#anti chinese tiktok

[straynoahide]

"could the tyrannical and draconian CCP benefit from westerners uncritically spreading this development like wildfire, mysteriously branded as centered in western values [i.e. ecologism], that chinese companies realistically don't abide by, ever?"

There is something deliciously funny about AI getting replaced by AI.

tl;dr: China yeeted a cheaper, faster, less environmental impact making, open source LLM model onto the market and US AI companies lost nearly 600 billions in value since yesterday.

Silicone Valley is having a meltdown.

And ChatGTP just lost its job to AI~.

[nando161mando]

About that new policy…

[milverton]

China's RedNote Disinformation

(article by WSJ)

[potatoof69]

wow it’s so crazy meeting actual chinese ppl online and seeing that they’re actually people just like us—

girl what. did you think we were aliens or smth

[2000swootie]

on the one hand im glad the tiktok goblins are going to rednote bc that means the tiktok antis arent coming here, but at the same time i feel so bad for the chinese users there who are inevitably going to be harassed by a bunch of shitty american children, bc antis are extremely racist.

[newsreleted]

TikTok set to be banned in the US after losing appeal

See More.....

[steevejr]

freaks on here will be like *google screenshot of misinformation* *google screenshot of misinformation* stay safe kiddos! *link to an article that refutes all the claims they made if you actually read it which op clearly didnt*

[never-quite-buried]

Nope now it’s at the point that i’m shocked that people off tt don’t know what’s going down. I have no reach but i’ll sum it up anyway.

SCOTUS is hearing on the constitutionality of the ban as tiktok and creators are arguing that it is a violation of our first amendment rights to free speech, freedom of the press and freedom to assemble.

SCOTUS: tiktok bad, big security concern because china bad!

Tiktok lawyers: if china is such a concern why are you singling us out? Why not SHEIN or temu which collect far more information and are less transparent with their users?

SCOTUS (out loud): well you see we don’t like how users are communicating with each other, it’s making them more anti-american and china could disseminate pro china propaganda (get it? They literally said they do not like how we Speak or how we Assemble. Independent journalists reach their audience on tt meaning they have Press they want to suppress)

Tiktok users: this is fucking bullshit i don’t want to lose this community what should we do? We don’t want to go to meta or x because they both lobbied congress to ban tiktok (free market capitalism amirite? Paying off your local congressmen to suppress the competition is totally what the free market is about) but nothing else is like TikTok

A few users: what about xiaohongshu? It’s the Chinese version of tiktok (not quite, douyin is the chinese tiktok but it’s primarily for younger users so xiaohongshu was chosen)

16 hours later:

Tiktok as a community has chosen to collectively migrate TO a chinese owned app that is purely in Chinese out of utter spite and contempt for meta/x and the gov that is backing them.

My fyp is a mix of “i would rather mail memes to my friends than ever return to instagram reels” and “i will xerox my data to xi jinping myself i do not care i share my ss# with 5 other people anyway” and “im just getting ready for my day with my chinese made coffee maker and my Chinese made blowdryer and my chinese made clothing and listening to a podcast on my chinese made phone and get in my car running on chinese manufactured microchips but logging into a chinese social media? Too much for our gov!” etc.

So the government was scared that tiktok was creating a sense of class consciousness and tried to kill it but by doing so they sent us all to xiaohongshu. And now? Oh it’s adorable seeing this gov-manufactured divide be crossed in such a way.

This is adorable and so not what they were expecting. Im sure they were expecting a reluctant return to reels and shorts to fill the void but tiktokers said fuck that, we will forge connections across the world. Who you tell me is my enemy i will make my friend. That’s pretty damn cool.

[cosmosarcana]

Hu5h

[mothman-etd]

I have talked a few times about Psychological Operations or psyops on here, but I would like to point out a real world example of a PO Operation that was found out recently by the Department of Justice.

Before that though, If you would like to read more about the actual position of a PO soldier, you can look no further then the PO benefits page on the US Army special operations recruitment website (https://www.goarmysof.army.mil/PO/).

