And they’re already kissing Trump’s ass
Spreading for awareness, I’ve been posting this in relevant threads for a week - 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.
I think there’s an even simpler explanation: political debt to Jeff Yass (15% tiktok owner) and his cash for the 2024 campaign.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-jeff-yass
Trump doesn’t have the power to “save” TikTok.
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You know I could but seeing as you’re being an absolute twat for no reason at all, I’m sure it would be in vain to explain to you how Trump is not (yet) an emperor.
You openly represent yourself as a PhD, a cancer researcher, a college professor, more than that a department chair, with a public relations responsibility to your college… and you’re here in a tiktok thread calling me a twat in an open forum? And all in a passive defense of donald trump?
You literally just fabricated 100% of that. WTF is wrong with you?
Wow, so you’re saying that’s not you… So you’ve STOLEN this man’s identity? Uh oh…
Where how do I report this fake account?
Look out, the internet police has arrived! 👮♀️🚨🚔😂
Stop trying to distract everyone from what a twat you’re being.
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I’m starting to think of Trump as one of those old school firefighters that would set fires and then swoop in to put the fire out lol.
He was one of the first people saying to ban it in 2020. To me it’s more like he is easily swayed with lobbying so it ends up looking like he is a pioneer on pushing new policy when in actuality he is the first person people go to when they need to bribe a politician.
This is not unique to Trump. Politicians say “they changed their views” if there is enough oil to grease wheels.
Except it doesn’t have the capability to put out fires, so it just starts them, then declares having put them out and leaves them burning
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Yeah, but the ban passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, randomly jammed inside of the global military spending package including funding the Ukrainian war effort and the genocide in Gaza (which is a must-support bill for Democrats and Republicans alike I guess).
It’s likely just staged bullshit so he can be the savior.
The entirety of global capitalism is lining up to bend the knee and gargle fascist balls.
This is what leftists have been warning forever. Capitalism wants the monopolies, bailouts — the political, financial and military backing, etc — that state-capitalist dictatorships provide. Democratically elected governments, acting in the interests of the people, are really the only threat to the corporate oligarchies wealth and power.
All of the wests “enemies” are equally supportive of fascism, because state-capitalist dictators are easier to influence (bribe).
So I am assuming most Lemmy people don’t use Tiktok or Meta stuff. Here is some things you may or may not already know.
- Shou (CEO) made a parting video praising Trump on the last day
- Shou will be on the stage with all the other tech billionaires during inauguration
- People have noticed the last couple days that FB and Instagram have had a “link your Tiktok account” so you don’t lose anything on the platform
I think it’s pretty obvious now that Tiktok is going to become a part of Meta one way or another.
People have noticed the last couple days that FB and Instagram have had a “link your Tiktok account”
WTF, how is this not news everywhere?
Surreal watching the rest of the internet freaking out. Meanwhile we are just sitting here on our own platforms doing our own things.
Personally, I never saw the appeal of TikTok anyway.
Then again I also was never interested in Twitter.
I guess my attention span isn’t short enough for that type of sites.
I wouldn’t say that I don’t see the appeal of it. I would probably get sucked right in if I gave it a shot. It’s a consciouss decision on my part to simply not do that. I don’t not-consume short-form media because I’m better than the people who do, I prohibit it from myself.
Drag gave youtube shorts a try when it came out, and then installed an extension to disable them because they’re boring.
I would scroll a bit after someone linked me a video. Content was fun, but after like 3 minutes, I could feel something wrong in my brain. Like just the nonstop influx of content with no breaks. You might think one video was faked, but you didn’t have enough time to contemplate it before another shows up in its place.
I have some friends who spend hours on it. I can’t imagine deciding to participate in that for so long.
Short video formats on all platforms make me very quickly feel like I’m going crazy. Just one voice after another, trying to cram whatever they have to say into your ears, or one joke taken out of context, or one simplistic moral, or absurdist humor that wouldn’t hold up for longer than a few seconds. My partner watches endless “reels” on Facebook, and that hurried talking they all do, with all those cuts to make sure there’s no gap between words, makes me fell very weird and agitated. It’s like everyone has the same voice. And then it keeps looping. I waste far too much time on Lemmy but the short video stuff seems like another level of brain melt.
