As someone in the US who has had their private data leaked multiple times (ive lost count) and is extremely careful when browsing you tube as to not be drawn into a conspiracy ridden rabbit hole, I’m not sure what the point of this tik tok ban is. To me tik tok is social media business as usual. If congress is going to go this hard on a social media company and privacy concerns they should be doing this with all the other companies that pry into our private lives and try their best to manipulate us as well (car makers, appliance manufactures, phone makers, wearbales, ect…) otherwise to me this comes across as the US congress extorting a single company to make billionaires richer. It has been shown time and time again that even US based social media companies are vulnerable to influencing conspiracy theorists and swaying the votes of thousands of people.I feel like we are at the pinnacle of technological ignorance here. Thoughts?
I’m personally all for it. I’ve never used tiktok before and never plan to, but I can see the negative impact it has on my peers. I can’t hang out with my friends without it turning into them just showing their favorite clips to each other. It’s just bad for people and relies of maxing out the happy brain chemical thing to keep people there. It’s like penny slots at the casino. There’s also the data harvesting for the Chinese government through tencent (who is also very heavily involved with epic games and reddit to name a couple others). If I’m remembering right, when the “head” of tiktok was testifying before Congress, he outright said he’s doing nothing different from Facebook or Twitter, and he’s right.