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Since this is the place for the most serious discussion:
If US lawmakers focused on protecting American's privacy with some sensible privacy laws coughGDPR equivalent cough, we could avoid pulling out the ban hammer to play whack-a-mole on these companies.
Companies would simply be punished by the law for being malicious or irresponsible with your data, forcing industries to take privacy seriously and make investments in protecting and not leaking it.
Companies would simply be punished by the law
can you show me any recent examples of this happening with any effectiveness?
Tiktok got banned not for peddling "chinese propaganda" but instead not peddling the US one.
All the major tech companies in the US take measures to ensure content deemed unworthy by the government never become mainstream or viral.
This is done under the pretense of stopping "hate speech" or "terroristic propaganda" but often include things like pro-palestinian content or class struggle content (like luigi mangione stuff).
Tiktok was bold enough to not do that by default, cuz they wanted someone to ask them to do this and then it would become a huge scandal about how the US suppresses free speech. And US gov don't want to do that for this exact reason as well. So they decided to ban it.
Remember talks for this "law" were initiated when all of a sudden tiktok became a host for pro-palestinian voices. We should ask ourselves, how is it that 60% of americans want the government to stop arms sales to israel but this 60% never shows up on the big social media platforms. But on other platforms like here in lemmy and tiktok, pro-palestinians is the majority.
For further reading, listen to employees fired from big US tech companies for voicing their concerns over the palestine issue, or read Meta's new terms and conditions specially the section on "dangerous organizations and individuals".
The last panel applies to every other social media, just replace the spying country.
That last part is becoming less and less relevant .... someone is spying but it isn't for the benefit or under the control of a country. More and more, the spying is meant more for the purposes of commerce and finance, for money and control. For business interests which is what major governments mainly represent.
Yeah but not Facebook and Twitter and other American ones. Right?
You're on the Fediverse. Most of the people here are already actively avoiding Facebook and Xitter. Unfortunately, getting the US, EU, etc. to ban American propaspyware companies is, uh, extremely unlikely. China, however, has banned them long ago, which is why I don't see why people think it's hypocritical of the US government to ban Chinese social media.
I'm not a fan of government banning stuff, but like... if they are gonna do it, ban Wechat too. My parent's be so deep in the Wechat propaganda, I wonder what they do without Wechat.
Yeah, only AMIERICAN companies can spy on our citizens and flood them with propaganda!
USA! USA! USA!
Those are valid criticisms, but can equally be applied to all of the rest of our main social media platforms.
I’m not seeing a big difference here between TikTok and YouTube except that one is not able to be influenced or backdoored by the US government and the other is.
In essence the optics here look an awful lot like the US simply doesn’t like other nations mining their citizens data that they want for themselves, and having foreign control of the type of news being fed by their algorithm.
Just remember that before Snowden dropped a dime on the NSA, similar suspicions sounded pretty wacky too
