Late Stage Capitalism

If the US government wanted to actually take the high road on this instead of hoping to be able to keep public discourse under the thumb of their own oligarchs, they would push in this direction instead imo

Maybe next year™

Which one is doing the shooting?

Yeah, if the government really cared, they would be pushing privacy laws instead of trying to ban a platform.

Is this the Amazon breach you're talking about?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/11/11/amazon-confirms-data-breach-exposed-2800000-lines-of-employee-data/

I hadn't heard of it, and I usually follow this stuff pretty closely. FWIW, in this case, it appears that the data was employee data from a third party vendor's systems:

The exposed Amazon dataset includes employee work contact information, email addresses, desk phone numbers, and building locations. While Amazon spokesperson Adam Montgomery confirmed the breach, he emphasized in a statement to TechCrunch that core Amazon and Amazon Web Services, or AWS, systems remained secure.

People misconfigure AWS resources all the time, so it is definitely true that data stored by Amazon leaks out from time to time, although they don't have much culpability in these cases.

Except this was never about "malware" or anything else.

Republicans first wanted to ban it because younger people were getting politically organized on it, and they weren't voting republican.

Then it was the main platform where news of Gaza was getting out, because American owned media, social media included, have always towed the line with Israel and anything that shows them in a negative light is just automatically considered "antisemitic".

Because of Gaza, Democrats jumped on trying to ban it with Republicans because neither side liked that information was being spread and they had no power to suppress.

If they actually cared about security or the privacy of citizens they would make regulation that applied to all social media, US included. There is nothing Ticktok does that Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest don't have a long history of doing. And there was the whole Cambridge Analytica thing where it was found Facebook sold user data and gave access to a foreign group that actively was using Facebook to influence the 2016 election. If China wanted data on US citizens there is nothing stopping them from just buying it from American companies like they already do.

Also, Twitter was specifically doing things to help prop up Trump this last time at the behest of Musk who was not born in the US and pretty much fits the bill of "foreign agent trying to undermine American values", except that he's trying to undermine the people and the push for equality and human rights, which most politicians don't care about.

And it's understandable. 170 million US citizens are on TikTok. More than 1% has a significant business enterprise that has flourished in that app (not so on the other apps).

The US government, beyond just violating* the free speech of half the population, would be shooting itself in the face by banning the app, considering how much lost tax revenue is likely to occur.

"Why are all these women so angry about not being able to vote?"

And no doubt they were bribed like motherfuckers to promote it.

A few days ago, this app had a few dedicated shitposters who really felt like they had a community, then a tidalfuck of Americans came and ruined everything.

Irony is an ouroboros

To be fair they also don't are about our own good, they just want us to install some good ol home grown American spyware.

I wasn't going to before, but now that you've told me not to I'm definitely going to do a bunch of opiates.

A bunch of people moved over to 小红书 (xiaohongshu) lit. "little red book" aka RedNote. It's basically chinese instagram.

rednote

Maybe it'll circle back around again like fashion, irc, phpbb, and xmpp messengers becoming the new hip retro protocols.

Explain exactly how using a Chinese app will negatively impact the average American. Don't use vague threats, use evidence based examples. I'll wait.