I’m right there with you, but I don’t see a compelling reason why either should be banned.
TikTok has tons of issues but this bugs me so much. There are many examples of people sharing their creativity, their skill, their knowledge, their passion to the world on tiktok and it’s so good at exposing you to it if you are interested in seeing all kinds of people expressing themselves.
Since when does the value of content correlate directly with the amount of time it consumes?
is brevity no longer the soul of wit??
If they want to share all of that, what hinders them to start an actual blog?
I actually help run a blog, so I know first hand how many barriers there are between a blogger and their audience and it’s getting worse all the time. These days even if you do make good content that people are looking for, the search engines summarize your content or rank higher content which has scraped your content and summarized it.
that’s even if you have the skills to set up a blog and the resources to fund it. Not everyone has that and if they don’t, does that mean their content shouldn’t be seen?
trust me, I wish the Internet was different but with things like TikTok, you just have to focus on making your content and it takes care of bringing it to the people. With a blog, you really need to seek people out and a lot of people are turned off by self-promotion.
And yeah, I know there’s an argument that people shouldn’t need other’s validation or attention for their art but also as a creative person it is demoralizing to make stuff that no one ever sees.
What hinders them to start a newspaper column?
is brevity no longer the soul of wit??
Maybe, if that’s your only goal.
Trying to make any sort of nuanced or subtle point about anything important is pretty much impossible in such an artificially limited format, though.
Sure, simple political memes can be done in a compact frame, but actually discussing the framework surrounding that meme, or trying to correct a bit of misinformation is not really possible to do under those same limitations of time or character count.
there’s more to life than political discourse 🤷♂️
How many other examples would you like?
you’re missing my point that there are many things in life that don’t require several hours of context and nuance. And those things aren’t automatically invaluable because they don’t require much time to grasp and move on.
For example, a one-panel comic may only take a few moments to parse and enjoy. Does that mean it can only be enjoyed by those “with short attention spans”? Does that mean its value is inherently less?
You talk like a redditor, someone who needs people to hear their opinion even if it doesnt add anything.
I’m willing to bet close to 100% of lemmy.world users are from reddit. Where does this sense of superiority come from?
Chances are they came from reddit too lol
I know bad for democracy and everything but
This app has done nothing positive for my life, arguably began my social media addiction, filled my brain with negative content at the height of COVID and severely impacted my mental health
I don’t think governments should ban platforns. But do I think TikTok should have ever existed? No
And yet most of it’s users are either to stupid or addicted to see the issue and just switch to RedNote, no questions asked. Which in turn nullifies the ban altogether.
It helped my spouse deal with medical trauma by finding content creators expressing similar experiences. It worked better than any of the support groups which often felt more hopeless and isolating.
At this point though my spouse just hates instagram reels and how chaotic and pointless this is shaking out to be.
If not for TikTok Israel’s genocide would have gone unreported in Western media and censored on US social media.
I don’t use TikTok but I knew plenty about Israel’s actions. It was all over the internet and plenty of news sources.
Yeah because teens love opening the paper in the morning and reading about how Israel is “liberating” Palestine?
The majority of media and news learnin’ is not TikTok or newspapers.
Sounds like a you problem.
it is a me problem
you want to subject yourself to doomscrolling and unresticted data collection? go ahead. i dont give 2 shits
Yes, it’s a you problem that you can’t control how you interact with your glass rectangle.
The glass rectangle is designed to be addictive. Should we let people and companies intentionally abuse addictive designs?
I did some research and now I know why Trump wants to “save” TikTok.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-tiktok-courted-conservatives-before-trumps-win
https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/tiktok-and-white-supremacist-content/
This one is especially damning:
TikTok is spending $50,000 on an inauguration party honoring influencers who helped Donald Trump spread his campaign message, according to the party organizer — and it’s scheduled for Sunday, the deadline for the company to spin off from its China-based owner or be banned in the U.S.
CEO Shou Zi Chew is expected to attend.
$50,000
lol peanuts aren’t that damning… Capital in USA is spending millions and millions on Trump’s inauguration.
50k gets you an “I’ll see what I can do” .
