- 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
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.
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.
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.
I don’t consider society in such ways because what we are seeing now is not a natural state of being. The global population is under educated, and that is by design. No one is taught how to think critically when it matters and then they are thrown into a world of non sense. Made worse by modern communication tools because people don’t know how to process information and communicate.
It is not about learning to handle new tech responsibly. If we focused on educating our population social media wouldn’t be so damaging.
AI already exists and is being used as a tool to further extract what is left by the people claiming it will be a good thing for the masses. It is not being made in a way to benefit everyone, and it is being built by people who want money and power. No average person will have a better life because AI is running more things, but a select few will be ever richer.
Exactly like what happened when mass production became a thing.
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.
Well it’s a good thing they banned TikTok because it has “Closed, source, manipulative and harmful algorithms” and not for some other reason
I disagree, I think this ban sets a bad precedent. What governments should do is pass stricter data protection laws, as well as banning the many addictive design patterns that manipulate people into scrolling for hours and hours. For example infinite scroll. Imagine how much less people would doom scroll if they had to manually click “yes, I want to continue to page 7 of my twitter feed”
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
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone is it still a fork? It thought it started that way to get something done quickly, but thay they moved to a proprietary platform. I could be wrong, but do have any info on instances blocking Truth Social? Are the instances that don’t block Truth Social?
@return2ozma@lemmy.world @TORFdot0@lemmy.world @woelkchen@lemmy.world
do have any info on instances blocking Truth Social? Are the instances that don’t block Truth Social?
Almost nobody blocks Truth Social. Everyone seems more preoccupied with blocking Threads over actual far right content.
Calling it now, the supposed “rumors” of Musk wanting to buy out TikTok are suddenly going to become not-rumors on January 21st.
They’re not selling
Don’t need to. The government can seize the brand and US infrastructure.
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.
What 2028 election?
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?
Right, but things rarely happen ‘for the good of humanity’, they just happen, and like mass production or the newspaper or even writing and language itself, it appears, we make use of it, we stumble and eventually we figure out where it really fits into the world. It will always be taken advantage of by those with the means to do so, but my point is that there is a period where we truly don’t know how to approach it as a society and there is a learning curve and we are in that adolescent or teenage year type curve for the Internet, and probably toddler stage for ai, and we will learn, but we’re not there yet.
Further, whether we learn enough quickly enough, or whether those with enough power and foresight will truly steal that opportunity from society remains to be seen. It may seem like it will be obvious right now, while we’re in the thick of things, but only history will tell if it’s an obvious eventuality or whether it is comical that they think they are smart enough to actually control it. Maybe it contains the seeds of their own undoing.
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.
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.
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.
The platform isn’t creating revenue, the traffic and data collection do however create lots and lots of revenue so it really just depends on how you want to parse out their financial situation.
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
Unanimous?! Makes you wonder what they know that we might not.
Nothing to do with the data collection, the court was ruling on the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act’s constitutionality.
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.