Personally I feel like many people still believe psyops to be some kind of conspiracy theory instead of a fairly standard military division in almost all modern militaries, anyways onto the example.

The US Department of Justice is going after (indicting) two RT (Russian state media) employees for committing fraud and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Basically they created a front "media" company in Tennessee, translated russian propaganda videos into english, then paid right-wing influencers to promote (reblog/retweet/talk about on streams) said videos.

Three of the named influencers that I could find were Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson.

I honestly have no idea who these three are, but supposedly their platforms have millions of followers. Also, some of these influencers were paid up too $100,000 a week to promote their videos and messaging.

So to summarize, Russia setup a fake company to pay American influencers to repeat their lies so that their followers would interpret those lies as legitimate since their were coming from a source they trust.

When people talk about election interference this is what we are talking about.

$100K a week is insane money for most, I am sure many people would be hard pressed to not sell their soul for that much money. Many of the videos from this media company were lies about the Ukraine war, and looking into Tim Pool it seems he also has a very anti-Ukraine stance (Audio from one of this podcasts https://v.redd.it/41xgvuri0vmd1/DASH_AUDIO_128.mp4)

I generally do not talk about my job on here, but corporations used to pay me to run seminars to help train their employees on spotting these types of attacks--mainly targeted psyops attacks from nation states to hack into their company via end user interaction.

Or in layman's terms, to help companies protect themselves from Russian Ransomware Thieves and Chinese Intellectual Property/Information collectors. Both of these being extensions of the Psychological Operations military divisions of each country.

I am really not sure how to end this post other than I am just trying to show people how real it is that the militaries of the world are spending obscene amounts of money in trying to influence your opinions and day to day life via your internet consumption.

Surf responsibility, be very wary of anyone telling you not to vote and don't believe everything you see/hear on TikTok/youtube/twitter/Insta etc etc

[fakenewsfactcheck]

I know this is an old post, but my blog is new. So I'm fact-checking whatever news-related posts I come across.

plus this turned out to actually be fascinating, holy crap.

Did Israel ban TikTok?

No. The countries in which TikTok is banned are Afghanistan, India, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, and Somalia.

It's also worth noting that while Israel did ban state-owned media outlet Al Jazeera, so did Palestine.

Did "the Zionists" ban TikTok?

It's unclear what exactly this means. But I'm going to make an educated guess that this is the non-Jewish definition of "Zionists," essentially meaning "an imagined global movement of Jews in support of genocide," and that it's a U.S.-centric reference to the United States' recent controversial ban on "distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok)."

This is really two separate questions:

Did Zionists push this bill through?

No. This bill was a bipartisan effort, which had bipartisan support from its start, and was co-sponsored by a Republican and a Democrat.

OpenSecrets lists all the groups that did lobbying on any specific bill, and how many times.

ByteDance Inc (the company that owns TikTok): opposes

Oracle (the U.S.-based company that TikTok offered to move all its data to): opposes and hosts TikTok's data in the US

PEN America (a writers' union): opposes

Issue One (a campaign finance reform group): supports

Competitive Carriers Association (a nonprofit group for small/local telecommunications companies): unknown, "'monitored and discussed with congressional staff regarding' the FCC’s so-called rip and replace program for Chinese tech equipment."

Dell Technologies (the computer company): unclear

60 Plus Association (a conservative seniors group that lobbies for a free market and small government): supports

The American Principles Project (a racist far-right group that also opposes trans rights): supports

Lenovo Group (the computer company): unclear; FWIW, it's also a China-based company

American Civil Liberties Union (free speech etc.): opposes

Americans for Prosperity (a Koch-funded libertarian group and one of the most influential think tank/lobbying groups in the U.S.): supports

Foundation for Defense of Democracies (a non-partisan foreign policy research institute): supports

Republican Jewish Coalition (focuses on getting Republican politicians to care about issues that affect Jews): supports

State Armor Action (I am picturing suits of armor here, but apparently it's a very small group that focuses on potential security threats from the Chinese government): supports

