Summary
The Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to reject Donald Trump’s request to delay a law banning TikTok or forcing its sale by Jan. 19, 2025.
TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, claims the ban violates First Amendment rights, but the DOJ argued the law targets foreign ownership, not free speech, and passes constitutional scrutiny.
Trump, despite opposing a ban publicly, asked the Court to extend the deadline to seek a political resolution.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Jan. 10, with the ban set to take effect before Trump’s inauguration.
There is only one reason I’m concerned about but it’s a big one - China could at any time tweak the algorithm to influence a whole generation of people addicted to the network. At that level they could really tip the scales in their favor, and create unrest and instability, probably even violence or worse.
You’re absolutely right, but I have the exact same concerns about Meta and Facebook, Google and YouTube, and Musk and Twitter - all of whom have been shown to be influencing the algorithms to censor left-wing news and people and favor right-wing groups and push right-wing extremism.
The other platforms are already doing that. So does the news when they report on events using different language (see the cyber truck blowing up vs. the New Orleans attack). The only difference here is that it might be China doing the propagandizing instead of the corporate overlords.
Absolutely a concern but at least Meta and Twitter do have some interest in stability in the USA. China does not necessarily have the same interests.
All the large platforms can do that. Elon cried about too many bots before he bought Twitter and now it’s worse.
Meta has ai profiles. https://www.404media.co/metas-ai-profiles-are-indistinguishable-from-terrible-spam-that-took-over-facebook/
None of these big companies care as long as their profit goes up.
Gotta love the down votes people give for pointing out that it doesn’t matter whether it’s the US government, a foreign government, or even just the company having an agenda, someone has control over the algorithm and thus what people see.
They seem to want to believe that ignoring the idea that a foreign government can control what we see on social media is somehow inherently better, and that it isn’t a legitimate national security threat.
Does that mean it needs to be banned? That’s debatable. But it is delusional to insist that it’s not a national security issue to have a foreign government in control of the social media nearly 50% of the population interacts with (170m monthly US users in Jan 2024).
They may have already done that
22.94%(19.6% more than second place) of voters voted for a person that claimed pepsi had microchips, said that Donald Trump, a dictactor that was responsible for facilitating The Holocaust in Romania and the founder of a fascist party were heroes, called global warming “a global scam”, and spread covid 19 missinformation. As far as i know, his only marketing was tiktok. A lot of romanians were surprised by his place in the election