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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 5th, 2023
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25·9 hours agoThis was the turn of events anyone who knows anything about China and the CCP (and how closely they control businesses there) would have expected.
They are throwing a tantrum in the stupidest way possible.
Do it. Do a flip!
Third party apps with small users bases or ones that are used by people with disabilities (that have disability features) still work. For now. Also apps that allow for a read only view (meaning they can’t be used to sign in, write/post comments, or upvote/downvote) also still work I believe.
Sigh. That’s a whataboutism argument and I’m over it. You do not have to agree.
5·2 days agoI updated my Joycons to the hall effect sticks and they’re awesome. No drift after several months.
I’m not suggesting they move to other American platforms though there’s a lot of overlap in the userbase of all of those apps and because this kind of social media is addictive, I don’t think they will boycott these platforms for a long period of time.
There’s 150 million or so American users on Tik Tok, and it seems like maybe only about a million of them have moved to rednote.
To put this in perspective, Apple stopped selling small iPhones because they didn’t make up enough of the market to justify continued sales and they sold way more than a million of them (3% of iphone sales which is about 45million iPhone minis sold just from a quick Google search).
I can appreciate wanting to protest. I can appreciate the effort that it takes to organize etc. But I don’t think this will do much of anything except be seen as token resistance.
Moderation of an influx of 1 million new users who don’t speak the same language will be difficult right at first but rednote themselves say they’re hiring more English speaking moderators. So rest assured they will be moderating that content eventually.
So, these users likely already were not using meta (reels etc), or YouTube for the purposes of Tik Tok style short form content as users but as content creators who were doing so this hurt them more than it hurts the platforms they’re boycotting. Leaving Tik Tok hurts Tik Tok more than it helps them, yes, even as a form of protest. Apple and Google are still gathering information about you through your phones, and meta will literally follow you around the internet using cookies and trackers wherher you use their apps or not.
What I would like to see personally is these users, and internet users in general, take their personal internet data privacy and security seriously (regardless of whether it’s against apps like tik tok that are foreign, or meta/Google etc all which are domestic).
I have lots of ideas but most of them involve forcing the issue on internet privacy laws by lobbying the government and voting out elected officials who don’t want to do things like repeal the Patriot Act and subsequent legislation that allows the government to spy on people. Leveraging this ban against the federal government to sue for the right to data privacy would be a good idea as well. The argument probably should be that this bill foments the idea that this scale of internet/app data collection is harmful, and if it’s harmful in the hands of a foreign adversary it’s just as harmful in the hands of the federal government who have countless times leaked the sensitive information of citizens. Voting in younger politicians is also a form of protest. Lobbying not just for data privacy but for a non-government entity to audit any decisions made by the AG and such investigations would be a start as well.
I actually agree that Loops is not ready for this number of users to descend on it, and if they tried the platform would very likely go belly up. That’s why I said like Loops. I would love for it to be fedi related but there’s more than a handful of other apps from places like Japan and the EU that would work. It doesn’t have to be the fediverse, much though I wish what you say about us being ready for prime time wasn’t true. I don’t disagree with you there.
It’s not about tik toks reach. I know from long experience that reach is the only problem. Tik Tok’s reach with its userbase probably will not translate to the apps they’re targeting for protest specifically because of how those apps moderate (and censor) specific content. Some Tik Tok users have already been banned from rednote for the content they post and comments they make.
I’m not downplaying the users, their number, or that they are trying to protest by taking these steps. I’m pointing out that the apparatus to thwart what they’re doing is basically already in place, and if this isn’t the long term plan they may as well abandon it now because the government is not going to change their mind about this ban just because it seems like “work”. The idea that the government will get tired of using resources to ban these apps before the people do is just not reasonable, unless they’re planning to do this til the end of time. And people lose interest in these kinds of movements pretty fast. We only have to look to the whole reddit fiasco to know that the user base of 150 MIL is not going to stick this out for a long period of time so long as they can find something reasonable to switch to. There’s a lot of users who post the same content to meta, Google, and insta already, on top of posting that content to Tik Tok. Those creators will likely be cutting off revenue streams and harming themselves to push this protest and if that is their only source of income it’s fairly unlikely for them to do that long term. To be frank, that math doesn’t add up.
