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by whoevercares 519 days ago
Everybody loses? The fact that TikTok remains available to millions of users is a significant benefit, especially for those who rely on it for creative expression, community building, and small-business promotion.
5 comments

I would say yes, everybody. TikTok is very bad for our society. It has had profound negative effects on people's ability to pay attention to things. I don't know that I'd say the solution is legalistic in nature, but the continued existence of that platform is a cancer on humanity.
He means net loss to the status quo in reference to the entire fiasco. I had TikTok before… I still have TikTok… what rights were trampled in the process of bringing about zero change to me using tiktok?
Tiktok now exists at the whim of the sitting president, whoever that may be. This means that the USA is one small step closer to a dictatorship.
That’s only true if Tik Tok remains operating in violation of the law.
This has nothing to do with tiktok and everything to do with shifting power in the US political system towards the executive.
That's true. Unfortunately, it is also highly addictive, esp. for kids and teens.
The us opium wars:

Where the fights isn't over selling opium to the us masses, but about who gets the profits from the sales.

Here, have my upvote.

I might not share your views but it is important to defend this side of the debate to get the full picture.

It’s easy to reduce TikTok to its negatives and forget that ton of people do get value from it. Obviously for content makers but even for watchers, entertainment and sense of community do have values.

I strongly dislike vertical video and find channel-flipping physically uncomfortable, and my life would probably be a little bit better if I didn't hear that around me all the time, but I will staunchly defend what I believe to be a violation of the first amendment.

I'm not sure why people seem to have more narrowly defined their idea of freedom of speech to be "the freedom to shout futilely into the void," when it's a two-way street. The government telling booksellers they can't sell a book to people isn't just a violation of the author's rights, but the right of other people to seek and acquire that book. (Hence the clauses in the amendment about anssociation and abridgment of press.)

The whole situation is very Fahrenheit 451. Which is kind of ironic, since Bradbury would have probably hated TikTok and assumed it would be the television-flavored precipice leading to books being destroyed.

Captain Beatty would be proud of all of the would-be firemen itching to torch everything they don't like, oblivious to the simple corollary that someone else doesn't like what they like.

It's interesting how most commenters seem to forget about TikTok users. Every interest is taken into account, China, USA, intelligence services, TikTok "competition". Users somehow never enter the picture for most people in any other way than as gullible idiots getting exploited by the aforementioned parties.
In this model, users are the consumers and therefore aren't under consideration for malfeasance by suppliers.
Are they irrelevant?
Well, they’re TikTok users. They only have a five-minute attention span, so they’ll forget about any consequences pretty quickly.
Because they aren't TikTok users, simple as that. If the Trump admin was going to ban Reddit for being partially Chinese owned, they'd be up in arms.
Aren't we all, to a large extent?

I mean, yeah, I would be slightly annoyed to lose ${social network}, but in truth, my life would be hardly impacted.