SAA also operates as the TikTok Coalition, which is also listed as lobbying in support of the bill

Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization (lobbies on issues that affect Jewish women): unknown, likely opposes

Heritage Foundation (the far-right group behind Project 2025): supports

Jewish Federations of North America (an umbrella org for Jewish community organizations): supports, on the grounds that TikTok has fueled antisemitism

Anti-Defamation League (a Jewish org that fights for civil rights and against hatred of all marginalized groups): opposes

Alphabet Inc (Google's parent company): unknown

Electronic Frontier Foundation (fights for free speech and an open internet): opposes

Microsoft Corp (the computer and software company): unknown

NCTA The Internet & Television Association (represents enormous cable/internet providers and entertainment companies like disney and at&t): unknown, lobbied on unspecified portions of the TikTok bill pertaining to the cable industry.

According to Politico, the tech companies were largely "working on the bill" by answering lawmakers' questions about technical issues. Likewise, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization, were answering questions, particularly addressing antisemitism on TikTok and the allegations that the push for its ban was a Jewish conspiracy.

Since the ADL opposed the ban and Politico grouped them together in its analysis of lobbyists, it seems likely that Hadassah opposed it too.

Politico links to this ADL explanation of the conspiracy trope:

Conspiratorial claims about Jewish influence in the media are nothing new, dating back to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, one of the most notorious and egregious antisemitic texts of the early 20th century. Allegations of Zionist media control are also widespread on both the far-right and the far-left, on social media and at demonstrations—most recently, at protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

Did TikTok get banned in the U.S.?

Yes, and now not yet. The law that was passed in 2024 went into effect on January 19, 2025 - the last day of Biden's administration - and while I've been writing and researching this, the ban has already gone into effect and then been TEMPORARILY lifted.

Specifically, the ban "prohibits distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok)." In fact, ByteDance's other apps, Lemon8 and CapCut, are still banned.

The ban went through a series of court cases. Courts agreed that ByteDance doesn't have First Amendment rights because it's a foreign company, and were unsure whether and to what degree the First Amendment even applied in this case.

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ban. Then, according to CNN:

...Trump had said [on Truth Social] he was considering a 90-day extension in the ban to give him time to work out a deal to sell the app to a non-Chinese owner. In his post, Trump said he would seek a 50-50 joint venture between TikTok’s existing parent company, China-based ByteDance, and a new, American owner.

Why did they ban TikTok?

Initially, I was going to say that in my opinion - not research - I would attribute a good 60% of the bill's existence to two evergreen bipartisan issues:

Lawmakers Don't Actually Know What A TikTok Is

They Also Don't Understand Social Media At All

Partly, the issue is confused by numerous legislators talking about it in rhetorical, ideological terms without concrete information about what the problem is.

However, I was eventually able to ACTUALLY FIND INFORMATION ON WHAT THE FRIGGING PROBLEM IS. Which is a goddamn miracle tbqh. Someone please teach these people how to communicate.

Maybe the CCP could help them with that?

The basic argument lawmakers made for the bill is, "we don't want the Chinese government to have data on the location and interests of individual Americans." The arguments in favor of it are long, so I'll highlight the main points in green.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a moderate think tank that analyzes international politics, says:

The theory goes that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which is itself beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese government control over TikTok gives the Chinese Communist Party direct access to the data of these 170 million Americans, but more importantly, gives them the ability to manipulate the algorithm to drive the national security interests of China into the social media drive reading of the 170 million Americans. And separately, you could look at research that shows you that a disproportionate amount of Americans under the age of 35 get their primary news source from these social media applications. Look, I think it's important here to recognize, FDD has been working this for about four years, we've been supporting legislation working it, but the key organization in this is the Network Contagion Research Institute, NCRI, at Rutgers University. It's the one that, when TikTok was transparent, which is no longer the case, and that should worry you, that TikTok's immediate reaction to criticism was to reduce transparency, but when they were transparent and you were able to understand the relative availability of messaging on TikTok versus a similar sized grouping of Instagram accounts on certain issues that matter to China a lot, the available feed was significantly biased towards a Chinese [government] interpretation, which is to say, questions about Uyghur genocide and Uyghur freedom were 11 times more likely on non-TikTok applications than on TikTok.

