TikTok Ban!?

Ugh...
The TikTok Ban... or we're pretending it's not a ban but "forcing TT to sell."
Politicians on both sides as well as our media are spreading misinformation and sinophobia about this issue. I hope this video sheds some light on what's really happening.
This bill is colonialism. This bill is a dramatic overreach of power and is sinophobic.
If we're going to regulate social media, we need to pass laws that apply to ALL social media, not just those from East Asia.
#KeepTikTok #TikTokBan #Sinophobia #Xenophobia #GovernmentOverreach #Misinformation

[@waywrdsun]

I'm reading this the same way you are, Jeremy. I have way more concern about my own US government overstepping than I do about tiktok. Thanks for using your platform to spread the message.

[@etiennesportfolio]

I truly hope Tiktok's company don't budge, this is truly messed up and people don't think so, we know how the us acts, this is just colonization in other fonts

[@JanneGlass]

I hope the YT algorithm pushes this to EVERYONE using YT

[@shadetreader]

Corporate algorithms uphold US hegemony, so it's up to us to spread this information.

[@Cassocian]

I wish more people would see this

[@shadetreader]

We have to spread this ourselves because corporate algorithms will hide it from most users.

[@spaghetti5914]

Pretty concerning that Meta is considered ok, but TikTok is viewed as a threat

[@its.Lora.]

The xenophobic "murrrrica is #1!" fools are the biggest hypocrites ever.

[@shadetreader]

Exactly-- the US Empire is fine with being a fascist (aka corporatist) police state, but will project its own human rights violations onto the Global South...

[@EnigmaNeko]

Thank you for the facts.

[@jmaessen3531]

Thank you so much for explaining this in a digestible way!

[@michaelfreydberg4619]

You’re too smart for the government. Seeing things the rest don’t.

[@fintux]

I think the problem isn't even in whether TikTok has close ties to the Chinese government or whether Musk is a good leader for Twit... X I mean. The problem is that our most important public forums are owned and controlled by private corporations. This is a huge, huge problem. The companies can decide what kind of narratives are being offered to people.

[@sarahsovereign4522]

An American company (holding) would be subject to gov't requirements to not only control content and algorithms for presenting content to users, but also for reporting on data collected From users.

[@cameronschyuder9034]

Did he not say that TikTok’s owners are in the Cayman Islands? I am confused and feel like I lack a lot of context; can someone explain like I’m five

[@ollieq3150]

​@@cameronschyuder9034if I'm reading it correctly, then the comment you replied to was saying that the bottom line is really about who owns that social media data. 1: TikTok becoming US-owned would make TikTok responsible for reporting its data to the US government. 2: The Cayman Islands is a popular destination for corporations because of its comparatively lax corporate taxation laws (meaning the company keeps more money by being based in the Cayman Islands, rather than being based somewhere else that charges corporations a higher percentage of their earnings than the Cayman Islands does). 3: Popular misrepresentation of this TikTok legislation is fanaticized, using a classic playbook of "us versus them" to send a message like, "hey guys, remember big bad China? Well, their government is spying on you through this TikTok app that's telling your children dangerous things! WE should own TikTok so WE can control its messaging instead." 4: The US has a long history of antagonism & competition with China. You may have heard of the "red scare," a moral panic first constructed in the US over 100 years ago (during the time of World War One) to cause mass fear of the government being overtaken by (largely Russian) Communist forces, ending in the destruction of church/state/marriage/family life as "we" knew it back then. This is a vast simplification, of course. The "second red scare" around the time of World War Two is more where specifically anti-Chinese sentiment (AKA "Sinophobia") arose, after the People's Republic of China was formally established in 1949, and the Korean War started in 1950. This time is where the US saw a surge of anti-Asian violence, where simply being an Asian person (not just Chinese) was, because of this red scare moral panic combined with racism/xenophobia, often all it took to garner suspicion of being a "foreign Communist spy" - even if that Asian person was fully born & raised in the US. 4: COVID was highly politicized as being a "Chinese virus" which ALSO lead to surges of anti-Asian hate crimes. 5: social media of all kinds contribute to a global mental health crisis. "Fighting social media" can then be framed as "protecting public health & our way of life" even when there is no actual harm-reducing result. 6: Social media also spreads information that can be seen as threatening to people who are highly invested in maintaining the social status quo, such as the US religious right, who rely on the image of there being only one "correct" way to live life, AKA a "nuclear family" with a working husband, a stay-at-home wife, and a certain amount of children. White, Christian, heterosexual, with a clear hierarchy of power. 7: the political hotbuttons of the moment include racial equality, gender, reproductive healthcare, sexuality, and worker's rights. The most recent generations have higher reported percentages of being LGBTQ+ and left-leaning, to the point where some conservatives want to raise the minimum voting age. These combined hatreds - hatred of social mobility, deviation from status quo, fear of being taken over by the "other" or having one's children "brainwashed" - and the fear of "losing control of the population" come crashing together with the TikTok issue. "My kid learns about gender & mental health on cHiNeSe TikTok & now disagrees with my conservative views & wants to live differently." So it's phrased as, "we're protecting our children & country from Bad Foreign Government & Leftist Ideological Control by taking over this app!" But those are holdovers from a century of fear. And they're scary enough to the general public that propagandists are able to whip those fears up into a frenzy & scare people into thinking censorship & control of media is good. We see the same with the waves of book-burnings, and attacks on public education & libraries. An educated public is "dangerous" to the establishment because it is harder to control. So they make people scared of information. Scared of outsiders. Scared of losing their children. Scared of being overtaken. And people are made to hate the idea of change SO MUCH that they're willing to give up freedoms if they think it will protect them from some Dirty Other. (I gotta go to the grocery store now before it closes, but I hope I made some sense. Cheers)

[@shadetreader]

It's time we realised that Western companies are actually the problem, NOT the solution.

[@ElfieBrown-i6s]

Thank you for calling this out!

[@faiora]

I disagree with just one part of this: you said the company headed elsewhere doesn’t have control over decisions made in their US branch. Of course they do. If you start a company in the US, you have some degree of control over your worldwide locations. In the case of internet, we have access to (nearly) worldwide information/data/etc. and it doesn’t require a US branch for us to view content. A company across the world can decide what we see when we log into their website. I’ll agree though that the level to which the US government exerts control over the internet as a whole - including cases where no part of an issue even took place in the US - is a problem that’s likely bigger than this one.

[@Ninsidhe]

@BurbNBougie talking about modern colonialism and xenophobia, same tactics being used against women.

[@thegriffinnews]

I got here so early the video hadn't finished uploading. There was no sound until I F5'ed. lol

[@Sarah_H]

Amazing that Jeff brings up The Algorithm in his video but had previously expressed concern about the Chinese government "influencing what you see on your For You page". Like, my man, the US-based social media platforms already do that, and their billionaire CEOs have a vested interest in curating feeds to show certain political viewpoints

[@Sugar3Glider]

Do you also talk about KOSA?

[@coffeegonewrong]

I think some concerns are valid but either poorly expressed or not fully thought out. As usual the way they are trying to fix it is mired in a mix of questionable intentions and unforeseen consequences. I think the root issues are: 1: Privacy and user data, an issue which has solutions. They could also use the EU model if they were really interested in fixing this issue. 2: accountability - they can’t haul bytedance before senate over issues like spreading misinformation. The whole “US owned” is just a knee jerk reaction to a real concern. Also, how big is their US branch? I figured it was only an advertising team and that’s it.

[@ratewcropolix]

to be fair tiktok being banned would probably be an overall good to society