TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal

to suppress video coming from Gaza and Lebanon? just a guess; but I'd imagine that's at least a part of it.
- That and labor organizing, environmental awareness, and many other things where the absence helps the rich get wealthier .
  It’s also just a blatant theft; there is a lot of money to be made here however it goes down , and that money goes to connected arseholes
- Because when US politicians advocate for a single, global market, and a single, global internet, it is with the understanding that US firms and allied parties will dominate the space anyway. When that is no longer the case they get about as nervous as the Chinese got when they went and built the Great Firewall and made a clone of every popular western platform. Now that US/Western dominance is seriously challenged, we are seeing more and more signs of protectionism.
Theater.
Cybersec is hard. There are always more holes. China exports a LOT of stuff with holes. We can do little more than stick our fingers in the dyke. This looks like they're doing something.
What they're not going to expect is how much people hate them for taking their entertainment away.
- China already doesn’t control US TikTok servers.
  https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/
Because it's bad if China has the information. It's fine if "US entity" had the information. The ban is ultimately fake. No one banning the app cares about TikTok, they just hate that China is getting the information they want. What will happen is some US based company, Oracle last time, but someone like that will buy a sufficient enough stake in the company and the ban will not happen. It will be declared "safe" and the data will go to a US controlled entity, but also still secretly to China. (The later will be revealed years later, to the shock of no one.)
- They already have a condition of “sell to an American entity or shut it down”

I am rubbing my nipples in anticipation of the FLOOD of pissed off teenagers who don't know how to human without sharing their dances now.

.........can someone explain the point of overlaying closed captions over the center of the video, but one word at a time fast paced?

I'm on the spectrum. I can process reading way, WAY faster than I can process someone just audibly speaking to me. That shit's actually helpful. I admit, it doesn't need to be in the center of the video though.
- It also shouldn't be one word at a time imo
Actually captions like that can help you read faster. I've seen speed reading training things like that.
- Ok, but how is it helpful for the general population?
I don’t understand it either but it’s a product of how people consume the videos in their upright depression rectangles in public places with no volume I’d imagine.
- Yeah, removing the headphone jack and jacking up the price for Bluetooth headphones will do that...
OK boomer.
The one word at a time thing is a way to demand more of your attention. It's just a side path of the old advertising stick where words would 'pop' in weird ways. See this video for an example.
Or why the video is of minecraft gameplay that's entirely unrelated to the voice over and captions?
- Because it wouldn't be a video if it just had audio
- I think that’s to keep you occupied to force you to listen to the shitty voiceover that you’d normally skip. Or I guess the opposite?

Sign up for https://loops.video — the fediverse alternative

"We got rid of the brain cancer. Here, have leukemia instead"
The way I see this is that it's not TikTok that's the issue. It's short form videos.
- The real issue is that these companies are purely for profit and couldn't give a flying fuck about any negative social implications of their product. Every Le bad thing about any service is just down streamed from this reality of society.
- How much more ADHD can I really get at this point ?
I doubt there's many here that are even interested in that format.
- or vice versa
Though they've announced plans to do so, Loops is not yet federated. It's presently still a closed site and not part of the Fediverse.
Without the super addictive algorithm, it won't draw the Tiktokers. It'll take a serious marketing department to make it even start to compete. TT and Insta have spent an assload of money to make their algo addictive. FB and YT shorts took years of paid content injection at enormous scales to even become interesting.
the issue with loops is there's no algorithm. so I get 10 random videos that don't interest me and just one that does, almost.
that's not going to work long term for engagement. i already get bored on loops after like a minute.
- that...sounds super healthy? where's the downside? lol
Loops feels like that website that showed you YouTube videos with 0 views.

ITT: Braindeads defending government censorship of the internet as if Zuckerberg won't immediately replace the void with his own platform or by buying out TikTok in a bid.

Banning one platform would not magically get rid of short attention span and brainrot you fools. Every social media company already copied or utilizes the same techniques as TikTok, which is already a massive platform because they don't spam ban or regulate content as hard as Facebook and YouTube do.

It is insulting that a Chinese run social media platform provides more freedom of speech online than its US competitors.