In my opinion, that's an extremely important point. The Chinese government has put millions of Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps, and forced even more into slave labor, over the past decade.

This seems like it should be a top issue on places like Tumblr or TikTok, and across the progressive movement in general.

It seems like the kind of issue where people would be sharing ways to avoid buying products made with slave labor (like not buying from Shein and Temu, or sharing which industries and brands have the largest problems) and trying to actively fight back against the Chinese government's active silencing of Uyghur voices.

Instead, there's almost no awareness or activism around it.

NPR reported last April,

Beijing has stepped up its online information operations in recent years in support of its broader goals, experts say.... For example, in a handful of 2022 midterm races, Beijing sought to boost candidates seen as pro-China and counter those seen as opposing its interests, according to a December report from the ODNI. More recently, those efforts have shifted to exploiting existing partisan divides in the U.S. That includes "the Chinese actually going into U.S. audience spaces, masquerading as Americans, and posting inflammatory content around current events or social issues or political issues," said Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center. ...Microsoft and ISD both linked the posts they identified to Spamouflage, a long-running Chinese network of fake accounts across social networks including Facebook, X and TikTok. Spamouflage accounts have previously pushed attacks on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, praised China's COVID-19 response, and posted videos with AI-generated news anchors promoting Chinese leadership.

As in the U.S., China's goal is to undermine democracy, said Chihhao Yu, co-director of the Taiwan Information Environment Research Center (IORG). He said the strategy is to "create an alternative worldview for Mandarin readers in Taiwan, of course, but also around the world for Mandarin-speaking communities.

And FDD wrote a piece published in the Free Press that explained further:

...And we are absolutely hooked, with 16 percent of teens using it “almost constantly.” Today, 69.7 percent of Americans aged 12–17, 76.2 percent aged 18–24, and 54 percent aged 25–34 use TikTok. By tweaking the TikTok algorithm, the CCP can censor information and influence Americans of all ages on a variety of issues. It can shape what facts they consider accurate, and what conclusions they draw from world events.  If you doubt that the CCP would introduce bias—against Israel, against Jews, against the West, or anything else—into apps under its de facto control, consider that on October 31 The Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese web platforms Baidu and Alibaba have wiped Israel off the map—literally. The two most widely used mapping programs in China show the outlines of Israel’s territory but do not label it as Israel, and may not have for some time.

(The WSJ piece specifically says that China's maps erase both Israel and Palestine, even though smaller countries like Luxembourg are clearly labeled by name.)

We know for a fact that the CCP uses TikTok to push its propaganda and censor views that diverge from the party line. Reports have confirmed that TikTok spied on journalists who wrote negative stories about TikTok. Via TikTok, Chinese state media pushed divisive information about U.S. politicians ahead of midterm elections. Numerous reports have found TikTok censoring and suppressing content about Xinjiang, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, and other issues sensitive to the CCP. TikTok has also suppressed content about LGBT issues, and even temporarily blocked a teenage American Muslim activist who criticized the CCP’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims. [emphasis mine] ...ByteDance leadership has made it clear that it can manipulate content, and therefore minds, at the behest of the CCP. In 2018, the CCP suspended ByteDance platform Toutiao because it “post[ed] content that goes against socialist core values.” In a fit of groveling self-criticism, the founder of ByteDance apologized for failing to respect “socialist core values,” “deviat[ing] from public opinion guidance,” and “fail[ing] to realize that socialist core values are the prerequisite to technology.” Following this, ByteDance announced a new strategy to hire 4,000 extra censors and integrate “socialist core values” into its technology.  

Socialist core values sound great.

