Not that it personally affects me- I’m not in USA and it’s one of the platforms I dislike the most. But I can’t find a concise explanation for why.
I’ve searched for news articles and those I found either don’t address the reason behind the ban and talk about US politics, or are vague about it, saying it would collect user sensitive data.
I’ve also found lists of countries banning TikTok from government devices, okay I understand that, and some countries banning it completely because of cultural sensitivities, which I doubt is US’ case.
Fair enough. What kind of user sensitive data would it be collecting? Isn’t this what most social media apps do already? What makes TikTok stand out in this regard?
It basically boils down to the USA not wanting China to be the ones collecting all that data. Which is a bit tenuous. The owner of TikTok is ByteDance, ByteDance is registered in the Caymans, with global headquarters in LA and Singapore. The current CEO is a Chinese national, but lives in Singapore. TikTok does collect quite a lot of data, but the FB app collects at least as much. It’s a bit of Sinophobia.
My personal pet theory is the US alphabet boys have a deal with all the other social media giants for first pick of data they mine, and TikTok didn’t want to play ball.
This is just what I’ve kinda thought, it’s by no means absolute fact, and I look forward to hearing what other people think/know about it.
The NSA had a plan to implement a wide spectrum data capture on US citizens … which it cancelled right around the same time Facebook got a large angel investment.
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/04/investigative-reports/the-military-origins-of-facebook/
You are nearly certainly correct that TikTok did not want play the same game as other US social media.
I fucking knew it!
Sounds like standard practice for our government. Personally I just hate vertical videos and short form content, so anything that takes a machete to those is okay in my book. Yeah I’m Gen-X, what of it?
While data privacy is a concern, in my opinion the real fear motivating the government is the massive control China has, indirectly, through TikTok, over citizens’ beliefs and culture.
As another comment pointed out, Facebook (and Cambridge Analytica) had an enormous role in Donald Trump getting elected. That is the kind of influence and power that shouldn’t be in the hands of a foreign power (ironically, it’s the kind of power the US has wielded for generations over many countries). And the US especially doesn’t want China or Russia to have that power.
If China felt inclined, they very likely could push to have the algorithm modified to fit a particular agenda - say perhaps promoting a pro-China candidate - and most users would barely notice and slowly be drip fed posts that nudge them in a particular direction. People in power could start to lose that power at the behest of TikTok.
As many will likely point out, there’s a good arm’s distance between China and TikTok right now, as far as we know, but it’s possible they are more involved than they let on (much like the NSA and Facebook) and could become more involved over time. It’s a risk the government is unwilling to take.
A good example of what kinds of things can happen is when TikTok published a post to every US user with their congressperson’s number, urging them to call them to protest the ban. I’m certain that scared the shit out of the US government and probably did more to force the ban down mid than anything else.
Could they? Oracle has access to their source code to please US lawmakers. Supposedly it’s because they have access to US users data, but they can already buy that from US data brokers all over the place. I think it’s more likely one of the theories below. They want to keep the monopoly to US rich interests and be able to push people towards algorithms they can control (for example, if the youths start to be against Israel).
IMHO you’re kinda right. There’s a trade war going on between the US and China, and data is damn valuable so it’s just logical to prevent the enemy access to your own citizens’ data, specially since we know how it’s used to manipulate elections (Russia’s been proven guilty of it for the 2016 US elections), but also Facebook was at least paid to do so.
Now I do agree with you in that the ban is probably due to the wrong reasons though. But it kinda doesn’t matter to me.
Yet I am not US citizen either, I’m an EU citizen, so my opinion on US politics ain’t quite relevant. I just wished we would do the same here in Europe and more consequently. Both the US and China do have laws that require companies to hand over there user data to their respective country’s agencies, which is technically illegal under GDPR for EU citizens’ data (they shouldn’t be able to leave the EU). So we should ban all social media that stores data on servers belonging to US or Chinese companies (leaving basically only fediverse instances on european servers).
A few years ago, all of that was China and nothing else but China.
Maybe these “international” items are just deliberate actions to conceil the truth?
Literally the first sentence of ByteDance’s wikipedia article says they’re HQed in Beijing. Which means the CCP has unfettered access to the company’s property and can strong-arm their leadership to do their bidding (as is standard for all Chinese businesses).
The data TikTok collects is extremely sensitive and is digital gold for things like training facial recognition models, which China totally does not use for bad things
But nice try, comrade bot
I literally did what everyone says you shouldn’t, and looked at the first result on Google.
Also get fucked with the comrade bot shit. I don’t have any issue with the Chinese as a people, their government is fucking dystopian.
I was going off what was obviously incomplete information, which I did try to make clear in my post. You think cause this is .ml account calling me a comrade bot is some kinda gotcha, but there’s a pretty wide spectrum of people on this instance and you can take that shit and fucking shove it.
Sorry man I just think it’s irresponsible to be spreading disinformation. You even admitted at the end of your post that you have no idea if what you said is true, so like, why even post? You’re contributing to the problem the same way bots are