So… the company that was removed for spreading propaganda is suing for being removed for spreading propaganda and is using…. checks notes: propaganda as evidence.
Ok then, let's sue for the Chinese ban of literally most of the Internet. Where can I find the court that gives a shit about countries who don't wanna participate in other countries Internet toys and what the fuck are they gonna do about it?
Wasn't Facebook proven to give misleading information that led old people to vote for Trump that was ultimately from Russia propaganda sources? Where's the Meta ban?
Wouldn't actual data privacy laws stop this all the same? I can't help but feel this weird song and dance avoiding the privacy argument exists so US companies don't get in the crossfire for doing the same shit with your data.
Yeah. They do have their own data collection practices and privacy policies. IIRC, meta was crying over Apple implementing permission data for apps since it would allow people to back off from meta but Apple would be sole winner from that move.
Yeah I was curious about Apple selling data to brokers, which I think would be new news. For Meta yeah that was the ios14 update, which really messed with their bottom line apparently lol
Yeah I don't think this person knows what they're talking about, they must either think ByteDance is hosting the source code on Oracle's servers or they somehow think that binaries are the same as source code 🤷
Microsoft was reported to be in talks of acquiring TikTok. Later that day, President Trump announced plans to ban TikTok in the United States, and signaled opposition to any sale to a U.S.-based company. Trump's ban threat and his indication he would oppose any sale to an American buyer was condemned by TikTok users, many of whom argued that national security concerns were being used as a cover by the administration to justify a ban as retaliation for pranks aimed at Trump by TikTok users (particularly, a ticket-purchasing effort to inflate projected and depress actual attendance of his June 20 campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma) and other content satirizing Trump or critical of him and his actions, especially in relation to his response to the George Floyd protests.
Where did you get the idea that Oracle can see their source code? That only applies if they host their source repository on Oracle, if they host the servers there chances are it's binaries that are hosted on the server not the source code.
(Bloomberg) -- TikTok will “soon” grant Oracle Corp. full access to its source code, algorithm and content-moderation material as part of efforts to alleviate national security concerns about the app.
Oracle will also begin monitoring the controlled gateways where data comes in and out of the secure environment it set up on servers to host data from TikTok’s US users, according to a statement from the social media company Monday.
No, because it's more about the curation algorithm than it is about the data or privacy.
Regulating curation is a clear violation of free speech laws for citizens, but foreign entity that controls TikTok has no such protections. Giving them this protection could be a dangerous precedent.
This is still a problem with US based platforms, though.
I would think people of the fediverse of all places would feel strongly about allowing users to control their own curation rather than allowing private companies to dictate what individual users see.
It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out. In my head this argument is a little shaky, since it seems to be effectively arguing that Americans have the right to access foreign propoganda machines? There is legal precedent here, but the nature of propoganda has massively changed since the 60s.
This is going to be a very interesting court case that has broad reaching implications, but expect no Americans to give a shit because it's not going to feature a trash fire to gawk at.
In my head this argument is a little shaky, since it seems to be effectively arguing that Americans have the right to access foreign propoganda machines?
I don't see why that's shaky? There a plenty of books written by members of the CPC (Including Xi Jinping himself) on Amazon, in English, should Americans be banned from accessing that foreign propaganda?
Supreme Court ruled that publishing propaganda in America is free speech. You're not allowed to interfere with an American's access to propaganda
Justice Brennan made explicit what had been implicit in the majority opinion, declaring that “the right to receive publications is . . . a fundamental right,” the protection of which is “necessary to make the express guarantees [of the First Amendment] fully meaningful.”
I'm aware of the precedent, but there's a pretty massive difference between being able to receive printed media, and being able to have continual access to post and contribute content to a foreign propoganda tool that uses an algorithm to purposefully suppress subjects the CCP disapproves of. I don't believe the precedent is going to be applicable here, but IANAL, and maybe ByteDance's lawyers think this defense will be a slam dunk.
