Some congressperson is going to be assassinated by a Gen Z terrorist cell and I'll be like 
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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I'll honestly celebrate.
Putting the Zs in Leon Czolgosz
We're quickly going to learn if gizmos and doohickeys are protected by the 2nd amendment
Multiple would be great!
I disagree with adventurism usually but that would be worth it just because it would be funny.
I hope China calls the bluff and lets TikTok be banned, leading to the Gen Z Uprising
They're not even trying to hide the fact they just want TikTok to be Westoid-owned.
Purely just a question of capital flow, they don't care about surveillance.
The context is a chef's kiss.
The US House of Representatives agreed to reauthorize a controversial spying law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last Friday without any meaningful reforms, dashing hopes that Congress might finally put a stop to intelligence agencies’ warrantless surveillance of Americans’ emails, text messages and phone calls.
The vote not only reauthorized the act, though; it also vastly expanded the surveillance law enforcement can conduct. In a move that Senator Ron Wyden condemned as “terrifying”, the House also doubled down on a surveillance authority that has been used against American protesters, journalists and political donors in a chilling assault on free speech.
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They care about surveillance alright. They just need to be the ones surveilling and reality inventing.
I'm wondering is if the driving interest is to ensure American companies own most of the social media that Americans use because they don't want to lose the means to surveil large portions of the population. They very much act like there's a threat to state power, and this is the only angle that makes sense.
The alternative is that the state is now dominated by racist boomers that actually believe the red scare propaganda their predecessors made up.
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Nobody has ever explained to me why any person in the US should care about a government with no jurisdiction over them might conduct surveillance on them. The government that worries me is the one that has power over me. Maybe I’m stupid, though.
One reason could be because that other government may not be bound to rules regarding surveillance on people who are not citizens of their country, thus can't be held accountable, and then that government could share that information with anyone they want including that government where the person is a citizen.
But then I'm just describing Five Eyes and US surveillance again anyway.
I can see TikTok calling their bluff and then Gen Z just using VPNs to get around it so now all the ad dollars flow exclusively to Chinese companies instead of American ones
That is what will happen
over 1.7 billion users as of 2023
TikTok has 150 million active monthly users in the United States.
I'm guessing that 1.7 billion number is prolly off due to bots and defunct accounts, but still, you don't sell your platform for 10% of your market lmao. I'm not sure if the US thought they would honestly back down just because they're America, if they wanted to ban it because they honestly think it's spying on Americans, or what exactly the play here was, but the obvious one (force them to sell to Americans) was laughably stupid and unlikely to happen for obvious reasons.
tbh that 10% of the market probably contributes about ~30-40% of the revenue
Western users typical contribute >10x more revenue than all other users for adtech platforms, and just ~20-30% of users will contribute to 90% of the revenue (my source is my employers' internal analytics dashboard)
Here is Google's (note that rest of world includes all other developed countries too like Canada, Europe, Oceania, East Asia)
79% of revenue comes from China
8% of revenue comes from the US
Article is more current than the last one too, and that seems to track with what other sources say
That's ByteDance's revenues (the parent company). TikTok is its own subsidiary that can't operate in China
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There's also a better than zero chance US vassals will follow.
I actually don't see this tbh. Unlike India and US, no other Western-aligned country has a domestic industry in this area to protect and the EU really loves to fine tech giants for free money, so TikTok is overall good for them
I don't think 'good for them' is the thing that matters here though. The EU is a massive market for Instagram and we've seen first hand in recent years where EU leadership's loyalties lie.
It's possible they won't follow the US lead but I wouldn't be too surprised if they do.
Good point... I'd imagine the list of countries that would follow is probably similar to the list of countries that banned Huawei
https://www.reuters.com/technology/european-countries-who-put-curbs-huawei-5g-equipment-2023-09-28/
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If VPN providers are smart, they'll start advertising that you can use TikTok on them.
ByteDance should start selling VPNs as a side business
ByteDance should simply take TikTok down and replace it a few days later with a new app called “Tik tok 2”
Pretty similar to what US corporations do to shed pension liabilities…
Tic Tac Too?
Tok tik
More tankie tik tok
The "aid" is to Israel/Ukraine isn't it
And Taiwan lol
I've always found it darkly comical that United States government policymakers, masters of the art of soft power in the first cold war, is now staffed with people who can't conceive why anyone would use soft power and always leaped to military options. They can't imagine the government of China continuing economic soft-power control over Taiwan for long-term reintegration purposes. Because US policymakers would never do such a thing themselves.
All the time I'm talking about the decay of imperial competency.
Can you talk more about it here? It's a fascinating concept really. It always seems to happen in the decline of empires without fail.
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You know it is, our 'leaders' are genocidal ghouls on the brink of going feral and dumping the silos.
It's not often the US expresses its whole value system in one bill.
Banning tiktok 
Banning tiktok AND supporting genocide 
I'm gonna download tiktok out of principle. And probably never use it.
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It's like nationalisation except for private companies
Large private companies are effectively the state, so the term nationalisation isn't so far from the truth.
they attached it to the bill??? like in Simpsons???
Considering this includes an aid bill with it, would it pass the US senate?
Yanis Varoufakis was recently saying some interesting stuff about TikTok. Basically TikTok is a way for a Chinese company to generate data capital in a way that cant be taxed or restricted in ports, and that drives US capital crazy.
He also connected it with the Huawei ban- basically the US is terrified of China's free universal digital banking, because it could threaten to unseat the dollar as the international trade currency.
Don’t think China will allow it to happen. Someone on here once explained why that’s the case but I can’t remember the details
There are a couple of points to consider the biggest one being that Americans as a user base are but a fraction of the global base,less than 10% iirc, and one of the hardest to monetize. Outside of financial considerations it's worth more to keep tiktok just for the global soft power it exerts on the other parts of the world and to send a message as well.
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