143
Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to Biden, who has already committed to signing it
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
143 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37691 readers
328 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I like how you pretend people weren't sharing their experiences and politics on the million other forms of social media that exist before TikTok. As if everyone was in the dark ages. I've seen all the ugly things happening in the US and I don't use chinese spyware.
China is not just a "boogie man", it's literally a technofascist state that tightly controls all information coming into, out of and circulating within its country. It disappears a million Uyghurs into hundreds of concentration camps and its own population is literally the only one on earth that doesn't realize its happened. The brutalization of peaceful Hong Kong protestors was broadcast around the world and yet mainland chinese still think it was some violent uprising. People there don't even know the truth about Tinanmen or Tibet.
But somehow that's all a gap in your knowledge of the world...hmmm, weird must just be a coincidence that the dude who gets all his info from TikTok doesn't understand that China has the most developed censorship and social engineering apparatus on the planet...surely they suddenly give all that up when operating TikTok in the west.
And it can take a far more dangerous and intractable form in one place compared to another.
You are vastly, vastly understating the degree of fascist control in China, you'd have to in order to try and even begin to try and compare the US and China. You may as well try to claim that downloading Russian spyware gives you better info on the US affairs because they're our adversary as well so they must be a better source of information than anything in the US, it makes no sense.
China has a pointed interest in deceiving you, they do not have any interest in ensuring you have accurate information about the US and its history, you're foolish to believe that they would.
There is no true information about the US on TikTok that is not available to me outside of China's information ecosystem. Yes, you're not going to get reliable information from corporate media or far-right outlets, but that has not stopped me from learning about the black spots in American history. In fact I was taught many of those black spots in American schools. Go ask a person in China what actually happened in Tienanmen or in Hong Kong, or Tibet or what is happening to the Uyghurs as we speak.
Here's the difference that you are keen to ignore; The US information ecosystem is not a monolith. It's why I can go and find sources that are reporting accurately about events in Palentine, or the protests on Columbia campuses. It's why I learned about the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa Massacre, or The Battle of Blair Mountain in school, why I can find that kind of information freely on the Internet. There are many independent media and journalism outlets that, if I practice some basic media literacy, are not difficult to find.
By contrast, the Chinese information ecosystem is a monolith, by design. It is built so that the state has control over all information and can censor at will. They are far ahead of the US in this regard, and when you carry water for the CCP by equating them to the US, claiming they're better or "just as bad" you are pushing us further into fascism, not out of it.
Uh huh, no shit and eugenics was essentially born in the US. All information I learned here in the US.
History doesn't change the fact that China still represents the next step towards a higher, more all-encompassing form of fascism and that your apologetics only further humanity's movement in that direction by normalizing it.
China not having the geopolitical power to act on all of their worst inclinations does not mean those inclinations don't exist.
Except that I did learn about that in high school.
I think it is deeply unwise to take that to heart.
I grew up deep in the American Midwest, surrounded by Evangelical-leaning Christian fundamentalism. Out there, committing one sin was considered as bad as committing a hundred (see also: Matt 5, James 2:10). They dropped the whole "lesser of two evils" thing, and you know what happened? They treated gays the same way they treated murderers, because the two sins were equally easy to condemn. They put rapists in pulpits because in their eyes, molesting a child was just as easy to forgive as ogling an adult.
When you tell people to reject nuance in ethics, that there is no "greater evil," you remove 90% of their moral compass. They become pliable and easily manipulated by whoever can seize power or respect (see also: Trump).
Every person has flaws, and every system, government, or ideology created by people is likewise flawed. If we refuse to judge the severity of those flaws, refuse acknowledge that there are lesser evils in government, then we claim our own ideologies are no better than fascism -- after all, both have their sins, and we just claimed that all sins are equal.