[josho]

I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.

Don't believe me, we've got lots of data correlating the rise of social media and mental health crisis. As time moves on the evidence linking the two continues to become stronger.

[nrb]

You strained to look past the parent’s point, nowhere did they excuse the private institutions for their part in this; just that a totally unaccountable foreign power having this capability is not ideal.

[chinathrow]

I guess the counterpoint here is that we have lots of data how external actors (e.g. Russia) is influencing large parts of the political landscape in Europe right now.

[Aunche]

> having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us

Dogs kill more Americans than lions, but that doesn't mean that we should be letting people have lions as pets.

I'd personally be happy to see something like Australia's recent restriction of teen use of social media in the US, but bringing that up now is just a whataboutism.

[keeganpoppen]

uh... "... worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us"... yet. this is only true because we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation-- up to now, the U.S. has had a monopoloy on social media giants and the like. it is absolutely not guaranteed that this will hold true, and there are many reasons to suspect that it won't be true. given how china views about U.S. sovereignty when it comes to setting up their own (secret) de facto government, police state, etc. on U.S. soil, it would be shocking if they didn't put their thumb on the scale.

and none of that is to say that i agree with the ban-- i think the mere fact of how unamerican, frankly, taking possession of foreign assets for american gain at others' expense is as blatant a signal as possible that we shouldn't be doing it. if we are trying to protect america, western values, etc., if we don't act in accordance with those values, what are we even protecting? the way to protect the american way of life is not through becoming more "unamerican".

in my personal opinion, the so-called "decline of western values", or whatever, has nothing to do with imperialism, nor to do with those values being short-sighted or wrong. it is because of our collective crisis of confidence in these values because of the (many) mistakes we have made along the way. the moral compass still points essentially in the same direction; it's just that for whatever reason we seem to have convinced ourselves that we don't want to go North after all, and instead prefer to just wander around the map aimlessly (all the while shitting on how the compass isn't taking us where we want to go). and so now we have people who unironically defend organizations like Hamas at the expense of the United States as though believing in universal freedom and equality of opportunity is merely a "cultural" value, rather than an absolute one. and, more insanely, that these values are somehow subordinate to the political issue du jour. these values don't give anyone carte blanche to coerce others who don't share them, but the idea that they are somehow subjective or relative-- that they are negotiable-- is the height of insanity.

[drawkward]

how did you manage to shoehorn israel in here? seems entirely irrelevant.

[motorest]

> I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.

That's pure, shameless whataboutism, and one that desperately tries to hide the fact that totalitarian regimes are using social media service as a tool to control you and your opinions.

You can bring up any bogeyman you'd like, but you are failing to address the fact that these totalitarian regimes clearly are manipulating you to act against your own best interests.

[JohnMakin]

How are you not doing the exact same thing?

[motorest]

> How are you not doing the exact same thing?

I'm not trying to distract people away from discussing how totalitarian regimes are abusing services like TikTok to manipulate people from Democratic countries to act against their best interests and in line with the totalitarian regime's interests.

Now, can we go back to discuss how the CCP is using the likes of TikTok to manipulate people to do their bidding? Or is the subject being discussed verboten?