My TikTok feed is full of content that I find interesting and educational, from creators who work hard to make something valuable.

For them, banning TikTok means the work they put in to curating an audience will be partially lost, they’ll retain only the followers who find them on another app. If they are monetizing, they’ll potentially have to start over. That may discourage some who are just getting started from developing their craft.

If china, bytedance, meta, or any other platform is collecting user data in such a way as to be a national threat they definitely need to cut it out and this should be regulated. For example, it should be impossible to identify the location of military generals based on where their wives access TikTok from, or who’s having an affair with who based on proximity to each other, or to develop a vast dataset of individually identifiable profiles of every user that could be used to selectively damage their character.

Aside from these problems, which are potentially solvable, I think the individual creator/maker economy is an awesome way to give more power to the people.

It has its bads and a lot of the content is worthless trash, but it’s also a really good way to see what’s going on around the world from those people’s perspectives. You see a lot of stuff that doesn’t make it to Reddit or Twitter.

It’s a lot harder to be against Ukraine when you can see the horrors minutes after a Russian strike.

The government hates it because they can’t control it. They’d rather people only see what the mainstream media says, and not the fact everyone sympathizes with Luigi.

The free speech argument is genuine, despite how much I hate the shady practices of the platform.

I imagine because a lot of people use it as a way to run their independent business now, TikTok accounted for $24 billion in gross GDP in 2023. Banning TikTok would be really disruptive to all the people who started using it to run a business, and while they will eventually find a new platform it will be disruptive for them in the short run https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/tiktok-economic-impact-report-2024-smb

Another reason is that it’s relatively unfiltered stream of information where people can discuss issues like the genocide in Palestine that are censored on US owned platforms. If you don’t see why that’s important I don’t know what else to tell you.

I don’t use tiktok, I’ve never been interested in using tiktok, and if it was just going out of business or something then I would give precisely zero fuckaroos.

But I don’t need the government making the decision to block it for me arbitrarily. I confess that I’m not studied up on the reasoning behind blocking it (I’ve mostly heard about security concerns), but if Congress and the supreme court actually cared about digital security, then they’d be passing a bill of digital rights right now. Instead of doing that, they’re set on going after TikTok specifically, which tells us two things:

• Because they aren’t passing blanket digital privacy rights, it’s likely that TikTok is not the only company committing these privacy violations, but they don’t want to punish the “wrong” company.
• Given the previous point, it follows that they don’t actually care about digital privacy (duh), so the actual reason for banning them is likely something else. Other people in this thread have pointed out that the US government can’t control propaganda on TikTok like they can other social media, but it could also be as simple as clearing the way for American competitors/lobbyists who stand to profit from the ban.

So yeah, like you I don’t use tiktok so I’m not directly affected by the ban, I might’ve even supported it if it was due to an impartial bill of digital rights, but reasoning behind the actual ban is clearly bullshit on principle just by being so specific, and it sets a dangerous precedent. You saying that TikTok is shit so you don’t care if it gets injustly and unconstitutionally banned is no different then saying that George Floyd was a criminal so you don’t care if he was murdered by cops sans-due-process. You’re being distracted, soulifix. Think about it, if the government cared about addressing the issues with TikTok that you brought up in your post, why are they going after TikTok specifically instead of addressing that behavior generally?

Because it’s censorship by the goverment? also all the bad shit you mentioned can be easily found in most other social media too, should those be banned as well then?

they’re banning tiktok because people there are denouncing the crimes of israel and, and the ties to the US gvt, and they can’t force censorship like they can on US-based platforms, which are as bad, or even worse, in terms of data protection (since they keep selling & getting the data break which will inevitably end up in chinese hands anyway)

government bans social media because it makes it too easy to see the devastating results of wars that we profit off of

“Who cares about Tik Tok dances?!?!”

I hate everything the US government does

A TikTok ban would consolidate more power into the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Arguably, that’s worse.

I don’t care about tik tok, I hate it. But its concerning how the government could just bypass the first amendment. They could ban Lemmy Instances next.

I enjoy tiktok (using Vanced) but I don’t care if it goes away tomorrow. With that said, I don’t like this ban as it sets a precedent where corporations can just ban the competition.

Look, TikTok is trash, but clearly the people championing this ban don’t care at all about data privacy or social media manipulation. Ban none, or ban them all.

The one true way to resolve this issue (IMO) is to pass a digital bill of rights, regulating these social media corporations, and forcing them to make their products safe for all ages.

Banning one of many is pissing in the wind, and I don’t enjoy urine in my face (no judgement if that’s your thing, it’s just not mine).

there’s also an economic problem with banning tiktok: tens of millions of americans rely on it as a source of income and its banning will effectively become the biggest layoff in american history and will have detrimental impacts to our already fraught economic situation.

It matters whether the government can do things like this at all, because if they can do it to TikTok, they can do it to anyone and anything else. TikTok may or may not be a good platform, that doesn’t matter at all.