President Biden signed a bill that states if TikTok doesn't cut ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance over the next nine months to a year, it will be banned in the U.S.
That’s the thing. I definitely think short form content, and spawning even before that, the news bite culture, has been bad for attention spans, and I wouldn’t mind some sort of regulation on that with respect to kids probably. If I ever get a kid, they’ll be mad at me for being one of the last of their friends to get a smart phone lol.
But the fact that it’s only Tik Tok and not the just as algorithm-laden YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, and Snapchat stories kind of proves it’s not for the good reasons people keep bringing up, of mental health or privacy. So they have to concoct the red scare, “China can manipulate our youth” angle. Even though we already had foreign companies and states influencing Americans, especially our older people, on other good, homegrown social media companies, like Meta and Twitter. So it won’t make a difference on that front, so it’s for less good reasons, like protecting American social media monopolies and censorship of news, the exact stuff we criticize China for. Then they’re going to pat themselves on the back about solving the problem. That’s the part that bothers me, i suppose. The lies and hypocrisy.
That’s the thing. I definitely think short form content, and spawning even before that, the news bite culture, has been bad for attention spans, and I wouldn’t mind some sort of regulation on that with respect to kids probably. If I ever get a kid, they’ll be mad at me for being one of the last of their friends to get a smart phone lol.
But the fact that it’s only Tik Tok and not the just as algorithm-laden YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, and Snapchat stories kind of proves it’s not for the good reasons people keep bringing up, of mental health or privacy. So they have to concoct the red scare, “China can manipulate our youth” angle. Even though we already had foreign companies and states influencing Americans, especially our older people, on other good, homegrown social media companies, like Meta and Twitter. So it won’t make a difference on that front, so it’s for less good reasons, like protecting American social media monopolies and censorship of news, the exact stuff we criticize China for. Then they’re going to pat themselves on the back about solving the problem. That’s the part that bothers me, i suppose. The lies and hypocrisy.