They're banning it to remove competition, congress does not care about its effects on privacy or health, otherwise they'd have done something about Faceebook, Insta, Twiiter, and YouTube decades ago. They pulled their usual committee shenanigans to pretend to care by calling in CEOs to testify, and then promptly accepting a shitload of lobbying money.

Absolutely none of this law was ever about privacy or mental health. No one ever claimed it was. The law is banning tiktok because it is based in China. That is the reason given by the law itself. The possibility that meta or Google or some other American company will buy or replace tiktok and operate the same way is not an unintended outcome. It is literally the whole point of the law to get bytedance to sell tiktok to an American company.
- Hence them saying it's braindead to say otherwise.
  What would be interesting to see is if other countries ban Facebook because it's a "national security risk" lol.
Banning one platform would not magically get rid of short attention span and brainrot you fools.
Ah yes, the old "Taking this action won't solve all of the problems therefore we should do nothing" argument.
You think the communist party of China will allow western billionaires to buy one of their asymmetrical psyops weapon systems? Ha!

Ha, eat that China! Now you need to pay millions to American oligarchs for all our user data!

USA!

Has anyone actually looked at their network traffic whilst TikTok is running? I've already isolated my partners phone because it's so bad.

I am against blocking shit online but since it's being done against my will at least it's that shit hole.

I've worked in mobile development before. We hide the traffic by batching it, sending it through i.e. Google Play Services (so it looks like Google traffic), or simply sending it all to a relay server so it doesn't look diverse. In any case, all your apps are doing this, and the ones that want to hide it, can.
first they came for the tiktok but only the person closest to me in the world used it so fuck it
- Tik Tok likely isn't going anywhere, they'll sell to someone able to keep it up and running. The Tik Tok allowed in China isn't the same one, so they don't have to worry about data being pulled from their citizens.
What is the traffic? How did you look at it?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/26/24280075/fediverse-tiktok-alternative-loops-pixelfed-mastodon-activitypub-signups-open

Until a flood of TikTok users bankrupt them, anyways.
Not entirely sure how you'd make the economics of hosting endless video files work without great big piles of money and some way to get even more big piles of money on a routine basis :/
- Yeah, video hosting is notoriously expensive. It's why there's still not a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else but Google could afford to run the platform at a net loss for the amount of time required to build a profitable user base.
  If even a tiny percentage of TikTok's US user base decided to move to Loops, that may be enough traffic to not only completely disable Loops, but would probably impact the rest of the Fediverse at large, too.
- Not entirely sure how you'd make the economics of hosting endless video files work without great big piles of money
  You're absolutely right, which is why BitTorrent never managed to take off. Totally unviable, doesn't work at all, and definitely isn't the technology underpinning federated video services like PeerTube.
  Edit: WTF? Why are you people denying the reality in front of your face? BitTorrent works and distributing video peer-to-peer is a solved problem. I do not understand this defeatist religious insistence that Video Must Cost Money.

This is only great news if you are Mark Zuckerberg and you want a near-monopoly on social media.

You are aware that no western social media is allowed in China, are you not?
- Are you implying we should firewall free internet like china?
TikTok could have sold to an American company (read: a company that we can hold legally accountable for bad things that their product does) and made billions of dollars in the process. They chose not to, for some reason, and thus knowingly opted to face a ban in the United States. Those were the options and they knew it.
As I understand it American companies doing business in China almost always have to go through a Chinese company in order to operate legally and make products available to the Chinese market. Platforms like Facebook are already banned in China and must be accessed through a VPN because they don't play ball with the Chinese regime, so why should it not be reciprocal?
Until TikTok is being managed and operated by a company that can be held legally accountable here in America, they are nothing but a security threat and a backdoor for the Chinese government into every cell phone of every person who is dumb enough to install that shit. Is that what the people want to hear? Probably not, but it's the truth.
I wouldn't install TikTok on my phone any sooner than I'd install RedStarOS on my PC, because the implications of using a proprietary, closed source application with ties to the Chinese regime should be fucking obvious to anyone with bare minimum technical knowledge. Likewise, I wouldn't blame a Chinese person for being skeptical of Microsoft Windows or X.com for their close relationship with the American government. To think otherwise is just not smart.

