I don’t know if it’s that ByteDance wants to push people into supporting Trump, but it could be that Trump agreed to “save” it if they appeared to kiss his ass.
friendbot@beehaw.org 2 days ago
I just don’t see how this move and the timing was not orchestrated to manipulate uninformed TikTok users into supporting Trump. The explicit callout to Trump in the message… I have been fearing the next presidency and this was a blow.
satxdude@lemm.ee 1 day ago
azolus@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Glazing Donald’s ego is a last ditch effort to save their platform. This is entirely on the Democrats—they didn’t have to agree to the ban, they could have insisted on higher standards for transparency and data security for social media instead. But banning the platform that featured pro-palestinian sentiment was more important to them. Now all that’s left is billionaire owned pro-Trump social media which Tik Tok may or may not join in the future. Good job guys!
SoupBrick@yiffit.net 1 day ago
I would imagine this is them putting political pressure on Trump to uphold his campaign promise. The uniformed will open the app, see that message, and know where to direct their attention.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
On one hand, yeah, on the other hand Biden literally signed the law banning it. If Democrats didn’t want Tik Tok being banned to be associated with them and to give Republicans an easy, obvious win by unbanning a wildly popular app, then they could have just… not done that. This was just completely an unforced error on the part of the Democrats.
OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 1 day ago
Or instead of targeting tiktok specifically, they could have chosen to pass a data privacy law and actually did something worthwhile instead of pointless, unpopular grandstanding. Haha just kidding, they would never do anything to reduce even slightly shareholder value.
themurphy@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
It’s never been about data privacy. Never.
It’s always been about control. Always?
Snape: “Always.”
ryper@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Apparently the law is written so that it would also be applicable to other apps like RedNote, if a president were interested in applying it.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
As long as it’s completely legal for American companies to sell the data that’s allegedly so sensitive to anyone they please, the law does nothing except allow the president to target apps selectively. If it’s the propagandizing via the algorithm that’s such a huge concern, that’s still completely legal too.
Democrats shutting down TikTok over a do nothing bill is probably the stupidest shit they could have done with Biden’s last year in office.
sonori@beehaw.org 1 day ago
As is traditional, the Republicans drafted a law, got bipartisan support to push it through congress, and then after it passed publicly flip flopped their support for the law they just wrote when they realized they could score political points by complaining about it while the Democrats would hold to their agreed support.
This way the Republicans get the law they want, get to claim any benefits of said law by pointing to their voting record, and get to blame anything people don’t like about it on Democrats, all at the same time.
Meanwhile there are no consequences to their bad faith actions because the Democrats will just bend over and take it in the name of bipartisanship and working across the aisle because half of them are Republicans, they just don’t want to call themselves Republicans and leadership is willing to fight tooth and nail to protect said members.
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Accurate perspective but another one is this was a very successful social engineering of US politics by its global adversaries.
Dems have been been trying to pull back the moment they released they got played but its to late. Above messaging is additional salt in the wound.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
How did the “[get] played”? Like the poster you replied too said, it was a completely unforced error on their part. It feels like they tried to jump on the right-wing “China bad” bandwagon and it bit them in the arse.
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Its pure speculation but i suspect china may have purposely pushed for the tiktok is spyware narrative and fueled the china bad bandwagon themselves.
They mad it a real privacy nightmare but also by made sure western leaders know it is a privacy nightmare.
Something i noted is that European parlement and many individual European govs have in recent years put up laws banning tiktok for gov officials and all staff but not the general public/citizens.
Commiunism@beehaw.org 1 day ago
I’ll get a bit conspiratorial here, but if what Bernie has said is to be trusted in his video about oligarchy, up on his youtube channel, then Democrats are largely owned/influenced by billionaires who would benefit from the increased Trump support. It would make sense to do this, but yeah it could also just be a blunder, given how Trump was the first one to propose the ban and Democrats could take it as “hey if we do this, we’ll win the moderate right support again!!”, though who knows.
yozul@beehaw.org 1 day ago
It’s important to remember that politicians are still people, too. Some of them might just not have realized what would happen, some of them might just be corrupt, some of them might have known this was a bad idea but played along anyway to try and get support for things they thought were more important. There isn’t actually a single motivator for all of the Democratic Party. That’s just not how people work.