was to stop spreading seditious material and to engage with their court system.
The American law is to bar them from the market. Reducing that to “follow the law” is a bit disingenuous.
The was hilarious 😄
Ah well that makes sense then
It really doesn’t. Banning Tiktok is banning certain types of speech. Same goes for Twitter/X and Meta. It’s like banning a book because it wax heavily influenced by an adversary country.
Brazilians and Europeans should be very angry about doing anything that resembles banning speech.
China has banned practically all US social media sites, not just Meta-owned properties. A bunch of other sites are blocked too.
China generally wants major internet services to have servers in China itself, similar to how the EU wants citizens’ data to remain in the EU. In order to operate servers located in China, you need to get a license from the Chinese government (ICP license). Large sites that don’t do this tend to get banned by the Great Firewall.
Uh, there are several countries that ban Amazon. And amusingly, the EU Parliament has also banned their employees from entering the building.
I wasn’t aware, thanks
It never had appeal in the first place…
easiest way to lose is to never try
Tell basically all young people that.
You not liking it does not mean it doesn’t have appeal.
I was being facetious
Cool, but the rhetoric on Lemmy around non-federated social media being stupid indicates that many others here aren’t.
Trump said he’ll unban it, if he does that’ll be the one brightside of the new admin
Your instance is the same kind of malignant cancer as TikTok.
^ Imagine being this mad about TikTok. This is another reason why libs lost the election.
Ugh wah wah wah
The security and privacy of hundreds of millions of people being penetrated to the benefit of a massive hostile dictatorship!
I’m so angwy! How dare an actual militaristic attack on the USA be allowed?! RRRrrgh!
ugh liberals are insufferable.
A bit of a self-report to note the opponents to the platform hold a stance of personal liberties and freedoms, which you oppose as a user of said platform.
I didn’t say you were wrong, I said you’re insufferable.
Ah, fair enough
I don’t see it as a bright side, but I also think it should be unbanned. Don’t get me wrong, I think TikTok is cancer and nobody should use it, but I also don’t think the government should decide what propaganda I get to consume.
The government should absolutely do a public campaign against it and keep a close eye on it, but don’t ban it.
In the meantime, we should look into passing laws to solve the underlying problems, which would impact Meta and other big social media orgs as well. Or maybe fund independent social media alternatives that are FOSS.
But don’t ban speech. Banning TikTok feels a little too close to banning books…
I think TikTok appeased the right by changing their algorithm. Charlie Kirk is apparently doing extremely well on the platform now.
Actually tiktok is not just china, its the soviet union too, used by putin’s services…
I honestly cannot tell if this is parody.
Incorrect. Control of US TikTok servers was handed over years ago. The State Department has been actively censoring content on the platform, but I guess they’re having trouble keeping up.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/
Free links to American spying devices:
I wish those would be banned too.
I know you’re trying to whataboutism it but they’re all terrible and should go away.
Not meant to be whataboutism, just awareness… ism.
The difference is that those make you stupid and depressed as a side effect of making money. In tiktok it’s the main goal.
Ha, eat that China! Now you need to pay millions to American oligarchs for all our user data!
USA!
Until a flood of TikTok users bankrupt them, anyways.
Not entirely sure how you’d make the economics of hosting endless video files work without great big piles of money and some way to get even more big piles of money on a routine basis :/
Yeah, video hosting is notoriously expensive. It’s why there’s still not a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else but Google could afford to run the platform at a net loss for the amount of time required to build a profitable user base.
If even a tiny percentage of TikTok’s US user base decided to move to Loops, that may be enough traffic to not only completely disable Loops, but would probably impact the rest of the Fediverse at large, too.
The millions of free porn sites would beg to differ…
Free? They are ad-ridden and unlike YouTube, porn videos are removed from the site all the time.
Yet none of them really paywall you for using an adblocker.
Actually come to think of it, porn sites are the only place I allow ads (obv blocking the pop ups and other dark pattern fuckery)… probablys because I learned to ignore them entirely as a teen before ad blockers existed.
