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_The_Floor_is_Lava_ t1_jdgep3d wrote

I hope they ban TikTok in the United States. Or it gets sold to a US company. 45% of Americans have the app installed. This gives China GPS data on nearly half of Americans. And that's just GPS. They can run AI sentiment analysis on your videos and comments to tell your mood, who your friends are, what you're interested in, what your political leanings are. They can recommend anything they want to your feed and influence the opinions and attentions of our populace en-masse. It's too much control to hand over to an unfree foreign surveillance state.

A replacement for it will be created and people will have a new place to go viral. It's not TikTok they want necessarily, it's an app exactly like TikTok. Imagine "KitKot", a US competitor app that's functionally identical to TikTok. Why not use it? It does the same thing. It'll suck massively for people to rebuild their followers list, but hey, sometimes life is hard. Once it's up and running, and everyone is reestablished on the new app, no one will care anymore.

TL;DR: I love hearing about shelter animals finding new homes. It warms my heart. :)

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doxiepowder t1_jdgz73c wrote

I wish they would just institute sweeping privacy reform that forces all the apps mining our data to change (all of them, not just social media) instead of scapegoating a single foreign app that's no different than Facebook.

My wife works in digital marketing. Privacy is an illusion.

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Apt_5 t1_jdgvsx5 wrote

TikTok and all of its impersonators should be banned. It is legitimately rotting everyone’s brains, especially youths which are its main user base. I don’t have it b/c I don’t like registering just to look at stuff (same w/ Pinterest) but I discovered Youtube shorts in the Summer and I definitely got hooked for a good few months. Too easy to just lay in bed and endlessly scroll until you notice the damn sun is coming up.

Edit: Meant to finish with “That’s Reddit’s job, damnit!”

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Dangerous-Leg-9626 t1_jdgv8of wrote

You know that they already did that with the data they bought from all the social media company, rightm

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madpacifist t1_jdgrovc wrote

You sound like a US congressman.

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gruffity t1_jdgtfek wrote

They have a point though

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madpacifist t1_jdgufwu wrote

The argument being a US-owned social media application, which still does all of these things, is better than one belonging to an alien company by sheer virtue of the sole fact that it's American?

Sounds like 19th Century American foreign policy.

Besides, there are US alternatives already. YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, no one is flocking to those outlets now even though they are, surprise, functionally identical. The free market the US has cultivated has chosen, and it's chosen TikTok.

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changiairport t1_jdgiet2 wrote

Nah they should name it KitKotKat. It's what America does best.

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kaizervonmaanen t1_jdh3z5t wrote

China at least have less nefarious reasons for collecting that data than American companies and the American government. China only oppress people inside their borders. Americans oppress people all over the world including America

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