TikTok’s bid to overturn a law which would see it banned or sold in the US from early 2025 has been rejected.
The social media company had hoped a federal appeals court would agree with its argument that the law was unconstitutional because it represented a “staggering” impact on the free speech of its 170 million US users.
But the court upheld the law, which it said “was the culmination of extensive, bipartisan action by the Congress and by successive presidents”.
[…]
The court agreed the law was “carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary, and it was part of a broader effort to counter a well-substantiated national security threat posed by the PRC (People’s Republic of China).”
But the free market is free, guys! Look at this freedom!
Truly free markets suck. The inevitably become dominated by a small number of monopolies, who fuck over everyone else as hard as possible every day …
There’s some equivocation going on there: On the one hand we have a theoretical model, due to Adam Smith, that says if you have perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information then you get very very nice results and that’s called the free market. Then you have peddlers of institutionalised market failure saying that any regulation that would make people’s choices more rational, or give them more information, is making the market unfree.
In short: While classical liberals and specifically ordoliberals are saying “there shall and must be regulation, so that the real-world market comes closer to approximating Smith’s free market”, neoliberals say “there shall be no regulation because Adam Smith doesn’t like monopolies but we do so let’s poison the conversation by calling inherently unfree markets free”.
It helps to think before you type.
The free market is free if and when you play by the same -democratic- rules. Look at Romania, just to name an actual example. Tiktok is much worse than Facebook and (most) others, and being worse is not an easy task here.
Tik Tok is not much worse than Facebook. The only reason is because Facebook cooperates with the US agencies, while they don’t get the information from Tik Tok. US does not like that citizen data is going to China instead being able to collect it themselves. From privacy standpoint of the end user, it does not matter who has the data; lost privacy is lost privacy.
I think Tiktok is much worse. It’s about a foreign country whose government is pursuing a dictatorial policy trying to interfere in foreign elections (again, look at Romania, for example).
The argument of FB collaborating with the US gov is true I guess, but isn’t valid here. China is doing the same, the Chinese government is banning the Western version of Tiktok, too, let alone all other non-Chinese apps. So the ‘free market’-argument doesn’t make any sense here, it’d be even hypocritical.
Except all the social media are doing the exact same thing. This is pointless political posturing
Not quite. TikTok has been shown to tweak their algorithm against criticism of China. That’s the real reason for the concern. Their ability and willingness to purposefully manipulate people.
Big corporations cannot survive in a real free market. For that very reason real free markets do not exist. So the ‘legitimate businesses’ which do not do things as well as others do can survive.
As horrible as it sounds, no regulation is what makes a free market. But there is no free market because when there is talk of free market, it just means extreme regulation to stifle small, extremely small business. These businesses run by people who work with their own hands are what give the large ones a run for their money. They’re the real obstacle to large entities which do things in not the best way (so almost all of them). What people are left with are legitimate small businesses allowed under regulation after everything has been restricted already… and with the methods these follow, they’re no harm to the big entities. The common human be damned, they’re forced to choose from the least bad option for anything.
‘Free market’ in politics is a joke, an intentional joke. It wouldn’t be a little bit surprising if the ones who advocate for free markets most have a laugh, outside of public view, at people who actually believe their points.
To be fair… real free market would see the crashing of many industries as things go back to being a bit more practical. A slow process which takes even luxury to be affordable—but the meaning of luxury changes. Things inessential for survival would then be deemed luxury and such things, good things which are also very accessible, would be fairly common around. The main flaw with that, however, is the purpose of luxury. Luxury is hardly used to refer to things merely inessential for survival, they’re considered mere vehicles of showing your status and power (even though a relatively simple trick would be to not pay no heed to them). They are objects to enable one’s pride, ‘pride comes before the fall’ be damned to them. One can have solace in the thought that the fall really does come, though.
Note: I do not support deregulation, it just means to allow big corporations to fuck around at the cost of other humans. But then, I do not really support anything.
“Free markets” is a complete farce. The only free markets are in places where no government exists like Somalia. In a true free market, anyone could take over a business by sheer force since no laws would be there to protect them.
That’s not what the term means. It is a historical term with a precise meaning, and that meaning is not synonymous with “unregulated”.
Again. Not a TikTok ban. A ByteDance ban.
If BytDance sells, TikTok stays.
Yeah that’s all it really says. Media made it into a ban, but it’s just that China has major influence over it and the us doesn’t want that, so they need to sell it or spin it off to an American company. Or they can shut it down, but no one is just going to set that much money on fire and walk away. The modern world I guess.
While the justification for this is primarily based on TikTok being a privacy and data security risk due to it being owned by a Chinese State Organ/Corporation… which is hilarious bullshit because the US does exactly the same thing with all the net data that goes through US corporate social media…
Brainrot is a real thing.
Shortform video platforms are addictive the same way cigarretes or heroin is, extended use ruins your cognitive ability, ruins your attention span, increases depression and anxiety, and fhe format promotes an absurdly fake, narcissistic culture, scams, and mis or disinformation.
Algorithmic profiling is definitely not unique to TikTok, but it is used by the app, and this often pigeonholes the user into content/advertisements that often becomes more and more extreme, manipulative and exploitative of the user.
Though this is being done mostly for stupid reasons, and it isn’t stoping US Corpo brainrot inducing social media platforms, I’ll take what I can get.
Honestly? Good.
I don’t really see this as a free speech issue. TikTok isn’t being banned because of the kind of speech that’s on there, it’s being banned because it’s a predatory app created as a means of soft power by a hostile foreign nation. Does that mean we should also shut down Twitter? Yeah. Probably.
This isn’t some newspaper with dissenting opinions, is a foreign intelligence operation that simultaneously interferes with the normal operation of our democracy, puts our citizens in danger, massively inflates narcissism, and collects our user data to hand to a country that literally is actively spying on us.
Frankly, I’d be okay with tossing any similar social media with obfuscated engagement algorithms anyway. Make YouTube and Facebook bring all that shit above board while we’re at it. All this is is corporate regulation, and I fully support it. Fuck TikTok.
I hate TikTok but I hate even more that the ban seems to have been successful this time because of Israel. Lots of people (Romney, etc) have said that TikTok must be banned because it’s the reason why young people don’t support Israel’s genocide.
I don’t like CCP propaganda being fed to Americans, but let’s be real, CCP propaganda about Israel is way more honest than domestic American propaganda.
While I’m on the subject, Facebook, Google, etc, are pretty near equally as evil.
Ban Twitter too, if you ban Tik Tok. Don’t do half ass job if you are taking away users choice.
I mean the issue with TikTok is that they give the data and videos over to the Chinese government to be able to mass process it and search for vulnerabilities or enable social engineering attacks on the US government.
Meanwhile Twitter/X is totally different in that they give the data and videos over the US government to be able to mass process it and search for vulnerabilities or enable social engineering attacks on US citizens.
