Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban in unanimous ruling
Although President-elect Donald Trump could choose to not enforce the law, it's unclear whether third-party internet service providers will support the app.
TikTok being banned is good. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter should be banned as well. Closed, source, manipulative and harmful algorithms should be banned and these apps all use dark patterns in their design.
The fediverse and open social networks where the algorithms are open source and well understood and the user is allowed to choose their own algorithms is the only safe way to use social media.
A government that can ban social media sites is going to base their choices of which ones to ban on their preferences - not yours.
Honestly I think it's a terrible precedent to set. Now the government can just say they don't like XYZ website and are banning it. That wasn't really something they did 10 years ago. Unless of course it was illegal activity. But I don't think this is a net win for the internet. Regardless of what decision has been made, freedoms were removed and citizens' rights were sidestepped for political means. I think it shouldn't be the government's job to protect us from ourselves.
I was totally onboard with banning tiktok on government computers and I was completely on board with the government publicly expressing concerns over the motives of tiktok as a business. That's where I personally believe this should have stopped. Inform the people of the danger and then let them decide what to do with that information.
The problem with that idea though, is that nation-wide, citizens' trust in the government is at an all-time low. So even if the government said tiktok is bad and you shouldn't use it, people already don't trust the government. Maybe they should work on regaining the trust their people had for them 65 years ago before it tries to get people to behave how they think we should.
Well it's a good thing they banned TikTok because it has "Closed, source, manipulative and harmful algorithms" and not for some other reason
Inb4 Lemmy ban
If we left it up to our government, that’d probably be what happens
No no no my friend. You misunderstand USAing. You sweet sweet summer child.
I disagree, I think this ban sets a bad precedent. What governments should do is pass stricter data protection laws, as well as banning the many addictive design patterns that manipulate people into scrolling for hours and hours. For example infinite scroll. Imagine how much less people would doom scroll if they had to manually click "yes, I want to continue to page 7 of my twitter feed"
Non-American here. This actually goes a long way in helping me to avoid US-centric news and content for the next 4 years. So, there’s that.
That's an interesting perspective. Please enjoy having our stupid bullshit slightly further away from your face for a while! My only option is sticking my head in this hole in the ground.
I know! I'm so happy!
enjoy not having FREEDOM though /s
The only thing I really feel bad for from this is the small town food banks/animal welfare societies/sanctuaries that were able to find alternative sources of incomes through Tiktok via their partner programs and through a wider audience. Apparently Instagram doesn't pay as well, and Youtube shorts are abysmal for discovery.
I used to volunteer at an animal shelter, and my city dropped funding for them in 2023. Tiktok donations helped a lot more than you'd think. Highly encouraged people reading this to drop some food/donations off at your shelter of choice if you have any to spare.
That's interesting, last I had heard TikTok was morally abysmal when it came to paying creators. Unless that changed in the last few months then any Tiktok creator would make more money on YouTube even with a smaller audience.
For normal Tiktok creators, I'm not sure. But from what I remember, our TikTok revenue (combined creator fund payout + donations) outperformed every other source of revenue on a month-to-month basis EXCEPT the large local fundraising drives (which we only had quarterly).
The secret hack to the internet has always been animal content, lol. Animal videos performed very well, especially if you got into the creator fund. Youtube shorts only performed well for us when we had long form content the short could lead into. Before then we had 0 visibility on the YT algo.
Finally, Tiktok has better integration different payment methods through fundraising platforms (GoFundMe, Kickstarter, etc) than Youtube (or any Meta app tbh), or at least from what I understood from our accountants (I never bought anything off of Tiktok).
Again, this is only from my experience, and some other small animal rescues that we worked with. That's why I express sympathy for these organizations. I don't really care what happens to the drop shipping influencers or whatever.
why not have better data protection laws instead
Because that would have hurt their donors
Calling it now, the supposed "rumors" of Musk wanting to buy out TikTok are suddenly going to become not-rumors on January 21st.
I'm no lawyer but I don't even think it's that complex.
The law as written states "...However, the prohibition does not apply to a covered application that executes a qualified divestiture as determined by the President."
It goes on the clarify in a little more detail what a " qualified divestiture" is, but ultimately the determination seems to be by the President.
Trump can "make a deal" that he considers a "qualified divestiture" and allow the app again. For example ByteDance can sell TikTok to AmericaDance, a new company that just so happens to work for and does everything ByteDance does.
Now this wouldn't hold up in any real court, but that would take A LONG time to resolve at which point Trump declares a win and likely everyone just moves on. Bonus during the 2028 election Vance or whomever can say that Democrats want to ban TikTok.
What 2028 election?
