- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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This is all theater.
trump is going to “save” tik tok after starting the initial push to ban it (for the wrong reasons) to pretend he did something for you. Worst part is that all of the no/low info voters and non voters will eat it up.
It’s the equivalent of a person pushing you into the middle of the street and at the very last second, that same person tells the drivers to all stop. “Wow, I owe you my life!”
And now, this adds two layers:
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You think trump and the Supreme Court are colluding? now they get to say, nah uh!!! Even though again, this is all convoluted.
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trump gets to look “stronger” than the “highest court in the land” to help delude the next generation of low info tiktok folks.
P.s. The Chinese “protest” apps are going to mine the FUCK out of these millions of phones in the brief window they have them. Also, when the kids inevitably move back to tiktok, majority of them will leave these other apps installed on their phones, dormant and collecting in the background.
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why not have better data protection laws instead
Because that would have hurt their donors
i don’t understand why everyone wants to push trump, who already doesn’t care for the constitution, to just unilaterally decide not to obey laws passed by congress? like what are we doing?
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.
For normal Tiktok creators, I’m not sure. But from what I remember, our TikTok revenue (combined creator fund payout + donations) outperformed every other source of revenue on a month-to-month basis EXCEPT the large local fundraising drives (which we only had quarterly).
The secret hack to the internet has always been animal content, lol. Animal videos performed very well, especially if you got into the creator fund. Youtube shorts only performed well for us when we had long form content the short could lead into. Before then we had 0 visibility on the YT algo.
Finally, Tiktok has better integration different payment methods through fundraising platforms (GoFundMe, Kickstarter, etc) than Youtube (or any Meta app tbh), or at least from what I understood from our accountants (I never bought anything off of Tiktok).
Again, this is only from my experience, and some other small animal rescues that we worked with. That’s why I express sympathy for these organizations. I don’t really care what happens to the drop shipping influencers or whatever.
Ah, i see. Thats really interesting, thanks for your insight.
No problem! A lot of commenters on Fedi/Reddit seem like they don’t have a lot of experience with Tiktok compared to Meta or Google platforms, so I’m always happy to speak on my experience with it.
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.
Trump may even welcome that, considering that Truth Social is just Mastodon.
isn’t it a mastodon fork?
and considering it’s probably blocked by like 98% of the fediverse, i don’t think he likes it very much
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.
Citizens United was a death sentence for the ideal of the government representing the will of the people.
Trump’s election is the final nail in its coffin. He hasn’t even taken office yet and he’s already brazenly selling influence
And if he and the oligarchs have their way about it, it won’t he long before we won’t even be able to say things like that. Not because the oligarchy will do something so doomed to failure as trying to censor it themselves, but because sites that don’t “choose” to censor whatever they want censored will be banned.
The EU seems to be handling it fine, the point is not targeting specific sites but targeting user hostile behaviors against citizens
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.
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.
Well it’s a good thing they banned TikTok because it has “Closed, source, manipulative and harmful algorithms” and not for some other reason
Inb4 Lemmy ban
If we left it up to our government, that’d probably be what happens
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.
I know! I’m so happy!
enjoy not having FREEDOM though /s
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.
Despite what TikTok might claim, I’m fairly certain they’ve never actually turned a profit. Data collection, and influencing the American was always the point.
Very likely, but I’d be surprised if they couldn’t achieve 80% of that on the web. Targeted surveillance, as they’ve been caught doing to critics before would not work as well.
With that data collection, their algorithm for targeted marketing is on a completely different level. I completely believe they’re profitable.
Not only do you have knowledge into people who are likely buyers, you can put them into a buying mood right before showing them the ad so they’re primed for it. Then on top of THAT, you don’t have to design, film or edit the ad - you just pay an influencer to do it for you. It makes it faster, easier and cheaper to AstroTurf brand awareness than ever before.
Relatedly, the only people I know ordering things from Shien or Temu are on TikTok.
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.
Calling it now, the supposed “rumors” of Musk wanting to buy out TikTok are suddenly going to become not-rumors on January 21st.
Calling it now, it’s not gonna happen. And I’ll be back in this threat when dust settles
They’re not selling
Don’t need to. The government can seize the brand and US infrastructure.
Lol that would be an absolute mess. And they’d end up having to redo everything from the ground up because Bytedance isn’t gonna hand over encryption keys and would probably wipe everything important if they knew that was coming
Lol that would be an absolute mess.
Mister “I’m gonna be a dictator for a day” and getting elected on that platform making a mess? No way!
I’m no lawyer but I don’t even think it’s that complex.
The law as written states “…However, the prohibition does not apply to a covered application that executes a qualified divestiture as determined by the President.”
It goes on the clarify in a little more detail what a " qualified divestiture" is, but ultimately the determination seems to be by the President.
Trump can “make a deal” that he considers a “qualified divestiture” and allow the app again. For example ByteDance can sell TikTok to AmericaDance, a new company that just so happens to work for and does everything ByteDance does.
Now this wouldn’t hold up in any real court, but that would take A LONG time to resolve at which point Trump declares a win and likely everyone just moves on. Bonus during the 2028 election Vance or whomever can say that Democrats want to ban TikTok.
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
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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!
Pretty gross being violently ruled by a few fossils in wacky costumes.
The law allowing this happen was already passed, by a democratically* elected government. All the court is saying is that the law isn’t unconstitutional. They don’t decide what laws are “right” or “wrong”, merely that it doesn’t (in their opinion) contradict the constitution.
*how democratic it is is debatable, but still… an election did take place that put congress (and the president) in power
It’s not even a running consistent with their own dogma. They’ve gone completely rogue.
I know lots of people are mad, but I just see TikTok as another centralized platform that capitulates to special interests (read: money). I think the ban is a net positive, and I wouldn’t lose any sleep if they banned other centralized social media platforms.
It never feels good to have the rug pulled out from under you, but people will find better ways to communicate. Humans are nothing if not creative problem solvers.
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.
Nothing to do with the data collection, the court was ruling on the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act’s constitutionality.
They absolutely made data collection part of their opinion.
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.
Ah yes boldly following in the liberatory footsteps of India.
Wasn’t claiming it was a good or bad call, just that the Supreme Court is about legality and there is history of the US banning software and a global history of banning this specific app.
Imagine believing these wacky old farts know anything at all about the internet.
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.
This is correct, but the law doesn’t do that. It mentions TikTok in the title, but the text describes what is banned in terms of user count and control by a foreign adversary. It would apply to a future product made by a Russian company, for example.
