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TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
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Technology
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But the free market is free, guys! Look at this freedom!
Truly free markets suck. The inevitably become dominated by a small number of monopolies, who fuck over everyone else as hard as possible every day ...
Yeah. That's.. what I said. It's a two-in-one--I recognise that regulation is necessary, yet people seem to oppose it.
Until it benefits them (or, leopards).
There's some equivocation going on there: On the one hand we have a theoretical model, due to Adam Smith, that says if you have perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information then you get very very nice results and that's called the free market. Then you have peddlers of institutionalised market failure saying that any regulation that would make people's choices more rational, or give them more information, is making the market unfree.
In short: While classical liberals and specifically ordoliberals are saying "there shall and must be regulation, so that the real-world market comes closer to approximating Smith's free market", neoliberals say "there shall be no regulation because Adam Smith doesn't like monopolies but we do so let's poison the conversation by calling inherently unfree markets free".
It helps to think before you type.
The free market is free if and when you play by the same -democratic- rules. Look at Romania, just to name an actual example. Tiktok is much worse than Facebook and (most) others, and being worse is not an easy task here.
Tik Tok is not much worse than Facebook. The only reason is because Facebook cooperates with the US agencies, while they don't get the information from Tik Tok. US does not like that citizen data is going to China instead being able to collect it themselves. From privacy standpoint of the end user, it does not matter who has the data; lost privacy is lost privacy.
I think Tiktok is much worse. It's about a foreign country whose government is pursuing a dictatorial policy trying to interfere in foreign elections (again, look at Romania, for example).
The argument of FB collaborating with the US gov is true I guess, but isn't valid here. China is doing the same, the Chinese government is banning the Western version of Tiktok, too, let alone all other non-Chinese apps. So the 'free market'-argument doesn't make any sense here, it'd be even hypocritical.
Because another countries takes away freedom and eliminates the free market, makes it a non argument if the US does the same? The US is doing the same what China does.
@thingsiplay
If so, why then haven't you long been criticizing China the same way you do now the US? Where are these posts?
(Just to say that: The US, China, EU, and all the others can ban Tiktok, Twitter, FB, and all the centralized data collectors. I wouldn't miss any of them, and I think it would be better for the world. But the hypocrisy here in this thread is very telling.)
So you are saying I am hypocrisy, because you could not find posts in my history criticizing China? And that makes my critique about the US less true or acceptable? I no longer believe in good faith of your discussion here and will end discussing with you. You have the last word if you want.
When the dictionary points to bad faith arguments, your name comes up.
I agree with you that "free market" standpoints aren't very good places to criticize this decision from – except to point out the hypocrisy of the right-wing, which I do think the original comment was trying to do – but it has to be said that nobody is obligated to criticize both China and the U.S. equally in order to not be a hypocrite.
One simple example of why would be that most if not all users here have absolutely no say at all as to what China does. There aren't a lot of Chinese citizenry here. But there are a lot of Americans. It so follows that it makes sense to criticize the U.S. more, because many people on Beehaw can actually do something about it, especially in aggregate.
It doesn't help to criticize China much either, anyway. China's bad, yes; we know. Even among honest-to-god capital-C Communist circles, China is controversial. Posts about it tend to do three things: 1) Create a sort of misery/anger circle-jerk, 2) arbitrarily and unnecessarily signal to others that you aren't a tankie, when nobody should really need to clarify that in most scenarios, and 3) further U.S. propaganda interests by taking people's time and attention away from issues they're more likely to be able to do something about.
I'm obviously not in favor of forgetting what China's done, either, but there's a happy middle-ground I think a lot of Western-centric sites sail right past, and I don't think any of it is helpful.
@LukeZaz
I agree that there are most likely more Americans (or other 'Westerners') here than Chinese, yet there are many tankies here with alt accounts on Beehaw. It is them who spread the Chinese propaganda, criticizing the West in general while being silent on China.
I don't think that is what was going on here, though. They were saying TikTok and Facebook are both equally bad. You may not agree, but at no point did they say it was a good thing that China gets your data. They said it is bad that both China and the US get your data.
Yeah China sure is scary. Centralized social media owned by American billionaires on the other hand can totally be trusted never to interfere in elections.
Why not include legacy media? Same problem.
