What Happened After India Banned TikTok? (apnews.com) 112
What happened after India banned TikTok? The move "mostly drew widespread support" notes the Associated Press, in a country "where protesters had been calling for a boycott of Chinese goods since the deadly confrontation in the remote Karakoram mountain border region."
"There was a clamour leading up to this, and the popular narrative was how can we allow Chinese companies to do business in India when we're in the middle of a military standoff," said Nikhil Pahwa, a digital policy expert and founder of tech website MediaNama. Just months before the ban, India had also restricted investment from Chinese companies, Pahwa added. "TikTok wasn't a one-off case. Today, India has banned over 500 Chinese apps to date."
At the time, India had about 200 million TikTok users. And the company also employed thousands of Indians.
TikTok users and content creators, however, needed a place to go — and the ban provided a multi-billion dollar opportunity to snatch up a big market. Within months, Google rolled out YouTube Shorts and Instagram pushed out its Reels feature. Both mimicked the short-form video creation that TikTok had excelled at. "And they ended up capturing most of the market that TikTok had vacated," said Pahwa.
TikTok is also banned in Nepal and Somalia, according to Mashable, and the Associaterd Press adds that it's now also banned in Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan "and restricted in many countries in Europe."
Their article concludes that "for the most part, content creators and users in the four years since the ban have moved on to other platforms." They quote one frequent TikTok user as saying they just switched to Instagram after the ban, and "It wasn't really a big deal."
At the time, India had about 200 million TikTok users. And the company also employed thousands of Indians.
TikTok users and content creators, however, needed a place to go — and the ban provided a multi-billion dollar opportunity to snatch up a big market. Within months, Google rolled out YouTube Shorts and Instagram pushed out its Reels feature. Both mimicked the short-form video creation that TikTok had excelled at. "And they ended up capturing most of the market that TikTok had vacated," said Pahwa.
TikTok is also banned in Nepal and Somalia, according to Mashable, and the Associaterd Press adds that it's now also banned in Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan "and restricted in many countries in Europe."
Their article concludes that "for the most part, content creators and users in the four years since the ban have moved on to other platforms." They quote one frequent TikTok user as saying they just switched to Instagram after the ban, and "It wasn't really a big deal."
immaterial (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:immaterial (Score:5, Informative)
Fortunately then, this hasn't got anything to do with the Constitution. No citizen's speech is being abridged, but an app over which a hostile nation has control is being banned in the name of national security, if it does not remove itself from the control of that hostile nation within a year. Everyone using it will move to one of the other apps comparable in format and reach and so will their followers, without missing a beat.
Re:immaterial (Score:5, Interesting)
It also says federal government has exclusive control over interstate and international commerce. In other words, the federal government has virtually unlimited power on what is allowed into the United States. They can ban pretty much the import of anything, and assess almost any condition for trading stuff into the US.
So sure, let Tiktok continue to operate, just it won't be allowed to communicate outside the US, and all of its money, and operations must be entirely in the US. Which is basically what we are demanding, divest itself of external companies and run itself as a sole US based business.
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Thanks for your input. I was just correcting AC's incorrect view that the constitution only applies to citizens.
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Sounds like a major hole in the constitution that we need to patch up quickly.
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Be a good idea, that way it would be easy to remove rights from people simply by removing their citizenship, or claiming they never were a citizen as that birth certificate was forged. Government doesn't like what cayenne8 says, remove his citizenship, which the constitution allows and then lock him up for his speech.
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Sounds like a major hole in the constitution that we need to patch up quickly.
Fixing it is next on the list right after we get done figuring out what bathroom people are supposed to use.
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That's an easy one...
Just refer back to say....the 90's or earlier. Everyone knew where you went....pee-pee's to one bathroom, pussies to the other....simple and effective.
No one had any arguments not that long ago....
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I know, right? But for some reason people can't figure it out anymore.
Re:immaterial (Score:4, Insightful)
I am still a bit on the fence about this but the fact that ByteDance has indicated it would rather exit the US market entirely rather than sell or reveal it's algorithm to a US company definitely has given me pause and some more reason to be favorable on a ban on the National Security argument, which if this goes to court will be the argument the government makes.
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Also known as blackmail.
