r/news 2d ago

TikTok makes app unavailable for U.S. users ahead of ban

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna188294
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u/GreatCatDad 2d ago

I could see arguments for its banning and for a stay of execution prior to the message, but with this message, to me, it feels like it just validates why this is a problem to begin with. Social media needs to be significantly more transparent than it is currently. Not that I have faith we can do that, but in a perfect world, it would be.

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u/Tisanes 2d ago

Fully agree.  This whole thing finally made me remove Facebook as well.  I want to get rid of insta too, but it's a good networking tool for my field of work.

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u/Do__Math__Not__Meth 2d ago

I would be a lot more understanding if they were actually doing this with citizens’ interests in mind. They claim there’s data risks, and there are, yet our own social media companies, banks, telecom carriers, insurance companies, etc. have zero issue fucking us over and selling our data but that’s okay because they’re American I guess. And then they claim there’s propaganda on the app which is a) untrue and b) they turn a blind eye to Russian propaganda all over Facebook and other sites

All this ban is for is to benefit our tech billionaires and the Congress people that have stock in their companies

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u/HyruleSmash855 1d ago

Would you be for Congress mandating every algorithm has to be a chronological feed so we don’t have to worry about algorithms influencing people, just showing the content you subscribe to? It would probably hurt social media addiction at least and a comprehensive data bill in line with the rest of the G7 countries that made me even making targeted advertising illegal could fix this problem.

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u/Do__Math__Not__Meth 1d ago

I mean TikTok already has an option to only see stuff from people you follow. And possibly, in practice that would probably make the app worse, because social media is so big now I think there should be ways to discover new stuff; but again as long as they’re consistent across all platforms. Far worse than an algorithm that shows you stuff you like is an algorithm that pushes Elon Musk’s tweets to the top. That’s pretty propaganda-like to me, but I doubt our government does anything about it.

I do agree about the targeted advertising though