Short videos are dumb. Are people really that addicted? I have it and go on it sometimes. And by sometimes I mean like 10 minutes per week. The videos are OK at best, but half of them are ads or live weird shit and the search function for relevant topics are trash.

I stay the f away from it. You haven't spent enough time to properly train it. As you watch, it tracks time spent on each video, interactions, passive and active choices and slowly builds a dossier on you.
As you keep going, it occasionally throws adjacent stuff in. It starts tossing you stuff that other people with your likes watch. If there is content on there that you'll appreciate, it will eventually find it. If there is enough, it'll stream it to you non-stop.
They'll find people who share your political alignment and say precisely what you want to hear. If you like brunettes with flowy blouses or redheads who are gym rats, you'll get them. If you like skeptics or preppers, you'll get them.
My wife gets a lot of her news from it, I find probably 1/3 of it to be suspect and 90% of it biased toward what she wants to hear. Nothing there is telling both sides of any story. (to be clear we have the same political/ethical views, but I'm a touch more skeptical about journalism and random influencers, especially popular influencers)
- My wife gets a lot of her news
  Wow, that's scary. I'm guessing a surprising number of people do this as well.
- For all its bullshit, YouTube is the same. I've found myself on it more lately precisely because of the reasons you're saying. It's amazing how much niche content there is for any taste, even ones you don't yet realize you have.
It's about xpntrolling the narrative. Tiktok is one of the few (if not the only one) popular social media apps that doesn't censor everything that the US government decides. Just look at how much Palestine stuff goea around there compared to anywhere else.
Yes with the attention span of a ground squirrel.
Why do you think they all talk vast with stupid ADHD inducing shit on one side. (Minecraft parkour, GTA V driving or subway surfers)
Because people will scroll away if you don't jingle keys in front of them
I actually really like short-format videos for recipes so you don't have to watch somebody chopping onions for ten minutes. Also, Ronaldo highlights set to Brazilian phonk are kinda cool. Other than that, the format seems pretty worthless.
Most videos on my feed are 3 - 10 minutes, they are ttending less short.
I like tiktok, it's the only "social media" I use other than Lemmy. I normally hate finding video content, YouTube sucks, and their shorts are even worse. But on Tiktok I get served all sorts of interesting videos, I will stumble upon some cool topic that has been chopped up into five 10 minute videos and then find the video or a similar video on YouTube or something.
It's an excellent way to discover things fast. You just can't use it as a good source, need to do external research.
My biggest gripe is as you said, they have really seemed to amp up the ads and stupid live crap.
I was on tiktok and even created for it for a bit, but it did get exhausting quickly after getting flooded with a painful amount of ads. I do like short form content though, I've been enjoying Loops!
Framing this as people being pouty because their favorite social media is being banned is a shit tier take. This is a problem of censorship and government overreach.
As someone who never uses this platform, this comment made me chuckle.

This week on How to Raise an Entire Generation With an Intimate Knowledge of Counter-Surveillance: Ban Their Favourite Social Media!

Honestly, I don't see any downsides to this. Tiktok and Instagram are horrible platforms that are actively hurting, and in some cases killing, young teens. Sure, they did it for propaganda reasons, but that doesn't mean it's not a net positive.