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And yet Google, Meta and other US companies had to enjoin with Chinese companies to be able to do business there.
Your argument is probably right on the principles but the government isn't going to make an argument on 1st amendment grounds, they're going to do it on National Security grounds which the secrecy around their argument works in favor of the government here and they have a point.
And for the US if there is a trade secret the US does not want exported they simply put an export control on it which is
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And yet Google, Meta and other US companies had to enjoin with Chinese companies to be able to do business there.
So bring this up with the WTO. Its clearly already illegal.
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Sure, can you point to what portion of WTO between the US and China that violates? Also what does "illegal" mean in the terms of the WTO? How does the WTO rule and enforce any of that?
If you can't tell I am being cheeky because the WTO isn't really going to apply to two countries that are already engaging in trade sanctions against each other because the WTO can't actually enforce anything, it's between the member states and sanctions are the very thing we are discussing here.
Turns out political and trade n
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Sure, can you point to what portion of WTO between the US and China that violates?
No thanks, its not my job to teach you, but feel free to read our own government's opinion about it. It took like 10 seconds to find this on google.
https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/2022%20USTR%20Report%20to%20Congress%20on%20China%27s%20WTO%20Compliance%20-%20Final.pdf
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Well thank you,,so that answers part one, so onto part two the WTO knows it's illegal, now what? Does the WTO do anything or is the US using that as justification for it's actions since the WTO is a self enforcing agreement? So this is all in accordance with you now since the WTO has been notified? I am not exactly sure what you want here
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What I want doesn't matter. Its not even on the menu. I want to outlaw data brokers entirely. I want it to be illegal for an app to pretend to be the system web browser, period. What should we do about tiktok? Put a tariff on it, as usual. Not require app stores to stop updating software made in China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. Apple doesn't need another moat around its walled garden, and sites like sourceforge don't have the resources to deal with the new rules.
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Tarrif versus ban, I get that. Honest question though, what do we do in the case of if say the USG is correct and TikTok is a CCCP sorta controlled, sorta information warfare tool and the cost of operating isn't a factor, it's worth the expense to them tp continue, do you have thresholds where stronger action would become acceptable? Has the government simply not made it's case in your eyes?
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Not really. I'm not safer if google does it instead of the CCCP. The nation isn't really more secure either. Multinational corporations are loyal to no nation, only to their shareholders. That's why they need to make the entire class of information war tools illegal.
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An analogy would be for example...a physical bulletin board, that people pinned messages to....
If for some reason, that bulletin board was deemed a national security risk...or maybe, more realistically, the city needed to put a road through that location....they could tear it down and put the road in.
The people would still be free to pin their messages on other bulletin boards around town, etc....their speech isn't affected, only the
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It's well known that to do business in China the government heavily tilt's foreign companies in the direction of creating a new joint venture company with an existing Chinese company. Tesla did it, Meta did it, China doesn't want and makes rules around foreign companies operating independently within their borders.
https://voxchina.org/show-3-11... [voxchina.org]
Specifically, multinational firms seeking to conduct foreign direct investment (FDI) in China are often required to form legal business relationships with a domes
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Well hold on, forget examples for a second, if China can legally require IJV and technology transfer and you seem to find that is justified what exactly is your problem with US policy and what in the linked article is getting wrong?
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There's nothing wrong with the policy as long as we are understanding that we are just another version of an authoritarian state like China.
If people would stop pretending we're any better than they are, then i'd be fine with this.
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Well I see your point, if it's just a response to "China bad" that "US also bad" then sure, I don't think that's arguable, I certainly wouldn't but you have to understand people finding that somewhat reductive.
I can list ways either country is better than the other but on the whole I think the case is easily made that the US is less authoritarian than China, by quite a lot.
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That's probably true, but would I rather live under Mussolini than Hitler? Probably. Would I prefer to live under neither? Yes.
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IF the algorithm is that valuable, then ByteDance is doing the right thing business-wise. If they keep the algorithm, they lose the US market, if they sell it, they lose the worldwide market. (I doubt the algorithm is that valuable, US just want to control what their citizens say and read)
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Yea, that's true, but the notion that a corporation can be the equivalent to a person in this context is a very modern convention that is both factually inaccurate and provably harmful.