Sure, but if you tried to explain TikTok to the ruling judge on the 1965 case, I think their head would explode. The ruling isn't some all powerful precedent that shuts down the ban before the suit can begin, it's old and outdated. Something like TikTok was not even getting theorized at the time, you can't seriously expect it to be treated the same way.
I don't think the source of propaganda is relevant to the distinction being made by the precedent. If TikTok can be considered propaganda, then so can Facebook or Twitter or Instagram because they all utilize algorithms subject to the control or manipulation by their owners.
I can agree with that, but it becomes muddier when it's a social media platform where your participation on the platform lends it credibility. As an example, the Hong Kong protests were supressed on TikTok at the behest of the CCP. You could argue that by creating the content that ByteDance's algorithm used to bury the videos being posted on TikTok, regular unwitting Americans were assisting the CCP in covering up the protests.
It'll be on ByteDance to prove those kinds of concerns invalid, just as it will be the US' job to demonstrate the threat posed by TikTok to Americans.
Yeah, except China has been committing a genocide and would gladly commit an atrocity on the scale of Israel x Palestine to Taiwan if the U.S. blinks.
Yes, the U.S. is evil as hell, and yet China is still worse. The U.S. doesn't have citizen reeducation camps, people don't get disappeared for talking out against dear leader. If you can't understand why giving an adversary like that unfettered access to people's minds is a security risk, I've no interest in arguing geopolitics with you.
I'm not making a comparison between china and the us, I'm simply pointing out that banning chinese control over social media doesn't address the vulnerability of social media being manipulated against users by other parties.
If you have a problem with china owning a social media platform because they could potentially scew public perception through manipulative practices, then I would imagine the core of the issue isn't chinese ownership but the manipulative potential of social media algorithms generally.
I think most people would much prefer more transparent practices and user choice, such as what federated social media protocols provide. We shouldn't simply ban the one we fear, we should regulate them all so that users have more choice and control themselves.
Especially for real law, you would have to define propaganda which I don't think has really been done.
I have thought about it and I don't see why all information isn't some form of propaganda because you're either bias on purpose by trying to persuade or bias by what you're aware of and know which can't be all information with our tiny human minds.
How do you measure bias without having some objective physical level model of the truth even?
I think the argument against TikTok and other Chinese companies is probably that you wouldn't allow Facebook by Chinese Communist Party and this crosses the line into that. To be fair though, you could probably ultimately make the same argument for US companies. Why is there so much money available for ads for VPNs compared to the financials of that market? Only a few answers to that one...
Propoganda does have a legal definition though, it's not nearly as nebulous as all biased information. It does need to be purposefully distorting, either by falsifying information or by withholding relevant information. It also needs to be produced by an organized group or government, just making up nonsense about yourself doesn't count.
I think it just got hyper-politicized and segregated along political lines during the reddit migration.
You can pretty well predict the comment sentiment based on how the topic relates to political discourse. It's not surprising that a liberal-dominated instance would view TikTok through a political lense, even if it's super disappointing.
Other privacy-focused instances might see this less politically but lemmy.world has become centered around liberal politics.
Well, then the only hope it has of winning is on first amendment grounds because they already said that they would not be willing to sell the algorithm.
TikTok sued Tuesday to block a US law that could force a nationwide ban of the popular app, following through on legal threats the company issued after President Joe Biden signed the legislation last month.
The court challenge sets up a historic legal battle, one that will determine whether US security concerns about TikTok’s links to China can trump the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s 170 million US users.
If it loses, TikTok could be banned from US app stores unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells the app to a non-Chinese entity by mid-January 2025.
In its petition filed Tuesday at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, TikTok and Bytedance allege the law is unconstitutional because it stifles Americans’ speech and prevents them from accessing lawful information.
The petition claims the US government “has taken the unprecedented step of expressly singling out and banning” the short-form video app in an unconstitutional exercise of congressional power.
“For the first time in history,” the petition said, “Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.”
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