And they're already kissing Trump's ass
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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I wish people knew that TikTok being banned was more about it not suppressing posts about Palestine than national security or whatever else they say. Antony Blinken and Mitt Romney outright said last year it was about stopping people from seeing the truth about Israel committing genocide. If the government actually cared about foreign influence operations they'd regulate data privacy and social media algorithms in some way (idk how, but I'm sure you could) but they obviously won't because US companies manipulating people and stealing their data is totally fine.
If that were true then they wouldn't have given ByteDance the option to sell 80% to citizens and continue operating.
The law also bans every company from doing the same thing, sending personal data to any of the listed adversarial nations or being more than 20% owned by them. Why ban every company if they only cared about the Palestine message?
Except the entire point of that is the U.S. ownership would succumb to that pressure.
*U.S. Citizen Ownership
Because yeah, Chinese Military ownership is problematic for an app used by US Citizens.
Making ByteDance sell 80% to US companies is a win for the powers that be because then that too can be manipulated by right-wing oligarchs.
I don't trust Chinese companies all that much either, but Mitt Romney outright said this was about Palestine, you can see another reply of mine below with a link.
So how are a ton of people going to red note? Shouldn't that have been banned a long time ago if they ban every company?
Probably difficult to enforce if RedNote doesn't have American servers or offices, we will see if anything happens.
How did you go from "foreign influence operations" to "US companies manipulating people"
Facebook and YouTube have for years boosted conservative people and posts/videos: this is fine according to the powers that be.
Russia and no doubt countless others run influence operations through all US social media companies: this is also fine according to the powers that be.
China probably runs influence operations through a Chinese social media company: this is a national security problem that needs to be dealt with!!
The reasons TikTok is maybe being banned are because it's the only major social media that isn't suppressing pro-Palestine speech and because it's not owned by a right-wing US oligarch. Musk is the shadow president, Zuckerberg is blatantly sucking up to Trump, etc etc.
Blinken and Romney. name a more trustworthy duo!
ironic you talk about manipulating people in a comment that's goal is to...manipulate people.
I don't trust either of them, but why would they lie about wanting to suppress support for Palestine? And if you don't believe me, the State Department has them on record saying as much: https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-mccain-institutes-2024-sedona-forum-keynote-conversation-with-senator-mitt-romney/
if your only evidence is two liars that are on the record lying about anything, anything in the record from them can never be considered the truth.
liars lie, regardless of if they tell the truth or not.