Interaction with the fediverse is very limited atm
Companies or creators can run their own instance can’t they?
They can. And if at any point it becomes untenable, you can just archive whatever you host, shut down your instance, and put the videos up for download somewhere.
I think this could lead to bigger activity pub instances collecting revenue for allowing company owned instances to federate. aka ad revenue.
Could you explain that idea in more detail? I’m not really sure I understand how that would work in practice.
Private instance for company/creator: Hey, can we federate with your instance?
Large public instance: pay me.
If a company is going bankrupt as a result of hosting a video service, they’re not hoping to be able to afford to archive and make it available for download either.
AFAIK, it’s still not had the code released, so at the moment there’s just the one site and you can’t host your own.
Not entirely sure how you’d make the economics of hosting endless video files work without great big piles of money
You’re absolutely right, which is why BitTorrent never managed to take off. Totally unviable, doesn’t work at all, and definitely isn’t the technology underpinning federated video services like PeerTube.
At one point BitTorrent/P2P was responsible for something like 30-40% of all global internet traffic.
The thing is the protocol never really developed beyond some useful, but minor evolutionary updates.
You say “never really developed beyond” as if that isn’t a synonym for “finished and working fine.”
The fuck is the point of banning tiktok if the Chinese government already hacked our entire communication network lol
to suppress video coming from Gaza and Lebanon? just a guess; but I’d imagine that’s at least a part of it.
That and labor organizing, environmental awareness, and many other things where the absence helps the rich get wealthier .
It’s also just a blatant theft; there is a lot of money to be made here however it goes down , and that money goes to connected arseholes
It also broadcasts propaganda disproportionately highly and harmful ideologies as much as that little list of yours.
On its face the platform itself is neither good nor bad, but the massive theft of identifying information, photos, and personal conversations leading to increasingly common hacking and theft from Chinese sources tips the scales a bit.
Because when US politicians advocate for a single, global market, and a single, global internet, it is with the understanding that US firms and allied parties will dominate the space anyway. When that is no longer the case they get about as nervous as the Chinese got when they went and built the Great Firewall and made a clone of every popular western platform. Now that US/Western dominance is seriously challenged, we are seeing more and more signs of protectionism.
Because it’s bad if China has the information. It’s fine if “US entity” had the information. The ban is ultimately fake. No one banning the app cares about TikTok, they just hate that China is getting the information they want. What will happen is some US based company, Oracle last time, but someone like that will buy a sufficient enough stake in the company and the ban will not happen. It will be declared “safe” and the data will go to a US controlled entity, but also still secretly to China. (The later will be revealed years later, to the shock of no one.)
They already have a condition of “sell to an American entity or shut it down”
Theater.
Cybersec is hard. There are always more holes. China exports a LOT of stuff with holes. We can do little more than stick our fingers in the dyke. This looks like they’re doing something.
What they’re not going to expect is how much people hate them for taking their entertainment away.
China already doesn’t control US TikTok servers.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/
Could I interest you in a bridge?
What are you suggesting? That Congress didn’t force TikTok to hand over control is US servers years ago? You didn’t see it in the news at the time, or you just don’t believe it?
Or do you think China has been censoring on behalf of the state dept?
I think they still get all the data of what goes off the servers, and I think that the Chinese side of the company still has ultimate control over what gets displayed.
The servers being in the US means that the Chinese government doesn’t have to have access to the servers but it doesn’t mean that they still don’t have the equivalent situation silently going on.
I really don’t care if China gets my data. They don’t have any jurisdiction over me. I’m concerned about domestic surveillance.
They aren’t banning it because China can see what you put on it, they’re banning it because China can control what you see from it.
Except there’s no evidence of that.
There’s no evidence that China can control what’s shown on a China-owned app?
In case you’re still unaware, the China govt is the ultimate authority within China, even in private companies. More so after recent crackdowns on their oligarchs and billionaires. The idea that they have no control over tiktok is plain laughable.
TikTok has gone out of their way to show they’ve siloed American operations. There has been no evidence that the Chinese government could or would breach that.