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This is exactly right. The freedoms guaranteed in a nation's constitution should apply to people. Actual living human beings. Not to corporations, which should have a much more limited set of rights.
The granting of rights to corporations as if they were people is a huge problem and it's contributing to the decline in political discourse.
Re: immaterial (Score:2)
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You're flip flopping between a principled free speech question and a US constitutional one and while they overlap they in many cases do not overlap.
Free tip since I don't think you are American but really the argument you should be making is that the internet lines are not public airwaves so the US should not have authority in the same way they do with FCC transmissions. IANAL so I don't know if it holds up.
IMO the "principled" free speech argument doesn't get very far with a lot of people because it's just
Re: immaterial (Score:4, Informative)
Its painfully obvious that nobody in this thread has actually read the bill. It doesn't force TikTok to do anything. It forces Apple to stop making the app available on the app store. And it does that for any app owned by a company whose majority owner is North Korea, China, Iran, or Russa, or a citizen of those countries.
What else does it do? IANAL, but it looks to me like the law also would apply to Steam, Amazon Appstore, Google Play Store, Xbox Game Pass, Epic Games store, and even maybe SourceForge and NPM.
Almost but not quite (Score:3)
Just a heads up: the constitution says freedom of speech applies to everyone, not just citizens.
It does if you are in somewhere like Canada but it actually says something slightly, but importantly, different if you are in the US. Instead of stating it as a right, the US constitution only prevents the US congress from passing a law that abridges freedom of speech. The key difference is that this only binds the US government from resgtricting it whereas an actual right binds everyone, including companies, from restricting it.
In today's world where companies have considerable power this is becoming a
Re:immaterial (Score:5, Interesting)
Just a heads up: the constitution says freedom of speech applies to everyone, not just citizens.
You are free to speak, you're not free to use any product without the possibility of government restriction simply because you use it to speak. Freedom of Speech means you can't be prosecuted for what you say, not that TikTok must be protected.
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Just a heads up: the constitution says freedom of speech applies to everyone, not just citizens.
You are free to speak, you're not free to use any product without the possibility of government restriction simply because you use it to speak. Freedom of Speech means you can't be prosecuted for what you say, not that TikTok must be protected.
FFS, so you'd be okay with Trump taking over the Internet ("government restriction" you mentioned), and saying free speech isn't being violated because you can still take a literal soapbox and stand on your porch shouting things at passerbys? Maybe you should from time to time imagine that power being wielded by the OTHER guy before you decide "should the government be allowed to do this".
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No. I'd not be okay with it, I'm also not okay with the TikTok ban because I think it's dubious. But it none the less isn't applicable to the First Amendment. The first amendment guarantees your right not to be prosecuted for your speech. That's it. It's not a long statement. 45 words long, and not complex legalese. It doesn't say you're entitled to a platform. It doesn't say every product used for speech is protected.
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So have to fall back on Freedom of Association, arguably as an important right as Freedom of Expression.
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Freedom of Association is just like the First Amendment's free speech, in that is has nothing to do with what we are talking about.
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I don't know, the 1st is pretty simple and if you ever get an originalist Supreme Court, might be enforced as written. It seems this is Congress creating a law that abridges freedom of speech, or of the press and the people peacefully assembling on Tik Tok to petition the government.
Re: immaterial (Score:2)
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A platform is a platform...it is not speech.
And the Feds do have a bit of leeway when it comes to matters of national security.
I'm guessing that if this made it to SCOTUS, the originalists judges we now have would think back to how our forefathers were thinking...and I kinda doubt that after just coming off a war for independence not long back (still fresh on their minds) that they would be wanting to extend A
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Re: immaterial (Score:3)
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keep reading till you get to the part that says "No Bill of attainder [.. ]shall be passed" and that's mentioned in both Article 1, Section 9 and in Article 1, Section 10.
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TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese organization with ties to the CCP. TikTok isn’t being banned, per se: ByteDance is being forced to divest itself of TikTok or else cease its operation. Should they divest, TikTok can continue to exist, per what you suggested. Congress is only regulating TikTok to the degree that it is beholden to a foreign entity.
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Bytedance isn't necessarily foreign either. 60% of its shareholders are basically US shareholders.