Until you learn that according to the Chinese government, those values include:

constant government surveillance;

a police DNA database that can identify any man in the country;

police databases that track the movements of all Muslims and anyone who has ever protested;

mandatory state-run malware programs that track the movement and online activity of anyone who enters the country and everyone who lives in China;

literal slavery;

actual concentration camps;

and genuine imperialism. As in, China considers parts of the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Nepal, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, Myanmar, Singapore, and Brunei, large parts of Laos, and all of Taiwan and Tibet, to be China's by right. And the Chinese military hacked into Japan's most confidential military files for months in 2020-21, and has fired missiles into Japan. And the Chinese government has increasingly hacked into critical infrastructure in the United States, Guam and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific, including communication, transportation, and utility systems -- evidently pursuing development of capabilities that could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises.

As the China Law Blog said in 2021:

The Chinese cyber-insecurity system is designed to make all networks of any kind open to access by the CCP and its agents. This access includes collection and use of all data available on every network operating within the borders of the PRC. For a foreign invested enterprise, this means access to and use of all technical data that crosses the Chinese border.

By 2022, half the surveillance cameras in the world were installed in China - over 400,000,000 of them, in a system that lets the government see anything happening outside at any time. In conjunction with its ability to monitor anything people do on their phones, this gives the Chinese government near-complete monitoring of people's lives.

Another neighbor told me how much she regretted taking her camera down. Her grandson was too fond of playing online video games, so she decided to disconnect her home internet, and when she did, her surveillance camera went offline, too. Not long after that, someone poisoned and killed all five of their dogs.

TL;DR:

China has developed incredibly detailed and far-reaching abilities to monitor what people in China are doing on their phones (and elsewhere).

It has the method, and the opportunity to do the same for people outside of the country. There are no privately-owned companies in China; the government ultimately owns and controls all of them. It has access to any data it wants from any company that does business in China.

It also has the motive to track the location, movement, interests, and communication of people in other countries, and to manipulate the information they have access to on apps like TikTok, which it has a history of doing.

To give just one example: it's increasingly clear that Uyghur forced labor is an integral part of China's economy.

Slavery and profit are powerful motivators. Massive global awareness of, and opposition to, forced labor in China would cause a lot of problems for its government.

In my opinion, banning TikTok is a good idea. (And using RedNote instead is definitely not.)

If anyone wants to see what he decides to do (90-day extension? Something else entirely?) ABC News is liveblogging his every move here, and I'm sure there are many others doing the same thing.

A final note:

As I write this (3:44 pm Pacific), he's had a desk set up for him in the Oval Office where he'll sign a ton of executive orders live, but he's busy chewing the scenery onstage first.

As you watch him sign what will no doubt be a lot of wild garbage orders (again, my opinion here) remember this:

Trump's top advisers, including his incoming DOJ leadership, are preparing for a storm of legal challenges to some of his most controversial actions, one top adviser told ABC News. "We're going to get sued on all of these things," the adviser said, adding that the volume of litigation is expected to be a full-time job for Trump's Department of Justice. During Trump's first administration, he faced upwards of 400 lawsuits challenging his actions. His advisers anticipate more than that this time around.

these zionists know that no one believes in their propaganda that they're spending billions to spread so they ban tiktok and al jazeera. now that people are able to see through their hypocrisy they are invading rafah to mass murder palestinians. they have bombed hospitals and kindergartens and mosques and bakeries and destroyed aid warehouses and killed and tortured and raped palestinians. i doubt a state has ever commited so many war crimes. zionist evil knows no bounds.

[finchandthebard]

The "tiktok ban" should scare you and here's why.

Rant made by an autistic, history-loving, chronically online American tiktok cosplayer. Please let me know if I've gotten anything wrong and I will edit the post.

Reblog to spread awareness!

This is not just about Tiktok, and it's not about national security. The Tiktok ban is wrapped up in the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" which has the ability to ban any foreign website or app that the United States government sees as a threat to their "democracy." Not only that, but if the gov't didn't want China to gather data, then they would ban things like Shein and Temu (the latter which they advertised during the Super Bowl), which collect similar data that Tiktok does. If they wanted to prevent our data being stolen in general, they would ban companies like Meta, which monetarily supports the Tiktok ban and had to change their name because "Facebook" was associated with the largest data leak in history.

