this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Wild to me how much people here are celebrating the App ban.
I get that this is the fediverse and the goal is decentralized social media, but this ban also means thousands of small businesses will lose a primary or secondary source of income that they can't just replacewuickly, tons of people will lose access to methods of communication that would otherwise be censored on US platforms, and it eliminates a platform that has excelled at breaking down governments placed barriers of communication between different groups (which is something the fediverse does well, too)
Celebrating this is rather selfish and anti-free speech.
Its a platform that was secretly suppressing people for being disabled, black, queer or ugly. Cheering it's death is reasonable, defending it on the grounds that people will have to advertise somewhere else really isn't.
I'm pretty sure every imperial app is also censoring anti-genocide perspectives, etc. That's literally the whole point of this ban.
https://newrepublic.com/post/181327/mitt-romney-congress-ban-tiktok-israel-gaza
I think most people on here would agree that TikTok is a shitty app, but you can't deny that just deciding to ban something in the manner they're doing with this bill is shady. The bill is very obviously targeted towards TikTok but is worded in a way that it can be used on any software owned by a "Foreign Adversary" as defined by the government.
It's proposed in the frame of national security with concerns of data collection being sent to China, but if that's the case there are far worse offenders of that violation of privacy than TikTok! Most large tech companies collect data from their users and sell it overseas. They may not sell directly to China but the amount of data collected is insane and once it is out of the hands of Meta or Google or whoever, it becomes hard to know for certain where it ends up.
The point I'm trying to make is that if the real concern is national security, their focus should be on regulating data collection instead of banning a singular app which collects the same data every other app in the world does. I don't defend TikTok, I couldn't care less if it was gone, but the grounds on which it is being banned are concerning and somewhat contradictory.
If I have been misinformed of any of this please let me know, this is just what I've gathered from reading sections of the bill myself and from the court hearings.
I confess I phrased my intial comment a tad too harshly. There are many, many good reasons to criticize this; the loss of an advertising platform is not one of them.
Disabled, black, queer, ugly (which is subjective but whatever) seemed quite unsuppressed on tiktok to my perception and the perceptions of many in those spaces... I'm sure there are exceptions due to the large sample size.
I fit several of those categories and have been immersed in those spaces on tiktok for a long time and the opinion has always trended to it being far superior for discussing and being in those groups than Instagram or YouTube. Especially for disabled and queer groups, tiktok was always the bigger audience.
Shop is a lot more than advertising. Much closer to pre-enshittified etsy, and there's a reason a lot of small businesses formed around it instead of instagram. Tiktok would actually allow those products to be shown to people rather than supressed in favor of corporations.
It's pretty well documented that they did/do this. I'm sorry, you've fully bought into the PR TikTok spin. They present themselves as somehow an egalitarian organization. They aren't.
This was absolutely happening in 2020. That was a long time ago and the App is practically unrecognizable from its 2020 state.