House lawmakers voted to advance a bill that would ban TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform’s parent, ByteDance, divests the company.

The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance.

US officials have cited the widespread commercial availability of US citizens’ data as another source of national security risk. The US government and other domestic law enforcement agencies are also known to have purchased US citizens’ data from commercial data brokers.

  • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
    31·
    9 months ago

    I’m saying that Tiktok is not a national security threat and the only reason that congress is pretending so is because they don’t like or understand the people using it and because it’s a non-donating threat to some of their biggest sources of legal bribes.

    I don’t use Tiktok myself and I’m in no way a fan of their awful algorithm, but that doesn’t give politicians license to just make shit up while blatantly ignoring the REAL threats because they are paid to.

    • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
      23·
      9 months ago

      That would be a very reasonable assumption. Accept that ByteDance does in fact donate and lobby quite a lot. It just isn’t working very well for them.

      I’d argue that a foreign power using a local platform for propaganda, is one kind of threat. And a foreign power owning and controlling the platform itself, can be a more subtle and probably more potent threat. They don’t have to create the content like Russia did. They only have to tweak the algorithm a little, so as to surface content they want slightly more often. That would be much harder to prove.