US politicians want ByteDance to sell off TikTok or face ban A group of US lawmakers introduced legislation on Tuesday that, if passed, would force Chinese internet concern ByteDance to divest TikTok – its most valuable property – or see it banned in the US. The bill is titled the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. Among other things, it forbids app …
This is down to the old saying "News Is Power And Who Controls The News, Has The Power" and in the old days it was newspapers, then radio/TV and now it's social media, which is in reality is in the hands of a handful of entities, with the majority being unscrupulous and untrustworthy in how they use this power and the data they collect.
If TikTok is too dangerous to leave in the hands of a Chinese proxy, it is too dangerous to leave in the hands of whoever will be allowed to buy it.
If it can be de-fanged and made safe that needs to be done transparently and if both those terms are filled new owners aren't needed. In reality it can't be rendered safe or transparent, and it just needs to go away. That isn't popular, but we don't need another online media whale drip feeding the populace a steady diet of brain rot and venom. We don't need another platform trying to lock up access to voters and seeking rent for access to the public. We need less of them. So if we can gut TikTok we should do the same for Meta/insta/face.
Thankfully Musk is killing twitter faster than any government action.
The app has nothing to do on any government's devices.
I note that we haven't heard about banks banning it on their platforms, because banks wouldn't allow users to install it in the first place. When you're working in a bank, you puny little cog do not have the right to install anything without approval from your department manager. And your department manager won't approve anything that is not for your work.
Why are governments not doing the same ? Oh, of course, IT costs money and people in government - especially politicians and their aides - don't have time to be subject to actual IT security.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I have always thought BYOD was a terrible idea. Either the organisation has to compromise security (allowing stuff with any old crap to connect) or the user has to compromise ownership (allowing restrictions on their device which they own).
The only people I can see bleating about social media access from a work device are the wankers in marketing. Oh, and the execs.
This is usually my philosophy. When I start to work somewhere, my employer provides me with any hardware they want me to use. That stuff is theirs and they can do almost anything with it. My stuff is mine and they can do almost nothing with it. They can call my phone to contact me, and that's mostly it. If they want to attach that to a paging system, that works for me. If they want more than that, they can buy another phone and hand it to me. The same goes for laptops, although I've rarely seen a BYOD policy that applies to desktops and laptops.
It's just taking a leaf out of Apple supporters' books. It's a choice to not have a choice, and that is more important than anyone who wanted a choice to have a choice. Those politicians should try the relatively basic tactic of imagining what they would say if someone did the same thing to them:
The government of [some country, I don't know, let's just say it's the entire EU and they now have any authority necessary to make this hypothetical work] has announced that Google must sell its platform to a local subsidiary or be banned. The president of the EU has the ability to, without even passing another law, apply the same rules to any other company, effectively at will.
There are some legitimate worries about ByteDance's operations and control, but this law is not a valid way to deal with it. Laws intended to counter concerning actions should be directed at the actions concerned, not a specific company. Politicians shouldn't need this pointed out.
The problem with ByteDance isn't that its Chinese owned so much as depriving American companies of their God-given right to extract as much revenue as they can from whatever they can get their hands on. Tictoc is obviously a bit of a bust in that respect so It Has To Go. All this security risk is just BS for the 'rubes. (If you don't believe me then there was a report last week that the government is intending spending $20 billion to replace cranes at our ports because the Chinese ones pose a security threat. Exactly what is never told to us so I presume they're expecting them to start attacking us like "Godzilla meets Transformers".)
Our (Federal) legislators do a very good job of behaving as if they're pawns, bought and sold by a web of mostly dark money. They are, on the whole, utterly useless. If they disappeared overnight into a huge hole in the ground I doubt that anyone would notice outside the Beltway.
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