• Buttons@programming.dev
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    6 months ago

    They can’t actually ban TikTok by name, it’s unconstitutional to make laws targeted at individuals.

    The current law actually says “no company can operate in the US with over 20% owned by China, Iran, N. Korea, or Russia”, or something like that.

    There’s a lot of people in the US and at least of few of them would be willing to run TikTok the same way, same algorithms, same content, and sell the users data on shadowy data markets (which China can surely get their hands on), etc. I’m repeating myself now.

    Again, my point is there are a lot of people in the US and surely some of them can form a company willing to do what China wants, and isn’t that their right by our laws and morals of free speech? I know if things get heated enough laws and morals will be ignored (see Japanese internment camps).

    And my even broader point is that this move against TikTok has ulterior motives. We should have created regulations that apply to all companies instead of targeting TikTok specifically. Even though we didn’t technically target TikTok specifically, we effectively did.

    • lud@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      If you help TikTok in that way you would absolutely get on the government’s hit list (literal or not).

      It would probably be quite easy to just make a new law or revision that stops the theoretical loophole.