Do you think tiktok will come back straight away after the ban in America?

@Elessar True. I mean if the sob story about spying and protecting user data actually mattered they would be going after Facebook and Twitter that have been collaborating with US intelligence to spy on Americans for about 20 years at this point.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow It's not the data collection the real concern (they could just buy those from Meta, only difference with collecting them directly is that Zucc doesn't get paid), the actual concern is that it can be used to shape public discourse (read: sway elections), by controlling what people get to see in their feed. i.e. what Musk does with X.

@Elessar well it explains why Israeli lobby groups backed it. Tik Tok is basically the last place anti Zionist content can be found.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Meh there's plenty of that stuff all over FB, YT, Reddit (especially the latter) and none of these are threatened

@Elessar regulation will create jobs and potential government revenue.

@exchrist Maybe in the parallel universe in which Bernie Sanders won the 2016 election they're doing fine with those

@Elessar The difference is on Facebook and YT good luck finding any of that stuff that doesn't have a giant block of text below it claiming it is all lies.

@Elessar Another distinct difference is we know from Mr. Snowden that Facebook and Amazon have been renting out data centres to the NSA for about 20 years.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow It isn't really a difference, anyone sane of mind knows the CCP does the same, that's the whole point of those apps besides brainrotting people

@Elessar Ummm no. That is cold war brainrot. "Everything Chinese is MSS" is just nonsense. Whereas Facebook and Amazon actually are subcontractors of the NSA.

But the west knows reducing everything "Commies bad" still works, especially in the US where half the population think Red Dawn is a documentary.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow There's abundant evidence of what the app is coded to do from reverse engineering, and some things aren't excusable in any way that isn't espionage/sabotage. All authoritarian govts have the same end goals and the Chinese one isn't any better than the American one in that regard. These companies all exist as a branch of their respective parent govt

@Elessar Again. Your own words are speculation about hypotheticals based on stereotypes older than either of us.

@Elessar Just because a company has ties to a government doesn't make them a branch of an intelligence agency. That is conspiracy theory stuff.


That is literally the equivalent of claiming the BBC is a division of MI6.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Sure dude, China is a beautiful democratic country that would never do anything like that. It must be a pure coincidence that it access literally API that provides identifiers on the phone and that it has a built-in mechanism for downloading random zip files, extracting and executing the binaries inside. Totally legit stuff. And this was years ago before they started to better obfuscate the code

@Elessar And now the strawman. Typical.


And a theoretical capability is not the same thing as actually doing something nefarious.


And if the US or any other western government thought this was a serious threat. Do you seriously believe the response would have been

"No worries, we will just sit on it for a decade and then only do something 10 years later when lobbies from a certain country bug us enough."



And I suggest you go back and see those interviews with Ed Snowden.


And I suspect for the US in particular it is a certain amount of projection.


Radio Fee Europe- Created as a CIA propaganda PsyOp.

Operation Mockingbird- Pretty much all major US media had at least one CIA spook manipulating the media and the only evidence that it is not happening anymore is an agency whose job it is to lie promised they stopped.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Yeah dude, go on and believe that the US is the only imperialistic nation in a world of saints, if that makes you feel better

@Elessar Another strawman.


I asked a serious question. If I grant you all your points about Tik Tok.

By that logic the US response was to sit around and do nothing for a decade until the Israel lobby got involved. Does that sound like a serious threat response to you?

@Elessar And yet you see the US as a force for good and anti imperialism while they travel 1800 nautical miles to accuse China of provocation.

@Elessar I also noticed you dodged the biggest flaw in your argument about Tik Tok and changed the subject.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow No I see the US as an authoritarian dystopia where at least a sizable slice of the populace has the awareness they're one. China and Russia are the same beast without the awareness (arguably a decent chunk of Russians do but they're much less motivated to do anything against it). You don't have a Russian or a Chinese Snowden mostly because the scandal wouldn't even exist, there wouldn't be a "the Guardian" like entity to tell his story, and the population would dismiss it as a traitor or simply wouldn't care (if the govt don't track and silence him down before, see the doc who first recognized COVID was a SARS like outbreak). All three countries want to screw you up exactly the same, they compete with each other at who screws the most, and consequently if one of the three does something nasty in terms of foreign influence you can be certain the other two do it too not to lose ground.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Which? I didn't bother replying a long àss comment when I had already seen where it was going.

@Elessar Yet the minute it became more than a mental exercise the western "leftist " here yourself included are now indistinguishable from the Lindsey Graham camp.

As soon as there are real stakes it can all be summed up to "commie bad".

And again you seem determined to avoid the obvious flaw in yhe fear mongering about Tik Tok.

@Elessar If it is a serious security threat.

Do you seriously think ignoring it for a decade until Bibi gets mad is a believable response?