Your argument is predicated on the idea that banning TikTok is censorship. It's not. No speech or information is being suppressed; any speech being made on TikTok can instead be made on other platforms.

This isn't like China where the government bans any services they can't control, and directs the services that they can control to suppress any information they don't want people talking about.

Who says the US isn't controlling the narrative on US social media?

Sure are alot of people insinuating they are

Half of US social media (and more than half of Twitter) is saying US controls the narrative on US social media and something should be done about it. describe logical knots required to explain why that is the narrative if US controls the narrative?

As a Russian people from the West saying how it's total censorship and totalitarianism amuse me.

And I see how totalitarian and censored regimes are using of the lack of censorship with great success.

> any speech being made on TikTok can instead be made on other platforms

That wholly depends on what are the other platforms. Meta's platforms for example are pretty heavy handed in their censorship:

https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

And Youtube is not that much better.

To be fair, some of the same voices that get censored on US platforms are also getting censored on TikTok (though I currently cannot find the posts or articles that highlighted the issue)

> Your argument is predicated on the idea that banning TikTok is censorship. It's not.

My take is that the elite was shocked the American youth is vaning in their Israel support and that they want algorithmic feeds that are sionist. Simple as that.

I really need to coin the phenomenon of when people attribute the reasoning for something happening as being due to the current thing they care about. I see it so often. Some sort of specific confirmation bias.

Are you refering to me or 'the elite'?

I think some sort of 'bias' is the term. Narrative bias? Opportunity bias?

'China' was the main reason but Gaza tipped the scale, I would say.

Any evidence potentially supporting that?

To me it seems that every time a congress critter gets briefed behind closed doors they come out resolved to ban TikTok. Therefore, most likely, the Chinese probably have some insidious goal like profiling every American to ever post online.

Well thankfully that ship has sailed. Tiktok has nothing to do with it either, America's youth by in large cast off the zionist evangelical brand of Christianity the babyboomers love so much. This has been going on for decades, tiktok isn't responsible for it.

Anyway, I don't think this is the reason for the tiktok ban. The zionists have lost control of the narrative on American platforms too, they know it, and they have no actionable plan for getting it back. I think the tiktok ban is instead motivated by concerns for what a PRC controlled tiktok could do to military recruitment. Military recruitment hinges on appealing to teenagers, making tiktok a particular threat to the American government. Sending teenagers videos of drones dropping grenades on helpless wounded soldiers can't be canceled out by flying cool military jets over sportsball games.

>any speech being made on TikTok can instead be made on other platforms.

That's the arguments right wingers make about why flag burning should be a crime as there are other ways to express displeasure with the country it represents. IIRC, Robert Bork was a proponent of this line of thinking.

"any speech being made on TikTok can instead be made on other platforms"

Tiktok is not banning certain topics, as other platforms do

The elephant in the room, is that content on Tiktok is served algorithmicaly, so if majority of population prefer to watch brainwash content, it's due to their choice, not algorithm's

Isn't the point that "choice" as you're defining it is a conscious, system-2 process, but the algo-served content is targeting much deeper, system-1 responses? If so can we say that people "prefer" to watch it, or that they've been conditioned to consume it? The question (to which I don't know the answer) is where does free will start?

Of course there is difference between institutionalized censorship and making social bubble by our preferences.

Did you ever saw on TikTok videos about Tiananmen Square, pro-democracy protest before covid or generally videos from handicapped people?

> Tiktok is not banning certain topics, as other platforms do Great point

> content on Tiktok is served algorithmicaly, ... due to their choice, not algorithm's Mixed, no production algorithm is without fingers on the scale.

Ticktock content is curated to fit CCP’s narrative not simply an algorithmic reflection of what its users care about.

Beyond that it was intentionally designed to have 15 second clips fight, which is the path to brain rot. The’ve slowly increased video length, which will impact what’s on the platform over time.