Well yeah, it’s no secret that TikTok had a white supremacy problem. There was a researcher who discovered that they could make a brand new account and (by only interacting with certain types of content) get white supremacists on their For You page within 20 minutes. Algorithmic feeds are funny like that, because they just gauge engagement. The algorithm isn’t making any moral decisions on whether the engaging content is socially acceptable. For better or worse, it just goes “this person likes this content, so I’ll show them more.”
Hey, look over here at the TikTok performative theatrics while we set up an oligarchy and rob you of your labor, your health, and your livelihood.
Tiktoks removel is not a distraction from oligarchy, it is oligarchy in action. This is meta collecting on what they paid congress for.
So wait, you’re complaining cause they did something? But if they had done nothing you’d also be complaining
You see me complaining? I’ve never used TikTok, but the entire controversy around it is just wag-the-dog type distraction.
Tik Tok removed platform access from their US userbase voluntarily.
This was their choice.
The law is literally not even being enforced.
I hear that businesses existing in the face of unenforced laws are really stable and enduring. \s
Large businesses literally operate in conflict with the law until the law directly forces consequences, usually in monetary form. So, until they get caught and are forced not to do the thing. Explain to me why this is any different.
Multiple apps must have done so.
That’s what I see when I search for Marvel Snap on the playstore. Someone mentioned it was down as well earlier
Because they are distributed by a company that is owned by Bytedance. You know. The people who own Tik Tok.
Yeah, that’s why I brought that one up
Noteworthy thing I haven’t seen mentioned here: They apparently only removed app access. The website still works just fine.
The website didn’t work from US IPs last night, but it’s back already.
Bytedance’s long-term hope is naturally to be able to continuing operating everywhere without violating any laws. Right? Therefore, their strategy is to stay as compliant as possible with various national laws (within reason), right? Therefore they have to take a conservative reading of the bill (PAFACA). So let’s look at the text of the bill:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text
(1) PROHIBITION OF FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATIONS.—It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute, maintain, or update (or enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of) a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out, within the land or maritime borders of the United States, any of the following: […]
Now, the actual distribution of TikTok is done by a U.S. corp, incorporated in California and Delaware. That corp has to stay compliant with these laws. Therefore, to maintain or update or enable the distribution of an app as defined in this bill, is legally punishable. Make sense? Particularly because the law mentions them by name, there is basically zero legal defense against it besides contesting its constitutionality. Which the horrifically corrupt Supreme Court upheld.
So, probably the only way they felt comfortable resuming operations in the U.S. was with some kind of written agreement with the Trump admin - as of yet undisclosed.
That second paragraph is just vile. Donny brought this ban into motion and now they say he will save them?
The current Ban was not brought into motion by Trump, the current Ban started being discussed in congress in 2024, trumps efforts fell apart, shockingly enough. https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-timeline-ban-biden-india-d3219a32de913f8083612e71ecf1f428
if people can’t go this long without tiktok they’re addicted to social media and it should stay banned
There was kids and teenagers calling 911 because the service was down. I think we’re long past that concern
THIS SHIT MADE ME BURTS OUT LAUGHING
Should see a doctor. I burts out laughing once. 3 month recovery time.
❌
Trump isn’t going to save them. He’s setting it up so one of us cronies will get it.
People are reporting that Meta platforms just started allowing users to link their tiktok accounts a few days ago… take that for what you will.
And nothing of value was lost.
TikTok turned the youth pro Palestine whereas Facebook and Xitter censored it.
And those same youth then gave us an oligarchy, useful fools
The oligarchy has been in charge since before those people were born.
Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand
If TikTok has the power to “turn” youth into pro Palestine, they can also turn the youth pro China when China invades Taiwan.
TikTok is in its expansion phase so it need to show its good will, but as soon as it is large enough, it will seek to do whatever make them the most money, like everyone else.
Time and time again, big-tech controlled social media have intervened and will continue to intervene with public opinion, Meta, Xitter, TikTok, all in their own ways.
If government decide to ban meta tomorrow, will you object as hard as banning tiktok?
If TikTok has the power to “turn” youth into pro Palestine, they can also turn the youth pro China when China invades Taiwan
You’re not making the argument you think you’re making here. Tiktok showed young people the uncensored truth about the genocide. If showing the uncensored truth about Taiwan makes young people want an invasion by China, then it means China is right?
