Summary
The Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to reject Donald Trump’s request to delay a law banning TikTok or forcing its sale by Jan. 19, 2025.
TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, claims the ban violates First Amendment rights, but the DOJ argued the law targets foreign ownership, not free speech, and passes constitutional scrutiny.
Trump, despite opposing a ban publicly, asked the Court to extend the deadline to seek a political resolution.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Jan. 10, with the ban set to take effect before Trump’s inauguration.
Eh this is the one social media that the oligarchs can’t censor so I’m fine with it sticking around. I’d rather have options than Elon and Zuck controlling the majority methods for average joes to get information out. Cause it doesn’t seem like the fediverse is going mainstream for a while
Yeah, the reason they want to ban TikTok is because it’s not an American owned social media platform like every other one in the country, which means that they can’t as easily police its content and only China has that kind of power over it (but I think they don’t really have much control over the international version? I don’t know enough to say).
This is purely about America’s ability to put propaganda on the platform.
There is only one reason I’m concerned about but it’s a big one - China could at any time tweak the algorithm to influence a whole generation of people addicted to the network. At that level they could really tip the scales in their favor, and create unrest and instability, probably even violence or worse.
You’re absolutely right, but I have the exact same concerns about Meta and Facebook, Google and YouTube, and Musk and Twitter - all of whom have been shown to be influencing the algorithms to censor left-wing news and people and favor right-wing groups and push right-wing extremism.
The other platforms are already doing that. So does the news when they report on events using different language (see the cyber truck blowing up vs. the New Orleans attack). The only difference here is that it might be China doing the propagandizing instead of the corporate overlords.
What evidence do you have that oligarchs in any nation cannot influence your TikTok algorithm? Like… we should assume they can by default until proven innocent.
Even if it’s just a competing team of oligarchs fighting over who can produce the most amount of animosity and mistrust of the other, they’re going to accidentally stumble across some shit that the other one doesn’t want you to see and then they’ll show it to you.
It turns out we don’t have any way of getting clean unbiased sources so the best we can do is just have a lot of different ones with different biases since there is no such thing as clean public media anymore.