TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal
TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal
The app - which faces being banned in a matter of weeks - says it will now take its case to the Supreme Court.
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!
64Truly free markets suck. The inevitably become dominated by a small number of monopolies, who fuck over everyone else as hard as possible every day ...
28Yeah. That's.. what I said. It's a two-in-one--I recognise that regulation is necessary, yet people seem to oppose it.
Until it benefits them (or, leopards).
8There'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".
5
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.
15Tik 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.
40Dude, the US based social media platforms are no better than TikTok. Its all rotten to the core. X is a great example of this.
14
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.
4"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.
3
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.
43I'm with you. Tiktok is about as "healthy" as vaping. There are other just as bad (if not worse) apps out there, and the reasoning is stupid and has some first amendment concerns. But I won't die on the protecting Tiktok hill.
17
Again. Not a TikTok ban. A ByteDance ban.
If BytDance sells, TikTok stays.42Yeah 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.
8Yah. Whatever happens, TikTok will NOT be leaving the US market.
1
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.
29I 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.
26Well hope you're ready to pay way more in tax to support those losing their jobs with this decisions, all several million of them.
All so the Chinaman Boogeyman youve invented (which has nothing to do with tiktok) doesnt know you like watching girls doing cute dances.
3
Ban Twitter too, if you ban Tik Tok. Don't do half ass job if you are taking away users choice.
26They don't have a problem with what is being done, just who are the ones doing it.
38I 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.
3
...and nothing of value was lost
21This is nyot goob.
Ya tiktok bad, but this is about ensuring america has a monopoly over local social media. If this really were about safety, Facebook would also be fucked
18@sleepybisexual @tardigrada It's also about the rich people of the world stopping anything the non-rich use to organize.
10Ya. Sure tiktok was still run by rich fucks but other platforms are just as bad. Used to be an extreme anti tiktok person but this isn't about tiktok. Its about capitalism
5
My friends and family are trying to find ways to get around it like vpning and changing region lock app stores to china or something to access it.
You can take the people away from brainrot but can't take the brainrot from the people.
18changing region lock app stores to china
This wouldn't work, given that TikTok isn't allowed in China. This cyberweapon is only meant to be used against foreigners. Either way, don't help them and instead actively dissuade them from trying to keep their addiction alive.
12While technically correct, they do have it in China itself, it's a modified version called Douyin. It is more restricted, censored and tightly controlled.
I agree that it is a cyberweapon, but don't think that it's only used against foreigners, they use it just as much to observe and influence their own population.
Finally, I would like to point out that to a lesser extent this is also the case for a lot of USA owned social media and tech companies. Edward Snowden's revelations for example indicate this. While the extent of government control and influence is much larger in China, I wouldn't underestimate the influences of Meta, Google and Microsoft for example.
5
It's not going to be banned. It's a forced sale or spinoff. They'll still have TikTok. Media just made up the term ban. It's just that tencent has ties overseas and they don't want the foreign influence
2
Is there a workaround for the people who are in the US when and if this happens?
I can imagine sideloading(?) but how about the less tech-savvy people?
7Don't use tiktok
24Maybe. But its a bit pointless if only a subset of the user base goes through the effort.
6Yeah, side loading and or vpns. You'll probably still be able to use the web version regardless because Americans are stupid so I doubt whoever is enforcing this is going to block all venues.
3
How does this functionally work?
4the primary source of this is annoyingly hard to track down for legislation that passed Congress and was signed by the President.
it turns out that's because it was part of H.R.815 - "Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes."
if you want to read the actual text of the law, this PDF starting on page 61.
the gist is that it's illegal to:
Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
everyone calls this a "ban on TikTok" and it kinda annoys the shit out of me, because as far as I can tell, the website tiktok.com is probably still going to be available in the US.
what this law actually does is require Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, for US-based users. and makes them subject to a fine of $5000 per user if they don't comply.
I'm generally in favor of more regulation of tech companies...but this is a really fucking stupid way to do it.
12Permanently Deleted
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I guess the gif I posted about seeing this before was spam. Sorry, everyone. Didn't mean to violate a rule :/
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The only thing Trump and I have probably ever agreed on.
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