The documentations of the Tiktok court interrogations prove how incompetent our government is. Repeatedly asking the TikTok CEO Mr. Chew if he's Chinese while he repeatedly assures them he's Singaporean. The officials being concerned that they can't find Singapore on a map. The officials then being confused why the app would be able to have access to their wifi because it needs wifi to load.

The possibility of the US buying Tiktok exposes a greater issue in America: monopolies. The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890 that restricted the activities of large companies known as monopolies, which started out as small companies and would either buy other companies or buy the factories which produced all their materials. This eliminated competition in the market and gave the monopolies almost full control of quality and prices of items, and it was considered very anti-American at the time. Since the US already has multiple major social medias, including Facebook (Meta), Instagram (Meta), Threads (Meta), X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, and Reddit, adding Tiktok would mean that nobody could compete with the US in the social media market. This makes them a monopoly, and it's incredibly dangerous.

Banning Tiktok breaks several American trademarks. A) the Republicans banning Tiktok are very concerned about their second amendment right to own guns, but they seem to not care about the first amendment right to freedom of speech and press, which Tiktok delivers. Of course there are app guidelines, but for the most part you have fairly uncensored political and ethical commentary like no other social media. B) the only other countries that have banned Tiktok are either heavily demonized by America or are direct targets for American propaganda (ex. China), which really doesn't make the ban look good. C) banning a social media for the purpose of censorship is a trademark of communism, which Americans are INCREDIBLY wary of.

Your country may follow in suit. Because of America's influence as a global superpower and an ally to many other major powers, America banning Tiktok would likely lead to a domino effect in other countries.

The rich get richer. There is a concept called social darwinism, in which it is the rich's beliefs that the poor must fend for themselves without the help of the government in order to make a living - "survival of the fittest." Tiktok contributed around $14.7 billion USD in 2023 and $24.2 billion in 2024, and it supports around 224,000 jobs [source]. The actual Tiktok website says in 2023, they contributed $15 billion USD in revenue and supported 7 million US businesses [source]. Without these jobs, there could be in increase in homelessness, debt, and sickness due to withdrawals (if you're incredibly addicted to Tiktok) and lack of quick dopamine hits (due to the rapidfire nature of the algorithm).

Remember that the president is not your friend !! Many of the political figures rallying to support Tiktok right now, such as President Biden, initially voted for the ban. President Biden is likely supporting now so that Trump won't get credit for it, and future President Trump is likely doing it for brownie points among younger generations.

The Xiaohongshu migration exposed the American government and its lies. The stories from American 'Tiktok refugees' about the questions from native Chinese on the Xiaohongshu / Rednote / Redbook app (considered the Chinese mixed of Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook) posed a lot of conspiracies and realizations about the American government. The Chinese actually own their homes, they have lower food prices than we do, and they have a slim homelessness rate. Whether this is true or not, it has greatly influenced how we see ourselves in the grand scheme of the American oligarchy, and that is not something that can be suppressed with an app being banned.

Tiktok is not totally Chinese! The CEO is Singaporean, as I've already stated, and there are multiple headquarters in the US, with the main one being in Los Angeles.

In conclusion...

Whether Tiktok is banned or not, whether permanently or not, no matter who saves it or rallies against it, remember that it is harder to scare and control someone when they are in a group. And if you think this was interesting, I'd love it if you could reblog to show some support and inform your friends as well. <3

THIS IS NOT RIGHT VS LEFT❗️IT'S UP VS DOWN❗️

[agentoffangirling]

TikTok users going to Red Note, an actual Chinese-owned app based in China, out of pure pettiness bc of the TikTok ban citing "national security concerns" (read: sinophobia and anti-Palestinian sentiment) is the best thing of all time, I love us

[bunniefluidz]

Seeing American TikTok antis go on Red note (Chinese app) and telling them what they should and shouldn't do on THEIR app.

Is like having a guest coming to your house and telling you how to arrange YOUR furniture.