Calling it now, it's not gonna happen. And I'll be back in this threat when dust settles
This is all theater.
trump is going to "save" tik tok after starting the initial push to ban it (for the wrong reasons) to pretend he did something for you. Worst part is that all of the no/low info voters and non voters will eat it up.
It's the equivalent of a person pushing you into the middle of the street and at the very last second, that same person tells the drivers to all stop. "Wow, I owe you my life!"
And now, this adds two layers:
P.s. The Chinese "protest" apps are going to mine the FUCK out of these millions of phones in the brief window they have them. Also, when the kids inevitably move back to tiktok, majority of them will leave these other apps installed on their phones, dormant and collecting in the background.
Pretty gross being violently ruled by a few fossils in wacky costumes.
The law allowing this happen was already passed, by a democratically* elected government. All the court is saying is that the law isn't unconstitutional. They don't decide what laws are "right" or "wrong", merely that it doesn't (in their opinion) contradict the constitution.
*how democratic it is is debatable, but still... an election did take place that put congress (and the president) in power
It's not even a running consistent with their own dogma. They've gone completely rogue.
TikTok’s fate in the U.S. now lies in the hands of President-elect Donald Trump, who originally favored a TikTok ban during his first administration
...
Trump began to speak more favorably of TikTok after he met in February with billionaire Republican megadonor Jeff Yass. Yass is a major ByteDance investor who also owns a stake in the owner of Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform.
Stop the ban or we'll burn your own platform to the ground.
Do it. Do a flip!
i don't understand why everyone wants to push trump, who already doesn't care for the constitution, to just unilaterally decide not to obey laws passed by congress? like what are we doing?
As an Indian, welcome to the party.
I know lots of people are mad, but I just see TikTok as another centralized platform that capitulates to special interests (read: money). I think the ban is a net positive, and I wouldn't lose any sleep if they banned other centralized social media platforms.
It never feels good to have the rug pulled out from under you, but people will find better ways to communicate. Humans are nothing if not creative problem solvers.
Anyone know if it's possible to take a program and "decompile" it? Like reverse engineering or something so it could be verified to be "clean?"
I imagine with all the resources the government has they could achieve such a thing if they were really concerned about national security and not really just worried about metas profits.
I mean what would Elon buying it have really changed about the actual code of the apps? It would just change who gets the profits, no?
Best you can do is a disassembler that will turn it into readable assembly or some kind of best-guess pseudocode, and you'll have to reconstruct it into a higher level language from there by yourself. Or learn to read assembly I guess.
So if it's possible then it's possible for the government to have that done by people that are capable.
That would tell me then that it's more than likely not a national security concern, it's a profit concern. Apparently Zuckerberg was a major actor pushing for this ban as it is, he supposedly kept harping on the security aspect. :/
Right, but things rarely happen 'for the good of humanity', they just happen, and like mass production or the newspaper or even writing and language itself, it appears, we make use of it, we stumble and eventually we figure out where it really fits into the world. It will always be taken advantage of by those with the means to do so, but my point is that there is a period where we truly don't know how to approach it as a society and there is a learning curve and we are in that adolescent or teenage year type curve for the Internet, and probably toddler stage for ai, and we will learn, but we're not there yet.
Further, whether we learn enough quickly enough, or whether those with enough power and foresight will truly steal that opportunity from society remains to be seen. It may seem like it will be obvious right now, while we're in the thick of things, but only history will tell if it's an obvious eventuality or whether it is comical that they think they are smart enough to actually control it. Maybe it contains the seeds of their own undoing.
Unanimous?! Makes you wonder what they know that we might not.
Nothing to do with the data collection, the court was ruling on the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act's constitutionality.
They absolutely made data collection part of their opinion.
I think it's more there is a precedence of the government blocking software they think is a threat - https://cmmcinfo.org/list-of-hardware-software-and-services-banned-by-us-government/
We give the government a lot of leeway when it comes to "national security"
Also, we're not the first country to ban it - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/heres-what-happened-when-india-banned-tiktok
Imagine believing these wacky old farts know anything at all about the internet.
Most of them[1] know a whole lot more about constitutional law than the average lemming.
When things are working correctly, the Supreme Court's role is usually not very concerned with the facts of the case; its role is to resolve questions of law. Congress considered the facts including some classified briefings, decided that American app stores should be forbidden from distributing TikTok to American users, and made a law. The court was asked whether Congress has the authority to make laws like that, and the court decided that it does.
[1] Maybe not Clarence Thomas
Nothing. The arguments were public. They obliterated the first amendment rights of 170 million Americans because the government said National Security. If the government can use magic words to make your rights disappear, then you don't have those rights.
