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Dan Gillmor

By banning (or forcing sale of) TikTok (which I loathe), Congress -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- and a Democratic president just performed extreme censorship of the Internet.

They claimed it was for your privacy, but that is a flagrant and stupid lie.

They believe you have no privacy rights, and deserve none, and have made that clear again and again.

We need public spaces controlled by the public, not rapacious companies and control-freak lawmakers.

@dangillmor it’ll make them feel like they were right to believe Joe’s an older loser

& they’ll essentially be fkn right
but who cares to think vs. to think+feel=>to know

when u can just feel liek u now u no

@dangillmor I agree TikTok is a tool by foreign governments and has been used nefariously, but our own government used this bill to roll back privacy protections in the name of security. To "protect the children". Forcing a sale of TikTok is one thing, but they took it much farther in this bill.

@dangillmor — is it censorship when over 90% of the content is trifling drivel and the app is a spy menace?

@dangillmor

unfollowed

perfect is not the enemy of the good

anyone who winds up making noise against acting against is no friend of privacy and is morally confused and not acting on principles, they are merely posturing and showboating

we don't get perfect when we go after tiktok, yes. and?

if you care about privacy, you celebrate going after tiktok

then you demand we go after

i am disgusted i find these weak broken takes on of all places

@lesblazemore @dangillmor Oh, I have no idea, not in the slightest

@dangillmor So the president can now ban any app or website based on their judgement? Is this true?

@elsantonegro @dangillmor Yep. This would set a dangerous precedent assuming it holds up in the courts that the US government can ban any non-US service it doesn't like.

@joeo10 @dangillmor I shudder to think how a Trump administration would wield this power.

@dangillmor @burritojustice TIL censorship is when primary foreign adversaries do not have direct control over our media

@dangillmor there are so many other places in the allowed internet with less privacy. That's gotta be a ruse.

@dangillmor What a weird set of contradictory statements.

@dangillmor anyone who thinks that tiktok is a problem but meta is not, is either racist as hell or painfully naive to the abuse USian corporations put the rest of the world through. The idea that tiktok would be less harmful if it was US owned is laughable at best.

@dangillmor it is hardly extending freedoms of choice etc at all. The rest of th world too, would prefer not to have a single country dominating/owning all the major social media platforms.

@dangillmor I am not a fan of tictok, but dislike what is being done to them. Why should we force them to sell when the larger similar company youtube has been operating in a STRONG monopolistic manner, facebbok has pulled comments that go like "I like this message." along with other (larger, similar) companies that are operating MANY times worse that tictok has ever done and nothing is being done about it.

@dangillmor I’m very ok if the rule is: media companies controlled by adversarial governments can’t operate unfettered in our country.

@dangillmor The concern is legitimate. There are tradeoffs. The real risk is TikTok’s black box algorithm and its continuous misrepresentation of its relationship with parent ByteDance. *The bill forces a sales, not a ban. China may blocks it with its recent law classifying the algorithm as a national security asset.
*If China blocks the sale, it validates the US concern that it would use the algorithm to manipulate free speech or, it would prefer political discord over letting ByteDance profit.

@dangillmor

> We need public spaces controlled by the public, not rapacious companies and control-freak lawmakers.

But you're not under the impression that that's what TikTok is right?

If we've learned anything from the disastrous mid 20th century, it's that propaganda and misinformation are extremely dangerous at scale.

The justification for free speech (and hence the reason to oppose censorship) is the same as the reason to oppose mass disinformation. Namely, a functioning democracy requires access to the truth. Censorship increases the cost of accessing the truth by making the truth scarce in absolute terms. Propaganda increases the cost of accessing the truth by flooding the market with lies and making truth scarce relative to other information. Both have the same effect.

Theses sorts of decisions should be cause for healthy skepticism and debate, but I don't buy the argument that a country should never mitigate an adversary's propaganda campaign because doing so would be censorship.

@ants_are_everywhere No, of course not. But this is a blatantly protectionist piece of BS that doesn't even begin to fix what is wrong overall.

@dangillmor I don't know what you mean by overall, but the actual problem this particular piece of legislation is trying to fix is that TikTok appears to be controlled by the Chinese government and that it has been used in the past to interfere with US elections.

Obviously we don't have access to the classified information, but there is some unclassified info, such as the study by Accelerate Change on TikTok's algorithm suppressing get out the vote messages acceleratechange.org/tiktok-20

On privacy generally, yeah I agree the US has a poor track record.

Accelerate Change · TikTok 2022 Election Interference Report - Accelerate ChangeIn the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, nonprofit media lab Accelerate Change ran a series of experiments which found that TikTok heavily suppressed nonpartisan videos that encouraged users to vote. Accelerate Change estimates that TikTok may have suppressed over 2 million votes from young people in 2022.

@dangillmor we should still ban Chinese run social media, even though I agree with your other points about privacy.