I don't know how old you are, or what your lived experience has been. But the US did not invent the idea of democracy, nor did anyone promise us that democracy could actually work.
What the United States has accomplish over the last 200 or so years is remarkable, but it's colossally myopic to believe that the US has never curtailed the rights of it's citizens in the name of security. The OSS was never legal. The CIA definitely should not be legal. And lord only knows what the NSA does. But I promise you that restricting access to a Chinese mobile app is not the most egregious thing the United States Government has ever done.
TikTok can still serve data to the US, it just can't list its apps in US app stores.
Re:TikTok goes dark in the US
by listenallyall on Sunday January 19, 2025 @02:21AM
(#42754682)
I agree with your first paragraph - but people went pretty berserk when (supposedly) Russia was influencing US elections via social media. RT news channel was banned, the reasoning being it was Russian propaganda. Lots of people supported Facebook and Twitter, working with the government, silencing anything Russian back around the 2016 and 2020 elections. Did you?
I have always and will always say that the government does not have the sole right to influence me as a US citizen, and it is my right to slurp up "influence" from whoever and wherever I want to. The idea that Americans are too stupid to ingest whatever information is out there (edited or unedited, curated or not, propaganda or not) for the sake of democracy is a threat to the very idea of democracy itself.
The very fact that this argument has gained traction is the worst outcome of this entire debacle. I never ever ever thought I'd see Americans cheering that the government should limit the ability of their own fellow citizens to access information, and here we are.