Source of brain rot
For me the downside is the precedent it sets. Yes, most of us agree getting rid of TikTok is a good thing, but how long until they start banning other sites "for the children"? How long until they target federated sites they can't control "for the children"?
To top it off, it doesn't solve the data harvesting problem their so scared of with TikTok. They only care about that one because the data is going to China. Instagram and others can stay because they are American companies spying on citizens.
- This is a slippery slope argument.
  The "problem" re TikTok is that they are a Chinese company with ties to the Chinese government who have managed to get a closed source black box app on millions of Americans phones that servers as about the most perfect avenue for social/political manipulation as any adversary could dream of.
  The solution to that problem that was offered to TikTok more than a year ago was to simply sell to an American company (and thus a company that could in theory be held somewhat accountable, but probably not if we're being honest) for doing bad things here in the USA. ByteDance would have made billions of dollars selling the American version of TikTok, but they knowingly chose the other option, which was to face a ban at the end of this year.
  FWIW, American companies cannot operator or sell product in China without going through a Chinese company, and social media platforms like Facebook are banned in China, so in my opinion some degree of reciprocity here is at least warranted.
- I understand your argument, and I don't disagree with it. Nor do I agree with the absolutely ridiculous reasons the government has given for the ban. It's the end result that doesn't bother me.
  As for federated sites, they aren't as threatened as you might think. Sure, the government could shut some of them down if they tried. But that's only true for those that are hosted and ran by people in jurisdictions that the US government can affect. That's the strength of federation. Not only can platforms like Lemmy not turn out like Twitter, since you can defederate from instances that allow things like white supremacy, effectively purging those types of people from the fediverse at large, the decentralized nature of the system means that there's no practical way for any one government to take down the entire ecosystem. A good example of governments trying to take down something they collectively hate, is piracy. Even united behind the cause of capitalism, and with the billions of dollars of the recording and motion picture industries behind them, nations across the world have not had great success in stopping piracy of any kind, mostly due to the patchwork nature of takedowns. I don't have any fear that the US government would be any more effective in tackling federated platforms.
  I would go so far as to say that federated sites are the only social media people should be using, because it's much easier to control things like disinformation, since the power in adjusting the flow of information isn't centralized to one group with one agenda. Some would say that just creates an echo chamber, and for some instances that's true. But unless those admins defederate from everyone, their users are going to be exposed to viewpoints that disturb that echo chamber, from places they don't have power to control.
I hope that Europe will follow soon.
- Yeah, normally I would say fuck the government, but in this case it's exactly the same as the people who got pissy about Juul getting in trouble for targeting children. I'm all for "freedom to choose", as long as whatever it is you're choosing isn't directly targeting kids with something that has an actively detrimental effect on their health, and that's being tracked as an emergent medical problem by psychiatrists around the world.
You don't see any downside to the government banning a platform people use for communication? That doesn't sound like a problem of overreach at all?
Also, you know other platforms are just gonna take its place. Reels and Shorts will still exist. Depending on how the sell goes, it's possible TikTok itself won't go away and might be unchanged as far as users are concerned.
- I don’t get why people like you are being dishonest. Just admit you like TikTok and don’t want it to go. You don’t need to frame it as a supposed free speech issue, I would respect your option more if you were honest.
  Either way, I don’t feel like hearing more about your body, so I’m blocking you too.

Even with APK, it wouldn't work if traffic itself is blocked.
- VPN time

Don't worry musk will buy it....

TikTok has said multiple times they will not sell. They will just exit the US market.
- we'll see, we'll see
How nice must it be to be able to force your biggest competitor to sell their business off. You either get it on the cheap, or get to make the replacement product.

Shit site, but not a legal precedent we want to be setting.

The biggest problem is them doing illegal shit like scanning all your photos instead of just what you pick

so America bans tiktok for the same reason china bans Facebook

Actually tiktok is not just china, its the soviet union too, used by putin's services...

Free links to American spying devices:
https://facebook.com/
https://x.con/
- I wish those would be banned too.
  I know you're trying to whataboutism it but they're all terrible and should go away.
- The difference is that those make you stupid and depressed as a side effect of making money. In tiktok it's the main goal.
Incorrect. Control of US TikTok servers was handed over years ago. The State Department has been actively censoring content on the platform, but I guess they’re having trouble keeping up.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/
- Yeah, handed over formally 😉
I honestly cannot tell if this is parody.

Excellent

Cheering on censorship and protectionism, the American chauvinist way
- It's not "censorship" to ban a product like TikTok any more than it's censorship to ban any other product. TikTok had the opportunity to sell to an American company (the same way all products on the Chinese market are forced to go through Chinese companies) and, for reasons that only they can explain, they chose not to do that. They would have made billions of dollars selling, but perhaps money isn't their primary concern...
  At any rate, we absolutely need to have a separate conversation about all social media in terms of privacy and data rights (though it'll never happen under Republicans), but that doesn't mean TikTok is free to continue being a completely opaque and unaccountable backdoor to the Chinese government.

