“Tiktok is a tool for Chinese propaganda, but we’d prefer if it were a tool for American propaganda instead.”
The fact that they only targeted Tiktok already shows their motives. They claim that Tiktok is a powerful tool for data collection and propaganda. They claim that’s too dangerous to leave in the hands of China.
However, all the other social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc) are all equally as powerful. There’s only one difference between them: who controls the propaganda.
I remember when President Obama suggested investing in Solyndra in order to save it and stop China from overtaking the energy market and Republican blew their lid but I guess they’ll be ok with wasting billions nationalizing a terrible social media app linked to multiple deaths of kids.
past political motives and descisions are dead, now is the Trump era.
All of this falls in dead waters as soon as people realize, Bytedance has already let tiktok die in the states once due to it’s refusal to sell under the ruling. I don’t see how them learning that the US government and a third party /also/ want to buy it will change anything. I think the outcome will be the same.
Bytedance has made it clear, they would rather have the app offline in the states and leave it online for the rest of the world, then to lose their product, and even if they wanted to sell, which they have currently stated they don’t, that type of deal would need to be OK’d by the Chinese government first, and there’s no way that would happen with a third party, let alone if it means the US government would get half the company.
I respect Trumps hustle for wanting to give one of the worlds largest social media platforms onto American Soil(more explicitly/likely one of his advisors/business partners), but I really don’t think it’s going to work.
If they nationalize it, even partially, they’re not gonna be able claim any loopholes on government censorship by letting third party platforms do the dirty work.
Goverment stake, isn’t that communism?
Why would China want to sell the lucrative secret TikTok algorithm to the US government?
This may be going off on a tangent, but it seems appropriate here. I am sick and tired of hearing about every little minutia of clickbait bullshit related to Trump. If Musk wants to buy and tank TikTok, great. I don’t give a fuck one way or another. Trump isn’t buying TikTok, and I truly don’t give a shit what his opinion is on it.
I want to stay aware of current events in my country. If the president signs an executive order, I want to hear about it. I don’t want to hear about what his friends are doing. I couldn’t care less who made his wife’s hat. I’d rather watch paint dry than a video of him and his wife dancing. I hate that I know he consumes McDonald’s slop and Diet Coke in the oval office.
People argue about how news outlets are biased right or left. The real problem is that news outlets are just entertainment outlets, and not legitimate journalism. I don’t care if you’re reading Fox News or CNN; you’re still going to wade through a river of worthless celebrity worship before you actually find something of substance. Scroll down far enough, and you won’t be reading about Trump any more. Instead, you’ll be reading about which actors are fucking each other and the latest and “this year’s hottest budget-friendly Temu styles that are now made of only slightly toxic synthetic fibers.” If you’re lucky, you might find an article about how some random nobody met another random nobody on vacation and got married. Good for them. I’m glad they’re happy. I still don’t give a shit.
While I agree with the sentiment, I’d say this qualifies as news. Elons not buying shake shack, he’s buying a social media platform with a very opaque algorithm that has the power to influence a large chunk of the American public. Even if he tanks it, twitter has shown that through network and data ownership combined with sheer inertia many people will remain on an app even after its been revealed to have its thumb on the scale for one side.
In addition to that, they’re suggesting a government stake, which likely means using taxpayer money to help him subsidize it. Hmm. Where have we seen that before?
The media really moved swiftly back into “Stop the fucking presses, Donald Trump just sneezed twice in a row” status
Did anyone expect anything less? Trump was great for their profits.
boost app for Lemmy has a nice word filter and trump has been added. I’m already exhausted. I wish there was an easy way to word block on the web, since I use that more than my phone. Clearly evident, I’m on ‘web’ now <sigh>
I’ve thought about adding him as a filter but I’m afraid I’d stop getting most US news. Even if I don’t want to have any discussions about him, plenty of policy changes and laws are going to be a result of his actions and I will need/want to know about them.
Ya, I get it for sure… I just do not want it consuming me which is is currently doing.
Voyager works as a web app and PWA. It has keyword filtering.
Some of the different interfaces do have filters. I use Mlmym (like the old reddit interface) usually, but the Voyager interface supports filters. I took a quick look at Photon and Alexandrite but didn’t see filters in those. I think I’ll switch to usign Voyager for a while.
All of this because some dude in the country with more guns per capita in the world, can’t shoot for shit.
And because almost 400 million other people didn’t even try.
We all saw this coming from a mile off.
I’d love to see TiXToX
LOL
I mean, this was probably the point from the beginning. I’m sure this has been their plan since they saw that he could turn a place like Twitter into a propaganda machine in just under a year. I’m probably just grasping at straws here, but it seems pretty sus that the TikTok ban only started gaining traction around the time Elmo turned Twitter into a shit hole.
Don’t think he realizes how problematic it would be for the government to have a stake in any company that actively removes posts. Suddenly they’re forced to allow far more speech than they previously did.
Yeah, but who’s going to enforce that?
The same guy who has toddler level temper tantrums when people call him out for being a man child.