So you’re arguing that TikTok US, despite being fully owned and controlled by China, has full independence and decision making capability? Even regular western companies don’t have that. What the home office says, goes. At most, their American operations are making sure they’re abiding by US law with regards to data and such (and even then I’d highly doubt that, given all the forensic breakdowns about TikTok sending encrypted data to China).
If it sends encrypted data to China it would be the first I’ve heard of it. The worst the news could come up with last time is headcount data. And yes they went on an entire project to silo it. At the end of the day they want the money, and TikTok shop provides it. Other than that they sell the same info Meta does on the open market.
And yes they went on an entire project to silo it
So? It doesn’t matter what internal bureaucratic sleight of hand they pull. The bosses are in the CCP, and when they say ‘jump’, the answer is going to be ‘how high?’. That’s how private companies work.
At the end of the day they want the money
TikTok wants money. The CCP wants other stuff. As long as the CCP isn’t making demands, TikTok will make their money. The moment the CCP says to do something, TikTok will do it.
If it sends encrypted data to China it would be the first I’ve heard of it.
No shit. Do you think they would tell everyone? Do you think it would be easy to prove?
I really don’t think China is nearly as interested in siphoning data as controlling the algorithm. Getting people to see more pro-Chinese videos, more anti-US videos, and some bias toward candidates they want to see win is completely doable without exfiltrating any data.
Basically, all the stuff people are pissed about Musk doing to Twitter (changing algo to push right wing content) are just as feasible for TikTok to do, with the main difference being China is a state actor, whereas Musk is a private billionaire.
We should be very worried about any social media app that’s very popular and controlled by an org with political motivations.
Except for the extremely obvious disparity between chinese tiktok and american tiktok.
Nothing at all.
So are you saying they run the algorithm in their country? On their internal mirror app? The exact same setup TikTok offered the US?
I don’t see how that’s the evidence you’re looking for.
https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/china-is-hurting-us-kids-with-tiktok-but-protecting-its-own/
It’s extremely well documented that TikTok offers extremely different experiences within China than it does elsewhere.
I’m just a bystander, China sucks, but referencing a NY Post opinion piece feels a bit like using a Fox News segment as a source. They’re pretty trash.
There’s individual sources for practically every paragraph in that article, so I’m not seeing the issue in this case.
Of course it does, and for two major reasons:
- Chinese law is very different from American law
- China’s domestic propaganda interests are quite different than it’s international propaganda interests
OK, so lets say they moderated it the same way here as they did in China… All good now?
I don’t think it matters at all how tiktok is actually being managed or moderated in the US - Americans simply do not trust anything Chinese.
The cold war never ended.
By moderating, if you mean using the same algorithm for the content feed, it would make a significant difference to a lot of people I believe.
Inversely, they’re banning it because the US cannot control what is posted on it— regardless of whether the central party in China can (they can and they do though so I am not sure why you’re debating it).
Really? Then you can point to the news article that lays out evidence of that actually happening and not just quoting FUD?
What the government wants out of this is to make an example. Then whenever they want something from Meta, Google, Apple, X, etc, they’re going to remind them of TikTok while pointing to the third section of the definition for foreign control. The catch all that says the app can be considered foreign if the government claims the owner has been unduly influenced by a foreign entity.
Meta is already a willing partner of the USSD, they don’t need to ‘make an example’.
SD?
Are we still supposed to be on this shithole’s side or something?
I don’t care about winning the global economy. Do you? Does anyone who isn’t a sociopath that would. Drown a thousand babies for another nickel of quarterly earnings?
The nords are quite happy without playing herp derp growth or die.
Uh reply to the wrong comment?
That would actually help the Democrats though, so it will probably be reversed
Left vs Right is a distraction.
The fight for a better life is Top vs Bottom.Sure, I’m just saying that Republicans are taking over and they rely on the disinformation machine to have a chance to get elected so banning TikTok goes against their interests.
They already have a massive disinformation machine across every medium.