>Ticktock content is curated to fit CCP’s narrative not simply an algorithmic reflection of what its users care about.

If you can show evidence of that you should give it to the U.S. government, because it has repeatedly said there is no evidence of such and any threat remains hypothetical.

> If you can show evidence of that you should give it to the U.S. government

Tens of millions of teenage Americans are addicted to it is the evidence. Chinese don't allow their kids to waste all day long on stupid douyin, Americans don't have such luxuries, as tons of red necks are going to jump up and label it as anti free speech if you want something similar. As a result, you see Chinese kids spend time on STEM subjects, building toy robots and learning how to code AI stuff while American kids are all dreaming to be the most popular influencer on social media.

The whole system is an algorithm carefully designed. Let's just be honest. btw, Chinese national posting from China here, you'd be seeing me protesting in the Tiananmen Square if some American social media apps manage to waste Chinese teens time while being carefully restricted in the US for their own kids. It is just shocking to see it takes almost a decade for the US to actually start doing something concrete.

> Tens of millions of teenage Americans are addicted to it is the evidence. Chinese don't allow their kids to waste all day long on stupid douyin, Americans don't have such luxuries, as tons of red necks are going to jump up and label it as anti free speech if you want something similar. As a result, you see Chinese kids spend time on STEM subjects, building toy robots and learning how to code AI stuff while American kids are all dreaming to be the most popular influencer on social media.

So it's Chinas fault that the US doesn't have the same laws restricting social media content and screentime for children? Or, if it is the red necks fault, then how does 'TikTok is spreading CCP propaganda' follow from 'US red necks oppose laws that are anti free speech'? It seems you're skipping some steps to get to that conclusion.

I’ve read it in a few places ex:

https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-...

Not sure how creditable their research is, but I’d place it above random news articles.

There research is not credible because their only "evidence" is that when using certain keywords, Instagram and YT returned more "anti-China" content than TikTok.

So instead of arguing the U.S. social media has an anti-China bias, they argued that it's the evidence of TikTok being more pro-China.

Using American social media as the control group for neutrality on China is absolutely insane.

The most likely cause is that TikTok is just a lot less political and more international than YT and Instagram.

For rest of the world, people do not automatically associate words like "Xinjiang" to "Chinese government oppression", the fact that they expect that to be the top result can be argued that American media is the one manipulating information.

The damming bits were 100% on Ticktock, no need for comparison.

On TickTock, views to likes ratio for anti China content was 87% lower despite higher upvotes on TickTock anti China content. Read page 4 suppression on anti China content.

That alone shows the algorithmic alone isn’t selecting results and they are instead engaging in propaganda. The credibility question in my mind is in regards to how they are classifying videos and other bits you don’t see, but that’s a deeper question than the methodology.

> Tiktok is not banning certain topics, as other platforms do

Oh but they do, or at the very least carefully steer what you see by demoting certain subjects; don't forget that only in 2020 their internal moderator policies were leaked, telling them to suppress posts by ugly, poor and disabled people [0], or suppress streams that "harmed national order" or "defamed civil servants". Sure, this was the Chinese branch of tiktok, and the US / EU based version has distanced themselves from it - already mostly being its own platform. But this is where they came from barely four years ago.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

The specific topic in question is Gaza. TikTok has been accused of spreading pro-Hamas content and leading the young population to support Hamas, whereas YouTube and Facebook ban it on sight.

Tiktok algorithms could be considered a form of editorial position(be it foreign government influenced one, or just the type of content they elevate / not remove), and in this sense it is similar to banning a newspaper(which would obviously be censorship) -- journalists could publish in other newspapers. Therefore banning TikTok absolutely is censorship.

