me sowing (signing a bill into law and bragging about its bipartisan support): haha fuck yeah!

me reaping (hearing that the Supreme Court has ruled 9-0 to uphold the law that I signed): well this fucking sucks. what the fuck.

there’s always fierce competition in the category of Dumbest Own-Goal by a Democrat…but here comes President “only mostly dead…still slightly alive” Biden with a last-minute buzzerbeater and…MUH GAWD HE’S DONE IT!

tapping the “there are no good billionaires” sign

remember when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, slapped “Democracy dies in darkness” on the masthead, and a bunch of MSNBC-brained liberals thought it was going to be the newspaper that led the resistance against Trump?

I just woke up from a years-long coma. could someone tell me how that worked out?

And you think Xiaohongshu is run by the Chinese workers?

oh yes daddy, harder. shove those words right into my mouth.

And I’m pretty sure that’s the approach that lawmakers have taken with this

well, sometimes…I linked in this comment to some statements made by the Republican congressman who sponsored the original bill. he was pretty clear that he wanted the ban because he thinks TikTok is pushing propaganda, not just from the Chinese, but the Chinese Communist Party (which has been a long-standing right-wing bogeyman - that congressman was even the chair of the “House Select Committee on the CCP”)

I believe that’s the primary angle they’ve taken to get around First Amendment concerns.

this is true, in the same way that Trump in his first campaign promised a “Muslim ban” and then when they tried to actually implement it they realized they needed to frame it as a “travel ban…applying to countries that happen to have a lot of Muslims…oh and also North Korea because look at us, we’re definitely not discriminating against people based solely on religion”

everyone (except the right-wing hacks on the Supreme Court) saw through the “travel ban” facade pretty easily. it’s been disappointing to see how many people uncritically repeat “well, there’s a data privacy angle to it too…” as if it’s a legitimate justification and not just another facade.

Removed by mod

I’ve been very cynical about the TikTok ban, and assumed people would work around it by sideloading the APK on Android phones, after it was removed from the app stores (which, as I detailed in this comment, could theoretically get random users who share the APK with friends prosecuted by the federal government and charged with a $5000 per user fine)

but this is exceeding my wildest expectations

“oh, but it’s full of Chinese propaganda!!!” people will whine. cool. don’t care. Twitter and Facebook are full of American propaganda, no one seems to be falling over themselves to ban those apps from app stores.

if propaganda is the concern, have schools teach critical thinking and how to recognize propaganda techniques. they won’t do that, of course, because they want people to be susceptible to American propaganda.

haha class solidarity go brrr. the average American worker has more in common with the average Chinese worker than they do with an American oligarch. all of the American propaganda about how Chinese people are inherently untrustworthy and nefarious is gonna fall apart as people interact with actual Chinese people and realize “oh they’re pretty much just like me, other than the language barrier”.

and TikTok-style shortform video is very nearly the ideal medium for surmounting that language barrier. it was already commonplace to have captions in TikTok videos. start captioning videos on RedNote in both English and Chinese and bang, language differences don’t matter nearly as much anymore.

“tiktok” does not appear to me to be a viewpoint

seriously? have you not paid attention to any of the arguments in favor of the ban that boil down to “it’s pushing evil Chinese Communist propaganda into the minds of our precious children”?

here’s the original bill - H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

it was introduced by Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin).

here’s a tweet of his from March:

“This is my message to TikTok: break up with the Chinese Communist Party or lose access to your American users. America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States.” - Rep. Gallagher

and from November 2023, in a Fox News appearance:

Rep. Gallagher on why it’s critical to ban or force a sale of TikTok:

“It would be national self-suicide to allow the dominant media platform in America to be controlled, or at least be influenced by, the Chinese Communist Party.”

the advocates for the ban have been very clear, from the start, that they believe TikTok has a viewpoint - specifically that it’s controlled or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. and they want to discriminate against that viewpoint.

id say you have a stronger argument than viewpoint discrimination by saying it violates the first ammendment of the users of tiktok, personally, though the courts might disagree.

have you read the bill? the actual law, not news articles or summaries of it?

