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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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I keep hearing that the US government is trying to ban TikTok. That just ain't happening, but forcing it to divest from Bytedance is much more realistic. And that's exactly what should happen.
TikTok is the primary news source for a lot of young people. The algorithms absolutely could be controlled by the CCP. The ability to amplify fringe beliefs is a power Xi should not have over us.
A quick read through the first bill, HR 7521: "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act", shows that they explicitly call out divesting as an option. If ByteDance would rather shut down than sell, that's their call.
If Bytedance shutters TikTok, a multi-billion dollar operation, that's proof positive they are hiding some heinous shit.
I wouldn't quite go that far. ByteDance would be balancing shuttering TikTok in the US with selling it off worldwide, likely at a reduced price. Then there's the Chinese TikTok equivalent that ByteDance owns that seems to run off the same code base. They would certainly want to retain that. The US has the largest user base, but it might be the best business decision to not sell off TikTok. It still has potential elsewhere.
What I don't get is that they wanted to have the most public system of any social media company. The proposal included an independent audit board, compromised of industry and government officials that could audit the code at any given time and would be forced to do periodic audits. AFAIK bytedance was completely on board with the proposal, but then it just gets scrapped and then they say the only thing they want is a ban and resale.
So it's clearly not about the CCP changing algorithms to promote progaganda... it's about the US governments current inability to change the algorithms to promote their propaganda. Otherwise having everything out in the daylight would solve the whole CCP problem, it just wasn't the problem.