>This isn't like China where the government bans any services they can't control

This is literally like this, and done precisely due to the lack of control due to the illegality of overt/direct speech regulation, and the fears that China would elevate content that isn't in the interest of the US in the broadest sense, but that is still legal according to the 1st amendment. The US Government has tremendously more influence on the local/western platforms, and on people who work there. (There is already an appeals court decision about Biden administration overstepping in communicating with online platforms about what content they don't like). The logic goes "We can't regulate speech like we want to, order what we like and what we don't like, but at least we can remove/censor individual owner-editors that we suspect might harbor some harmful intentions. That means no owners from 'evil' countries". That's about it.

This is a pretty short, but significant list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_adversar...

It's censorship and also import controls and also turning off one propaganda faucet.

> On December 6, 2024, a panel of judges on the U.S. District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the company's claims about the constitutionality of the law and upheld it.

Let's see whether SCOTUS barks at it.

>Your argument is predicated on the idea that banning TikTok is censorship. It's not. No speech or information is being suppressed; any speech being made on TikTok can instead be made on other platforms.

Not really, which is the whole point of censoring TikTok.

The Free Palestine movement has grown on TikTok in ways it hasn't on American-owned platforms because it's so heavily censored on American apps. It is the censoring of genocides across the world that TikTok bypasses. Why this is doesn't matter. The end result is populations being kept in the dark about what their governments are complicit in or actively contributing to.

>No speech or information is being suppressed;

Except the whole reason for the TikTok bill is that information/speech will be under Chinese government control on TikTok and that can be weaponized.

So make up your mind, if you say TikTok is being banned for the possibility of "weaponized propaganda", then it is information being suppressed.

If you say it's not about information suppression, then you can't use the "Chinese propaganda" argument, which is used by pretty much all ban supporters.

>This isn't like China where the government bans any services they can't control, and directs the services that they can control to suppress any information they don't want people talking about.

That's exactly what it is.

> … if you say TikTok is being banned for the possibility of "weaponized propaganda", then it is information being suppressed

Eliminating weaponized propaganda is not even a little bit close to suppressing freedom of speech. Your argument falls apart there, like completely.

Except it is. The Supreme Court has actually ruled that the First Amendment rights for Americans to receive foreign propaganda, even during the Cold War:

https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/lamont-v-postmaster-...

I don't think you know what the First Amendment is. Not only does it guarantee freedom of expression, but also freedom to receive other's expression and speech.

The U.S. government is not allowed to ban any foreign books, movies, or even propaganda.

I really wish people like you do a little bit research before making such a confident statement like that.

They may not legally be allowed to ban it, but that doesn't mean it has to be easy to access it. This is probably also why banning Tiktok was / is such a challenge and couldn't just be done with Trump's exective order after Zucc whispered it in his ear in 2019, and why they can't just block it, but have to subpoena the app stores to delist it.

But, it's not really censorship, per se. It's "your company, which is of <this country> cannot do business in our country; because we want to give that a company in our country". And, in that light, doing the reverse (not allowing the company from that country to do business in ours) doesn't seem unreasonable.

I'm not a fan of it, but I can understand the argument for it.

It’s not a censorship issue. It’s about market access. This is a commercial dispute not a freedom of expression one.

There is plenty of other platforms where you will still be able to say whatever you want.

Not Twitter or Truth Social though.

The world isn't black and white. It's very very gray.

Adding Chinese censorship to the mix doesnt improve freedom of speech. At some point we have to stop being naive and operating in the realm of frictionless theory.

By that logic if you are attacked you would no nothing because violence is wrong. Then you die.

Censorship is the suppression/prohibition of speech. Therefore, removing TikTok from app stores is not censorship, because it's the platform itself that's being targeted, not particular speech that's on it.

Either you knew that already and you're making a bad faith argument, or you don't understand the concept of censorship.

Your argument implies that banning was the only option… it wasn’t. They could’ve continued operating just the same had they sold the company.

>If censorship is wrong, then it is wrong. If censorship is just fine, the n it is just fine.

This is it, and it's so laughably simple that anyone who doesn't get it should check CO levels in their home before arguing.