Guess who's quietly bankrolling a legal fight against Montana's TikTok ban. Why yes, it's TikTok Five TikTok users who sued to overturn Montana's state-wide public ban on the video-sharing app have been getting secret support for their case from an unsurprising source: TikTok itself. The biz admitted it was funding the suit to the New York Times after the plaintiffs revealed as much. In response, TikTok told the Big …
That's interesting. So I understand that some people are complaining that data concerning US citizens is not held in the US.
But it doesn't bother any US citizen that data concerning European citizens is not held in Europe.
Funny, that.
Who cares if Tik Tok data is stored in the US or stored in China? Tik Tok programmers/admins have access to it, because the software cannot function without being able to read that data. So if you believe that the Chinese government would put pressure on Tik Tok to allow them access to data on US users it doesn't matter if they store everything on an NSA cloud server it will still be accessible by China's government.
Funny thing about the Sinophobia at the moment, about all these Chinese companies apparently being forced to do this stuff (without any actual evidence to support it, as far as I've seen)? The only other country I know of which makes demands for access to data stored overseas, even by subsidiaries? The USA. Due to its CLOUD Act.
It's not that we have proof that they *are*, it's that we have proof that they *could* - the CCP has passed laws that given themselves those powers. That's apparently enough to make the US gov go *heck no*.
Re: Data in America not being safe, well no. That's why the EU are currently fighting with Google and Facebook in the courts about storing EU citizen data in the US, as they don't consider that secure for many of the same reasons as America is worried about data in China.
And that's why this whole anti-TikTok thing is a sham. User data from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. is for sale, which means China or even much more sinister entities can still gain access to it. If this were really about privacy of US citizens, they'd pass privacy laws for all social media.
Not really my field but I think that part of Tik Tok's relative popularity might be supported by these factors -
- Infinite source of 1/8 price educated, sufficiently intelligent human curators and reviewers in China, so they have a higher human to algorithm ratio than YouTube, etc..
- Company has good credit with Chinese banks by government order, because the government likes having that window into US data.
Without that Chinese labor and financial support Tik Tok's relative quality would drop.
You Tube has 2.5 billion monthly active users. But TikTok built up 1.4 billion in a very short amount of time, targeting only the short segment market.
Tik Tok did claim in 2021 that they had stopped using Chinese moderation for US content, and so hired 10000 US moderators.
But surely that can worked around by designating content as "international", so they can continue using cheaper Chinese moderators as well.
In addition, they may consider that content "curation" (hand promoting certain content, as opposed to removing horrific content) doesn't count as moderation, but that works well to defeat bot voting and so increase quality.
If you've got something worth saying, say it.
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