They aren’t protecting you. They are protecting themselves from what you may give their enemies. Don’t think just because the federal government is doing something “for the people” that nominally it’s not about the government itself. National security is literally the government protecting itself by protecting its citizens.
Facebook sold personal data to a foreign organization called Cambridge Analytica who used it to influence our elections. If their motivations are to protect us via protecting themselves, why is Facebook not banned, and not even in the discussion of being banned?
Did occurring in 2015 happen to make it less bad somehow? We sure as hell weren’t passing laws to ban facebook back then either, so I’m not sure what point you think you’ve made.
And we should ban them too. I love this argument. We need better user data privacy laws, and this whataboutism does not change the fact that China is a hostile foreign nation.
I can appreciate that people view Google and Meta and so on as very similar in their transgressions. But as was pointed out in the original comment, this is a cost to benefit ratio type of analysis for the federal government and they gain more by keeping Meta and Google going and can enact other measures to prevent that from hurting them (usually reactionary), so to them this is fine. It is and always has been about what the US government can to do protect itself and enrich itself. Enrichment doesn’t always come in the form of monetary value.
If you’re upset at your own government (or government adjacent tech entities) gathering this type of data from users, you should be for banning them too, not keeping tik tok.
I am for severely restricting the ability for all corporations to gather and sell user data. You think I’m making a whattaboutism or whatever debate buzzword you want to conjure up; what I’m taking issue with is the argument that the reason they’re getting banned has anything to do with that data collection or “national security”. If that had any truth to it, Facebook would have gotten the same treatment, or at the very least would be in the conversation now since they do the same exact shit. If this was about data collection they would pass regulations about that instead of targeting one specific site to unilaterally ban.
Wrong. They let Cambridge collect it on their platform. Huge difference.
The rest of your post is irrelevant.
Pretty much this! Also it is much easier and cheaper to tell Google to stop offering tiktok in their app store then it is to build affordable housing where it is needed…
Yea but where? There’s a push for it in my state. Drove past a new area that will be a neighborhood of cookie cutter SFH, probably with driveways too short to contain full size vehicles. And they’ll cost more than half a million so I’m not sure how that’s affordable. Anyway. It’s being built on the flood plain. 8/10 flood factor.
We really need more high density housing closer to urban centers, but Americans seem to be allergic to it. Everyone wants their single family house. Also too, without subsidies they’re is no profit incentive for developers to build the necessary housing stock, they all shoot for “luxury” housing because it’s the most profitable.