Which doesn’t matter even one bit, given that the 1% share the CCP has is a golden share [wikipedia.org] that trumps the rest of the shares. For all intents and purposes, it’s under the thumb of the CCP and thus its US operations are subject to Congressional oversight.
Re:immaterial (Score:4, Informative)
I fail to see how this is ignoring the Constitution. People are calling this a “ban”, but legally speaking it isn’t. TikTok itself is fine: it’s the foreign ownership of TikTok that’s at stake, and yes, that distinction matters. We can’t do business with, say, Iran or Libya because Congress has the Constitutional authority to regulate commerce with foreign entities, as they should, and all they’re saying here is that TikTok has to change hands from its current, foreign owner. That’s well within their Constitutional authority. If TikTok gets a new owner, it’s fine to continue.
It’s absurd to think that any company would be able to wrap illegal commercial activity in a robe of free speech and then try to argue that they’re untouchable as a result. If that were permissible, we’d be able to legally perjure ourselves, engage in defamation, or commit fraud. Free speech has always had limits (e.g. the First Amendment uses the definite article—the freedom of speech—to refer to an idea that would have been understood in the context of existing case law and precedent, rather than a generic, limitless idea), hence why the more absolutist notion of it you see spreading in some echo chambers these days was called “absurd” when it was raised before the Supreme Court a few decades back.
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You might want to point out what part of the constitution gets ignored. Because so far I fail to see what that should be.
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Please don't ban TikTok (Score:5, Funny)
The nation will collapse without TikTok. There'll be mass starvation, possibly even civil war. It's like banning apple pie. Think what would happen if we banned apple pie. Like nobody can eat apple pie ever again. Do you know what that would do?
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Like nobody can eat apple pie ever again. Do you know what that would do?
If India is anything to go buy it would cause people to shrug and eat rhubarb pie instead.
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Re:Please don't ban TikTok (Score:4, Insightful)
Fewer people would become diabetic?
Re: Please don't ban TikTok (Score:2)
Keep calm and pecan.
(Pie, that is. It's made with all-American corn syrup!)
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Think what would happen if we banned apple pie.
Is that part of the same hypothetical bill that imposes the broccoli mandate?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
NOT THE POINT. (Score:2, Insightful)
Obviously they will go elsewhere, but this is just to benefit US megacorps.
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Who will go where. Without US dopamine addicts, TikTok will wither and die.
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>"Obviously they will go elsewhere, but this is just to benefit US megacorps."
1) I am not sure that is the motivation, although I don't doubt there there is support behind it from US megacorps on that basis. But multiple things can be true at once
2) There are legit concerns about security and information manipulation.
3) Why is that worse than benefiting China's megacorps?
4) There is an "out" that would allow it to continue to exist and compete, all they have to do is sell off the division that operates
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Yeah, it's a shithole country. That doesn't meant they don't do something sensible from time to time.
Re: India violates freedom of press. (Score:2)
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I think it has been said before in this thread, but nothing of value...
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The limits of free speech is where you abuse it. And you know it.
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Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has an opinion about banning TikTok: https://rsf.org/en/tiktok-amer... [rsf.org]
What happened? (Score:2)
Everyone switched over to an remarkably similar "competitor" named TokTik by a totally different new company named BitDisco?
Seriously, what's to keep ByteDance from simply creating another company and licensing their TikTok product to it under a different name? For example, I worked for a small company (way back) that had a commercial software product and licensed it to a sister company to sell to government customers -- that way, the sister company didn't own the software.
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Really like what?
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It likely would not be interconnected with the rest of the TickTock world.
I'll tell you what hapened (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing of value was lost.
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Literally. You're going for a funny take on how social media is meaningless, but the reality is that people found enough "value" in it to seek alternatives, and quite critically those alternatives are plentiful which should a reminder that you don't hate social media companies, you hate people since that is all social media is, opinions from randoms.
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The EFF was right about this, as they often are.
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I have to agree here. I don't use TikTok, but when I am searching some tutorial on YouTube and the content is made by Indians, usually it is garbage.
Foreign national propaganda isn't free speech (Score:2, Insightful)
It can be banned. Also, China practices unfair trade practices, which can be banned. Also this shit is often sexual manipulation of kids, which can be banned.
