I also find it comical that banning TikTok is the red line for folks when the NSA and other government agencies have been acting with impunity when it comes to harvesting data for decades now.
People don't care about most things because there are a practically infinite number of things one could care about.
But when you ban something 9 figures of people happily use, with some small chunk of that even being people making a living off of it, people will care about that because it directly and visibly affects them.
If I were an US citizen this would be the most worrying aspect to me.
Are the congressmen so incompetent that they didn't see this coming? This backfired horribly for them in multiple ways... unless this was somehow part of a master plan my simple mind can't comprehend?
Did it somehow not backfire and I'm just being led to believe so?
It’s literally pay to play with the new administration which is why it doesn’t feel coherent. He’s being courted by Meta to ban and TikTok to not ban.
The elite have always known the value of media and propaganda. TikTok could easily sway electorate decision making in the same way as Meta, X, and YouTube. The US oligarchs have no control over a sizable social media platform. The data security and privacy concerns are theater. The very same logic we use for TikTok applies to our own apps and social media. The only distinction is the false premise they have our interests in mind.
Are congressmen this incompetent? Yes. Are they bought by adversaries? Yes. Are they just humans who are as equally manipulated as you? Yes.
The assumption (whether right or wrong) is that the NSA and other government agencies are at least doing it to keep Americans safe. And I think there's an assumption (again, whether right or wrong) in the general public that the NSA doesn't harvest the data of Americans themselves – or if they are harvesting the data of Americans, then they're Americans who are up to no good.
The issue isn’t data harvesting, and it’s unclear to me why people getting this wrong.
The issue is a foreign government having access to that data, to installed software on millions of phones, and foreign control of the primary information source for tens of millions of Americans.
