House panel unanimously approves bill that could ban TikTok | CNN Business
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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.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12876226

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.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          Buddy. I’m not the one here who’s naive and I’m not a tankie.

          Facebook being sued for giving data to Chinese companies with tighter relationships to the CCP than Bytedance is literally headline news right now. I’m not going to spend time linking reality to you.

          The fact is you’re bending over backwards to defend an unconstitutional law with unprecedented powers. The common sense and constitutional law is staring you in the face. Make it illegal on pain of ban to give, or sell American data to a sensitive country; or otherwise cause American data in your company’s control to come into their possession.

          There’s one paragraph that removes the xenophobia, holds the entire data industry accountable, and is constitutional.

          The question of what’s the difference isn’t some cute gotcha thing. Datasets are storage containers. China will keep their data in one too. So what is the difference between getting everything Facebook can scrape and getting everything TikTok can scrape?

          And you need to look up targeted advertising. It’s literally creating a custom algorithm on everything from Reddit to Facebook to Google Search. Which is why it was used by the Russians to impact our 2016 elections via Facebook. Yet another reason your demand for evidence about Facebook is ridiculous.

            • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              10 months ago

              You get a pass on this because you’re not an American and most Americans don’t know what a Bill of Attainder is. But it’s a law that targets a single person or organization. And the Constitution outright bans it.

              SCOTUS has also historically been very unhappy with attempts to weasel word around the Constitution. Their position has consistently been if the effect is to do something that would be unconstitutional then it is unconstitutional.

              That said. There’s no reason to target a single company when we can regulate the industry just as easily. Unless the actual intent is to force a private sale for the benefit of American billionaires.

              But with your response to an actual bill and over a decade of American data vendors selling everything to China; I can see that you don’t care about regulating the industry. You just want to punish China. Nobody is refuting the horribleness of China. But there isn’t any evidence they’ve even tried to do anything to the international version of TikTok. Or that the Singaporean company that runs TikTok would listen to them

              So yeah I’m against giving the US government powers it’s called corrupt in every country that’s used them. Especially in response to xenophobic jingoism. This is being done the wrong way, for the wrong reasons.