Not the biggest fan either but sometimes it’s the only way to organize a response in text with multiple layers of context. Far to easy in async discussion to branch off and it can be difficult to circle back or ask for clarification while addressing other items and it provides a way to organize.

I’m not here to have an in depth academic, cited, philosophical discussion. Not right now. I understand that you are pushing more in that direction and there’s nothing wrong with it. As such, I’m not formulating arguments or discussing with that in mind. We don’t need to have a discussion of dismissal of evidence because I’m sure we’re on the same page. But I don’t owe you a perfectly crafted argument in a Lemmy thread. This is informal, and as such there are times where one has to leave space for less rigid constructs for presenting evidence.

I’ve found this frustrating. But I don’t think you are outright trying to troll which is why I’ve engaged. I hope you understand that I’m not going to engage at the level you might wish I would. (Its exhausting to do so in a context like this even though I’m an academic and philosophical discussion-minded person at heart)

I’m more concerned about the methodology of the ban and its downstream effects of it than whether (in your case, extremely valid criticism) amounts to it deserving a ban. I’m not going to find some articles for you or counter that because it’s not something I want to spend my time doing since the reality is extremely nuanced and we could present evidence from both perspectives for days.

In an effort to combat this, would it be fair to say your position is that while TikTok is bad, it’s okay to still use it because it’s extremely popular, and thus the ability to do things like engage or organize with other people in your subcultures is consequently quite high? “The good outweighs the ill” as it were? Which is a reasonable position to take, to be clear, even if your actual feelings are more nuanced.

More or less. I think there are plenty of things to criticize the platform for and/or strive to adopt a less-bad platform for. Users of the platform should be allowed to stay or not stay, and not be abruptly cut off for a political stunt by an authoritarian act of government, and as such, my position is that celebrating this particular ban is antithetical to the overall goals that one would expect from people using the fediverse.

The law prevents other American companies from hosting their infrastructure so they don’t really have much to do other than shut down and offer the minimum required to off-board employees and contractors.

So why is tiktok, an equally bad app (but one you like), suddenly okay?

It shouldn’t be banned for the reasons the law is stating. I’m all for people moving to better places. Centralized moderation will always be influenced by the ownership and succiptible to problematic choices (intentional or unintentional) that will effect people. some content will be less moderated on different platforms and that will change over time, which is just the reality of the current social media landscape.

Look I’m sorry this apparent egalitarian wonder app is on the chopping block, but do you seriously want to be a TikTok Apologist?

I’d be happy to see a better option that works for people currently using Tiktok that doesnt have the baggage of the corporation. Maybe Loops can be that one day. Maybe something else will show up. But I’m not wishing an entire platform to just evaporate even if I have major issues with it, and pointing out things that it is good for compared to alternatives is not the same as being an apologist. Pointing out that a ton of people incomes (in a country in a time where small businesses and self employed income is at every increasing risk) is not defending EVERYTHING tiktok has done, currently does, or will do. Nor is any of that claiming it’s an egalitarian wonder app.

Could you imagine your reaction to someone this zealously defending, say, Facebook? You’d think they were nuts, facebook has been exhaustively shown to be so evil their CEO is widely rumored not to be human.

I’m all for people abandoning Facebook. While I’d be less caring if it got banned in a similar way, i would not celebrate it. There are still tons of normal people using it for normal reasons and they shouldnt be suddenly cut off like this. They should absolutely move away from it or their own voilition, not due to authoritarian intervention.

Facebook has actively promoted a genocide entirely of its own creation, which is quite a different issue from content suppression. You are mischaracterizing my arguments by making it out to be equivilant to a completely different situation.

You’re changing the requirements for evidence to render previous valid evidence invalid.

I never said your evidence was invalid, I just said it needed context.

I offered my opinion (which is absolutely personal experience bias!). I suggested you consider that the article in question it may not be universally applicable to the current state of the App due to its age. I did not say you had an invalid opinion or reason to dislike it. I did not say that there was not a problem. I did not say that there still aren’t problems.

Being in a minority on social media sometimes means choosing the places that are the least awful. Tiktok can be both good and bad for groups. That doesn’t mean it deserves to be banned.

Look, I’m just advocating for people who are being harmed by the actions of an authoritarian government against an app and suggesting that celebrating the actions of said authoritarian government is problematic, even if there are other reasons to dislike the app.

