US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users

Can the US Lawmakers do anything about the US companies harvesting my data and selling it off… please?

So when do they plan to do something about those domestic businesses trying to manipulate citizens of America?

Whatever Tiktok is doing, the correct response is to write enforcable laws to prevent ANY company from doing what Tiktok is doing.

This is bad governance.

This was a committee vote. The bill now must advance to the floor, pass a vote there, then go through the same process in the Senate.

Many bills are passed out of committee but are never given an actual vote.

Many users called lawmakers' offices to complain, congressional staffers told Politico. "It's so so bad. Our phones have not stopped ringing. They're teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app and we can't take it away," one House GOP staffer was quoted as saying.

and they still voted 50-0. really tells you something about how much these politicians are willing to listen to their constituents.

Tik Tok pushes so much toxic content towards children and teenagers it should be shut down in my opinion.

I wonder if this could also be applied to games owned in whole or part by Tencent...

Good. Fuck them and all social media controlled by any big mega corp. But fuck the CCP especially.

My prediction is coming true: https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/10ofony/anything_to_protect_the_youth/

Bold move. Who are they going to blame all the online privacy issues once they cant yell about the Chinese? Or are we going to start pretending everythings fine then?

Bytedance needs to figure out which congresspeople Meta has been bribing.

So NSA backdoors are mandatory but Chinese ones are bad.

I dislike TikTok as much as the next guy, but I think there are several issues with this bill:

• It specifically mentions TikTok and ByteDance. While none of the provisions seem to apply exclusively to them, the way they are included would give them no recourse to petition this, the way other companies would be able to (ie, other companies could argue in court that they aren't controlled by a foreign adversary, but TikTok can't. The bill literally defines "foreign adversary controlled application" as "TikTok, or ..." (g.3.A)). It also gives the appearance that this law is only supposed to apply to them, which isn't what it says but it might be treated that way anyway.

• It leaves the determination of whether or not a company is "controlled by a foreign adversary" entirely up to the president. He has to explain himself to Congress, but doesn't need their approval. That seems ripe for exploitation. I think it should require Congress to approve, either in a addition to or instead of the president.

• According to g.2.A.ii (in the definition of "covered company"), the law only applies to social media with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. Not sure why that's included.

• There is a specific exemption for any app that's for posting reviews (g.2.B). I'm guessing one such company paid a whole lot to just not have this apply to them.

So TikTok is sending out app notifications that they are at risk of being shut down and urging their users to call their representatives right now. They are not going down without a fight.

The 165 days time limit would land the deadline in August-ish, right before the most intense phase of election season in the States, and I do think TikTok would be a very influential part of the election strategy this year.

High school nerds pay attention. This is how you can make some money and have an excuse to talk to the hot girls…by installing a vpn on their phones so they can still have their tik tok.

Get one popular girls phone set up and every girl in the school will be hitting you up within a week.

Sooo... How do Republican's square being the party of "Small Govt" and then interfering in a private business?

...TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn't sell. It also would lose access to US-based web hosting services.

Oh no. Where would children act out jokes they stole from old tweets?

Lemmy.world has horrible takes as usual when it comes to censorship of a platform lmao

I don't see why users would even have a problem with this. Same services, more competitive market, and with less ties to an evil dictatorship should be celebrated, right?

An app would be allowed to stay in the US market after a divestiture if the president determines that the sale "would result in the relevant covered company no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary."

So apps can still be banned after divestiture, based on an arbitrary decision by one corrupt and potentially insane and/or senile person?

After all the talk of a "rules based order", I'm disappointed - this isn't a rule, its a leap of faith into the arms of serial liars.

I feel there's a lot of China influence in this thread. I wonder why that is...

The world police is scared about the competition lmao, "only us should violate worldwide privacy!"

The world is on fire but the kids are upset that they have to use another platform for their stupid fucking dance videos.

BTW: someone in the US should just make a similar app and call it tiktok. It’s not like China gives a crap about IP protection so turn about is fair play.

I want my data to be centralized, profiled and used against me, but I want it by American corporations, dammit!

U.S. lawmakers can't force anything on foreign corporations.

If the bill passes in the House and Senate and is signed into law by President Biden, TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn't sell. It also would lose access to US-based web-hosting services.

ByteDance would be banned from the U.S. market and lose it's webhosting on U.S. servers.

Also, what's with the "foreign adversary" status of China?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The House Commerce Committee today voted 50-0 to approve a bill that would force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company or lose access to the US market.

If the bill passes in the House and Senate and is signed into law by President Biden, TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn't sell.

These applications present a clear national security threat to the United States and necessitate the decisive action we will take today," she said before the vote.

Gallagher also said his bill puts the decision "squarely in the hands of TikTok to sever their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party."

While the bill text could potentially wrap in other apps in the future, it specifically lists the ByteDance-owned TikTok as a "foreign adversary controlled application."

An app would be allowed to stay in the US market after a divestiture if the president determines that the sale "would result in the relevant covered company no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary."

The original article contains 601 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

But....how will we dance to save Roe vs Wade now????

Ahhh....hmm. Kindof a point-and-shoot sort of thing, isn't it? Blow away/take over (well, "unrelated parties may buy," ha ha) any app associable with Russia, North Korea, Iran, or China 🤔 'Course, they can edit that list too.

Nah, I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong. US government never abuses powerful, broad powers it gives itself 😃👍

The free market economy for you

NSA can't harvest user data from tiktok because it's Chinese based, so they force them to split and sell to American subcompany that is obliged by law to give them access to their server. Everything else is political bullshit, like the Chinese gouvernement can "weaponize it's app" ?? They can't turn teenager into terrorist hating their country just like that, tiktok can only influence so much.

Even if China has access to my data, that's way less scary than Zuck, musk, Bezos or any other tech bro.