POV: It's January 19th

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.ml might just be useful idiots tbh. But I remember speedrunning an /r/sino ban and that took me all of 1 minute, with a comment that wasn't even critical about China. It was a thread about how it's awesome that the west can't live without China for 5G connectivity and I said that "maybe it isn't all that great that an entire industry has been entirely centralized to one country" just to see if an absolutely lukewarm take would get banned. It did.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

Well yeah. Why would corporations write laws against their own self-interest?

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

What the hell is WeChat? Did that WeWork guy start a social media service?

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

My wife quit it and was back on it a week later. Apparently it's very addictive. As someone who is on Lemmy a thousand times per day, I guess I can understand. I don't consider it quite the same though since we actually talk here, and discuss things beyond pressing like buttons on glorified commercials.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

I always thought Vine was so stupid and pointless, but I thought the same thing about Twitter and it sold for $44 billion dollars, so what do I know? I miss the old Internet when content was more than a blurb, and conversations were deep and meaningful.

Something Burger 🍔

I haven't seen a proof of intelligence on .ml yet.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

and even banned the use of vpns to get to foreign sites

Who is "we" in this context? VPNs are certainly not banned in the United States.

ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed

WeChat - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

TLDR: Chinese "Facebook" (actually its more like Facebook+Instagram+Twitter+ every social media combined into one + Googlepay/Applepay + A lot of government censorship)

Its app only, no webpage or computers, requires a smartphone, requires a phone number. How much censorship and survelliance depends on what phone number you use. Accounts with Mainland Chinese number will have a much stricter censorship and more data collected. Accounts with a western number will have less strict censorshop and less data collected (probably about the same amount of data collected by western corporate social medias).

Zement

Yeah, it's strange. Like even slight criticism. I mean that's okay, but what about actual constructive discussions? None!

If you are not allowed to criticize a system, that system is inheritly flawed. But that's my personal take on this.

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Tiktok got banned not for peddling "chinese propaganda" but instead not peddling the US one.

All the major tech companies in the US take measures to ensure content deemed unworthy by the government never become mainstream or viral.

This is done under the pretense of stopping "hate speech" or "terroristic propaganda" but often include things like pro-palestinian content or class struggle content (like luigi mangione stuff).

Tiktok was bold enough to not do that by default, cuz they wanted someone to ask them to do this and then it would become a huge scandal about how the US suppresses free speech. And US gov don't want to do that for this exact reason as well. So they decided to ban it.

Remember talks for this "law" were initiated when all of a sudden tiktok became a host for pro-palestinian voices. We should ask ourselves, how is it that 60% of americans want the government to stop arms sales to israel but this 60% never shows up on the big social media platforms. But on other platforms like here in lemmy and tiktok, pro-palestinians is the majority.

For further reading, listen to employees fired from big US tech companies for voicing their concerns over the palestine issue, or read Meta's new terms and conditions specially the section on "dangerous organizations and individuals".

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Jokes on you, you use it too

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They track the location of people in the US and gather large amounts of data. They didn't get banned for refusing to spread US propaganda.

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I'm impervious to communism, comrade.

AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet

app only, no website

Oh fuck this future!

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That’s what they’re telling you, and since when are they telling the truth?

LoudWaterHombre

I think aliens did it.

Anas

Not to defend tiktok (to this day I have not ever used it), but if the issue is the tracking and data collection, you could ban/regulate that specifically instead of singling out the app.

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Ding ding ding

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Facebook does the same tracking and data harvesting. Is Facebook up to be banned? It isn't the tracking and data harvesting.

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Yeah, so prepare for battle between people who want to tell you that their empire is better.