You’re the one who seems pretty upset about things but sure. Feel free to stoop to name calling and bad faith accusations if you’d like.

Time is, in fact, a thing that exists. Pointing out the age of an article is not shifting the goal post. Bad actions can be learned from and it is possible for things to become less shitty. You are welcome to couch your opinions in out of date information.

Tiktok is absolutely not perfect. It absolutely has issues of over-censorship at times. It absolutely should be critiqued. Even so, it provides a valuable place for people who are disenfranchised on other social media, even if it’s simply that they are disenfranchised less on Tiktok.

This was absolutely happening in 2020. That was a long time ago and the App is practically unrecognizable from its 2020 state.

To address some specific points:

What I would like to see personally is these users, and internet users in general, take their personal internet data privacy and security seriously (regardless of whether it’s against apps like tik tok that are foreign, or meta/Google etc all which are domestic).

Absolutely agreed. But as you also discuss, there’s only so much individuals can do so long as the US lacks real privacy laws. Even those of us who do our best to de-google and make our online lives as private as possible can not truly avoid the surveilance state- just make it less easy for the surviellance state to gather info about us.

Leveraging this ban against the federal government to sue for the right to data privacy would be a good idea as well. The argument probably should be that this bill foments the idea that this scale of internet/app data collection is harmful, and if it’s harmful in the hands of a foreign adversary it’s just as harmful in the hands of the federal government who have countless times leaked the sensitive information of citizens.

Good news! This is the core of TikTok’s legal argument in front of the supreme court right now. And I’m sure that people with the funds and connections are planning on pursuing this strategy in the future, too, but these kinds of legal solutions take time.

Leaving Tik Tok hurts Tik Tok more than it helps them, yes, even as a form of protest.

They aren’t leaving tiktok. They’re in both places.

Some Tik Tok users have already been banned from rednote for the content they post and comments they make.

That’s fine, people aren’t jumping to rednote to actually move their content there for the long haul. No one is legitimately thinking this is where everyone will move and they’ll pick back up as if nothing had happened. It’s simply a method of civil disobedience that has an added benefit of cultural exchange.

I’m not downplaying the users, their number, or that they are trying to protest by taking these steps. I’m pointing out that the apparatus to thwart what they’re doing is basically already in place

Everyone jumping into Rednote is aware of this.

Hell, if creators got together and put in a bid to buy Tik Tok, that would be a better protest because at least then they’d be collectively attempting to save it.

It would certinally be neat, but there’s no way the userbase could do this. Even if enough people got together to put up the capital, there’s a whole suite of regulations and funding nonsense that would get in the way. The law text gives the president a lot of leeway in how the sale is handled, so even if the people put up the money the president could just say “nah” and ban it anyway. This also requires ByteDance to even agree to the sale, too. So far, all indications are that ByteDance is planning on just letting things shut down according to the law (which also bans any US companies from hosting or providing services to a company that has been banned) It’s clear that the ideal resolution that congress wanted was for tiktok to either go away (as it is now) or be purchased by someone who could add it to the toolbelt of corporate america and bring it under the thumb of the surviellance state. A group of citizens purchasing the app to preserve it is not one of these outcomes that congress is expecting nor would tolerate long-run.

I think you are fixating on Rednote here rather than seeing Rednote as a component of the efforts at hand. It’s a minor item, it may be short lived, and it’s absolutely not the thing anyone is viewing as the stone that will break the back of the ban law. It’s not easy to know for sure how many are making accounts, but it’s most likely less than 1 million so far, which is obviously a drop in the bucket of the tiktok user base. MOST of the organizing on TikTok is not focused on Rednote, and instead of trying to ensure there are lines of communication for people to find each other elsewhere once the ban hits, because nothing else could be done in such a short span of time once it became clear the ban was actually going to happen.

For now, the secondary goals are focused on trying to ensure Meta doesn’t gain as a result of this, especially since it bankrolled the lobbying efforts for this ban, congress members have invested in Meta in anticipation of the ban, and because Meta is worse with data collection (and sells the data to china anyway). We’ll see if that happens, but between Bluesky, the account closures as a result of Meta’s awful moderation rollbacks, and the long-held distaste for Meta by TikTok users, it’s certinally possible.

