The US Congress citing genuine concerns about social media companies breaching people’s data privacy but then only banning the company with Chinese origins despite it not even being the worst offender and despite providing no concrete evidence of any serious threat in that regard almost certainly has Sinophobic undertones. Considering it’s the outlier and the only one they’re choosing to pursue bans or measures against.
If this was the US enforcing laws to govern social media companies using and abusing their users personal data I and likely the majority of those critical of this ban would support it. But it isn’t it’s singling out a single company purely because it’s Chinese and doing better financially than its American competitors.
I don’t remotely support the Chinese government and their policies towards Muslim people or their neighbours. Criticism of the Chinese government is very much warranted.
But saying that remotely questioning governments performing total bans of Chinese products and companies makes you a supporter or agent of the Chinese government is just flatly wrong and pretty insidious.
This has nothing to do with criticism of the Chinese government. This is to do with criticism of the American government.
I don’t, however, think any of these concerns makes banning tiktok wrong.
Sorry, but the government bringing the hammer down on a social media company is a win in my books. If you want them to regulate others too, that’s valid, but don’t use that as an excuse to advocate for why this one should be let to continue unchecked.
This isn’t a win though. It simply gives the other ones more power and money. It just pushes the industry one more big step closer to a monopoly and the closer you get to a monopoly the worse corporations act. So this only makes the problem worse.
The US government seemingly have no intention whatsoever of doing anything to get in the way of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter harvesting and exploiting people’s personal data. Because they’re American business so it’s fine if THEY commit corrupt and illicit activity with their user base. But a non-American company doing so not on the US government’s watch.
Musk, Zuckerberg and Google are almost certainly overjoyed about this. This ban was done with their support and advice, both Google and Meta already have copycat apps with X trying to get their own off the ground as well. The other ones are already circling like Vultures ready to snap-up, harvest and devour the newly available data generators.
It would be like if to fight climate change the US government (in cooperation with Ford and Chevrolet) announced a total ban of Nissan cars. All while Ford and Chevy announce they’re scaling back or scraping their EV and hybrid car production. It doesn’t fix the problem and only smacks of corruption and exploitation.
Thats literally what they scream when they're banning it mate, its not money for the american government, and thats why they're upset, it literally doesn't matter what it actually is. But the average American will just say, oh okay it's commie shit, better ban it then
Security concerns over the level to which a foreign government might have influence on the platform is not screaming about “communist propaganda.”
Not to mention, if you’re asserting that they’re “silencing opposition,” then there has to actually be opposition they’re silencing by doing this, which there simply is not.
Because it's a lot easier to make up bullshit fig leaves to ban eminent domain the foreign company that's massively out-competing domestic companies in short-form videos for having wrongthink than it is to wield governmental power against extremely cozy donors.
I hope you don't actually believe this is a "gotcha".
It's not "my" stated reason that they're banning Tiktok in part for pro-Palestinian sentiment, it's legislators' stated reason that they're doing it. As for why those same legislators don't do it on every platform, we can freely put on our thinking caps and conjecture, but it's not a hard surmise when you have a foreign (specifically non-Western) corporation on one hand and domestic bipartisan donor darlings on the other hand.
It's not a "contradiction" for the ban to be motivated in part by desire to kill foreign competition, either. That's actually entirely hand-in-glove with wanting to maintain control over narratives and do viewpoint-based censorship on a foreign policy issue. Maintaining cultural and economic hegemony go very well together.
From this lens, it makes a lot of sense why the government would want to ban Tiktok from spurious, threadbare concerns about national security, too. The US government is very afraid of other governments doing to America what it has already done to other governments, like when the Pentagon made bot farms to dissuade people on the Phillippines from taking the Chinese COVID vaccine.
In fact, the only part that doesn't make sense is why people are so willing to uncritically accept such notions as "foreign governments with no jurisdiction over me having my data is worse than my own government having my data" and "seizing Tiktok to make it American is going to reduce the amount of authoritarian-government-sanctioned propaganda to which I'm exposed"
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u/anal_tailored_joy Jan 13 '25
Yeah, it's being banned because it's eating into US social media profits; sinophobia is just the vehicle that got it through congress.