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0 pointsBarrin921y ago0 comments

You didn't even engage with what I said. You dismiss statements of a US senator because of the paper that reports them?

Please address the actual argument, namely that in the US, when you hand platforms to people like Zuckerberg, you don't need to do any actual censoring because American business leaders change their political opinions in line with the sitting administration the way other people change T-Shirts. That is the point of the sale, anybody who is not utterly gullible can see it from a mile away.

On a Chinese owned TikTok Americans get information presented to them, whether intentionally or authentically, that the US powers that be do not like. There is no other security argument, data was already managed by Oracle in the US, the app was technically separated from its Chinese equivalent Douyin.

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LPisGood1y ago· 1 in thread

I engaged directly with what you said. Namely,

>Obviously the transfer of ownership was always about the content

I’m struggling to see why you say I didn’t.

> you don't need to do any actual censoring because American business leaders change their political opinions in line with the sitting administration

I think this is blatantly not true. Instagram, reddit, and others host a TON of anti-current-administration content.

Now, I’d like to discuss your assertion that there is no other security argument with a series of questions. I do not believe even a casual observer can uniformly answer “no” to the following;

Do you think it is likely that CCP has access to the data obtained by Tik Tok on US phones?

Do you think the US government warnings and security audit results were based on real concerns and findings?

Do you think it is a national security risk for millions of Americans to run CCP controlled code on their phones?

Do you think CCP is able to control the Tik Tok recommendation algorithms to promote their interests, possibly at the expense of American interests?

Barrin92OP1y ago

> I do not believe even a casual observer can uniformly answer “no” to the following;

The only one I wouldn't uniformly answer "no" to is the last one as there's no real evidence for the first two and that one is at least in principle possible but what's important is that private American citizens running entertainment apps on their personal phones isn't a "national security issue".

Running TikTok on government phones in Langley probably is so banning an app like this from government devices is fair enough, but the interest of any individual American is that they have free access to services, domestic or foreign, even if it's literal propaganda because they're the ones who are supposed to make that judgement. Hell even if it's Red Star OS from North Korea and they want to run it on their personal computer, they should be able to.

American interest isn't a synonym for interest of the state department, because if that's the case you're living in a security state (ironically like China) and not a free country.

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