I know you’ve drawn some comparisons to reddit, but it’s really not the same. Reddit didn’t go away by government action, and it acted on it’s own to disgruntle it’s user base, and even then, it wasn’t the entire user base. It is absolutely not the same. I know we all love to view the lemmy migration as a big deal here, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t change anything for reddit as a corporate entity and there was little fuel for continuing the conversation. We moved. We set up something that works for some, doesn’t for others. The same is true of the multiple Twitter -> Mastodon+ migrations. Enough people moved over to the fediverse to establish a much more sustainable userbase and allow for more innovation, but no one in social media is looking at the ~11 million Mastodon users and thinking “wow, we gotta win them back”. The fediverse is a long-term game when it comes to the future of social media and in it’s present state, it may not even be that future. But it might (along with BlueSky, assuming it doesn’t enshittify too) inspire the next-gen solution that does pull people off of centralized social media.

Successful acts of protest and change require a multi-pronged effort. Some efforts fail. Others are successful. Many efforts seem like failures until the downstream effects become more apparent years later. Some of the most successful acts of protest during the civil rights era were viewed at the time as silly and counter-productive, but now we view many of those things as instrumental in bringing about change.

I think a lot of people in the TikTok world who are organizing around this situation would agree with your broader points. Tiktok, after all, was a haven for organizing on behalf of progressive efforts in human rights, privacy, and other areas. I certinally agree with your sentiment and concerns as well.

Disabled, black, queer, ugly (which is subjective but whatever) seemed quite unsuppressed on tiktok to my perception and the perceptions of many in those spaces… I’m sure there are exceptions due to the large sample size.

I fit several of those categories and have been immersed in those spaces on tiktok for a long time and the opinion has always trended to it being far superior for discussing and being in those groups than Instagram or YouTube. Especially for disabled and queer groups, tiktok was always the bigger audience.

defending it on the grounds that people will have to advertise somewhere else really isn’t.

Shop is a lot more than advertising. Much closer to pre-enshittified etsy, and there’s a reason a lot of small businesses formed around it instead of instagram. Tiktok would actually allow those products to be shown to people rather than supressed in favor of corporations.

Wild to me how much people here are celebrating the App ban.

I get that this is the fediverse and the goal is decentralized social media, but this ban also means thousands of small businesses will lose a primary or secondary source of income that they can’t just replacewuickly, tons of people will lose access to methods of communication that would otherwise be censored on US platforms, and it eliminates a platform that has excelled at breaking down governments placed barriers of communication between different groups (which is something the fediverse does well, too)

Celebrating this is rather selfish and anti-free speech.

(Edit 2: read the bill, it also bans American companies from offering hosting services to a company that is banned through the law https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text)

Arguably, if the app isn’t easy to obtain then the cost of all the US-based servers would become an enormous expense. All US customer data is on its own US-based infra hosted by Oracle. Migrating all the US data elsewhere would also be an enormous expense. Server infa for 170 million Americans on an App is not gonna be cheap to keep running, esp since even if tiktok tried, the best they could do is get apk’s to android users. iOS users are SOL.

Given how iOS dominates the US still and only a small portion of android users are comfortable manually installing apps from non-store locations, why would they go through the effort to stay around for a fraction of the previous user base.

Its a perfectly uneerstsndable business decision, and its one they may be making on the hopes thay the ban will get reversed shortly after its put in place. Its also perfectly understandable to not want to sell the US-based component of the App when they still operate in plenty of other countries, including China, and the sale would devalue what they retained.

(Edit: and while their web offering has improved over the years, they probably are assuming a similar drop of userbase since only so many would be willing to move their usage to a web app that is not super easy to use for capturing video or handling notifications)

Like I said, we will see if it ends up having an effect. In the absence of other valid options, becoming ungovernable is the only reasonable option. Perhaps you have better ideas? I don’t know if it’s going to make a difference, but I’m not about to pretend I’m any better equipped to plan action to fight the constitutional abuses of the US government with a loosely organized group of social media users.

The “tik tok” ban already has the terminology built into the relevant clauses to ban any app beholden to a hostile foreign power that is a threat to national security with a certain number of users. They’ll just add this to the list.

Tiktok users are aware of this, especially the ones participating in this.

It’s not just about rednote, either. The other compinent is boycotting Meta products. There is also a simultaneous effort to push people to follow tiktok creators on YouTube or bluesky, and not on facebook/threads/Instagram. There is also a mass understanding that this is all interim and not long term.

Moving to something like Loops would absolutely be a better option, both because of it being part of the fediverse and therefore not controlled directly by any government, and because it’s not likely to get banned.