[batboyblog]

I fundamentally disagree with your take that any future/ongoing users of TikTok are supporting or enabling trump.

We don’t use TikTok or any other social platform because of the CEO. We use social media because of the communities we form and love.

Obviously trump wants it back because it helped his election campaign, but that doesn’t negate every positive collective action or community that formed on the app. Everything good also has bad, because as the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. We can try to be good, but we can’t only support ethical companies.

Also, what about international users? I’m Australian, and trump impacts Australian politics directly and indirectly, but does me using TikTok support him? It’s still an independent company.

Given the ban was done by congress, not the executive, I have every reason to believe that a Harris/democrat office would also make efforts to stop the ban. It’s easy political points.

I'm gonna try to be nice, which given my mood today, the impending Trumpalypse and the hostage release today have me in a bad mood.

Sooooo I have to reject the idea that helping re-elect Trump could ever be balanced out by any other "good", if such good even exists, that any app, person, or organization does.

before anyone jumps in to smugly tell me they're not an American so Trump being the American President doesn't matter, I'll remind you, we all live on the same planet. One thats getting warmer? in case you hadn't noticed. 2024 was the first year on record to breach the 1.5 degree warming mark that is very bad news. President Biden passed the biggest climate action bill that any government anywhere on earth ever ever has passed. Trump has pledged to repeal that law, and also hold back all the money in it not already spent.

as you can see under Biden we're on goal through 2030, and then more and different policies would be needed to get us where we need to go, which Biden team in the dying days of his administration has set not that Trump will follow through.

so point being helping re-elect Trump might have doomed the planet so idk about anything "good" TikTok could possibly do to make up for being Responsible or the single biggest climate disaster in human history.

any ways, as a Jew when I think of TikTok I think antisemitism

"Jewish teens say life on TikTok comes with anti-Semitism" 2020

"Sliding Through: Spreading Antisemitism on TikTok by Exploiting Moderation Gaps" 2023

"How fast does TikTok send users down the antisemitic rabbit hole?" 2024

being on the internet right now as a Jewish person is fucking wild, buck wild, seeing people in their teens and 20s say NAZI, old school, 1940s Nazi shit on-line, in videos with their faces, it is everywhere and TikTok is some of the worst of it.

on top of which TikTok is spoon feeding massive amount of disinformation to users all the time, from mental health, to Covid Vaccines, to conspiracy theories that are effecting the real world. And studies show its actively hurting teens, pushing them toward self harm

speaking of Australia, its very clear that China is REALLY interested in influencing your country seeking to shift Australian public opinion against Taiwan and in favor of China, as well as push the country toward a more isolationist view. Also they're using data from not just TikTok but other apps to track people, and actively kidnap Chinese nationals in Australia who offend Xi's government. That's a wider problem than just TikTok of course, but it's super fucking scary.

So sorry the app you like is getting the axe in the US? I guess? but short form video in and of itself might be bad for your health. Apps like TikTok don't allow you to do what I've done here, offer links and data to back up what I'm saying so fact checking and accountability is basically 0. Finally there's a lot of evidence that TikTok has put its finger on the scale to push propaganda for Trump, for Xi and generally destabilize the world.

finally, what community? watching videos fed to you by a computer isn't a connection, its certainly not a conversation.

oh also "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" is not some magical spell, it doesn't do away with the need to do good in the world, its meant to say don't let perfect be the enemy of good, whats the least bad option, nothing is flawless, but that doesn't mean going on to the app who's parting message to America was "big good daddy Trump gonna come save us" like fuck man thats bad

[samwinchestermydude]

Okay so I downloaded the app and y’all are right. It is Wincest heaven. Whereas on TikTok you are crawling on the floor looking for scraps of Wincest, on red note you can browse freely. On the bad side tho I’m getting so embarrassed by seeing American antis in the comments of Wincest videos. Like literally stfu it’s their app. 😭 I just know if I was a Chinese wincestie I’d be really annoyed by American spn fans bringing their purity culture with them yuck.