Comment by bumphot@lemy.lol on They rushed that through with the quickness too

Banning TikTok and not banning Meta and Google is a stupid idea that will just give more power to the fewer people with less competition. They are all bad of course and they should all be banned, but giving one bad group all the power is worse then letting two bad groups compete for power.

OK, you have this all wrong. Let me explain what the differences is. Tiktok has NO COMPETITION. Tiktok’s ***intent *** is not like the others. The others are competing for ad revenue. Tiktok’s purpose is solely to influence us Americans. Tiktok doesn’t care about your ad revenue or even a sustainable business. They are banked rolled by the CCP.

If META or Google(um…what social media company does google have?) was banked rolled by Russia and had its servers all there and the app was installed on 75% of all Americans, they essentially have eyes and ears on everyone in America. But they are not owned by Russia. Its own by stakeholders who only care about money and how much they will make them.

While I agree that META and Google(really google?) has too much control over our data, at the very least the intent is not to disrupt the American democracy.

Google owns Youtube (and gmail, most popular mail provider). You should think more deeply about what ads are and what are governments motivations. It is both the same thing. Google and META want power, they want money, because money is a voting power for allocation of resources in the society. Chinese governments want power, so they can have more money and more voting power for allocations of their resources.

The nationality of people in these governments doesn’t matter at all to them. Chinese government doesn’t care about regular Chinese citizens no more then US government does about their own. They simply care for their own power/money. And that is their interests.

Google and META work with the governments, they have actual NSA offices and follow any orders from the government, just like TikTok does. The problem here has nothing to do with what country it is in, it is simply that one set of rich folks are bothered that they can’t control something other rich folks are controlling. People, in both cases, suffer and have no power whatsoever in the process.

Meta has zero interest in destabilizing the American democracy. China does. China wants to take over Taiwan. Meta doesn’t.

You see where I’m getting at? It’s in Meta’s best interest to have a vibrant democracy and a strong economy. China does not.

Meta doesn’t give a flying fuck who owns the south China seas. Guess who does and has the tools to influence the people who vote for the politicians that will ignore an invasion to Taiwan?

Sure China probably wants money. But imagine how much money they can have if they influence America not to step into an invasion into Taiwan. 90% of the world’s semiconductors would be under the influence of China.

Meta has a vested interest in making money. This has caused them to force polarizing content onto users pages, even when the information presented is false. They have worsened the political divides in America, and caused a significant number of people to believe lies about their fellow citizens.

The fact is Meta has damaged democracy for it’s own profit.

Mate look at neo-fascist/white supremacist content on Facebook and tell me with a straight face that Facebook isn’t destabilizing American democracy.

Also, fuck their rebranding. It’s always going to be Facebook for me.

Facebook “accidently” created a polarizing bubble for neo fascist. Because they only cared about user engagement, regardless of what kind of engagement they get.

Now imagine an adversary was more intentional with this. Imagine the power they would wield.

Meta has absolutely best interest in removing any democracy in US since it profits from abusing rights of the citizens that would very much like to regulate it. So it is in their interest, like of any company, to strip away it’s workers and customers of any rights it possibly can.

Don’t fall for tricks of politicians when they pretend that they are any better from politicians from another country, they are not, they just have more influence in the media to elevate problems in other countries and minimize the problems in their own.

Abusing rights can still be done without removing democracy. Shit, they are doing that now and making a shit ton of money. Billionaires actually might lose it all under communism. Did know why the CCP came into power, right? The working class got sick of the rich and started a revolution. They drove the KMT into what is now modern Taiwan.

Did you know what happened to Jack Ma? The old CEO/Founder of Alibaba. Dude was the richest person in China. Under China, dude just slightly mentioned something negativity about the CCP and he hasn’t been able to go back to China.

You think Zuck wants to risk communism so he “might” make a few more bucks at the sake of losing all his wealth? Bro. Our adversaries are the only people that wants to end of democracy.

They constantly make such risks when they make anti-consumer policies and somehow it doesn’t seem to hurt them, because they have the power to force the people in a system they don’t want. They can’t abuse rights without removing democracy, US has no democracy since the people don’t support the policies of their governments. They are forced to vote between two worst possible choices and they are brainwashed to think that is somehow a democracy.

They are already infected. Only way to kill a cancer is to nuke it. Ban Tiktok. Fuck the CCP.

I’m sorry, what evidence do you have that they don’t care about ad revenue, or that no other businesses are interested in influencing elections?

They’ll double down on condescension, derision, and dismissiveness in order to maintain a rhetorical higher ground while never doing any work to substantiate their point.

Inevitably, they’ll distort your question to something you’re clearly not saying and answer that. It’s all very predictable and still frustrating. The only thing left for them is to ignore your question because they don’t have answer to it.

They haven’t even bothered to answer lol

TikTok has no competition? Reels for Instagram, Shorts for Youtube.

They copied TikToks format, because it does that format very well.

TikTok is not competing for your wallet. They are competing for your influence and from the sound of it, it’s working.

You’re just wrong. It’s an app, dude. The most influence it has had on my life is show me things I’m interested in. Get a grip.

I don’t use the app, do you get to pick each video like you do on YouTube or does it automatically find videos for you?

You can do both. I usually just let it show me videos, because they’re usually really interesting. There will always be videos that get through that are like little tests to see if you’ll like the content or not.

For example, I’m more interested in world affairs and technology. I get plenty of videos about those subjects. Then, once in awhile, they’ll throw a car mechanics type of content at me because I thought one video was interesting and liked it (stuff to make sure you keep your car in the best shape it can be, etc.) so it throws those videos at me and sometimes it is hit or miss.

You can always tell when someone has not used the app, because their opinion is always that it must be harvesting SO MUCH DATA! When (on iPhone at least) it asked me for my camera and location once and has not ever asked me since. I denied it of course because fuck that, and I also used Apple’s hide my email feature to create a dummy email for the app because I too used to shit on the TikTok because I too thought it was just a bunch of people doing stupid shit and dancing or whatever. Turns out I was wrong! It’s almost like if you used it, you could form a better opinion than TikTok = China = Bad

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They rushed that through with the quickness too(lemmy.world)

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