Loops is 0% ready for people. I’m on loops. I hope it’ll be viable in the future. It’s taken loops months to send out beta access invites. How in the world could it handle several thousand up to 150 million users RIGHT NOW.

The fediverse isn’t viable yet for the vast majority of people, especially creatoes with big followings. It can’t even keep up in moderating for its existing user base, it doesnt have rhe tools that people with thens of thousands of followers would need to sort through their interactions, and it couldn’t handle a mass influx of millions. Especially loops. Even Mastadon would cumble if its userbase went up by 50 million right now.

The fediverse is absolutely a long term solution and I’m hopeful for it, but there are some major gaps in onboarding, moderation, and scaling that prevent it from being a viable option rn. As it grows stronger it’ll be able to serve that need.

The fact that rednote will absolutely get banned once it reaches the threshold of users is not going to endear anyone who doesn’t use tik tok to the movement. You don’t explain what they’re organizing or how the move to rednote makes the government look bad. If people don’t care about tik tok they aren’t going to care about rednote or the government banning it as well.

There are up to 150 million Americans on tiktok, and basically any creators of significance are widely talking about this there. You could go see yourself. If only 1/6 of the user base sees the information that means the average American is 6 degrees or less of separation from someone who does care. Its got a wider reach than you think. Just because you don’t understand the method of organizing doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Plenty of discussion happening on tiktok about the reasons and methodology for this, which is where it’s being organized from.

Keep in mind that mass adoption of rednote will force the US to ban it as well, which provides another opportunity in the future to bring more visibility to the authoritarianism by which the US government is operating this ban. It also sets a precedent for any other things the US government might target. There’s a lot of speculation that other games and apps owned partially or majority by ByteDance will be next, like Epic games, League of Legends, etc. If the rednote jump proves to be a successful method for continuing the conversation, then gamers and users of other services that are banned in the future could see that as a blueprint for their own acts of civil disobedience.

We will see what happens, but if every time the US government bans an app or platform, the people just move onto something even worse for the US governments desires (and especially if we move to something that won’t give profits to US companies), then it becomes a tactic the US government will have to abandon. So, more accurately, this is a large act of civil disobedience. Wanna ban tiktok? Great, we’ll just go to an actual Chinese-influenced place that actually has Chinese government surveillance

It isn’t as good as blocking city infrastructure, no, but it’s certainly going to make a lot of shareholders of Meta and other US social media angry that people aren’t flocking back to their apps. It also stands a chance of ensuring US officials who signed the tiktok ban and then bought Meta stock won’t see a profit from their actions.

A protest on the streets isn’t likely going to move the needle on tiktok. The only successful street protests (and barely successful at that) on a national level in recent times have been the BLM protests. The Free Palestine protests haven’t been unsuccessful, but they also haven’t really moved the needle either. Protesting on the streets runs an ever increasing risk of police violence and retribution by the surveillance state. And with the trump administration signaling it plans to green light further police violence against protesters, up to bringing in the military, that may not even be viable in the future.

Protests are about bringing visibility about an issue to a wider audience right?

Tons of news coverage, anyone on the app store or play store are seeing the App at the top of the charts, sounds like visibility to me!

The rednote move is mostly a form of protest. People are fully aware its a dumb idea for privacy.

Fediverse by design is ideal for institution-based social networks for sure. Each school hosts a server and federates with the nearby institutions (possibly in a limited manner so it’s still focused on your group but you can easily interact with other people from your city)/school district too.

Maybe the school has two servers: one for active students, another for alumni. Some configuration for letting people say “only fill my main feed with stuff from my graduating class +/- 2 years” and so on. When you graduate, you get auto migrated to the next server.

Hometown sort of tries to do this for cities as a Nextdoor replacement (and even nextdoor for a long time tried to keep things hyper local with optional visibility elsewhere until they caved to ad money and NIMBYism)

This. I basically didn’t use my facebook for the last 6 years and i left it deactivated most of the time. My thinking was that people could use messenger to reach out to me (and my family has mostly been using messenger for stuff anyeay) but even then, that only proved true for a handful of circumstances, and the people who did make use of messenger or a non-deactivated account all had my phone number anyway.

Would my experience be different if I was more active on facebook? Eh, maybe. Maybe I’m an oddity, but most of my high school and college connections barely post on facebook as it is, if at all. I didn’t lose much by finally giving it the axe last week.