Paris Marx: The TikTok ban is all about preserving US power

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The TikTok ban is all about preserving US power
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I don't use TikTok and I don't think anyone really should but if we're going to ban TikTok for data collection then there are a lot of platforms that need to be banned. We know the 2016 election was fucked with through Facebook and not a damn thing has been done

We definitely need to legislate the way that they operate and make the majority of the corporate surveillance that is happening now illegal. Facebook should face consequences, as should Google, Reddit, and all the others. That doesn't mean that we ignore TikTok though. We should address problematic companies both domestic and foreign. But only one of those companies is partially owned and heavily influenced by an oppressive foreign government.

It's one thing to regulate foreign corporations and you don't see me making a case against the EU for regulating Apple or Google. You see me saying this isn't about data collection like they say, it's about preserving US power in the software space. The US is completely within it's rights to block TikTok but you don't need to lie to me and say it's for security. The servers are located in the US, there's no real evidence China has done anything illegal and if Google did the same thing and sold the data to China it would be fine. This whole issue is a bunch of individuals sucking on billionaire tech giant toes.

We know the 2016 election was fucked with through Facebook and not a damn thing has been done.

Okay I’ll beat that dead horse.

I appreciate you beating the dead horse, especially with all the sources.

Seems pretty cherry picked. From the Wapo regarding Twitter:

But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.

It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.

Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.

Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.

Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to “Protect Democracy”

All of the US corporate social media platforms are part of the US military-industrial-intellegence complex now. Look at their boards of directors and executives. Look at Reddit:

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TikTok as well. We’ve known since Snowden that US “cloud”/hosting companies are deeply embedded. The US already forced them to move their service to the US onto one of those providers, and they have already put people with a history of aligning with “American interests” into executive positions, like CEO Shou Zi Chew and vice president Michael Beckerman.

They have their eye on the fediverse now, too: Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World

As I’ve said before, the threat has always been coming from inside the house:

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Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

One can’t prove a negative, and I’m sure there isn’t literally nothing that has happened or will ever happen. But trying to propagandize the voters of the most propagandized country in the world probably isn’t the most efficient way to go about it. Bribing politicians surely would be more efficient, for example.