It seems unfathomable that we’re even here. The First Amendment is one of our clearer constitutional provisions. “Make no law,” it says, “abridging the freedom of speech.” And yet, with the “Protec…
To me the issue is tik-tok could be used to sideload data gathering for China, such as government officials camera or microphone use, beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda. There have already been binary apps with malicious backdoors. Compared to a weather app that may harvest location, contacts, etc, but most likely verifiable content.
But that’s why I don’t install garbage apps, run GrapheneOS and Linux to try to minimize data gleaning.
tik-tok could be used to sideload data gathering for China, such as government officials camera or microphone use
but again - nothing about that is unique to TikTok.
do you think the federal government should force Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app, because of the risk that Elon Musk might use it to spy on politicians to get leverage for the 2026 midterms?
or, since Musk has said he’s starting to meddle in European politics as well - should the EU require Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app on European soil, out of a similar fear that the Twitter app could be used as spyware?
beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda.
of the 3 apps that I mentioned - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter - aren’t all 3 of them “poisoning our society with propaganda”?
why is TikTok singled out for the ban, do you think?
does it have anything to do with the long-standing right-wing grievance and fear and distrust towards Ghyna (or the “ChiComs”, if you prefer the pre-Trump right-wing nomenclature)?
because as far as I can tell, every argument about this ends up boiling down to “sure, lots of apps do it…but it’s uniquely bad when an app written by Chinese people does it”
The fear is because China is known to be a spy advesary, where as google and apple (operating from the USA) would really not need to spy on it’s own government.
It is really no different than the Russian maintainers being kicked off the Linux kernel dev team as a security measure.
To me the issue is tik-tok could be used to sideload data gathering for China, such as government officials camera or microphone use, beyond the worry of poisoning our society with propaganda. There have already been binary apps with malicious backdoors. Compared to a weather app that may harvest location, contacts, etc, but most likely verifiable content.
But that’s why I don’t install garbage apps, run GrapheneOS and Linux to try to minimize data gleaning.
lol it’s been poisoned since a bunch of slavemasters founded it. TikTok is just a drop in the bucket.
but again - nothing about that is unique to TikTok.
do you think the federal government should force Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app, because of the risk that Elon Musk might use it to spy on politicians to get leverage for the 2026 midterms?
or, since Musk has said he’s starting to meddle in European politics as well - should the EU require Apple and Google to ban the Twitter app on European soil, out of a similar fear that the Twitter app could be used as spyware?
of the 3 apps that I mentioned - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter - aren’t all 3 of them “poisoning our society with propaganda”?
why is TikTok singled out for the ban, do you think?
does it have anything to do with the long-standing right-wing grievance and fear and distrust towards Ghyna (or the “ChiComs”, if you prefer the pre-Trump right-wing nomenclature)?
because as far as I can tell, every argument about this ends up boiling down to “sure, lots of apps do it…but it’s uniquely bad when an app written by Chinese people does it”
The fear is because China is known to be a spy advesary, where as google and apple (operating from the USA) would really not need to spy on it’s own government. It is really no different than the Russian maintainers being kicked off the Linux kernel dev team as a security measure.