Same shit, different country (Score:2)
Within months, Google rolled out YouTube Shorts and Instagram pushed out its Reels feature. Both mimicked the short-form video creation that TikTok had excelled at. "And they ended up capturing most of the market that TikTok had vacated,"
And that's better... how?
India simply traded Chinese social media mediocrity and corporate surveillance with American equivalents. But America isn't the enemy, so it's okay I guess...
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It's not exactly better, but at least less fucked up.
What do they mean "moved"? (Score:2)
Hurray for the race to the bottom of corporate manipulated knee-jerk populist public discourse!
Weird (Score:4, Insightful)
It is legitimately suspicious that TikTok isn’t doing a single thing to preserve their market share. It’s almost like it’s not a real business.
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You know who else banned it? (Score:2)
Nepal!
(read the summary)
(It clumsily twice mentions Nepal banning it ...)
(I'll show myself out.)
TikTok Is Fungible (Score:2)
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Not to mention that most of the popular TikTok videos are already cross posted to other shortform video sharing sites like YouTube Shorts and Instagram. Hell... most of the time they don't even take the time to remove the TikTok logos from them.
Even if TikTok does get shut down in the US (which I highly doubt, they'll probably cut a deal to divest their US operations to a US company), nothing of value is going to be lost.
Banning TikTok (Score:4, Funny)
Don't ban TikTok! Won't you please think of the children! Oh, wait....
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Since the 7 October attacks in which 33 children were killed in Israel, more than 13,800 children have been killed in Gaza and 113 in the West Bank, and over 12,009 children have been injured in Gaza and at least 725 children in the West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Ministry of Health in Gaza. UNICEF has reported at least 1,000 children have had one or both legs amputated, and about 30 out of 36 hospitals have been bombed, leaving only 10 partially functioning.
They're the ones the TikTok ban is trying to hide from you.
What happens after has me concerned (Score:2, Insightful)
I am certain Twitter/Musk is going to be exactly where TickTok is today by the end of 2025. Probably ov
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It only took few years from deplatforming Alex Jones to claiming that some inconvenient facts are malinformation and censoring people for posting counter-narrative messages.
Are you implying that the government had something to do with all those online services that banned Alex Jones, or that the US government is now censoring users on those platforms? Got a source?
The same trajectory applied to this situation will get us Ministry of Truth [wikipedia.org] running all social media.
That controversial advisory board that was paused after a few weeks and dissolved less than four months later? Not exactly off to a strong start creating an Orwellian state, are they?
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Karakoram (Score:2)
The issue isn't in Karakoram, but Ladakh. For perspective here, this is a fairly remote and mountainous area in India. There are populated areas, though, and China was getting upset that India was building a road between two villages *near* the border. It wasn't on China's side of the border. Also, there is absolutely nothing on China's side of the border except a road. It's theorized that China wants control of transportation in the region, and doesn't like that India is building parallel infrastructure.
Can we ban Meta next? (Score:2)
We need to ban Meta next. Facebook and Instagram are provably harmful [mcleanhospital.org] to mental health and directly responsible for whipping up xenophobic massacres [pbs.org].
If we strongly regulate tobacco for being harmful to our physical health, then why are we not strongly regulating social media for being harmful to our mental health, and in some cases to people's very lives?
Oh wait... it's American companies profiting from the harm. So that's OK then.
Owners of META and GOOG Stick Rejoice (Score:2)
Censorship (Score:5, Interesting)
One month after the October 7 Hamas attack, TikTok videos with hashtags like #freepalestine were watched by Americans about fifty times more than pro-Israel ones. Although the app’s users skew young and hence leftward, their politics probably don’t account for the ratio. Researchers at Rutgers and the Network Contagion Research Institute compared TikTok and Instagram (which has a similar demographic) and found that although Instagram has only twice the number of politically themed posts generally, it had six times more pro-Israel and anti-Hamas posts than TikTok.
TikTok has the wrong propaganda.
So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations, that every war must appear to be a war of defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about who the public is to hate.
- Harold Lasswell
Good old American anti capitalism wins (Score:1)
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For Android users, don't even need apkmirror: just put the .apk on your website and users can sideload it from there. For everybody: make it work as a website so people can run it from any browser. Make an API available so people can build 3rd party apps.