As an Indian, welcome to the party.
The only thing I really feel bad for from this is the small town food banks/animal welfare societies/sanctuaries that were able to find alternative sources of incomes through Tiktok via their partner programs and through a wider audience. Apparently Instagram doesn’t pay as well, and Youtube shorts are abysmal for discovery.
I used to volunteer at an animal shelter, and my city dropped funding for them in 2023. Tiktok donations helped a lot more than you’d think. Highly encouraged people reading this to drop some food/donations off at your shelter of choice if you have any to spare.
That’s interesting, last I had heard TikTok was morally abysmal when it came to paying creators. Unless that changed in the last few months then any Tiktok creator would make more money on YouTube even with a smaller audience.
TikTok being banned is good. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter should be banned as well. Closed, source, manipulative and harmful algorithms should be banned and these apps all use dark patterns in their design.
The fediverse and open social networks where the algorithms are open source and well understood and the user is allowed to choose their own algorithms is the only safe way to use social media.
Honestly I think it’s a terrible precedent to set. Now the government can just say they don’t like XYZ website and are banning it. That wasn’t really something they did 10 years ago. Unless of course it was illegal activity. But I don’t think this is a net win for the internet. Regardless of what decision has been made, freedoms were removed and citizens’ rights were sidestepped for political means. I think it shouldn’t be the government’s job to protect us from ourselves.
I was totally onboard with banning tiktok on government computers and I was completely on board with the government publicly expressing concerns over the motives of tiktok as a business. That’s where I personally believe this should have stopped. Inform the people of the danger and then let them decide what to do with that information.
The problem with that idea though, is that nation-wide, citizens’ trust in the government is at an all-time low. So even if the government said tiktok is bad and you shouldn’t use it, people already don’t trust the government. Maybe they should work on regaining the trust their people had for them 65 years ago before it tries to get people to behave how they think we should.
A government that can ban social media sites is going to base their choices of which ones to ban on their preferences - not yours.
The problem is not the government got to choose - in a functioning democracy, the government would represent the will of the people.
The problem is this democracy is fucked.
The EU seems to be handling it fine, the point is not targeting specific sites but targeting user hostile behaviors against citizens
Governments can place qualifiers based on hostile behaviours but then still selectively enforce said restrictions on the platforms they want to target.
Such as with tiktok they specially worded the laws so that it only affected tiktok and not the others.
That is the thing that fear mongering against the Government always fails to address.
Yes, banning one thing out of ten that all do the same thing is wrong. Yes, we do not want to give the Government the ability to ban specific sites because history.
But banning or regulating algorithms, which are the actual problem, does not stop social media sites from existing. It just stops them from being able to manipulate massive groups of people by hiding/pushing the information the company wants one to see.
Unfortunately, the majority doesn’t see algorithmic social media as a bad thing because they really do like echo chambers, and politicians don’t ever seem to understand what a “root issue” is.
I still consider us in something like the teenage years as a society, just discovery something big like the Internet and social media and we’re going to handle it poorly until we learn to handle it responsibly.
Heads or tails whether we make it to adulthood before the powers that be manage to wrangle things in their favor first. Signs point in a bad direction, but there’s no saying that the tools that worked on society before won’t break when the next thing comes along. Maybe ai will take a form that liberates, or hits the powerful far more negatively than it hits the masses.
Well it’s a good thing they banned TikTok because it has “Closed, source, manipulative and harmful algorithms” and not for some other reason
No no no my friend. You misunderstand USAing. You sweet sweet summer child.
Non-American here. This actually goes a long way in helping me to avoid US-centric news and content for the next 4 years. So, there’s that.
That’s an interesting perspective. Please enjoy having our stupid bullshit slightly further away from your face for a while! My only option is sticking my head in this hole in the ground.
enjoy not having FREEDOM though /s
I know! I’m so happy!
I’m really surprised they’re not pushing the web version, which can operate in a way not covered by this ban.
It also can’t track the users nearly as well.
No, but I imagine they can still run profitable ads, and probably more effectively than most websites.
Sure, but profit may not be the most important factor for Bytedance here. They say they’re more willing to shut down than negotiate divestment.
TikTok’s fate in the U.S. now lies in the hands of President-elect Donald Trump, who originally favored a TikTok ban during his first administration
…
Trump began to speak more favorably of TikTok after he met in February with billionaire Republican megadonor Jeff Yass. Yass is a major ByteDance investor who also owns a stake in the owner of Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform.
Stop the ban or we’ll burn your own platform to the ground.
Do it. Do a flip!
Anyone know if it’s possible to take a program and “decompile” it? Like reverse engineering or something so it could be verified to be “clean?”
I imagine with all the resources the government has they could achieve such a thing if they were really concerned about national security and not really just worried about metas profits.
I mean what would Elon buying it have really changed about the actual code of the apps? It would just change who gets the profits, no?
Best you can do is a disassembler that will turn it into readable assembly or some kind of best-guess pseudocode, and you’ll have to reconstruct it into a higher level language from there by yourself. Or learn to read assembly I guess.
So if it’s possible then it’s possible for the government to have that done by people that are capable.
That would tell me then that it’s more than likely not a national security concern, it’s a profit concern. Apparently Zuckerberg was a major actor pushing for this ban as it is, he supposedly kept harping on the security aspect. :/
If the code were static and unchanging, sure. But it’s not possible to conduct such analysis every time an update is issued on a continuing basis, without fast becoming a hundreds of millions of dollars or more program.
So the better question isn’t whether it’s possible — it’s whether it’s feasible. And the answer is no, it’s not.
I think if pirates working on their bedroom PCs can release cracks and keygens only days after a game or other piece of software is out, then the government can probably keep up with app updates.
It’s a lot easier to scan for very specific code behavior than it is to scan for “anything useful for espionage”. And that still wouldn’t solve the question of what their server software is doing or where the collected data is ending up.
Oh yeah, with the resources the government has, they are more than capable of reverse-engineering everything the app is doing.
Unanimous?! Makes you wonder what they know that we might not.
Nothing. The arguments were public. They obliterated the first amendment rights of 170 million Americans because the government said National Security. If the government can use magic words to make your rights disappear, then you don’t have those rights.
I think it’s more there is a precedence of the government blocking software they think is a threat - https://cmmcinfo.org/list-of-hardware-software-and-services-banned-by-us-government/
We give the government a lot of leeway when it comes to “national security”
Also, we’re not the first country to ban it - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/heres-what-happened-when-india-banned-tiktok
There’s a history of the US putting people in prison too. It’s still unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law requiring someone to go to prison just because the law they passed named them.
Most of them[1] know a whole lot more about constitutional law than the average lemming.
When things are working correctly, the Supreme Court’s role is usually not very concerned with the facts of the case; its role is to resolve questions of law. Congress considered the facts including some classified briefings, decided that American app stores should be forbidden from distributing TikTok to American users, and made a law. The court was asked whether Congress has the authority to make laws like that, and the court decided that it does.
[1] Maybe not Clarence Thomas
Then they should be fired. The Constitution, in plain English, bans the practice of naming a person or group in a law specifically to punish them. That’s the domain of courts. These judges are either illiterate or corrupt.