The irony of this post is over 9000
From a national security standpoint of the government, it absolutely does matter who has the data.
Except all the social media are doing the exact same thing. This is pointless political posturing
Not quite. TikTok has been shown to tweak their algorithm against criticism of China. That's the real reason for the concern. Their ability and willingness to purposefully manipulate people.
Which is no different from any of the US social media companies tweaking their algorithms against criticism of all number of political things.
Twitter blatantly forced right wing radical propaganda down their entire user bases through a for months. Facebook was selling user data to foreign influence groups to assist with political message targeting. They're all the same.
Lots of people think the US social media platforms do that. But none of the scientific studies have been able to show it.
The US companies are all purely driven by engagement, to maximize profit. The most effective source of that engagement, changes from person to person. But it's most commonly what you might call "Rage Bait".
Twiter's recent bend toward the right, is primarily self selection of it's users. As the left... left... the platform, the pool of available content shifted right; Causing even more to leave. Unless you have some paper I haven't seen.
And Facebook selling data, is entirely different and unrelated. Nobody (no lawmakers) care about that.
No, Twitter changed its algorithms leading up to the election. That was not self selection. They were actively pushing right wing bullshit down everyone's throats because the owner spent $200 million trying to get the dipshit elected.
That could be. It sounds plausible. Do you have any studies?
I don't think you're going to find peer reviewed studies on something that happened a month ago, but I would be very sure to say someone is working on it.
But if you've used Twitter you can recognize when something changes. I haven't used it for years, but secondhand I've heard it was pretty egregious. Obviously this could be due to external parties heightening a disinformation campaign, but I'm not sure that really matters.
American social media platforms creating an environment where propaganda and misinformation flourish and refusing to take action against it has the same net effect as TikTok altering internal algorithm. Arguing that somehow TikTok is worse because it's a foreign government is nonsense when every social media platform is manipulated by foreign governments to the same effect.
Doesn't help the US government just keeps saying "trust us bro, we have reports that say China is spying on us" while they threaten to ban one platform. Nobody trusts that, it looks like a witch hunt, and sounds racist when they single them out this way.
Targeted intent vs general apathy is a massive difference.
Do you have a source that is not from a hostile intelligence agency?
What intelligence agency?
NCRI is a social media research group.
Dude, the US based social media platforms are no better than TikTok. Its all rotten to the core. X is a great example of this.
Big corporations cannot survive in a real free market. For that very reason real free markets do not exist. So the 'legitimate businesses' which do not do things as well as others do can survive.
As horrible as it sounds, no regulation is what makes a free market. But there is no free market because when there is talk of free market, it just means extreme regulation to stifle small, extremely small business. These businesses run by people who work with their own hands are what give the large ones a run for their money. They're the real obstacle to large entities which do things in not the best way (so almost all of them). What people are left with are legitimate small businesses allowed under regulation after everything has been restricted already… and with the methods these follow, they're no harm to the big entities. The common human be damned, they're forced to choose from the least bad option for anything.
'Free market' in politics is a joke, an intentional joke. It wouldn't be a little bit surprising if the ones who advocate for free markets most have a laugh, outside of public view, at people who actually believe their points.
To be fair… real free market would see the crashing of many industries as things go back to being a bit more practical. A slow process which takes even luxury to be affordable—but the meaning of luxury changes. Things inessential for survival would then be deemed luxury and such things, good things which are also very accessible, would be fairly common around. The main flaw with that, however, is the purpose of luxury. Luxury is hardly used to refer to things merely inessential for survival, they're considered mere vehicles of showing your status and power (even though a relatively simple trick would be to not pay no heed to them). They are objects to enable one's pride, 'pride comes before the fall' be damned to them. One can have solace in the thought that the fall really does come, though.
Note: I do not support deregulation, it just means to allow big corporations to fuck around at the cost of other humans. But then, I do not really support anything.
"Free markets" is a complete farce. The only free markets are in places where no government exists like Somalia. In a true free market, anyone could take over a business by sheer force since no laws would be there to protect them.
That's not what the term means. It is a historical term with a precise meaning, and that meaning is not synonymous with "unregulated".
I get the joke but it still doesn't exist for anyone that matters. You see free markets, you attack violently