You would honestly believe a giant media conglomerate and one of the most influential tech monopolies in this hyper-capitalistic world shows people completely unbiased news, just out of the goodness of their heart? For their unconditional love towards the vulnerable underaged population that they intentionally attracted?
So let’s instead confine ourselves to social media from western countries which reflects exclusively western bias, whether through censorship as is the case of Meta/X, or through contributions by overwhelmingly white western men as is the case of Lemmy. Just look at politics.world and see what country most linked articles are from.
Maybe, just maybe, having more diverse options, including social media from other countries not subjected to western bias, could be good? That way maybe you can see some realities hidden by the Chinese government heavily publicised in western social media, and viceversa
In principle yes, but it is in general dangerous to think that social media can be a learning moment and people should use whatever pushed to them to guide their behavior.
The content is eventually controlled by several monopolies and will serve their own good. As social media are natural monopolies, it is also really hard to build ethical platforms that competes with the ones backed by capital.
Westerners are priviliaged to have a diverse and free news/media landscape, non-profits pushing for truthful and accessible knowledge, and world-class educational institutions. I, as a Chinese, have never experienced such when growing up.
Yet, I see people insist a giant Chinese tech monopoly is their best learning experience, instead of resorting to more time-proven, unbiased, and trust-worthy ways to learn. Doesn’t this sound dangerous to you?
Westerners are priviliaged to have a diverse and free news/media landscape, non-profits pushing for truthful and accessible knowledge, and world-class educational institutions
Bullshit. Westerners fall for western propaganda as much as anyone. Most on Lemmy were certain that the submarine cables were destroyed by the Russians on purpose, turns out the consensus isn’t the case. Most on Lemmy were certain that Nordstream was blown up by Russian, turned out not to be the case. Most on Lemmy believe there’s an ongoing genocide against Uyghur people, turns out it’s not the case. Most on Lemmy believe there was a massacre in Tiananmen square (good luck asking them to spell it) because the CPC sent the PLA to murder protestors, instead of a clash between protestors and military which happened after weeks of pro-capitalist protests and started after protestors murdered some military personnel in negotiation attempts. Most on Lemmy are willing to forgive the support for Genocide in Gaza to the US and its constant imperialism and aren’t willing to do the same for other countries.
You’re just being extremely chauvinist and ignorant about the quality of information in the west, and unaware of the manufacture of consent and the fabrication of false information and narratives.
resorting to more time-proven, unbiased, and trust-worthy ways to learn
Which are these unbiased ways to learn you talk about? Can you provide me any examples?
Tell that to the millions of American small businesses that thrived on the app. Billions of tax revenue just vanished.
I see this sentiment a lot but I don’t understand, which small business are doing all of their business exclusive on TikTok?
It’s less about only doing business on TikTok (there are many, however), but of all the other social media platforms, they get more engagement and sales from TikTok. (Ask yourself how many people are successfully selling their products and services on Lemmy, for example)
It allows people to make chained response videos that also shows their work, as well as illuminating the personality and goals of the people who run the business.
Connectivity between videos, with video responses to comments, is a powerful tool that TikTok does better, and it’s created a boon for many who are self employed.
When 170 million Americans are using the platform, your level of exposure skyrockets.
Ask yourself how many people are successfully selling their products and services on Lemmy, for example
I’m still stuck on asking how many people are successfully selling their products and services on TikTok.
Like, what businesses are these and what are they selling? I wouldn’t imagine any of these social media platforms would be good for selling anything on. What’s an example of something I could go on TikTok and buy? I couldn’t imagine buying anything on any social media platform. I’ve never even seen anyone selling anything on any social media platform. How would I even do that if I wanted to?
Oh, no. Someone think of the pink sauce lady and dildo sellers!
And Quality Patch, Mr Seems, various actual artists who showcase and sell their work, candle makers, authors, wood artisans, leather and metal workers, and everyone else who was doing well and making good products.
Your flippance shows you know noting.
Yeah, that was quite inhumane of me. How can I hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth from werewolf gangbang authors and used underwear merchants and not despair?
