The US House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill giving Chinese owner ByteDance about six months to sell that part of its business
China could use social media app TikTok to influence the 2024 US elections, the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has told a House of Representatives intelligence committee hearing.
Asked by Democratic Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi if China’s ruling Communist party (CCP) would use TikTok to influence the elections, Haines said “we cannot rule out that the CCP would use it”.
Lawmakers have long voiced concerns that the Chinese government could access user data or influence what people see on the app, including pushing content to stoke US political divisions.
Why only TikTok? Every social media company does the exact same thing.
This is true. Cambridge Analytica wasn’t that long ago, either.
Right? The algorithms are all designed to stoke outrage. Why don’t we do something like the EU and pass legislation that applies to all social media companies, not just demonize certain ones. What am I missing here?
What am I missing here?
Mountains of hypocrisy and xenophobia.
They want to be able to tell voters on the right that they “stood up to China and big tech” and voters on the left that they “stood up to social media companies perverting democracy” without going after the American companies that do the same things but pay them a lot more in legal bribes (and probably illegal ones too).
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Oh…so it’s ok if a US company pushes political division, but if it’s a foreign company then it’s an issue?
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companies like Facebook (Meta) and Cambridge Analytica can be investigated and regulated by US agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
They aren’t, though. Because they keep legally bribing Congress to give them more or less free rein.
You’re gunna turn into dust by the time the government regulates Meta. The only reason they care about TikTok so much is optics and the fact that a foreign company is abusing the system in the same way as the domestic social media companies. The fix isn’t to divest ByteDance, the fix is to pass actual regulation with teeth that applies to domestic and foreign companies alike.
Facebook, Twitter and Google are at least as obedient to the whims of the fascist Netanyahu and Modi governments (not to mention the parts of the US government that routinely violate the rights of its own citizens and people from all other countries) as Tiktok is to the Faux-Socialist totalitarian regime of China.
Rachel Maddow just covered this.
Drumft came out for TikTok after meeting at Mag-a-Lardo with a billionaire TikTok investor.
He’s desperate for a sugar daddy to cover his half billion bar tab.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/14/trump-tiktok-billionaire-donors-00146892
so rather than running someone that could organically capture more of the gen z vote, they’re banning their most popular form of communication because the old man wanted another term. awesome
