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this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
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I suggest you read the bill. It isn't a tik tok ban. It's actually quite a good piece of legislation.
It is a vague and sprawling piece of legislation that gives money to Israel and Ukraine, makes Fentanyl more illegal, makes money laundering for fentanyl more illegal, allows seizure and use if Russian assets, restricts "foreign adversaries" from distributing and maintaining apps, restricts "foreign adversaries" from transferring data away from the US, and makes Iranian terrorism more illegal.
It does like 3 things that are fine, but these should all be different bills (the data transfer bits, seizing Russian assets, and sending aide to Ukraine, though that is getting iffy)
It IS a TikTok band and explicitly names ByteDance and TikTok, and also vaguely defines foreign adversaries to the point where it could be any person operating in a country that the US doesn't like.
"Quite a good piece of legislation" is only true if you mean quite as sprawling and good as ill defined
"sending aide to Ukraine, though that is getting iffy"
This tells me everything I need to know. That you would even say something like this means you have no idea what you're talking about.
Additionally, you realize that those are all separate bills, right?
Really? Just writing someone off without even hearing why?
Looks like I was mis-remembering Zelenskyy talking about moving troops into Russia, so that is the part I was iffy on. I never said they should not get the aide
It is one bill with 13 divisions called H.R 8038. The TikTiok part was fast tracked as an addendum to the bill. I can't find any other bill related to it, and that is one referenced in most news outlets that I can see, but if you have more info I would love to read it.
But even if that has evolved into it's own separate bill, that doesn't change the fact that "foreign adversary" is poorly defined to the point where it can be anyone residing in a country deemed as an adversary. That means even say a rando in Cuba puts out an app with no ties to the Cuban government it would be illegal to have that app in the US. The bill also still names TikTok explicitly, so it is still a TikTok ban (with the exception that they sell, which they are unlikely to do).
There is an "iffy" part in the aid to Ukraine, in the sense that Zelenskiy said it's going to be destined to finance German firms building munition producing facilities in Ukraine... so it's somewhat hard to tell who exactly is benefitting from it... but that's more of an "iffy as business as usual" rather than "particularly iffy".
That's on purpose, and in part caused by the fact that countries have the last say on what their residents are allowed to do. Like, you can't have a private corporation in China without the CCP controlling most of it, or forcing you to save all data on datacenters controlled by... corporations controlled by the CCP.
Most totalitarian countries work like that, doesn't really matter whether a certain resident is against the regime and making an app to let people get slightly freer from it.
Oh for sure I know the vague nature was 100% on purpose, but it doesn't mean the bill is good or that is what I want to see from my government. Data privacy protections for citizens regardless of which country controls an app would have been more effective. Instead, our own homegrown unethical social media companies still get to hoard and sell our data. But of course that is useful to the US government, so...
Yeah... the bill is probably as much of an agreement as they could reach.
For contrast, the EU has tackled "data privacy" directly through the GDPR, and has plans to tackle "addiction" in upcoming legislation. That has lead, just this week, to TikTok withdrawing monetization features from TikTok... Lite, I think?... from all across the EU, pretty much because they're risking fines of "up to 5% worldwide gross revenue", which is turning out to be a nice stick that's keeping even large corporations proactive about following these laws.
Yup! I am pretty familiar with GDPR thanks to working for a company that had to comply with it.