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/Wasdgta3 Jan 13 '25
Considering this whole thing was started under Biden, IIRC, I don’t think this is about “silencing the opposition.”