I linked it in this comment. go read it, it’s short, and not terrible as far as legalese goes.

the gist of it is that the law makes it illegal to run an app store (or anything that looks like an app store) that offers downloads of the TikTok app.

so the two big obvious targets of the law are Apple and Google…but it applies equally to everyone. F-Droid could violate it, in theory, by hosting the APK for download through their servers.

or for example, say the ban took effect, and TikTok gets removed from app stores. some tech-savvy high school kid knows how to copy the APK from their Android phone before it gets deleted, and shows their friends how to sideload it onto their phones.

then a bunch of other people ask for it too, so this kid uploads it to some filesharing service, passes around the link, and eventually it gets around to 100 other classmates.

that high school kid has violated the TikTok ban. the federal government can levy a fine against them of half a million dollars ($5,000 per user who downloaded it)

does that satisfy your desire to have the ban infringe on the free speech of “real” people, and not just Apple and Google?

tik-tok could be used to sideload data gathering for China, such as government officials camera or microphone use

but again - nothing about that is unique to TikTok.

do you think the federal government should force Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app, because of the risk that Elon Musk might use it to spy on politicians to get leverage for the 2026 midterms?

or, since Musk has said he’s starting to meddle in European politics as well - should the EU require Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app on European soil, out of a similar fear that the Twitter app could be used as spyware?

beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda.

of the 3 apps that I mentioned - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter - aren’t all 3 of them “poisoning our society with propaganda”?

why is TikTok singled out for the ban, do you think?

does it have anything to do with the long-standing right-wing grievance and fear and distrust towards Ghyna (or the “ChiComs”, if you prefer the pre-Trump right-wing nomenclature)?

because as far as I can tell, every argument about this ends up boiling down to “sure, lots of apps do it…but it’s uniquely bad when an app written by Chinese people does it”

you arent responding to their point about framing this as a 1st ammendment issue being problematic.

I’ve posted previously about why “the federal government can require Apple and Google to remove apps it doesn’t like, and that has nothing to do with free speech” is a laughable position. I didn’t feel like rehashing it here.

the platform’s collection of user data

this “oh banning TikTok is good because TikTok collects a bunch of user data” talking point has hoodwinked a whole lot of tech-savvy, generally-left-of-center people who really should know better.

thought experiment: I go out and buy a brand-new phone. Apple or Android, it doesn’t matter.

I install some apps. let’s say TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.

all of those apps use the platform APIs published by Apple or Google respectively.

all of them are equally capable of collecting user data.

TikTok is not unique or special in any way when it comes to data harvesting.

oh, except TikTok is owned by Ghyna, and everyone knows that Ghyna is evil and scary. surely that makes it different, right? US-based companies can harvest our data all they want, and sure maybe an EU-based company too. but Ghyna harvesting our data? that’s a bridge too far!

and that’s why we need to ban companies owned by Ghyna from harvesting our data!

here’s the problem with that. I install another app. I don’t like the stock Weather app that comes with my phone, so I install Totally Trustworthy Weather from a developer named Absolutely Not Spyware LLC.

that weather app needs location permissions, obviously. and network access. and to be allowed to run in the background constantly.

because it’s given permissions to run in the background, there’s a decent chance the weather app can actually collect more info about me than TikTok/Facebook/Twitter/etc.

but, why would a weather app collect data like that? what’s it going to do with it? it’s just a weather app, surely it doesn’t care, right?

wrong - it’s going to sell all the data it collects on me to a data broker.

(read Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer if you’re skeptical of how much money is thrown around in order to collect data of this sort)

if those nefarious people in Ghyna want data about you…they’ll just buy it from a data broker, the same way everyone else (including the FBI) does.

if Congress had passed some sort of GDPR-ish law, that applied across the board to all forms of data harvesting, I’d be all in favor of it. but obviously they’re never going to do that.

instead, what started out in 2020 as a “Ghyna bad” policy from Trump now has bipartisan support and people on the left defending it on data privacy grounds. we live in the stupidest goddamn timeline.