Users with an addiction (which describes a large number of social media users full stop), will try to get their fix elsewhere eventually.
The American apps and the government will be happy to wait them out. I think people should use their system against them.
Hell, if creators got together and put in a bid to buy Tik Tok, that would be a better protest because at least then they’d be collectively attempting to save it.
This ban was never to protect user privacy. It is to protect the federal government from what users willingly give away to foreign social media companies (and only those companies that are in the control of US adversaries). It was never about you and if you assumed that based on what the government said, you deserve to be disappointed. They give only fucks about what the average user can do to hurt them.
I doubt that. They’re slow to legislate. Not to react when the law is already on the books. This is as simple as their OPSEC community flagging the apps (which they do already), and then adding it to a list of apps they likely already have of apps that violate the terms and sending that information to the relevant app platforms.
They literally already have a list of apps that government employees aren’t allowed to use. This is not any different.
They’re already expending that manpower for the purposes of OPSEC. All those people already exist and are actively doing this job in the government. To add to that, literally all it calls for is for an order to remove the app from apps stores by adding it to a list of apps already banned. That doesn’t require extra man-power. Even if they bother with an “investigation” by the AG’s office etc (which is actually in the bill), it’s likely that relevant app stores will just remove the apps once they come understand investigation because the government is looking into them.
The Chinese government was never going to let that happen. It threatens their control of their people.
I would like Loops to get an influx of users, but this would be too many in one go while loops is not in a sustainable position to support them. The unfortunate truth is that Loops can’t handle that level of usership yet
Supposedly they’re doing it on purpose as a protest. Not just one sketchy Chinese app, but any sketchy Chinese app they can find. In the hopes that Meta and Google will miss them, and the federal government will capitulate to stop them using those apps.
Because apparently they haven’t read the bill in question and think banning these apps too will somehow be “unsustainable”.
Sigh. Two things. 1. This will not force the government to capitulate on the Tik Tok situation. It does not have the hallmarks of an effective protest and the federal government will ban these apps too. If you don’t think so you should read the bill in question. 2. Rednote and apps like it have the opposite in TOS and content moderation (meaning these new users will not be able to use these apps as free speech platforms because the Chinese government does not allow that on those apps). It’s very likely that any user trying to organize for LGBTQ or other marginalized groups will be banned pretty much right away for breaking the content policy of apps like rednote.
How do you figure it’s not sustainable? The government doesn’t have to do anything particularly to do it. It doesn’t require that Congress decide to/vote on the ban, will already be written into law, and it requires the users to have somewhere to move to that’s feasibly bad and able to sustain them.
We’re also already seeing Americans run afoul of rednote’s TOS and content policies. It will absolutely be the same on the next platform.
The thing you have to realize is that the bill is written in such a way that it doesn’t require any further regulation. That’s the main problem with this idea that the government won’t be able to keep up with regulating. If you don’t think the government’s OPSEC community has been vetting Chinese and Russian social media platforms for quite awhile now, you’re living in a dream world. The thing is they had to figure out a way to make it so they could ban or otherwise interfere in these apps because they’re corps. Now that they have figured that out the cat is out of the bag.
I will say that the suggestion that people use Loops instead is probably not going to work specifically because it’s too many users too fast.
The US government has been on a ban or otherwise regulate Chinese products kick for a few years now and it only takes someone who’s been paying attention to note the number of sanctions, bans of products and services, etc.
The US has levied 117 sanctions since 2020.
They have effectively banned Chinese EV’s.
The ban of Huawei, and ZTE, and potential ban of Chinese made Routers and networking equipment.
A better protest would be to stay on the Tik Tok platform with a VPN or other method. But moving to rednote is a lot like throwing a tantrum in your living room where nobody can see it. It detrimentally affects tik tok because they’re losing users/engagement as well.
You’re dealing with what is likely restricted intelligence here. The reason people haven’t been backing up claims with proof of interference is because that proof isn’t declassified. It isn’t hard to understand that. Nobody was particularly up in arms about the potential TP Link ban, and that can be fixed with updated firmware.
Additionally, two things can be true at once. It can be rue that the government took Meta lobby money in exchange for this ban, and true that Tik Tok is a danger to national security. It would not be the first time the government had their cake and ate it too.