President Biden signed a bill that states if TikTok doesn't cut ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance over the next nine months to a year, it will be banned in the U.S.
I’m convinced that US lawmakers believe that the pro-gaza sentiment is coming from TikTok. The timing, the mechanism. They see themselves as no longer able to control the narrative and are blaming ‘non-US’ social media.
I think it’s more so just about controlling narratives in general. Tiktok has a lot of real time tracking of politician corruption and trades. A lot of good useful info for political activism, etc.
Now they can move to better platforms like mastodon, lemmy, peertube, pixelfed, which unlike tiktok, can be hosted outside the U.S. and don’t seek to suck every bit of data out of every user.
Arguably better platforms to organize activism, especially in conjunction with secure chat apps out of the U.S. control.
And yet it finally got the momentum to succeed now, during all these Gaza protests and when the US-Israeli mainline narratives have been starting to break down for the first time.
I’m convinced that US lawmakers believe that the pro-gaza sentiment is coming from TikTok. The timing, the mechanism. They see themselves as no longer able to control the narrative and are blaming ‘non-US’ social media.
I’d like to point out that the US has been publicly going after TikTok since the Trump Administration so I’m unconvinced that the timing lines up.
I think it’s more so just about controlling narratives in general. Tiktok has a lot of real time tracking of politician corruption and trades. A lot of good useful info for political activism, etc.
So did Twitter and even in the Pre-Elon days the Federal Government didn’t go after it like this.
Now they can move to better platforms like mastodon, lemmy, peertube, pixelfed, which unlike tiktok, can be hosted outside the U.S. and don’t seek to suck every bit of data out of every user.
Arguably better platforms to organize activism, especially in conjunction with secure chat apps out of the U.S. control.
And yet it finally got the momentum to succeed now, during all these Gaza protests and when the US-Israeli mainline narratives have been starting to break down for the first time.