....the same shit is on Facebook.

The same exact mindless drivel bullshit.

They don't care what the content or format is, just who owns it, and where the data is flowing. They want the data flowing into the U.S. and sold out. Rather than into China and sold out. That's all it is.

I get it, but also can you imagine a foreign country banning Amazon because "it means the US can see what you're up to and it gets to choose what deals to push at you" etc?

I mean.. Facebook for god's sake..

Being protectionist makes sense sometimes but it screws you over when other countries start banning your apps in favour of home grown alternatives..

The People's Republic of China has banned Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc). Brazil has banned Twitter and the European Union is considering it.
- Brazil banned Twitter because Musk thought he could just ignore their laws.
- China has banned practically all US social media sites, not just Meta-owned properties. A bunch of other sites are blocked too.
  China generally wants major internet services to have servers in China itself, similar to how the EU wants citizens' data to remain in the EU. In order to operate servers located in China, you need to get a license from the Chinese government (ICP license). Large sites that don't do this tend to get banned by the Great Firewall.
- Ah well that makes sense then
The US should ban Amazon
- The US should have humane worker rights.
Uh, there are several countries that ban Amazon. And amusingly, the EU Parliament has also banned their employees from entering the building.
- I wasn't aware, thanks

Just wait 'til truth.social and xitter run the country. Wouldn't be surprised if TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, MySpace, WeChat, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, Discord and Tumblr all get banned.

Trump said he'll unban it, if he does that'll be the one brightside of the new admin

Your instance is the same kind of malignant cancer as TikTok.
- ^ Imagine being this mad about TikTok. This is another reason why libs lost the election.
I don't see it as a bright side, but I also think it should be unbanned. Don't get me wrong, I think TikTok is cancer and nobody should use it, but I also don't think the government should decide what propaganda I get to consume.
The government should absolutely do a public campaign against it and keep a close eye on it, but don't ban it.
In the meantime, we should look into passing laws to solve the underlying problems, which would impact Meta and other big social media orgs as well. Or maybe fund independent social media alternatives that are FOSS.
But don't ban speech. Banning TikTok feels a little too close to banning books...
I think TikTok appeased the right by changing their algorithm. Charlie Kirk is apparently doing extremely well on the platform now.

Well this is going to go extremely poorly.

obtain vpn
use tiktok as usual

Obtain VPN
Never use tiktok as usual

The ban will not stand up and, because he had no core principles and is an opportunistic scoundrel, when this fails inevitably, trump will folly shift position and reframe/embrace the failure as deliberate action he took to "give tiktok back to the young people". He'll then do his double jerk off dance on the white house account and cement another couple decades of loyalty from the underinformed gen zers who will make up the bulk mass of humanity that officially drives us into full "ouch my balls" idiocracy

In other news you can't shit in the street anymore either.

That implies that social media is going to be banned; it isn't. The only thing this ban does is punish Tiktok for allowing content that revealed Israel's genocide.
The thing about freedom of speech is that we are only allowed speech that doesn't threaten the interests of the oligarchs. If any speech creates a real movement that threatens the oligarchy then the government takes swift action against it (hence outlawing socialism during the red scare)

already banned, but thanks

Now the horses are completely out of the stables, we close the door before the cows get any ideas

stupid rule that helped cost Harris the election. Fuck every moron that voted for it.

I cannot decide what to support here. On one hand, Tiktok is a blight and a cancer upon the whole world. But on the other hand, I'm kind of a libertarian, anyone should be able to do what they like.

Honestly this might stop some of these bad shit in the same stupid ass trends that keeps cycling on the platforms.

That devious lick bullshit that happened a few years back was absolutely stupid, and it's only going downhill from there with the stupid bust into the bathrooms rearrange the Isles of all the grocery stores

I cannot decide what to support here. On one hand, Tiktok is a blight and a cancer upon the whole world. But on the other hand, I'm kind of a libertarian, anyone should be able to do what they like.